What do some of the most iconic protests in Belarus, Hong-Kong, and Russia have in common?

One app: Telegram.

And governments around the world are trying to stop it.

In November of 2011, Pavel Durov looked out his window in Saint-Petersburg, Russia. He saw a team of armed, masked men approaching his building. They weren’t looking for drugs. They weren’t looking for money. They were looking for data.

Pavel was 26. He was the founder of VKontakte, the Facebook of Russia. And he had just refused a direct order from the Federal Security Service to hand over the personal data of Ukrainian protest organizers.

The message was clear: The state owns your data. The state owns you.

The police eventually left him unharmed that night, but Pavel had heard the message perfectly.

Every phone call could be listened to. Every message could be intercepted. Every platform he used was someone else’s property.

If he texted, the telecom provider would intercept it. If he emailed someone, the email provider could be required to turn them over. If he called, the line was tapped.

Pavel realized that even with millions of dollars and a massive tech company, he had zero digital freedom. He was naked.

We’re told the story of social media is a story of connection. Of sharing. Of a global village. But for Pavel Durov it was a story of surveillance. Of control. Of platforms that know you better than you know yourself, and governments that can knock on your door and ask for the keys.

Two years after that SWAT team visit, Pavel and his brother Nikolai, who co-founded VKontakte with him, became refugees. And with the money Pavel had left, they didn’t buy an island. They built a country. A digital country called Telegram.

Today, Telegram is a digital nation of over one billion active users. It has shaped elections, coordinated revolutions, facilitated economies, and terrified world governments from Moscow to Paris.

The insane part? They did all of this with zero advertising budget and a tiny team of just about 30 people. How did an app built by two Russian brothers reach 1 billion users without ads or selling user data? Why did WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger fail to stop it? And why did France arrest Pavel Durov?

This is a story of privacy over dollars.

The story of Telegram.

THE SEED

First, let’s meet the Durov brothers, the creators of Telegram. These Durov brothers are quite an odd pair.

Pavel, the younger one. The public face. Charismatic, ascetic, a libertarian who wears all black, trains in martial arts, posts shirtless photos on social media, and once threw paper airplanes made of 5,000-ruble notes, then worth about $155, out of his office’s window just because.

Pavel… is a meme.

And Nikolai… Older, reclusive, a mathematical genius who won gold at the International Math Olympiad three times in a row and built the technical backbone of everything they touched. He doesn’t do interviews. He doesn’t appear in photos. Nikolai is a ghost.

Together, they created VKontakte in 2006, Russia’s answer to Facebook, an app that became the country’s dominant social network.

By 2011, Pavel was worth hundreds of millions of dollars. He was untouchable.

Until he was not.

The government started demanding user data on opposition figures after disputed elections. Protesters’ names. IP addresses. Private messages.

Pavel refused.

When asked to ban opposition groups, he posted a picture of a dog sticking its tongue out as his “official answer to the security services.”

That’s when the knocks came at his door. By 2013, the pressure became unbearable.

Shareholders, some with ties to the Kremlin, forced him out of his own company.

He sold his shares for $300 million and in the aftermath of Crimea’s annexation in 2014, fled Russia with his brother Nikolai.

He told TechCrunch: “I’m out of Russia and have no plans to go back.”

They’d built something remarkable, only to lose it to powerful political interests.

But, now they had capital. They had skills. And they had a problem that wouldn’t leave them alone: How do you communicate when governments and tech giants want to read your messages?

This was the seed of Telegram. A messaging app that no government could tap, no corporation could harvest. Secure communication across borders, built for themselves at first, then offered to the world.

Pavel and Nikolai started building in 2013 while bouncing between places like Berlin, London, and Singapore. The team, composed of the two brothers and a core group of 15 computer programmers, was fully nomad by necessity.

They established Telegram in Berlin with a complex worldwide network of shell companies to avoid government interference.

Then Nikolai designed something called MTProto, an encryption protocol specifically engineered to be super fast, and resist state-level surveillance.

It was designed to challenge intelligence agencies that have billion-dollar budgets and legal authority to demand backdoors. The problem they saw wasn’t just “messaging.” It was the global hunger for private communication in an age where Silicon Valley giants were building walled gardens of data, and authoritarian regimes had developed an addiction to eavesdropping.

The early MVP was remarkably simple: encrypted “Secret Chats” that self-destruct. Fast messaging that works on spotty connections. Cloud sync that lets you access messages from any device. No phone number requirements for certain features.

But what made it really different was that Telegram didn’t ask you to choose between security and usability. WhatsApp was fast but owned by Facebook after a $19-billion acquisition in 2014. Signal was secure but kinda clunky. Telegram offered both, wrapped in a nice, clean interface.

Telegram’s positioning? A messaging app for people who need to stay alive.

Durov told Techcrunch: “The no. 1 reason for me to support and help launch Telegram was to build a means of communication that can’t be accessed by the Russian security agencies“

That clarity, that razor-sharp understanding of the problem, became Telegram’s moat.

While WhatsApp said “connect with friends“ and Signal said “privacy matters” Telegram was saying something more primal: “This cannot be taken from you.”

Digital sovereignty. That was the product.

That said, Telegram’s approach to privacy has always involved trade-offs.

Unlike Signal, which uses end-to-end encryption by default for everything, Telegram’s regular “Cloud Chats”, the ones most users rely on, are encrypted only between your device and Telegram’s servers.

This means the company technically could access message content if compelled or hacked, though Pavel insists they never have. True end-to-end encryption is optional, limited to one-on-one “Secret Chats” that don’t sync across devices.

Critics, including security experts, argue this prioritizes convenience, seamless multi-device access, unlimited storage, over maximum security, and that the custom MTProto protocol lacks the extensive peer review of industry standards.

THE SPARK

Telegram launched quietly on August 14th, 2013, on iOS first, then on Android on October 14th. But there was an issue: How do you get people to trust a proprietary encryption protocol built by two Russians?

So they find a clever solution. They launch with a stunt that most startups would never attempt:

A public cryptography contest with a $200,000 prize for anyone who could crack their encryption.

This is either brilliant or stupid.

If someone breaks it, Telegram is dead before it starts. If no one succeeds Telegram earns credibility that no amount of marketing could buy.

And no one breaks it.

The contest ran for years. Hackers tried. Security researchers tried. Intelligence agencies presumably tried in secret.

But MTProto held, even though the company gave $100,000 to one developer in Russia for finding a critical bug.

This victorious stunt created a huge amount of word of mouth in tech circles and among privacy-conscious users post-Snowden leaks.

By October 2013, Telegram already had 100,000 daily active users. By March 2014, it had reached 35 million monthly users and 15 million daily active users.

Telegram’s early word of mouth spread through a very specific network: activists, dissidents, journalists, and technologists, people who had something to lose if their messages were compromised.

People in places like Iran and Russia where surveillance was daily life. They spread it through niche networks because it worked when others failed, was fast even on slow connections, accessible from multiple devices without losing history.

Starting in September 2014, during the Hong Kong protests, activists switched to Telegram when they realized the government was monitoring other platforms.

Protesters needed coordination without leaders, real-time updates without censorship.

Telegram’s channels and supergroups, up to 200,000 members, became command centers. Downloads exploded. And Pavel Durov watched, fascinated.

In October 2014, South Korean government surveillance plans scared many citizens and made them switch to Telegram from the Korean app KakaoTalk.

Something remarkable was happening. Something I call “product-crisis fit.”

Whenever WhatsApp crashed, which it did periodically, Telegram downloads surged. Whenever Facebook faced a privacy scandal, which it did regularly and still does, Telegram downloads surged. Whenever a government cracked down on speech, which happens constantly somewhere in the world, Telegram downloads surged.

2020, Belarus, the opposition candidate uses a Telegram channel to organize the largest protests in the country’s history, coordinating hundreds of thousands of people through a single broadcast feed.

The government tries to block Telegram. It doesn’t work. Telegram’s architecture is designed to route around censorship, using a decentralized network of proxy servers that users can set up themselves.

In Iran, too, during repeated waves of unrest, Telegram became the uncensorable lifeline.

Telegram’s growth path was not paid acquisition. It was not gimmicky referral requests. It was crisis.

People switched to Telegram during moments of fear, anger, or betrayal. Then they stayed because the product was genuinely better in specific, measurable ways.

Speed for example. Telegram is fast. Messages are sent instantly even on weak connections. Files upload without compression. The interface is snappy and responsive in ways WhatsApp often isn’t.

And groups.

While WhatsApp limited groups to 256 people in the early days, Telegram allowed tens of thousands. This transformed Telegram from a chat app into a coordination tool.

And channels.

Telegram introduced “channels”, one-to-many broadcast tools where anyone can build an audience without going through an algorithm.

Part newsletter, part social network, part organizing platform. Before this, messaging apps were for talking with people, 1-to-1 or in small groups.

Telegram channels allowed you to broadcast messages, like Twitter.

And Bots.

Telegram opened up APIs that let developers build bots, automated tools that live inside chats.

Need a poll? There’s a bot. Need to translate? There’s a bot. Want to order food without leaving the app? There’s a bot for that too.

Telegram didn’t position against WhatsApp on some vague privacy claims. It positioned against all of social media on “control.” You control your data. You control your audience. You control your digital life.

GOING MAINSTREAM

By 2016, Telegram has 100 million users. By 2018, 200 million. Still tiny compared to WhatsApp’s billion-plus. But the users are engaged.

They’re spending hours per day in channels. They’re building communities. They’re creating sticker packs and bots and ecosystems.

The tiny team, never more than a few dozen engineers, nomadic, always relocating to evade political pressure, keeps shipping features that makes it stickier.

Then comes something enormous. A real black swan event.

January 6, 2021. WhatsApp announces a new privacy policy. Going forward, users must agree to share data with Facebook, including phone numbers, transaction data, and how they interact with businesses.

The backlash is instant. And user panic ensues.

Elon Musk tweets: “Use Signal.” Millions of people see that tweet. But something interesting happens.

Many download Signal. But even more download Telegram. Telegram become the most downloaded non-gaming app worldwide in January 2021.

Why?

Signal is secure but austere. It feels like a vegetable, good for you, but boring.

Telegram is fast, and it offers security plus stickers, video calls, channels, bots, massive groups, cloud storage, and a design language that’s modern rather than spartan.

Telegram feels like candy.

In three days, Telegram adds 25 million users. In January alone, more than 100 million people join. The servers strain but don’t break. Pavel tweets updates in real time, almost giddy in this chaos.

In October 2021, Telegram gains a record 70 million new users as Facebook experiences a nearly six-hour long outage across its services.

By 2022, Telegram passes 700 million users.

The growth isn’t linear. It’s exponential spikes triggered by external events, each crisis bringing a new wave that mostly stays.

And one thing makes Telegram’s growth unique: it manages to be both a tool for democracy activists and a platform for mainstream culture at the same time.

Channels become media empires. In Russia, some Telegram channels have millions of subscribers, more reach than TV networks. In India, regional language communities thrive. In Latin America, Telegram becomes the preferred platform for cryptocurrency discussion, finance tips, and neighborhood coordination.

Telegram isn’t hired for one job. It’s hired for dozens.

Protest coordination: “Help me organize without surveillance.” Community building: “Help me reach my audience without algorithms I do not control.” Private conversation: “Help me talk without being tracked. “Content discovery: “Help me find information my government is hiding.” Group coordination: “Help me manage a community of thousands.”

Every time you open Telegram, you don’t know what you’ll find. New channels. Fresh content. Breaking news your government doesn’t want you to see. It’s an information slot machine that makes the product super sticky.

And here’s a crucial detail: Telegram’s team is still under 50 people.

Pavel runs the company from Dubai, where he’s taken citizenship. The engineering team is distributed globally, bouncing between countries to avoid legal pressure. There’s no office. No extra bureaucracy. Every dollar not spent on bureaucracy is a dollar spent on servers, features, and survival.

By 2023, Telegram has 800 million users. In 2024, it crosses 900 million. And in March 2025, Telegram hits 1 billion users.

HEADWINDS

But success at this scale always comes with new problems. Problems Pavel never had to face when Telegram was just a tool for dissidents.

The same features that made Telegram powerful for activists also made it powerful for criminals.

Drug markets. Scam rings. Terrorist coordination. Child exploitation.

Pavel’s philosophy is absolutist: Telegram doesn’t read private messages. Ever. It moderates public channels based on local laws, but private chats are sacrosanct.

Critics call it negligence. Pavel calls it principles.

In 2018, Russia tries to block Telegram entirely after Pavel refuses to hand over encryption keys.

The ban fails spectacularly. Users simply route around it using VPNs and proxy servers. The government eventually gives up.

But the pressure doesn’t stop.

In 2024, Pavel Durov is arrested at Le Bourget airport in France. The charges: Telegram’s alleged failure to cooperate with law enforcement.

He’s released on €5 million bail after four days, initially barred from leaving France.

The arrest sends shockwaves through the tech world. Could a founder be held personally responsible for what users do on an encrypted platform?

Pavel doubled down. Quote

“If a tool can be used for good, it will also be used for bad. That’s not the tool’s fault.”

End quote.

But still, there was a small shift. In September 2024, Telegram conceded it would begin handing over IP addresses and phone numbers to authorities with valid warrants.

Beyond criminal misuse and regulatory pressure, Telegram faces ongoing criticism from privacy experts.

Default chats aren’t end-to-end encrypted, requiring users to manually enable “Secret Chats” for true protection, a step most don’t take.

The proprietary MTProto protocol, while refined over years, is seen by some as less battle-tested than open standards like Signal’s. And requiring a phone number for signup reduces anonymity.

Pavel defends these as necessary for speed, features, and mass adoption, arguing perfect privacy would sacrifice the usability that made Telegram a billion-user platform.

Meanwhile, competitors are circling. WhatsApp, Signal, iMessage: all adding features Telegram pioneered.

So far, none have cracked Telegram’s core positioning: privacy and usability.

But there’s another challenge: money.

Telegram has never charged users. Never ran ads. Pavel personally funded it for a decade, burning through hundreds of millions.

By 2021, hosting a billion users with unlimited cloud storage becomes unsustainable.

Pavel’s solution? Totally unconventional.

He doesn’t raise venture capital, he uses debt financing by issuing bonds. Over $1 billion raised while maintaining complete independence.

Then he introduces ads, but only in large public channels, only text-based, no personal data harvesting.

He launches Telegram Premium for power users, while the free version stays fully functional.

With this contrarian strategy, Telegram survives without becoming a surveillance platform. Without selling user data. Without compromise.

This is the luxury afforded by being mission-driven rather than investor-driven. Pavel never went public. Never gave up control.

While WhatsApp sold to Facebook for $19 billion, Telegram issued bonds. While Snapchat IPO’d under shareholder pressure, Telegram stayed private. This was the opposite of every tech playbook. And that’s why Telegram could stay Telegram.

CONCLUSION

If there’s one thing we can take away from Telegram’s story, it’s this: Telegram achieved product-market fit by selling something rarer than features.

Digital freedom.

In a world where free apps harvest your life, Telegram offers a powerful blend of privacy and usability. Though that privacy is not perfect for everyone: for maximum security, users must opt into Secret Chats and trust Telegram’s servers for everything else.

But every feature like encryption, channels, bots, groups, reinforces the same insight: you don’t have to choose between privacy and usability.

Users needed that. For secrets. For coordination. For saving lives. And also, for fun.

Telegram’s success endures because it chose a small, viable market first: people who couldn’t afford to be watched.

Then stayed true to that vision as the world caught up.

Today, Telegram is profitable. It’s uncensored. It’s a digital nation of more than a billion citizens…

With a two-person government.

August 2022, Pueblo, Colorado. A man submits a painting to the digital arts competition at the Colorado State Fair. The title? Space Opera Theatre. It is stunning. A baroque hall, flooded with golden light, a massive circular window looking out into the cosmos, figures in robes staring into the void. It looks like a Renaissance painting of Star Wars.

The judges pin the blue ribbon on it. First place!

The artist, Jason Allen, accepts the prize. And then, he tells them the truth. He didn’t paint it. He didn’t photograph it. He didn’t even use Photoshop.

He just typed some words into a chat room.

The news broke the Internet. Twitter threads proclaimed the death of art. Artists called it theft. The judges admitted they didn’t know what was going on.

But here is the paradox ☝️.

At that exact moment, the company behind that image, Midjourney, didn’t have a marketing department. They didn’t have venture capital. They didn’t even have a website where you could log in and generate an image. To use the product, you had to join Discord, a chat app for gamers.

Yet within three years, Midjourney would have over twenty million registered users and nearly five hundred millions of annual revenue. No investors. A team of just 40 people. And lawsuits from Disney, Universal, and DreamWorks.

So how did Midjourney, a product that lived entirely inside a chat app for gamers, grow so big? How did a product with such a terrible user interface get so many users? How did a company with no traditional app and no venture capital manage to beat juggernauts like OpenAI and Google? And how did they find themselves fighting lawsuits against Hollywood’s most powerful studios?

This is the story of Midjourney, the leanest high-growth AI company in the world.

THE SEED

David Holz is not your typical Silicon Valley CEO.

If you met him in the street, you might not think business mogul. You might think he looks like the guy who fixes your Mac at the genius bar.

Before Midjourney, Holz was a student of the universe, literally. He studied applied math and physics. He worked at the Max Planck Institute. He did time at NASA’s Langley Research Center, working on LiDAR technology to map Mars.

Then he left in 2010 to found a startup called Leap Motion. They were building a little device that let you control your computer with hand gestures. Like Minority Report. It was incredibly hyped. It raised millions of dollars and it worked… well… technically.

In practice, in the end, it failed. The market adoption was just underwhelming, and Leap Motion sold to the British company Ultrahaptics in 2019 for roughly $30 million dollars, about 10% of Leap Motion’s $300 million peak valuation in 2013.

Why? Because it was a solution looking for a problem. It was cool technology, but it didn’t really have a Job to Be Done. Waving your arms at a screen is tiring and makes you look kinda silly. Turns out, the mouse is pretty great!

Holz learned the hard way: impressive tech is worthless if it doesn’t solve real problems. And distribution often matters more than innovation.

So he retreated. He started thinking about new ambitious ideas in lowkey mode, like a lion waiting for a prey to pass nearby.

In 2021, the prey manifested.

There was a buzz around new AI research papers on something called diffusion models. Holz was obsessively reading the diffusion model papers. These new AI systems could generate images from text.

The results were messy, unpredictable. But Holz saw something others didn’t. He wondered: “What does it mean when computers are better at visual imagination than 99 percent of humans?”

He saw a new medium of thought emerging. A way to democratize visual arts. A way to empower billions of people to draw and paint anything they could imagine without having to sweat ten years learning.

So in 2022, he founded an independent research lab. They called it Midjourney. No external investors. Just 11 engineers and a Discord server. With a big hairy goal: expand the imaginative powers of the human species.

Sounds pretentious, right?

Well… it worked.

THE SPARK

In late 2021, they had a prototype, but the initial tests were… unexciting.

You’d give someone this magical canvas and ask, “What do you want to see?” And the most common answer would be a disappointing, one-word: “dog.” Maybe two words, like “pink dog”. Or three words, like “pink fluffy dog”.

But at some point, they made a breakthrough. It was not a technical breakthrough, it was a social breakthrough.

They noticed that when people were in a group, the dynamic changed. One person would say “dog”. Another would say “space dog”. A third would shout “Aztec space dog!”.

At that moment, Holz got it. They were not building a tool. They were building a social network. So they would not build a standalone app. They would build a bot for Discord.

On paper, this looked like a dumb idea. Why would you start with a Discord bot instead of a normal website everyone already knows how to use?

When Midjourney launched in March 2022, it should have flopped.

They had this weird Discord chat bot social network idea. And OpenAI’s DALL-E already dominated the conversation. DALL-E 2 was the polished, invite-only frontrunner. Stable Diffusion was coming. Google had Imagen in the wings. These were billion-dollar research labs with massive datasets and marketing machines.

Midjourney had… Discord.

Instead of building a normal website or app, Holz forced every user into Discord. Textbook marketing logic would say this is suicide. You are adding massive friction to the product. You require users to download a third-party chat app, join something called a server, and type obscure commands, like slash imagine, in a public channel. And then, people would often lose their images in that stream of thousands of other people’s messages posted on that public channel.

But let’s look closer.

By forcing users into public channels, Midjourney solved the cold start, chicken-and-egg problem every social network faces. When you joined, you didn’t see a blank text box. You saw a waterfall of other people’s artworks. You saw the prompts they used. You saw the results.

You learned how to use the product by watching others. You saw someone generate something incredible and thought, “I want to do that”, and you could then just copy-paste the prompt they used.

Every user was generating content that advertised the product to every other user. They turned a single-player utility into a massively multiplayer game.

Holz said in an interview with The Verge, quote: “We could have built our own social network, but why? Discord already has the social primitives. The community is already there.” End quote.

In another interview, he told Ben Thompson from Stratechery, quote: “I think that the Midjourney experience would not work at all if it was just talking to a chatbot in a room by yourself, but the second that it’s in a room with lots of people, it becomes really interesting.” End quote.

But beyond this social aspect, Midjourney had another advantage. One nobody expected would matter so much.

Beauty.

Midjourney launched with a radically different model tuning. It didn’t try to look like a photograph; it tried to look like concept art. It understood lighting, composition, and texture. It was “opinionated” software.

While other models were optimizing for accuracy, Midjourney optimized for aesthetics. They realized that 99% of users are not artists.

When normal people type something and get a bland drawing, they get bored, and leave. If they get a cinematic, moody masterpiece, they feel like a genius, and stay.

Midjourney images felt designed, intentional, cinematic. The output wasn’t just correct. It was beautiful. Midjourney made its users feel badass!

As 37Signals CEO Jason Fried once said: “Here’s what our product can do” and “Here’s what you can do with our product” sound similar, but they are completely different approaches.

The real goal is to make your users feel badass!

Experimental artists. Creative geeks. Hobbyists who cared about mood and atmosphere. These were the early adopters. And they were ecstatic. They were vocal.

By July 2022, just six months after launch, the Discord server reached one million users, surpassing major servers like Fortnite and Minecraft at the time. Press coverage in The Verge, Forbes, PCWorld. The Economist even put a Midjourney-generated image on its cover. Holz described this growing community as a “hive mind of people, super-powered with technology”.

For any normal startup, that would be the moment of raising more capital to accelerate growth. Going from seed funding to series A funding round. Or from Series A to Series B and so forth.

But that was not how Midjourney operated. They were not burning loads of VC cash like Silicon Valley cool kids. They were charging from the start.

Subscription tiers. Pay for compute. A business model aligned with usage, not vanity metrics. And they stayed lean. Just a few dozen people at that time. No bloat.

In August 2022, Holz said in an interview with The Register, quote: “We’re like a self-funded research lab. We can lose some amount of money. We don’t have like $100 million of somebody else’s money to lose. To be honest, we’re already profitable, and we’re fine”. End quote.

They were going to ride this momentum to mainstream status, on their terms.

GOING MAINSTREAM

Geoffrey Moore’s “Crossing the Chasm” theory says there is a gap between early adopters, i.e the tech nerds, and the early majority, i.e the mainstream.

The early adopters loved Midjourney. But early adopters always love new things.

The chasm, the gap between enthusiasts and normal people, that’s actually where many products fall and die. Early adopters want possibilities. Early adopters tolerate quirks and friction.

The mainstream wants reliability. The mainstream hate bugs.

Midjourney crossed this chasm with three big things.

First big thing: quality improvements. In November 2022, they released Version 4. The leap was visible. Images went from “impressive for AI” to “wait, a human didn’t make this?”.

Lighting improved. Details sharpened. Consistency increased. The model started feeling less like a slot machine and more like a reliable collaborator.

Then Version 5 in March 2023. It’s even better. Photorealism. Greater consistency. The “shimmer” and weird artifacts of early AI are gone. Fingers start looking like fingers. Eyes look like eyes. The kind of output you could use commercially. For marketing. For book covers. For social media. For everything.

Second big thing: the memes. This is where Midjourney got out of tech circles and broke into mainstream conversations.

March 2023. Someone generates an image of Donald Trump being arrested. Surrounded by police. Dramatic lighting, facial expressions, and dynamism. It goes viral. Millions of views. News outlets cover it. Some people believe it’s real, until they figure it out. The conversation shifts from “Is this real?” to “Holy shit, AI can do this?”

A week later, we get an image of Pope Francis wearing a massive, stylish white Balenciaga puffer coat. It looked swaggy. It looked real. It also goes viral instantly. Fashion blogs cover it. People think the Pope just got a fashion epiphany!

These viral images proved Midjourney could create things people cared about sharing. Things that sparked emotion. Delight. Confusion. Outrage. It didn’t matter which. What mattered was they couldn’t be ignored. It was a public demonstration that this tool could generate impactful content in seconds. It was a tipping point in public awareness.

Third big thing: the web interface. For two years, Midjourney lived only in Discord.

That was brilliant for the early community of early adopters. But it was a total pain for everyone else. Non-gamers didn’t use Discord. Professionals found it clunky. The mainstream needed easier.

So in 2024, Midjourney publicly launched their web editor.

Simple interface. Gallery of examples. Create without joining a server. The barrier to entry disappeared.

Midjourney recognized that to reach the Late Majority, they eventually had to leave the chaos of Discord. But they only did it AFTER the community was cemented.

Midjourney was now not just for tech-savvy creatives. It was for marketing teams. Publishers. Social media managers. Real work.

The numbers speak for themselves. From 1 million Discord members in mid-2022 to over 20 million by mid-2025. Daily active users soared into the millions. Revenue, without a cent of VC money, exploded from an estimated $50 million in 2022 to $500 million in 2025.

In 2024, Stripe even named Midjourney its most globally distributed merchant and gave David Holz a custom CRT monitor displaying a live map of the company’s worldwide customer base.

They had built a new market, and were leading it. They’d crossed the chasm.

But here’s the thing about crossing the chasm. A smooth landing is absolutely not guaranteed.

HEADWINDS

The first challenge to hit Holz and the Midjourney team was that competition got very heated, very fast. By 2023 and 2024, the moat began to dry up. Stable Diffusion offered open-source control. Adobe integrated Firefly directly into Photoshop. Making pretty pictures was becoming a commodity.

Then, OpenAI embedded DALL-E into ChatGPT. ChatGPT’s massive user base now had image generation built in. That integration went viral and people suddenly started sharing Studio Ghibli versions of EVERYTHING.

And video arrived. Kling. Runway. Veo from Google. Grok Imagine from xAI.

Midjourney had carved out a new market. But that market was getting crowded.

Unfortunately, external competition wasn’t Midjourney’s only problem. They were also fighting battles from within.

The second challenge was moderation, which became a nightmare. Remember, Midjourney’s entire model relied on public generation. But public generation also means public abuse.

In 2024, ahead of the U.S elections, Midjourney started blocking images of certain political figures. Xi Jinping. Donald Trump.

The goal was to prevent deepfakes and misinformation. But the backlash was immediate. Users accused them of censorship. Of choosing sides. Of overreach.

Holz defended it as risk management. But the tension was real: how do you run a platform for imagination when imagination can become a liability?

Third challenge, and this is the big one: copyright.

In 2023, a Twitter user posted a children’s book they’d created entirely with Midjourney. Illustrations, characters, everything. Twitter got very mad.

Artists pointed out the images looked suspiciously similar to existing illustrators’ styles. The question wasn’t subtle: did Midjourney train on copyrighted work without permission? The guy took a proper Twitter beating.

Then the lawsuits started.

A class-action lawsuit filed by artists Sarah Andersen, Kelly McKernan, Karla Ortiz, alleged that AI companies like Stability AI and Midjourney scrapped billions of copyrighted images to train its model without consent. The allegations were specific: training datasets included copyrighted art from living artists, used to generate images that directly competed with those same artists.

Then in June 2025, the hammer dropped.

Disney, Universal, and DreamWorks filed a federal lawsuit.

The claim: Midjourney enabled users to generate images of Mickey Mouse, Shrek, characters from Frozen, copyrighted IP worth billions. The studios alleged the model was trained on their work and now functioned as an unlicensed content generator.

Warner Bros Discovery followed months later. Their claim was devastating: Midjourney had built a business on the “theft” of their iconic characters, from Superman to Scooby-Doo.

This was not just about artists anymore. This was legal warfare from industry giants. That kind of giant with bottomless pockets. That kind of lawfare that could shut down a company.

But challenges were also cultural. AI-generated images started flooding the internet.

Social media feeds began filling up with low-effort AI garbage. “Shrimp Jesus.” Fake architectural wonders.

More recently, OpenAI released SORA 2, an AI short video generator for social media which accelerated the trend. At some point, the novelty wore off. People started calling it “AI Slop”. And Midjourney, because it was so visible, so successful, became one of the targets of that backlash.

The narrative shifted from “democratizing creativity” to “stealing from artists.” From “collaborative imagination” to “copyright infringement.” From “community-funded underdog” to “capitalist thief.”

So what did Midjourney do?

They fought. They hired lawyers. They filed motions. They argued fair use and transformative purpose. They pointed out that users controlled prompts. Midjourney didn’t create copyrighted images, users did.

Midjourney didn’t apologize, but they adapted.

They didn’t pivot to B2B enterprise sales to hide. They doubled down on their power users. They launched video generation mid-2025, competing with Veo and all the others. They released “Style Tuners” to give artists more control. They improved moderation tools. They added features for commercial licensing and attribution. They evolved their product. They stayed small. They stayed quiet in the press. They kept shipping models. V5. V6. V7.

And they invested some more in the community.

Because here’s the truth: Midjourney’s strength was never just the model. It was the people. The Discord channels where users taught each other prompt craft. The galleries where people showcased their work. The rituals of iteration and upscaling and sharing.

That community didn’t abandon them. Even as lawsuits mounted. Even as critics called them thieves. The users stayed. Because Midjourney gave them something they couldn’t get anywhere else.

A fellowship of people making beautiful art with just a keyboard and a screen.

CONCLUSION

So, where does that leave us?

Midjourney started as a Discord bot run by a guy who used to map Mars. It became the defining visual engine of the early 2020s. They broke major rules in the marketing playbook. They didn’t build an easy-to-use web application. They didn’t take venture capital. They charged real money from the start instead of artificially boosting growth with free users. And they still achieved incredible success.

Now that competition in image and video generation is fiercer than ever, what will Midjourney do in the months and years to come? Keeping up with the competition for sure, but probably, not just that.

Just like Space Opera Theatre shocked the world in 2022, Midjourney may be preparing its next surprise.

On August 28, 2024, Midjourney publicly announced on Twitter they had started working on hardware.

They had hired Ahmad Abbas just a few months before. Abbas, who is an ex-Neuralink engineer and the former hardware engineering manager on Apple’s Vision Pro, is also a former colleague of Holz at Leap Motion.

For now, nothing is known about the hardware they plan to make: AI-generated 3D worlds? Real-time generated video games? Something even crazier?

When Holz revealed the initiative to Midjourney users on Discord in early January 2024, he called it a device for creating and managing thousands of 3D rooms. He later alluded on X that Midjourney “will make the Orb.”

So what’s the orb? I don’t know, and maybe even Holz doesn’t know either.

Yet.

March 9, 1959, New York Toy Fair. The ballroom is packed with buyers from Sears, Woolworths, every titan of retail. They decide what American children get to play with. And in the middle of this room, standing next to a tiny booth, is a woman named Ruth. She is holding something that is making these men uncomfortable. A blonde doll in a zebra-striped swimsuit. They’re thinking: “That thing has too much figure. It has heels. It has heavy makeup. And, most problematically... It has breasts. No mother will buy it for her daughter. Three dollars for a doll with breasts? It’ll be dead by Christmas.”

They were wrong. The doll these men dismissed would become the most successful physical product ever created for children. By Christmas, Mattel couldn’t make them fast enough. More than three hundred thousand sold in the first year. This was the beginning of the worldwide Barbie craze.

But there’s something strange to this story. The toy that taught generations of girls they could be anything… was almost killed before it ever left the room.

So how did a doll nobody believed in become the most successful toy in human history? How did a product that offended half the parents who saw it end up in the dreams of a billion children? How did this borderline-inappropriate doll go on to dominate every toy shelf on earth, become a billion-dollar franchise, survive a cultural civil war, collapse, resurrect, and then turn into the most talked-about movie in the world?

Let’s go back, way back, before the pink Corvette, before the Dreamhouse, before the movie that made a billion dollars in three weeks.

THE SPARK

Los Angeles, 1956. Ruth Handler is forty years old. She’s the only woman in most rooms she walks into. She’s the co-founder of a small toy company called Mattel. The company is still small enough that the entire staff fits in one garage. They make picture frames and dollhouse furniture out of scrap wood. Profits are thin. Elliot, her husband, designs. Ruth sells. She’s quite good at selling.

Over the years, she has watched her daughter Barbara playing with paper dolls. Cut-out movie stars. Cut-out brides. Cut-out airline stewardesses. Barbara gives them adult lives, adult jobs, adult conversations. Ruth notices something strange. When Barbara plays with baby dolls, she’s the mother. When she plays with paper dolls, she’s the woman in the story. She’s projecting herself forward.

Ruth asks a simple question most toy executives never thought to ask. What if a girl could play at being grown-up in three dimensions? They wanted to try adulthood. But the only technology they had to do it was paper. And paper tears. Paper is fragile. Paper is limited.

The idea should have died right there. Every doll on the market was a baby. Betsy Wetsy.

Tiny Tears. Chatty Cathy. Dolls that wet their diapers. Dolls that cried. Dolls that needed to be fed and burped and put to bed. The entire category existed to teach girls one job: motherhood.

Adult-figured dolls? Those were European gag gifts sold in tobacco shops. The most famous was a German cartoon character named Bild Lilli, eleven inches of plastic skin with a wink and a cigarette holder. Lilli wasn’t a toy for kids. Lilli was a gag gift for men. She was based on a risqué comic strip character who was a call girl. You bought Lilli at bachelor parties. You hung her from the rearview mirror of your car. It was, essentially, an adult novelty item.

Ruth, Elliot, and their kids, Barbara and Kenneth, take a vacation to Switzerland in 1956. While walking through Lucerne, Ruth spots something in a shop window. It’s Bild Lilli. She buys three. One for Barbara, two for Elliot, her husband, and Jack Ryan, the brilliant, chain-smoking engineer they poached from Raytheon. Jack was not a toy designer: he had designed the Sparrow III and Hawk missiles for the Pentagon, and was credited with over 1,000 patents worldwide.

Ruth gave them a mandate: make this, but make it for kids. Lilli looks hard. She looks mean. Strip the smirk. Soften the face. Make her less overtly sexual but keep the breasts.

Who’s it for? The answer wasn’t “moms.” It wasn’t “parents.” It was for the girl imagining her future self. That was the market.

Jack Ryan was a maverick engineer who understood materials better than anyone. Jack looks at the Lilli doll and realizes the problem is the tactile experience. Hard plastic feels cheap. It feels cold. He engineers a new skin. It’s soft. It yields to the touch. He invents a joint system for the waist and the knees so the doll can strike a pose. Not a stiff pose, but a model’s pose. If the doll felt like a statue, it was an object. If it felt like skin, it was a friend.

THE LAUNCH

Inside Mattel, the executives panic. The wholesale buyers panic. Even the factory in Japan sends telegrams: “American mothers will never allow it.”

But Ruth is not moved one bit. They name the prototype Barbie, after Ruth’s daughter. But how do you sell a doll with adult curves to conservative, Eisenhower-era mothers? This is where the genius of Mattel’s marketing kicked in. It’s a lesson in positioning. April Dunford defines positioning as “how your product is uniquely qualified to solve a problem that a specific customer cares about.” If Mattel positioned Barbie as a “sexy doll,” they’d die. If they position her as a “friend,” they’d fail. So they positioned her as a Teacher. They marketed Barbie as a tool for teaching little girls “poise” and “grooming. “The box didn’t say “Future CEO.” It said “Teenage Fashion Model.” That was smart framing. They told mothers: This isn’t a threat to your values. This is a training tool for your daughter to learn how to dress properly and attract a husband. It was a brilliant, necessary lie. It lowered the defenses of the gatekeeper just enough to get the product into the house.

But how exactly did Mattel bring this message to their target audience?

Well, back in 1955 Ruth made a bet that almost bankrupted the company: she signed Mattel as the first year-round sponsor of the Mickey Mouse Club. Five hundred thousand dollars, more money than the company has ever made in a single year. At that time, no toy company advertises year-round, only around Christmas. No toy company advertises directly to children during children’s programming. It was considered wasteful and slightly scandalous. Four years later, when the buyers at Toy Fair laughed Barbie out of the room, Ruth already owned the most powerful children’s advertising slot in America. The moment the doll was ready, she turned on the firehose.

Elliot thought she had lost her mind. But Ruth knew something the men didn’t. If you ask mothers, they’ll say no. If you ask the girls themselves, they’ll scream YES!.

And so, for the first time in history, a toy speaks directly to the child who will use it, not the adult who will pay for it. The commercial is one minute long. Barbie walks down a runway.

A girl’s voice sings: “Barbie, beautiful Barbie… someday I’m gonna be exactly like you.” The ad showed the doll, but mostly, it showed the clothes. It showed the lifestyle.

The result was immediate. It was the invention of “Pester Power.” Thousands of girls saw the ad, turned to their parents, and begged. The phone lines at Mattel melt. The retailers who said “no” in New York? Two months later, they were calling Mattel begging for stock. The demand was thunderous. They couldn’t keep her on the shelves. 350,000 dolls sold in the first year.

CROSSING THE CHASM

Between 1959 and 1961, sales are strong, girls love her, but some parents still hesitate. Ruth realizes the doll is missing something essential. Barbie is alone.

1961. Enters Ken, named after Ruth’s son. Now Barbie has someone to go on dates with. Someone to argue with. Someone with whom she can become President while he’s still Vice President. Suddenly the stories get bigger.

Girls start doing something with Barbie they never did with baby dolls. They don’t put her to bed.

They leave her out. On the desk. In the car. With weird poses, mid-adventure. Because the story isn’t over when playtime ends. Barbie is a projection of a future self. And future selves don’t clock out at 5 p.m.

The product-market fit wasn’t the doll. It was the job the doll was hired for. Not “teach me to be a mother.” But “let me rehearse being accomplished and powerful.”

Geoffrey Moore talks about crossing the chasm between the early adopters and the mainstream. Early adopters were the imaginative outliers, girls who already cut up Sears catalogs to make paper dream boards. The mainstream were the girls who still played with baby dolls because that’s all there was. The bridge between them wasn’t a better, cuter baby doll. It was a better question. Who do you want to be when no one is forcing you to be anything?

Mattel just kept giving new answers to that question. Astronaut Barbie, 1965, four years before Armstrong walked on the moon. Doctor Barbie, 1973, when only nine percent of American doctors were women. President Barbie, 1992, long before anyone thought it was possible. Every time society told girls “not yet,” Barbie whispered “watch me.”

And parents bought it. Even some of the ones who wrote angry letters. Because deep down they wanted their daughters to believe the whisper. Some parents were writing complaint letters about unrealistic beauty, consumerism, and the dangers of a child playing with an adult woman. To feminist critics, she’s objectification. In 1970, at the Women’s Strike for Equality march in New York, the protest chant is: “I am not a Barbie doll.“ Barbie becomes a symbol of everything wrong with beauty standards. Her proportions are impossible. Her focus on fashion is superficial. Her body is said to teach girls to hate their own.

Barbie was and still is polarizing. But that’s exactly part of why it became such a huge hit. If Ruth Handler had listened to the buyers, she would have made a better baby doll. She would have been safe. And she would have been invisible. Barbie worked because she was polarizing. The features that made the gatekeepers hate her (the breasts, the makeup, the independence) were the exact features that made the users love her. Polarization is how you know you’re remarkable. The opposite of remarkable isn’t terrible. It’s “very good.” It’s invisible. Barbie wasn’t very good. It was different, and in a sense, it was weird. As the famous marketer Seth Godin would say, it was a purple cow.

And in a world where we have too many choices and too little time, the obvious thing to do is just ignore stuff. And my parable here is you’re driving down the road and you see a cow, and you keep driving because you’ve seen cows before. Cows are invisible. Cows are boring. Who’s going to stop and pull over and say -- “Oh, look, a cow.” Nobody. But if the cow was purple -- isn’t that a great special effect? I could do that again if you want. If the cow was purple, you’d notice it for a while. I mean, if all cows were purple you’d get bored with those, too. The thing that’s going to decide what gets talked about, what gets done, what gets changed, what gets purchased, what gets built, is: “Is it remarkable?” And “remarkable” is a really cool word, because we think it just means “neat,” but it also means “worth making a remark about.

This “Who do you want to be” question was also the key that opened the right positioning that made Mattel and Barbie thrive. No other competitors were empowering girls to visualize the answer themselves. Barbie was the kids’ avatar. The child became the doll. When Barbie is an astronaut, the girl is an astronaut. When Barbie is a doctor, the girl is a doctor. This is why Barbie’s lack of personality was her greatest feature. She didn’t talk. She didn’t have a backstory. She was a blank canvas. And this triggered a powerful behavioral loop known as the Diderot Effect. The Diderot Effect states that obtaining a new possession often creates a spiral of consumption which leads you to acquire more new things. Because Barbie was an avatar of an adult life, she needed the trappings of an adult life. She needed a boyfriend, Ken. She needed a car. She needed a Dreamhouse. Every accessory wasn’t just a toy; it was a piece of the identity the child was building.

This led Mattel to invent a breakthrough business model for the toy industry. Before Barbie, you bought a doll, and you were done. The transaction ended. Ruth and her team looked at the economics. It was very expensive to make Barbie high-quality, with that soft vinyl and rooted hair. If they sold her at a profit, she’d cost $10. Too high for an unproven toy. So they did something radical. They pioneered the Razor and Blades model for the toy industry. They sold Barbie for $3.00. That’s about $30 today. It was barely break-even. Maybe even a loss leader. But... Barbie was naked. Or nearly naked. She came in a black-and-white swimsuit. If you wanted her to be a “Teenage Fashion Model,” you had to buy the clothes. And the clothes? The margins on the clothes were astronomical. Kids were not buying Barbie. They were buying Barbie’s world. The clothes. The accessories. The fantasy careers. This was more than a doll. It was a platform. Barbie was the iPhone, and the clothes were the App Store. This created a network effect. If your friend had the “Commuter Set,” you needed the “Evening Splendour” set. It turned a one-time purchase into a recurring revenue stream that lasted for years.

Every accessory added value to every previous accessory. In other words: more Barbie makes Barbie better. And Mattel would build and sell every imaginable brick of this Barbie’s world. Merchandising, IP licensing, everything. Barbie would become a money printing machine.

This was the product-market fit moment. Direct-to-child television advertising + razor-blades accessory model + blank-canvas personality. That trio is what turned a risky $3 doll into a platform empire.

By the 1970s, Barbie is generating hundreds of millions in revenue. Since 1959 over a billion dolls have been sold worldwide. Mattel estimates three dolls are sold every second. In 2016, Time magazine found that ninety-two percent of American girls ages 3 to 10 owned a Barbie.

CHALLENGES AND RESILIENCE

But… the road to mega-success was not without some pretty big bumps. During the 1990s and 2000s, Barbie will be battling some headwinds. Success creates new problems. Like sharks attracted by blood in water, competitors appear left and right. The most formidable was Bratz which at that time was edgier and cooler.

Bratz gains market share. Mattel sues. The legal battle lasts years. Mattel, instead of doubling down on what made Barbie different, tries to play defense. They chase trends. They dilute their positioning. They produce too many dolls with too many contradictory messages. And of course, when you try to be for everyone, you become for no one. Meanwhile the culture shifts. People scrutinize body image. Parents question stereotypes. “Barbie is outdated” becomes a talking point. The brand is wobbling. A horrible fate is looming at the horizon: it’s called irrelevance. What will happen next then?

2014. A new team comes in. And instead of running from criticism, they study it. They read the scathing opinion pieces. They talk to kids. They talk to parents. And they realize something: Barbie had lost her story. So Mattel changes course. In 2016, they redesign the body shapes. They introduce three new body types: petite, tall, and curvy. They expand skin tones, eye colors and hairstyles. They adjust proportions. They introduce career dolls that feel like they have actual careers, not just costumes. They stop chasing trends and start giving kids what they want: a vehicle for their dreams. And this unlocks one of the most incredible comebacks in business history. A comeback so big it will end up breaking the box office.

It’s 2023. It’s Greta Gerwig’s Barbie blockbuster with Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling. A sea of pink. People wearing cowboy hats they’ll never wear again. Movie theaters selling out like it’s 1999. There are even tweets about Barbie official color: Barbie Pink, Pantone 219C. Barbie has reached the peak of the cultural zeitgeist.

CONCLUSION

There’s a moving moment in Ruth Handler’s memoir, Dream Doll.

1997. She’s eighty years old. She’s been forced out of Mattel decades earlier over a bookkeeping scandal. She’s watching Share a Smile Becky, a Barbie in a wheelchair roll off the production line. A doll she didn’t design. She cries. Not because it’s perfect. But because the idea outlived her.

That’s the quiet truth of Barbie. The woman who made her was flawed. The doll was flawed.

The company was flawed. But the story they started, this dangerous, generous story that a girl’s future is hers to invent, will keep growing after all of them are gone.

One billion dolls sold. And still, every year, Mattel asks the same question Ruth asked in 1956.

What does she want to be next? The answer keeps changing. The question never does.

Marketing isn’t about selling a piece of plastic. It’s about giving people better versions of their tomorrows. Barbie didn’t take over the world because she was beautiful. She took over the world because, for one fleeting hour every day, she let little girls be free.

And freedom, it turns out, is the most addictive product there is.

You have seen this face. You know the top hat. And you definitely know that finger.

James Montgomery Flagg’s “I Want You” poster is arguably the most famous piece of advertising in American history. It is the visual definition of patriotism, duty, and the United States Army.

But what if I told you that the most iconic image of Uncle Sam isn’t actually Uncle Sam at all? It’s a selfie. The artist, James Montgomery Flagg, an aging commercial illustrator, looked in a mirror, and added a fake goatee and wrinkles because he didn’t want the hassle of hiring a model.

And what if I told you that this “quintessentially American” masterpiece was actually a blatant rip-off of a British design from three years earlier?

We are looking at this poster today not just because it’s a piece of history, but because it is a masterclass in psychology and marketing. In 1917, the United States government had a massive product launch problem. They had to sell a war to a population that didn’t want to fight, and they had to do it without a modern advertising agency, without television, and with zero budget for illustrators and copywriters.

Yet, this single poster managed to print four million copies, helped shift the national consciousness from isolationism to intervention, and convince young men to leave their homes for the trenches of Europe. No celebrities. No catchy jingle. Just an old man pointing his finger. And somehow, that piece of paper became the most influential advertisement ever created. One that’s been copied, parodied, and studied for over a hundred years.

So, how did a piece of borrowed art, sketched in a single afternoon by a guy looking in a mirror, become the greatest recruitment ad of all time?

We’ll break down this poster and once you see what we’ll show you, you’ll never look at it the same way.

BACKGROUND

But first, to truly grasp its genius, we have to rewind a bit.

1916: America is neutral, but Europe is bleeding out. Magazines are screaming “Preparedness!” because everyone knows the U.S. is eventually getting dragged in. James Montgomery Flagg, already a famous illustrator, cocky, patriotic, kind of a jerk, draws himself as Uncle Sam for Leslie’s Weekly. The headline? “What Are YOU Doing for Preparedness?”

1917: America enters the war. Problem is, Americans don’t want to go.

Wilson literally won reelection on “He kept us out of war.” The standing army is about 120,000 men, smaller than Portugal’s. The government needs millions. Immediately.

But for years, the public’s been told this is a “European problem.” Isolationism is the dominant mood. Yes, there’s a draft. But if you can force someone to fight, you can’t force them to be motivated. They needed young men to want to sign up.

So the government created the Committee on Public Information, headed by a journalist named George Creel. Essentially America’s first federal marketing agency. Posters, pamphlets, films, and “Four Minute Men” giving patriotic speeches in movie theaters nationwide.

This wasn’t Madison Avenue. It was volunteer illustrators like Flagg. His brief was a brain-teaser: take “come die in a muddy trench“ and make it irresistible. In the split second someone walks past a post office. Flagg took his Leslie’s cover, reworked it, handed it to the government. The rest… is history.

POSTER BREAKDOWN

So, let’s break down exactly how he pulled this off, step by step.

The first thing that hits you is the Pattern Interrupt.

In the early 1900s, advertising and war communication usually looked like a scene from a play. It was third-person. You, the viewer, were watching people do things, heroic soldiers marching, families smiling, pretty ladies, eagles, flags. You were a passive observer.

Flagg made something different. He used a technique called “Direct Address.”

Look at the eyes. Flagg painted them specifically to follow you. It’s the “Mona Lisa” effect, but aggressive. Whether you stand to the left or the right of this poster, Uncle Sam is staring at you.

Psychologically, this triggers an immediate response. You are being confronted. It removes the “Bystander Effect.” You can’t look at this and say, “Oh, the Army needs people.“ The poster is saying, “No, I’m not talking to the crowd. I am talking to YOU.”

Now look at the composition. Uncle Sam takes up about 70 percent of the poster. There’s almost no background. No distracting elements. No scenery, no other people, no decorative flourishes.

There’s extreme visual compression. Everything that doesn’t serve the message has been stripped away. Your eye goes face, finger, headline, call to action. In that order. In about two seconds.

Flagg used foreshortening, a perspective technique where the finger appears larger than it would in real life because it’s pointing toward you. This makes the gesture even more powerful, more immediate. The finger seems to project out of the two-dimensional surface into your physical space.

The color palette is the obvious red, white, and blue patriotic triad. But notice how the face uses warm flesh tones that contrast against the cooler blues of the coat and hat. Your eye naturally gravitates toward the face because of this color temperature difference.

The text is condensed, all-caps and uses the loudest possible typography of the era.

This brings us to the fantastic, incredible copy.

“I WANT YOU.”

It’s massive. It screams urgency. Notice the pronoun choice. It’s not “The Army Wants Men.” It’s “I Want YOU.“

Flagg also personalizes the institution that’s making the call. Uncle Sam isn’t a random old dude. He IS America. The top hat is Abraham Lincoln. The stars on the hat band are the flag. The goatee is a 19th-century marker of wisdom and authority.

Uncle Sam isn’t a faceless bureaucracy here; he’s a father figure. He’s an authority. And by saying “I Want You,” Flagg leverages a deep psychological trigger: the desire for validation from authority. It makes you, the viewer feel selected. It makes you feel necessary.

If you ignore a poster that says “Enlist Today,” you’re just ignoring an ad. If you ignore a poster where a father figure is pointing at your face saying “I Want You,” you are committing an act of personal rejection. You feel guilt. And guilt can be a much stronger motivator than patriotism.

The primary emotional lever here isn’t inspiration. It’s not excitement about adventure or glory. It’s guilt. It’s duty. It’s the fear of being seen as a coward or a shirker.

Robert Cialdini’s principles of influence are all over this poster. Authority: Uncle Sam represents the federal government itself, the ultimate authority figure. Commitment and consistency: if you consider yourself a patriot, an American, this poster implies that enlisting is the consistent action. Social proof: these posters were everywhere, in post offices, train stations, shop windows. If everyone’s seeing this message, there’s an implicit pressure that everyone’s responding to it.

But the deepest trigger is identity reinforcement. The poster doesn’t argue. It doesn’t present facts about why the war matters or what Germany has done. It simply says: you’re American, and it implies that Americans answer when called.

This is what makes it so effective and, if we’re being honest, what makes it propaganda rather than persuasion. It short-circuits rational evaluation. You don’t weigh the pros and cons. It makes you feel this is what you’re supposed to do.

Now… All of this psychological brilliance is impressive, but there’s a catch.

Flagg didn’t invent this composition. He basically stole it.

Three years earlier, in 1914, a British artist named Alfred Leete created a nearly identical poster. It showed Lord Kitchener, Britain’s Secretary of State for War, pointing at the viewer with the words “Britons: Lord Kitchener Wants You”. That poster was published on the cover of London Opinion magazine in September 1914. It was a hit in Britain.

Historians agree Flagg must have seen it. Now, you might think this makes him less creative. Actually, that makes him even smarter. He took a proven concept and asked: how do I make this work for an American audience? How do I make it better? This is a critical lesson for anyone creating content or advertising. You don’t always need to invent something new. Sometimes the smarter move is to identify what’s already working and execute better than anyone else. As the saying goes, good artists copy, great artists steal.

The British version is stiff. Lord Kitchener looks distant. Kitchener says “Your Country Needs YOU.” Flagg goes harder: “I WANT YOU.” It’s first-person. It’s personal. Flagg took the concept and Americanized it. He removed the background. He cropped it tight on the face. He stripped away the military uniform coat and just left the stars and stripes top hat. He made it louder, cleaner, and meaner. You don’t always need a new idea; sometimes you just need the best version of the right idea.

Now let’s look at a detail that many miss. It’s at the bottom of the poster.

There is a line of text that says “Nearest Recruiting Station,” and often, there is a blank white space underneath it. This is brilliant user experience design from 1917. This poster was printed centrally by the millions, but it had to work in Iowa, in New York, and in Texas. That blank space allowed local postmasters to stamp their specific address. This is what we’d now call dynamic personalization, but a century ago with blank ink and a rubber stamp. This single national campaign could be localized for every town, every neighborhood. The poster was answering the question “Okay, but where do I go now?”

In modern marketing terms, this is reducing friction and optimizing for conversion. The poster creates the emotional spike, the guilt, the fear, the duty, and then immediately gives you the “How.” It bridges the gap between “I should do something” and “Here is where I go to do it.” It’s a conversion optimization trick built right into the print.

Finally, let’s talk about the budget, or lack thereof.

We don’t have the receipts, but we know the creative cost was effectively zero. Flagg donated his time. But the reason he used his own face for Uncle Sam wasn’t just ego, it was efficiency. He was working on a tight deadline. He didn’t have time to arrange a sitting with a model. So he sat in front of a mirror, aged his face up, added the whiskers, and got to work.

Frankly, I find it a bit ironic that the face of the American government, the face of intimidating authority, is actually just a commercial artist from New York who needed to get a job done by 5:00 PM. It reminds us that iconic work often comes from constraints, not unlimited resources.

THE PAYOFF

So, if you aren’t recruiting for World War III, what does this poster teach you about modern advertising? Here are key principles you can steal from James Montgomery Flagg.

(1) Direct address beats broadcast messaging
Let’s start with direct address. The most powerful word after I, and me, is you. If your marketing speaks to a demographic, it’s noise. If it speaks to a person, it’s a conversation. Flagg proved that making a message feel like a private confrontation is the fastest way to hack attention.

(2) Pattern interrupt

The pointing finger, the direct eye contact, these are deliberate pattern interrupts. In a world full of visual noise, you need something that stops the scroll, catches the eye, demands attention. Sometimes that means breaking the conventions everyone else follows.

(3) Steal proven frameworks

Flagg didn’t invent the pointing-man recruitment poster. Alfred Leete did. Flagg just executed it better for his audience. If something’s working in another market, another industry, another country, don’t reinvent the wheel. Adapt it. Execute it better.

(4) Design for action
Flagg didn’t just create awareness; he added a path to conversion. That blank line at the bottom is the 1917 equivalent of a “Link in Bio.” Don’t just get people excited; tell them exactly where to go next, and make it easy for them to act.

(5) Borrow authority
Flagg didn’t invent a new mascot. He took Uncle Sam, a figure that already existed, and gave him a makeover.

The character actually started as a joke during the War of 1812 about a meat packer named Samuel Wilson who supplied beef to the Army. Wilson stamped his barrels with “U.S.” for United States, but soldiers joked it stood for Uncle Sam Wilson. Uncle Sam. The nickname stuck. Over the next century, Uncle Sam evolved into the personification of the American government itself.

By the time Flagg painted his poster, Uncle Sam had appeared in political cartoons for decades. Thomas Nast, the same cartoonist who gave us Santa Claus and the Republican elephant, had already made him a household figure. Flagg didn’t have to explain who this was. The trust, the authority, the patriotic feeling... all pre-loaded.

So Flagg leveraged 50 years of built-in brand equity. Attach your message to a symbol your audience already trusts, and you shortcut the persuasion process.

But here’s the twist: for a century, Uncle Sam was drawn as a friendly grandfather. Flagg realized a jovial meat packer couldn’t sell a war. So he kept the name but hardened the face. Turned a folk hero into a commanding father figure, and rebranded a 100-year-old symbol with a single brushstroke.

FINAL VERDICT

If we had to rate this ad, it’d break the scale. Strategic Clarity? 10 out of 10. Creative Execution? Flawless. Business impact? It must have worked bonkers because they dusted it off in 1941 for World War II with almost zero changes. Think about that. The same creative ran, unchanged, across two world wars and still crushed. Longevity? It’s been over 100 years, and here we are, still talking about it.

It managed to do what all great advertising aims to do: It turned a passive audience into active participants. It didn’t just ask for attention; it summoned a response.

And once the world realized the power of that pointing finger... Well, everyone stole it.

Hello friends,

It’s been a while since my last post, but with the new year comes a fresh start and an exciting change.

I originally launched The Data Exec to keep up with what’s happening in the data world. Along the way, though, I realized there was another project I was even more passionate about, one that simply couldn’t wait.

That project is Small Big Thing: a YouTube channel and newsletter about the great stories behind incredible products, companies, and the people who build them.

So today, The Data Exec officially becomes Small Big Thing.

If you enjoy stories about entrepreneurship, innovation, and bold ideas, I think you’ll love what’s coming next. New posts and videos are on the way very soon.

And if this new direction isn’t for you, feel free to unsubscribe or unfollow, no hard feelings at all. I’m genuinely grateful you’ve been a subscriber or a follower, even just for part of the journey.

Thank you for being here, and happy new year!