I accidentally catfished the startup industry.
A few years ago at SXSW (where else?), I had a crazy idea for a startup.
An idea so crazy, it couldn’t possibly work.
At least not as an actual company.
As the premise for a satirical novel about how crazy the startup world had become, however, it seemed perfect.
So I took the idea (a service that lets you to rent someone else’s life for a week), and wrote it up. Okay, it didn’t happen as breezily as that. It took a few false starts and several drafts and a couple of online courses and a hard-core critique group and a structural re-write and a professional editor and another re-write and beta reader feedback and a line edit and two rounds of proofing but then it was written up.
I found an agent and she shopped the manuscript for a while but I became impatient to release it because I had a marketing idea that was almost as good as the idea for the book itself.
I launched ShelfLife (the novel) by launching ShelfLife (the app).
How it all started
A lot of authors now make video ‘trailers’ for their books. My thought was, what if the ‘trailer’ for a book about startups looked more like an actual startup.
- I sketched up a basic framework for the site — the ‘life rental’ ideas from the story became inventory.
- The three fictional founders became the faces on the ‘About’ page.
- I took a few of the trials and tribulations the founders faced in the story and presented them as updates in short, casual blog posts.
It was fun. I felt like I was writing the book again, but in a truly digital medium. A few beers, a bit of putzing around on a wysiwyg web-builder and hey, presto: getashelflife.com was ready to rent you a week as a dominatrix, surf guide, fashion designer or war photographer.
I showed it to a few friends who all agreed it looked ragged enough to pass as an MVP. A friend in Saigon who’s building a real startup even asked me what I would do if someone wanted to invest. I sent the thing live.
How it turned into catfishing
Before you judge me some kind of huckster, I’d like to point out I never concealed the fact that the life-rental service wasn’t real.
On the main menu you’ll find a tab that says ‘Book, now.’ Because that’s what I wanted people to do: to get the Book, now. If you click on the tab, the page freely admits that the ‘life rental’ service doesn’t exist and the closest you can get right now is to read the ‘fast, fun, slick’ debut novel of the same name.
A bunch of logos clearly indicate the book is available on Amazon and also at several places that haven’t yet been bought by Amazon. More of that in a minute.
Ok Google, how do I launch a startup?
‘Get it on ProductHunt and Betalist’ seemed to be a popular answer.
So I did.
Then I started tweeting from my shiny new Shelflife account, which helped the idea get upvoted and re-tweeted amongst startup enthusiasts. I also wrote a straight-faced press release and lodged it with a couple of free(ish) PR distribution services. Then things started to get interesting.
“Are you hiring?”
My inbox filled with semi-serious enquiries from people who wanted to list their lives on ShelfLife and rent them out:
- restauranteurs
- photographers
- fashion designers
- a stand-up comedian
- stoners
- gamers
- branding consultants
- CEOs
- and even a doctor offering a ‘real life ER experience’ (bizarrely, this is the opening scene of the novel and the fictional inspiration for the fictional founder to start the life-rental service).
Amongst the potential ‘life renters’ also came a couple of job applications, a possible investor, business networking offers and a few invitations to join incubator programs. The press release generated a slew of interview requests from media outlets, including an inflight channel on a domestic US airline, a tech program on a cable network, the European edition of a men’s lifestyle magazine and a tech-focussed podcast out of NYC.
You know this can’t be real, right?
I responded (as me, the author) to all the individual potential ‘life renters’, gently explaining that although ‘ShelfLife the app’ wasn’t going to happen anytime soon, perhaps they’d enjoy the book. Most responded with good humour, if not enthusiasm, and I made a few book sales in the bargain.
The ‘professional’ enquiries from the tech world, however, seemed like an opportunity for further fun.
I took turns at assuming the personas of the three fictional founders, answering emails, and arranging interviews. Along the way, I pointed producers and journalists to the ‘Book, now’ page, hoping they’d make the leap and maybe show interest in my debut novel. Most went silent as soon as they realised they’d been catfished.
Some enquiries, however, refused to spit the hook:
- Shanti (the ‘hacker’ character) got a fair way towards structuring an equity deal before she got bored of the relentless questions.
- Trent (the ‘hustler’ character) completed an email interview with Men’s lifestyle portal InsideHook, who I have to believe were in on the gag and wrote a cracking piece.
- Gavin (the ‘hipster’ character) sat down late one night in my dining room to record an interview with an NYC-based startup podcast. Gavin spoke enthusiastically for an hour on the challenges of bootstrapping & onboarding, before leaving on good terms with the podcaster, who has probably since figured it out. He’s had the good humour to post the interview anyway.
Then things started to get weird.
‘You’ve made it to the final round!’ read the email from an invitation-only accelerator program, focussed on startups in the travel industry and backed by the Portuguese government.
I’d almost forgotten I’d applied. Now I had just three days to build a deck and create a disguise — for I looked nothing like any of the stock photos I’d used on the ‘Meet the Founders’ page and the final round interview was a live pitch via video call.
A career in advertising had left me with Mad Powerpoint Skillz, so my ShelfLife elevator pitch deck looked more than convincing. My wife pleaded with me not to go through with it but my voice coach insisted I did, just for kicks. I rode my motorcycle into the office in the middle of the night (lunchtime in Portugal), arranged some overpowering backlights, donned a trucker cap, slipped on my reading glasses, reminded myself I was Gavin and logged on. After exchanging pleasantries with the incubator representative, I turned the camera off (claiming ‘bandwidth issues’) and continued the pitch in voice-only mode. I nailed it in 15 minutes, just as I’d rehearsed, and got through the Q&A in another 10. My voice coach had been right.
Congratulations, you’re going to Portugal!
It took the accelerator program just 3 days to decide they wanted me in their 5-week intensive bootcamp. Well, not me. They wanted Gavin, Trent and Shanti to come and for ‘workshop ShelfLife for proof of concept, rapid prototyping and testing market fit’ in sunny Lisbon. For a brief moment, I wished I had an actual startup.
I sat on the invitation for a few days past the acceptance deadline, trying to figure out my next move. A good friend from the adtech world was hyped.
“Stupider ideas than this have been funded before. You have to keep riding this,” he said. “Go to Portugal! Go full J T LeRoy on this thing! You’re doing trans-media storytelling now, man!”
I decided I didn’t have the ticker for full immersion (or the lawsuits that seemed part of the deal). I looked on Fiverr, thinking I could maybe hire an actor to go in my place, but it all got too difficult. It turns out actors are hard work. Besides, I was trying to sell my novel, not a startup. Gavin wrote to the incubator program, claiming that ShelfLife’s current Singaporean investors were very protective of their equity. He apologised for not checking the fine print and wished all the bootcamp finalists well. We never heard back from the Portuguese incubator people.
Why so desperate to believe?
It kind of amazed me that people so deep in the tech industry had looked past the obvious shortcomings of my ‘book trailer website’. They seemed to want it to be a real app in the making.
My friend Richard Wise was far less surprised. “The God of Technology demands that we believe in endless progress. We stand in awe of this endless progress while the nagging question persists, Why aren’t we happier?”
I first met Richard Wise at that same SXSW from whence the idea for ShelfLife sprang. He’s one of the world’s leading ‘Brand Anthropologists’ and he believes we’re all suffering from the same delusion, more or less:
“The French sociologist Jacques Ellul predicted 50 years ago that the two major forces that would shape modernity would be technology and propaganda. He observed that technology would no longer be a tool but the end purpose of all human endeavours. Like Amazon, swallowing up all of transactional life and reorganizing it on principles of efficiency. Propaganda, the re-formation of people’s attitudes based on emotional manipulation, becomes the sister of Technology. It is particularly powerful with those who think of themselves as most immune to its power: educated people.”
Where to now for ShelfLife?
The whole ‘ShelfLife the app’ experiment revealed to me there is incredible scope for indie authors to take their stories off the page and into different realms, all by themselves.
And that’s exciting.
I have a friend who writes Superhero Detective Noir and occasionally runs ads in regional newspapers across South East Asia, advertising the services of his protagonist, a genetically-enhanced Private Investigator. I’ve also met a wonderful writer who partnered with a restaurant to accurately re-create an ancient Roman feast — all in support of her historical fiction based on the author of one of the western world’s first cookbooks.
Although I’m supposed to be writing the next one, I’m having too much fun taking this book ‘off the page’. I’m currently working on a series of video testimonials from ShelfLifers who’ve literally ‘changed their lives’ for a week. (If you’d like to contribute or act in one, hmu.)
While some publisher interest has re-surfaced via my agent’s international trade contacts, I’m also pursuing the more traditional indie book marketing route: running paid promotions, doing blog tours, and chasing reviews. After all, I’d still like to sell more books.
And for my next ShelfLife stunt? I’m planning a competition for my readers. The prize is a week playing the role of a genre-twisting indie author who’s on a book tour, doing interviews and explaining how they built a fake app to sell their real novel.
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I spent my early career in advertising, moving between Australia and South East Asia. I now live in Sydney with my family, surfing when I can and riding my dirtbike where I shouldn’t. ShelfLife is my debut novel. My second novel, The Stacking Plan, is currently under construction. You can follow me @BarrieSeppings
ShelfLife the novel is a ‘fast, fun, slick’ satire of startup culture and digital nomads // ShelfLife the app is still looking for seed funding.
