I was 12 years old, walking down a dusty back road with a guy we called the Donkeyman.

He had 16 donkeys, two mules, a few goats, and a whole bunch of chickens. All riding, trailing, or pulling his two wagons.

Cars would slow down. Then stop. People would get out and start asking questions.

“Where are you headed?”

“How long have you been traveling?”

“Can I take a picture?”

The Donkeyman didn’t mind. But he also didn’t relish in the attention. Yet, everywhere he went, a newspaper would write about him:

The Donkeyman lived on my family’s rural property for nine months. He slept in his wagon while he worked to build a new one. His animals were scattered throughout the property.

When he left, I went with him.

I spent a few days and nights walking alongside the spectacle.

Here was a guy with some outrageous beliefs who lived them for others to see. He was genuine long before “authentic” became a buzzword.

That authenticity drew people like a magnet.

Some companies spend millions to create what the Donkeyman had naturally.

But most skip it entirely. They try so hard to emulate other companies that they fail to differentiate themselves at all.

That’s why I encourage marketers like you to ​share your technical opinions​. Your dev tool stands for something, so you might as well tell developers about it!

Regardless of what you think of modern Salesforce, the company brought a strong viewpoint to its earliest campaigns.

The company claimed “the end of software” and even had a mascot named SaaSy to represent it:

Traditional enterprise software was broken, they said. Their whole identity came from that belief.

It’s been successful for Salesforce, and it was for the Donkeyman, too.

I gave a short talk about him years later. A woman in the audience came up after. She’d met him in Santa Fe years earlier.

That’s the thing about being genuinely different. People remember you decades later.

So here’s the question for your company:

What do you actually believe that’s different from everyone else?

Not what sounds good in a mission statement. What conviction runs so deep that you can’t help but live it?

​Want help identifying it?​ Because when you find that thing, people notice.

Just like they noticed a man with donkeys on back roads. Living exactly how he believed life should be lived.