How to make ideas spread: comms frameworks for founders and underdogs

Executive overview

Most founders treat communications as a megaphone — blast your message and hope it sticks. The real job is different: find what your audience already cares about and build a bridge from that to your thing.

Lulu Cheng Meservey shares a set of practical frameworks — cultural erogenous zones, concentric circles, and pressure-force-area — that together form a repeatable system for getting ideas to spread without big budgets or media relationships.

The core insight: it is nearly impossible to make someone care about something new; it is easy to show someone who already cares about X why they should also care about Y.

Making ideas memorable and repeatable

• Ideas spread when people want to repeat them — not as a favor to you, but to entertain, signal identity, or bring joy to others
• Use a mental image or analogy over abstract description ("put the pill in the cheese" beats "craft a story that sticks")
• Short, unusual phrases work — normal words in an unusual order, repeatable by a second grader
• Use stories and anecdotes instead of adjectives; adjectives are subjective and forgettable
• Avoid inside jokes with yourself — colorful references only land if the audience already shares the context
• Strip out clichés, then test whether a second grader could understand it

Cultural erogenous zones

• People have fixed passions; you will not change their worldview, so don't try
• Find the thing your audience already cares deeply about and show how your thing connects to it
• "Build it and they will come" does not work for messaging — you must create the API between what they care about and what you're offering
• Example: Kamala Harris got defense hawks to care about K–12 reading standards by linking literacy to army enlistment eligibility — the connection was real and the audience already cared about defense

Taking risks in comms

• For startups, the enemy is the status quo — doing nothing lets that enemy win by default
• Prefer mistakes of commission over omission: commission mistakes are visible, learnable, and correctable; omission mistakes are invisible and compound silently
• Analogy: sitting in cash feels safe but loses in real terms over time; making investments creates volatility but long-run gains
• The free-expression thread at Substack was a risk that worked because the audience (independent writers) already held strong views on that issue — the message fit their erogenous zone

Concentric circles framework

• Spread a message outward in circles, starting from inside: employees → co-founders → executives → investors → power users → influencers → general public
• Each outer circle assumes the inner circle knows better — if employees are not excited, no one else will be
• You cannot skip a circle; disgruntled inner-circle members become highly credible detractors
• Map each circle by: what do they care about (erogenous zones) and where do they reside intellectually (which podcasts, subreddits, conferences)
• Practical tool: one-page doc, list five or six audiences, rank by influence and credibility, then map message and channel for each

Pressure = force ÷ area

• Decrease the surface area (fewer people, sharper message) and you apply more pressure with the same effort
• For most startups: target a tiny corner and dominate it entirely before expanding
• Start with 10 diehards, not the general public — food coloring in a cup, not in the ocean
• Balaji Srinivasan and The Network State: built his own distribution, focused on true fans, refused to water down his message to win over people who would never like him — true fans propelled the book to the top of Amazon
• Trying to appeal to everyone forces you to average your message into invisibility; you cannot be remarkable if you are the average of 500,000 tastes

The comms formula: goal → people → belief → channel

• Start with a business goal (not a comms goal like "impressions")
• Identify who needs to do what for that goal to happen
• Ask what they need to believe in order to take that action
• Then identify where they reside intellectually and how to reach them
• Result: a deliverable equation — deliver this message, to these people, through these channels, with this call to action

Going direct: building your own distribution

• Every founder needs a direct channel — a real person speaking in first person, making mistakes visibly, building relationships with the community
• Do not try to build six platforms at once; pick the one that matches the spokesperson's natural style (writing, video, audio, short-form)
• Build a content pipeline before launch; consistency and regularity matter more than trying to go viral
• LinkedIn is heavily underutilized — most content is low value, so genuine insight stands out disproportionately
• Going direct serves both offense (telling your story better than any reporter can) and defense (standing up for yourself when institutions won't)
• Prime the audience before you need them: if you never post and then suddenly post in a crisis, people will assume something is wrong

Diagnosing why your comms are not working

• Too wide a target: the most common cause — message is diluted trying to reach everyone
• Speaking as a corporation instead of a person: people trust and like people, not institutions; cosplaying an executive kills resonance
• Ryan Peterson at Flexport: never became a generic corporate chief; his personality became the human gateway drug to a company in an unsexy industry

Building an audience: practical steps

1. Assess what medium you are naturally best at and enjoy
2. Pick one platform, set it up, and build a pipeline of content before going live
3. Establish an ongoing cadence — consistency compounds; sporadic viral attempts do not
4. Match the audience to the content — mismatched followers (from a one-off viral moment) actively reduce signal

Lightning round highlights

• Book recommendation: Gates of Fire by Steven Pressfield — on leadership, courage, and creativity
• Best tip for getting attention: give your product away for free to the people at the intersection of "will love this" and "have influence over the people you want to reach"
• Tools: Notion with AI, Lex (AI writing editor)
• Newsletter and writing: getflack.com