YouSaid · the spoken record

Julian Shapiro

lines on the record: 68
first: 2022-09-25
most recent: 2022-09-25
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review, as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lennyspodcast.com. See you in the next episode.”
2022-09-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Growth tactics, retention strategies, and becoming a better writer | Julian Shapiro (Demand Curve, Hyper, Webflow, TechCrunch) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Cool, man. Where can folks find you online? And how can listeners be useful to you? Sure. You can go to julian.com. It has everything, Twitter, handbooks, all that good stuff. And that's it. I hope you guys find the handbooks useful. Amazing. Julian. I know you don't do a lot of podcasts. I really appreciate you being here. This was awesome. And I'm excited to get this out. Dude, truly my pleasure. I think you're awesome and you're why I'm doing the podcast. So really my pleasure, man. Have a great day. Thanks, man.”
2022-09-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Growth tactics, retention strategies, and becoming a better writer | Julian Shapiro (Demand Curve, Hyper, Webflow, TechCrunch) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I just kind of take a first pass and then I look at it, make it better, look at it, make it better, and just kind of keep editing for days and days and days until it's not bad. I love that. I mean, that's what I've always done. Until one day, I was like, I need a process here. Anyway, dude, pleasure chatting. You're a gent. Sorry to all the listeners for rambling so much at high pace and cut anything you want. You can cut all of that. I don't care. So whatever you find interesting with. We're just going to have this final goodbye and that's it. Yeah. It's like, well, that was.”
2022-09-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Growth tactics, retention strategies, and becoming a better writer | Julian Shapiro (Demand Curve, Hyper, Webflow, TechCrunch) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Finish the creative process. There's no way you would have come up with gold. And so, like Neil and Ed, for example, they know they're not superhuman. What they're doing is in every creative session, they simply have the discipline to allot time, no matter how long it takes. Could be an hour to empty all of the bad ideas, and then they're not worried about whether good ideas will come after the bad ones because they know the following process. You start with a weak imitation, you identify what makes your imitation weak, then you iterate the imitation until it's finally original. And that is the process. You have to kind of just throw yourself into. I love that. I feel like I don't do that enough. I feel like when I get to writing, I'm just like, okay, let's make this awesome. And so this is a really good reminder just to like get stuff out, connects to the kind of the concept of the shitty first draft, just like just write. It'll be bad. And then you edit. You asked me this question. What are my processes for writing? And most of it is just refining like a thousand times.”
2022-09-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Growth tactics, retention strategies, and becoming a better writer | Julian Shapiro (Demand Curve, Hyper, Webflow, TechCrunch) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To achieving the clarity, the clear water of good ideas until you first empty the wastewater out. So if we apply that to creativity, at the beginning of every writing session, write out every bad idea that comes to mind. And instead of being self-critical and resisting these bad ideas, you have to recognize bad ideas as progress because once they are emptied out of you, the better ideas begin to arrive. And here's the key part. Why do good ideas arrive after the bad ideas are empty? It's because when you've gone through a bunch of bad ideas, your brain, your mind starts reflexively identifying what elements are causing the badness. Then it becomes way better at avoiding those bad elements. And you become way better at pattern matching the novel ideas with way greater intuition. And so like most creators are resisting their bad ideas. So if you've sat down, scribbled a few thoughts in a blank document and just walked away because you weren't struck with gold, then you never actually”
2022-09-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Growth tactics, retention strategies, and becoming a better writer | Julian Shapiro (Demand Curve, Hyper, Webflow, TechCrunch) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Content. And the way I found it was interesting, I was watching a masterclass like masterclass.com with Neil Gaiman and he explained his process for writing fiction novels. And then in the same year I watched a documentary of Ed Sheeran explaining his process for writing songs. And they were identical. And then a year later, I came across a YouTube video that I post on Twitter with John Mayer spinning his process, also identical. I'm like, fuck, there's the answer. So I called, they don't have a name for their process. So I just call it the Creativity Faucet. And very quickly, what they do is they visualize their creativity as a backed up pipe of water. And so the first mile is packed with wastewater. And this wastewater has to be emptied before the clear water behind it can arrive. And so because your creativity pipe or creativity faucet only has one faucet, there's no shortcut.”
2022-09-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Growth tactics, retention strategies, and becoming a better writer | Julian Shapiro (Demand Curve, Hyper, Webflow, TechCrunch) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Things they And so the thing is, you are brilliant. You're an actual host who is a useful, amazing human being, and we want to hear your thoughts. Sounds good. What was the last topic? Topic was the creativity faucet. And so we can save that for another talk or if you want to touch on it, we can do that too. Sure. Yeah, let's do it. The quick version here is that this is an idea that I saw recur across three of the most prolific creators in the world. So John Mayer, Ed Sheeran, Neil Gaiman, Ed Sheeran might work with other producers and so on, but the basic thing between the three is they're very independent creators who are constantly making blockbusters in large part on their own. And I was curious, what on earth are those three doing that very few other people are doing? Taylor Swift also. And one day I actually found the answer. What is their approach to consistently making phenomenal?”
2022-09-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Growth tactics, retention strategies, and becoming a better writer | Julian Shapiro (Demand Curve, Hyper, Webflow, TechCrunch) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe for a follow up episode is one idea, or we could touch on it. Sure, up to you. Anything you want, my friend, if you want me to cover the next topic, super happy to. Up to you. I just, I realized I was basically, everyone listening right now is like, man, Jenny's just been fucking rambling for like an hour. And I realized we were not having a conversation. Now I feel bad because I was so in my momentum of sharing some concepts that I didn't really have a conversation. This was very normal for this podcast. So do not stress. Okay. Okay. All right. People actually, you should leave this all in here so they know I feel bad. I'm not cutting anything. So what was the last topic again? Remind me. I was just saying, I think one of the things people really like about this podcast, from what I hear often, is they like that I'm not talking a lot. They kind of like that I'm letting the guests speak mostly because a lot of podcasts, you know, guests think they know it all, or sorry, the host and they just talk talk talk.”
2022-09-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Growth tactics, retention strategies, and becoming a better writer | Julian Shapiro (Demand Curve, Hyper, Webflow, TechCrunch) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I'm not sure if you've seen this as well, but to make something truly actionable, I have to leave them with a cheat sheet because if I have all these actionable steps but they're spread throughout a monster newsletter edition, it's too much mental work to go and make my own cheat sheet out of and have a quick to follow series of steps. So I feel like compression is a key part of making something actionable as well. There's a book called Unwriting Well that taught me a lot about cutting cutting like two-thirds of what you've written to get to the core of it. And so let's go. I'm curious, what else are you doing to try to harden your each newsletter edition to make sure it's good? Is it just like, hey, this is actionable and we were pretty comprehensive. And I checked it past experts. And is that like, is that the extent of it? Or what are you trying to do to feel like it's fantastic? And what's your review process like when you pass it by others as well? I'm happy to answer that, but I also know you got to run soon. I guess we could touch on, we could just save the fifth top.”
2022-09-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Growth tactics, retention strategies, and becoming a better writer | Julian Shapiro (Demand Curve, Hyper, Webflow, TechCrunch) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Actual fiction. So teach their own so you're spot on. It's like do what you would want to read to me as the golden rule. Awesome. Yeah. And also don't be afraid. Like don't feel like the bars are that high if you want to get started. Yeah. What have been your frameworks for sitting down and knowing that one of your newsletter editions is where you want it to be? And what do you think is the framework justifying that a piece is or explaining why a piece is good? The thing that I always strive for is that this needs to be actionable and useful. something someone could take and do something with like that day versus just a bunch of theory and pontification and philosophy it's like oh here's a thing you can go do today so that's kind of my bar is make it very actionable which i which i think is specific to the type of newsletter i have not necessarily broad writing the way you're describing but that's what i try i love that i mean the way i think i agree with you my rules of thumb are like it has to be actionable concise and novel”
2022-09-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Growth tactics, retention strategies, and becoming a better writer | Julian Shapiro (Demand Curve, Hyper, Webflow, TechCrunch) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Writing because they think they have to write really well, like be real good writers. And what I've learned is that it's okay if you're not. You just be good enough and you'll get better the more you do it. The most important thing is the content is valuable and interesting, which I think you're describing as novelty. And so I just want to make sure people don't get scared away by like, oh my God, I need stories and metaphors and all these beautiful writing. Initially, you don't, is my experience, but it helps in a big way. I agree. In fact, the biggest criticism of my writing is that it is too dry. It's too novelty focused, and there's a lack of the resonance. But I do that purposely because oftentimes people can over-indulge in resonance and then it really bloats the piece. And as a reader myself, I like reading super concise pieces like reference manuals almost. And I'm only looking for the length from personal anecdotes, personal stories of people's lives or life lessons they've learned that they want to share with me or like”
2022-09-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Growth tactics, retention strategies, and becoming a better writer | Julian Shapiro (Demand Curve, Hyper, Webflow, TechCrunch) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it's something you remember, then it's fairly ineffective novelty. It's more like just trivia. It's bland, dry, trivia. So when you add resonance to the novelty, now it becomes a beautifully written piece. And so resonance is a matter of including examples, analogies, metaphors, stories. And so really writing quality is novelty times the storytelling power you have to make the novelty resonate in the back of people's minds. And so the way that I structure my writing process is draft one. So I'm just focused on finding my novelty, which is the backbone of what makes anything interesting. And then draft two, I come back and try to increase the resonance by embedding story and analogy and examples. That's basically my process there. I like that a lot just to add real quick. Something I've learned is that if your stuff is really useful, it doesn't have to be written beautifully. And a lot of people I think are afraid of.”
2022-09-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Growth tactics, retention strategies, and becoming a better writer | Julian Shapiro (Demand Curve, Hyper, Webflow, TechCrunch) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Quality overall is, and again, and these are all me being hand wavy and these are not rules. There's no right way to write, just like there's no right way to paint. These are just frameworks I've developed that when I use them, I'm more frequently arriving at success as far as I define it. So the point I want to point out, the thing I want to point out though is that very closely tied to everything I'm talking about is my framework or my equation for determining how good any piece of writing is is novelty times resonance. And so writing quality equals novelty times resonance. So novelty is like we discussed. Here are all these things that are giving you dopamine hits that are where I'm opening your eyes about how the world really works and shocking you and elegantly synthesizing things. Times resonance. And resonance means I can tell you the most novel thing on the planet. But if I don't wrap it in a way that resonates and really lifts off the page and into your mind,”
2022-09-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Growth tactics, retention strategies, and becoming a better writer | Julian Shapiro (Demand Curve, Hyper, Webflow, TechCrunch) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Need a motivation, in my opinion. And so I'll pair one of those objectives that I've selected with a motivation and some example motivations are, does writing this piece get something off my chest that I really badly need to get off? Or does it help me solve like a nagging, unsolved problem that I've been dealing with? And this piece is a way for me to explore and find the solution. Or is it like me obsessing over a topic that I want others to also geek out about? So these are all powerful motivations that I pair with an objective to guarantee my follow through to get done writing the piece. And so that's I think about. And by the way, everything I've mentioned on this entire chat with you, the novelty stuff, the topic selection, PLA, state building, everything we've covered, I have tons of examples on join.com. So that's why I'm not trying to go through every single one. Yeah, and we'll link to all that. Absolutely. Awesome. The flip side, I'll point out is that I think writing.”
2022-09-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Growth tactics, retention strategies, and becoming a better writer | Julian Shapiro (Demand Curve, Hyper, Webflow, TechCrunch) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Number one, I want to open people's eyes to prove the status quo wrong. Or two, I want to articulate something that everyone's thinking about, but no one is saying I want to cut through the noise. Another objective might be I want to contribute original insights through like my own research and experimentation, hence some of my handbooks. Another objective is just telling a suspenseful and emotional story that maybe imparts a lesson. So these are all clear-cut objectives that give me a guidepost. I know that I'm done writing a piece. If I can read the piece and say, I've accomplished that particular objective, that people don't know when they're done writing. I petered out here and this seems like a good place for an outro. With an objective, you know whether you should actually stop. But then the question is, how do you sustain the motivation to see through an objective? Again, an objective might be something like open people's eyes by proving the status quo wrong, to do all the work necessary to accomplish that.”
2022-09-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Growth tactics, retention strategies, and becoming a better writer | Julian Shapiro (Demand Curve, Hyper, Webflow, TechCrunch) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To get more creative. And so I will turn it over to you to share your thoughts on these topics. Sure, sure, my pleasure. So the way I think about topic selection, meaning what is it you should write about if your blog posts, for your newsletter, Twitter, company blog, whatever, books, is you choose topics based on two factors. What would you actually be able to complete? So you're not going to give up halfway through and what will actually be high quality. And so I have a framework for helping you figure out what that is. So basically, I believe that your likelihood to follow through on something you start writing is a function of the objective you have with writing that piece and how strong your motivation is for seeing that objective to fruition. So here's what that looks like more specifically. Anytime that I write something, I'm first trying to identify what is my objective. So here's a few examples of objectives that I'll use before sitting down to write.”
2022-09-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Growth tactics, retention strategies, and becoming a better writer | Julian Shapiro (Demand Curve, Hyper, Webflow, TechCrunch) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Largely due to that reason. People love having their eyes opened and they'll reflexively retweet you to agree with your worldview if they feel like you're finally speaking truth, the power in some sense, if that makes sense. Yeah. We'll link to those in the show notes. By the way, I love your reading your own tweets voice that you have. I'm adopting my, who's the dude from the who's the guy from Star Trek who's amazing who reads the kids. Oh, yeah, Lavar Burton reading Rainbow. Lavar Burton. There you go. That's my Julian Shapiro, then you Lavar Burberton. Okay. So I know you have to run in not too long from now. We have two more topics. So how about I set up both topics and then you kind of talk through as much as you want with each. That sounds good? Sure. Cool. So the fourth topic we want to talk about is topics election, how meta, essentially picking what to write about, and you have a bunch of great advice on what's worth writing about and their framework around that. And then the fifth is something you call the creativity faucet, which is essentially.”
2022-09-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Growth tactics, retention strategies, and becoming a better writer | Julian Shapiro (Demand Curve, Hyper, Webflow, TechCrunch) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Counter narrative that gives people dopamine hit, they lean in, they want to see what my punchline is, and that tweet got a lot of engagement. One more example, okay, so see if you can catch the novelty here. New tweet. The world is not run by exceptional people. This is the hidden reason for imposter syndrome. We mistakenly think imposter syndrome is due to low confidence or low anxiety. No, it's caused by not accepting that your new world-class peers aren't that special. It's just discipline. And so the key statement there that has the novelty is the world is not run by exceptional people. And the type of novelty being used there is counterintuitive. Your intuition is the world run by the best of the best or many of these experts are there for a reason. And I'm saying, not in most cases. So anyway, those are some examples of novelty. And of course, these tweets took off.”
2022-09-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Growth tactics, retention strategies, and becoming a better writer | Julian Shapiro (Demand Curve, Hyper, Webflow, TechCrunch) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Meaning like you found something that people say that you know is a lie and you're about to tell people the way the world really works So some examples of novelty I'm just going to pull from I'm scrolling through Twitter here so this is a tweet I wrote where I wrote reading many books is the most socially accepted vanity metric for adults I give zero kudos for reading 100 books a year but I give you massive kudos for learning efficiently and making interesting things So this tweet is an example of me using novelty. So as we reread the key novel part, it's where I say reading many books is the most socially accepted vanity metric for adults. That is counter narrative novelty because the prevailing narrative is all the smart people I've ever met, they read a ton of books, they always have a book in their hand, they're reading five books a month, blah, blah, blah. And so I'm saying, no, that's a vanity metric, how many books you read.”
2022-09-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Growth tactics, retention strategies, and becoming a better writer | Julian Shapiro (Demand Curve, Hyper, Webflow, TechCrunch) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's just like another way of knowing if your thing is interesting is are you excited about it and are you interested in it as you're reading it? And that fades after you read it like 10 times and kind of edit and edit. But that's just a small tip I've learned. Just kind of trust your own gut feeling when you're excited about something that you're writing about. I agree. And that's why I tell people when you first encounter something that to you is novel, write down with a score, like let's say out of five, zero to five, how novel that thing was to you when you first heard it. You want to remember and capture the degree of novelty because to your point, Lenny, it's going to become less novel over time. And then if you pull that out of your idea bank for a blog post in two years, you'll be like, oh yeah, that will blow people's minds, even if it doesn't blow my mind today. And to your point, the way you basically get novel ideas is you go live your life and write down every time you come across something that interests or surprises you or anytime you come across something that makes you think, well, that's obviously not true.”
2022-09-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Growth tactics, retention strategies, and becoming a better writer | Julian Shapiro (Demand Curve, Hyper, Webflow, TechCrunch) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A lot of popular Twitter users do is what I call elegant articulation, where you're taking an idea like Naval does this, Naval on Twitter, the founder of Angelist, and he'll say something that's a complicated rich thought and boil it down into a very concise sentence. And then the reader goes, wow, that's beautiful. I couldn't have said that any better myself. That also triggers that dopamine reaction. And there's a few more, but the point I want to get at here is all of these are formats for identifying the types of things you could say to get people to go, whoa. And so that's what I think of as novelty, something I've found to kind of identify something that I've written is going to be interesting is I just kind of read it myself and I kind of like feel what I feel when I'm reading it the first time. And often I find that if I'm like, oh, wow, this is really good and really exciting. I've learned to trust that feeling wherever that comes from. And so that's.”
2022-09-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Growth tactics, retention strategies, and becoming a better writer | Julian Shapiro (Demand Curve, Hyper, Webflow, TechCrunch) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Different categories for it, and this is the backbone of how I write in many cases. So the first category of novelty is what I call counterintuitive information. So where you tell people something and they go, oh, wow, I never realized that the world worked that way or different categories and you tell people counter narrative information. That's where people respond, wow, that's not how I was told the world worked. So whereas counterintuitive novelty is that's not how I would have thought the world worked counter-narrative novelty is that's not what I've been told. I've been lied to now you're telling me the truth That also triggers a dopamine hit third category of novelty is just pure shock and awe like that's crazy I would have never believed that's true like for example there's a volcano that's going to erupt the next 15 years gonna swallow this whole island like that's wow that's shocking holy holy moly next category is what”
2022-09-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Growth tactics, retention strategies, and becoming a better writer | Julian Shapiro (Demand Curve, Hyper, Webflow, TechCrunch) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Dopamine hit reaction not being scientifically accurate here, but you get that dopamine hit like, whoa, that's super cool. And so the more you have readers pausing going, whoa, that was interesting, the more novel your writing is. And so my whole approach to writing is write something out and then point out all the points of novelty. And I do that by actually having like 20 friends read something I've written and highlight the sentences that made them go, whoa. And then I have this visualized map of in a given blog post where the areas that people go, that's really interesting. And then I can see all the white space between the interesting parts and I go in and I condense that white space. I chop it down so that the frequency of novelties as high as possible. And this is how you get a blog post that just has this phenomenal momentum that gets the read to completion rate to be very high. So the question is, what exactly does novelty look like? So I've identified about”
2022-09-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Growth tactics, retention strategies, and becoming a better writer | Julian Shapiro (Demand Curve, Hyper, Webflow, TechCrunch) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“About why novelty is important in writing, and ideally share your framework for creating something novel that keeps people engaged in reading. Sure. So this actually goes back to your question about Twitter. What can one do to build an audience on Twitter? It often comes down to writing things that are novel. Novel is what powers clickbait in most cases. The other way is via curiosity gap where you raise a question you don't answer. But the other half is novelty is what gets people to click into a thread and read it. And so novelty I define as new idea. So something I haven't heard of before that's also significant. So it's not some trivial fact about Kim Kardashian. And it's something that I wouldn't have easily intuited on my own. So when you have those ingredients, it's new. It's significant. And you wouldn't have easily thought of it on your own. That's when you trigger that.”
2022-09-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Growth tactics, retention strategies, and becoming a better writer | Julian Shapiro (Demand Curve, Hyper, Webflow, TechCrunch) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“An actual scientific breakthrough in like the fusion energy space plus protected by patents, those are real modes. But the way most people use the word mode is wrong. And in practice, your quote unquote moat is just your mechanism for retaining users a little bit more than the average company. And I believe state building is one of the best ways to do exactly that. And so really it just comes down to what are you doing to help users build state and get more value over time out of the product, not the same level of value over any time period. Awesome. Shifting a little bit away from growth and into writing, which I know you've spent a lot of time writing about, very meta and sharing on Twitter and all the ways. You have a handbook where you go into this concept of novelty and a framework for how to be novel and why that's important in writing. And I'd love for you to talk.”
2022-09-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Growth tactics, retention strategies, and becoming a better writer | Julian Shapiro (Demand Curve, Hyper, Webflow, TechCrunch) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Customers, then I lean in harder because I think you'll be more defensible as a company. And actually, interesting little side note is you'll often hear retention and stickiness referred to as a moat, right? But I find this term actually very misleading because very few companies have actual modes to have a real moat, you're basically exploiting like cryptocratic, meaning like you're friends with the government and they're creating a literal like barrier to entry for your competitors or you have a scientific”
2022-09-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Growth tactics, retention strategies, and becoming a better writer | Julian Shapiro (Demand Curve, Hyper, Webflow, TechCrunch) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so a lot of modern API startups automatically capture the stickiness by virtue of being so deeply embedded into a product. Generally speaking, none of this is in the context of like, hey, add it on post hoc, pretty much. Got it. I like that lens actually through a lot of these things you're talking about is maybe it's less like change your product to make this happen and it's more idea selection and i know you're also an investor and so it's a really good lens on how many of these things does this company have that i'm investing in so earlier i was mentioning like why do i write handbooks So I write, I wrote the handbook that PLA and state building come from to cement my diligence criteria for companies I believe might grow super fast and retain customers. And so you're exactly right. My investor's perspective is if you have the zero cost of acquisition mechanism for customer acquisition, such as PLA, and you can retain them through something like state building, but there are other ways to retain.”
2022-09-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Growth tactics, retention strategies, and becoming a better writer | Julian Shapiro (Demand Curve, Hyper, Webflow, TechCrunch) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I like that it's a little bit like the concept of having skin in the game and just building more skin in the game with a product that you're using. One quick question, is there a company that you've seen do this add it on and succeed and increase retention that you've worked with or out there? Just like, is there a good example of this that comes to mind that added this piece? Well, I don't, again, none of this is really under the context of telling people to add it on after they've built decide to what they're building. So this is all in the DNA of the product you're choosing to build. So I'm not sure I haven't thought of those examples. I'm thinking more so in whose DNA, which company's DNA are they doing this brilliantly. So for example, one form of state is one I did not cover is when you're embedded infrastructure. And so like if you're a Twilio Striper AWS, it's really hard to move off or segment because it's so much work to redo your code and introduce all this risk to screwing up your code base. And people have built patterns around how they work with your API.”
2022-09-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Growth tactics, retention strategies, and becoming a better writer | Julian Shapiro (Demand Curve, Hyper, Webflow, TechCrunch) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Facebook, or I've added all my colleagues for the last 20 years onto LinkedIn, and I've built a social graph on these products where I've curated and found people, that's really sticky. You're building state in the form of taking time to expand the graph. The graph is representative of the state, the work you've put in. And you don't want to lose those connections with people. And so that makes that product extra sticky. This is why social networks in general can be sticky. So it's not just the fact that you have your audience there. It's that you've invested time. So if Facebook doesn't allow you to export your graph out, then that makes it extra sticky as well. Because you don't know how else to talk to old Jimmy from elementary other than Facebook. Anyway, so there's actually many more of these examples of building state. I'm going to stop with that. But the basic concept is, what can you encourage users to do within your product that makes them more deeper entrenched in the product? And most apps just completely lack this.”
2022-09-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Growth tactics, retention strategies, and becoming a better writer | Julian Shapiro (Demand Curve, Hyper, Webflow, TechCrunch) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You want to encourage users to build a follower graph within that product and that they can take advantage of by pushing their product or their content or their insights too. So this is why Twitter, by the way, a big shout out to Substack, which actually allows customers to export emails off of Substack. So Substack is not playing that same game, which is better for users and a very nice thing for them ecosystem. But this is why Twitch and Instagram and Twitter are just like irreplaceable. I mean, not necessarily everything dies over time like Facebook, but they're just so darn hard to topple. So let's maybe touch one more. I don't want to ramble too much about this. Well, this one's kind of similar. So basically, if you spend a lot of time building a social graph in a product, like if I spent the last 10 years trying to remember the names of all my high school friends and elementary school friends and add them one at a time over the years to face.”
2022-09-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Growth tactics, retention strategies, and becoming a better writer | Julian Shapiro (Demand Curve, Hyper, Webflow, TechCrunch) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So the second state building technique that a startup could adopt, and again, this is all under the guise of how do we maximize retention and build somewhat of a moat, for example. So the second way you can do this is you encourage your users to accrue a non-transferable audience. So if I'm a big YouTuber and I've acquired a million subs, those subs can't be transferred anywhere else. I can't bring them to Twitter. In fact, YouTube doesn't even tell me their email, so I can't even bring them to a newsletter if I wanted to. And so the more subs you acquire on YouTube, the easier it is for you to go viral on YouTube. And this is what I mean earlier by the rich keep getting richer. It's like, it's this momentum trap. And so it's very, very hard to convince any YouTuber to get off YouTube if anything, they'll dabble within another network in parallel at best. So basically, if you have a startup where you're creating a marketplace or an audience graph,”
2022-09-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Growth tactics, retention strategies, and becoming a better writer | Julian Shapiro (Demand Curve, Hyper, Webflow, TechCrunch) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's producing a huge boost in revenue because of the trust it engenders with buyers on eBay, and it probably results in you ranking better in search results for any eBay query. And because you cannot move those 10,000 feedbacks through an eBay competitor, you're not incentivized to go use an eBay competitor. And so this type of stickiness, this non-transferable reputation, basically applies to all marketplaces and directories. So same thing on Yelp. use a restaurant, build your reputation on Yelp. the momentum keeps you stuck there you want to keep getting reviews and hone your reviews airbnb with your properties etsy for you as a seller aliba all of this stuff are examples of companies that are kind of old now cannot be toppled or haven't been yet and people are like why well because of this exact reason and this is why those companies pester you so much to leave reviews and provide feedback all the time they want you to play into this game of in-market reputation building”
2022-09-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Growth tactics, retention strategies, and becoming a better writer | Julian Shapiro (Demand Curve, Hyper, Webflow, TechCrunch) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is why media over companies like eBay or Craigslist remain completely unbeatable for decades, even though the UX is bad, people don't like using them, they fail to innovate. No one topples them, and it's because of state. So let's walk through some examples. So state, kind of like my PLA mega spiel, mega rant there, subdivides into a few categories. Well, I'll make this one shorter and less boring. So the first subcategory of building state is when you're encouraging your users to accrue non-transferable reputation, meaning they're doing stuff to build reputation on the platform and they cannot take their reputation to them off platform. So they're stuck there to get the compounding advantage of that reputation, for example. Let's say you've spent years getting 10,000 or more feedback ratings as an eBay seller. You are not leaving eBay anytime soon because that reputation is just too valuable.”
2022-09-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Growth tactics, retention strategies, and becoming a better writer | Julian Shapiro (Demand Curve, Hyper, Webflow, TechCrunch) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Video games where basically the more you play any given game, the more state you're accruing. So that might be your armor, your weapons, your character skins and whatever. And so as a player of the game, the more state you build, the more you're compelled to stick around because you don't want to lose everything you've worked so hard for. And the more state you have, the more you can exploit that state to get more. So the rich keep getting richer. And the same mental models apply to, let's say, SAS retention. This is like as old as time. Like if you think of, or at least as old as like modern capitalism. So like if you think of credit card rewards or frequent flyer programs, you spend money, you accrue points, you convert the points into rewards. And once users build momentum doing that, they're less likely to switch to a competitor. And so that's the age-old example of building state. In software, it's unbelievably powerful. This building state concept.”
2022-09-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Growth tactics, retention strategies, and becoming a better writer | Julian Shapiro (Demand Curve, Hyper, Webflow, TechCrunch) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And payments. And EPO supports tests on the front end, the back end, email marketing, and even machine learning clients. Check out EPO at getepo.com, get epppo.com, and 10x your experiment velocity. I have many questions I'd love to ask, but I also want to make sure we get to the other topics, so we talked about acquisition, which we'll link to in the show notes, by the way, this whole post. The flip side, you could say, is retention. And if you're a reader of my newsletter, you know how much time I spend thinking about retention and how important that is. And I know that's a second topic that we wanted to chat about because you've also helped a lot of companies think through their retention strategies and to help them retain more users. And so I'm curious to hear what you've found to be the best strategies for retaining users and increasing retention. Yeah, sure. So the way I think about retention, my favorite strategy is what I call building state. And so it's a concept I stole from.”
2022-09-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Growth tactics, retention strategies, and becoming a better writer | Julian Shapiro (Demand Curve, Hyper, Webflow, TechCrunch) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For how you're going to grow and scale. Awes This episode is brought to you by Eppo. Eppo is a next generation AB testing platform built by Airbnb alums for modern growth teams. Companies like Netlify, Contentful, and Cameo rely on EPO to power their experiments. Wherever you work, running experiments is increasingly essential, but there are no commercial tools that integrate with a modern grow team stack. This leads to wasted time building internal tools or trying to run your experiments through a clunky marketing tool. When I was at Airbnb, one of the things that I loved about our experimentation platform was being able to easily slice results by device, by country, and by user stage. FO does all that and more, delivering results quickly, avoiding annoying prolonged analytics cycles, and helping you easily get to the root cause of any issue you discover. EFO lets you go beyond basic click-through metrics and instead use your North Star metrics, like activation, retention, subscription,”
2022-09-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Growth tactics, retention strategies, and becoming a better writer | Julian Shapiro (Demand Curve, Hyper, Webflow, TechCrunch) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On Google and SEO. So basically, if you just encourage users to have conversations that are publicly indexed, that increases your surface area on Google for hitting more keywords and you get way more search traffic. So basically, the question that this boils down to is to leverage UGC in your product you ask yourself, do users use my product to make content in any way, shape, or form? If so, what type of content that they make should we encourage them to then share? And then how can we make the page that they use to share the content as appealing and as easily to consume as possible? And that's basically UGC. So we'll pause there. But basically, that's PLA in a nutshell. And the things that all of these have in common is you're not spending a dollar. They scale super quickly. You're not reliant on, well, maybe to some extent with SEO, but you're not relying on third-party volatility. And it's a much healthier narrative for.”
2022-09-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Growth tactics, retention strategies, and becoming a better writer | Julian Shapiro (Demand Curve, Hyper, Webflow, TechCrunch) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That users themselves are generating and the users are incentivized to share that content off platform, which brings users to the platform because users want to get customers wherever they can. They're going to cross sell to either YouTube channel and so on. So if you have a marketplace like eBay or some marketplace for selling, collectible shoes or something where you're encouraging users to create beautiful content of the items being sold at these cool like landing pages that show show off the products and they share elsewhere, then that's an example of users making content. They're sharing off platform that is useful for their own followers. And so another example of UGC that people often overlook is Quora or Reddit or Stack Overflow or TripAdvisor, where you're encouraging users to create content in the form of conversation that then surfaces.”
2022-09-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Growth tactics, retention strategies, and becoming a better writer | Julian Shapiro (Demand Curve, Hyper, Webflow, TechCrunch) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a phenomenal form of billboarding. People are sharing it willingly, and no wonder they've exploded. Same thing with dropbox, sharing file links, and you're seeing the Dropbox URL or GoFundMe when people share the GoFundMe page. You get the gist. So billboarding costs you nothing, scales infinitely, can have compounding effects. And if your product lends itself to billboarding, it's just a phenomenal way to grow if possible. So that's category three, I guess. We'll cover one last one if you like me too. Absolutely. Which is basically UGC. So user generated content. And same sort of thing, basically I hop on YouTube or TikTok or Insta or whatever. I make content. I share it with the world. And in so sharing that content, the platforms brand themselves on the content. So at the end of every TikTok video on Twitter that you've ever seen or in title, at the end, I'll say, you know, here's the TikTok user's account. So they're billboarding themselves into the content.”
2022-09-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Growth tactics, retention strategies, and becoming a better writer | Julian Shapiro (Demand Curve, Hyper, Webflow, TechCrunch) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sort of most topical hot example right now on Twitter is when you switch your Twitter profile to an NFT in a particular collection, you're billboarding for that NFT collection, right? Same phenomenon that occurred with the Bitcoin laser eyes. And also for Twitter Blue to be able to even do that. Yes, exactly, exactly right. Or like a Telegram right now, they released something like Twitter Blue. I forget, I don't know what it's called, but now when you're a Telegram premium paying user, it has a little star thing next to your name to everyone else sees. And like, wait, what is that? Oh, that's Telegram Pro. Let me take a look at that. Last example, which is one of my favorites, is billboarding via the nature of your product being something people are compelled to share in order to use. So if I have a Cowland account at the share my Calendly link with the world in order to create an event on my calendar. So if you're like me, you get a million cali links every week.”
2022-09-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Growth tactics, retention strategies, and becoming a better writer | Julian Shapiro (Demand Curve, Hyper, Webflow, TechCrunch) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which furthers the brand awareness and gets more people buying. So, for example, if you have a feature in your application where people are sending emails or communications to other users outside of the org, like it's an app for sending SMS messages or it's like a way to send invoices to your vendors when you're facilitating that generated messaging, say brought to you by the name of your startup in the signature of it. Really use your own surface area to increase your own awareness. So that's billboarding in two different ways. A third way is the very obvious way of like having something unmistakably recognizable out in the world. So if I drive a Tesla, if I wear Nike shoes, if I have Apple AirPods, all of these are immediately visible to everyone around me, which is why sometimes physical products can really explode because they're just free walking billboards all over the world.”
2022-09-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Growth tactics, retention strategies, and becoming a better writer | Julian Shapiro (Demand Curve, Hyper, Webflow, TechCrunch) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is I was looking at these billboards above the highway in San Francisco where I was seeing the company that actually hosts the billboards advertise their own logo on the billboard while also showing you whatever ad they were being paid to show. So they were using their own surface area to advertise themselves. Another example is like when you're seeing an ad network across the web like Google Matter ads perhaps and it says like brought to you by Google Ads they're using their own surface area to advertise themselves. That's billboarding. It's a brilliant free way to get a ton more exposure. And so there's a few ways to do billboarding. One is the classic example of hotmail and iPhone. So when you send an email via hotmail at the end, it depends a signature saying sent via hotmail. Same thing sent from my iPhone. So every single email sent from an iPhone device, unless you remove that signature, is a free billboard for Apple.”
2022-09-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Growth tactics, retention strategies, and becoming a better writer | Julian Shapiro (Demand Curve, Hyper, Webflow, TechCrunch) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You settle your debt with the payment recipient. You get to have a better conversation because now your friend Jack is part of the conversation. So you don't have to incentivize them with anything artificial, with any rewards. And refill programs generally are not exciting to me because you're usually trying to, again, you're like self-selecting for folks who just want the reward very often. And then the people they invite might also just want the dual-ended reward and they're not even here for the app really and then they can bounce. And then they don't invite other people typically. It's just, it's not very, it doesn't have the same compounding sticky retentive nature of PLA. So I'm not a fan of it. If you can make it work though, fantastic. Anyway, third category is what I call billboarding. So billboarding is this idea that the use of the product is inherently visible to people around you. And so the product advertises itself. A few examples. Actually, where I got the term from.”
2022-09-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Growth tactics, retention strategies, and becoming a better writer | Julian Shapiro (Demand Curve, Hyper, Webflow, TechCrunch) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which is extremely saturated, or paid acquisition, meaning ad channels which are extremely saturated, especially if you have low LTVs where we can't really tolerate the volatility of paydack or just the cost in general of those CACs, then we have to be thinking more strategically at the product level. So it's less about tacking it on later, but sometimes this will work brilliantly if it's very organic. So when we cover my next category, we'll actually see some examples of how you can pack it on more seamlessly. But the other response to your question, which is a great question, is people mistake product acquisition for referral programs, which it is not because referral programs are attacked on incentive trying to give people something to encourage them to invite because they otherwise are not invited. Whereas PLA, as I've currently defined it, is through the national use of the product, you get more value when you invite others.”
2022-09-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Growth tactics, retention strategies, and becoming a better writer | Julian Shapiro (Demand Curve, Hyper, Webflow, TechCrunch) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“natural fit and so as you're going through this i'd love to know how how often have you seen startups succeed adding something like this when their app is not like a money exchange app or a chat app i'm curious how often it works to add something like this when your app's kind of some some else if that makes sense yeah well the real lesson is don't start a company if you have no idea how it's going to grow now that's not categorically true for all startups like it's a relevant for deep tech and biotech and climate tech and all that stuff but for a lot of these like people starting SaaS companies where they intend to grow very quickly among B2B customers or B2C like the real point of what I'm saying is if you have three ideas before you as a founder and one of them lends itself to product cloud acquisition really beautifully then lean in that direction perhaps if you think that growth is the key differentiator between them for what's going to lead to success so it's like make life easier on yourself because if we're relying so heavily on SEO and content”
2022-09-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Growth tactics, retention strategies, and becoming a better writer | Julian Shapiro (Demand Curve, Hyper, Webflow, TechCrunch) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If I'm a product person, I'm roadmapping my product, I will think, is there anything in my product conducive to either one of those two functionalities, settling debts, or can I introduce chat within my product? And if so, you might be cracking open an amazing channel. And so when I tell people about product at acquisition, I'm usually doing it in the context of let's rethink your product feature roadmap to prioritize features that facilitate these things that can lead to explosive growth. So I'll pause if there's anything you want to dive in there, but I have like three more categories we could chat about if you want to, that three more ways of doing PLA. Yeah, absolutely. I just want to lob a question over there as you're going through these to maybe touch on this. So most founders would love to find a way to grow through virality and invites and all the things you're talking about. I find that it's often hard to kind of lop onto something they're doing if it's not.”
2022-09-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Growth tactics, retention strategies, and becoming a better writer | Julian Shapiro (Demand Curve, Hyper, Webflow, TechCrunch) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Install the app in order to have the conversation with you. So inviting people to critical social or business conversations in an app is the other way that you can nearly guarantee you'll grow very quickly from product-led acquisition. The business version of this is Slack. You sign up for Slack, you invite all your friends or all your coworkers. Then you even invite all your vendors via Slack Connect. So Slack Connect was a brilliant Slack feature where they're saying, hey, we're now going to encourage you to invite people who aren't using Slack who are outside of your work. And that, I don't know how that's done for them as a feature, but in theory it's a brilliant way to expand the surface area for inviting people via product on acquisition. So just to recap where we are real quick, one of the ways of acquiring customers is to encourage existing users to pay other people or to encourage them to come into your app, to have conversation that's only happening on the app. So if I'm a startup,”
2022-09-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Growth tactics, retention strategies, and becoming a better writer | Julian Shapiro (Demand Curve, Hyper, Webflow, TechCrunch) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Be money, it can be settling a debt of like an NFT, for example. Someone buys an NFT from you on OpenSea. And the only way for them to receive their NFT, I'm just making this up right now, is to also have an OpenSea account or a wallet that's specific to that collection. Again, making this up. The point is, if you're settling the debt of something you owe someone and they must make an account to capture the thing owed, they're going to sign up. Okay, so that's category one. Category two is when you're inviting someone to join the product you're using to partake in a conversation that the otherwise cannot access. So like, why does Telegram, WhatsApp, iMessage, all these chat apps, Discord grow so quickly? Pretty obviously because if you and your little clique of friends are having your conversation in that app, then the person who's also in your real life friend group but who hasn't yet installed the app has to”
2022-09-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Growth tactics, retention strategies, and becoming a better writer | Julian Shapiro (Demand Curve, Hyper, Webflow, TechCrunch) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'll go into some examples. So we started with the example of actually one thing that came to mind that I love is Paul Graham, who we mentioned earlier, Paul Graham from YC has this quote, which is don't start a startup where you need to go through someone else to get users. And that always really resonated with it. So here are the categories of product-led acquisition that I've identified. So number one, like I mentioned, is users inviting other users to settle debts. So if I'm going to pay you money I owe you for splitting dinner on Venmo or a business expense that I'm paying you for. You're my vendor on PayPal or anything that's allowing me to just pay you money I owe you and I have to use a product to do so. Whoever is collecting the money from me is going to make an account on that product if necessary to claim their hard-earned money. So almost guaranteed way for you to have user-led growth, product-led growth. Now, it doesn't have”
2022-09-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Growth tactics, retention strategies, and becoming a better writer | Julian Shapiro (Demand Curve, Hyper, Webflow, TechCrunch) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So let's say your company primarily grows via content and SEO. Well, you're at the mercy of Google releasing an algorithmic update every couple, you know, let's say twice a year, which occasionally will absolutely tank your traffic and most people know what I mean by that if they've experienced that. It's awful. Or if you're a paid acquisition-led company as opposed to a content-led acquisition company, meaning you're running Facebook ads, and let's just stick with Facebook for now, Facebook and Instagram, you're also at the mercy of the volatility of CPMs and whatever weird updates Facebook introduces or whatever targeting options they suddenly remove, your entire acquisition strategy is anchored on something that is completely out of your hands and very volatile. So product that acquisition is like the better you craft your product and the incentive structures for existing users inviting other users, that's entirely in your control and the better you grow. So that's the quick context.”
2022-09-25 · Lenny's Podcast · Growth tactics, retention strategies, and becoming a better writer | Julian Shapiro (Demand Curve, Hyper, Webflow, TechCrunch) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source