Pod Insights Lenny's Podcast Growth tactics, retention strategies, and becoming a better writer | Julian Shapiro (Demand Curve, Hyper, Webflow, TechCrunch) About this episode Julian Shapiro is widely known as the founder of Demand Curve, where he’s helped thousands of companies figure out their growth strategy. He also wrote the growth marketing column at TechCrunch, was CMO at Webflow, and even created an animation engine called Velocity that’s now used in apps like Uber and WhatsApp. In today’s episode, Julian dives deep on product-led acquisition (PLA) and why he believes it’s the best way to grow your company. He shares specific marketing strategies for growth and retention and speaks about his framework for creating novel, engaging content, and how to choose topics for that content. He also discusses a framework called the Curiosity Faucet, inspired by prolific creators such as Ed Sheeran, John Mayer, Taylor Swift, and Neil Gaiman, to help you unlock your own creativity.
—
Where to find Julian Shapiro:
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/Julian
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/julian-shapiro/
• Website: https://www.julian.com/
—
Where to find Lenny:
• Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/lennysan
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/
—
Thank you to our wonderful sponsors for making this episode possible:
• Amplitude: https://amplitude.com/
• Flatfile: https://www.flatfile.com/lenny
• Eppo: https://www.geteppo.com/
—
Referenced:
• Paul Graham’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/paulg
• Julian’s guide on startup growth channels: https://www.julian.com/guide/startup/growth-channels
• Topic selection: https://www.julian.com/guide/write/ideas
• Product-led acquisition: https://www.julian.com/guide/startup/product-led-acquisition
• Novelty: https://www.julian.capital/growth-strategy/content-marketing
• Julian’s example of counter-narrative novelty: https://twitter.com/julian/status/1348001396277186560 https://twitter.com/julian/status/1348001396277186560?lang=en
• Julian’s example of counterintuitive novelty: https://twitter.com/julian/status/1348001397753532416
• On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction: https://www.amazon.com/Writing-Well-Classic-Guide-Nonfiction/dp/0060891548/
• Neil Gaiman Teaches the Art of Storytelling: https://www.masterclass.com/classes/neil-gaiman-teaches-the-art-of-storytelling
• Ed Sheeran, Songwriter: https://music.apple.com/us/music-movie/songwriter/1411353855
• John Mayer describes his songwriting process: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9cNRDWEXnrQ
—
In this episode, we cover:
(03:42) Julian’s background
(04:46) Why Julian hasn’t been tweeting frequently
(07:43) Advice for building a Twitter following
(09:53) The main reason Julian creates handbooks
(11:33) The difference between e-handbooks and newsletters
(13:25) What is product-led acquisition?
(16:20) The categories of product-led acquisition
(22:31) What is billboarding, and how can you take advantage of it?
(25:56) UGC—leveraging user-generated content for free advertising
(29:33) Strategies for retaining users
(38:36) How to keep novelty high in writing
(45:50) Julian’s framework for choosing writing topics
(54:35) The creativity faucet—how to unclog your pipes and get it going
—
Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [email protected] mailto:[email protected] .
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.lennysnewsletter.com/subscribe https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2
Transcript 11,682 words · 4 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Speaker 00 Why do good ideas arrive after the bad ideas are empty? It's because when you've gone through a bunch of bad ideas, your brain, your mind starts reflexively identifying what elements are causing the badness. Then it becomes way better at avoiding those bad elements. And you become way better at pattern matching the novel ideas with way greater intuition. And so like most creators are resisting their bad ideas. So if you've sat down, scribbled a few thoughts in a blank document and just walked away because you weren't struck with gold, then you never actually finished the creative process. No, there's no way you would have come up with gold.
0:36 Lenny Rachitsky? Welcome to Lenny's Podcast. I'm Lenny and my goal here is to help you get better at the craft of building and growing products. I interview world-class product leaders and growth experts to learn from their hard-won experiences building and scaling today's most successful companies. Today, my guest is Julian Shapiro. I actually spent a bunch of time introducing the wondrous Julian at the beginning of the episode, so instead, let me just share some of the things that we talk about. We get into a framework he calls product-led acquisition, which is work that has come out of his working with thousands of companies, helping to figure out their growth strategies. We get into ways to increase your product's retention. Then we talk a lot about writing, the importance of novelty in your writing, how to choose a topic when you plan to write, and then a framework that Julian calls the creativity
1:21 Lenny Rachitsky? faucet. Julian is such a fascinating human and I'm really excited to bring you this episode. And so with that, I bring you Julian Shapiro.
1:33 Lenny Rachitsky? I'm excited to chat with my friend, John Cutler, from podcast sponsor Amplitude. Hey, John.
1:37 Speaker 02 Hey, Lenny. Excited to be here.
1:38 Lenny Rachitsky? John, give us a behind the scenes at Amplitude. When most people think of Amplitude, they think of product analytics. But now you're getting into experimentation and even just launched a CDP. What's the thought process there?
1:50 Speaker 02 Well, we've always thought of Amplitude as being about supporting the full product loop. Think, collect data, inform bets, ship experiments, and learn. That's the heart of growth to us. So the big aha was seeing how many customers were using Amplitude to analyze experiments, do segments for outreach, and send data to other destinations. Experimenting CDP came out of listening to and observing our customers.
2:11 Lenny Rachitsky? And supporting growth and learning has always been Amplitude's core focus, right?
2:15 Speaker 02 Yeah, so Amplitude tries to meet customers where they are. We just launched starter templates and have a great scholarship program for startups. There's never been a more important time for growth.
2:24 Lenny Rachitsky? Absolutely agree. Thanks for joining us, John, and head to amplitude.com to get started.
2:30 Lenny Rachitsky? Hey Ashley, Head of Marketing at Flatfile. How many B2B SaaS companies would you estimate need to import CSV files from their customers?
2:38 Speaker 03 At least 40%.
2:39 Lenny Rachitsky? And how many of them screw that up? And what happens when they do?
2:43 Speaker 03 Well, based on our data, about a third of people will consider switching to another company after just one bad experience during onboarding. So if your CSV importer doesn't work right, which is super common, considering customer files are chock full of unexpected data and formatting, they'll leave.
3:02 Lenny Rachitsky? I am 0% surprised to hear that. I've consistently seen that improving onboarding is one of the highest leveraged opportunities for both sign-up conversion and increasing long-term retention. Getting people to your aha moment more quickly and reliably is so incredibly important.
3:17 Speaker 03 Totally. It's incredible to see how our customers like Square, Spotify, and Zora are able to grow their businesses on top of Flatfile. It's because flawless data onboarding acts like a catalyst to get them and their customers where they need to go faster.
3:34 Lenny Rachitsky? If you'd like to learn more or get started, check out Flatfile at flatfile.com/lenny.
3:44 Lenny Rachitsky? Julian Shapiro is what I'd call a polymath of the internet. He's an amazing writer, marketer and growth mind, investor, community builder, podcaster, tweeter. He's also an expert on building muscle. He's maybe most known for being the founder of DemandCurve, a YC startup that trains people on growth and marketing. Prior to that, he was a part-time columnist at TechCrunch. He was also VP of Marketing at Webflow, which I had no idea about. He also created a JavaScript web animation engine that is used by Uber and WhatsApp and Samsung and thousands of companies. Currently, he is a full-time investor with his own fund and as a partner at Hyper. He's also one of the most hilarious and generous humans that I know. And so with that, Julian, welcome to the podcast.
4:28 Speaker 00 This is the greatest honor of my life. Thank you.
4:31 Lenny Rachitsky? Wow, crying.
4:32 Speaker 00 Crying from that intro. Very nice of you.
4:35 Lenny Rachitsky? That's the idea. Wow. This is the greatest honor of my life. So we match.
4:39 Speaker 00 Excellent. Excellent. It'll cancel each other out and we'll see how interesting this is.
4:43 Lenny Rachitsky? That's right. It's a lot of hype. So I know you have something like 250,000 Twitter followers. You're very good at Twitter, but I've noticed that you've only tweeted three times this past year. What is going on there?
4:57 Speaker 00 Yeah, so there's a few things in parallel. One is a lot of people are writing threads and I found them to be very cringe. They're like these fortune cookie threads, like here's 21 ways to, you know, rework your startup or something. I found them all cringe and what they actually do when you write that stuff is they attract people who think that's valuable information. And then they cause people who you actually want to follow you to unfollow you. And I remember just seeing people unfollow me when, early days of threads when like no one was doing them and I was experimenting. And they were like pissing off people that I actually cared to have dialogue with. And so I kind of lost the momentum and enthusiasm for writing that sort of stuff.
5:39 Speaker 00 And now I'm only writing anything when it's basically a reflection or a condensed version of a blog post that I happen to be writing for my website. So I know it's high quality. I know it's original. I know it's thoughtful. It's not for the clickbait. So that was part of it. The other thing is that it's kind of like two, here's a mental model for thinking about the quality of your followers. You have people who follow you for the quality of your brain and you have people who follow you for sort of you being a glorified curator. So if they're following you for being a curator, they're sort of what I call labor followers. They're following you for the work that you're doing where you're finding cool, funny memes, you're posting cool, funny jokes, you're doing these fortune cookie threads.
6:23 Speaker 00 In contrast, if they're following you for your mind, which is category one. It means they're following you for the original thoughts and insights and takes that you have on the world. And so someone like Paul Graham, you know, the founder of Y Combinator is doing original takes. He's not trying to write threads for the sake of gaining followers. He's trying to write interesting novel ideas. And when he does that, he strengthens the affinity that his followers have for him and his mind because wow, that was an original, interesting take. And so they're following you for your mind, not for the labor you're doing, putting together a virtual BuzzFeed account on Twitter. And when people follow you for your mind, when they're mind followers, not labor followers, higher affinity means more loyalty, means they pay closer attention to what you're saying. And if you actually try to get them to do something with you, you have an event offline,
7:07 Speaker 00 there's something you're selling, there's a cause you care about, they're way more likely to indulge. Whereas if they're following you for your labor, you're interchangeable with all these other meme accounts and there's no real affinity for you as the individual. So I just care more about the quality of the follower than I do the volume.
7:22 Lenny Rachitsky? I love that. That's such a good reminder not to just focus on follower, follower, follower. I'm curious if someone, so you have a lot of followers at this point and it's just like so valuable to have Twitter followers, I've learned. For me, anytime I have a question about anything, I just ask and I get so many amazing answers from people. And there's this, there's this power to having a large following. I'm curious, while we're on this topic, if you're just starting out on Twitter, do you have any advice for someone that's just thinking about building their following?
7:50 Speaker 00 I mean, generally speaking, threads, despite everything I've said, are the primary way to get followers. So there's a reason why people do threads as opposed to single tweets, because when people get exposure to a thread, they're basically getting exposure to the length of thoughts equivalent to you having sent a newsletter edition or a blog post in many cases. And the more exposure, the more surface area you have, the more you give people of your brain in a single tweet, the more they're able to confirm that what you're sharing is actually a consistency from you. Whereas if you just tweet one clever thing, they're like, oh, that's probably just a drop in the bucket. Who knows if that person can consistently generate clever stuff. But in a long thread, where it's 30 tweets and they're all good, they're like, whoa, this person is a machine.
8:35 Speaker 00 If I follow them reliably, I'll get more great stuff. So it reaffirms to readers they should follow you, which is why threads trigger more follows. So yeah, basically you do want to do threads, frankly. And That's the back one of it. Threads with very clickbaity opening tweets is kind of how it works. You can also port followers over from other places like your website and newsletter, just to start giving yourself an initial sample audience through which the threads can actually take fire, pretty much.
9:02 Lenny Rachitsky? Awesome. I wasn't expecting to go into Twitter a strategy, but this is interesting because you're really good at it. And as you've said, your stuff is like actually very thoughtful. It's not just a thirsty Twitter thread trying to find followers and retweets. And so, thanks for sharing that.
9:18 Speaker 00 Yeah. Well, it sort of started that way because me and a few other friends of mine, I felt like we were the first people doing threads at scale. And then when we realized what it turned into, that's when we just stopped.
9:28 Lenny Rachitsky? I love that. Yeah, I know what you mean about these cringey Twitter threads. Anyway, what I want to do is instead of asking a bunch of random questions is to focus on five big topics and kind of go deep on these topics. And these are topics that are maybe most popular of the stuff that you've put out across your handbooks and writing and courses and things like that. And also things that I've found to be most interesting. Does that sound good?
9:51 Speaker 00 Yeah, I would love to.
9:53 Lenny Rachitsky? Cool. So first little context, you write these super in-depth handbooks on a bunch of different topics, on growth and writing and muscle building and things like that. First of all, could you just explain what these handbooks are and why you create them?
10:04 Speaker 00 They're forcing functions for me to hold myself accountable and to be thorough when learning something for my own benefit. That's all they are. So basically, if I want to go learn growth or writing well or some other topic, I will go ahead and do a ton of research, read everything I can get my hands on, do a ton of experimentation to try to build a set of novel insights that you couldn't find from other people's research, hopefully. And then the next stage is try to make it as concise and actionable as possible so that I can reference it for my own selfish benefit. So like, here's my guidebook for myself on writing better blog posts, for example. And then by the time I've done that work, what usually happens is it's only like, I'm going to make up a number here, an extra 30 hours of work
10:48 Speaker 00 to make it palatable and digestible for the public. So if I've done all this work privately, why not make it accessible publicly? And at that point, It winds up being acquisition fodder for essentially building an audience and distributing my thoughts further. So that's, that's why I do that. But the thing that I pride myself on with them is by no means are they thoroughly unique. But in every one, there's a lot of original stuff folks on average have never heard of before. And that's what I'm proud of is coming up with those insights between the lines that make that thing, whatever the topic is, much more approachable. So like I've succeeded in my view, if I've made something that people often mistakenly think of as overwhelmingly complex, very simple for them to follow. And I think that's where the dopamine hit comes from for them.
11:34 Lenny Rachitsky? Well, my experience, you definitely hit the nail on the head with the handbooks you put out. And it's an interesting middle ground between a newsletter and in a book. And it's cool to just have a digital way of doing that of just kind of consolidating a bunch of ideas and going really in depth, but not, not having to write a book.
11:49 Speaker 00 Well, speaking of the contract there, so you have a very large newsletter that goes very in depth. And that arguably is a more valuable asset than my handbooks for someone building an audience, because the newsletter has this built in form of retention recurrence where they get pinged in their inbox when you have new content. And then it becomes a referable thing and people refer each other and then they sign up for the newsletter. And so I do love the emphasis on long form being newsletter. But the reason I do it on the web is, and we'll talk about the trade offs in a second, is it's much more digestible and referenceable. Like no one's going to go refer to the epic guide in their email inbox. It's very hard to navigate for building muscle or something. So one is
12:31 Speaker 00 a UX decision. Two, I get the SEO traffic, which you don't. And then three, it's basically a living asset that I can keep updating over time. It's not stuck in someone's inbox and getting printed out. One of the things that might separate me from other writers, at least many other writers online, is I'm spending as many hours going back and rewriting old blog posts and handbooks as I am writing new ones. So if you come back to anything I've written over the course of a year, a year and a half, it'll be updated because I consider everything I write to be evergreen and I avoid writing things that I feel like are a drop in the pan, just like talking about a trend or something, something very newsy. I avoid that altogether. I'm just interested in writing stuff that'll stay for, be relevant for a long time.
13:13 Lenny Rachitsky? I didn't know that. That is very cool. I love that you do that. You should make that clear. That's so interesting that this is not stale. Last updated last week. I don't know if you already do that.
13:20 Speaker 00 Yeah, no, I actually don't. I probably should. People have complained to me that I haven't, so maybe I will one day.
13:25 Lenny Rachitsky? All right. We got a good idea out of this. If nothing else.
13:27 Speaker 00 There we go.
13:28 Lenny Rachitsky? Okay, so the first idea that I want to chat about is something that you call product-led acquisition. And I believe it's the most popular page in any of your handbooks. And it comes from you working with thousands of companies to help them figure out their growth strategies through demand curve. And so I'm curious to hear what this concept is and how people can use it to help their products grow.
13:50 Speaker 00 Yeah, so product-led acquisition to your audience will be more commonly known as product-led growth. But I think product-led growth is a bit of a misnomer. So it's often used, you know, to basically refer to SaaS companies who are using self-serve sales funnels where a salesperson isn't required, right? It's like bypassing sales and allowing the product to grow itself. That's fine, but I think the term we really care about as growth marketers is product-led acquisition, meaning the use of the product grows the product. So for example, if I'm using PayPal and I'm sending a thousand dollars to somebody else, there is no way they will not create a PayPal account to accept the thousand dollars.
14:31 Speaker 00 So by me trying to use PayPal, it is in its everyday intention and me getting value out of it to settle a debt, I'm automatically enticing someone else, very strongly so, to also become PayPal customer. That's product-led acquisition. And so there's a few different categories I've identified. And I think the reason why people like this part of this article I wrote is because it's, in my opinion, the absolute best way to grow any startup. So if your startup can grow via product-led acquisition, not all can, maybe some are enterprise-based and all they're going to make work is sales. Then it is by far the best way to grow because zero marginal costs have users invite other users. It's scalable. It creates network graphs typically and has compounding effects there in terms of both
15:16 Speaker 00 moats and the ability to acquire more customers quickly. And basically to the point I just mentioned, it's basically viral. The other interesting thing here is there are far fewer dependencies. So let's say your, your company primarily grows via content and SEO. Well, you're at the mercy of Google releasing an algorithmic update every couple, you know, let's say twice a year, which occasionally will absolutely tank your traffic. And most people know what I mean by that. If they've experienced that, it's awful. Or if you're a paid acquisition led company as opposed to a content led acquisition company, and meaning you're running Facebook ads and let's just stick with Facebook for now, Facebook and Instagram. You're also at the mercy of the volatility of CPMs. And whatever weird updates Facebook introduces or whatever targeting options they suddenly
15:59 Speaker 00 remove, your entire acquisition strategy is anchored on something that is completely out of your hands and very volatile. So product led acquisition is like the better you craft your product and the incentive structures for existing users inviting other users, that's entirely in your control and the better you grow. So that's the quick context. Now I'll go into some examples. So we started with the example of, actually, one thing, one thing that came to mind that I love is Paul Graham, who we mentioned earlier, Paul Graham from YC has this quote, which is, "Don't start a startup where you need to go through someone else to get users." And that always really resonated with me. So here are the categories of product led acquisition that I've identified.
16:44 Speaker 00 So number one, like I mentioned, is users inviting other users to settle debts. So if I'm going to pay you money I owe you for splitting dinner on Venmo or a business expense that I'm paying you for, you're my vendor on PayPal, or anything that's allowing me to just pay you money I owe you and I have to use a product to do so, whoever is collecting the money from me is going to make an account on that product if necessary to claim their hard earned money. So almost guaranteed way for you to have user led growth, product led growth. Now, it doesn't have to be money. It can be settling a debt of like an NFT, for example. Someone buys an NFT from you on OpenSea. And the only way for them to receive their NFT, I'm just making this up right now,
17:25 Speaker 00 is to also have an OpenSea account or a wallet that's specific to that collection. Again, making this up. The point is, if you're settling the debt of something you owe someone and they must make an account to capture the thing owed, they're going to sign up. Okay, so that's category one. Category two is when you're inviting someone to join the product you're using to partake in a conversation that they otherwise cannot access. So like, why does Telegram, WhatsApp, iMessage, all these chat apps, Discord, grow so quickly? Pretty obviously, because if you and your little clique of friends are having your conversation in that app, then the person who's also in your real-life friend group
18:08 Speaker 00 but who hasn't yet installed the app has to install the app in order to have the conversation with you. So inviting people to critical social or business conversations in an app is the other way that you can nearly guarantee you'll grow very quickly from product-led acquisition. The business version of this is Slack. You sign up for Slack, you invite all your friends or all your coworkers, then you even invite all your vendors via Slack Connect. So Slack Connect was a brilliant Slack feature where they're saying, "Hey, we're now going to encourage you to invite people who aren't using Slack, who are outside of your work." And that, I don't know how that's done for them as a feature, but in theory, it's a brilliant way to expand the surface area for inviting people via product-led acquisition. So just to recap where we are real quick.
18:53 Speaker 00 One of the ways of acquiring customers is to encourage existing users to pay other people or to encourage them to come into your app to have conversation that's only happening on the app. So if I'm a startup, if I'm a product person, I'm roadmapping my product. I will think, is there anything in my product conducive to either one of those two functionalities? Settling debts or can I introduce chat within my product? And if so, you might be cracking open an amazing channel. And so when I tell people about product-led acquisition, I'm usually doing it in the context of... Let's rethink your product feature roadmap to prioritize features that facilitate these things that can lead to explosive growth.
19:36 Speaker 00 So I'll pause if there's anything you want to dive in there, but I have like three more categories we could chat about if you want to, that three more ways of doing PLA.
19:44 Lenny Rachitsky? Yeah, absolutely. I just want to lob a question in over there as you're going through these to maybe touch on this. So most founders would love to find a way to grow through morality and invites and all the things you're talking about. I find that it's often hard to kind of lop onto something they're doing if it's not a natural fit. And so as you're going through this, I'd love to know, how often have you seen startups succeed adding something like this when their app is not like a money exchange app or a chat app? I'm curious how often it works to add something like this when your app's kind of some else, if that makes sense?
20:17 Speaker 00 Yeah, well, the real lesson is don't start a company if you have no idea how it's going to grow. Now, that's not categorically true for all startups, like it's irrelevant for deep tech and biotech and climate tech and all that stuff. But for a lot of these like people starting SaaS companies where they intend to grow very quickly among B2B customers or B2C, like the, the real point of what I'm saying is if you have three ideas before you as a founder and one of them lends itself to product acquisition really beautifully, then lean in that direction, perhaps if you think that growth is the key differentiator between them for what's going to lead to success. So it's like make life easier on yourself because if we're relying so heavily on SEO and content, which is extremely saturated, or paid acquisition, meaning ad channels, which are extremely saturated, especially
21:01 Speaker 00 if we have low LTVs where we can't really tolerate the volatility of paid ac or just the cost in general of those CACs, then like we have to be thinking more strategically at the product level. So it's less about tacking it on later, but sometimes this will work brilliantly if it's very organic. So when we cover my next category, we'll actually see some examples of how you can pack it on more seamlessly. But the other response to your question, which is a great question, is people mistake product acquisition for frill programs, which it is not because The referral programs are attacked on incentive, trying to give people something to encourage them to invite because they otherwise are not inviting.
21:42 Speaker 00 Whereas PLA, as I've currently defined it, is through the natural use of the product, you're inherently, you get more value when you invite others. You settle your debt with the payment recipient. You get to have a better conversation because now your friend Jack is part of the conversation. So you don't have to incentivize them with anything artificial, with any rewards. And referral programs generally are not exciting to me because you're usually trying to, again, you're like self-selecting for folks who just want the reward very often. And then the people they invite might also just want the dual-ended reward and they're not even here for the app really, and then they can bounce. And then they don't invite other people typically. It's just, it's not very, it doesn't have the same compounding sticky retentive nature of PLA. So I'm not a fan of it. If you can make it work though, fantastic.
22:26 Speaker 00 Anyway, third category is what I call billboarding. And so billboarding is this idea that the use of the product is inherently visible to people around you. And so the product advertises itself. A few examples, actually where I got the term from is I was looking at these billboards above the highway in San Francisco, where I was seeing the company that actually hosts the billboards advertise their own logo on the billboard while also showing you whatever ad they were being paid to show. So they were using their own surface area to advertise themselves. Another example is like when you're seeing an ad network across the web, like Google Matter Ads perhaps, and it says like brought to you by Google Ads.
23:11 Speaker 00 They're using their own surface area to advertise themselves. That's billboarding. It's a brilliant free way to get a ton more exposure. And so there's a few ways to do billboarding. One is the classic example of Hotmail and iPhone. So when you send an email via Hotmail, at the end it depends a signature saying sent via Hotmail. Same thing, sent from my iPhone. So every single email sent from an iPhone device, unless you remove that signature, is a free billboard for Apple itself, which furthers the brand awareness and gets more people buying. So for example, if you have a feature in your application where people are sending emails or communications to other users outside of the org, like it's an app for sending SMS
23:55 Speaker 00 messages, or it's like a way to send invoices to your vendors, when you're facilitating that generated messaging, say brought to you by the name of your startup, in the signature of it, really use your own surface area to increase your own awareness. So that's billboard in two different ways. A third way is the very obvious way of like having something unmistakably recognizable out in the world. So if I drive a Tesla, if I wear Nike shoes, if I have Apple AirPods, all of these are immediately visible to everyone around me, which is why sometimes physical products can really explode because they're just free walking billboards all over the world. And then the sort of most topical hot example
24:38 Speaker 00 right now on Twitter is when you switch your Twitter profile to an NFT in a particular collection, you're billboard for that NFT collection, right? Same phenomenon that occurred with the Bitcoin laser eyes.
24:50 Lenny Rachitsky? And also for Twitter Blue to be able to even do that.
24:52 Speaker 00 Yes, exactly. Exactly right. Or like a Telegram right now, they released something like Twitter Blue. I don't know what it's called, but now when you're a Telegram premium paying user, it has a little star thing next to your name that everyone else sees. And like, what is that? Oh, that's Telegram Pro. Let me take a look at that. Last example, which is one of my favorites, is billboard via the nature of your product being something people are compelled to share in order to use. So if I have a Calendly account, I have to share my Calendly link with the world in order to create an event on my calendar. So if you're like me, you get a million Calendly links every week. That's a phenomenal form of billboard. People are sharing it willingly. No wonder they've exploded. Same thing with
25:35 Speaker 00 Dropbox, sharing file links and you're seeing the Dropbox URL or GoFundMe when people share the GoFundMe page, you get the gist. So billboard costs you nothing, scales infinitely, can have compounding effects. And if your product lends itself to billboard, it's just a phenomenal way to grow if possible. So that's category three, I guess. We'll cover one last one, if you'd like me to.
25:59 Lenny Rachitsky? Yeah, absolutely.
26:00 Speaker 00 Which is basically UGC, so user generated content. And same same sort of thing, basically, I hop on YouTube or TikTok or Insta or whatever. I make content, I share it with the world. And in so sharing that content, the platforms brand themselves on the content. So at the end of every TikTok video on Twitter that you've ever seen or Insta, it'll at the end will say, you know, here's the TikTok user's account. So they're billboardings themselves into the content that users themselves are generating. And the users are incentivized to share that content off platform, which brings users to the platform. Because users want to get customers wherever they can, they're going to cross sell to their YouTube channel and so on.
26:40 Speaker 00 So if you have a marketplace like eBay or or some marketplace for selling collectible shoes or something, where you're encouraging users to create beautiful content of the items being sold, like these cool like landing pages that show show off the products and they share it elsewhere. Then that's that's an example of users making content, they're sharing off platform that is useful for their own followers. And so another example of UGC that people often overlook is Quora or Reddit or Stack Overflow or TripAdvisor, where you're encouraging users to create content in the form of conversation that then surfaces itself on Google and SEO.
27:22 Speaker 00 So basically, if you just encourage users to have conversations that are publicly indexed, that increases your surface area on Google for hitting more keywords and you get way more search traffic. So basically, the question that this boils down to is to leverage UGC in your product. You ask yourself, do users use my product to make content in any way, shape or form? If so, what type of content that they make should we encourage them to then share? And then how can we make the page that they use to share the content as appealing and as easily to consume as possible? And that's basically UGC. So we'll pause there, but basically that's PLA in a nutshell. And the things that all of these have in common is you're not spending a dollar.
28:07 Speaker 00 They scale super quickly. You're not reliant on, well, maybe to some extent with SEO, but you're not reliant on third party volatility. And it's a much healthier narrative for for how you're going to grow and scale. Awesome.
28:19 Lenny Rachitsky? This episode is brought to you by EPO. EPO is a next-generation A/B testing platform built by Airbnb alums for modern growth teams. Companies like Netlify, Contentful, and Cameo rely on EPO to power their experiments. Wherever you work, running experiments is increasingly essential, but there are no commercial tools that integrate with a modern growth team stack. This leads to wasted time building internal tools or trying to run your experiments through a clunky marketing tool. When I was at Airbnb, one of the things that I loved about our experimentation platform was being able to easily slice results by device, by country, and by user stage. EPO does all that and more: delivering results quickly, avoiding annoying prolonged analytics
29:02 Lenny Rachitsky? cycles, and helping you easily get to the root cause of any issue you discover. EPO lets you go beyond basic click-through metrics and instead use your North Star metrics like activation, retention, subscriptions, and payments. And EPO supports tests on the front-end, the back-end, email marketing, and even machine learning clients. Check out EPO at geteppo.com. Get E-P-P-O dot com and 10x your experiment velocity. I have many questions I'd love to ask, but I also want to make sure we get to the other topics. So we talked about acquisition, which we'll link to in the show notes, by the way, this whole post. The flip side, you could say, is retention. And if you're a reader of my newsletter, you know how much time I spend thinking about retention and how important that is.
29:46 Lenny Rachitsky? And I know that's a second topic that we wanted to chat about because you've also helped a lot of companies think through their retention strategies and to help them retain more users. And so I'm curious to hear what you've found to be the best strategies for retaining users and increasing retention.
30:01 Speaker 00 Yeah, sure. So the way I think about retention, my favorite strategy is what I call building state. And so it's a concept I stole from video games where basically the more you play any given game, the more state you're accruing. So that might be your armor, your weapons, your character skins, and whatever. And so as a player of the game, the more state you build, the more you're compelled to stick around. Because you don't want to lose everything you've worked so hard for. And the more state you have, the more you can exploit that state to get more. So the rich keep getting richer. And the same mental models apply to, let's say, SaaS retention. This is, this is like as old as time, like if you think of, or at least as old as like modern capitalism.
30:43 Speaker 00 So like if you think of credit card rewards or frequent flyer programs, you spend money, you accrue points, you convert the points into rewards. And once users build momentum doing that, they're less likely to switch to a competitor. And so that's the age old example of building state. In software, it's unbelievably powerful. It, this building state concept is why mediocre companies like eBay or Craigslist remain completely unbeatable for decades. Even though the UX is bad, people don't like using them, they fail to innovate. No one topples them and it's because of state. So let's walk through some examples. So state, kind of like my PLA mega spiel, mega rant there. Subdivide into a few categories, but I'll make this one shorter and less boring.
31:26 Speaker 00 So the first subcategory of building state is when you're encouraging your users to accrue non-transferable reputation. Meaning they're doing stuff to build reputation on the platform and they cannot take that reputation to them off-platform. So they're stuck there to get the compounding advantage of that reputation. For example, let's say you've spent, you know, years getting 10,000 or more feedback ratings as an eBay seller. You are not leaving eBay anytime soon because that reputation is just too valuable. It's producing a huge boost in revenue because of the trust it engenders with buyers on eBay. And it probably results in you ranking better in search results for any eBay query.
32:10 Speaker 00 And because you cannot move those 10,000 feedbacks to an eBay competitor. You're not incentivized to go use an eBay competitor. And so this type of stickiness, this non-transferable reputation, basically applies to all marketplaces and directories. So same thing on Yelp. Use a restaurant, build your reputation on Yelp. The momentum keeps you stuck there. You want to keep getting reviews and hone your reviews. Airbnb with your properties. Etsy for you as a seller. Alibaba. All of this stuff are examples of companies that are kind of old now, cannot be toppled or haven't been yet. And people are like, why? Well, because of this exact reason. And this is why those companies pester you so much to leave reviews and provide feedback all the time. They want you to play into this game of in-market reputation building.
32:55 Speaker 00 So the second state-building technique that a startup could adopt, and again, this is all under the guise of how do we maximize retention? And build somewhat of a moat, for example. So the second way you can do this is you encourage your users to accrue a non-transferable audience. So if I'm a big YouTuber and I've acquired a million subs, those subs can't be transferred anywhere else. I can't bring them to Twitter. In fact, YouTube doesn't even tell me their emails, so I can't even bring them to a newsletter if I wanted to. And so the more subs you acquire on YouTube, the easier it is for you to go viral on YouTube. And this is what I mean earlier by the rich keep getting richer. It's like, it's this momentum trap. And so it's very, very hard to convince any YouTuber to get off YouTube.
33:39 Speaker 00 If anything, they'll dabble with another network in parallel at best. So basically, if you have a startup where you're creating a marketplace or an audience graph, you want to encourage users to build a follower graph within that product. And that they can take advantage of by pushing their product or their content or their insights to. So this is why Twitter, by the way, a big shout out to Substack, which actually allows customers to export emails off of Substack. So Substack is not playing that same game, which is better for users and a very nice thing for them to do.
34:16 Lenny Rachitsky? That's why I joined.
34:17 Speaker 00 Ego system.
34:17 Lenny Rachitsky? Yeah.
34:17 Speaker 00 But this is why Twitch and Instagram and Twitter are just like irreplaceable. I mean, not necessarily everything dies over time like Facebook, but they're just so darn hard to topple. So let's maybe touch one more. I don't want to ramble too much about this. Well, this one's kind of similar. So basically, if you spend a lot of time building a social graph in a product, like if I spent the last 10 years trying to remember the names of all my high school friends and elementary school friends, and add them one at a time over the years to Facebook, or I've added all my colleagues for the last 20 years onto LinkedIn, and I've built a social graph on these products where I've curated and found people, that's really sticky. You're building state in the form of taking time to expand the graph.
35:00 Speaker 00 The graph is representative of the state, the work you put in, and you don't want to lose those connections with people. And so that makes that product extra sticky. This is why social networks in general can be sticky. So it's not just the fact that you have your audience there. It's that you've invested time. So if Facebook doesn't allow you to export your graph out, then that makes it extra sticky as well, because you don't know how else to talk to old Jimmy from elementary other than Facebook. Anyway, so there's actually many more of these examples of building state. I'm going to stop with that. But the basic concept is what can you encourage users to do within your product? That makes them more deeper entrenched in the product. And most apps just completely lack this.
35:39 Lenny Rachitsky? I like that. It's, it's a little bit like the, the concept of having skin in the game and just building more skin in the game with the product that you're using. One quick question, is there, is there a company that you've seen do this, like add it on? And succeed and increase retention that you've worked with or, or out there? Just like, is there a good example that comes to mind that added this piece?
35:57 Speaker 00 Well, I don't, again, none of this is really under the context of telling people to add it on after they've built, built, decided what they're building. So this is all like in the DNA of the product you're choosing to build. So I'm not sure. I haven't thought of those examples. I'm thinking more so in whose DNA, which company's DNA are they doing this brilliantly? So for example, one form of state is, there's one I did not cover is when you're embedded in infrastructure. And so like if you're Twilio, Stripe, or AWS, it's really hard to move off or segment, because it's so much work to redo your code and introduce all this risk to screwing up your code base. And People have built patterns around how they work with your API. And so a lot of modern API startups automatically capture the stickiness by virtue of being so deeply embedded into products.
36:42 Speaker 00 Generally speaking, none of this is in the context of like, hey, add it on post hoc, pretty much.
36:46 Lenny Rachitsky? Got it. I like, I like that lens, actually, through a lot of these things you're talking about is it, maybe it's less like change your product to make this happen. It's more idea selection. And I know you're also an investor and so it's a really good lens on how many of these things does this company have that I'm investing in?
37:01 Speaker 00 So earlier I was mentioning, like, why do I write handbooks? So I wrote, I wrote the handbook that PLA and state building come from to cement my diligence criteria for companies I believe might grow super fast and retain customers. And so you're exactly right. My investor's perspective is if you have this zero cost of acquisition mechanism for customer acquisition, such as PLA, and you can retain them through something like state building, but there are other ways to retain customers, then I lean in harder because I think you'll be more defensible as a company. And actually, interesting little side note is you'll often hear retention and stickiness referred to as a moat, right? But I find this term actually very misleading because very few companies have actual moats.
37:46 Speaker 00 To have a real moat, you're basically exploiting like kleptocratic, meaning like you're friends with the government and they're creating a literal like barrier to entry for your competitors. Or you have a scientific moat where you have an actual scientific breakthrough in like the fusion energy space plus protected by patents. Those are real moats, but the way most people use the word moat is wrong. And in, in practice, your quote unquote moat is just your mechanism for retaining users a little bit more than the average company. And I believe state building is one of the best ways to do exactly that. And so really it just comes down to what are you doing to help users build state?
38:29 Speaker 00 And get more value over time out of the product, not the same level of value over any time period.
38:35 Lenny Rachitsky? Awesome. Shifting a little bit away from growth and into writing, which I know you've spent a lot of time writing about, very meta, and sharing on Twitter and all the ways. You have a handbook where you go into this concept of novelty and a framework for how to be novel and why that's important in writing. And I'd love for you to talk about why novelty is important in writing and ideally share your framework for creating something novel that keeps people engaged in reading.
39:03 Speaker 00 Sure. So this actually goes back to your question about Twitter. What can one do to build an audience on Twitter? It often comes down to writing things that are novel. Novel is what powers clickbait in most cases. The other way is via curiosity gap, where you raise a question you don't answer. But the other half is novelty, is what gets people to click into a thread and read it. And so novelty I define as new idea. So something I haven't heard of before. That's also significant. So it's not some trivial fact about Kim Kardashian. And it's something that I wouldn't have easily intuited on my own. So when you have those ingredients, it's new, it's significant,
39:47 Speaker 00 and you wouldn't have easily thought of it on your own. That's when you get, you know, you trigger that dopamine hit reaction. I'm not being scientifically accurate here, but you get that dopamine hit like, whoa, that's super cool. And so the more you have readers pausing going, whoa, that was interesting, the more novel your writing is. And so my whole approach to writing is write something out and then point out all the points of novelty. And I do that by actually having like 20 friends read something I've written and highlight the sentences that made them go, whoa. And then I have this visualized map of in a given blog post, where are the areas that people go, that's really interesting? And then I can see all the white space between the interesting parts. And I go in and I condense that white space.
40:30 Speaker 00 I chop it down so that the frequency of novelty is as high as possible. And this is how you get a blog post that just has this phenomenal momentum that gets the read to completion rate to be very high. So the question is, what exactly does novelty look like? So I've identified about five different categories for it. And this is the backbone of how I write in many, many cases. So the first category of novelty is what I call counterintuitive information. So you tell people something and they go, oh, wow, I never realized that the world worked that way.
41:02 Speaker 00 Or different categories and you tell people counter narrative information. That's where people respond, wow, that's not how I was told the world worked. So whereas counterintuitive novelty is that's not how I would have thought the world worked. Counter narrative novelty is that's not what I've been told, I've been lied to. Now you're telling me the truth. That also triggers a dopamine hit. Third category of novelty is just pure shock and awe. Like, that's crazy. I would have never believed that's true. Like, for example, there's a volcano that's going to erupt the next 15 years, going to swallow this whole island. Like, that's, wow, that's shocking, holy, holy moly. Next category is what a lot of popular Twitter users do is what I call elegant articulation.
41:46 Speaker 00 Where you're taking an idea, like Naval does this, Naval on Twitter, the founder evangelist. And he'll say something that's a complicated, rich thought and boil it down into a very concise sentence. And then the reader goes, wow, that's beautiful. I couldn't have said that any better myself. That also triggers that dopamine reaction. And there's a few more, but the point I want to get at here is all of these are formats for identifying the types of things you could say to get people to go, whoa. And so that's what I think of as novelty.
42:17 Lenny Rachitsky? Something I've found to kind of identify something that I've written is going to be interesting is I just kind of read it myself and I, I kind of like feel what I feel when I'm reading it the first time. And often I find that if I'm like, oh, wow, this is really good and really exciting. I've learned to trust that feeling wherever that comes from. And so that's, that's just like another way of knowing if your thing is interesting is like, are you excited about it? And are you interested in it as you're reading it? And that fades as, after you read it like 10 times and kind of edit and edit. But that's just a small tip I've learned, just kind of trust your own gut feeling when you're excited about something that you're writing about.
42:52 Speaker 00 I agree, and that's why I tell people, when you first encounter something that to you is novel, write down with a score, like let's say out of five, zero to five, how novel that thing was to you when you first heard it. You want to remember and capture the degree of novelty because to your point, Lenny, it's going to become less novel over time. And then if you pull that out of your idea bank for a blog post in two years, like, oh yeah, that will blow people's minds, even if it doesn't blow my mind today.
43:16 Lenny Rachitsky? Good tip.
43:17 Speaker 00 And to your point, the way you basically get novel ideas is you go live your life and write down every time you come across something that interests or surprises you. Or anytime you come across something that makes you think. Well, that's obviously not true. Meaning like you found something that people say that you know the lie and you're about to tell people the way the world really works. So some examples of novelty, I'm just gonna pull from, I'm scrolling through Twitter here. So this is a tweet I wrote where I wrote, "Reading many books is the most socially accepted vanity metric for adults. I give zero kudos for reading 100 books a year, but I give you massive kudos for learning efficiently and making interesting things."
43:59 Speaker 00 So this tweet is an example of me using novelty. So let's reread the key novel part. It's where I say, "Reading many books is the most socially accepted vanity metric for adults." That is counter narrative novelty, because the prevailing narrative is all the smart people I've ever met, they read a ton of books, they always have a book in their hand, they're reading five books a month, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And so I'm saying, no, that's a vanity metric, how many books you read. So that's counter narrative. That gives people dopamine hit, they lean in, they wanna see what my punchline is, and that tweet got a lot of engagement. One more example. Okay, so see if you can catch the novelty here. New tweet. "The world is not run by exceptional people.
44:42 Speaker 00 This is the hidden reason for imposter syndrome. We mistakenly think imposter syndrome is due to low confidence or low anxiety. No, it's caused by not accepting that your new world-class peers aren't that special. It's just discipline." And so the key statement there that has the novelty is, "The world is not run by exceptional people." And the type of novelty being used there is counterintuitive. Your intuition is the world's run by the best of the best, or many of these experts are there for a reason, and I'm saying, not in most cases. So anyway, those are some examples of novelty, and of course, these tweets took off largely due to that reason.
45:23 Speaker 00 People love having their eyes opened, and they'll reflexively retweet you to agree with your worldview if they feel like you're finally speaking truth to power in some sense, if that makes sense.
45:33 Lenny Rachitsky? Yeah, we'll link to those in the show notes. By the way, I love your reading your own tweets voice that you had, that you have.
45:38 Speaker 00 Ah, yeah. I'm adopting my, who's the dude from, who's the guy from Star Trek who's amazing, who reads the kids?
45:45 Lenny Rachitsky? Oh, yeah. LeVar Burton, reading Rainbow.
45:48 Speaker 00 LeVar Burton. There you go. That's my, that's my.
45:51 Lenny Rachitsky? Julian Shapiro, the new LeVar Burton. Okay. So I know you have to run and not too long from now, we have two more topics. So how about I set up both topics and then you kind of talk through as much as you want with each. That sound good?
46:01 Speaker 00 Sure.
46:01 Lenny Rachitsky? Cool. So the fourth topic we want to talk about is topic selection, how meta, essentially picking what to write about. And you have a bunch of great advice on what's worth writing about and their framework around that. And then the fifth idea is something you call the creativity faucet, which is essentially how to write, how to get more creative. And so I will turn it over to you to share your thoughts on these topics.
46:22 Speaker 00 Sure, sure. My pleasure. So the way I think about topic selection, meaning what is it you should write about? For your blog posts, for your newsletter, Twitter, company blog, whatever, books, is you choose topics based on two factors. What would you actually be able to complete? So you're not going to give up halfway through. And what will actually be high quality? And so I have a framework for helping you figure out what that is. So basically, I believe that your likelihood to follow through on something you start writing is a function of the objective you have with writing that piece and how strong your motivation is for seeing that objective to fruition. So here's what that looks like more specifically. Anytime that I write something, I'm first trying to identify what is my objective.
47:06 Speaker 00 So here's a few examples of objectives that I'll use before sitting down to write. Number one, I want to open people's eyes to prove the status quo wrong. Or two, I want to articulate something that everyone's thinking about, but no one is saying, I want to cut through the noise. Another objective might be, I want to contribute original insights to like my own research and experimentation, hence some of my handbooks. Another objective is just telling a suspenseful and emotional story that maybe imparts a lesson. So these are all clear cut objectives that give me a guidepost. I know that I'm done writing a piece. If I can read the piece and say, I've accomplished that particular objective. A lot of people don't know when they're done writing, oh, I petered out here and this seems like a good place for an outro.
47:50 Speaker 00 With an objective, you know whether you should actually stop. But then the question is, how do you sustain the motivation to see through an objective? Again, an objective might be something like open people's eyes by proving the status quo wrong. To do all the work necessary to accomplish that, you need a motivation, in my opinion. And so I'll pair one of those objectives that I've selected with a motivation. And some example motivations are, does writing this piece get something off my chest that I really badly need to get off? Or does it help me solve like a nagging unsolved problem that I've been dealing with? And this piece is a way for me to explore and find the solution. Or is it like me obsessing over a topic that I want others to also geek out about?
48:31 Speaker 00 So these are all powerful motivations that I pair with an objective to guarantee my follow through to get done writing the piece. And so that's I think about it. And by the way, everything I've mentioned on this entire like chat with you, the novelty stuff, the topic selection, PLA, state building, everything we've covered, I have tons of examples on Julian.com. So that's why I'm not trying to go through every single one. Yeah, we'll link to all that. Absolutely. Awesome. The flip side I'll point out is that I think writing quality overall is, and again, and these are all me being hand wavy and these are not rules. There's no right way to write, just like there's no right way to paint. It's, these are just frameworks I've developed that when I use them,
49:14 Speaker 00 I'm more frequently arriving at success as far as I define it. So the point I want to point out, the thing I want to point out though is that very closely tied to everything I'm talking about is my framework or my equation for determining how good any piece of writing is, is novelty times resonance. And so writing quality equals novelty times resonance. So novelty is like we discussed. Here are all these things that are giving you dopamine hits. They don't worry, I'm opening your eyes about how the world really works and shocking you and elegantly synthesizing things. Times resonance and resonance means I can tell you the most novel thing on the planet. But if I don't wrap it in a way that resonates and really lifts off the page and into your mind
49:56 Speaker 00 and is something you remember, then it's fairly ineffective novelty. It's more like just trivia. It's bland, dry trivia. So when you add resonance to the novelty, now it becomes a beautifully written piece. And so resonance is a matter of including examples, analogies, metaphors, stories. And so really writing quality is novelty times the storytelling power you have to make the novelty resonate in the back of people's minds. And so the way that I structured my writing process is draft one. So I'm just focused on finding my novelty, just the backbone of what makes anything interesting. And then draft two, I come back and try to increase the resonance by embedding story and analogy and examples. That's basically my process there.
50:40 Lenny Rachitsky? I like that a lot. Just to add real quick, something I've, I've learned is that if your stuff is really useful, it doesn't have to be written beautifully. And a lot of people I think are afraid of writing because they think they have to write really well, like be real good writers. And what I've learned is that's, it's okay if you're not like you just be good enough and you'll get better the more you do it. The most important thing is the content is valuable and interesting, which, which I think you're describing as novelty. And so I just want to make sure people don't get scared away by like, oh my God, I need stories and metaphors and all this beautiful writing. Initially you don't, is my experience, but it helps in a big way.
51:17 Speaker 00 I agree. In fact, the biggest criticism of my writing is that it's, it is too dry. It's too novelty focused and there's a lack of the resonance. But I do that purposely because oftentimes people can overindulge in resonance and then it really bloats the piece. And as a reader myself, I like reading super concise pieces, like reference manuals almost. And I'm only looking for the length from personal anecdotes, personal stories of people's lives or life lessons they've learned that they want to share with me or like actual fiction. So to each their own. So you're spot on. It's like, do what you would want to read to me is the golden rule.
51:52 Lenny Rachitsky? Awesome. Yeah. And also don't be afraid. Like, don't feel like the bar is that high if you want to get started.
51:57 Speaker 00 Yeah. What are your, what have been your frameworks for sitting down and knowing that one of your newsletter editions is where you want it to be? And what do you think is the framework justifying that a piece is, or explaining why a piece is good?
52:10 Lenny Rachitsky? The thing that I always strive for is this needs to be actionable and useful, something someone could take and do something with like that day versus just a bunch of theory and pontification and philosophy. It's like, oh, here's a thing you can go do today. So that's kind of my bar is make it very actionable, which I, which I think is specific to the type of newsletter I have, not necessarily broad writing the way you're describing, but that's what I try.
52:34 Speaker 00 I love that. I mean, the way I think I agree with you, my rules of thumb are like it has to be actionable. Concise and novel. And I'm not sure if you've seen this as well, but to make something truly actionable, I have to leave them with a cheat sheet because if I have all these actionable steps, but they're spread through to monster newsletter edition, it's too much mental work to go and make my own cheat sheet out of it and have a quick to follow series of steps. So I feel like compression is a key part of making something actionable as well.
53:05 Lenny Rachitsky? Yeah, there's a book called On Writing Well that taught me a lot about cutting, cutting like two thirds of what you've written to get to the core of it.
53:12 Speaker 00 And so let's go, I'm curious, what else are you doing to try to harden your each newsletter edition to make sure it's good? Is it just like, hey, this is actionable and we were pretty comprehensive and I checked it past experts? And is that like, is that the extent of it? Or what are you trying to do to feel like it's fantastic? And what's your review process like when you pass it by others as well?
53:30 Lenny Rachitsky? I'm happy to answer that, but I also know you got to run soon. I guess we could touch on, we could just save the fifth topic maybe for a follow up episode is one idea. Or we could touch on it.
53:40 Speaker 00 Sure, up to you. Anything you want, my friend. If you want me to cover the next topic, super happy to, up to you. I just, I realized I was basically, everyone listening right now is like, man, John's just been fucking rambling for like an hour. And I realized we were not having a conversation. Now I feel bad because I was so, I was so in my momentum of sharing some concepts that I didn't really have a conversation.
53:59 Lenny Rachitsky? This is very normal for this podcast, so do not stress.
54:02 Speaker 00 Okay, okay. All right.
54:05 Lenny Rachitsky? People actually.
54:06 Speaker 00 You should leave this all in here so they know I feel bad.
54:08 Lenny Rachitsky? I will, I'm not cutting anything.
54:10 Speaker 00 So what was, what was the last topic again? Remind me.
54:12 Lenny Rachitsky? I was just saying, I think one of the things people really like about this podcast, from what I hear often is they, they like that I'm not talking a lot. They kind of like that I'm letting the guests speak mostly because a lot of podcasts, you know, guests think they know it all and, or sorry, the host and they're just talk, talk, talk. And so that's.
54:27 Speaker 00 The thing is, you are brilliant. You're an actual host who is a useful, amazing human being and we want to hear your thoughts, but it sounds good. What was the, remind with, what was the last topic again?
54:36 Lenny Rachitsky? Topic was the creativity faucet. And so we can save that for another talk, or if you want to touch on it, we can do that too.
54:43 Speaker 00 Sure, yeah. So the quick version here is that this is an idea that I saw recur across three of the most prolific creators in the world. So John Mayer, Ed Sheeran, Neil Gaiman. Ed Sheeran might work with other producers and so on, but the basic thing between the three is they're very independent creators who are constantly making blockbusters in large part on their own. And I was curious, what on earth are those three doing that very few other people are doing? Taylor Swift also. And one day I actually found the answer. What is their approach to consistently making phenomenal content? And the way I found it was interesting. I was watching a masterclass like masterclass.com with Neil Gaiman.
55:27 Speaker 00 And he explained his process for writing fiction novels. And then in the same year, I watched a documentary of Ed Sheeran explaining his process for writing songs. And they were identical. And then a year later, I came across a YouTube video that I posted on Twitter with John Mayer explaining his process. Also identical. I'm like, fuck, there's the answer. So I called, they, they don't have a name for their process. So I just call it the creativity faucet. And very quickly, what they do is they visualize their creativity as a backed up pipe of water. And so the first mile is packed with wastewater. And this wastewater has to be emptied before the clear water behind it can arrive.
56:09 Speaker 00 And so because your creativity pipe or creativity faucet only has one faucet, there's no shortcut to achieving the clarity, the clear water of good ideas, until you first empty the wastewater out. So if we apply that to creativity, at the beginning of every writing session, write out every bad idea that comes to mind. And instead of being self critical and resisting these bad ideas, you have to recognize bad ideas as progress because once they are emptied out of you, the better ideas begin to arrive. And here's the key part. Why do good ideas arrive after the bad ideas are empty? It's because when you've gone through a bunch of bad ideas, your brain, your mind starts reflexively identifying what elements are causing the badness.
56:53 Speaker 00 Then it becomes way better at avoiding those bad elements. And you become way better at pattern matching the novel ideas with way greater intuition. And so like most creators are resisting their bad ideas. So if you've sat down, scribbled a few thoughts in a blank document and just walked away because you weren't struck with gold, then you never actually finished the creative process. No, there's no way you would have come up with gold. And so like Neil and Ed, for example, they know they're not superhuman. What they're doing is in every creative session, they simply have the discipline to allot time, no matter how many, how long it takes, could be an hour. To empty all of the bad ideas and then they're not worried about whether good ideas will come after the bad ones because they know the following process.
57:34 Speaker 00 You start with a weak imitation, you identify what makes your imitation weak, then you iterate the imitation till it's finally original. And that is the process you have to kind of just throw yourself into.
57:46 Lenny Rachitsky? I love that. I feel like I don't do that enough. I feel like when I get to writing, I'm just like, yeah, let's make this awesome. And so this is a really good reminder just to like get stuff out. Connects to the kind of the concept of the shitty first draft. Just like, just write, it'll be bad. And then you edit. You asked me this question, what I, what my process is for writing? And most of it is just refining like a thousand times. I just kind of take a first pass and then I look at it, make it better, look at it, make it better and just kind of keep editing for days and days and days until it, until it's not, not bad.
58:15 Speaker 00 I love that. Well, I mean, that's, that's what I've always done until one day I was like, I need a process. Anyway, dude, pleasure chatting. You're a gent. Sorry to all the listeners for rambling so much at high, high pace. And cut anything you want. You cut, cut all of that. I don't care. So whatever you find interesting, do it.
58:32 Lenny Rachitsky? We're just going to have this final goodbye and that's it.
58:34 Speaker 00 Yeah. It's like, well, that was your anthic, that's my anthic.
58:37 Lenny Rachitsky? Cool, man. Where can folks find you online and how can listeners be useful to you?
58:41 Speaker 00 Sure. You can go to julian.com. It has everything, Twitter, handbooks, all that good stuff. And that's it. I hope you guys find the handbooks useful.
58:50 Lenny Rachitsky? Amazing. Julian, I know you don't do a lot of podcasts. I really appreciate you being here. This was awesome and I'm excited to get this out.
58:56 Speaker 00 Dude, truly my pleasure. I think you're awesome and you're, you're why I'm doing the podcast. So really my pleasure, man. Have a great day.
59:02 Lenny Rachitsky? Thanks, man.
59:04 Lenny Rachitsky? Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lennyspodcast.com. See you in the next episode.
Previous Why product-led growth is the future | Elena Verna (Amplitude, Miro, Surveymonkey) Next Customer-led growth | Georgiana Laudi (Forget The Funnel) Page updated October 26, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
