Find the Cultural Erogenous Zone: A Comms Playbook for Making Ideas Spread

Meservey, who led comms at Substack and now holds a senior communications role at Activision Blizzard, says an idea must be memorable and people must want to say it voluntarily. They will not do so as a favor to a company. They will do it to bring joy to someone, make them laugh, look interesting or express part of their identity.

She lists four tools: turn the idea into a joke or a repeatable line, use an analogy or slogan such as "move fast and break things", paint a colorful mental image, and tell a story instead of piling on adjectives, which are subjective and forgettable. Her own image is to "put the pill in cheese" when crafting a sticky story. A cautionary example is Mitt Romney's "binders of women", which spread like wildfire because it was so visual and meme-able, though it backfired on him.

To craft such a line, she says to aim for something a second-grader could understand and to minimize the cognitive burden on the listener. Boil your company or mission down to one sentence, simplify it for a child, strip out clichés, then turn it into an analogy with imagery, and you are probably 80 to 90 percent of the way there. The joke has to be one the audience gets immediately, not an inside joke with yourself.

She illustrates the point with one of her own misses. In a well-received thread defending Substack's free-expression stance, she dropped in an obscure line borrowed from a New Yorker book review, and the likes fell off sharply at that tweet. Out of context it made no sense, which she offers as a lesson in not releasing private references into the world.

Many comms people are conservative, but Meservey says a startup's enemy is the status quo. The surest way to minimize risk is to do nothing, which lets that enemy win by default. She encourages mistakes of commission because you can observe them, learn from them and adapt quickly, while mistakes of omission teach you nothing and let opportunities slip by unnoticed.

Her analogy is investing versus sitting in cash. Cash feels safe, but over time the market grows and you get poorer in real terms, whereas investing brings volatility but a much better long-run outcome. The same logic applies to taking bold positions in communications.

Her example of a risk that paid off is the Substack thread standing up for free speech, which she wrote while on maternity leave. The topic was already contentious, and there was both execution risk and the risk of embarrassing the company or upsetting its founders. It worked because the people most likely to write on Substack appreciated the stance, and the founders were supportive.

Her signature idea is to find your audience's "cultural erogenous zones", the things they already care about or do not. Changing someone's worldview or passions is a huge lift, whereas shaping what you want to say to fit their existing passions is light. If the audience cares about X and you are offering Y, your job is to create the bridge from X to Y, because with messaging it is not true that if you build it they will come.

She says some people are simply not your natural audience, and you should recognize that and not waste time on them. Lenny links the idea to her widely shared tweet about the things she mutes, where readers simply nod and say it is them.

Her favorite illustration comes from Kamala Harris's Senate campaign. Not enough people care about K-12 education, but many care about national security, so the pitch to them was that you need a 10th-grade reading level to enlist in the army. If you care about a standing army, the argument went, you should care about reading standards.

Underdogs must first admit they are underdogs and avoid playbooks that rely on large budgets, deep relationships, institutional backing or riding the prevailing narrative. A startup that is fighting the status quo cannot count on mainstream media or government to carry its story. Instead it should build its own distribution from day one, shape its story to fit its audience, and find the influencers who can spread it.

To do this, Meservey recommends working in concentric circles starting from your own desk. First get your message crisp, picking one to three facts out of the thousand you know, then take it to cofounders, executives, employees and investors, then power users, and onward. She says the sequence matters because each circle assumes the inner one knows better, and you cannot skip a circle: if employees are not excited, outsiders wonder why they should be.

At Substack, she says, the founders propagated product updates this way. Power users like Lenny heard first and were made to love the product, and then spread it organically to their own circles, never because anyone asked or paid them. The key is that people have their own incentives to share, such as helping other writers, and a one-off favor request would have yielded a single tweet.

The closest circles also carry the most risk. An early employee who feels there was a bait and switch can become a very credible critic who shares your social and professional circle and is working against you. That is why the inner circle's enthusiasm is worth protecting.

In practice, Meservey says, you open a one-page Google Doc, list at most five or six audiences, and rank them from inner to outer. For each, you write down their cultural erogenous zones and where they live intellectually: which podcasts they listen to, whether they go to conferences, which subreddits or Hacker News they read. That map shows who you are reaching, what resonates, and how to reach them.

Erogenous zones are specific. At Substack, few people cared when a journalist said something unfair about the company, but many cared about free expression and the right to build their own media platform, so the free-speech stance resonated far more than a defensive rebuttal would have.

Because comms is largely measuring vibes, she likes frameworks that tie it to the business. Start with a business goal such as revenue, not a comms goal such as impressions, then work out which people need to take which action. Next ask what they must believe to take it, using a sneaker example where customers must believe their feet could be more comfortable and that the new technology is real, and finally where and through whom to deliver that belief.

Her second framework borrows from physics: pressure equals force divided by surface area. If you shrink the surface area by aiming at exactly the right people, the same effort produces more pressure. The spectrum runs from becoming the life partner of one person to appealing to everyone with a message as bland as "world peace is good", and for most startups she would choose the narrow end.

At Substack the target was writers and media people, who are heavy Twitter users, so she built a Twitter audience despite being uneasy about the platform. She notes that follower counts should not be a measure of a person, but journalists and writers take you more seriously if you have an audience. Force here means effort, whether money, time or credibility, and it goes further when focused: perhaps $100 to reach the hundred most important people rather than a million dollars to reach a million.

Start with ten diehards, she says, and dominate a tiny corner before expanding, instead of putting food coloring in the ocean. As an example, she cites Balaji Srinivasan's book The Network State, which skipped the traditional book tour and relied on his own channels and true fans, who pushed it to the top of Amazon without being paid. Because the internet's denominator is so large, she says, capturing even a tiny fraction can be a great business, while appealing to everyone makes you the average of 500,000 people's tastes.

When no one cares about your message, Meservey says one common cause is speaking as a faceless corporation. People do not trust or feel passionate about institutions, but they like people, and executives who try to cosplay corporate decree-issuers fail to connect. Her example is Ryan Peterson of Flexport, who stayed a real person as the company grew, and became a human gateway drug for people who had no passion for logistics.

Going direct, she says, means a founder or senior leader speaks in the first person, in a human voice, showing mistakes and vulnerability. She would not tell a startup to be on Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and TikTok at once; rather, pick what the spokesperson does best, whether writing, video, audio or short posts, since ghost-writing shows. She notes Musk is born for Twitter, while others write better long-form posts, and that you can change channels later.

Founders do not all need Twitter, but she thinks many do, especially if they are mission-driven and will need to defend their cause, or if their charisma helps recruiting, as with Palmer Luckey at Anduril. For career-related content she says LinkedIn can be better: it is less combative, and most of its content is work anniversaries and team shout-outs, so interesting posts stand out. She also points to makeup brands such as NYX as leaders in using human influencers rather than ad spend.

Meservey gives two reasons for going direct. On defense, an insurgent has no big institutions to stand up for it, so it needs its own channels and has to "prime the market" so that communicating in a crisis does not look strange. On offense, even the most sympathetic reporter cannot tell a new, mission-driven story as well as the founder who understands it.

Her three-step start is: decide what you are good at and enjoy, set up accounts on the chosen channels, and then build a content pipeline before launching. Like launching a Substack with a week or two of posts, on a platform like TikTok a strong, regular start helps the algorithm. Then keep a consistent cadence, including community management and announcements, rather than occasionally trying to go viral.

She and Lenny agree that viral bait rarely helps: one-off jokes do not build a relationship, and chasing followers can leave you with a mismatched audience that expected hamster content. Generic growth threads collect low-value likes without earning real respect. In the lightning round her top tip for getting attention for a product is to give it away free to people in the overlap between those who will love it and those with a following among your target audience.