Going Direct Is Easier to Say Than Do

If you listen to product marketing or founder podcasts, you've heard the term "going direct." The strategy calls for executives, founders especially, to skip the guardrails of PR and speak straight to stakeholders, mostly through social media. There's a real insight buried in it and a much weaker argument riding along with it.

The strong version: going direct builds immediate feedback and a dependable audience. A founder posting honestly, without three rounds of message-testing first, earns something a press release never will. I agree with that without reservation.

The weak version rests on a premise I don't recognize: that founders aren't invested in telling their own stories, so an intermediary class of PR handlers has been getting in the way. I've worked with plenty of founders, and I've never met one who treats their own company's narrative as someone else's problem. Sometimes they have the instinct exactly right. Sometimes they want to approve every word and become the bottleneck. Sometimes I've had to tell one directly that his read on a situation was wrong. But "indifferent to the story" has never been the failure mode.

The going-direct case against traditional PR also leans on grievances that don't add up together: that press "fishes for clicks instead of fostering community," and separately, that it "avoids risk by recycling worn-out tactics." Those are contradictory complaints. And the underlying claim that tech founders have spent a decade being cast as villains doesn't match what I've actually watched happen. Coverage of founders has, if anything, been generous, assigning genius to anyone who raised a large enough round, and only turning critical once fraud or real misconduct surfaced.

The manifesto itself gives away the tension. It insists going direct "doesn't mean going it alone," that it's still fine to have help amplifying the message, just not to be "dependent on intermediaries." Read that twice. If the founder still needs help crafting and amplifying the story, that help is doing something close to what a communications professional already does, just without the title.

Watch the strategy in practice and the gap gets clearer. A founder who's supposedly gone direct is tweeting frequently, and everything in the feed reads exactly like it was written or approved by a comms team, minus the parts where they'd have to address real criticism. That's not the elimination of PR. That's PR without anyone accountable for the parts that are hard to say.

None of this means going direct is wrong. Immediate, honest communication with the people who matter to your business is close to the entire job. But swapping out professional judgment for the appearance of authenticity isn't a strategy. It's a rebrand.