Rebel Thinking is not a platform for founders who want to do what works. It's for founders who want to question why things work — and build something bolder, more devoted, and more genuinely their own as a result.
Most marketing advice is designed to be followed, not questioned. The playbooks that dominate brand strategy, content, launches, and community building exist because enough people followed them to create inertia — not because they consistently produce the best outcomes for the people using them.
"What's the conventional approach here — and what's the version that actually works without all the parts that don't?"
That question gets applied to copywriting, brand strategy, launches, content, community, personal brand, and influence. Not abstractly — with specific frameworks, real examples, and tools built for founders who'd rather do the work boldly than follow instructions safely.
Rebel Thinking is for founders who believe the most interesting brands are the ones nobody saw coming. The most devoted communities are the ones built from genuine conviction. And the most powerful brands are the ones built on their own terms.
Where to start →Three instincts — from three very different disciplines — combine to produce a way of reading brand problems that most conventional strategy misses entirely.
Legal training teaches you to find the actual claim being made, separate from the language used to make it. Applied to brand strategy: what is this brand actually asking its audience to believe? Most brand strategies fail at this level — not the creative level.
Journalistic instinct means looking past what a brand says about itself to what its community actually experiences. The gap between the official version and the real one is almost always where the interesting problem lives — and where the bold solution starts.
The direct response tradition — Halbert, Schwartz, Ogilvy — strips out soft assumptions about what motivates people. What actually makes people act? That's the foundation. Everything else is built on it.
<img src="jody.jpg" alt="Jody Raynsford">
Rebel Thinking is Jody Raynsford's platform — built after fifteen years of doing the work across brand strategy, direct response copywriting, journalism, agency building, publishing, and podcasting.
The proof of concept is Bad Boy Running. Built from zero by two journalists with no marketing budget, no famous hosts, and no conventional strategy — into a community whose members tattoo the brand. That experience became How To Start A Cult. The methodology behind it became Rebel Thinking.
Bad Boy Running was built by two journalists with no strategy, no famous hosts, and no budget — just a podcast that treated its audience like people worth knowing. Within two years, people were tattooing the brand. That's not loyalty. That's devotion. And it's what Rebel Thinking teaches.
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