Every Startup a Church, Every Founder a Prophet

The new playbook of tech marketing

Because AI makes it so much cheaper to write code, the vector of competition shifts from building products to figuring out more efficient ways to distribute those products. The issue is that, as

Andrew Chen

of a16z argued, “Every marketing channel is broken now.” Meta ads? Expensive. Social media? Fleeting and fickle. Newsletter sponsorships? Golden, scrumptious, slots available for this winter, email team@gettheleverage.com.

Think about it this way: The more accurately everyone can forecast an ad’s return, the smaller the gap between what you pay for it and what it truly costs. People know Instagram ads work, that’s why so many founders buy them. Therefore, sometimes the best option is to do the least legible thing possible. The goal should be to make marketing that may not clearly connect to purchasing decisions, but still signals your product/company’s value to potential investors, employees, and customers.

In short, one increasingly popular marketing strategy is to found a cult. In Zero to One, published in 2014, Peter Thiel argued that,

“The best startups might be considered slightly less extreme kinds of cults. The biggest difference is that cults tend to be fanatically wrong about something important. People at a successful startup are fanatically right about something those outside it have missed.”

So this idea, of startups becoming cults, isn’t exactly new. But what is different now is the cultural knowledge. Founders have spent the last ten years learning from the successful cults (Tesla, Anduril, Stripe, Palantir, and Airbnb) and the destruction of multiple unsuccessful ones (Theranos, WeWork, Fast, Quibi, and FTX). There is a new playbook of cult formation that is almost entirely distribution focused. Our world is one where software is increasingly free and distribution is expensive, so perhaps belief can be priceless.

This matters not just if you are a founder though. You have to recognize that your employers and the companies selling you goods are going to use this new type of tactics in the attempt to hijack your attention. It won’t be the obvious ads shown during the Sunday Night Football, it’ll be something more ephemeral, more internal, and scarily, more powerful.

Here’s what that new playbook is: