Better the devil they don’t know

Bzzzzzzz bzzzzzz bzzzzzzzz – the front door buzzer kept ringing aggressively.

Pavel, barefoot and still in his underwear, patted over to check the security camera feed.

Six large men were standing outside his door.

“They had guns and they looked very serious,” Pavel said later. “They seemed to want to break the door.”

Pavel looked despairingly at his phone. If only he could call his brother and share just a few critical instructions.

But what could he say?

What kind of message could he send?

After all, the guys outside the door were from the secret service. And the secret service could read and hear anything.

“I realized I don’t have a safe means of communication with him,” Pavel said in an interview with the New York Times. “That’s how Telegram started.”

I just read a new Wired article about Pavel Durov.

In 2006, Durov founded VKontakte, a Russian Facebook clone.

VK eventually became a multi-billion-dollar company. Durov got rich.

Then in 2011, Durov drew the worst kind of heat upon himself.

He refused to cave to the Kremlin’s request to block opposition groups on VK. And he tweeted his “official” response to the government – a photo of a dog with its tongue hanging out.

That led to the visit at his home.

Durov survived that encounter. And he wasn’t cowed.

A short while later, he launched Telegram, the messaging app.

He positioned Telegram as a secure, decentralized, no-censorship alternative to corporate offers like WhatsApp.

That positioning went back to the origin story from 2011, with secret services thugs beating on Durov’s door.

The positioning has been reinforced by Durov’s actions since. As things got hotter for him in Russia, he picked up his small team and started moving around the world.

“I’m out of Russia and have no plans to go back,” he told TechCrunch in 2014. “Unfortunately, the country is incompatible with Internet business at the moment.”

Well, if you believe the Wired article, all that’s PR and marketing hype.

According to Wired, Durov wouldn’t be the CEO of Telegram today without powerful Kremlin connections yesterday.

And even after he supposedly left Russia with no plans to go back… he still kept his posh offices in St. Petersburg. He continued to visit there, and regularly spent entire days working in the office.

So what’s the truth?

I personally don’t care about Telegram or about Pavel Durov. But I do care about persuasion and influence.

And so the only truth I want to share with you is the following idea from the book True Believer:

“The ideal devil is a foreigner.”

Durov knew this instinctively. As one of his former business associate said,

“Pavel is a king of PR and marketing. Probably one of the best people in the world. I think he wanted to play the good guy with the West.”

It definitely worked.

Telegram grew steadily, and it became the world’s most downloaded app in 2021. It’s phenomenally popular in Asia, Latin America, and increasingly in Europe. To date, it’s been downloaded over 1 billion times.

In large part, that’s because Telegram is seen just as Durov wants it to be seen. As a decentralized, anti-establishment, freedom-fighters app.

How else could it be? The founder himself had to run away from the secret service of that foreign devil Putin… and the repressive state Putin represents.

So there you go:

If you want strong positioning for your product, create a good-vs-evil struggle between you and Vladimir Putin. Or at least some other foreign devil, relative to your target audience.

But what if you can’t get a good foreign devil?

In that case, keep an eye on Pavel Durov and the future of Telegram. Because as the Wired article says:

“As Durov’s run-ins with the Kremlin recede into the past, authoritarian surveillance has, in some ways, ceased to be the symbolic foil that it once was for Telegram. Instead, Durov has increasingly cast his platform in heroic opposition to Facebook, Apple, and Google.”

Will Apple and Google serve as well as Putin did?

Maybe they will. Maybe they won’t. Or maybe Durov has also read True Believer. And so maybe he’ll get some use from the full quote above:

“The ideal devil is a foreigner. To quality as a devil, a domestic enemy must be given a foreign ancestry.”

But maybe you’re wondering why I don’t take my own advice and talk about some foreign or domestic devils.

Don’t worry. I will. I just don’t want to draw attention to it by doing it today. If you’d like to keep an eye on me as I create some foreign devils, sign up for my email newsletter here.