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

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“So, by me trying to use PayPal in its everyday intention and me getting value out of it to settle a debt, I'm automatically enticing someone else, very strongly so, to also become PayPal customer. That's product-led acquisition. And so there's a few different categories I've identified. And I think the reason why people like this part of this article I wrote is because it's, in my opinion, the absolute best way to grow any startup. So if your startup can grow via product led acquisition, not all can, maybe some are enterprise-based and all they're going to make work is sales, then it is by far the best way to grow because zero marginal cost to have users invite other users. It's scalable. It creates network graphs typically and has compounding effects there in terms of both moats and the ability to acquire more customers quickly. And basically to the point I just mentioned is basically viral. The other interesting thing here is there are far fewer dependencies.”
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
“Popular page in any of your handbooks, and it comes from you working with thousands of companies to help them figure out their growth strategies through demand curve. And so I'm curious to hear what this concept is and how people can use it to help their products grow. Yeah, so product.acitis to your audience will be more commonly known as product-led growth. But I think product-led growth is a bit of a misnomer. So it's often used, as you know, to basically refer to SaaS companies who are using self-serve sales funnels, where a salesperson isn't required, right? Feeling bypassing sales and allowing the product to grow itself. That's fine, but I think the term we really care about is growth marketers is product-led acquisition, meaning the use of the product grows the product. So, for example, if I'm using PayPal and I'm setting $1,000 to somebody else, there is no way they will not create a PayPal account to accept the thousand dollars.”
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 getting printed out. One of the things that might separate me from other writers, at least many other writers online, is I'm spending as many hours going back and rewriting old blog posts and handbooks as I am writing new ones. So if you come back to anything I've written over the course of like a year, a year and a half, it'll be updated because I consider everything I write to be evergreen and I avoid writing things that I feel like are a drop in the pan just like talking about a trend or something, something very newsy. I avoid that altogether. I'm just interested in writing stuff that'll stay for, be relevant for a long time. I didn't know that. That is very cool. I love that you do that. You should make that clear. That's so interesting that this is not stable last updated last week. I don't know if you already do that. Yeah. No, I actually don't. I probably should. People have complained to me that I haven't, so maybe I will one day. All right. We got a good idea out of this. If nothing else, there we go. Okay. So the first idea that I want to chat about is something that you call product-led acquisition. And I believe it's the most...”
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
“Going really in depth, but not having to write a book. Well, speaking of the contract there, so you have a very large newsletter that goes very in depth. And that arguably is a more valuable asset than my handbooks for someone building an audience because the newsletter has this built-in form of retention recurrence where they get pinged in their inbox when you have new content and then it becomes a referable thing and people refer to each other and then they sign up for the newsletter. And so I do love the emphasis on long form via newsletter, but the reason I do it on the web is, and we'll talk about the trade-offs in a second, is it's much more digestible and referenceable. Like no one's going to go refer to the epic guide in their email inbox. It's very hard to navigate for building muscle or something. So one is a UX decision. Two, I get the SEO traffic, which you don't. And then three, it's basically a living asset that I can keep updating over time. It's not stuck in someone's Zenbox.”
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 the public. So then all this work privately, why not make it accessible publicly? And at that point, it winds up being acquisition fodder for essentially building an audience and distributing my thoughts further. So that's why I do that. But the thing that I pride myself on with them is by no means are they thoroughly unique. But in everyone, there's a lot of original stuff folks on average have never heard of before. And that's what I'm proud of is coming up with those insights between the lines that make that thing, whatever the topic is, much more approachable. So like I've succeeded in my view, if I've made something that people often mistakenly think of as overwhelmingly complex, very simple for them to follow. I think that's where the dopamine hit comes from for them. Well, my experience, you definitely hit the nail on the head with the handbooks you put out. And it's an interesting middle ground between a newsletter and a book. And it's cool to just have a digital way of doing that, of just kind of consolidating a bunch of ideas.”
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
“Super in depth handbooks on a bunch of different topics on growth and writing and muscle building and things like that. First of all, could you just explain what these handbooks are and why you create them? They're forcing functions for me to hold myself accountable and to be thorough when learning something from my own benefit. That's all they are. So basically, if I want to go learn growth or writing well or some other topic, I will go ahead and do a ton of research, read everything I can get my hands on, do a ton of experimentation to try to build a set of novel insights that you couldn't find from other people's research, hopefully. And then the next stage is try to make it as concise and actionable as possible so that I can reference it for my own selfish benefit. So like here's my guidebook for myself on writing better blog posts, for example. And then by the time I've done that work, what usually happens is it's only like I'm going to make up a number here, an extra 30 hours of work to make it palatable and digestible.”
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
“Take fire pretty much. Awesome. I wasn't expecting to go into Twitter a strategy, but this is interesting because you're really good at it. And as you've said, your stuff is actually very thoughtful. It's not just a thirsty Twitter thread trying to find followers and retweets. And so thanks for sharing that. Yeah. Well, it sort of started that way because me and a few other friends of mine, I felt like you were the first people doing threads at scale. And then when we realized what it turned into, that's when we just stopped. I love that. Yeah, I know what you mean about these cringy Twitter threads. Anyway, what I want to do is instead of asking a bunch of random questions, is to focus on five big topics and kind of go deep on these topics. And these are topics that are maybe most popular of the stuff that you've put out across your handbooks and writing and courses and things like that, and also things that I've found to be most interesting. Does that sound good? Yeah, I would love to. Cool. So first little context, you write these.”
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
“The length of thoughts equivalent to you having sent a newsletter edition or blog post in many cases. And the more exposure, the more surface area you have, the more you give people of your brain in a single tweet, the more they're able to confirm that what you're sharing is actually a consistency from you. Whereas if you just tweet one clever thing, they're like, oh, that's probably just a drop in the bucket. Who knows if that person can consistently generate clever stuff? But in a long thread where it's 30 tweets and they're all good, like, whoa, this person is a machine. If I follow them reliably, I'll get more great stuff. So it reaffirms to readers they should follow you, which is why threads trigger more follows. So yeah, basically you do want to do threads, frankly. And that's the backbone of it. Threads with very clickbaity opening tweets kind of how it works. You can also port followers over from other places like your website and newsletter just to start giving yourself an initial sample audience through which the threads can 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
“Such a good reminder not to just focus on follower, follower, follower. I'm curious if someone, so you have a lot of followers at this point, and it's just like so valuable to have Twitter followers I've learned for me, anytime I have a question about anything I just ask and I get so many amazing answers from people. And there's this power to having a large following. I'm curious while we're on this topic, if you're just starting out on Twitter, do you have any advice for someone that's just thinking about building their following? I mean, generally speaking, threads, despite everything I've said, are the primary way to get followers. So there's a reason why people do threads as opposed to single tweets is because”
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
“Following you for the original thoughts and insights and takes that you have on the world. And so someone like Paul Graham, you know, the founder of Y Combinator is doing original takes. He's not trying to write threads for the sake of gaining followers. He's trying to write interesting novel ideas. And when he does that, he strengthens the affinity that his followers have for him and his mind because, wow, that was an original interesting take. And so they're following you for your mind, not for the labor you're doing, putting together a virtual buzzfeed account on Twitter. And when people follow you for your mind, when their mind followers, not labor followers, higher affinity means more loyalty, means they pay closer attention to what you're saying. And if you actually try to get them to do something with you, you have an event offline, there's something you're selling, there's a cause you care about, they're way more likely to indulge. Whereas if they're following you for your labor, you're interchangeable with all these other meme accounts and there's no real affinity for you as the individual. So I just care more about the quality of the follower than I do the volume. I love 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
“With. And so I kind of lost the momentum and enthusiasm for writing that sort of stuff. And now I'm only writing anything when it's basically a reflection or a condensed version of a blog post that I happen to be writing for my website. So I know it's high quality. I know it's original. I know it's thoughtful. It's not for the clickbait. So that was part of it. The other thing is that there's kind of like two, here's a mental model for thinking about the quality of your followers. You have people who follow you for the quality of your brain and you have people who follow you for sort of you being a glorified curator. So if they're following you for being a curator, they're sort of what I call labor followers. They're following you for the work that you're doing where you're finding cool, funny memes, you're posting cool, funny jokes, you're doing these fortune cookie threads. In contrast, if they're following you for your mind, which is category one, it means they're”
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
“Match. Excellent. It'll cancel each other out and we'll see how interesting this is. That's right. There's a lot of hype. So I know you have something like 250,000 Twitter followers. You're very good at Twitter, but I've noticed that you've only tweeted three times this past year. What is going on there? Yeah, so there's a few things in parallel. One is a lot of people are writing threads, and I found them to be very cringe. They're like these fortune cookie threads. Like, here's 21 ways to, you know, rework your startup or something. Found them all cringe. And what they actually do when you write that stuff is they attract people who think that's valuable information. And then they cause people who you actually want to follow you to unfollow you. And I remember just seeing people unfollow me in early days of threads when like no one was doing them. And I was experimenting. And they were like pissing off people that I actually cared to have dialogue.”
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
“Like to learn more or get started, check out flat file at flatfile.com. Julian Shapiro is what I'd call a polymath of the internet. He's an amazing writer, marketer, and growth mind, investor, community builder, podcaster tweeter. He's also an expert on building muscle. He's maybe most known for being the founder of demand curve, YC startup that trains people on growth and marketing. Prior to that, he was a part-time columnist at TechCrunch. He was also VP of marketing at Webflow, which I had no idea about. He also created a JavaScript web animation engine that is used by Uber and WhatsApp and Samsung and thousands of companies. Currently, he is a full-time investor with his own fund and as a partner at Hyper. He's also one of the most hilarious and generous humans that I know. And so with that, Julian, welcome to the podcast. This is the greatest honor of my life. Thank you. Crying from that intro. Very nice of you. That's the idea. Wow. This is the greatest honor of my life.”
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 am 0% surprised to hear that. I've consistently seen that improving onboarding is one of the highest leverage opportunities for both sign-up conversion and increasing long-term retention. Getting people to your aha moment more quickly and reliably is so incredibly important.”
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 started. Ashley, head of marketing at Flatfile. How many B2B SaaS companies would you estimate need to import CSV files from their customers?”
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
“Excited to chat with my friend John Cutler from podcast sponsor Amplitude. Hey, John. Hey, Lenny. Excited to be here. John, give us a behind-the-scenes at Amplitude. When most people think of Amplitude, they think of product analytics. But now you're getting into experimentation and even just launched a CDP. What's the thought process there? Well, we've always thought of amplitude as being about supporting the full product loop. Think collect data, inform bets, ship experiments, and learn. That's the heart of growth to us. So the big aha was seeing how many customers were using amplitude to analyze experiments, use segments for outreach, and send data to other destinations. Experimented CDP came out of listening to and observing our customers. In supporting growth and learning has always been Amplitude's core focus, right? Yeah, so Amplitude tries to meet customers where they are. We just launch starter templates and have a great scholarship program for startups. There's never been a more important time for growth. Absolutely agree. Thanks for joining us, John, and head to amplitude.com.”
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
“Welcome to Lenny's podcast. I'm Lenny and my goal here is to help you get better at the craft of building and growing products. Interview world-class product leaders and growth experts to learn from their hard-won experiences building and scaling today's most successful companies. Today, my guest is Julian Shapiro. Actually spend a bunch of time introducing the Wondrous Julian at the beginning of the episode, so instead let me just share some of the things that we talk about. We get into a framework he calls product-led acquisition, which is work that has come out of his working with thousands of companies helping to figure out their growth strategies. We get into ways to increase your product's retention. Then we talk a lot about writing, the importance of novelty in your writing, how to choose a topic when you plan to write, and then a framework that Julian calls the creativity faucet. Julian is such a fascinating human, and I am really excited to bring you this episode. And so with that, I bring you Julian Shapiro.”
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
“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 finish the creative process. There's no way you would have come up with gold.”
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