Growth tactics, retention strategies, and becoming a better writer | Julian Shapiro (Demand Curve, Hyper, Webflow, TechCrunch)
Lenny interviews Julian Shapiro, founder of DemandCurve and investor, discussing product-led acquisition, increasing product retention through 'state building,' and writing strategies including the importance of novelty, topic selection, and the 'creativity faucet' framework.
Deep Dive Analysis
8 Topic Outline
Julian Shapiro's Twitter Strategy and Follower Quality
The Purpose and Value of Julian's Handbooks
Understanding Product-Led Acquisition (PLA) for Growth
Categories of Product-Led Acquisition: Debts, Conversations, Billboarding, UGC
Strategies for Increasing Product Retention: Building State
The Importance of Novelty in Writing and Content Creation
Framework for Choosing Writing Topics and Sustaining Motivation
The Creativity Faucet: Unclogging Bad Ideas for Good Ones
9 Key Concepts
Mind Followers vs. Labor Followers
Mind followers are attracted to original thoughts and insights, leading to higher affinity and loyalty. Labor followers are attracted to curated content like memes or 'fortune cookie threads,' making them interchangeable and less loyal.
Product-Led Acquisition (PLA)
A growth strategy where the natural use of the product itself drives its growth. It involves existing users inviting others to settle debts, partake in conversations, or through the product's inherent visibility, without relying on external incentives.
Billboarding (PLA)
A product-led acquisition method where the use of a product is inherently visible to others, causing it to advertise itself. Examples include 'Sent from my iPhone' signatures, visible physical products like Teslas, or sharing Calendly links.
Building State (Retention)
A retention strategy borrowed from video games, where users accrue non-transferable assets or 'state' within a product. This could be reputation, an audience, a social graph, or being embedded infrastructure, making users less likely to switch to competitors.
Novelty (in Writing)
The quality of an idea being new, significant, and not easily intuited, which triggers a 'dopamine hit' or 'whoa' reaction in readers. It is crucial for engaging content and high read-to-completion rates.
Counter-narrative Novelty
A type of novelty where information presented contradicts commonly accepted beliefs or what people have been told, making readers feel like they are learning the 'truth' that was previously hidden.
Counterintuitive Novelty
A type of novelty where information presented contradicts one's natural assumptions or intuition about how the world works, leading to a surprising realization.
Elegant Articulation
A type of novelty where complex, rich thoughts are synthesized into concise, beautifully crafted sentences. This allows readers to appreciate the clarity and conciseness of the idea, triggering a dopamine reaction.
Creativity Faucet
A mental model for creative output, visualizing creativity as a backed-up pipe of water. The initial 'wastewater' (bad ideas) must be emptied before the 'clear water' (good ideas) can flow, requiring discipline to write out all initial thoughts.
8 Questions Answered
Threads with very clickbaity opening tweets are the primary way to gain followers, as they provide more exposure to your thoughts. Porting followers from other platforms can also provide an initial audience for threads to gain traction.
Julian creates handbooks as a forcing function to hold himself accountable and be thorough when learning something for his own benefit. Once the in-depth research is done, it only takes a small amount of extra work to make it publicly accessible as acquisition fodder.
PLA is considered the best way to grow because it has zero marginal cost for user acquisition, is highly scalable, often creates network effects, and is less vulnerable to external volatility like algorithmic updates or ad channel changes.
Companies can increase retention by encouraging users to 'build state' within the product. This means users accrue non-transferable assets like reputation (e.g., eBay seller ratings), an audience (e.g., YouTube subscribers), a social graph (e.g., Facebook friends), or become deeply embedded infrastructure (e.g., Twilio API).
Novelty, defined as new, significant, and non-obvious ideas, triggers a 'dopamine hit' in readers, making them pause and go 'whoa.' This engagement increases the read-to-completion rate of content.
Writing quality is determined by 'novelty times resonance.' Novelty refers to the newness and significance of ideas, while resonance refers to the storytelling power—using examples, analogies, metaphors, and stories—to make those novel ideas memorable and impactful.
Choose topics based on what you can realistically complete and what will be high quality. This involves clearly defining an objective for the piece (e.g., proving the status quo wrong) and pairing it with a strong personal motivation (e.g., getting something off your chest or solving a nagging problem).
The 'Creativity Faucet' visualizes creativity as a backed-up pipe where 'wastewater' (bad ideas) must be emptied first. By disciplining oneself to write out all bad ideas at the start of a session, the brain learns to avoid bad elements, allowing clearer, better ideas to flow subsequently.
15 Actionable Insights
1. Embrace Bad Ideas First
Start creative sessions by emptying all bad ideas, as this helps your brain reflexively identify and avoid ‘badness,’ leading to better pattern matching and novel ideas. Recognize bad ideas as progress towards good ones.
2. Build Product ‘State’ for Retention
Design your product to encourage users to accrue non-transferable value (e.g., reputation, audience, social graphs, or embedded infrastructure) that makes it costly or difficult for them to switch to competitors.
3. Prioritize Product-Led Acquisition
Focus on building products where usage inherently drives growth, such as enabling users to invite others to settle debts, partake in exclusive conversations, billboard the product, or generate shareable content (UGC).
4. Foster Non-Transferable Reputation
Encourage users to build reputation within your platform (e.g., seller ratings, reviews) that cannot be moved, creating strong stickiness due to the accumulated trust and benefits.
5. Cultivate Non-Transferable Audience
Enable users to build a follower graph or audience within your product, making it difficult for them to leave due to the established reach and engagement they’ve cultivated.
6. Encourage Social Graph Building
Design features that prompt users to invest time in building a social graph (e.g., adding friends, colleagues) within your product, making it sticky due to the effort invested in curating connections.
7. Become Embedded Infrastructure
Strive for your product to become deeply integrated infrastructure (e.g., APIs, core services), as the high cost and risk of redoing code make it extremely difficult for users to switch.
8. Optimize Writing for Novelty
Have friends highlight ‘whoa’ moments in your writing to map novelty, then condense the ‘white space’ between these interesting parts to increase the frequency of insights and improve reader engagement.
9. Select Writing Topics with Objective & Motivation
Choose writing topics by first defining a clear objective (e.g., proving the status quo wrong) and pairing it with a strong motivation (e.g., getting something off your chest) to ensure follow-through and high-quality output.
10. Enhance Writing with Novelty & Resonance
Improve writing quality by focusing on both novelty (new, significant, non-intuitive ideas) and resonance (making ideas memorable with examples, analogies, metaphors, and stories). Draft for novelty first, then add resonance.
11. Focus on Evergreen Content
Create content that remains relevant over time, avoiding newsy or trend-based topics. Commit to regularly updating and rewriting old posts to keep them current and valuable.
12. Prioritize Usefulness Over Prose
When writing, prioritize making your content valuable and actionable over achieving perfect, beautiful prose. Useful and interesting content is more impactful, especially when starting out.
13. Compress Actionable Steps
When providing actionable advice, compress the steps into a concise cheat sheet or summary at the end of your content to reduce mental effort for readers and enhance usability.
14. Build Twitter Following with Threads
Use threads, especially with clickbaity opening tweets, as they provide more surface area for your thoughts, reaffirming consistency to readers and encouraging follows. Port followers from other platforms to kickstart engagement.
15. Cultivate ‘Mind’ Followers on Twitter
Focus on sharing original thoughts and insights rather than just curating content or posting ‘fortune cookie’ threads, to attract followers who value your mind and have higher affinity and loyalty.
5 Key Quotes
Why do good ideas arrive after the bad ideas are empty? It's because when you've gone through a bunch of bad ideas, your brain, your mind starts reflexively identifying what elements are causing the badness.
Julian Shapiro
Don't start a startup where you need to go through someone else to get users.
Paul Graham (quoted by Julian Shapiro)
Reading many books is the most socially accepted vanity metric for adults.
Julian Shapiro
The world is not run by exceptional people. This is the hidden reason for imposter syndrome.
Julian Shapiro
I give zero kudos for reading a hundred books a year, but I give you massive kudos for learning efficiently and making interesting things.
Julian Shapiro
2 Protocols
The Creativity Faucet Process
Julian Shapiro- Visualize your creativity as a backed-up pipe of water, with 'wastewater' (bad ideas) at the front that must be emptied.
- At the beginning of every creative session, write out every bad idea that comes to mind without self-criticism.
- Recognize that emptying these bad ideas is progress, as it allows better ideas to arrive.
- Understand that your brain reflexively identifies elements causing the 'badness' of initial ideas, improving its ability to pattern match novel ideas with greater intuition.
- Follow the iterative process: start with a weak imitation, identify what makes it weak, and then iterate until it becomes original.
Julian Shapiro's Writing Quality Improvement Process
Julian Shapiro- **Draft One**: Focus on finding and incorporating novelty, which is the backbone of what makes anything interesting.
- **Draft Two**: Come back and increase the resonance by embedding storytelling elements such as examples, analogies, metaphors, and stories to make the novelty memorable and impactful.