The Going Direct Playbook
Build one owned channel, voiced by a real human, primed before you ever need it.
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 5
- Confidence
- 94%
Meservey argues every company needs a direct channel 100% of the time — and that a Twitter or Substack account is not a direct channel unless a real, named human is on the other end of it. The playbook is concrete: pick the single medium your spokesperson is genuinely best at, stack a pipeline of content before launch, then hold a consistent cadence. The purpose is dual: offense (only you can explain what you're building) and defense (you must have a primed audience before you are attacked).
Origin
Lulu Cheng Meservey's operational version of the 'go direct' doctrine most aggressively advocated by Balaji Srinivasan — she positions herself as softer than him, keeping media engagement as one tool among several. She cites Ryan Petersen (Flexport), Elon Musk, Brian Armstrong, Substack's Chris Best and Hamish McKenzie, Mike Solana (Pirate Wires) and the makeup industry as models.
Core principles
- 01It is not a direct channel if the other side is a corporation — direct requires a person.
- 02Nobody trusts institutions; people trust people, and the founder becomes the 'human gateway drug' to the company.
- 03Pick one channel — the one your spokesperson is natively best at — and invest everything in it.
- 04Prime the market before you need it: build the cadence so a post isn't read as a crisis signal.
- 05Offense: no reporter on earth understands what you're building as well as you do.
- 06Defense: an insurgent has no institutions to defend it, so it must be able to defend itself.
- 07Consistency beats periodic attempts at virality.
How to run it
- 1
Assess what your spokesperson is genuinely good at and enjoys
Default to the CEO, then identify their dominant communication style: long-form writing, short-form posts, video, or audio. Elon Musk was born to do Twitter; Brian Armstrong, Chris Best and Hamish McKenzie write sincere, effective blog posts. If someone else ghostwrites it, it shows.
Pro tip Assess enjoyment as well as skill — the channel has to survive years of reps.
Watch out Do not attempt Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and TikTok at once. Six or seven channels at once gets you nowhere.
- 2
Pick the channel and stack a launch pipeline
Set up the account on the one chosen platform, then — before posting — build a pipeline of a week or two of content. Come out of the gate strong and regular rather than posting once and waiting.
Pro tip Algorithms favour new accounts that post consistently right after launch, so a stocked pipeline lets you ride that early boost.
- 3
Commit to a cadence and community management
Plan the ongoing content strategy: the cadence at which you talk to your audience, how you respond to people, and how announcements get made. Regularity and consistency are what grow an audience, exactly as with a newsletter.
Pro tip Meservey names herself as a counterexample — going quiet for two weeks then dumping posts in one day is explicitly not the practice.
Watch out Periodically trying to go viral instead of being consistent is the classic mistake; it also attracts an audience mismatched to your value.
- 4
Prime the market before you need it
Establish the normal rhythm and relationship with your audience so that when you do need to speak — under attack, or on a stand — it does not read as anomalous. If you never post and then suddenly post, people assume a crisis and read into it.
Watch out You cannot build the audience during the crisis; the channel must already exist and already be warm.
- 5
Expand outward only once the first channel is built
Grow the chosen channel to a decent size, then expand to a second. The choice is not permanent — founders get more comfortable on camera after reps, and you can change mediums later.
Pro tip Knowing you can change later dissolves the paralysis that leads founders to either do all channels or none. Go with your gut and pick one.
In the wild
Even after Flexport got large, Petersen never converted into a generic corporate chief — he stayed a person on Twitter with an interesting voice, most famously with his viral thread about the port congestion.
→ Many people became interested in Flexport not out of any passion for logistics and freight, but because Ryan is an interesting guy — he became the human gateway drug into the company.
The makeup industry understood years before tech that people don't buy makeup to subscribe to a brand — they buy because a specific human's eyelid looks good. NYX spends essentially nothing on marketing and pours everything into a small roster of influencers, speaking through human beings, and moving on a trend within an hour rather than routing it through days of approvals.
→ A completely fungible black eyeliner sells out at CVS stores across the country for weeks — human-voiced, direct, fast.
Meservey argues LinkedIn is severely underutilised: it gets a huge amount of eyeball-time, but by her rough estimate ~95% of the content is work-anniversary congratulations and team-pride posts that nobody finds genuinely interesting, and it lacks Twitter's instant-controversy dynamic.
→ Genuinely interesting content on LinkedIn faces almost no competitive set relative to the attention available — an excellent ratio for career-adjacent founders and PMs going direct.
Common mistakes
Speaking as a faceless corporation
Founders start cosplaying an executive and issuing press releases on behalf of the C Corp because it feels like what a 'real company' does. People don't trust institutions and aren't passionate about corporations — it simply doesn't resonate.
Calling an account a direct channel when a corporation is behind it
A Twitter or Substack presence with no identifiable human voice is not direct at all — there is no connection on the other side.
Launching six channels at once
Spreading a spokesperson across Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and TikTok simultaneously means never reaching escape velocity on any of them.
Posting once and waiting
New-account algorithms reward strong, regular launches. A single post followed by silence forfeits the initial boost the platform wants to give you.
Ghostwriting the founder's voice
If somebody else is writing all their stuff, it shows — and the authenticity that makes going direct work is exactly what's lost.
Is it for you?
Best for
Founders and executives at mission-driven or contrarian startups with no institutional air cover, who need to recruit, defend themselves, and explain something novel that no journalist can explain as well as they can.
Not ideal for
Founders whose charisma is irrelevant to recruiting and whose product needs no narrative defense — or anyone who would need to fake a voice they don't have.
From the transcript
“it means that the founder or executive or some very senior person has to be speaking from themselves first person maybe first person plural and…”
“your spokesperson is the best at and then invest everything into that channel and then build it up to a decent amount and then expand…”
“broadly step one would be assessing what are you good at and what do you enjoy so that's where you decide do I like long…”
“you're priming the market by making your audience aware of how you normally communicate so that when you do something it's not weird”
“here's the Cadence with which I'm going to talk to them here's how I'm going to do community management and respond to people”
From the episode
Navigating comms and PR
Lulu Cheng Meservey (Substack, Activision Blizzard)