#211 with Julian Shapiro - The 3 Cheat Codes Startups Use to Print Cash

if you can't make the economics of an ad channel exciting can you at least a not burn money while b building a huge database that that that likes you because your free thing or your cheap thing i feel like i could rule the world i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a day's off on a road travel never looking back i'm actually i'm surprised you haven't been on this before i feel like i feel like you're made for this in a way maybe i mean i was doing pods for a while because trying like purposely to get on podcast podcasts for for like indie hackers yeah for like getting the word out about the man then at some point i'm like this is cringe man like i don't like this in back to myself and so it's good took the process of actually starting a podcast you know in part thanks to also watching you do your your magic to be like yeah i can just totally be myself and i've worry about as much and then it stop being cringe so now i'm all for it and how how has it been since you launched the pod so you launched what's do you brands right brands with the s or without the s yeah brains with the ass it's been good it's been i because it is rare to have reasons in your life to be very seriously self reflective about whether or not you're boring the shit out of people so like i have to be so deliberate about can i be charismatic can i be interesting and i'm not saying i'm there yet but i'm saying i'm at least thinking about it you know in in the in the context of china not poor people on a podcast so it's been a really good forcing function okay i like that and has it been so you launched this podcast you did it very methodically you recorded like eight episodes with badass people ahead of time and so you i feel like you were pretty thorough about how you went about it or more so than me at least did it go the way you wanted to or where would you learn yeah i was thorough because i felt that i kinda had no choice because i listened to a bunch of podcasts and found most of them to be like un unreasonable right and then when i heard my first million i'm like there's something special here but i don't actually know what it is and so my c hosts on the podcast cor for media hackers he's like what's going on to that special is they're not asking boring interview questions they're literally just r on ideas collaboratively and making charge statements and letting other people response them and the net effect is it feels way more like rapport like if dinner conversation you're over hearing so we really rolled with that and then we try to be delivered out well how do we choose guests that can actually play into that can they speak spontaneously are they willing to play ball and bad ideas around right so i feel like it's probably a lot of the stuff that you're thinking about as well and yeah it's been it's been great so we're basically in a in know a way where my first million but for everything outside of business like writing a book being a storyteller seller you know what i mean yeah the episode i was on had alexandra bow heads i don't know how you say a name actually how do you say it properly that's right as issue got it chess champion twitch streamer so she's like content creator really interesting person her content is about chess because she's really damn good at chess and so i found it pretty interesting like that was not what i get in on a bunch of podcasts that's not usually what i get to to talk about or talk to and so i immediately it was pretty bought in just as i kinda guest on but anyways i wanted to have you on here because this is you know the pod for ideas and i feel like you have a lot of interesting ideas and also see a lot of interesting idea and for people don't know we're in a group chat together and being in a group chat is like the closest thing to being in a dorm together i feel you get to know people over time you get to see them walking around in their boxer you know you you just you're going to the the share bathroom together there's no place to run you're gonna be yourself over in enough time in in the right group chat so i feel like i've gotten to know you even though we have never met person but you are an idea person do consider yourself an idea person i see i see i think of myself as someone who's loves brainstorm but i'm not as fixated on ideas i think as you are like i know you and sam love the treasure hunt you love the chase like who's making money how i'm more like alright give me a problem i wanna solve the problem and so what i did for this show actually is i went through the community of my startup we have about forty thousand marketers and and founders and so i picked out the three most interesting growth trends i could find and i came to some examples of each of those trends so there like three things that were popping out that felt almost like cheap codes like ways that startups were printing cash and reaching unicorns status is much quicker than one would think it should okay so that's something we can jam on i got a few three categories there we can jam on if you'd like yeah let's do that right now don't even say anything else besides that i'm i'm completely i'm completely hooked let's do that alright alright so okay let's kick it off with this first category so i'm gonna give these funny names because i don't have good names for it so category one is give customers an absolute no brainer so there's two ways to give them a no brainer that i've seen in the community no brainer number one is you literally give them away money in a way that's economically sustainable which we'll get into right another no brainer way is make the friction so crazy low that people are like fuck it i'll just click the button one time and get this installed so let's walk through examples of what i mean by that so starting with giving away money there was this cut a long time ago called service and what they did is they would give you money back anytime that your flight was delayed if a few conditions were true because there was this lesser known loophole in the contracts of airlines where for reasons they wanted to have a policy to give fl some money back if their fight was the delayed you just have to do the paperwork and request it and nobody ever did exactly right no one wanted the friction so services is like hey we'll automate we'll create like a va army we'll file the paperwork for you you just give us your itinerary we're literally giving you cash almost literally because it's like credit so the reason this was so clever is for a very simple reason it wound up creating some of the world's best performing ads because when you made ads on facebook that were something like hey did you know the airlines will pay you up to a hundred bucks whenever you're delayed the click through rates on those ads were astronomical the cost per click were super low and they were able to yeah to just skyrocket to millions and ad spend monthly very quickly and let me give you a couple more examples because this is actually something more than just service could do so another interesting examples of recent yc company and they're called ia so ia does is they'll take your money just through a normal bank they'll take your money you know they'll manage savings but because they're so low overhead they they red distribute all of that extra potential margin into lottery winning for their bank customers so just by having more money in ia they're going to give you tickets to this vi to this real lottery that they run every single week they give away millions and you just you're automatically entered screwed us a bank no a no loss so imagine no loss lottery called right yeah exact and and just imagine their ads like just think about how compelling it is to position that to a lot of people who either love the lottery or just really want way to make extra cash so a couple more examples if it's helpful for me to run through here we got main street that's when you said it that's the one that came to mind as soon as you said give you know basically giving away money i thought of main street i was a company that's growing fast doing this it's brilliant right and so so explain explain what it is if people don't know so they're basically running ads i'll i'll come at it from the perspective of what is the ad because that's the whole perspective of this chat it's like what's the growth right so the ad main street can run to people is did you know that you're not taking advantage of an extra say ten thousand dollars in tax credits every year for your business it's like whoa if i a small business making it month to month that's huge and so again they found a business model that can act as a means to at least optically without being scammed either give you like free money in a sense or credit back and it functions is the ultimate acquisition wedge in a sense which then becomes how they grow so darn quickly and so the question is how do these companies make money and this brings us to this idea of like having a wedge in the gross world we talked about wedges or even investing and if you can just use one of these products as a means to collect emails and happy customers very quickly then it's a wedge to building a customer base that you can monetize some other revenue streams if not that one revenue stream itself right yeah i like that a lot and there was another one that was doing this or do not pay is another one that does this right they i think i i don't remember how they started if it was them or somebody else there's another one that was like the flight flight cancellation payback there was one that was hey did you get a parking ticket in san francisco we'll fight it for you so just show send us a picture of the ticket we will fight it for you did you know that you know four out of ten tickets are filled out incorrectly and are therefore invalid even if you were in the wrong to cop filled it out wrong and therefore you don't have to pay a a dime we we will find these opportunities for you and you only pay us out of the savings of whatever money we save you we'll take twenty percent of whatever money we give back to you and i thought wow that's actually like a great idea and it got so popular that san francisco banned them you know pretty quickly like after a few months because it was like being used so much team was serviced by the way service the airlines were like what what the hell going on here they just shut it they like close they started tightening up the policy and so sometimes that actual wedge can be a very flimsy one yeah but if you if you ran away with happy customers who now trust you for other products then maybe was still okay one so i i wouldn't necessarily recommend these flimsy unsustainable channels but but main street does not seem flimsy to me right on paper another great example i'll give you one last one this it's my favorite because it's under everybody's noses which is if you look at the top of buildings when you're driving around you have those clear view know this billboard ads and so imagine being a business owner and someone comes seem says say i'm gonna pay you let's say fifty grand a year all you gotta do is put this billboard on your roof right i'm sure it's much more complicated than that but the idea is that sometimes when you get pitched with a revenue machine that's super low friction for you that you did not realize it's possible it has becomes a crazy growth wedge yeah that's yeah and there's you could basically create value out of thin air just by just about just by knowing the rules of connecting the dots i feel this way about there's some bigger businesses that do this principle one for student loan ref financing it's just like hey you're paying too much just tell us what you pay today and then we will find you a cheaper student loan you just click a button and and boom your you changed to this monthly payment instead of this one i think common bond or something like that is one of those and house ref financing is another but these require it's not as they can't do the whole thing on your behalf unfortunately but i'm i feel like somebody could get closer to doing the whole thing on your behalf and that seems like a pretty big opportunity to me absolutely and and what this actually speaks to is this larger trend of can you think of your product roadmap if you're starting a business in unison with your growth roadmap because everything we've just been discussing is basically a product feature it's not like you're just running ads in a silo you're running ads because you have this way of giving away money or at least the optically giving away money so i tell founders sometimes can you think of the feature list on your product roadmap can you rep prioritize it such that it facilitates growth strategies like these and that can guide you for for growing a lot quicker as opposed to just you know living in a local maximum running in service and so because we're ultimately talking about the idea like a trojan horse for acquiring customers in a non scam and authentic way where you're really offering value so the other half of this by the way is this idea is mentioning of super low friction so this the we're selling at this category of giving customers an absolute no brainer exactly how do you become a no brainer where it's like i don't have to think about this so second sub subcategories so first was giving away money second is super low friction so let me give you an example chrome extensions are maybe my favorite example because if we think of honey right which gives you a chrome extension that as you browse the web surfaces discounts on whatever you're browsing right right you're looking at a chair say you you didn't know this but you can get twenty percent off so that's brilliant because the chrome extension is like a two click process from being part of your internet browsing experience for that until the rest of time you delete the extension right it's so low friction you don't have to sign up don't have to add a credit card you don't have to give any of your data verified via two two fact their authentication verify your email address none of it you don't even have to remember to open the app right that's most apps you just for person just forgets to open you ever again but with chrome extension they're opening chrome they already have that habit you just get to tag along like a little you know like the the flea on an elephant back exactly exactly that's right and so if you could find a way to make something so painless where it's like two clicks set it and forget it the idea is that now you're around now you have a bunch of exposure opportunities you keep popping up when relevant on webpage pages that the user's browsing and eventually when the time is right and you can deliver real value like contextual because of like this is gonna be a monster coupon i could give the customer we're gonna save them a thousand bucks right that's when finally ask hey can you make an account real quick before we give you this monster coupon and now they're completely bought and they've come to trust you yeah that's smart what what are chrome extension ideas have you have you seen that you like or you have like what what else is like honey does anything come to mind i know it's a hard question but what else is like honey yeah it is a tough question but one good example is extensions in the seo space that give you data about web pages yeah the competitive analysis as you're browsing so that if you are a marketer you can get this like x rate vision into how are they growing right what are they what keyword terms and all this stuff right so it winds up educating you to better grow your business and it becomes very sticky if that data is valuable what which which chrome extensions which chrome sensors do you have installed it i have similar web which is what you're talking about basically gives me traffic information about different websites so i can think how popular they are and where the traffic comes from i have meta mask which is you know an ethereum wallet or a crypto wallet and then i have ad block those are the three chrome extensions i have and i'm very particular about chrome extensions because when you install a chrome extension it says this extension can read everything you type under any website i'm like wow that's so insecure that's crazy what do you have installed yeah so nothing exciting i got my ad block i got the thing that tells me if i'm on a website that had their password sort of broken into so it'll tell me if i should switch my you know okay and then i have oh this awesome twitter extension that when i'm looking at someone's twitter profile it'll show me all of their historical best performing tweets so i get like a snapshot view who they are and what they're known for it's called t w e n e the between x i like that that's pretty cool i was thinking there could be a couple others like while you were saying that i was thinking of what what other x extra we used said x extra vision i like that so i was like what x vision would i want as i browse the web so one is just taking a like the twitter thing but sort of like anytime someone's name is on a web page if i just hover can i just pop out a thing that basically tells me about that person it's like here's you know here's the twitter profile you can click follow here's are some things about them here's the wiki or whatever so it's like you know the quick who is this on any name on any website that's one the other is facebook ads so i i'm constantly going to the facebook ad library to find what ads a company running i actually just want that done automatically so i just wanna go to any products website any any company's website and be able to click this and see what ads are running without having to go open up the high library mh yeah i love that the the way i think about this this type of a question is like what type of chrome extension or like what's a framework for thinking about which category of chrome extension would be the stick and would people love to download the most and i think about how to appeal advice how do i feel the people's desire to make money and so where might i bring those right away is what about some sort of x extra vision where you're on like bloomberg or you're on twitter and anytime the chrome extension picks up a keyword for a public stock or like some crypto token right put the cryptocurrency then it just suggests like it gives you an x rays like how is performing who else talks about it a lot who should you follow to learn more about this right and that then it kinda triggers more so like this is greedy like okay well i can make money off this so i'm gonna pay a bit more attention because when you do the educational route really with any tool the kids give x rays vision let people know like amazon's x rays vision to when you're watching a movie it'll it'll tell you like what music is playing in the background who are these acts like do people really care mean maybe some but it's obviously nerds yeah yeah the the the one more on this is that i was just thinking of while you're browsing websites if it basically could you create robinhood in a chrome browser a chrome extension i think you could so you could basically have it be like acorns where it sort of rounds up on anything you buy and then it buys either a fraction of that stock or it adds up until you it it tells you hey you've been shopping a lot on apple why don't you buy hundred dollars apple stock click here to do it and maybe there's a way to kind of like use that roundup model to get you to own instead of just being a customer and not own any of the underlying company even in which case you could so i think this just one interesting idea is just look at every app on your phone and say could this be a chrome extension how would you do robinhood as a chrome extension how would you do blah blah blah that's super clever so to recap that you're basically saying as i'm browsing like literally as on robinhood dot com right can there be an acorns it can be some acorns like extension that's like hey why don't you spend a little bit more at actually invest directly in this company exactly you get a sense of ownership and incentive alignment or even better like hey we stick it deed it pops up right as it easier you're about to do a trade it's like okay we see about the treat for like ninety seven bucks you wanna roll this up get the extra three bucks in robinhood hood itself yes that's that's super clever i love that alright so that that was theme one let's go to theme two sure so let's see here okay so this next category is does encouraging people to use your product naturally encourage other people they know to use the product also this is commonly called product led growth but we can break it down in a more interesting ways let me start by giving you some examples k so slack connect dropbox paypal cal so what these companies have in common is when i use any of those products my use of that cutoff is better if i invite other people onto it or share it with other people like when i join slack it's a ghost town if it's just meat right right so i'm naturally encouraged to to invite my coworkers and then slack did something super brilliant called slack connect where now i can invite non c so people who exist like at different com people who work at different companies and i'm using slack is the glue but because i'm using slack is the glue i need to go invite those people to start using slack so we can communicate on our you know whatever service contract we have going off so the idea behind product that growth the first half of the idea is that you use the products in a way that benefits you when you invite more people so you're gonna do it without than having to bribe with five bucks to invite your friends because you're gonna do it anyway right and then the back half a product that growth is when your friends receive your invite or when you share that product with your friends they have to feel that signing up for the product is also beneficial for them so let me give you an example like if i dropbox off someone a file they could just take the file as it is but if they signed up for dropbox well now they're gonna get version history now they're not gonna have to store it on their hard driver and email can be like this thing that they can more easily manipulate to the dropbox software or let's say i'm sending someone a paypal payment well guess what if you want my money you gotta sign up for paypal like you literally have to sign up order to get the money right and for cal the same thing like when i'm sharing my calendar link you know the software for calendar booking the person who's receiving the link has a much better experience if they themselves sign for cow because it'll show them when they have over overlapping time windows right that are free so that's the trick behind product led growth both parties have to benefit and if you look at the fastest growing companies over the last few years a lot of them grew in exactly this way where you don't have to rely on seo which can be super flimsy when google makes algorithm updates don't have to rely on like paid acquisition meaning ads so facebook if the cpm rise at the cost rise and is so healthy and robust and re attentive and so that's the obvious part though so the less obvious part is this idea that i call billboard and billboard boarding is a subtype of product led growth that is my favorite because anyone can do it you don't have to be a software company and i'll give you the og example billboard boarding if i sign up for hotmail and i send an email and you know where i'm going with this which isn't there's that hotmail signature in the email right or or if i send with my iphone there's that sent from iphone in the email signature right right and like how many millions of people every day get beating over the head was sent from my iphone and it's just a phenomenal way to stay top of mind so we also have to clear view example the billboards from earlier like were saying it such a brilliant business because it was giving people money but it's also brilliant because guess what they do whenever they put a billboard up they throw their logo on the billboard right so that's billboard boarding literally in the t like definition and then i'll give you one last example which is my favorite because it's like blowing up right now i can't stop like i'm to i'm subject to it i can't stop saying this crypto oh actually actually that is that's better than my example because they're they're they're they're making it they're like people make it their profile right so crypto punk are an n nxt and if you go buy it cool you bought this digital file it sits in your digital wallet privately and there's no you know it's it's even worse displayed the art because you're not putting it in a frame in your house but what people started doing was they put it in the most visible frame they have their profile photo so they're swapping their twitter profile photo with a crypto punk and one person started doing it in two three four and then more started doing it and so now i can't use twitter without saying fucking crypto punk and reminding myself how i missed out on crypto punk and so i feel like that's like a version of billboard it's like wearing your favorite companies t shirt but wearing it every day and in front of thousands of people a day exactly it's like the twitter equivalent of having like pods or nike on like everyone's gonna see it and it's also identity building like if you if you break apart what makes her brand loyalty like why would you want to put a crypto punk as your twitter avatar right or why would you want to wear a nike shoes it's because you actually feel a sense of prestige there's either social signaling you're in the club or you're signaling you of good taste right if you wanna be the the girl or the the the the guy who wears nike shoes every day or the girl or the guy who has slack stickers a over his laptop every day but it becomes this identity based affinity for a brand and when you have that it becomes very hard to think compete with because now it's almost approaching tribal for better for worse for and just because there's another crypto pump competitor it doesn't necessarily mean that they can just take over a few better marketing because better marketing has a hard we'll hit a hard wall against tribalism and a billing identity around something that people were i think the way it plays out is with one it's good but it's not great as soon as you get two tribes now they have somebody to fight and feud with and so you'll get republicans and democrats you'll get you know yankee and red sox on twitter right now you'll get crypto punk or board apes right board dot club this the other n project that is rival them and so people are switching to those too now you're probably not gonna get like twenty of these and so there's like room for two to three like main tribes and then everything else will be very very fringe and those be some people who want that but okay so you were gonna say mercury on these where do you see mercury billboard yeah mercury is interesting because well let me just back up here and wrap my head around okay yeah yeah okay so yeah mercury is a great example of billboard because it's it's a modern and hyper growth example and it's all digital i feel like anyone can find an equivalent way to do the following mh so mercury first of all is a bank for startups but not necessarily just startups and it be it's become the d facto startup that yc companies use so what happens is when yc companies go to demo where they fund raise with investors they have to they send a link bingo bingo so here's the interesting thing all these investors are now getting these like pdf wire details with the label mercury on them yeah and they're very nice very well formatted looks beautiful looks better than a normal bank but you're right it's a silent signal that i use mercury bingo and it's also it has this interesting phenomenon of over sampling so i might be using a term but you'll get the gist which is these vcs are seeing such a high percentage of startups using mercury that they're now under the assumption that everyone's using mercury right or at least it it it risk that impression right yeah and so as a result these vcs when they're asked by their own portfolio companies hey should we use mercury they're like oh yeah everyone uses it it's like the d facto but is it really probably not it's it's how i feel about max right you go to silicon valley you just see max everywhere and then you you're in the filter bubble of everybody uses max and then you look at the stats and it's like wait ninety percent market share for windows like how is this possible and it's like yeah because you know the world is not silicon valley that's right yeah it's that's exactly right you can create this optical impression and if you're making the impression on a persona that is itself a distribution like lightning rod like investors or like very high social signal like influencers if they get the impression just bim narrowly think that you're everything right well then they'll act like your everything and then finally it trickle down to the mainstream yes it's like what it's like high school but for you know fifty year olds so that's that's growth trend two so we got trend one no brainer no no no brainer no loss offers cool trend two is the the the billboard effect you know either you intentionally create kind of a status symbol that people choose to flag or just in the act of doing business you're attaching your logo into their world and so everybody that they use the product with sees you sees you sees you until it becomes a sort of like you know a self it's a free ad basically that you're getting through your own customers what's number three yep you got it so number three is self liquid dating funnels which i know sort of silly down term it's actually been around for a long time this is not really a new thing but very few founders appear to have heard about it so let's break down this idea of self updating funnels so did do you here is that let's say you can't make your facebook ads work profit or you can't get them to pay you back in a reasonable amount of time like it takes eight months before someone buys from you after you pay thirty bucks to get their email right right so self liquid basically means you're offering some type of product that is secondary to your main product so let's say you're selling a thirty dollar ebook or let's say you're an seo tool and you're selling a complimentary seo tool like a content planning tool that's only five bucks a month is a post to two hundred bucks a month okay and the idea here is if you decrease the cost of whatever you're offering but still make it related to your primary product people will buy much more reflex like they're in the checkout aisle of a grocery store and it's cheaper so lesser consideration purchase and because more will hopefully it will be a higher rate of purchase and a much quicker turnaround to purchase it could make the economics of your facebook ads for example suddenly totally viable right so imagine you're doing this just to break even you're not trying to make money off it the question is what is the point of this and this is where it becomes so clever is this a giant excuse to print email addresses because if i can now capture emails using a self liquid funnel and i'm paying effectively nothing for these emails they're just it's like literally self liquid and for the name then i can now just peel this up to the extent possible capture let's say a thousand a hundred thousand emails and now i'm playing the long game i've just come up with a fantastic source of lead gen so i can nurture those emails those people over time and eventually sell them the real product and make the real margins right so that's the sort of brilliance of like going back to my point earlier about if you think of your product roadmap in unison with your growth roadmap what are the product features that can actually facilitate much easier growth and i'm not saying every company has to do this it's just that if you're having a hard time making certain channels work these strategies are chatting about are like potentially available to you cheat codes albeit potentially very distracting ones so if there a lot of things they consider i'm just giving you guys ideas to pick from from what i've seen work in the community so to wrap up this this particular idea sean it basically comes down to this if you can't make the economics of an ad channel exciting can you at least a not burn money while b build a huge lead database stuff that that likes you because your free thing or your cheap thing rather was a really high call right yeah that so you see this in content a lot i think you do this pretty well i think you you have these like handbook i think you call them on your websites and it's like way more high quality than a blog post and so you send them that bank for free grabbed your email address they're happy goes wow i got he over delivered on value for this free thing and you're getting emails for free during that and i don't know if you do paid ads to run those but many people do you know run paid ads to a free ebook and then grab the lead there or a five dollar you know just pay shipping so i think i think they call this in marketing the free plus shipping offer which is you're giving the thing away for free and you just charge shipping so they do this with books or like if you're a clothing brand you can give away like a little hat and they just pay the shipping cost the shipping cost kinda bake in your cost of goods also because it's like you know seven dollars since like shipping is five the cost of goods is two and you think you're getting the item for free what do you have to lose all i gotta do is pay the shipping that seems fair and they're they're using that to get your to get your information and then they're safe great now i'm gonna go back to this list now they've had a sample of my stuff and can i go get twenty five percent of people to become a real customer after doing that mh yeah absolutely well the way i think about it is and this is a strong opinion of mind that i'm not saying is the right way is i actually don't sell anything on my website so julien dot com is what you're referring to where write these handbook i like a breakdown like how to write well how to grow your startup there's nothing being sold like there's some ads for not as per s but some some references to man dot com where we teach people growth but by and large if i'm making money from demand then i don't wanna have to make money from the things i'm doing for pure enjoyment and that i'm using to build an audience like i want to build this association that you can trust me that i'm never trying to sell you anything and i think that's not critically required but so healthy for the long term and like you think a paul like this you know the the writer grew yc you founded that everyone up there you know in a million years you would never expected to have like a like a banner ad at the bottom of blog post rights because it'd be so out of character we really compromise i think or or a hundred ninety nine dollar course yeah exactly exactly so yeah so i just try to keep them totally separate and anyway so yeah that's but not at i'm not saying people have to monetize they have to make a living but if you make a living through other things you don't have to make a living to the thing you're passionate about like when i see very rich people start podcast and still run ads on their podcast like unless you're doing it to pay employees awesome if for doing because you're trying to make an extra bucks it seems like it's totally defeats the purpose of wired let's call let's call them out reid hoffman you're a billionaire you created linkedin you sold it for twenty billion dollars why does your podcast have ads and i know they're i know the answer to it actually but no excuses as far as i've concerned now people can say the same thing about me i do i think there's ads on this podcast there are i do courses and the way i thought about it was was pretty simple which was i'm gonna spend my time doing something and i value my time and i also wanna score board for if the thing i'm doing is valuable and one score board is likes in the other the i think a more powerful score board it is money and i do a lot of things for likes the podcast is free e all that's good stuff but if i do something like a course or i'm actually gonna sit down spend time with you and teach you something then i wanna charge for that most of the time i give away a bunch of like free spots and the last thing is i i do this to get myself more excited about it so i'll set a a reason a a goal for the money so i'll be like okay like this right now with with this course i'm doing right now i'll say i wanna do two things i wanna be able to i made a list of ten people who've been just awesome to me in life and they've like mentored me or help me in some former fashion i was like i wanna buy them all like a fat gift like a gift that's like you know way more than what what they would be expecting in this case the second thing is i want to i'm i'm really trying to get in shape and i was like i wanna have a personal chef i was like how much does that cost i used to have an investor he had a he had a a personal chef of a private chef and the chef would come cook for us at lunch at the office every day and it was amazing and i always just thought that was a one day one day dream i kinda looked up the cost and i was like oh i think i could pay for that that's basically like you know six to eight grand a month okay cool so if i sell you know if i do a hundred thousand dollars of profit in this course that pays for a year of a chef and now i got excited about it so it made me more decided to actually do the thing than just my ben prevalence and maybe it's because i'm kind of a a greedy or selfish person that could be the reason why all i know is once i have a target and that target could be anything silly it could be i'm gonna go buy you know you know go buy a a bunch of crypto box sir i'm gonna put it all in on this penny stock and then i'm gonna turn that into content of riding the wave of this penny stock it doesn't really matter what it is is but when i have a target they i i'm a financial target it makes me trying to do a way better job at the thing i'm doing yeah that that definitely resonates and i think it's healthy and i think that's awesome i see it a bit differently and my different way is not a better way and my different way is i like i see i see what i spend my time on outside of like earning a salary through demand dot com in the context of a crash person and so i don't wanna do anything even if it's for like some intrinsic goal like getting a chef right unless i i would be happy doing it if i got nothing else from it like the process itself is the reward and i feel like it took a really long time for me to figure out what those things are in my life where the process alone is really rewarding is the and like to me so yeah yeah it's just like it's such a beautiful thing if you can find it and and like i was going through this binge on youtube where i was watching videos creators and like artists and musicians in the process of making their music like if you google if you search youtube for ariana grande i forget the name of the song but she's like ariana ariana grande in studio dude i've gone down so many rabbit holes of this there's an sheeran documentary if anybody wants to watch on apple plus of him making his on apple tv plus or whatever of him baking his album and it's like he invites a bunch of people to his house and you literally see him like in a car ride just messing around on the guitar and he's like you could you can hear him figuring out this one guitar lick that became you know you know love yourself or whatever becomes one of these like hits today and you could see him just trying like humming and be like oh what if i said you know blah blah and then he's like figuring it out live god that that stuff is like you know that's my business porn that's my creativity porn yeah it's a dopamine hit and a great one is if you guys search john mayer beats live radio on youtube you'll see him like literally make up a song in real time it's such a isn't this such a dopamine and hit to watch people but the thing i takeaway from all those videos is if they've made no money from that i know i in the deep in my bones i know not all of these musicians that are successful but some of them like john mayer they're just obsessed with doing this for and the reward is can they come up with something awesome so yeah the the the the the flip side of that is the flip side of that is you don't want john mayer to have to build demand curve as a business and order to fund his musical pursuits and so it if if this is the thing you love the most and you wanna spend all your time doing it and you didn't have some major major exit beforehand which is a big criteria for most people then this is how it becomes sustainable right like i wanna create more content i wanna teach so that i need teaching to be sustainable so i can say spend all my time on it i could hire the best people for it all those things right so i think that's the caveat do you have any kind of like yeah other backup stuff of sars opportunities or ideas or things that caught you eye i have one maybe we'll keep it quick because i don't know if it's what you're gonna find interesting so maybe we do this one super quick and you you can pull me along if you like it how's that okay sounds good cool so okay well actually have i told you my thoughts on like what goes into making awesome content like this podcast no break it down okay yeah yeah i feel like i feel like i i ever i remember who i was telling to do so the short of it is i think there's this curse of overcoming frequency and when i was going through like all the content creators that i see the most love profess for like wait but y or paul graham who i mentioned earlier everyday astronaut right what they all have in common is they don't publish content on a set frequency like literally the slogan for wait y dot com this great blog that people love is new post every sometimes at the end of the everyday astronaut videos will be like the next video will be out when it's ready and like paul graham will post at a very erratic schedule and what they all have in common is they're publishing when they truly have something to say they're not publishing tri hit a deadline which i think is a trap because you're then forced to try to be a creative genius on account on a schedule which is like near impossible now what do you make of the like casey neistat stats mister beast or whoever these guys that basically they made their their bones and they're following by doing a daily vlog and they got they chose to get on that they've chose to hand themselves to that treadmill and the fans kinda loved that and their premise was different it wasn't this is great it's this is everything yeah i think it's a great question so it's a good counter example i think this general idea i'm getting to is almost domain specific like it depends what you're trying to sell if you're just offering people like cheap awesome entertainment like money giveaways the threshold is not that high to be creatively like fulfilling to hit that but if you're trying to sit down like paul graham or wait for why james clear morgan h if these authors and you're trying to come up with something original and novel to say that is really where i'm getting at and it's also not unlike podcast like can you actually hit a podcast at a really high frequency maybe but at some point you run out of awesome guess or ideas as we get burned out and so the reason this is on my mind is because what i realized is there's this weird myth that an order for you to succeed as a podcast or vlogger or content creator or whatever is you have to have a very consistent and high frequency output but that's not true this is like some nineteen fifties mad men era like our billboard impression crap yeah it's like it doesn't exist with the internet it's not the same seeing matter of fact like if you look at like my twitter account i think i got to like two hundred thousand twitter followers and i tweet once every fourteen days at twice a month i literally i literally said two tweets a month people aren't forgetting who i am but if the quality is high the staying power so much better you don't have to be pumping out all the time right i'm like wait but why i think he didn't post anything for like eight months you know what i mean so just wanna sort of encourage people on this on this moment platform of my first million that really beautiful things happen when you can rise above this content overload that we live in if you focus more so on quality the quantities is useful for yourself like if you're trying to get good at something due to a high frequency but that doesn't mean you have to publish everything you can keep some back and do it for yourself so anyway that's my little rant on quality quantity and the reason everything brings this up is because your podcast is consistently good and i hit the brilliance of it the reason is possible is because you found a format which the threshold like i was you know referring to the youtube examples is achievable like you haven't you haven't backed yourself into a corner like how i built this where they have to spend so long doing something awesome you can just grab people r refund ideas and it's a lower threshold but still incredibly hard to do don't get me wrong and so i just yeah i i just i just find this whole topic so interesting because so many people are pumping a content with like the wrong framework yeah yeah and i think there's many ways to win like i think you typically wanna be in either end of the spectrum either light touch high frequency so you my the yeah i'm comfort i'm like friends there's a million episodes you can go through and they're all alright or your game of thrones and there's like no there's eight episodes that you can go go to for this season but they're all epic and you know i i think i find that if you're gonna choose one strategy polarized either end of that and focus on quality or focus on frequency and and in the middle is tough because if you try to be high frequency high quality you lose right if you try to be low frequency low quality you lose if you try to be right so it's like there's all you have to hit one of those in order to make it work as far as i've seen in terms of in terms of how content goes by the way tell me share with people your thoughts on bios so i hit you up and i was like hey i wanna redo my twitter bio and i feel like you've probably put some thought into this and you were like funny and enough i have here's some thoughts and you gave me this audio note this two minute i messaged audio note that was fire and i was like this is such a julian thing so so share share with people kinda your what you've seen or how you break that down the the whole idea of bio which sounds really light hearted but in reality how you talk about yourself matters to yourself like your own self concept but how you talk about yourself to others how you present yourself to others it's like it seems frivolous until you gotta go write one and then you sit down you're like fuck i have so much to say and i have nothing to say at the same time and it all sounds bad that it sounds too brag then it sounds too uni unproductive how do i do this and so give give me give me your thoughts on bios sure so this isn't a hard and fast rule it's just what i think makes the most sense and i'd love to hear a better idea which is write your bio to justify why people should follow by the way this is this is sticks with twitter for what we're talking about here so right your twitter bio that justifies why you're differentiated more falling what do people get from falling you so for example mine is something like i d i'm literally reading my buy right now so it was like this i d shock how things work like storytelling and critical thinking and i share my learnings along the way okay so you know what you're getting now and the reason this this distinction is important actually let's compare and contrast so the typical bios is something like forbes thirty under thirty two x founder three x father five x christian like all these are all these stats you know and it's and it's like this doesn't tell me anything it's just virtue signaling in to some respects right and i don't know why it should care so the second part of this is it's not just why they should follow but also what is the minimal amount of social proof to justify why you talking about the topics you're saying you'll talk about you actually are qualified to do so right so so you're you're kinda saying what are you gonna get from me what's in it for you and why you can trust the source just enough to get you to trust not everything bingo and it's what's interesting about this question actually sean is that you're fundamentally asking me a gross marketing question which is hey if i look at my twitter accounts my twitter profile and if we think of it as like a landing page for my startup what would you do to modify either one to increase conversion so in conversions with the startup we're talking about clicking and signing up but on twitter we're talking about clicking and following and so you could if you actually dive into the weeds there's more you could do to your twitter profile and maybe it's a fun exercise we can walk through because it just shows how to apply the lens of growth marketing to twitter or to youtube or to your podcast right right so i'll give you one quick example like if you just think ask yourself this question if i'm presenting the public with a page of any sort what are all of the elements that surface on that page that factor into their decision as to whether they're gonna convert so if i'm looking at my twitter account right now i'm seeing my bio i'm seeing my head shot i'm seeing my pin tweets so let's just talk about that that sees that one example pin tweet so like your pin tweet can reinforce what your bio said to further qualify why you talk about that why you should talk about it rather and it gives an example of it so they get the quick dopamine hit off the bat that your pin tweet is delivering on like for i said i talk about storytelling and critical thinking so my pin tweet is exactly it's this a tiny little blog post well essay say yeah exactly exactly so that's your surface area and the same thing goes for youtube like every little thing is surface area when added together can increase conversion you know yeah so you and then you have like the follower account which is like your social proof that you can't really fake i guess you can buy fake followers but that's the other signal that they're looking for is do other people trust this person do other people follow this person or the blue check mark right that's that's another signal that that you can you can have or or not out not fully in your control but that's what counts towards conversion alright i i like that great sean tell me about your blue check mark journey didn't you where do you say something and i messaged your blue check no what do you mean i don't have one i tried to get one they said this they just didn't reply because that's twitter i don't remember was something else okay i segment remember you had his story about trying to get it never mind we'll skip it you know if you remember it saying it i i don't remember maybe maybe you're mixing me up somebody no that that that actually might have been might been the world's worst story that might have been it never mind fair enough fair enough okay i think we can we can leave it with kind of like one last little piece and then we'll we'll we'll wrap it up to go but the last thing i wanted say is if you weren't doing what you were doing now right so you're not doing demand curve you're not writing i can't i can't let you go back through those doors those doors are now locked where does julian go what how does he spend his time what what would excites you if i gave you all your time back what where would you go spend it if you couldn't spend it how you're spending it now so the answer actually no flexibly as movies like the thing i actually came to the us to do from canada was to try to make movies and so that remains the thing that i find so interesting because it's it's i i don't have a it's gonna be hard for me to explain this but the brief version is it's so freaking hard sean like it's so hard to break in it's so hard to write a good screen play it's so hard to turn that into a good film it's so hard to get people to watch it and and the the the requirements for actually pulling it off are how resourceful how creative and how sort of well really those are the two key things resourceful and creative you can be and that do you have a good sense takes right right and i love that forcing i love that burden on my shoulders try to crack what i see is one of the hardest problems the intersection like creative and business i've always wanted to do it plus i love the idea of being able to tell people stories that moves them it's such a beautiful thing so what what kind of movies are we talking like comedy action drama indie artistic you know documentaries what are you talking about i'll tell you i'll give you four movies absolutely love and i think it'll answer the question so whiplash incredible fiction film yep the prestige chris nolan film magicians and then a documentary on netflix which i i'm so stoked i get to tell people this because some will actually go well that enough people will listen to that it'll get some views searching for sugar man on netflix is the best documentary i've ever seen and then the last one i recommend is who who's that one about who who's who's the sugar men wanna okay so this is really tricky sean because the entire movie a spoiler so i'll just say i'll just say this i'll say it's about a musician that disappeared off like the face of the earth and where he went to and how he came back and fuck you should cut that i'm giving spoilers i should delete that we had a update the and came back but the last thing i'll say is that counterpart which is this amazing show amazon it's my favorite tv show maybe ever kind of parts amazing so it's like a james bond type saying it's growing okay i've never even heard of that i'm not pitching anything well shy i suck at this with you're great at things until they become very personal like when it's like what do you really wanna do in your hard like i don't know how to say it but like you can say everything else or it's like these movies that you love that you really want other people to love the pressure in your head goes somehow how do i sell this right without ruining the the first time magic of experiencing it you almost create a a a pressure cooker for yourself here so okay so what you wanna do is you wanna make you wanna make a movie about you know searching for bobby fisher style right about you know ko the the competitive eater it's like greatness slash mode slash prod and like you know with with a dash of sort of drama mystery dude well i'd see i knew it i knew i rely on you yeah well pitched yeah i just love this stuff i just i love making it i love watching i love people i love seeing people watch it but how about you i'm here i wanna flip this around on what would you do if i could do anything right now yeah i would basically take like little three to five year arcs of my life that's what i think i do i'd i take three to five year arcs of my life and i would go try to do a really fun thing that i don't do so i would one would be stand up comedy so i would try to create a set that actually is good and i would figure out how you do that learn the learn the the trade i would go to shows i would do all that i would i would coach a basketball team and i would try to like be a high school basketball coach and and just give it my all and i would do doing that i would you know like one is i don't actually wanna make a show but i do wanna write a script i've actually trying to do that right now trying to write a script for a a mock episode of the office which is a lot of fun and i would try to make a song like a hit song how do make a catchy hit song that pops off i don't care if pops off as a tiktok meme or what but but that would be another one and i would just do these little like i'll try to write a book i'll try to create a a a brand of a drink or a chips bag or something like that i would just take these like little mini mini challenges that are three to five year sprints i would go really deepen them try to win and then i would come out the other side i would basically switch careers each time i do them i love that so you you wanna you wanna break up your life into chapters and you want used to be a very creatively fulfilling thing where you're like maximally using actually necessarily because the the high school basketball coach is a really cool it's a nice counter balanced with the creative screen editing thing yeah because it's not all about making a song and making a a stand set it's like things that i just think would be really fun if you did them at which typically is creative but sometimes it's not right like sports is its own thing competition is really fun leaving is fun strategy is fun all that good stuff what's stopping you from being a comedian in the next fifteen years because stop you for making the time to do it nothing i'm just occupied right now like i'm doing things i gotta a business i'm running and this content arm so i don't have the clear schedule at the moment to to clear everything off to go go chase that and i can just dabble kinda like for fun and very small ways but i think there's something really fun about the immersion so i've i've said myself this challenge to try to write it an episode of the office by the end of this month and i don't know how to do it but i hit up my friend who writes for a tv show and i said hey can we jam next thursday and tell me how you ride an episode of tv like that's what i'm trying to do so i'm i'm doing little like you know tip toe in the water but to do it for real the way i want i would like i i'm gonna clear my schedule for for like a two to your period you won't hear about me and then i come out the other side you know with some some story to tell the you know fun would be for all of us is what you're gonna do a set would one hundred percent show up live i would be the loudest laugh for even if as artificial i would one hundred percent support you dude that would be i kinda wanna live through you sean this is something i i really want you to do almost selfish officially but also i think you'll just have a black yeah i i i i i do and i will so so the other thing right now is i just had a kid two kids actually two babies and so i kinda feel like right now the main project is actually i'm trying to get in the best shape of my life and i'm also learning how to be a dad like can you dad and so i kind of wanna like not skip that part because like i already been already been baby so i needed the hard part now no i just have to like stay there don't don't busy myself doing something else just stay here and actually do a dead bit well what i will say is if i've learned anything from comedian and endlessly talking about wow their process it's that this is exactly the fuel in your life that turns into the comedy right like the struggles of being a dad right the struggles are losing weight yeah exactly so it almost seems like if you don't act on it now it almost seems like this is a time capsule will be write down your experiences and your thoughts and it can become future material i'm i'm i'm i'm real yeah i'll give you two so i was in the shower of the day and i wrote down two pieces two pieces of want it and i texted it to some guy who is a comedian that is it's pretty famous comedian i don't know him very well but we kind of we text your dm a little bit and i said hey i got two little nuggets for you two two little truths about life that i think you could turn into jokes here they are and it's just they've come to me while in the shower and one was receipts like i don't care how old i get i got no fucking strategy when it comes to if i'm at the cashier they said do you want the receipt i say yes i say no there's is no consistency there no logic there's is no strategy and like nothing is a more panic moment than whatever the fuck i do when they ask me do you want the receipt or not and why like why do we do that why well does nobody have like any kind of consistent to that the second one oh is the second what i sent to him it was oh racism it's like people think america's is really racist and there's racism is a big problem and when you think of racist like if i say racist you know think of a racist what image pops into your head k band member right so you know you think of the the the k the k k like a white guy in a white hood or you think of like you know white person in a mega hat or something like that that's what people think of when they're thinking of racist like what who are all these racist in america right and and it just occurred to me like in reality nobody is more white people are the least racist nobody is more racist than like you know an indian parent or a chinese grandmother like they'll just straight tell you like you pretty like it hey can i marry you know a person of this race and it's like no and here's why and and so i just it sort of occurred to me that nobody's more racist than a chinese grandma and and so i was like you know that's a truth about the world but i believe then i was like okay these are nuggets i wanna write down i don't know how you craft those into jokes like what i'm telling you isn't in a joke it's just sort of like an observation of the world the way i see it and then like okay cool how do i write these down so that i learned how to actually like turn these into jokes and weave them together and make a set out of it and that's exactly what i think is the most interesting part is like what's the scaffolding holding what's the narrative structure for taking that observation and making it laugh out loud funny as opposed to like just a sm on my face right and this is where it gets so fun to sit down a reverse engineer like pal and this is actually one of the podcast episodes we did storytelling is you're trying to reverse engineer what makes such a great storyteller and it's like setting up the stakes the heroes perspective all these cool ingredients the climax acts the twist right and and that to me is the joy that's gotta be the most fun part i think because you figure how to crafted and then the people who totally buck the trend like mitch he i knows he has a joke that's sort of like your cto joke but my point though first is he's like not really doing the the normal joke structure i don't think i'm expert right but it's still so funny because he has an extra layer the extra layer is phenomenally unique and like like like kicking delivery right and so there's there's an extra layer beyond the structure of the narrative like if you just wrote his jokes on paper it might not be as funny but he has his joke going back to your receipts thing where he's like people who hand out fires on the street as you pass by for like whatever you know organization they're running they're basically saying hey you throw this in the garbage and i've remember that i'd always fucked my head and like i can't do that i can't deliver it like he can that was pretty good he got me the laugh actually there's a thing you there's a thing you had put out in your storytelling thing by the way you you you said oh here's all these elements but the one that stood out that i actually was telling ben my right hand man i was like hey julian had this thing that i think is spot on and we should like i think i i do this to an extent i think you should do it more like we we can all do this more you were saying something like the best storyteller when they tell a story it's almost like they're blowing their own mind again live they are they are surprising themselves in they're they're or in a comedian case they're making themselves lap they're cracking themselves up and the extent to which you can genuinely blow your own mind repeatedly or crack yourself up repeatedly is pretty much the extent to which you can deliver a story or a joke and if once you realize that you can't un it and it gives you a blueprint to just be more charismatic and entertaining when you talk that's spot on so the way i came the way i realized that is there's this person interviewed on the podcast called jason silva who for my money is the most charismatic person on youtube jason silva and i was sitting at national a reverse engineer what made him so damn good then i eventually got him on my podcast and i asked them like what's going on here and he said julian before i even turn on the camera i first make sure i'm in a mental space where i'm experiencing the idea about to talk about like i was for the very first time because all of his videos are like interesting the philosophical concepts and so he sits there and he's like oh yeah that's what was so fucking mind blowing about it he like chew on it lets it sink in turns on the camera like those red and now we relive that initial impression and then it's it's it's infectious she is the purse he's the proxy that we now live through and it's just it's such a beautiful thing to see someone fully interact in in their own excitement without any concern for like it no self conscious like what am my hands doing am i stuttering where am i looking it's like all these things fade away when you can get absorbed by your own enthusiasm and then people people just love seeing that it's so authentic yeah exactly there it was was totally spot on and if you're gonna like try one thing try that get yourself into the state where you remember what it felt like so that you re you re you tell it with that same emotion that you felt when it happened if you mind blown then you'll feel mind blown now if you crack up the first time you realized it it'll crack you up now and i i love that i thought that was a the great great little hack a little d construction on your part alright where should people so twitter is at julian julian dot com your branding is is kind of a male amazing where else should people follow you yeah sure so really it's julien dot com and then demand dot com is where all of these ideas we chatted about that's where they come from we teach people how to do growth marketing i mean that's basically it and then if you wanna see sean himself on my pod there's brains pod ba dot com yeah right i think i'm on two two episodes of it so yes dude so we call you an honorary brain because corey and i love you so much for like alright even though that's it's kinda weird to have one person twice in the first six episodes there's no one more lovable and charismatic and just fun and interesting and juicy mental models and like a bag of cool ideas in the back of his brain and we're like we just we we love you i love you and so thank you for coming out as awesome i appreciate you thank you so much alright sweet we're out of here alright peace i feel like could i could what i want to never looking