My Philosophy on the Submit Catastrophe

I once spent a couple of years writing a series of features about some of the world's most successful social impact entrepreneurs. Those years became the lens through which I viewed the Submit story.

Anne Miltenburg was my favourite in the series. She helps impact businesses to brand themselves, and her opinions on her industry are far from ordinary. In our interview, she said, “Unfortunately […] you have to craft the brand that you deserve.” If you don’t deserve the brand you’ve created, people will find out. Things are going to fall apart. Public scrutiny digs deep.

Anne spoke a lot about “brand leaks” in her interview — These are moments when your audience finds out you’re not who you claimed to be. Submit’s brand is still leaking a month after their biggest diversity failure yet, and their attempts to stop them up have been unsuccessful because they were inauthentic. People smelled the plastic through the PR veil.

Submit was sold as an abuse-averse environment with inclusive, compassionate moderation guidelines. That wasn’t the brand the founder deserved, though, so users began closing their accounts en masse. Based on our interview with Miltenburg, I wrote:

“Today’s businesses exist on a grand stage, so authenticity and honesty are imperative. When something prevents you from submitting your ideas for full public scrutiny, your branding suffers. A failure to brand in an engaging, convincing, and honest way can destroy a business in five digital minutes, so today’s social entrepreneurs need to stop cutting corners on communicating the complexity of what they’re trying to achieve. Take your audiences seriously. They have millions of messages coming their way each day.”

Another of the impact entrepreneurs I wrote about was vegan cuisine pro, Kim Le. She created all her products in her own kitchen. Then she went out onto the streets to validate what she’d made in person. Before her business had even started selling products, she’d raised a pre-seed round of $4.25 million.

What did she have to offer? Not a hell of a lot. She had goals, and she had authenticity. She wanted to make an impact, and she’d created a brand she deserved.

Submit never went out into the streets to validate what it had made. Quite the opposite: It beat its fist on the desk and shouted, “You will like it, and you will test it.” You could smell the condescension leaking out of the code.

We also spoke to Andrew Savage of Lime back in 2019. Think what you will about his brand, his approach was still revolutionary.

“Tech innovators like Airbnb and Uber scrambled into cities asking for community forgiveness—a move that won them plenty of bad press. Lime decided to ask for permission instead. You can’t help a community by storming in and trampling everything.

Which of these two approaches did Submit choose?

Think about it. I’ll wait.

Next, we moved onto Bustle: a feminist brand launched by a man with far too few X chromosomes. If Bustle had been Submit, it would have held its helm, but Bryan Goldberg did not. He went out to find women to occupy that position instead. He says the reason for his success is, “We are who we said we are. Always have been. Always will be.”

I hope you’re noticing a trend. It takes remarkable clarity of vision to grow a desired ethos. The easiest way to achieve it is by being the greatness you want your brand to exhibit. Fail, and you will spring a leak.