The Chief Propaganda Officer
Thoughts on being the ‘CEO’ of an early stage startup
“The goal of modern propaganda is no longer to transform opinion but to arouse an active and mythical belief.” — Jacques Ellul
What if I told you that in addition to ‘CEO’, my official designation in my contract with my company is ‘Chief Propaganda Officer’? Sounds crazy right — my hope is in the next 3 minutes, I can convince you why it isn’t crazy!
The ‘CEO’ of an early stage startup is a Chief Propaganda Officer:
You’re ‘selling’ the stars
The point of propaganda is to incite almost fanatical belief that your company’s product will be the panacea to all misery in a given industry..
- This fanatical belief needs to be held by your early team, your early adopters and by your fist set of investors — can you convince 50+ people to ‘follow’ you?
- From an objective lens, even if you land on the Moon ($10M outcome) versus the ‘Stars’ ($1bn+ outcome), you’ve done right by a lot of people!
- Awkwardly reminiscent of politics right? And, those folks do it every election cycle.
You typically have a ‘promise’, not a product
- To get your MVP out, you may require people to trust you and root for you regardless of how bad the actual UX is…
- When Product-led growth is impossible (since you don’t have a Product) and paid growth is a slippery slope, Propaganda is the only viable option.
- Awkwardly reminiscent of politics right? But, you can be a bit smarter — talk about the ‘promised land’ with customers to discover what their hidden problems are — that’s how we discovered what our product at BimaPe needs to solve.
You’re creating the ‘handbook’
- Every successful ‘propaganda campaign’ in politics was driven by a novel Go-To-Market e.g. Obama & Facebook, Trump & Twitter etc…
- Your peers will think you’re mad for trying something ‘not prescribed in the playbook’ — if you run Propaganda well enough, the voices of supporters will drown out the detractors.
Why Propaganda?
Put quite simply, you need to hack distribution to have a differentiated CAC from the rest of your peers. You can’t rely on the ‘handbook’ as I highlighted earlier..
If you align your Propaganda with your Product, and your Product with the Problem you’re solving, chances are you will see some magic!
At BimaPe, we’ve onboarded 2,400+ members at zero CAC — ‘Propaganda’ is a nice way to summarize our playbook.
Pitfalls
Authenticity and not advertising
An excellent Propaganda person becomes the external face & voice of the company. You’d need to learn how to shamelessly plug your start-up without making it too obvious.
One way to do this is to post ‘valuable insights’ and then link it back to what you’re doing at your company.
The web of lies
Propaganda should not be misleading (no WeWork please). Whilst you may be selling a ‘dream’, there must be some underlying truth —
“Propaganda, to be effective, must be believed, To be believed, it must be credible. To be credible, it must be true.” — Hubert H Humphrey
Credits to Vishrut (Growth @ BimaPe) & Anmol (Engineering @ Quaestor) for their timely inputs on my rants.
Closing thoughts
‘Propaganda’ is controversial to say the least — I would encourage you to appoint a Chief Propaganda Officer at your company (ideally, it is the Founder). I hope you find this short piece interesting!
I am happy to answer any questions you may have — please feel free to reach me @Rahul_J_Mathur.
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