Navigating comms and PR | Lulu Cheng Meservey (Substack, Activision Blizzard)

I often say to find your audience's cultural erogenous zones so what it means is people have things

that they either care about or don't and you're not going to change that so it's a huge lift to try to change

someone's world view or their passions it's a light lift to take the thing you want to talk about and just shape it

into to fit into their worldview or their passions there's not always a fit there's going to be people who are just not your natural audience and you should know that and not waste your time

but if you're a natural audience cares about X and you're offering why then it's your job to create sort of the API right or to create the bridge from X to

Y it's not with messaging it's not build it and they will come it is so hard and you'd have to be super humanly gifted to the extent that I can't recall seeing in my entire life

where you create a message and a story so powerful that someone who didn't care at all before suddenly makes that their passion it's so much easier to take what they're passionate about and understand it and then convince them that if they

care about that then they should care about your thing because of this connection welcome to Lenny's podcast where I interview world-class product leaders and growth experts to learn from their hard-won experiences building and

growing today's most successful products today my guest is Lulu Missouri I met Lulu while she was head of comms at sub stack where she was Infamous for taking big risks in bold stands and as a result

creating a lot of attention for sub stack and other companies she's represented Lulu is definitely the most Innovative and interesting comps person I've worked with she's currently Executive Vice President of corporate

Affairs and chief Communications officer at activation blizzard and she writes what I'd say is the best newsletter on PR income strategy newsletter called Black in our conversation we get

tactical about how to make your ideas spread cultural erogenous zones the growing importance of going direct versus relying on traditional media the importance of taking risks in your comms

and much more Lulu is so insightful I could have continued to explore the subject for hours enjoy this episode with Lulu Missouri after a short word from our sponsors

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treasury account at public.com Lenny [Music] Lulu welcome to the podcast thank you Lenny great to be here I am really

excited to chat all things comms and PR I've never met a founder or product leader who doesn't want to get better at spreading ideas and getting their product out there and you're very good

at this we're going to talk about some of the things you've done in the space but just to start maybe just broadly I'm curious to hear just like what have you learned about what helps an idea spread

so there's a few ways to make the idea spread the overall principle is you have to make it memorable and you have to make people want to say it of their own

volition and so what doesn't make them want to say it is doing a favor for a corporation what does the make them want to say it is they want to bring joy to somebody else they want to make somebody laugh they want to appear interesting or

they want to project some part of their identity and so a few things that you can do with an idea to make it spread better you can make it into a joke so you can turn it into a line that people

will repeat you can use an analogy you can take something and just say it over and over move fast and break things don't be evil build something people want you can

create a mental image that is very colorful so I have a mental image for people that I use a lot which is put the pill in some cheese and we can talk

about it later it's about how to craft a story that will that will stick but when I say put the pill in cheese people tend to remember that and it's more easily repeatable and then the last thing is

use a story use an anecdote instead of using adjectives because adjectives are so subjective they're meaningless to people so if you give them a story that's something they can repeat over the dinner table do you have any examples of the of the

Frameworks you just shared so you talked about maybe having an analogy or putting the pill in the cheese which I think is referring to when you feed a dog a pill yeah you want to hide the pill and the cheese is there any stories or examples that come to mind of this in action

either some you've done or other companies you've seen one example not for the better is binders of women you remember when Mitt Romney said binders of women and it just absolutely caught

on like wildfire and it's because you could picture the binder it's a hilarious mental image you make lots of jokes about it it's a very specific unusual phrasing that is very repeatable

and it's so it lends itself so much to meaning so it's not something that they wanted to have happen which is I guess a word of caution this can backfire on you as well but that's an example I

mentioned move fast and break things software is eating the world it's time to build those are these short phrases that take normal words and put them in an unusual order and then especially if

you repeat them a few times they're they just come very sticky these things sound really smart and wise after the fact do you have any advice on just how to come like so we're talking about coming

up with a cool phrase that'll spread of how to do that I don't know what have you seen work for like coming up with move fast and break things how would a Founder approach that you want to make it something that a second

grader could understand like you want to minimize the cognitive burden on the recipient so it should be something where they're not having to expend any

extra energy understanding the thing where it immediately paints a picture or if you were to make a joke it has to be a joke that they immediately get or it's a very widely understood reference you

don't want it to be this inside joke with yourself that other people might get if you explain it to them so

if you were to boil down the essence of let's say your company or your mission get it to one sentence and then turn it into a sentence that you could explain

to a second grader and then cleanse it of all cliches and common parlance and if you can then turn that into an analogy or if you can make it into

something that has imagery then you're probably 80 90 of the way there so you've definitely done this on Twitter it might be fun just to share a

tweet or something of yours that has done this that has spread like crazy and notice that you delete your old tweets which I think is really smart yeah I should probably do that so I couldn't find any examples but I remember as being like holy it's got a

bazillion views uh is there an example that comes to mind that you could share just here's something you put out that just went crazy I actually have a negative example too

um I think it's useful to share my mistakes or missteps in addition to what went right because there's more mistakes and missteps than than what goes right you know

um in general you try a bunch of things every once in a while they succeed but I think it's useful to think about what didn't land and so

one of mine was when you might remember this because this was the sub stack era when we were taking a lot of incoming

for not censoring enough and we took a stand that we want to encourage free expression I was actually on maternity leave so I was a little bit out of the loop but I wanted to jump in there and

support the cause and so I did a thread about why we're standing by this principle even when it's hard and the threat was pretty well received it traveled a lot I think it was 30

something thousand likes among people that we cared about like people who write on the internet uh and then there was one tweet in the thread where

I said something like doing this isn't doing this isn't pleasant but neither

for that matter is the sea completely esoteric reference it was fresh in my mind because it was from a New Yorker book review where in that context it was like Poetic and evocative

and beautiful and I did the thing you're not supposed to do which is take an inside joke with yourself and release it into the world and that one tweet was sort of a dud in the middle of the

thread where you could see the likes drop off precipitously and people were like what are you talking about and then afterwards I looked at it with fresh eyes well yeah this makes no sense whatsoever out of context and also I'm

not in New York you know book reviewer so that was a good don't but the fact that it was such a colorful metaphor actually caught people's attention

in in an accidental way like I didn't mean for it to um yeah I guess that's that's a don't does that sort of what's an example yeah that'll work and we'll go through other

examples but yeah there's a good segue to something I was going to say for later but it may be a good time to chat about is just something that you're big on is this concept of taking risks as a comms person that you I think you have

the sense that comps people are just very conservative and there's a big opportunity to go to a little out there in this case you didn't maybe didn't work out other times you have and it has you just talk about that kind of

philosophy you have around taking risks I think if you're a startup your enemy is the status quo and when you don't take risks when you minimize Risk by doing nothing like the

best way to minimize risk is to do nothing you're letting the status quo win so you're letting your greatest enemy and rival and threat to your business

win by default because you're not even going to try to compete and so I always encourage people to try to make mistakes of commission rather than Omission because if you make a mistake of

commission you can observe it you can learn from it you know right away that it's happened you can move really quickly and adapt and become better whereas if you make mistakes of omission

you're letting status quo win you're not observing you're not learning and you're maybe not even noticing opportunities slip by so the example that I use again an analogy to make it more

memorable my analogy for this is if you're investing money in the market versus if you're just sitting in cash if you're sitting in cash you won't lose your money

and it feels safe but over time the world moves and the market grows and everybody else is getting richer and you're getting poorer in real terms whereas if you make an investment it'll go up and down there will be some

volatility not just going to go up every day but over the long run you'll be much much better off is there an example of something you did that we took at risk and it worked out or you saw someone

else do this really well the stand for free speech thread would be a risk that worked out it was a risk because it was a topic that a lot of people were already mad about

which will happen with every topic that matters it felt a little risky for me because I was on leave I wasn't really in the middle of things I was kind of addled

already so I I had at least one thing in there that was kind of nonsensical uh so there was the execution risk of would I be able to do this well there was also the risk of you poke your head

up and make a thing where there wasn't a thing and if that were to go wrong and embarrass the company or if that had made Chris or Hamish or jiraj upset that

would have been upsetting to me and obviously a failure of my job so that was a risk that I took and we took and they were supportive and it did work out

because the the people who were most likely to write on substat generally appreciate that stance I actually have one more free landing

when you asked about what are things that help stick in people's memory there was the kind of fail example of the C analogy I think a useful example

that works is I often say to find your audience's cultural erogenous zones and it is something that you immediately know what I'm talking about if I say like know

your audience is cultural erogenous sounds you know what it means it's a shorthand that everybody understands it's not an inside joke with myself and it's something that is unusual enough raising that you're going to repeat it

and hopefully remember it so there's one for you you told me about that framework and I I want I definitely wanted to share more about it like what does that mean and is there something

that you've seen someone do that's just like wow they really nail this erogenous Zone approach yeah it really they really got it in the garage just

Bullseye so what it means is people have things that they either care about or don't and you're not going to change that so

it's a huge lift to try to change someone's world view or their passions it's a light lift to take the thing you

want to talk about and just shape it into to fit into their world view or their passions there's not always a fit there's going to be people who are just not your natural audience and you should

know that and not waste your time but if you're a natural audience cares about X and you're offering why then it's your job to create sort of the API

right or to create the bridge from X to Y it's not with messaging it's not build it and they will come it is so sorry and you'd have to be super humanly gifted to the extent that

I can't recall seeing in my entire life where you create a message and a story so powerful that someone who didn't care at all before suddenly makes that their passion it's so much easier to take what they're passionate about and understand

it and then convince them that if they care about that then they should care about your thing because of this connection this makes me think about any other tweets that I think went crazy which is

where you share the things you're muting on Twitter where it's like the threads thimble and the pointing down thing and and it feels like that's exactly that

where people are just like Yep this is yeah yeah it is that I have an example for you Lenny um the one that my mind goes to is when Kamala Harris was running for Senate

it doesn't you know put aside what anyone thinks of Kamala Harris as a politician or if you agree with her politics doesn't matter when she was signing for Senate she had this example

where not enough people care about K-12 education it's not a sexy topic and only like moms care about it whereas people cared a lot and still do about National Defense National Security

and so she said the way to get their attention is you go to people who care about National Security and you tell them did you know that in order to enlist for the Army you have to have a 10th grade reading level because below

that if you if you can't read at that level you're not going to be able to read the Army Field Manual and so if you care about the future of National Defense and being able to maintain a standing army you need to

care about middle grade reading standards so that's a perfect example and in fact it stuck with me such that many years later I'm still repeating it to you hmm

something else that I think what you teach helps with is underdogs kind of coming up against incumbent companies giving them a chance to stand out like substack I think is a

good example where you just like helped Elevate substack on the world stage in a lot of ways what have you found works best for Underdog startups in companies trying to get attention

first you have to acknowledge that you're the underdog and you're not going to use the GE Playbook from the 1980s or whatever so acknowledging that means knowing that you're not going to play the game that requires you to have more

resources more in deeper relationships and institutional backings and to be able to draft off of the current narrative so all of those things that are going to be not in your favor if you're a startup

for example by definition you're trying to disrupt something you're trying to do something differently right you're fighting the status quo and if that's the case then

you can't rely on maybe the government maybe mainstream media to support what you're doing and

so you should assume that you want to go with an approach that doesn't require a lot of money or people that doesn't require that institutional backing and those those relationships that means

building your own distribution which you can do starting from day one you can start doing that before you even have the company it means taking your

your story and winning hearts and Minds number one by making it a story that you shape to fit people's cultural zones of

your audience and number two by finding the centers of gravity in society like the influencers that are going to help spread it for you because you're not gonna on day one call up the New York Times

and get them to print the story that you want them to so you need to figure out who are the influencers and the way to do that I'll cut off the rabbit hole after this because you can just go deeper and

deeper but the way to do that is in concentric circles there's a general who said if there's a problem I look for it in concentric circles going back to my own desk

if you want to spread something you go out in concentric circles starting from your own desk so you need to get first really clear with yourself about what your message is and just get really

crisp with it this is hard to do because you know too much so out of the Thousand facts in your head you're gonna have to pick just between one and three

and then the next circle is going to be your co-founders your Executives your employees you go to your investors you go to your power users and you go out from there and it has to be in that

sequence but once you get the sequence right and you identify who the people are and you know who your audience is and then you're able to hone in on what their cultural erogenous zones are then you're able to craft the message have

the the delivery mechanisms and then know your Target and then you're off but you just need to do that exercise up front so you don't have a lot of wasted motion I really like this concentric

Circle framework I haven't heard this before is there just to make it a little more real is there something that you could share something that comes to mind that kind of illustrates that well you and I have talked a lot about sub Stacks

so I'm speaking out of term now that I'm not you know I don't have the employee badge but something that I thought the suspect Founders have always done so well is

propagate product updates out in concentric circles so there's a lot of things where you're going to know about it like you Lenny will know about it more than a new writer who just joined

because you're sort of a power user of the product and they would want you we then now they would want to make sure that you love the thing and that you feel unborn that

you feel maybe even a little bit invested in the thing like you've been telling people about recommendations for nearly a year no one asked you to do that we didn't pay you to do that you've done it because you were brought on

board early and it was it something that the company made sure that you liked and then you became the next circle out that spread it to your next circle out it's interesting because I didn't think of it

as an intentional uh strategy to get news out and it feels like there's a Synergy with just talking to your power users getting feedback from your power users leads to this interesting second order effect where they also wanna they

feel like they're on the inside of something they want to share it maybe talk about it and tell friends about like hey these sub Stack's working this cool thing yeah yeah it's kind of a cool uh yeah well early on Lenny you asked about how do you get a message to spread and I said you give people incentives to

want to spread it so your incentive was you like helping others you know you like paying it forward and helping other writers and podcasters and you genuinely

enjoy the thing and I think there's some value to your own project that you get to show social proof that a lot of people like this thing and it's growing and that's what you got if it had been

like hey Lenny can you do us a favor and tweet this thing you might have done it but you would have done it once and stopped and it wouldn't have been something that you organically keep uh keep doing

to make this even more real I'm trying to uh help people understand this concentric Circle idea so first up stack as an example what would be like the few layers of the concentric circle like on

the middle would be maybe the power riders what would be like the next couple layers if the employees at the middle almost always and then it is

depending on the company um so here it would be that the power writers it's used a lot of the original writers Bill Bishop comes up a lot he's like sub stacker number one he's always

really meaningful and then it's like fast growing writers it is writer influencers there are certain members of the media that cover media and writing and so they matter a lot and then

investors uh are in there just to keep close to the fold but if you're a different kind of company that might be employees bored

institutional investors government and Regulators then users just depending on how much power each group has to influence your future and the weight and

the reason I say go out in concentric circles as opposed to just hit each of these groups kind of haphazardly is that's your way to control the message

because each circle is going to assume that the Inner Circle knows better than them and they're going to follow the lead of the Inner Circle so an example

is if you and I have a company Lenny and Lulu this is like a DTC uh that's a great name yeah it is yeah yeah we should do it we should do this if we

had a company and we were trying to put out a message to the world that our new thing works it's really revolutionary

like our genes are the best genes if employees are not saying that that people are going to look at employees and say well they would know they're closer to this than we are so if they're

not excited then why would we be excited and so that undermines everything that we're trying to do you can't skip a circle is my point super interesting and I imagine the closer they are to the

employees the more time you spend with them and the more like innately they're closer and also their perspective and what they share is more powerful because they're closer to

what's happening and if it goes wrong the more damage they can do if they so on the Spectrum it's if they are not totally on board and they're not

an affected messenger versus they're just lukewarm and they're not really sure they believe it all the way to they actively fell off the bandwagon and uh

you lost them and now they're out there like proactively contradicting everything you say or even trying to destroy the company that can happen right if it's an early

employee for example feels disgruntled which is easy to do and it's easy to do through a comms mistake if you sell them on one thing and here's a vision and now either that's changed or you

miscommunicated it they feel like there's a bait and switch they're gonna be really mad and now you've created someone who is incredibly credible and has the same social and Professional

Circle as you and is trying to ruin you that's such a good point for someone that's trying to do this maybe internally they're like oh cool we got to create these circles for our startup what do you recommend they do do they like make a list of like here's our

Inner Circle here's maybe the next circle of people yeah you take out your one-page Google doc I feel like most cons problems can be solved with a one-page Google lock say you go to your

one-page Google doc and you take your audiences you list them probably stop at like five or six because past that it's like

way way first world problem like you you'll have more than enough work to win over the five or six inner circles and then you have to rank them and you rank them by how much they're able to

influence your success and how much credibility other groups assign them so then you have like your inner to Outer circles and then for each of them you would think about what do they care about that's their cultural erogenous

sounds and where do they reside intellectually so do they listen to podcasts if so which ones do they go to in-person conferences are they getting all of

their news from Reddit if so which subreddits are they on Hacker News and once you map that out then again you have the people you're trying to reach

the ideas and messages that resonate the most with them and then the ways to actually reach them this is uh it's becoming like a real template we can we

can start using yeah in the bucket of erogenous zones what are some examples of rajinisms for people in this context we've talked about the the

pre-expression stand from last year a lot of people care about First Amendment protecting press freedoms and pre-expression

not a lot of people care that a journalist said something mean about self-stack and so there were a few times when we did have to push back

publicly against a journalist saying something mean and unfair or untrue about substock so obviously

my and our ulterior motives is to vindicate the company and show people that this isn't true but if we had just done that nobody would have cared or maybe a few diehards would have cared

there are people who care deeply about substack but not as many people and not as deeply as the people who care about their ability to express themselves

freely or their right to build their own media platform without too many controls the way you described it earlier came back to me as you were talking which is this idea that lights people up like

what lights people up within this list of people that you're making so that's uh that's really interesting okay so the idea is create this list of people across circles further and further away from your employees think about what

lights them up what are their original zones intellectually and then think about where they spend their time intellectually what are they listening to what are they reading yeah that's it

amazing it's not super cool it's not easy you know it's hard you have to make very difficult tactical decisions every day when you're doing that but it is simple yeah it seems pretty easy okay

this is great another framework that we haven't talked about yet you have this kind of math formula for how idea spread is that ring a bell yeah okay let's get into that yeah I think

it's useful to try to bring as much discipline as possible to comms because you're really just measuring Vibes and it's hard you know world of okrs and

data and metrics it's hard to know if you're doing the right thing with cons and so I think whenever you're able to establish a framework as useful so this

one is kind of a mathematical formula of comms for a purpose it assumes that you have a business goal and as a business goal not Communications goal it's not like get

this many Impressions or go viral or blah it is you know we're going to grow our Revenue by X or we're going to make this kind of penetration into this user base when you have your business goal

you're going to need certain people to do certain things for that goal to come true so for example you're going to need

this type of person in this quantity to buy these sneakers in order for you to meet your Revenue goal so now you know who the people are and

the action they need to take the next step is what do they need to believe in order to take that action so they need to believe that

their feet are not comfortable now and that it's possible for their feet to be more comfortable and that'll have a positive effect on their life and that this new sneaker technology is real

so they need to believe these things then it's where do they reside intellectually like how do you deliver that message to them and that's the who

do they listen to which accounts do they follow which podcast do they or what what trips do they take um what newspapers Etc and when you have that then you

had the equation of we need to deliver this message to these people through these mediums in order to get them to do this thing you know with this call to action and that way you know that you're

at least pushing forward uh and getting something done with your comms as opposed to just saying words into The Ether I think you had something like there's like pressure and force and areas that part of this or is that a different

framework different framework oh okay cool oh yeah okay okay let's talk about this stuff more Frameworks Lenny I love it this is what

this podcast is all about okay let's do it this is a useful one for uh early stage startups especially where anybody who's just trying to be lean and efficient which is anyone who's an

underdog like we talked about earlier um that if you decrease the surface area then with the same amount of force you

can apply more pressure so the amount of pressure is the force is divided by the surface area this this is through a basic equation from physics but it's also true of communications

which is if you decrease the surface area and don't try to appeal to everybody with everything and you're targeting exactly

who you're talking to and you are sharpening your message to a point to get them in the bullseye of the cultural Rising Zone

then you're able to with the same amount of effort or expense or time you're able to make more of an impact you're able to apply more pressure so I think of it as

there's a Continuum between you can either hyper Target so that the extreme of the Continuum is you are becoming the

life partner of one person that's like the ultra hyper targeting and then the other end of the spectrum is you're appealing to everybody you're appealing to a larger number of people but with a weaker message in a weaker

way so you could say like world peace is good nobody disagrees with that practically but also it doesn't stick and it's not meaningful to them so you have to choose where you're going to be

along that Continuum and for most startups I would choose towards the fewer people end of it where you choose who's going to be your die hards and

then you Foster them and create really deep meaningful relationships with them and the way to do that is to decrease the surface area and apply more pressure it feels like you did that with sub

stack where it was focused on like people writing online or or yeah I guess tell me is that how you thought about it sub stack of let's here's our little focused area and we'll focus Target

message to that that was the goal and that's actually why I started spending time on Twitter it was a very self-loathing exercise like Hamish doesn't like the Twitter model nor do I we would

talk about this a lot and I always felt a little bit Fringe being on there and then and before I worked at substack I had a sleepy account of a couple hundred followers that

didn't do very much and I realized that the people that we're trying to speak to are heavy Twitter users whether it's media people

or online writers and so I decided I'm gonna spend some time and try to build an audience and then that audience became leverage For Better or Worse like I don't think we should measure people

by their Twitter following but the fact is that if you have more than journalists and writers take you a bit more seriously and so if I was gonna try to carry a message on behalf of the

company I felt like it would be more effective if I had more people yeah and it worked this episode is brought to you by vanta helping you streamline your security

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going back to this formula pressure equals force divided by area basically to increase the effectiveness of your message you can either increase the force and what is in this context force

is it like the amount of messaging or is it like the success of your message it's the amount of effort you put in it's how much you're spending on this

campaign or you have a limited amount of hours in the day and dollars in the bank and so anytime you're doing something with thumbs you're either paying the dollars or you're paying the time sometimes

you're drawing down on credibility too you know you have a certain amount of credibility and you there are times when you just have to say please trust me you can spend that more efficiently if you

focus so instead of if you just take a simple ad campaign instead of spending a million dollars to reach a million people maybe you spend a hundred dollars

to reach the hundred most important people and focus that message exactly to them so that when they see your ad they're actually going to click on it and they're actually going to forward it and that's a much better return and then

you might end up with a million dollars worth of return because those people were so passionate that they then became their own Messengers without you even having to be involved anymore

this is a really great framework again is your advice that for the smaller you are just basically reduce the area yes and the larger you are you increase that

over time yes if you're just starting out get 10 die hards and just spend all your time you can't start out and try to win

over the general public you start out by creating a tiny not the best analogies what I can think of right now a tiny Monopoly so you carve out and it's the

same like succeeding on sub stack or succeeding on you know creating anything on the internet right you choose what is going to be your tiny corner of the internet that you are going to just dominate entirely

and the smaller it is the more you can dominate it and then these people that are in it become your True Believers your your die hards and they'll expand

it out to the next Circle and then you go from there but if you try to win over everybody at the same time it's for you know food coloring in the ocean kind of thing as opposed to food coloring in a cup is there an example that comes to mind if someone that did

this really well I don't know I know it's hard to think of just an example off top of your head but does anything come to mind biology did this really well with his book the network state

that book was super successful he didn't do a lot of the traditional book Tour New York Times done you know he went his own route and I think that was really smart if you're gonna

put it in the setting of this framework it's he created his own distribution channels he didn't try to compete with like the roster of harpercollins on

their turf and when he created his own distribution channels he focuses on who are the die hards and the true fans and these are people that he Fosters he goes

on podcasts that reach these people he said he doesn't deviate from messaging to try to appeal to everybody there are people who just will never like that guy and he is totally fine with it so he's

not watering down who he is to appeal to people who will never like him which it's tempting for companies to do you hate when people are mad at you so you try to appeal to them and then your true fans lose their passion because the

thing that made you so special has now gone milk toast so biology Fosters his true fans and then when the book launched they propelled him to the top of the Amazon list because they were out

there evangelizing proselytizing you probably saw all these tweets about his book he didn't pay anybody as far as I know he didn't pay anybody to do that he just shared it with the people and they

wanted to show that they were into this that's a great example I know that Founders often worry focusing too narrowly limits their market and it's never going to grow into anything large

in your experience do you find that that's just often not true that there's often a much bigger opportunity than they think and or is that just a good way to start and then you expand from there it's both I mean the denominator

if you're writing online or doing something online the denominator is the size of the internet you don't need to capture 80 of it if you capture point zero one percent of it that is a great

business and then you can go from there like once you've won that then you can decide to go from there and you know the world is a big place so now that everything is digital the denominator is so large that I wouldn't worry too much

about the numerator but it is also true that if you start off trying to appeal to too many people you have to water down your stuff so much that you'll never stand out and

you've written about this Lenny right with how to how to be viral how to be noticed and one of the things is be remarkable and you can't be remarkable

if you're trying to appeal to so many people that you have to become the average of five you know 500 000 people's tastes this is a good way to think about I think when something's not working when you're you know you're

trying to get a bunch of attention for your product and it's not no one cares feels like this is one reason is just you're going too wide right yeah I think that's probably the most common reason um

is there maybe just thinking about diagnosing why your comms may not be working this may be too big of a question but just like what other explanations could there be for why no one cares about what you're trying to

put out you're doing it as a corporation instead of a person this is another Super common mistake it's like you're you're letting yourself speak like a faceless Corporation because it feels like that's what you should do now like

okay now you're a real company and now you got to do real company stuff that means you have to issue dick freeze on behalf of the C Corp and you don't and it doesn't work because people don't

trust institutions people don't like corporations or at least are not passionate about them people care about people entrusted like people and so

there's a sense of wanting to cosplay an executive and it doesn't it doesn't work it doesn't resonate a good example of this

would be Ryan Peterson at plexport his company even after it got huge he never became the generic corporate chief

he always was a person and there are people many many people who became interested in flexport because Ryan's an interesting guy and it's not like they

had a passion for uh Logistics and freight and shipping but he's doing it something interesting and then he became the human gateway drug for people to

become interested in his company yeah absolutely he uh he had that crazy viral tweet about the uh the ports and that's a really good example yeah man I was going to go in a different direction but maybe we go to this idea of going

direct yeah you're a big fan and biology is a really big fan of this too speaking of him of just this the importance of going direct so maybe just talk about what does that mean and why is that important these days well biology is

more go direct than me like he thinks um soft in this area because I think that there's still a place for engaging with media and that it's just another tool

he's for just like straight up go direct undistilled but I think that for everybody a hundred percent of the time you want going direct to be a part of what you're doing whether it's all you're doing whether you're doing

something else you can't not have a direct Channel so what that actually looks like and people say this all the time go direct what does that actually look like to go direct it means that the founder or

executive or some very senior person has to be speaking from themselves first person maybe first

person plural and speaking in a human voice authentically you see them make mistakes you see them be vulnerable and they have to become an ambassador to the

community if you don't have that then you don't have a direct Channel even if you have a Twitter or a sub stack or whatever it's not direct if it's not connected to a person because if the other side of it is a corporation

there's no direct connection and then the second thing is start building your own audience as soon as possible you can do this alongside engaging with the media or doing

traditional things to the point of focusing your energy and decreasing the surface area for startups I would not recommend trying to do an

Instagram a Twitter LinkedIn YouTube and tick tock I would choose the thing that that person is the best at

so if your spokesman is going to be your CEO which is a good default they're going to have a dominant communication style where they're the best

uh at being themselves and that's important because if somebody else is post writing all their stuff it shows so some CEOs are better at writing long

form some CEOs are better at doing videos some do better with audio or podcasts somewhere better with short form like the way that Elon Musk communicates on Twitter he's like

born to do Twitter I guess like you can't picture him writing long thoughtful blog posts is not a thing that he does whereas

um Brian Armstrong or Hamish or Chris they write great blog posts that are sincere and effective and that's better than them just trying to do it only

through tweets so pick the thing that your spokesperson is the best at and then invest everything into that channel and then build it up to a decent amount

and then expand outward because if you try to do if you try to build six or seven channels at once you're just not going to get anywhere I think that's a such an important point I feel like me choosing a newsletter was actually a

really good choice it's like I'm not a as much as you may not believe this I just like I'm not a performer person I just want to hide behind the computer and just like type stuff and the newsletters especially during covet I

was like I just sit at home and share stuff and get it and think about it where it's like hello everyone and it took me a while to get to this point of like oh I can maybe do a podcast because I've built up a little more confidence

that this is useful so I so agree with that and that's what I tell a lot of people just like pick the platform that is most natural to you maybe you like talking maybe you like perform maybe maybe you just want to sit and type and that's a good point too Lenny because it

changes over time right like just because you pick one thing doesn't mean that you're stuck with only that forever like over time you might choose different things

and I've seen Founders become a lot more comfortable in front of the camera for example once they've done a few reps and the other reason to to know that you can just change it over time is otherwise it

feels like a deterrent to getting started sometimes there's paralysis of I don't know which thing to choose and so I'm either going to do a bunch of them or none of them like go with your gut pick one and you're not wet to that forever you can always change it down

the road do you think every founder needs to be on Twitter I get this a lot from Founders do I need to be on Twitter I hate Twitter what's your take no I

think a lot of Founders do if they are super Mission driven for example that's one way that you're gonna find other people that resonate with your mission and that you're gonna make the case for

the mission if you're Mission driven there's also a good chance that you're doing something that some people love and some people hate and so you're gonna need to be out there fighting the fight

in a way I don't mean in a pugilistic antagonistic way but you have to defend your thing and so I think it's important if you're Mission driven I also think

it's important if your Charisma is a big part of recruiting for the company there are some companies where the founders Charisma is a big part of why people want to go work there right so like

Palmer lucky and Andrew he is magnetic to a lot of Engineers and they want to go work with that guy specifically whereas there are companies where people want to go work for the company and it's

less important that the founder is vocal what's interesting I found recently is I get more traffic to my newsletter from LinkedIn and Twitter is that something you think about at all like going to LinkedIn instead of Twitter feels so

wrong to say but what's your take there yes if you are career related LinkedIn will be a lot better one it's better because it's not

such a cesspool where anything immediately becomes controversial and people fight over it in the mentions two because LinkedIn is really underutilized and Founders should know this PM should

know this LinkedIn is super underutilized because it gets a ton of eyeballs in time

but most of the content sucks like 95 of the content this is not scientific you might estimate 95 of the content is people congratulating each other on work

anniversaries or people saying I'm so proud of my team for this thing they did it's not actually interesting and then people react out of a sense of friendship and affection or support

right but actually genuinely interesting and useful content on LinkedIn is very rare so the ratio of your competitive set

of interesting content versus how much time and attention people spend on there is excellent that is really good advice I'm gonna throw a fishing line into the

pool of examples he talked about people doing this well uh going direct apology talk about Ryan Peterson and uh Elon obviously is there anyone else that's just like here check out what they're

doing and could be a good model to learn from I think it's um really interesting to see what Mike Solana is doing with pirate wise here's an example of why it clearly makes sense

to have the founder be very active on Twitter because he is his own recruiter and spokesperson so I think the makeup industry actually is at the Forefront of of this the

makeup industry is smarter than all of us in how they use social media and influencers because they caught on very early on that people don't buy makeup to

subscribe to makeup brands that they do it because a certain celebrity or influencer or Kardashian has this nice looking eyelid and they

want their eyelid to look that way and so going back years before the rest of us were talking about going direct there are makeup companies that would spend zero dollars on marketing and

minimal efforts on press and pour all of it you know decreasing the surface area pour all of it into fostering a small roster of influencers and having them

spread the message and so I think watch makeup companies watch consumer companies they're doing it right they speak with a human voice they speak

through human beings and and they're fast like if there's a trend the same day they will have hopped on the train you know within an hour they're on the trend as opposed to

other Industries or more traditional companies that take a few days and they routed through approvals and then the opportunity is done what are some makeup companies for people to check out to see

what they're doing so NYX NYX uh it's a division of L'Oreal NYX is one of the makeup companies that has as far as I know zero dollars spent on

marketing and all of their dollars and all of their effort spent on paying influencers and they really out punch

their weight in terms of using humans to deliver a message that contains a call to action and then selling out product and the product will be like

a normal black eyeliner it's the most fungible thing you could possibly imagine and that one eyeliner will be sold out at CVS's across the country for a couple weeks because they did something right with their social media

using a person just a couple more questions around this going direct concept I don't know if you actually uh talked about why that's important because I think we talk about this a lot and I think people may not

recognize why people find this so important these days what's kind of the motivation behind that with baljian and other Founders there's two reasons it's important there's the offense and the

defense of it the defense of it is going back to having the underdog the Insurgency mentality if you're trying to do something different that goes against the grain people are going to attack you

not everyone's going to like it and the point is that not everyone should like it but you need a way to stand up for yourself because you don't have the big institutions and power structures that are going to do that work for you

because you're going against the brain so if you're going to stand up for yourself there's only one way to do it which is you do it and so building the audience and the channels and you have to Prime the market by which I mean like

if you're a public company you're priming the market by getting them used to how you convey information to them if you're a small startup or a Founder

you're priming the market by making your audience aware of how you normally communicate so that when you do something it's not weird like if you never post and then suddenly you start posting people are going to think you're

having a crisis or something like what is going on they're going to try to read into it so you have to already have the Cadence and the relationship set up so that when you need to draw on

them if you're under attack then you can that's the defense of it the offense of it is if you're doing something new and if you're Mission driven and if what you're

doing is truly unique and Innovative no one else will be able to tell that as well as you media the most friendly sympathetic reporter on Earth could not tell that as well as you

because they don't understand it as well as you and so the onus just falls on you to do it if someone listening is like yep okay I fully agree time to do this what do you

suggests as a next step to starting to kind of build an audience going direct broadly step one would be assessing what are you good at and what do you enjoy so that's

where you decide do I like long form writing or do I enjoy podcasting or what are my mediums step two is setting up your account on

those channels so if you enjoy long form writing then you're gonna have to choose do you do a sub stack do you do a media or whatever else there's a objectively right answer on that one but you know if

you if you are doing short videos you're going to choose or you got to invest in Instagram or you got to invest in Tick Tock you set that up and then you start building your

audience and when you start if you're actually starting from zero get some pipeline of talent ready so no no sorry not pipeline of talent pipeline of content get it ready it's the same way

as if you're launching a sub stack if you're launching a sub stack you want to get like a week or two of posts ready to go so that out the gate you can build a lot of momentum with uh different social

networks it actually helps the algorithm if you come out the gate strong and are really regular so Tick Tock for example if you're starting at Tic Tac with zero followers you want to get a week or two

of solid data just in the pipeline so you can hit it hit it because the algorithm favors you right as you're starting out because they want you to keep going so you want to ride that as

much as possible so that's step two is just get yourself ready for launch don't do one post and wait like get a bunch of posts ready and then boom boom boom and then 3 three is to have an ongoing

um content strategy you know who you're going to reach you know what they care about so you have to plan out here's the Cadence with which I'm going to talk to

them here's how I'm going to do community management and respond to people and here are the ways where I'm going to do announcements and you get into a Cadence because it's the same as growing a newsletter the regularity and

the consistency is a big part of growing and so it's the same with audience a mistake that people make I think is just every once in a while trying to go viral as opposed to just being consistent and

then you know some posts do better than others organically but that's the way to do it I don't live that uh I'm not a good example I because I'm so sort of

self-loathing about being on Twitter I will go away for one or two weeks and do nothing and then I'll come in with a bunch of posts in one day it's not a best practice it's not the way you're supposed to do it ideally you're just

there every day saying something and then it builds over time I'm actually an example of trying to focus on consistent non-viral

content and it it's worked out it has worked out it's interesting it's worked out it's worked out so far but it's interesting to see how different people act and how it's like I'm trying to go viral every tweet every post and yeah

that is hard yeah and it's also just like people can tell you're just trying to like create some viral thing and no one cares yeah and it's obvious when you're just trying to go viral for the sake of it

and you don't have a real message it's like the the post the um when people screenshot the iPhone you know six digit security code and they say best feature

Apple's ever built you know a few people did that and now I've seen it probably dozens of times and it doesn't even help to get you followers because that's not something where people say only this

person could uniquely give me this kind of content in the future like if you're gonna get followers with a one-off joke it has to be an incredibly hilarious one-off joke where they say this person is gonna keep entertaining me but with

these kind of viral baits I don't think it's even that effective and also what I find is something does go viral whatever the term correct term is and then you

like life goes on like nothing's gonna significantly like that's just one thing yeah and then you have to do it again and again that's that's where people don't realize like oh it went viral I'm

done my life is good now no nothing's gonna really change just often and you have to do it again and again yeah I think that's true one thing that I've noticed about your audience Lenny is that it's a good

it's the Right audience like it's the people who find Value in what you do and they're in the right place and there's a match sometimes in the effort to just gain

followers for the sake of it or go viral for the sake of it you end up with a mismatch of the audience you had this viral hamster tweet and now they're all here expecting hamster content and

they're not engaging with you you're not bringing value to them it's just making the number go up which is not that meaningful so one example of this is

there's all these threads about how to just grow on Twitter for no reason just grow for the sake of growing and it's a lot of generic advice of like make sure

that you bullet point out the 10 things but it's always kind of pablum of make sure that you value your relationships and make time for yourself and things

that are not enriching people's lives they get a lot of likes that are kind of low value likes from random people about the internet but I don't think that they're deepening

a relationship with a meaningful audience and I don't think that they're really capturing the respect and admiration of their peers so I think it's just important to consider what

trade-offs people make in their efforts to grow well with that we've reached our very exciting lightning round I've got five questions for you are you ready

ready first question great what are two or three books you've recommended most to other people I recommend Gates of Fire it comes off the Marine commandant's reading list it's on there

perennially it is about the Battle of Thermopylae it's the 300 Spartans but it's the whole back story and if you get into it it's about leadership it's about courage but it's about creativity and

it's really well written so that's one that I recommend a lot what's a favorite recent movie or TV show I've been watching The Last of Us like everybody on Earth I've been watching it both for

entertainment and for work because it's really interesting to see how the show drives sales of the video games and how you can use that to kind of make the

whole of the sales greater than the sum of its parts so I'm watching that really carefully interesting uh we're gonna we have a drinking game now every time someone says Last of Us that's a new thing yeah because it's

starting to come up a lot yeah so everyone enjoy your drink favorite interview question you like to ask I like to ask people what they've been reading too it's a good way to get good book recommendations it's always a

good it's also a good way to see where their heads at when they're not working favorite SAS products that you use day to day and bonus points for something that is new or interesting that you've recently discovered I don't know that

this is newer novel because I use notion for almost everything and I really like the new AI that they filled into it I

also have been using Lex which is uh Nathan bashas's startup where it's like the AI writing editor that you've probably seen trying to think if there's anything that

I use that other people don't I don't think I'm terribly original in that sense I do I use a lot of Microsoft Excel which I think is controversial that is wow that's cool but I get it

that's when you know you're serious doing serious work yeah exactly final question best tip for someone trying to get attention for their product takeaway tip best takeaway

tip give it away for free to the right people if you can choose the people who are gonna love it like if you look at the Venn diagram of people who are going to

be obsessed with this product and people who have a large following among the other people that you want to get to whoever falls into that sliver of the Venn diagram shower them with free product

amazing Lulu I think this conversation is going to lead to a lot more people doing direct taking risks and ideas spreading thank you for being here two final questions working folks finding

online if they want to learn learn more and reach out and how can listeners be useful to you people can find me at getflac.com that's where I write down my ideas hopefully more frequently in the future than in

the past but that's where they can find some of this stuff if they're interested how can uh listeners be helpful to me is to give me feedback I'm learning on the job I don't think that there's anyone

alive who's an expert in communicating in this crazy environment that we have now I think we're all crossing the river by feeling the stones and so your listeners have gone through this in many

different ways and I hope that if they have new ideas of feedback or objections that they'll email me through that website or on Twitter and let me know

what they think amazing it's getflac.com we'll link to it in the show notes thank you lulu thank you for being here and sharing your wisdom with us thank you Lenny appreciate it thank you so much for listening if you

found this valuable you can subscribe to the show on Apple podcast Spotify or your favorite podcast app also please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review as that really helps other

listeners find the podcast you can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lennyspodcast.com see you in the next episode