Be Interesting, Not Just Good

The default enemy is indifference

The framework holds that in a crowded, well-funded, incumbent-dominated category, the binding constraint is not a better message or a better product but attention, and the default enemy is indifference rather than any named competitor. Eric Glyman credits the framing to Justin Kan, then a partner at Y Combinator, and states it plainly: "The biggest battle of a startup is people not giving a damn. You can work for years, slave away, very proud, put out a release, and no one hears about it. So the question is not how do I have a great message, but how do I be interesting, how do I be different and distinct."¹ In this account quality is necessary but invisible; being good does not earn notice, being interesting does, and distinctiveness is the gate that a message must clear before quality is even assessed.

Four levers for manufacturing distinctiveness

Glyman describes several deliberate moves Ramp used to become noticeable. The first is being diametrically opposed to the category. He recounts a "DEX analysis" in which the team printed every competitor's homepage and found "you can have any color card you want as long as it's blue," all selling access and more, through heavy metal cards, lounges, and points. Reasoning that the scarce resource had become time rather than money, Ramp went the opposite direction with a white, sparse card premised on spending less, a stance shared with The New Luxury Is Less.¹

The second lever is weaponizing rivalry for attention. "People like rivalries, Coke and Pepsi, Uber and Lyft," Glyman says, describing how Ramp deliberately drove a contrast against American Express and Brex and got, in his phrasing, "slingshotted up" by being mentioned whenever a rival was.¹ The third is going direct as a person: business buyers "go on Instagram, wear Nike or On, listen to Spotify, they're people too," and on social platforms clarity and thought are, in his account, underrated, because people want to buy from other people rather than corporations, a case he makes by pointing to Lulu at Rostra on going direct and Ryan Holiday's book "Trust Me, I'm Lying" on cutting through.¹ The fourth is showing up consistently, so that word of mouth compounds. "Great brands aren't built on how you look or what you say, but how you show up time and time again over years," he says, tying it to shipping customer feedback within two days and to the claim that more than a third of Ramp's customers arrive through referrals.¹

Why distinctiveness comes first

In Glyman's telling, a company with seven people and a few million dollars cannot outspend American Express, but it can be the only white card in a blue category, the only one naming a public rival, and the only one that answers like a person and ships in two days. Attention is the constraint and difference is the lever that relaxes it. The framework connects to how the same substance is sold rather than shown: the positioning of selling time, examined in Selling Outcomes Not Tools, is meant to be encoded into the look, the rivalry, and the referral proof. The consistency lever also feeds Brand as Familiarity Priming, where showing up over years hardens interestingness into instant recognition.

Where it strains

Glyman is explicit about the risk that interesting detaches from good, rewarding spectacle over substance; his stated safeguard is that the difference must encode a real customer truth, spend less and save time, and that referrals are hard to fake at scale. Bounded by Marketing Novelty Decay, being interesting is not a one-time launch trick, since novelty erodes as others copy it, which is why he treats consistency over years as doing the durable work. A manufactured rivalry can also backfire if the chosen rival is larger and the contrast flatters it, and the go-direct move leans on a charismatic founder or a few distinctive voices, which makes institutionalizing it without becoming corporate the hard part.