Overtime's Exclusive Community

Dan Porter shares how he built the Overtime brand by creating exclusive merchandise and a viral hand signal, drawing from lessons learned studying cults, soccer clubs, and bands.

"Every great gang in the world has a hand sign, so we needed a hand sign. I was like 'O O T' and they were like 'simplify it, make the O, throw up the O.'

For two years, we refused to sell our merchandise. When people would see our O shirt in videos, they'd ask 'How do I get one of those?' We'd say 'You can't buy one of those shirts - you have to be on Overtime.' Eventually, we created so much pent-up demand.

The reason we created the shirt with the O was because people used to steal our content all the time. They'd rip our video, so I'd make a watermark, then they'd zoom the video out to crop the watermark. So I thought, what if we just made a shirt with our O on it? Then we have a permanent watermark. If they rip our video, that's fine - our O is actually everywhere. We turned our biggest challenge into our biggest opportunity.

I've had people do the O signal to me at TSA when they see my shirt. If you want there to be community and you care about community, you have to give community a way to interact and share what makes that special with them. It's like being a Philadelphia Eagles fan - when you see someone in an Eagles hat, you say 'Go Birds' and they say 'Go Birds.' You've given us this common language to say 'I don't know who you are, we may have nothing in common, but we got one thing for sure in common.'"