Originally intended for the Splits blog, but it didn't quite fit there.
A lot of startup communication work is tactics. What day of the week should we publish, post on this platform or that platform or both, which business partner to feature next… It’s easy to get stuck in the weeds making small decisions.
Granted, those decisions do need to be made — the daily grind is important. As my boss Will said recently, “the potential in this space is VAST and the journey will be long, but we will get there one week of shipping at a time.” That applies to spreading the word as much as it does building the product. Each post or partnership becomes a chance to reinforce the core message.
Well, what message should we be hammering home? Why does any of this matter? Once you know the answer to that question, repeat it frequently, because:
only a small subset of your audience is listening at any given moment,
repetition leads to remembering.
You better know what you want people to remember, so you can repeat it. And repeat it.
You better pick the right thing to repeat.
Be ready to repeat it for a long time. The most powerful narratives shape how people imagine the future as it dawns, over the course of years. (We’ll return to this point.)
The right thing
Pour your heart and soul into building beautiful software, but all that effort is irrelevant unless the product does a job that people care about.
Y Combinator has a great motto: “Make something people want.” Emphasis on want. Not something people need, because it’s too easy to decide on someone else’s behalf that they need XYZ because it will be good for them. Meanwhile they don’t want it, so they ignore you.
How do you figure out what people actually want? That may not be easy, but it’s simple — Colin Dowling, self-proclaimed “best B2B cold emailer on planet earth,” boiled down the psychology of purchasing:
People buy 4 things and 4 things only. Ever. Those 4 things are time, money, sex, and approval/peace of mind. If you try selling something other than those 4 things you will fail.
For example, you’re trading the minutes spent reading this post for the sake of #4, approval and peace of mind. Don’t bristle; it’s not a bad thing. You want to assuage the itch of curiosity, to satisfy yourself that you’re not missing any important information about succeeding in the onchain economy.
This impulse ensures that your common knowledge about local norms and expectations stays current. You hope that your cultural facility will maintain or increase your standing in the community — the modern deployment of an age-old survival instinct.
That’s how to get people to do things: activate the deep programming that animates the meat puppet. (Hmm, I wonder why people find marketing creepy…)
Another piece of the puzzle is making something that enough people want. Marc Andreessen wrote about product-market fit in 2007:
In a great market — a market with lots of real potential customers — the market pulls product out of the startup.
The market needs to be fulfilled and the market will be fulfilled, by the first viable product that comes along.
Let’s say you nail all of the above. You’re making something people want, something that appeases one of the core urges. And it’s something that a lot of people want. How do you reach them, in order to flip the internal switches you need to flip?
With a meme. A catchy, sticky, irresistible little packet of information that yearns to be repeated and spread. The most effective meme marketing is not reposting funny image macros, but seeding the information landscape with your message. (Edward Bernays has himself become a meme for a reason!)
Meme meta, meta meme
"You're not just shipping a product — you're shipping an ecosystem of ideas, identity, and solutions." — jihad (@jaesmail)
Meme and memory have the same root. A memory is inherently a copy; a map that becomes its own territory. A meme is an idea that engrains itself, a memory in motion. The term meme, which naturally is itself a meme, was popularized by Richard Dawkins as a sort of conceptual gene, information-theoretic DNA, with a side of Girardian mimesis (imitation — again, copying).
As with genes, what is amazing about memes is they spread with fidelity, but also that they mutate. The specific form of each almost-perfect copy competes with every other copy; the fittest wins. Fitness is reproductive potential, actualized. It’s not “may the best meme win,” it’s that “best meme” can only signify a meme that wins. That is what memes do.
This evolutionary dynamic makes memes particularly suited for conveying longterm visions. Successful memes are robust enough to remain relevant as circumstances change, yet flexible enough to adapt along with the surrounding context.
This is why Splits is betting on “10-year narratives.” These are stories of the future that capture — if you’ll excuse a moment of jargon — the nexus of near-term technological innovation:
We want to understand what goals and needs will persist even as the means of accomplishing them changes. It is the combination of permanence and change that offers promising opportunities.
A successful 10-year narrative is a meme, and as such it cannot be arbitrary. It must respond to the structure of the market, the information landscape, and most of all, human nature. In other words, it has to be true, to the extent that predicting the future ever can be. Furthermore, promulgation of the meme should actively help it become true.
Crafting such a meme is easier said than done. The point is that tactical communication decisions aren't just about reach or engagement metrics. They're about sustaining narratives that tap into fundamental human desires — memes that will reproduce, evolve, and spread the "10-year narrative" that connects to the product.
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