Lenny's PodcastNavigating comms and PR | Lulu Cheng Meservey (Substack, Activision Blizzard)
At a glance
WHAT IT’S REALLY ABOUT
How Underdogs Win: Lulu Meservey’s Playbook for High-Impact Comms
- Lulu Meservey shares a tactical, framework-heavy approach to communications and PR, focused on making ideas spread, taking smart risks, and bypassing traditional gatekeepers. She explains how to craft sticky messages, identify and hit your audience’s “cultural erogenous zones,” and build influence by going direct rather than relying solely on legacy media. For underdog startups, she emphasizes concentrating effort on narrow, high-leverage audiences, using concentric circles of influence and physics-inspired “pressure” thinking. Throughout, she grounds theory in examples from Substack, politics, consumer brands, and prominent founders, offering a practical blueprint for founders and product leaders who want their ideas to travel further.
IDEAS WORTH REMEMBERING
5 ideasMake your ideas easy to repeat by real humans, not corporations.
People share things that make them look interesting, smart, or funny—not things that feel like doing a favor for a company. Use jokes, vivid analogies, memorable phrases (“put the pill in the cheese”), and concrete stories instead of vague adjectives so your message can be retold at a dinner table or in a group chat.
Target your audience’s “cultural erogenous zones” instead of trying to change their worldview.
It’s extremely hard to make people care about a brand-new topic; it’s much easier to connect your message to something they already care deeply about. Identify what ‘lights them up’ and build a clear bridge from that passion (X) to what you want them to care about (Y), as with connecting national defense concerns to K–12 reading standards.
Take deliberate risks in comms; avoid “mistakes of omission” that let the status quo win.
For startups, the enemy is the status quo. Playing it too safe—saying nothing, avoiding controversy, never experimenting—means you quietly lose by default. It’s better to make visible, recoverable mistakes of commission you can learn from than invisible missed opportunities you never see.
Communicate in concentric circles to control narrative and build advocacy.
Start with yourself, then employees, then close stakeholders (co-founders, execs, investors), then power users, then broader audiences. Each outer circle looks to the inner circle for cues; if employees or early champions aren’t aligned and excited, external audiences won’t be either—and disgruntled insiders can become powerful detractors.
Increase ‘pressure’ by narrowing your target audience instead of shouting at everyone.
Using the physics analogy pressure = force / area, Lulu argues that the same effort (force) applied to a smaller, more specific audience (area) yields much more impact. Rather than dilute your message for mass appeal, carve out a tiny monopoly of true diehards, win them deeply, and let them expand the circle outward.
WORDS WORTH SAVING
5 quotesYou have to make it memorable and you have to make people want to say it of their own volition.
— Lulu Meservey
Find your audience’s cultural erogenous zones.
— Lulu Meservey
With messaging, it’s not ‘build it and they will come.’
— Lulu Meservey
If you decrease the surface area, then with the same amount of force you can apply more pressure.
— Lulu Meservey
If you’re a startup, your enemy is the status quo.
— Lulu Meservey
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