We're Not The Best, But We're Pretty Good

Sub Pop never imagined a future where one of their artists would top the Billboard charts. Look no further than Bruce Pavitt and Jonathan Poneman's slogan for their company, “We’re not the best, but we’re pretty good.” Corporate mission statements everywhere, take note, because Sub Pop was the scrappy little upstart that helped knock Michael Jackson out of the #1 position on the Billboard Top 200 Albums chart in 1992 for a reason. The success may have been inspired, but the process they took to get there is copyable.

Read Pavitt and Poneman’s slogan again--”the best” was never the goal, but being reliably “pretty good” was their whole identity. The label was one part the result of Pavitt’s music fan zine turned newspaper column focused on underground rock bands (hence the original name, Subterranean Pop, which is as hard to spell as it is to say), and another part the result of Poneman’s ponying up of $20k to help fund a little band called Soundgarden’s first recordings in 1987. 

Pavitt had the tastemaker skills, Poneman had the business acumen, and the two decided to go all in on the record label in 1988. They never expected to have any traditional hits, after all, 99% of rock band records never went anywhere, and of the 1% who did, usually took 3 or 4 albums to catch. Their goal was to stay in business and stay in service to their community, which are both harder than they sound. 

While you can’t quite call it a business plan, the two did do their homework to find a business model that would suit them. Detroit’s Motown Records and Long Beach, California’s SST Records were the standouts. Both companies had deep roots in their local communities and prioritized succeeding in their backyard first, with an open door to broader appeal coming in second. Knowing larger-scale successes were an option but not a requirement allowed them to focus on building an ecosystem that wouldn’t let them fail, which is the face of the aforementioned odds, you have to figure out how to survive if you ever want a shot to thrive. 

The community re-investment worked. In 1988 a local band named Nirvana recorded a single for the label’s increasingly popular Sub Pop Singles Club subscription service. Nirvana’s first album, Bleach, followed in 1989, garnering enough attention for the band and label to get an offer from David Geffen’s DGC imprint to pay $72k to the label for Nirvana’s contract, along with a percentage of profits from the band’s next release. 

Nevermind hit record store shelves and the radio in 1991, and by the beginning of 1992, the King of Pop himself was being dethroned by the grunge darlings. Sub Pop’s logo was on the back of the CDs, tapes, and cassettes too, another smart buyout request, ushering in new era of awareness for the otherwise regional label.  

The odds were always against Sub Pop, but by not overreaching to start, they established a paying customer base that gave them the option to reach massive success later.

The objective is to figure out how to survive first.

Just get pretty good at whatever you’re doing to survive.

Being the best is subjective anyway.  

Play the first tape, Sub Pop 100, with the classic Steve Albini intro(!), here: