Episode of My First Million with Sam Parr and Shaan Puri.
Transcript
Note: This transcript was auto-generated from YouTube captions. It may contain errors and lacks speaker identification. A full Gemini audio transcript will replace this.
Kind: captions Language: en 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 that likes you because your free thing or your cheap thing i feel like i can rule the world i know i could be what i want to i put my law in it like no days off on the road let’s travel never looking back i’m actually uh 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 like i was trying like purposely to get on podcasts for like indie hackers yeah for like getting the word out about demand curve then at some point i’m like this is cringe man like i don’t like listening back to myself and so it took the process of actually starting a podcast uh you know in part thanks to also watching you do your your magic to be like you know what i can just totally be myself not to worry about it as much and then it stopped being cringed so now i’m all for it and how how has it been since you launched the pod so you launched uh what’s called brains right brains with the s or without the s yeah brains with the s it’s been good it’s been i guess it is rare to have reasons in your life to be very seriously self-reflective about whether or not you’re boring the [ ] out of people it’s 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 context of trying to not bore people on a podcast so it’s been a really good forcing function okay i like that and uh 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 uh so i feel like you were pretty thorough about how you went about it or more so than me at least um did it go the way you wanted to or where did you learn yeah i was thorough because i felt that i kind of had no choice because i listened to a bunch of podcasts and found most of them to be like unlistenable 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 co-host on the podcast cortland from indie hackers he’s like what’s going on here that special is they’re not asking boring interview questions they’re literally just riffing on ideas collaboratively and making charged statements and letting other people respond to them and the net effect is it feels way more like rapport like a dinner conversation you’re overhearing so we really rolled with that and then we try to be deliberate about 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 you know in a way we’re my first million but for everything outside of business like writing a book being a storyteller you know what i mean yeah the episode i was on had uh uh alexandra botez i don’t know how you say her name actually how do you say it properly that’s right example because she got it chess champion uh twitch streamer so she’s like content creator really interesting person her content is about chess because she’s really damn good at chess um and so i found it pretty interesting like that was not what like i’ve been on a bunch of podcasts that’s not usually what i get to to talk about or talk to and uh so i immediately was pretty bought in just as i kind of guessed on it but anyways i wanted to have you on here because uh 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 ideas and for people who 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 boxers you know you you just you’re going to the shared bathroom together there’s no place to run you’re going to be yourself over in 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 uh but you are an ideal person do you consider yourself an ideal person um i see i think of myself as someone who just loves to 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 all right give me a problem i want to solve the problem and so what i did for this show actually is i went through the community of my startup we have about 40 000 marketers and and founders and so i picked out the three most interesting growth trends i could find and i came with some examples of each of those trends so there were like three things that were popping out that felt almost like cheat codes like ways that startups were printing cash and reaching unicorn status much quicker than one would think they should okay so that’s something we can jam on i got a few three categories there we can jam on if you 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 all right all right so okay let’s kick it off with this first category so i’m going to give these funny names because i don’t have good names for them 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 ah [ ] 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 product a long time ago called service and what they did is they would give you money back any time 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 loyalty reasons they wanted to have a policy to give flyers some money back if their site was delayed you just have to do the paperwork and request it and nobody ever did it 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 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 example is a recent yc company and they’re called yada so yada does is they’ll take your money just go to normal bank they’ll take your money you know they’ll manage savings but because they’re so low overhead they they redistribute all of that extra potential margin into lottery winnings for their bank customers so just by having more money in yada they are going to give you tickets to this vert to this real lottery that they run every single week they give away millions and you just you’re automatically entered just due to some income no no loss so imagine no loss lotteries called right yeah exactly 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 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 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 as 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 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’m 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 a scam either give you like free money in a sense or credit back and it functions as 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 growth world we talk 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 into building a customer base that you can monetize through 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 um or do not pay is another one that does this right they uh i think i don’t remember how they started if it was them or somebody else there was 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 send us a picture of the ticket we will fight it for you did you know that you know 4 out of 10 tickets are filled out incorrectly and are therefore invalid even if you were in the wrong the cop filled it out wrong and therefore you don’t have to pay 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 20 of whatever money we give back to you um and i thought wow that’s actually like a great idea and it got so popular that san francisco banned them um you know pretty quickly after a few months because it was like being used so much same with service by the way service the airlines were like what what the hell is going on here and 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 it was still an okay one so 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 because 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 you know these billboard ads and so imagine being a business owner and someone comes to you and says hey i’m going to pay you let’s say 50 grand a year all you got to 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 stream that’s super low friction for you that you did not realize is possible it just becomes a crazy growth wedge yeah that’s yeah and there’s you could basically create value out of thin air just by just just by knowing the rules of connecting the dots i feel this way about there’s some bigger businesses that do this principle um one for 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 and boom you change to this monthly payment instead of this one i think uh common bond or something like that is one of those and house refinancing 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 um and that seems like a pretty big opportunity to me absolutely 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 way 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 and that can guide you for growing a lot quicker as opposed to just you know living in a local maximum running in circles and so because we’re ultimately talking about the idea like a trojan horse here for acquiring customers in a non-scammy 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 we’re still under this category of giving customers an absolute no winner no brains exactly how do you become a no-brainer where it’s like i don’t have to think about this so second sub-category 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 it’s a chrome extension that as you browse the web it surfaces discounts on whatever you’re browsing right right 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 for until the rest of time until you delete the extension right 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 verified via two-factor 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 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 flea on an elephant’s back exactly that’s right and so if you can find a way to make something so painless where it’s like two clicks i didn’t 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 and eventually when the time is right and you can deliver real value like contextually because like this is going to be a monster coupon i could give the customer we’re going to save them a thousand bucks right that’s when you 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 yeah that’s smart what other chrome extension ideas uh have you have you seen that you like or you have like 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-ray 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 becomes very sticky if that date is valuable um what which which chrome extensions which chrome extensions do you have installed i have similar web which is what you’re talking about basically gives me traffic information about different websites so i can see how popular they are and where the traffic comes from i have meta mask which is a you know an ethereum wallet uh or a crypto wallet and then i have adblock 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 into 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 passwords sort of broken into so it’ll tell me if i should switch my password you know um and then i have um uh oh this awesome twitter extension that when i’m looking at someone’s twitter profile it’ll show me all their historical best performing tweets so i get like a snapshot view of who they are and what they’re known for it’s called t-w-e-m-e-x like twee max i like that that’s pretty cool i was thinking there could be a couple others like uh while you were saying that i was thinking what other x-ray you said extra vision i like that so i was like what x-ray vision would i want as i browse the web so one is just taking uh 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 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 um facebook ads so i i’m constantly going to the facebook ad library to find what ads a company is running i actually just want that done automatically so i just want to go to any products website any any company’s website and be able to click this and see what ads they’re running without having to go open up the ad library yeah i love that the um the way i think about this this type of a question is like what type of chrome extension or like what’s the framework for thinking about which category of chrome extension would be the stickiest and would people love to download the most and i think about how to appeal device like how do i appeal to people’s desire to make money and so where my brain goes right away is what about some sort of x-ray vision where you’re on like bloomberg or you’re on twitter anytime the chrome extension picks up a keyword for a public stock or like some crypto token right cryptocurrency then it just suggests um like it gives you an x-ray into like how it’s performing who else talks about it a lot who should you fall to learn more about this right and that then it kind of triggers more so like this 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 okay let’s give x-ray vision let people know like amazon’s x-ray vision when you’re watching a movie it’ll tell you like what music is playing in the background who are these actors like do people really care i mean maybe some but it’s probably nerds yeah yeah the the the one more on this is uh 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 tells you hey you’ve been shopping a lot on apple why don’t you buy a hundred dollars of 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 owning any of the underlying company in which case you could so i think this is 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 that’s super clever so to recap that you’re basically saying as i’m browsing like literally as i’m on robinhood.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 and actually invest directly in this company exactly and get a sense of ownership and incentive alignment or even better like hey we like it it pops up right as it sees you’re about to do a trade it’s like hey we see about the trade for like 97 bucks you want to roll this up get the extra three bucks in robin hood itself yes that’s that’s super clever i love that all right so that was that was theme one uh 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 into more interesting ways let me start by giving you some examples okay so slat connect dropbox paypal calendly so what these companies have in common is 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 other people like when i join slack it’s a ghost town if it’s just me right right so i’m naturally encouraged to to invite my co-workers and then slack did something super brilliant called slack connect where now i can invite non-co-workers so people who exist like at different people who work at different companies and 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 on our you know whatever service contract we got going on the idea behind product led growth the first half of the idea is that you use the product in a way that benefits you when you invite more people so you’re going to do it without them having to bribe you with five bucks to invite your friends because you’re gonna do it anyway right and then the back half of 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 someone a file they could just take the file as it is but if they signed up for dropbox well now they’re going to get version history now they’re not going to have to store it on their hard drive or in the email it’s going to 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 got to sign up for paypal like you literally have to sign up in order to get the money right um and for calendly 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 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 let 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 cpm’s rise at the cost rise and is 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 is there’s that hotmail signature in the email right or if i send with my iphone there’s that sent from my phone in the email signature right right and like how many millions of people every day get beaten over the head was sent from my iphone and it’s just a phenomenal way to stay top of mind we also have the clear view 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 so that’s billboarding literally in the truest 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 just like i’m i’m subject to it i can’t stop seeing this and it’s mercury oh actually actually that is that’s better than my example because they’re they’re they’re making it they’re like people make it their profile right so crypto punks are an nft 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 even worse display 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 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 seeing [ ] crypto punks and reminding myself how i missed out on crypto punks and so i feel like that’s like a version of billboarding uh it’s like wearing your favorite company’s 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 airpods or nikes on like everyone’s going to see it and it’s also identity building like if you if you break apart what makes your brand loyalty like why would you want to put a crypto punk as your twitter avatar right or why would you want to wear nike shoes it’s because you actually feel a sense of procedure there’s either social signaling you’re in the club or you’re thinking you have good taste right uh you want to be the girl or the the guy who wears nike shoes every day or the girl or the guy who has slack stickers all over his laptop every day like it becomes this identity-based affinity for a brand and when you have that it becomes very hard to compete with because now it’s almost approaching tribal for better for worse and just because there’s another crypto punk competitor it doesn’t necessarily mean that they can just take over through better marketing because better marketing has a heart will hit a hard wall against tribalism and building identity around something that people 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 yankees and red sox on twitter right now you’ll get crypto punks or board apes right board api club it’s the other nft project that is rivaling them and so people are switching to those two now you’re probably not going to get like 20 of these and so there’s like room for two to three tr like main tribes and then everything else will be very very fringe and there’ll be some people who want that but okay so you were gonna say mercury is one of these where do you see mercury billboard yeah mercury’s 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 billboarding because 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 uh for startups but not necessarily just startups and it’s become the de facto startup that yc companies use so what happens is when yc companies go to demo day where they fundraise with investors they have to then 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 which i might be using a term wrong 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 risks that impression right 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 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 90 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 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 very high social signal like influencers if they get the impression of just them narrowly think that you’re everything right well then they’ll act like you’re everything and then finally it trickles down to the mainstream yes it’s like what it’s like high school but for uh you know 50 year olds um okay so that’s that’s growth trend two so we got trend one no-brainer no no brainer no loss offers cool uh trend two is the uh 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 uh and so everybody that they use the product with sees you sees you sees you until it becomes uh sort of like you know a self it’s a free ad basically that you’re getting through your own customers um what’s number three yeah you got it so number three is self-liquidating funnels which i know sort of silly sounding term um 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-locating funnels so 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 eight months before someone buys from you after you pay 30 bucks to get their email right right so self-liquidating basically means you’re offering some type of product that is secondary to your main product so let’s say you’re selling a 30 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 as opposed to 200 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 reflexively like they’re in the chocolate aisle of the grocery store and it’s cheaper so lesser consideration purchase and um because more will i hopefully it’ll 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-liquidating funnel and i’m paying effectively nothing for these emails they’re just it’s like literally self-liquidating hence the name then i can now scale 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 that 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 we’re chatting about um are like potentially available to you cheat codes albeit potentially very distracting ones so there’s a lot of concerns to consider but i’m just giving you guys ideas to pick from from what i’ve seen work in the community so to wrap up this particular idea sean it basically comes down to this building a huge lead database that likes you because your free thing or your cheap thing rather it’s really high quality right yeah so you see this in content a lot i think you do this pretty well i think you have these like handbooks i think you call them on your website and it’s like way more high quality than a blog post um and so you send them that thing for free grab their email address they’re happy because wow i got he over delivered on value for this free thing and 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 uh 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 kind of bakes 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 you gotta do is pay the shipping that seems fair and they’re they’re using that to get your um to get your information and then they say great now i’m gonna go back to this list now they’ve had a sample of my stuff and can i go get 25 of people to become a real customer after doing that yeah absolutely well 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 i actually don’t sell anything on my website so julian.com is what you’re referring to where i write these handbooks like i break down like how to write well how to grow your startup there’s nothing being sold like there’s some ads for not ads per se but 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 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 of paul graham like this you know the writer guru y.c founder that everyone looks up to you know in a million years you would never expect him to have like a banner ad at the bottom of a blog post he writes because it’d be so out of character and it would really compromise i think or or a 199 course yeah exactly exactly so yeah so i just try to keep them totally separate and um anyway so yeah that’s but not 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 podcasts and still run ads on their podcast like unless you’re doing it to pay employees you’re awesome but if you’re doing because you’re trying to make an extra buck it seems like it’s totally defeats the purpose of why you’re let’s call let’s call them out reid hoffman you are a billionaire you created linkedin you sold it for 20 billion dollars why does your podcast have ads uh and i know they’re i know the answer to it actually but uh no excuses as far as i’m 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 going to spend my time doing something and i value my time and i also want to scoreboard for if the thing i’m doing is valuable and one scoreboard is likes and the other the 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 or i’m actually going to sit down spend time with you and teach you something then i want to charge for that most of the time i give away a bunch of like free spots um and the last thing is i uh i do this to get myself more excited about it so i’ll set a um a reason a goal for the money so i’ll be like like this right now with this course i’m doing right now i was like all right i want to do two things um i want to 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 want to buy them all like a fat gift like a gift that’s like you know way more than what uh what they would be expecting in this case the second thing is i want to i’m really trying to get in shape and i was like i want to have a personal chef i was like how much does that cost i used to have an investor he had a he had 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 kind of 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 um okay cool so if i sell you know if i do a hundred thousand dollars 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 uh i’m gonna go buy you know uh you know go buy a bunch of crypto pucks 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 is but when i have a target then i’m a financial target it makes me try to do a way better job at the thing i’m doing yeah 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 what i spend my time on outside of like earning a salary through demand curve.com in the context of a craftsperson and so i don’t want to do anything even if it’s for like some extrinsic goal like getting a chef um unless i i would be happy doing it if i got nothing else from it like the process itself is the reward um 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 and to me so yeah yeah it’s just like it’s such a beautiful thing if you can find it um and and like i was going through this binge on youtube where i was watching videos of creators uh and like artists and musicians in the process of making their music uh like if you google uh if you search youtube for ariana grande i forget the name of the song but she’s like ariana grande in studio dude i’ve gone down so many rabbit holes of this uh there’s an ed sheeran documentary if anybody wants to watch on apple plus of him making his uh on apple tv plus or whatever of uh him making 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 can see you can hear him figuring out this one guitar lick that became you know uh you know love yourself or whatever becomes one of these like hits today and you can see him just like humming and being 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 it such a dopamine hit to watch people but the thing i take away from all those videos if they’ve made no money from that i know i think 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 and the reward is can they come up with something awesome so yeah 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 in order to fund his musical pursuits and so if if 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 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 that i need teaching to be sustainable so i could 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 as far as opportunities or ideas or things that caught your eye 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 okay sounds good cool so um 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 don’t remember who i was telling this to 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 loved profess for like weight 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 waypoint.com this great blog that people love is new posts every sometimes at the end of the everyday astronaut videos they’ll 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 try 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 uh mr beast or whoever these guys that basically they made their their bones and their following by doing a daily vlog and they got they chose to get on that they chose to handcuff themselves that treadmill and the fans kind of 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 but why 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 podcasts like can you actually hit a podcast at a really high frequency maybe but at some point 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 1950s 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-factly 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 two tweets a month um 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 like wait but why i think he didn’t post anything for like eight months you know what i mean so i just want to sort of encourage people on this on this momentary platform of my first million that um 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 high frequency but that doesn’t mean you have to publish everything um you can keep some back and do it for yourself so anyway that’s my little rant on quality events quantity and the reason i’m bringing 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 with like the wrong framework yeah yeah and i think there’s many ways to win like i think you typically want to be on either end of the spectrum either light touch high frequency so um you might i’m comfort i’m like friends there’s a million episodes you can go through and they’re all all right um 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 think i find that if you’re going to choose one strategy polarize to either end of that and focus on quality um or focus on uh 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 you have to hit one of those in order to make it work um as far as i’ve seen in terms of in terms of how content goes by the way tell me uh share with people your thoughts on bios so i hit you up and i was like hey i want to redo my twitter bio and i feel like you’ve probably put some thought into this and you were like funny enough i have here’s some thoughts and you gave me this audio note this two-minute imessage audio note that was fire and i was like this is such a julian thing so so share share with people kind of your what you’ve seen or how you break that down 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 [ ] i have so much to say that i have nothing to say at the same time it all sounds bad then it sounds too braggy then it sounds too unimpressive how do i do this and so give me give me 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 write your bio to justify why people should follow you by the way let’s let’s just just stick with twitter for now that’s what we’re talking about here so write your twitter bio that justifies why you’re differentiated and worth following what do people get from following you so for example mine is something like i deconstruct i’m literally reading my bi right now so it goes 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 and the reason this distinction is important well actually let’s compare and contrast so the typical bio is something like forbes 30 under 30 2x founder 3x father 5x christian like all these all these stats you know and it’s like and it’s like this doesn’t tell me anything it’s just virtue signaling in to some respect and i don’t know why i 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 so so you’re kind of saying what are you gonna get from me what’s in it for you and why you can trust this 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 growth marketing question which is hey if i look at my twitter account 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 conversions 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 going to 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 pinned tweets so let’s just talk about that let’s use that one example pin tweet so 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 me i said i talk about storytelling and critical thinking so my pin tweet is exactly it’s just a tiny little blog post little essay yeah exactly exactly so that’s your surface area um 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 uh 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 um or the blue check mark right that’s that’s another signal that that you can you can have or not have not fully in your control but that’s what counts towards conversion all right i like that um wait sean tell me about your blue checkmark journey didn’t you where do you say something an imessage your blue check uh 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 uh i don’t remember was something else okay so i remember you had a story about trying to get it never mind we’ll skip it you know if you remember it say it i i don’t remember it maybe maybe you’re mixing me up with somebody no that that actually might have been this it might even be the world’s worst story that might have been it’s never mind fair enough fair enough um okay i think we can we can uh leave it with kind of one last little piece and then we’ll we’ll wrap it up to go but the last thing i wanted to 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 how does he spend his time what 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 so the answer i actually know reflexively is 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 i don’t have a good 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 screenplay 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 requirements for actually pulling it off are how resourceful how creative and how sort of um uh well really those are the two key things resourceful and creative you can be and that do you have a good sense of taste 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 so i’ve always wanted to do it plus i just love the idea of being able to tell people stories that moves them it’s such a beautiful thing so what kind of movies are we talking like comedy action drama indie artistic you know documentaries what are you talking about well i’ll tell you i’ll give you four movies i absolutely love and i think it’ll answer the question so whiplash incredible fiction film um the prestige uh christopher nolan’s film about magicians uh and then a documentary on netflix which i’m so stoked i get to tell people this because some will actually go well 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 who’s that one about who’s who’s the sugarman okay so this is really tricky sean because the entire movie is a spoiler so i’ll just say i’ll just say this i’ll say it’s about a musician that disappeared often like the face of the earth where he went to and how he came back and uh [ ] you should cut that i’m getting spoilers i should believe that we gotta believe the enemy came back uh but the last thing i’ll say is a counterpart which is um this amazing show on amazon is my favorite tv show maybe ever counterpart’s amazing it’s it’s like a james bond type saying it’s brilliant okay i’ve never even heard of that uh i’m not pitching anything well sean i suck at this you’re great at things until they become very personal like when it’s like what do you really want to do in your heart of hearts you’re 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 so high how do i sell this right without ruining the the first time magic of experiencing it um you almost create a a pressure cooker for yourself here so um okay so what you want to do is you want to make you want to make a movie about uh you know searching for bobby fischer style right about you know kobayashi the uh the competitive eater it’s like greatness slash enigmas slash prodigies and like you know within it with a dash of sort of drama and mystery dude well i see i knew i knew i could rely on you yes well pitched um yeah i just love this stuff i just i love making it i love watching i love people i love seeing people watch it how about you i’m here i want to flip this around on you what would you do if i could do anything right now um yeah i would basically take like little three to five year arcs of my life that’s what i think i would do i’d 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 um stand-up comedy so i would try to create a set that actually is good and i would figure out how you do that i would learn the learn the trade i would go to shows i would do all that i would um i would coach a basketball team and i would try to like be a high school basketball coach and uh and just give it my all you know dude doing that i would um you know like one is 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 trying to write a script for a mock episode of the office uh which is a lot of fun and uh i would try to make a song like a hit song how do you make a catchy hit song that pops off uh i don’t care if it pops off as a tic toc meme or what but but that would be another one and so i would just do these little like i’ll try to write a book i would try to create a um 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 deep in them try to win and then i would come out the other side i would basically switch careers uh each time i do them i love that so you want to you want to break up your life into chapters and you want each to be a very creatively fulfilling thing where you’re like maximally using uh actually not necessarily because the high school basketball coach is a really cool one it’s a nice counter balance to the creative screenwriting thing yeah because it’s not all about making a song and making a stand-up set it’s like things that i just think would be really fun if you did them and 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 what’s stopping you from being a comedian in the next 15 years because what stop you from making the time to do it uh nothing i’m just occupied right now like i’m doing things i got a business i’m running and uh 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 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 and um 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 like that’s what i’m trying to do so i’m i’m doing little like you know tiptoe in the water but uh to do it for real the way i want i would um like i’m gonna clear my schedule for for like a two to two year period you won’t hear about me and then i come out the other side uh you know with some some story to tell you you know fun would be for all of us to watch you go do a set i would 100 show up live i would be the loudest laugher even if it was artificial i would 100 support you um dude that would be i kind of want to live through you sean it’s something i really want you to do almost selfishly but also i think you’ll just have a blast yeah i i i do and i will so so the other thing right now is i just had a kid uh two kids actually two babies and so i kind of feel like right now the main project is actually i’m trying to get the best shape of my life and i’m also learning how to be a dad like a new dad and so i kind of want to like not skip that part because uh like i already already made the baby so i already did the hard part now i just have to like stay there don’t don’t busy myself doing something else just stay here and actually do a dad bit 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 right like the struggles of being a dad right the struggles of losing weight yeah exactly so it almost seems like if you don’t act on it now it almost seems like this is the time capsule where you write down your experiences and your thoughts and it can become future material i’ll give you two so i was in the shower of the day and i wrote down two pieces uh two pieces of content and i texted it to some guy who is a comedian that is pretty famous comedian i don’t know him very well but we kind of we text her dm a little bit and 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 and uh it’s just they’d come to me while i was in the shower and one was receipts like i don’t care how old i get i got no [ ] strategy when it comes to if i’m at the cashier 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 and like nothing is a more panic moment than whatever the [ ] i do when they ask me do you want the receipt or not and why why do we do that why why does nobody have like any kind of consistency with that the second one uh what was the second one i sent him it was uh oh racism it’s like people think america is really racist um and there’s racism is a big problem and when you think of racist like if i say racism you know think of a racist what image pops into your head um the ku klux klan member right so you know you think of the the kkk like a white guy in a white hood or you think of like you know a white person in a maga hat or something like that that’s what people think of when they’re thinking of racist like who are all these racists in america right and uh and it just occurred to me like in reality nobody is 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 up tell you like you know some pretty like hey can i marry you know a person of this race and it’s like uh 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 uh and so i was like you know that’s a truth about the world that i believe that i was like okay these are nuggets i want to write down i don’t know how you craft those into jokes like what i’m telling you isn’t 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 learn 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 what’s the narrative structure for taking that observation and making it laugh out loud funny is it post like just a smirk on my face right and this is where it gets so fun to sit down and reverse engineer like dave chappelle um and this is actually one of the podcast episodes we did uh storytelling is you’re trying to reverse engineer what makes such a great storyteller and it’s like setting up the stakes the hero’s perspective all these cool ingredients the climax the twist right um and that to me is the joy that’s got to be the most fun part i think is you figuring how to craft it and then the people who totally buck the trend like mitch hedberg i actually you know he has a joke that’s sort of like your receipt joke but my point though first is he’s like not really doing the normal joke structure i don’t think i’m not an expert right but it’s still so funny because he has an extra layer the extra layer is phenomenally unique and like like like tickling delivery right and so 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 this joke going back to your receipts thing where he’s like uh people who hand out flyers 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 remember that always stuck in my head and like i can’t do that i can’t deliver it like he can right that’s pretty good he got me to laugh actually there’s a thing you there’s a thing you would put out in your uh storytelling thing by the way you you said oh here’s all these elements but the one that stood out that i actually was telling ben uh my right-hand man i was like hey uh 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 but like we could we can all do this more you were saying something the best storytellers when they tell a story it’s almost like they’re blowing their own mind again live they are they are surprising themselves again they’re they’re or in a comedian’s case they’re making themselves laugh they’re cracking themselves up and um 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 um if once you realize that you can’t unsee 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 can the way i realize that is there’s this person we interviewed on the pod called jason silva who for my money is the most charismatic person on youtube jason silva and 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 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 i’m about to talk about like i was for the very first time because all of his videos are like interesting philosophical concepts and so he sits there and he’s like oh yeah that’s what was so [ ] mind-blowing about it he like chews on it lets it sink in turns on the camera light goes red and now he relives that initial impression and then it’s it’s it’s infectious he is the person 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 their own excitement without any concern for like no self-consciousness like what are 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 it was totally spot on and if you’re going to like try one thing try that get yourself into the state where you remember what it felt so that you re you re you tell it with that 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 and uh i love that i thought that was a great great little hack great little deconstruction uh on your part um all right where should people so twitter is at julian julian.com your branding is kind of amazing amazing um where else should people follow you yeah sure so really it’s uh julian.com and then demandcurve.com is where uh all these ideas we chatted about that’s where they come from we teach people how to do growth marketing and that’s basically it and then if you want to see sean himself on my pod uh there’s brainzpodcast.com yeah that’s right i think i’m on two episodes of it so yes dude so we call you an honorary brain because cory and i love you so much for like all right even though it’s kind of 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 love you i love you and so thank you for coming on it’s awesome i appreciate you thank you so much uh all right sweet we’re out of here all right [Music] i feel peace i could rule the world i know i could be what i want to i put my law in it like my days off on