The 3 Cheat Codes Startups Use to Print Cash | My First Million #211 with Julian Shapiro
Growth Hacking, No-Brainer Offers, and Effective Twitter Bios - August 25, 2021 (over 3 years ago) • 01:03:26
Transcript:
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Julian Shapiro | 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 lead database that likes you because of your free thing or your cheap thing?
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Shaan Puri | I'm actually surprised you haven't been on this before. I feel like you're made for this in a way.
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Julian Shapiro | Maybe. I mean, I was doing podcasts for a while. I was trying, like, purposely to get on podcasts for indie hackers, you know, to get the word out about the Man Curve.
Then at some point, I thought, "This is cringe, man." I don't like listening back to myself.
It took the process of actually starting a podcast—thanks in part to watching you do your magic—to realize, "You know what? I can just totally be myself and not worry about it as much." So now, I'm all for it.
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Shaan Puri | And how has it been since you launched the pod? So, you launched "What's Your Call?" Brains, right? Brains with the "s" or without the "s"?
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Julian Shapiro | Yeah, "brains" with an "s." It's been good. I guess it's 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, I have to be very deliberate about, "Can I be charismatic? Can I be interesting?" I'm not saying I'm there yet, but I'm at least thinking about it, you know? In the context of trying to not bore people on a podcast, it's been a really good forcing function.
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Shaan Puri | Okay, I like that. Has it been... so you launched this podcast. You did it very methodically. You recorded like 8 episodes with badass people ahead of time. 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? What did you learn?
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Julian Shapiro | Yeah, I was thorough because I felt that I kind of had no choice. I listened to a bunch of podcasts and found most of them to be unlistenable.
Then, when I heard "My First Million," I thought, "There's something special here," but I didn't actually know what it was. My co-host on the podcast, Courtland from Media Hackers, said, "What's going on here that's special is they're not asking boring interview questions. They're literally just riffing on ideas collaboratively and making charged statements, letting other people respond to them."
The net effect is that it feels way more like rapport, like a dinner conversation you're overhearing. So, we really rolled with that. We tried to be deliberate about how we choose guests that can actually play into that. Can they speak spontaneously? Are they willing to play ball and bat ideas around?
I feel like it's probably a lot of the stuff that you're thinking about as well. It's been great! In a way, we're "My First Million" but for everything outside of business, like writing a book or being a storyteller, you know what I mean?
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Shaan Puri | Yeah, the episode I was on had Alexandra Botez. I don't know how you say her name, actually. How do you say it properly?
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Julian Shapiro | that's right | |
Shaan Puri | alexandra botez okay so she's | |
Julian Shapiro | you got it | |
Shaan Puri | Chess champion, Twitch streamer... so she's like a content creator. Really interesting person. Her content is about chess because she's really good at it. I found it pretty interesting; that was not what I usually get to talk about or who I usually get to talk to on a bunch of podcasts. So, I immediately was pretty bought in just as I kind of guessed on it.
But anyway, I wanted to have you on here because this is, you know, the pod for ideas. I feel like you have a lot of interesting ideas and also see a lot of interesting ideas. For the people who don't know, we are in a group chat together. 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 boxers, you're going to the shared bathroom together. There's no place to run; you're going to be yourself over enough time in the right group chat.
So, I feel like I've gotten to know you even though we have never met in person. But you are an idea person. Do you consider yourself an idea person?
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Julian Shapiro | I see myself as someone who just loves to brainstorm, but I'm not as fixated on ideas as you are. I know you and Sam love the treasure hunt; you love the chase, like who's making money. I'm more like, "Alright, give me a problem. I want to solve the problem."
So, what I did for this show, actually, is I went through the community of my startup. We have about 40,000 marketers and founders. I picked out the three most interesting growth trends I could find, and I came up with some examples of each of those trends.
There were three things that were popping out that felt almost like cheat codes—ways that startups were printing cash and reaching unicorn status much quicker than one would think they should.
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Shaan Puri | okay | |
Julian Shapiro | so that's something we can jam on I got a few 3 categories there we can jam on if you'd like yeah | |
Shaan Puri | Let's do that right now. Don't even say anything else besides that. I'm completely hooked. Let's do that.
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Julian Shapiro | Alright, alright. So, okay, let's kick it off with this first category. I'm going to give these funny names because I don't have good names for them.
**Category 1** is "Give Customers an Absolute No Brainer." There are two ways to give them a no brainer that I've seen in the community.
**No Brainer Number 1** is you literally give them away money in a way that's economically sustainable, which we'll get into.
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Shaan Puri | right | |
Julian Shapiro | Another no-brainer way is to make the friction so low that people are like, "Ah, 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. Starting with giving away money, there was this product a long time ago called Service. What they did is they would give you money back anytime that your flight was delayed, if a few conditions were true. This was because there was this lesser-known loophole in the contracts of airlines where, for loyalty reasons, they wanted to have a policy to give flyers some money back if their flight was delayed.
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Shaan Puri | you just have to do the paperwork and request it and nobody ever did it | |
Julian Shapiro | Exactly right. No one wanted the friction. So, service 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." Well, almost literally, because it's like credit.
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 $100 whenever you're delayed?" the click-through rates on those ads were astronomical. The cost per click was super low. | |
Shaan Puri | interesting | |
Julian Shapiro | And they were able to, yeah, just skyrocket to $1,000,000 in ad spend monthly very quickly.
Let me give you a couple more examples because this is actually something more than just service could do.
So another interesting example is a recent Y Combinator (YC) company called Yotta. What Yotta does is they take your money through a normal bank. They'll manage your savings, but because they're so low overhead, they redistribute all of that extra potential margin into lottery winnings for their bank customers.
So just by having more money in the Yotta account, you are going to receive tickets to this real lottery that they run every single week. They give away $1,000,000, and you're automatically entered if you're just a bank customer.
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Shaan Puri | no loss so imagine no loss lotteries call right | |
Julian Shapiro | Yeah, exactly. And just imagine their ads. Think about how compelling it is to position that to a lot of people who either love the lottery or just really want a way to make extra cash.
So, a couple more examples, if it's helpful for me to run through here, we got Main Street.
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Shaan Puri | That's when you said it. That's the one that came to mind. As soon as you said "giving away money," I thought of Main Street as a company that's growing fast and doing this.
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Julian Shapiro | it's brilliant right | |
Shaan Puri | and so so explain explain what it is if people don't know | |
Julian Shapiro | So, they're basically running ads. I'll come at it from the perspective of what the ad is because that's the whole perspective of this chat. It's like, what's the growth?
The ad that Main Street can run to people is: "Did you know that you're not taking advantage of an extra $10,000 in tax credits every year for your business?" It's like, whoa! If I'm a small business making it month to month, that's huge.
So again, they found a business model that can act as a means to, at least optically—without being a scam—either give you like free money in a sense or credit back. It functions as the ultimate acquisition wedge, which then becomes how they grow so darn quickly.
The question is, how do these companies make money? This brings us to the idea of having a wedge. In the growth world, we talk about wedges, or even investing. 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 into building a customer base that you can monetize through other revenue streams, if not that one revenue stream itself.
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Shaan Puri | Yeah, I like that a lot. There was another one called "Do Not Pay" that does something similar, right? I think I don't remember how they started—if it was them or somebody else.
There was another one that focused on flight cancellations. There was one that said, "Hey, did you get a parking ticket in San Francisco? We'll fight it for you." You just send us a picture of the ticket, and we will fight it for you.
Did you know that 4 out of 10 tickets are filled out incorrectly and are therefore invalid? Even if you were in the wrong, if the cop filled it out wrong, you don't have to pay a dime. We will find these opportunities for you, and you only pay us out of the savings.
Whatever money we save you, we'll take 20% of that. I thought, "Wow, that's actually a great idea." It got so popular that San Francisco banned them pretty quickly after a few months because it was being used so much.
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Julian Shapiro | Same with service, by the way. The airlines were like, "What the hell is going on here?" and they just shut it down. They started tightening up the policy.
Sometimes that actual wedge can be a very flimsy one. But if you ran away with happy customers who now trust you for other products, then maybe it was still an okay one.
So, I wouldn't necessarily recommend these flimsy, unsustainable channels, but Main Street does not seem flimsy to me.
Right on paper, another great example I'll give you—one last one because it's my favorite and it's under everybody's noses—is if you look at the top of buildings when you're driving around, you have those clear view billboard ads.
So, imagine being a business owner and someone comes to you and says, "Hey, I'm going to pay you, let's say, $50 a year. All you gotta do is put this billboard on your roof."
I'm sure it's much more complicated than that, but the idea is that sometimes when you get pitched with a revenue stream that's super low friction for you that you did not realize is possible, it just becomes a crazy growth wedge.
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Shaan Puri | Yeah, that's right. You could basically create value out of thin air just by knowing the rules and connecting the dots.
I feel this way about some bigger businesses that apply this principle. For example, with student loan refinancing, it's just like, "Hey, you're paying too much. Just tell us what you pay today, and we will find you a cheaper student loan." You just click a button, and boom! You change to this monthly payment instead of that one.
I think CommonBond or something like that is one of those. House refinancing is another example. But these require... it's not as if they can do the whole thing on your behalf, unfortunately. However, 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.
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Julian Shapiro | Absolutely. What this actually speaks to is this larger trend: can you think of your product roadmap in unison with your growth roadmap when starting a business?
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 optically giving away money.
So, I tell founders sometimes, can you think of the feature list on your product roadmap? Can you reprioritize it such that it facilitates growth strategies like these? That can guide you for growing a lot quicker, as opposed to just living in a local maximum and running in circles.
Ultimately, we're talking about the idea of a Trojan horse here for acquiring customers in a non-scammy and authentic way, where you're really offering value.
The other half of this, by the way, is this idea I was mentioning of super low friction. We're still under this category of giving customers an absolute no-brainer reason to engage.
So, how do you become a no-brainer? It's like I don't have to think about this. The second subcategory, so the first was giving away money, and the second is super low friction.
Let me give you an example: Chrome extensions are maybe my favorite example. If we think of Honey, which is a Chrome extension that surfaces discounts as you browse the web. If you're looking at a chair, it'll say, "You didn't know this, but you can get 20% off."
That's brilliant because the Chrome extension is like a two-click process from being part of your internet browsing experience until you delete the extension. | |
Shaan Puri | right | |
Julian Shapiro | It's so low friction. You don't have to sign up. You don't have to add a credit card. You don't have to give any of your data. There's no need to verify via two-factor authentication or verify your email address. None of it.
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Shaan Puri | You don't even have to remember to open the app, right? That's the issue with most apps; people just forget to open them again. But with a Chrome extension, they're already opening Chrome. They have that habit, and you just get to tag along, like a little... you know, like the flea on an elephant's back.
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Julian Shapiro | Exactly, that's right. If you can 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 web pages that the user is browsing. Eventually, when the time is right, you can deliver real value contextually.
This is going to be a monster coupon I could give the customer. We're going to save them $1,000.
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Shaan Puri | right | |
Julian Shapiro | That's when we finally ask, "Hey, can you make an account real quick before we give you this monster coupon?" And now they're completely bought in, and they've come to trust you.
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Shaan Puri | Yeah, that's smart. What other Chrome extension ideas have you seen that you like? Or what else is like Honey? Does anything come to mind? I know it's a hard question, but what else is like Honey?
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Julian Shapiro | Yeah, it is a tough question, but one good example is extensions in the SEO space that give you data about web pages.
For instance, competitive analysis as you're browsing. So, if you are a marketer, you can get this "x-ray vision" into how they are growing.
What are they doing? What keyword terms are they using? 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.
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Shaan Puri | Which Chrome extensions do you have installed?
I have SimilarWeb, which is what you're talking about. Basically, it gives me traffic information about different websites, so I can see how popular they are and where the traffic comes from.
I also have MetaMask, which is an Ethereum wallet or a crypto wallet. Then, I have AdBlock. Those are the three Chrome extensions I have.
I'm very particular about Chrome extensions because when you install one, it says, "This extension can read everything you type onto any website." I'm like, "Wow, that's so insecure. That's crazy."
What do you have installed?
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Julian Shapiro | Yeah, so nothing exciting. I got my ad blocker and I have the thing that tells me if I'm on a website that had their password sort of broken into. It will tell me if I should switch my password, you know?
Okay, and then I have this awesome Twitter extension. When I'm looking at someone's Twitter profile, it shows me all their historical best-performing tweets. So I get a snapshot view of who they are and what they're known for. It's called **TweeMax**. | |
Shaan Puri | I like that! That's pretty cool. While you were saying that, I was thinking about a couple of other ideas. You mentioned "x-ray vision," and I like that concept. So, I was considering what kind of x-ray vision I would want while browsing the web.
One idea is similar to the Twitter feature. I thought, what if anytime someone's name appears on a webpage, I could just hover over it, and a pop-up would appear? This pop-up could provide information about that person, such as their Twitter profile, a follow button, and some details about them, like a link to their Wikipedia page. It would be a quick way to find out who someone is on any website.
The other idea involves Facebook ads. I'm constantly visiting the Facebook Ad Library to see what ads a company is running. I would love for that process to be automated. I want to be able to go to any product's website or any company's website, click a button, and instantly see what ads they are currently running without having to open the Ad Library separately. | |
Julian Shapiro | Mhmm, yeah, I love that. The way I think about this type of question is: what type of Chrome extension, or what's a framework for thinking about which category of Chrome extension would be the stickiest and would people love to download the most?
I think about how to appeal to people's desire to make money. So where my brain goes right away is: what about some sort of x-ray vision?
Imagine you're on Bloomberg or you're on Twitter. Anytime the Chrome extension picks up a keyword for a public stock or some crypto token, it just suggests... it gives you an x-ray into how it's performing, who else talks about it a lot, and who you should follow to learn more about this.
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Shaan Puri | right | |
Julian Shapiro |
And then it kind of triggers more so like this greedy thought: "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 like... Hey, let's give X-ray vision and let people know... Like Amazon's X-ray vision when you're watching a movie. It'll tell you what music is playing in the background, who these actors are.
Do people really care? I mean, maybe some, but it's probably nerds.
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Shaan Puri | Yeah, the one more thing on this is that I was just thinking about while you're browsing websites. Could you create Robinhood as a Chrome extension? I think you could.
You could basically have it be like Acorns, where it rounds up on anything you buy. Then it buys either a fraction of that stock or it adds up until it tells you, "Hey, you've been shopping a lot on Apple. Why don't you buy $100 of Apple stock? Click here to do it."
Maybe there's a way to kind of use that roundup model to get you to own something instead of just being a customer and not owning any of the underlying company.
In which case, I think this is one interesting idea: just look at every app on your phone and ask, "Could this be a Chrome extension?" How would you do Robinhood as a Chrome extension? How would you do blah, blah, blah?
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Julian Shapiro | That's super clever. So to recap, you're basically saying that as I'm browsing, like literally as I'm on Robinhood.com, can there be an Acorns extension? Something that says, "Hey, why don't you spend a little bit more and actually invest directly in this company?" | |
Shaan Puri | exactly | |
Julian Shapiro | Get a sense of ownership and incentive alignment. Or even better, like, "Hey, we stick it, and it pops up right as it sees you're about to do a trade." It's like, "Hey, we see you're about to trade for $97. You want to roll this up and get the extra $3 in Robinhood itself?"
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Shaan Puri | yes | |
Julian Shapiro | that's that's super clever I love that | |
Shaan Puri | alright so that was that was theme 1 let's go to theme 2 | |
Julian Shapiro | Sure, so let's see here.
Okay, this next category is: does encouraging people to use your product naturally encourage other people they know to use the product? This is commonly called **product-led growth**, but we can break it down in more interesting ways.
Let me start by giving you some examples: Slack, Connect, Dropbox, PayPal, and Calendly.
What these companies have in common is that when I use any of those products, my use of that product is better if I invite other people onto it or share it with others. For instance, when I joined Slack, it was a ghost town if it was just me. Right? So, I'm naturally encouraged to invite my coworkers.
Then, Slack did something super brilliant called **Slack Connect**, where now I can invite non-coworkers—people who work at different companies. I'm using Slack as the glue, but because I'm using Slack as the glue, I need to go invite those people to start using Slack so we can communicate about our service contract or whatever we have going on.
So, the idea behind product-led growth—the first half of the idea—is that you use the products in a way that benefits you when you invite more people. You're going to do it without them having to bribe you with $5 to invite your friends because you're going to do it anyway.
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Shaan Puri | right | |
Julian Shapiro | and then the back half of product led 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 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 drive or in the emails it's gonna be like this thing that they can more easily manipulate through 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 in order to get the money right and for calendly same thing like when I'm sharing my calendly link you know the software for calendar booking the person who's receiving the link has a much better experience if they themselves sign up for calendly 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 of 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 you don't have to rely on like paid acquisition meaning ads so facebook if the cpms rise if the cost rise and it's so healthy and robust and retentive and so that's the obvious part though so the less obvious part is this idea that I call billboarding and billboarding 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 of billboarding 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 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 beaten over the head with sent from my iphone and it's just a phenomenal way to stay top of mind so we also have the clearview example the billboards from earlier like we were saying it was 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 | |
Shaan Puri | right | |
Julian Shapiro | So that's billboarding, literally in the truest definition.
Then I'll give you one last example, which is my favorite because it's blowing up right now. I can't stop... it's like I'm subject to it. I can't stop seeing this.
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Shaan Puri | cryptopunks | |
Julian Shapiro | mercury oh actually actually that is that's better than my example | |
Shaan Puri | Because they're making it their profile, right? So, Cryptopunks are an NFT. 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 even worse displayed than 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 Cryptopunk. One person started doing it, then two, three, four, and then more started doing it.
Now, I can't use Twitter without seeing fucking Cryptopunks and reminding myself how I missed out on them. I feel like that's a version of billboarding. It's like wearing your favorite company's T-shirt but wearing it every day in front of thousands of people.
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Julian Shapiro | Exactly. It's like the Twitter equivalent of having AirPods or Nikes on. Everyone's going to see it, and it's also identity building. If you break apart what makes your brand loyal, why would you want to put a CryptoPunk as your Twitter avatar?
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Shaan Puri | right | |
Julian Shapiro | Or why would you want to wear Nike shoes? It's because you actually feel a sense of prestige. Like, there's either social signaling that you're in the club, or you're signaling that you have good taste.
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Shaan Puri | right | |
Julian Shapiro | If you want to be the girl or the guy who wears Nike shoes every day, or the girl or the guy who has Slack stickers all over their laptop every day, it becomes this identity-based affinity for a brand. When you have that, it becomes very hard to compete with because now it's almost approaching tribalism, for better or for worse.
For sure, because there's another CryptoPunk competitor, it doesn't necessarily mean that they can just take over through better marketing. Better marketing will hit a hard wall against tribalism and building an identity around something that people want. | |
Shaan Puri | I think the way it plays out is with one tribe. It's good, but it's not great. As soon as you get two tribes, now they have somebody to fight and feud with.
So you'll get Republicans and Democrats. You'll get, you know, Yankees and Red Sox on Twitter right now. You'll get CryptoPunks or Bored Apes. Bored Ape Yacht Club is the other NFT project that is rivaling them.
People are switching to those two. Now, you're probably not going to get like 20 of these, so there's room for two to three main tribes. Everything else will be very, very fringe, and there'll be some people who want that.
But okay, so you were going to say Mercury is one of these. Where do you see Mercury billboarding?
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Julian Shapiro | Yeah, Mercury is interesting because... well, let me just back up here and wrap my head around it.
Okay, yeah, so Mercury is a great example of billboarding. 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.
So, Mercury, first of all, is a bank for startups, but not necessarily just startups. It has become the de facto bank that Y Combinator (YC) companies use.
What happens is when YC companies go to demo day, where they fundraise with investors, they have to then...
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Shaan Puri | they send a link | |
Julian Shapiro | Bingo, bingo! So here's the interesting thing: all these investors are now getting these PDF wire details with the label "Mercury" on them.
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Shaan Puri | Yeah, and they're very nice. They're very well formatted; it looks beautiful. It looks better than a normal bank. But you're right, it's a silent signal that I use mercury.
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Julian Shapiro | Bingo! It also has this interesting phenomenon of oversampling, which I might be using a term wrong, but you'll get the gist. These VCs are seeing such a high percentage of startups using Mercury that they're now under the assumption that everyone's using Mercury, or at least it risks that impression.
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Shaan Puri | yeah | |
Julian Shapiro | 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 de facto."
But is it really? Probably not. | |
Shaan Puri | It's how I feel about Macs. Right? You go to Silicon Valley, and you just see Macs everywhere. Then you're in the filter bubble where everybody uses Macs.
Then you look at the stats, and it's like, "Wait, 90% market share for Windows? How is this possible?" It's like, yeah, because you know, the world is not Silicon Valley.
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Julian Shapiro |
That's right, yeah. 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 investors or high social signal influencers - if they get the impression of just them narrowly thinking that you're everything, well then they'll act like you're everything. And then finally, it trickles down to the mainstream.
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Shaan Puri | Yes, it's like high school, but for, you know, 50-year-olds.
Okay, so that's growth trend 2. So we got trend 1: no-brainer, no loss offers.
Cool. Trend 2 is the billboard effect. You know, either you intentionally create a kind of status symbol that people choose to flag, or just in the act of doing business, you're attaching your logo into their world.
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 3?
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Julian Shapiro |
Yep, you got it. So number 3 is **self-liquidating funnels**, which I know is sort of a silly-sounding 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.
Let's break down this idea of self-liquidating funnels:
The idea here is that let's say you can't make your Facebook ads work profitably, or you can't get them to pay you back in a reasonable amount of time. Like it takes 8 months before someone buys from you after you paid $30 to get their email, right?
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Shaan Puri | right | |
Julian Shapiro | So, **self-liquidating** basically means you're offering some type of product that is secondary to your main product.
Let's say you're selling a $30 eBook, or you're an SEO tool and you're selling a complementary SEO tool, like a content planning tool, that's only $5 a month as opposed to $200 a month.
The idea here is that if you decrease the cost of whatever you're offering but still make it related to your primary product, people will buy much more reflexively—like they're in the checkout aisle of a grocery store and it's cheaper.
This leads to a lesser consideration purchase. Because more will buy, I hope it will result in a higher rate of purchase and a much quicker turnaround. This could make the economics of your Facebook ads, for example, suddenly totally viable.
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Shaan Puri | right | |
Julian Shapiro | 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 purpose of this?
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-liquidating funnel, and I'm paying effectively nothing for these emails, it's like literally self-liquidating—hence the name.
Then I can now just scale this up to the extent possible. Let's say I capture 1,000 or even 100,000 emails. Now I'm playing the long game. I've just come up with a fantastic source of lead generation so that I can nurture those emails and those people over time. Eventually, I can sell them their real product and make the real margins.
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Shaan Puri | right | |
Julian Shapiro | So, that's the sort of brilliance of going back to my earlier point. 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?
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 we're chatting about are potentially available to you—cheat codes, albeit potentially very distracting ones.
There are a lot of things to consider, but I'm just giving you guys ideas to pick from based on what I've seen work in the community.
To wrap up 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) building a huge lead database that likes you because your free thing, or your cheap thing rather, was really high quality?
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Shaan Puri | Right, yeah, so you see this in content a lot. I think you do this pretty well. You have these handbooks, I think you call them, on your website, and it's way more high quality than a blog post.
So you send them that thing for free, grab their email address, and they're happy because, wow, you over-delivered on value for this free thing. You're getting emails for free during that.
Now, I don't know if you do paid ads to run those, but many people do. You know, they run paid ads to a free ebook and then grab the lead there, or a $5 offer where you just pay for shipping.
I think they call this in marketing the "free + shipping offer," which means you're giving the thing away for free and just charging for shipping. They do this with books, or like if you're a clothing brand, you can give away a little hat and they just pay the shipping cost.
The shipping cost kind of bakes in your cost of goods as well because, you know, if it's $7, the shipping is $5 and the cost of goods is $2. You think you're getting the item for free, so what do you have to lose? All you have to do is pay the shipping, and that seems fair.
They're using that to get your information, and then they're saying, "Great, now I'm going to go back to this list." Now they've had a sample of my stuff, and can I get 25% of people to become real customers after doing that?
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Julian Shapiro | Absolutely! The way I think about it is, and this is a strong opinion of mine that I'm not saying is the right way, is that I actually don't sell anything on my website.
Julian.com is what you're referring to, where I write these handbooks. I'm going to break down how to write well and how to grow your startup. There's nothing being sold. There are some references to DemandCurve.com, where we teach people growth, but by and large, if I'm making money from Demand Curve, then I don't want to have to make money from the things I'm doing for pure enjoyment and that I'm using to build an audience.
I want to build this association that you can trust me and that I'm never trying to sell you anything. I think that's not critically required, but it's so healthy for the long term.
You think of Paul Graham, the writer, guru, and Y Combinator founder that everyone looks up to. In a million years, you would never expect him to have a banner ad at the bottom of the blog posts he writes because it would be so out of character. We really compromise, I think.
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Shaan Puri | or or a $199 course | |
Julian Shapiro | Yeah, exactly. So, I just try to keep them totally separate. Anyway, I'm not saying people have to monetize or make a living from their passions. If you make a living through other things, you don't have to rely on the thing you're passionate about for income.
When I see very rich people start podcasts and still run ads on their podcasts, it seems like unless you're doing it to pay employees, that's awesome. But if you're doing it just to make an extra buck, it totally defeats the purpose of why you're doing it. | |
Shaan Puri | let's call let's call him out reid hoffman you are a billionaire you created linkedin you sold it for $20,000,000,000 why does your podcast have ads and I know there I know the answer to it actually but no excuses as far as I'm concerned now people could 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 want a scoreboard for if the thing I'm doing is valuable and one scoreboard is likes and the other I think a more powerful scoreboard is money and I do a lot of things for likes the podcast is free all that's good stuff but if I do something like a course where 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 goal for the money so I'll be like okay like this right now with this course I'm doing right now I was like alright I wanna do 2 things I wanna be able to I made a list of 10 people who've been just awesome to me in life and they've like mentored me or helped me in some form or 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 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 6 to $8 a month okay cool so if I sell you know if I do a $100,000 profit in this course that pays for a year of a chef and now I got excited about it so it made me more excited to actually do the thing than just my benevolence and maybe it's because I'm kind of a greedy or selfish person that could be the reason why but 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 bunch of cryptopunks or 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 but when I have a target that I'm a financial target it makes me try to do a way better job at the thing I'm doing | |
Julian Shapiro | Yeah, that definitely resonates. I think it's healthy and awesome.
I see it a bit differently, and my different way is not a better way. I see what I spend my time on outside of earning a salary through DemandCurve.com in the context of a crass person.
I don't want to do anything, even if it's for some extrinsic goal like getting a chef, unless I would be happy doing it if I got nothing else from it. The process itself is the reward.
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.
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Shaan Puri | is and | |
Julian Shapiro | And like, to me, it's just such a beautiful thing if you can find it. I was going through this binge on YouTube where I was watching videos of creators, artists, and musicians in the process of making their music. If you search YouTube for "Ariana Grande in studio," I forget the name of the song, but it's really interesting to see the creative process.
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Shaan Puri | Dude, I've gone down so many rabbit holes with this. There's an Ed Sheeran documentary, if anybody wants to watch it, on Apple TV+ of him making his album.
He invites a bunch of people to his house, and you literally see him in a car ride just messing around on the guitar. You can hear him figuring out this one guitar lick that became, you know, "Love Yourself" or whatever. It becomes one of these hits today.
You can see him just trying to hum and being like, "Oh, what if I said, you know, blah blah blah?" Then he's figuring it out live. God, that stuff is like, you know, that's my business porn. That's my creativity porn. | |
Julian Shapiro |
Yeah, it's a dopamine hit. A great example is if you search for "John Mayer Beats Live Radio" on YouTube. You'll see him literally make up a song in real time. It's such a dopamine hit to watch people do this.
The thing I take away from all those videos is this: Even if they've made no money from that, I know deep in my bones... I know not all of these musicians are successful, but some of them, like John Mayer, they're just *obsessed* with doing this for sure. The reward for them is: can they come up with something awesome?
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Shaan Puri | Yeah, the flip side of that is you don't want John Mayer to have to build a demand curve as a business in order to fund his musical pursuits.
So, if this is the thing you love the most and you want to spend all your time doing it, and you didn't have some major exit beforehand—which is a big criteria for most people—then this is how it becomes sustainable.
Right? Like, I want to create more content. I want to teach, so then I need teaching to be sustainable so I can spend all my time on it. I could hire the best people for it, all those things.
So, I think that's the caveat. Do you have any kind of backup stuff as far as opportunities or ideas or things that caught your eye?
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Julian Shapiro | I have one. Maybe we'll keep it quick because I don't know if it's what you're going to find interesting. So, maybe we do this one super quick, and you can pull me along if you like it. How's that?
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Shaan Puri | okay sounds good | |
Julian Shapiro | Cool, so, okay. Well, actually, have I told you my thoughts on what goes into making awesome content like this podcast?
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Shaan Puri | no break it down | |
Julian Shapiro | Okay, yeah, I feel like I remember who I was telling this to.
So, the short of it is, I think there's this curse of overcoming frequency. When I was going through all the content creators that I see the most love professed for, like "Wait But Why," or Paul Graham, or Everyday Astronaut, right? What they all have in common is they don't publish content on a set frequency.
Literally, the slogan for "Wait But Why" dot com, this great blog that people love, is "new post every... sometimes." At the end of the Everyday Astronaut videos, they'll be like, "the next video will be out when it's ready." Paul Graham will post on a very erratic schedule.
What they all have in common is they're publishing when they truly have something to say. They're not publishing to try to hit a deadline, which I think is a trap. Because then you're forced to try to be a creative genius on a schedule, which is nearly impossible.
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Shaan Puri | Now, what do you make of the likes of Casey Neistat, Mr. Beast, or whoever? These guys basically made their bones and their following by doing a daily vlog. They chose to get on that treadmill and handcuff themselves to it. The fans kind of loved that. Their premise was different; it wasn't "this is great," it was "this is everything."
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Julian Shapiro | yeah I think it's a great question so it's a good counterexample 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 wayfair or james clear or morgan housel like 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? You run out of awesome guests or ideas you get burned out and so the reason this is on my mind is because what I realized is there's this weird myth that in order for you to succeed as a podcaster or vlogger or content creator or whatever is you have to have a very consistent and high frequency of output but that's not true this is like some 19 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 thing matter of fact like if you look at like my twitter account I think I got to like 200,000 twitter followers and I tweet once every 14 days like twice a month I literally I literally send 2 tweets a month people aren't forgetting who I am but if the quality is high the staying power is so much better you don't have to be pumping out all the time right like wait but why I think he didn't post anything for like 8 months you know what I mean so I just wanna sort of encourage people on this on this momentary platform of my first million that really beautiful things happen you can rise above this content overload that we live in if you focus more so on quality the quantity is useful for yourself like if you're trying to get good at something due to the 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 I bring this up is because your podcast is consistently good and I think the brilliance of it the reason it's 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 riff on ideas and it's a lower threshold but still incredibly hard to do don't get me wrong and so I just yeah I just I just find this whole topic so interesting because so many people are pumping out content it was like the wrong framework | |
Shaan Puri | Yeah, and I think there are many ways to win. Typically, you want to be on either end of the spectrum: either light touch, high frequency, or the opposite.
So, you might be comfortable with something like "Friends," where there are a million episodes you can go through, and they're all alright. Or you could be like "Game of Thrones," where there are only eight episodes for this season, but they're all epic.
I find that if you're going to choose one strategy, it should be polarized at either end of that spectrum. You can focus on quality or focus on frequency. The middle ground is tough because if you try to be high frequency and high quality, you lose. If you try to be low frequency and low quality, you lose as well.
So, you have to hit one of those in order to make it work, as far as I've seen in terms of how content goes.
By the way, tell me, share with people your thoughts on bios. I hit you up and said, "Hey, I want to redo my Twitter bio." I feel like you've probably put some thought into this. You were like, "Funny enough, I have some thoughts." You gave me this audio note, this two-minute iMessage audio note that was fire. I was like, "This is such a Julien thing."
So, share with people what you've seen or how you break that down. The whole idea of a bio sounds really lighthearted, but in reality, how you talk about yourself matters to your own self-concept. How you present yourself to others seems frivolous until you have to go write one.
Then you sit down and think, "I have so much to say," but at the same time, "I have nothing to say." It all sounds bad. It sounds too braggy or too unimpressive. How do I do this?
So, give me your thoughts on bios.
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Julian Shapiro | 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.
Let's stick with Twitter for now; that's what we're talking about here. Write your Twitter bio to justify why people should follow you. What makes you differentiated? What do people get from following you?
For example, mine is something like this: "I deconstruct 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. The reason this distinction is important... well, actually, let's compare and contrast.
The typical bio is something like "Forbes 30 Under 30, 2x founder, 3x father, 5x Christian"—all these stats. And it's like, this doesn't tell me anything. It's just virtue signaling to some respect, and I don't know why I should care.
The second part of this is, it's not just about why they should follow you, but also what is the minimal amount of social proof to justify why you are talking about the topics you say you'll talk about. Are you actually qualified to do so?
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Shaan Puri | So, you're kind of saying, "What are you going to get from me? What's in it for you?" and "Why can you trust this source?" Just enough to get you to trust, not everything.
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Julian Shapiro | Bingo! What's interesting about this question, actually, Sean, is that you're fundamentally asking me a growth marketing question.
You're asking, "Hey, if I look up my Twitter account, my Twitter profile, and if we think of it as a landing page for my startup, what would you do to modify either one to increase conversions?"
So, on conversions with the startup, we're talking about clicking and signing up. But on Twitter, we're talking about clicking and following.
If you actually dive into the weeds, there's more you could do to your Twitter profile. 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?
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Shaan Puri | right | |
Julian Shapiro | So, I'll give you one quick example. 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 going to convert?
If I'm looking at my Twitter account right now, I'm seeing my bio, my headshot, and my pinned tweets. So, let's just talk about that. Let's use that one example: the pinned tweet.
Your pinned tweet can reinforce what your bio said to further qualify why you should talk about it. It gives an example of it, so they get the quick dopamine hit off the bat that your pinned tweet is delivering on. For me, I said I talk about storytelling and critical thinking, so my pinned tweet is exactly that. It's just a tiny little blog post, an essay.
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Shaan Puri | yeah | |
Julian Shapiro |
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?
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Shaan Puri |
Yeah, so you have the follower count, 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:
- Do other people trust this person?
- Do other people follow this person?
Or the blue check mark, right? That's another signal that you could have or not have. It's not fully in your control, but that's what counts towards conversion.
All right, I like that.
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Julian Shapiro | Wait, Sean, tell me about your blue check mark journey. Didn't you say something in iMessage about your blue check?
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Shaan Puri | No, what do you mean I don't have one? I tried to get one. They said they just didn't reply because that's Twitter. I don't remember, was it something else?
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Julian Shapiro | okay no I remember you had a story about trying to get it never mind we'll skip it | |
Shaan Puri | no if you remember it say it I don't remember it maybe you're mixing me up with somebody | |
Julian Shapiro | no that actually might have been the story it might have been the world's worst story that might have been it never mind | |
Shaan Puri | Fair enough, fair enough. Okay, I think we can leave it with kind of like one last little piece and then we'll wrap it up to go.
The last thing I wanted to say is, if you weren't doing what you are doing now—right? So you're not doing Demand Curve, you're not writing. I can't let you go back through those doors; those doors are now locked.
Where does Julian go? How does he spend his time? What would excite you if I gave you all your time back? Where would you go spend it if you couldn't spend it how you're spending it now?
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Julian Shapiro | So the answer, actually, is no. Reflexively, movies like *The Thing*—I actually came to the U.S. from Canada to try to make movies. That remains the thing that I find so interesting because I don't have a good... it's going to be hard for me to explain this, but the brief version is: it's so freaking hard, Sean.
It's so hard to break in. It's so hard to write a good screenplay. It's so hard to turn that into a good film. It's so hard to get people to watch it. The requirements for actually pulling it off are how resourceful and how creative you can be. And do you have a good sense of taste?
Right? I love that forcing. I love that burden on my shoulder to try to crack what I see as one of the hardest problems: the intersection of creativity and business. So I've always wanted to do it. I just love the idea of being able to tell people's stories that move them. It's such a beautiful thing. | |
Shaan Puri | So, what kind of movies are we talking about? Like comedy, action, drama, indie, artistic, you know, documentaries? What are you talking about?
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Julian Shapiro | Well, I'll tell you. I'll give you four movies I absolutely love, and I think it'll answer the question.
1. **Whiplash** - an incredible fiction film.
2. **The Prestige** - Christopher Nolan's film about magicians.
3. A documentary on Netflix, which I'm so stoked I get to tell people about because enough people will listen 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'll recommend is... | |
Shaan Puri | who who's that one about who who's who's the sugarman one about | |
Julian Shapiro | Okay, so this is really tricky, Sean, because the entire movie is a spoiler. So I'll just say this: it's about a musician that disappeared off the face of the earth, where he went, and how he came back.
*You should cut that because now I'm giving spoilers. You should bleep that.*
We gotta bleep the end. He came back, but the last thing I'll say is that *Counterpart*, which is this amazing show on Amazon, is my favorite TV show, maybe ever. *Counterpart* is amazing. It's like a James Bond type thing; it's growing.
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Shaan Puri | okay I've never even heard of that | |
Julian Shapiro | I'm not pitching anything well sean I suck at this | |
Shaan Puri | You're great at things until they become very personal. Like when it's, "What do you really want to do in your heart of hearts?" You're like, "I don't know how to say it." But you can say everything else.
Or it's like these movies that you love and really want other people to love. The pressure in your head goes so high. How do I sell this right without ruining the first-time magic of experiencing it? You almost create a pressure cooker for yourself.
So, okay, what you want to do is make a movie about, you know, searching for Bobby Fischer style, right? About Kobayashi, the competitive eater. It's like greatness, enigma, prodigies, and, you know, with a sort of drama and mystery.
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Julian Shapiro | Dude, well, I see. I knew I could rely on you. Yes, well pitched!
Yeah, I just love this stuff. I love making it, I love watching it, and I love seeing people watch it.
But how about you, Kiera? I want to flip this around on you. What would you do?
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Shaan Puri | If I could do anything right now, I would basically take little 3 to 5 year arcs of my life. This is what I think I would do: I would take 3 to 5 year arcs of my life and try to do a really fun thing that I don't usually do.
So, one would be stand-up comedy. I would try to create a set that actually is good, and I would figure out how to do that. I'd learn the trade, go to shows, and do all that.
I would also coach a basketball team. I would try to be a high school basketball coach and give it my all.
Additionally, I don't actually want to make a show, but I do want to write a script. I'm actually trying to do that right now; I'm trying to write a script for a mock episode of "The Office," which is a lot of fun.
I would also try to make a song—a hit song. How do you make a catchy hit song that pops off? I don't care if it becomes a TikTok meme or what, but that would be another one.
So, I would just take these little mini challenges, like trying to write a book or create a brand for a drink or a chips bag or something like that. I would take these 3 to 5 year sprints, go really deep into them, try to win, and then I would come out the other side and basically switch careers each time I do them.
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Julian Shapiro | I love that! So, you want to break up your life into chapters. You want each chapter to be a very creatively fulfilling experience where you're maximally using your skills.
Actually, not necessarily because the high school basketball coach is a really cool role. It's a nice counterbalance to the creative screenwriting thing.
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Shaan Puri | Yeah, because it's not all about making a song or creating a stand-up set. It's about things that I just think would be really fun to do, which typically is creative, but sometimes it's not.
Right? Like sports is its own thing. Competition is really fun. Leading is fun. Strategy is fun. All that good stuff.
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Julian Shapiro | What's stopping you from being a comedian in the next 15 years? Because what's stopping you from making the time to do it?
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Shaan Puri | Nothing, I'm just occupied right now. I'm doing things; I have a business I'm running and this content arm, so I don't have a clear schedule at the moment to clear everything off to go chase that. I can just dabble, kind of like for fun, in very small ways.
But I think there's something really fun about the immersion. So, I've set myself this challenge to try to write an episode of *The Office* by the end of this month. 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 write an episode of TV?" That's what I'm trying to do.
So, I'm doing little, you know, tiptoeing in the water. But to do it for real, the way I want, I would like to clear my schedule for like two years. You won't hear about me, and then I'll come out the other side, you know, with some story to tell.
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Julian Shapiro | Do you know how fun it would be for all of us to watch you do a set? I would 100% show up live. I would be the loudest laugher, even if it's artificial. I would 100% support you, dude. That would be... I kinda wanna live through you, Sean.
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Shaan Puri | if it's | |
Julian Shapiro | something I I really want you to do almost selfishly but also I think you'll just have a blast | |
Shaan Puri | Yeah, I do, and I will.
So, the other thing right now is that I just had a kid... two kids, actually—two babies. I kind of feel like the main project is actually trying to get in the best shape of my life. I'm also learning how to be a dad, like a new dad.
I kind of want to not skip that part because, like, I already made the baby, so I already did the hard part. Now, I just have to stay here. I shouldn't busy myself doing something else; I just need to stay here and actually be a dad.
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Julian Shapiro | Well, what I will say is, if I've learned anything from comedians endlessly talking about their process, it's that this is exactly the fuel in your life that turns into the comedy.
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Shaan Puri | right | |
Julian Shapiro | Like the struggles of being a dad, right? The struggles of losing weight.
Yeah, exactly. It almost seems like if you don't act on it now, this is the time capsule where you write down your experiences and your thoughts. It can become future material.
So, I'm... I'm real... I'll, yeah.
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Shaan Puri | I'll give you two. I was in the shower the other day and I wrote down two pieces of content. I texted it to some guy who is a comedian—a pretty famous comedian. I don't know him very well, but we kind of text or DM a little bit.
I said, "Hey, I got two little nuggets for you. Two little truths about life that I think you could turn into jokes. Here they are." They just came to me while I was in the shower.
One was about receipts. I don't care how old I get; I have no strategy when it comes to whether I'm at the cashier and they say, "Do you want the receipt?" I say yes, I say no. There is no consistency, there is no logic, there is no strategy. Nothing is a more panic-inducing moment than whatever the heck I do when they ask me if I want the receipt or not.
And why? Why do we do that? Why does nobody have any kind of consistency with that?
The second one... what was the second one I sent him? Oh, racism. It's like people think America's really racist and that racism is a big problem. When you think of a racist—if I say "racist"—what image pops into your head?
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Julian Shapiro | the ku klux band member | |
Shaan Puri | Right, so you know, when you think of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), you picture a white guy in a white hood. Or you might think of a white person in a MAGA hat. That's what people envision when they think of racists in America.
It just occurred to me that, in reality, white people are the least racist. Nobody is more racist than, say, an Indian parent or a Chinese grandmother. They will straight up tell you some pretty blunt things. For example, if you ask, "Can I marry a person of this race?" the answer is often "No," and they'll explain why.
So, I realized that nobody's more racist than a Chinese grandma. This is a truth about the world that I believe. I thought, "Okay, these are nuggets I want to write down."
I don't know how to craft those into jokes. What I'm telling you isn't a joke; it's just an observation of the world as I see it. So, I was like, "Okay, cool. How do I write these down so that I can learn how to actually turn them into jokes, weave them together, and make a set out of it?"
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Julian Shapiro | And that's exactly what I think is the most interesting part. It's like, what's the scaffolding? What's the narrative structure for taking that observation and making it laugh-out-loud funny, as opposed to just a smirk on my face?
This is where it gets so fun to sit down and reverse engineer, like Dave Chappelle. This is actually one of the podcast episodes we did on storytelling. You're trying to reverse engineer what makes someone such a great storyteller. It's about setting up the stakes, the hero's perspective, all these cool ingredients, the climax, the twist, right?
To me, that's the joy. That's gotta be the most fun part, I think, is figuring out how to craft it. Then there are the people who totally buck the trend, like Mitch Hedberg. I actually use him as an example. He has a joke that's sort of like your receipt joke, but my thought is he's not really doing the normal joke structure. I don't think I'm an expert, right? But it's still so funny because he has an extra layer.
The extra layer is phenomenally unique and has this tickling delivery. So, there's an extra layer beyond the structure of the narrative. If you just wrote his jokes on paper, it might not be as funny.
But he has this joke, going back to your receipts thing, where he's like, "People who hand out flyers on the street as you pass by for whatever organization they're running are basically saying, 'Hey, you throw this in the garbage.'" I remember that always stuck in my head, and like I said, I can't deliver it like you can.
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Shaan Puri | That was pretty good! It actually got me to laugh.
There's a thing you had put out in your storytelling workshop. By the way, you said, "Oh, here are all these elements," but the one that stood out was something I was telling Ben, my right-hand man. I said, "Hey, Julian had this thing that I think is spot on, and we should—like, I think I do this to an extent, but I think you should do it more."
We can all do this more. You were saying something like, "The best storytellers, when they tell a story, it's almost like they're blowing their own mind again live." They are surprising themselves again. In a comedian's case, they're making themselves laugh; they're cracking themselves up.
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. Once you realize that, you can't unsee it. It gives you a blueprint to just be more charismatic and entertaining when you talk.
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Julian Shapiro | That's spot on. The way I realized that is through a person we interviewed on the podcast called Jason Silva, who, for my money, is the most charismatic person on YouTube.
I was sitting there trying to reverse engineer what made him so damn good. Then I eventually got him on my podcast and I asked him, "What's going on here?" 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 I'm about to talk about like I was for the very first time."
All of his videos are interesting philosophical concepts. So he sits there and he's like, "Oh yeah, that's what was so mind-blowing about it." He chews on it, lets it sink in, turns on the camera, the light goes red, and now he relives that initial impression.
It's infectious. He is the proxy that we now live through, and it's just such a beautiful thing to see someone fully interact in their own excitement without any concern for being self-conscious—like, "What are my hands doing? Am I stuttering? Where am I looking?" All these things fade away when you can get absorbed by your own enthusiasm. People just love seeing that; it's so authentic.
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Shaan Puri | Yeah, exactly! It was totally spot on. If you're going to try one thing, try that: get yourself into the state where you remember what it felt like. This way, you can retell it with the same emotion that you felt when it happened.
If you were mind blown, then you'll feel mind blown now. If it cracked you up the first time you realized it, it'll crack you up now. I love that! I thought that was a great little hack, a little deconstruction on your part.
Alright, where should people follow you? So, Twitter is at JulianJulian.com. Your branding is kind of amazing. Where else should people follow you?
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Julian Shapiro | Yeah, sure. So really, it's **Julian.com** and then **DemandCurve.com** is where all of these ideas we chatted about come from. We teach people how to do growth marketing, and that's basically it.
If you want to see Sean himself on my podcast, there's **BrainsPodcast.com**.
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Shaan Puri | yeah that's right I think I'm on 2 2 episodes of it so | |
Julian Shapiro | Yes, dude! So, we call you an honorary brain because Cora and I love you so much. We're like, "Alright, even though it's kind of weird to have one person twice in the first six episodes, there's no one more lovable, charismatic, fun, interesting, and juicy with mental models and a bag of cool ideas in the back of his brain."
We just... we love you! I love you! So, thank you for coming on. It's awesome!
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Shaan Puri | I appreciate you thank you so much alright sweet we're out of here | |
Julian Shapiro | alright peace |