Growth tactics, retention strategies, and becoming a better writer | Julian Shapiro (Demand Curve, Hyper, Webflow, TechCrunch)

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.