Concentric Circles Message Propagation
Spread any message outward from your own desk, one audience ring at a time — never skip a circle.
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 5
- Confidence
- 95%
Rather than blasting a message at all stakeholders simultaneously, Meservey sequences it outward in concentric circles starting with yourself, then employees, then investors, then power users, then the wider world. The mechanism is credibility inheritance: each circle assumes the circle inside it knows better and takes its cue from them. Skipping a circle (e.g. announcing to the press before employees believe it) destroys the message because outer circles look inward and see doubt.
Origin
Meservey attributes the concentric-circles heuristic to a general's line about searching for a lost item — 'if there's a problem I look for it in concentric circles going back to my own desk' — and adapts it to comms sequencing. She cites Substack's founders (Chris Best, Hamish McKenzie, Jairaj Sethi) as practitioners of it for product updates.
Core principles
- 01Each circle assumes the inner circle knows better and follows its lead.
- 02You cannot skip a circle — an unconvinced inner ring silently poisons every outer ring.
- 03Sequencing is how you control a message without controlling the media.
- 04Rank circles by influence over your success and by how much credibility other groups assign them.
- 05The innermost circle is you: crispness of message precedes distribution.
How to run it
- 1
Start at your own desk — get crisp
Before telling anyone anything, force yourself down to the one to three facts that matter out of the thousand in your head. This is hard precisely because you know too much.
Pro tip Do this on a one-page Google doc; Meservey claims most comms problems can be solved on one page.
Watch out Skipping this step means every downstream circle repeats a different version of your message.
- 2
List and rank your audience circles
On that one-pager, list your audiences — stop at five or six — and rank them by two criteria: how much they can influence your success, and how much credibility other groups assign to them. That ranking is your inner-to-outer ordering.
Pro tip Typical startup ordering: employees → power users/original believers → influencers in the niche → the journalists who cover that niche → investors. For a regulated or public company it may be employees → board → institutional investors → government/regulators → users.
- 3
Profile each circle's erogenous zones and habitat
For each circle, write what they care about and where they reside intellectually — which podcasts, conferences, subreddits, newsletters, Hacker News. This gives you the message and the delivery mechanism per ring.
- 4
Win the inner circle completely before moving out
Convert employees first — they must be genuinely, visibly excited, not lukewarm. Only then move to the next ring. Give each ring a sense of being on the inside and slightly invested before the next ring hears it.
Pro tip Seed the ring with something that makes them feel invested rather than asking for a favour: 'give it away for free to the right people' — the overlap of people who'll love the product and people with a following.
Watch out A disgruntled early employee is your most dangerous adversary: maximally credible and inside your exact social and professional circle.
- 5
Let each circle carry it to the next
Give each ring an intrinsic reason to spread it (identity, joy, paying it forward, social proof) instead of asking for a favour. A favour gets you one tweet; an incentive gets you an ongoing evangelist.
In the wild
Substack's founders consistently told power writers about product updates before the wider writer base — making sure early, high-leverage users like Lenny Rachitsky loved the feature and felt invested in it. Nobody paid or asked them to promote it.
→ Lenny voluntarily promoted Substack recommendations for nearly a year, unpaid and unprompted, and passed the message to his own next circle out — exactly the propagation the sequencing was designed to produce.
Meservey's hypothetical: a DTC company announces to the world that its product is revolutionary while employees are not saying so. Outsiders look at the employees, reason 'they would know, they're closer to this than we are', and conclude that if insiders aren't excited there is nothing to be excited about.
→ The external message is undermined before it lands — which is why she insists you cannot skip a circle.
Common mistakes
Hitting all groups haphazardly at once
Simultaneous announcement forfeits your only real lever of message control — the credibility each ring inherits from the ring inside it.
Announcing outward while employees are lukewarm
Outer circles read employee enthusiasm as the ground truth. Lukewarm insiders silently kill the external narrative.
Creating a bait-and-switch with early employees
Selling an employee one vision and then changing or miscommunicating it produces a maximally credible enemy inside your own network, capable of actively contradicting everything you say.
Asking your power users for a favour
'Can you tweet this for us?' gets one grudging tweet and then stops. An intrinsic incentive (status, social proof, helping peers) creates a self-sustaining messenger.
Is it for you?
Best for
Founders and comms leads planning any launch, stance, or crisis announcement who have limited institutional access and must borrow credibility from inside out.
Not ideal for
Genuinely time-critical disclosures (legal/regulatory) where simultaneous release is mandatory, or one-off consumer promos with no stakeholder structure.
From the transcript
“if you want to spread something you go out in concentric circles starting from your own desk so you need to get first really clear…”
“each circle is going to assume that the Inner Circle knows better than them and they're going to follow the lead of the Inner Circle”
“say you go to your one-page Google doc and you take your audiences you list them probably stop at like five or six because past…”
From the episode
Navigating comms and PR
Lulu Cheng Meservey (Substack, Activision Blizzard)