The 3 Cheat Codes Startups Use to Print Cash | My First Million #211 with 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? I feel like I could rule the world. I know I could be what I want to.

I put my all in it like no days off.

On the road, let's travel, never looking back.

I'm actually I'm surprised you haven't been on this before. I feel like, I feel like you're made for this in a way.

Maybe. I mean, I was doing pods for a while. Like, I was trying, like, purposely to get on podcasts for, like, IndieHackers. Yeah, for, like, getting the word out about The Mancurve. And 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 and not worry about it as much. And then it stopped being cringe, so now I'm all for it.

And how, how has it been since you launched the pod? So you launched, uh, what's it 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'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 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 8 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 what'd 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, Courtland from Indie Hackers, He's like, 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 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 tried 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 bat 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.

So 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 a kind of guest 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 the people who don't know, we are 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 'em walking around in their boxers. You know, you just, you're going to the shared bathroom together. There's no place to run. You're gonna be yourself over in enough time in the right group chat. And 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?

I think of myself as someone who loves to brainstorm, but I'm not as fixated on ideas, I think, as you are. I know you and Sam love the treasure hunt. You love the chase. Right. 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 founders. And so I picked out the 3 most interesting growth trends I could find, and I came with some examples of each of those trends. So there were like 3 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— 3 categories there we can jam on if you'd like.

Yeah, let's do that right now. Don't even say anything else besides that. I'm 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 1 is give customers an absolute no-brainer. So there's 2 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.

Right.

Another no-brainer way is make the friction so crazy 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. 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 anytime that your flight was delayed, uh, 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 flight 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 services 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, right? 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 $100 whenever you're delayed? The click-through rates on those ads were astronomical. The cost per click was super low.

Interesting.

And they were able to, yeah, to just skyrocket to millions in ad spend monthly very quickly. And let me give you a couple more examples, cuz this is actually something more than just service could do. Another interesting example is a recent YC company, and they're called Yotta. So what Yotta does is they'll take your money, just like a normal bank, they'll take your money, they'll manage 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 Yotta, they're going to give you tickets to this real lottery that they run every single week. They give away millions and you just, you're automatically entered if you're just a bank card.

No, a 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 giving, 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, is 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, $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. 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 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, uh, or Do Not Pay is another one that does this, right? They, 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 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 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 quick, like 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's going on here? And they just shut it. They like closed. 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, 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 cuz it's, 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 Clearview, 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 was possible, it just becomes a crazy growth wedge.

Yeah, that's— yeah. And there's You can basically create value out of thin air just by knowing the rules of connecting the dots. I feel this way about— there's some bigger businesses that do this principle. One for student loan 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 this one. I think CommonBond 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 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? And that can guide you for, 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 of 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 I was mentioning of super low friction. So this, we're still under this category of giving customers an absolute no-brainer reason to— exactly. How do you become a no-brainer where it's like, I don't have to think about this? So second subcategory. 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. So that's brilliant because the Chrome extension is like a 2-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, verify 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— for person just forgets to open you ever again. But with Chrome extension, they're opening Chrome, they already have that habit, You just get to tag along like a little, you know, like the 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 2 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's browsing, and eventually when the time is right and you can deliver real value, like contextually, because like This is gonna be a monster coupon I could give the customer. We're gonna save them $1,000.

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 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, a 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 it becomes very sticky if that data is valuable.

Um, which, which Chrome extensions— which Chrome extensions do you have installed? I have SimilarWeb. 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 MetaMask, which is an Ethereum wallet or a crypto wallet. And then I have Adblock. Those are the 3 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, uh, TWE M-E-X, like Tweemex.

I like that, uh, 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— we used to— X-ray 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 it just pop out a thing that basically tells me about that person? It's like, here's, you know, Here's their Twitter profile, you can click follow. Here's some things about them, here's the wiki or whatever. So it's like, you know, the quick who is this on any name on any website, that's one. The other is Facebook ads. So I'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 wanna go to any product's website, 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 a 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 to vice, 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, and 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 follow 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 going to pay a bit more attention. Because when you do the educational route, really with any tool, like, hey, let's give X-ray vision, let people know, like Amazon's X-ray vision to 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, um, 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 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." And maybe there's a way to kind of like use that roundup model to get you to own instead of just being a customer and not own any of the underlying company, 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, 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, the, 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 like $97. You wanna roll this up, get the extra $3 in Robinhood itself?

Yes.

That's, that's super clever. I love that. All right.

So that was, that was theme 1. Let's go to theme 2.

Sure. So let's see here. Okay. So this next category is, does encouraging people to use your product naturally encourage other people they know to use the product also? This is commonly called product-led growth, but we can break it down in a more interesting way. So let me start by giving you some examples. Okay, so Slack 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 coworkers. And then Slack did something super brilliant. Called Slack Connect, where now I can invite non-coworkers, so people who exist at different companies, 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 whatever service contract we got going on. So 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 I don't need to bribe you with $5 to invite your friends because you're going to do it anyway.

Right.

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 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 through 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 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 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, the costs 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 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, right? 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— like, I'm subject to it. I can't stop seeing this. CryptoPunks. Oh, actually, actually, that is— that's better than my example because they're, they're, they're making it their—

like, people make it their profile, right? So CryptoPunks 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 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, and one person started doing it, and 2, 3, 4, and then more started doing it. And so now I can't use Twitter without seeing fucking CryptoPunks and reminding myself how I missed out on CryptoPunks. 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 gonna see it. And it's also identity building. Like, if you, if you break apart what makes for brand loyalty, like, why would you want to put a CryptoPunk as your Twitter avatar?

Right.

Or why would you want to wear Nike shoes? It's because you actually feel a sense of prestige. There's either social signaling, you're in the club, or you're signaling you have good taste, right? Uh, if 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 or for worse. For sure. And just because there's another CryptoPunk competitor, it doesn't necessarily mean that they can just take over through better marketing, because better marketing has a hard— will hit a hard wall against tribalism and a building identity around something that people want.

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 CryptoPunks or Bored Apes, right? Bored Ape Yacht 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 2 to 3 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 going to say Mercury is one of these. Where do you see Mercury billboarded?

Yeah, Mercury is interesting because— well, let me just back up here and wrap my head around. Okay. Yeah, yeah. Okay. So yeah, Mercury is a great example of billboarding because it's a modern and hypergrowth 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. 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 oversampling. Which I might be using the 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? Yeah. And so as a result, these VCs, when they're asked by their own portfolio companies, hey, should we use Mercury? They're like, oh yeah, everyone uses it. It's like the de facto. But is it really? Probably not.

That's how I feel about Macs, right? You go to Silicon Valley, you just see Macs everywhere, and then you You're in the filter bubble of everybody uses Macs, 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 like 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 2. So we got trend 1, no-brainer, no, no, no-brainer, no-loss offers.

Cool.

Uh, trend 2 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. And so everybody that they use the product with sees you, sees you, sees you, until it becomes a sort of like, you know, a self— it's a free ad basically that you're getting through your own customers. What's number 3?

Yeah, you got it. So number 3 is self-liquidating funnels, which I know is sort of a silly, 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. So let's break down this idea of self-liquidating 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 8 months before someone buys from you after you paid $30 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 $5 a month as opposed to $200 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, uh, people will buy much more reflexively, like they're in the checkout aisle of a grocery store and it's cheaper. So lesser consideration purchase. And because more will— hopefully, there will be a higher rate of purchase and a much quicker turnaround to purchase. It could make the economics of your Facebook ads, for example, suddenly totally viable.

Right.

So imagine you're doing this just to break even. You're not trying to make money off it. The question is, what is the point of this? And this is where it becomes so clever. Is this a giant excuse? To print email addresses. Because if I can now capture emails using a self-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, 1,000, 100,000 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, or 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 are like potentially available to you cheat codes, albeit potentially very distracting ones. So there's a lot of things 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, 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, It was 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. And so you send them that thing for free, grab their email address. They're happy because, wow, I got, he overdelivered 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, you know, run paid ads to a free ebook and then grab the lead there, or a $5, you know, just pay shipping. So I think that, 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, $7 and it's like shipping is $5, the cost of goods is $2. And you think you're getting the item for free. What do you have to lose? All you got to 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 going to 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. 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, YC 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 a $199 course.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So yeah, so I just try to keep them totally separate. Anyway, so yeah, 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 through the thing you're passionate about. When I see very rich people start podcasts and still run ads on their podcast, unless you're doing it to pay employees, awesome. But if you're doing it because you're trying to make an extra buck, it seems like it totally defeats the purpose of why you're doing it.

Let's call them out. Reid Hoffman. You are a billionaire. You created LinkedIn. You sold it for $20 billion. Why does your podcast have ads? And 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 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 good stuff. But if I do something like a course where 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, okay, 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, uh, 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, um, 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, 6 to 8 grand a month. Um, okay, cool. So if I sell, you know, if I do $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, uh, a greedy or selfish person. Uh, 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 going to go buy, you know, uh, you know, go buy a bunch of CryptoPunks, or I'm going to put it all in on this penny stock, and then I'm going to 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, 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. Um, I see it a bit differently, and my different way is not a better way. My different way is I see what I spend my time on outside of earning a salary through demandcurve.com in the context of a craftsperson. So 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. 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, on Apple TV Plus or whatever, of 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 hear him figuring out this one guitar lick that became, you know, Love Yourself or whatever. It becomes one of these like hits today. And you can see him just trying to like humming and being like, Oh, what if I said, you know, blah 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 is if they made no money from that, I know I— in the deep in my bones, I know not all of these musicians that are successful, but some of them, like John Mayer, they're just obsessed with doing this. And the reward is, can they come up with something awesome?

So, um, 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 it— 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 can 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, okay, well, actually, have I told you my thoughts on what goes into making awesome content like this podcast?

No, break it down.

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. And when I was going through all the content creators that I see the most love profess for, like Wait But Why, 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 waitbutwhy.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. 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 to try to 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, MrBeast, 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 to 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 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's 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 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, 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 2 tweets a month. Um, 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. Like, wait, but why? I think he didn't post anything for like 8 months. You know what I mean? So I just want to sort of encourage people on this momentary platform of My First Million that really beautiful things happen when you can rise above this content overload that we live in. If you focus more so on quality, the 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. Anyway, that's my little rant on quality versus quantity. The reason I bring this up is because your podcast is consistently good. I think the brilliance of it, the reason it's possible is because you found a format which the threshold, like I was referring to the YouTube examples, is achievable. 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, uh, light touch, high frequency. So, um, you—

my—

I'm comfort. I'm like Friends. There's a million episodes you can go through and they're all all right. Or your Game of Thrones, and there's like, no, there's 8 episodes that you can 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, or focus on frequency. And in the middle is tough because if you try to be high frequency, high quality, you lose. If you try to be low frequency, low quality, you lose. If you try to be, right? So it's like, 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. So I hit you up and I was like, hey, I wanna redo my Twitter bio. And I feel like you've probably put some thought into this. And you were like, funny enough, I have. Here's some thoughts. And you gave me this audio note, this 2-minute iMessage audio note that was fantastic. Fire. And I was like, this is such a Julian thing. So, so share, share with people kind of what you've seen or how you break that down though. The whole idea of bio, which sounds really lighthearted, 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 got to go write one. And then you sit down and you're like, fuck, I have so much to say that I have nothing to say at the same time. And 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 your thoughts on bios.

Sure. So this isn't a hard and fast rule. It's just what I think makes the most sense. I'd love to hear a better idea, which is write your bio to justify why people should follow you. By the way, let's 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 bio 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 stats. You know, and it's, and it's like, this doesn't tell me anything. It's just virtue signaling in, in, to some respect. Right. And I don't know why I should care. So the second part of this is, is not just why they should follow, but also what is the minimal amount of social proof to justify why you talking about the topics you're saying you'll talk about, you actually are qualified to do so. Right.

So 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 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 on 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 headshot, I'm seeing my pinned tweet. So let's just talk about that. Let's use that one example, pinned tweet. So your pinned 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 pinned tweet is delivering on. Like, for me, I said I talk about storytelling and critical thinking, so my pinned 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, it can increase conversion, you know?

Yeah. So you, uh, and then you have like 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 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 could, you could 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 check mark journey. Didn't you already say something in iMessage about 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 there 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 don't remember it. Maybe, maybe you're mixing me up with somebody.

No, that, that actually might have been this. It might have been the world's worst story. That might have been it. So never mind.

Fair enough, fair enough. Um, okay, I think we can, we can, uh, leave it with kind of like one last little piece, and then we'll, we'll, we'll wrap it up to go. But The last thing I wanted 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 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?

So the answer, actually, no, reflexively is movies. 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 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. And 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 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 as 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 4 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, not enough people will listen that it'll get some, you know, 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 the Sugar Man one about?

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 off like the face of the earth, um, and where he went to and how he came back. And, uh, Fuck, you should cut that because now I'm giving spoilers.

You should bleep that.

You gotta bleep the "and he came back." But the last thing I'll say is Counterpart, which is, um, it's an amazing show on Amazon. It's my favorite TV show maybe ever. Counterpart's amazing. It's like a James Bond type thing. It's brilliant.

Okay, I've never even heard of that.

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, ah, 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 of how do I sell this right without ruining the first-time magic of experiencing it? You almost create a pressure cooker for yourself here. So, okay, so what you wanna do is you wanna make a movie about, you know, Searching for Bobby Fischer style, right? About, you know, Kobayashi the competitive eater It's like greatness/enigmas/prodigies and like, you know, with a dash of sort of drama and mystery.

Dude, well, I'd say I knew I could rely on you. Yes, well pitched. Yeah, I just love this stuff. I just, I love making it. I love watching it. I love people. I love seeing people watch it. How about you? I'm curious. I wanna flip this around on you. What would you do?

If I could do anything right now?

Yeah.

I would basically take like little 3 to 5 year arcs of my life. This is what I think I would do. I'd take 3 to 5 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 standup 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 trade. I would go to shows. I would do all that. 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, 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 TikTok meme or what, but But that would be another one. And so I would just do these little, like, I would try to write a book, I would try to create a brand of a drink or a chips bag or something like that. I would just take these like little mini challenges that are 3 to 5-year sprints. I would go really deep in them, try to win, and then I would come out the other side and I would basically switch careers each time I do them.

I love that. So you wanna break up your life into chapters and you want each to be a very creatively fulfilling thing where you're, like maximally using, um, actually not necessarily, because the high school basketball coach is a really cool one. It's a nice counterbalance 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, um, 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's stopping 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 clear everything off to 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 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 doing little, like, you know, tiptoe in the water. But to do it for real the way I want, I would, like, I'm gonna clear my schedule for, like, a 2-year period. You won't hear about me. And then I come out the other side, you know, with some story to tell.

You know how fun it would be for all of us to just 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. This is 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 in 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, I 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. So I'm, I'm, yeah, I'll give you two.

So I was in the shower the other 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 a pretty famous comedian. I don't know him very well, but we kind of, we text or 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 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 fucking 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 fuck I do when they ask me, do you want the receipt or not? And why, like, 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 racist, 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 Ku Klux, 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 as opposed to 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 out how to craft it. And then the people who totally buck the trend, like Mitch Hedberg, He has a joke that's sort of like your receipt joke. But my point though first is he's 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 tickling delivery, right? And 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, 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 was pretty good. He got me to laugh. Actually, there's a thing you— there's a thing you had put out in your 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, Julian had this thing that I think is spot on, and we should— like, I think I do this to an extent, I think you should do it more, but like, 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 in there, 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 came— the way I realized 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 him, I'm 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 fucking 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 enwrapped 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 gonna like try one thing, try that. Get yourself into the state where you remember what it felt like so that you re— you re— you tell it with that same emotion that you felt when it happened. If you 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, 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 @Julian, uh, julian.com. Your branding is, is kind of 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, there's brainspodcast.com.

Yeah, that's right. I think I'm on 2 episodes of it.

So yes, dude. So we call you an honorary brain because Corin and I love you so much. We're like, all right, even though it's kind of weird to have one person twice in the first 6 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. All right, sweet. We're out of here.

All right, peace.