Lulu Cheng Meservey

LinkedIn is super underutilized because it gets a ton of eyeballs in time, but most of the content sucks. 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.' And then people react out of a sense of friendship and affection or support, 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.

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.

If you decrease the surface area than with the same amount of force you can apply more pressure. So the amount of pressure is the force divided by the surface area, this is a basic equation for 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 whom you're talking to and you are sharpening your message to a point, to get them in the bullseye of the cultural erogenous 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.

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, the best way to minimize risk is to do nothing. You're letting the status quo win. 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.

You're doing it as a corporation instead of a person. This is another super common mistake is you're letting yourself speak like a faceless corporation because it feels like that's what you should do now. Okay, now you're a real company and now you got to do real company stuff, that means you have to issue decrees 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 and trust and like people.

Going direct means that the founder or executive for some very senior person has to be speaking from themselves. First person, may be 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 Substack or whatever, it's not direct if not connected to a person because if the other side of it is a corporation there's no direct connection.

Give it away for free to the right people. If you can choose the people who are going to love it, 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.

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 worldview 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.

It is so hard and you'd have to be superhumanly 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.

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 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.

You want to make it something that a second-grader could understand. 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.

For most startups I would choose towards the fewer people end of it, where you choose who's going to be your diehards 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.