What's up, everybody? This is Cortland from IndieHackers.com, and you're listening to
the IndieHackers podcast. More people than ever are building cool stuff online and making
a lot of money in the process. And on this show, I sit down with these IndieHackers to
discuss the ideas, the opportunities, and the strategies they're taking advantage of
so the rest of us can do the same. All right, I'm here with Julian Shapiro, a
buddy of mine. He's been on the show a few times. What have you talked about in the past,
Julian? Basically, your business demand curve and how to grow a SaaS business, which you've
helped hundreds of businesses do. What are you up to nowadays?
Yeah, so demand curve is a community of like 40,000 marketers and operators. And then we
use them as research and as Intel for learning how companies are growing. And we package
that Intel into these playbooks. And then we teach them to you very tactically, like
hands on how do you acquire customers through Facebook as Pinterest, you name it. So what
I've been doing this week is I've been figuring out the patterns among the fastest growing
companies that are in our community, like who's growing way faster than they should.
Like who has the cheat codes and what are they? I thought that would be a fun exercise.
And this is important because probably growth is the number one challenge for any startup.
Like so many people start companies, and they've had a cool product, they got a cool idea.
They build it, they get it out there, nobody uses it. And they're like, Oh, shit, I didn't
realize that like actually getting people in the door was like the hard part. And so
I want to hear these tactics. Yeah, sure. So I'm not saying these are necessarily new,
but they're just interesting. I know a lot of people don't really emphasize them. So
one is something called self liquidating funnels. A bunch of folks spoke to me about this. And
the idea here is, if you can't make the economics of paid acquisition work, if you can't get
your Facebook ads to work for your business, because it's just too expensive, the idea
is you can release a second product that is not the primary thing you sell. And the second
product is something cheap. And it's like an impulse buy like when you're at the checkout
aisle of the supermarket. And if you push that, and if enough people buy this cheap,
say $50 $20 thing, that it at least breaks even on your ad cost, well, then the net gain
is you know, have an email address and a potentially loyal new customer. So and then you use emails
like drip sequences over the next few months to convert that person to buy the primary
product, right? So so that's a self liquidating funnel, meaning liquidates itself financially.
And I thought that was so clever. And so just as a quick example, if you're like an education
company, you can do it with an ebook. Or if you're like an SEO tool, and you normally
charge 200 bucks a month, well, what if you had a secondary product that's like a content
planning tool, and you just charge five bucks a month?
I like that one. There's this idea of a side project marketing that people used to write
about a lot, I don't see this much anymore. But it's like, okay, it's really hard to get
people to your main product, you build a secondary product, and that gets people in the door.
And so it's not the same as a self liquidating funnel where the goal is to sort of recoup
your costs. But it is kind of similar in that like you build a different thing in order
to get traffic. And so I know, like, Len tie, my friend did this with her company key values,
her company is all about like, getting, you know, software engineers to find jobs companies
that share their values. And then she built a side project called culture queries that
helps you ask the right questions during a job interview, like ask questions to the company
that's interviewing you. So you can find out about their culture, like that one gets a
ton of search traffic, and then she forwards that traffic to her main business. That was
super smart.
Yeah, absolutely. And of course, the risk there is that you could get very distracted
building all the, you know, totally all these secondary cheap products. So there's much
more to the strategy of prioritization underlying this. But for some folks, if you can spin
up something quick and cheap, that is very enticing, it can make the difference as to
whether Facebook acquisitions even possible. Alright, so next category of stuff demand
curve companies in our community are using to grow quick. So next is giving away money,
which I know sounds like you had no shit Julian, but who would want it? How could that possibly
work?
Yeah, exactly. But let me give you some examples of what I mean in practice. You have Main
Street, which is a company that literally shows you how to get like 10,000 plus in tax
credits every year. So their ad is essentially, we're going to give you 10,000 bucks, not
literally but essentially. And that's an extremely compelling hook, which whenever you can present
something to someone in the framing of we're giving away tons of money, and there's really
no catch, the ads tend to perform extraordinarily well, as they have for Main Street. Another
example is a company called service that used to exist. They used to be this like lesser
known policy among airlines where they would give you some money back if their flights
were delayed for certain reasons. And service was an app that automated that customer support
interaction. So that literally like if you just upload your itinerary, you can start
like printing cash back to your your kind of like credits towards future flights, if
you were ever delayed. And so the ads run for that we're like, Hey, did you know airlines
will pay up to like 100 bucks in credit if your flights delayed, and those ads crush
it and they were quickly spending, like well over a million a month in ads there. So it's
such a powerful Trojan horse, because even if that's like, not the best business model
unto itself, it's such a quick way to grow, because like people flock to it, that it can
then become the growth wedge, like the growth hook, that powers your user base and builds
loyalty that and then you then find secondary revenue streams that are way bigger to build
on top of that.
Yeah, I'm reading about Main Street right now I wasn't aware of this business. It's
funny, I have a bunch of friends who started businesses in the past. And then when COVID
hit, you know, the government started doing like all these sort of grants and loans and
it's like a crazy rates where people were getting tons and tons of money. And it's not
how life changing this money was for different businesses. But it's also not like how challenging
it is to like know what all the options are. And so yeah, this is giving you free money
by saying, Hey, we'll take a small cut. If you let our professionals go to work and save
you all this money is huge.
One of the cool business models is we'll take five or 10 or 20% of what we see. Right? Everybody
wins. Business makes money, you get money back, you never knew you were you had you
know, coming to you. It's pretty compelling. So the third growth topic from the demand
curve community we got here is product led growth. So I'm sure a lot of people have heard
of this term, but I'm not sure if everyone has thought through how to implement it. So
first of all, what does it mean? So product that growth is basically when I sign up to
use a product as it's intended to be used. Inherently, other people learn about my use
the product, or other people around me benefit hugely from signing up to experience it with
me. And the reason that's so important is because it's the healthiest form of growth
next to word of mouth and referrals, which is a function of like the quality of your
products product experience. So and the reason I'm going to dive into product that growth
for a moment is let's just compare it to all these other channels that are just sort of
like worse over the long term. So ads, the CPMs, so the cost per impressions for running
ads can spike up, it can be volatile, people constantly saturate their ad channels and
they can't get the ads to work anymore. Meaning people have seen their ads too many times.
With content, you're at the mercy of Google's algorithm updates, which can completely tank
cut your traffic in half happens all the time. But with product that growth, it's like the
healthiest thing that no one can take away from you that you can optimize over time and
tends to be the most viral. So let me give you an example. Like when I sign up for slack,
inherent to me getting value out of slack, I have to go invite a lot of other people,
I bring my whole team on, I bring contractors on through slack connect, because that makes
the slack experience even better. Let me give you another example. When I use PayPal, and
I send someone money, that's like the ultimate product that growth because for them to even
get my money, they have to sign up to get it, right? That's another great example product
that growth. And there's so many more examples like Dropbox and so on. But that's a really
healthy way to grow. So anyway, those are the three things that I guess I'll just wrap
up by saying, like, if these are interesting to folks, this is all of what demand curve
calm as we just help people with growth strategies. Obviously, this whole concept of the creator
economy has been really big recently. And you kind of got started maybe around this
time last year, a little bit earlier, we were like, Portland, I'm gonna grow the hell out
of my Twitter account. And at the time, you're like, I don't know, 10 or 20,000 followers
is like, okay, cool, Julian, that's cute. Like you could spend your time on Twitter. And
now a year later, you're like 200,000 followers, literally 199,100 followers. So you'll be
like at 200,000 followers by the end of this episode, you like crushed it. Like, I don't
know if I've ever seen anyone set their mind to something and then like figure out the
formula and do it as well as you did. And now you're at this place where you have like
a crazy following on Twitter. And it's kind of like, okay, you want to branch out. So
then we started the podcast brains. And now you're also starting a newsletter. And I'm
just curious like what you're thinking is like, why start a newsletter? If Twitter can
ban the President of the United States, Donald Trump from the platform, no one's safe. And
it just struck me that I need a separate so called channel and marketing speak to a relationship
with folks that I quote unquote, own, meaning I have their email addresses, it's a one way
connection, there's no mediator other than email servers. So I think it's really important
for you to spend all this time building an audience on say, Twitter, that you have an
escape hatch, or like an off ramp. So just theoretically, from a time defensibility perspective,
it makes sense. But that's not obviously why I would do it. I have hopefully pure, more
interesting motivations than that. So for example, I think a lot about repurposing and
forcing functions. So like, if I'm already doing x kind of repurpose into y, and then
how, how useful could y be to me? So if I'm already reading books, I'm already learning
things, then I can condense them into newsletter issues. Awesome. Or as a forcing function,
if I want to be reading more of that stuff, well, then I will publicly tell people I will
do this thing, and then I will have to stick to it. So forcing functions and repurposing
go a really long way, I think when you're essentially a content creator. But the design
of the newsletter is the newsletter I always wanted, which is, I'm basically like identifying
beloved books in nonfiction, and distilling the most interesting insights from them, and
sharing them with my opinions and my takes. And I only email you once a month. So I call
it highlights, the highlight newsletter is Julian.com slash newsletter. Because think
of it like if you read through someone's Kindle highlights of the best books they've ever
read, but they're like written really clearly and editorialized like summarize, like that's
what you get is like the best interesting stuff. So that was the whole idea. You know,
it's interesting. So we could talk more about the content. But what's interesting in particular,
is I have a conundrum, which is there's like, well over 40,000 people who had subbed to
Julian calm in the past, not really for anything. It was like really nebulous, like I wasn't
doing anything. And so now the conundrum is how do I swap people over, particularly given
like some of them, it's been quite a while. And like, who is this asshole and instantly
hit the spam button. So I have to figure out the actual strategy for on ramping all of
these people who basically read at one point, one of my handbooks on Julian calm on my blog
post, like that, and nothing said, cool, I'll stay in touch with you. Have you sent any
issues yet?
Yeah, so right now I've sent the first two just kind of as an automated drip sequence
for folks to sign up. And I've been checking the metrics. So I'm taking a very like iterative
approach to this. So I'm not trying to go to the backlog of 40,000 folks just taking
the people who sub every month right now. And I'm testing does my instant email that
gets sent upon subscription? What's the performance of that? And then I have this another issue
that comes out a few days later automatically. And what's the performance of that? And if
those are looking good, if I can harden that performance, then I'm in a position to go
to the backlog, and knowing that a lot of them won't turn, you know, in marketing speak,
like fall off. So that's what I've done in the unsub rates extremely low, the open rates
extremely high, like I've definitely cracked it there, I think. So now I got to go through
the backlog.
Do you ever worry about being like, I'm kind of a treadmill? I mean, you're already on
a treadmill as am I like the fact that I have this podcast means that every week, I'm kind
of on the hook to produce one or two pockets ever says, whether I'm feeling in the mood
to do it or not. And that's like partly why I'm not that active on Twitter, like I'll
tweet every now and then but I don't want to like condition people to think that I'm
going to tweet all the time because sometimes I just don't feel it. But you're like on a
bunch of you're running like 10 treadmills simultaneously, and like a peloton and like,
you've got like everything you've got like your Twitter, a podcast, you've got your handbooks
on Julian calm, people are expecting those to come out, you've got your blog on Julia,
Julian calm, you've got your newsletter. Do you ever feel like you're piling up like too
many things and it's unsustainable? Or are you just like, go mode all the time, never
get tired of this stuff?
It's a great question. The thing is, I don't care at all about expectations regarding frequency.
Like I tweet twice a month. My newsletter is once a month. These are very low cadences.
My handbooks come out once every year and a half. Like I just really don't care. There's
this weird myth out there that you have to hit some certain recurring high frequency
people remember who you are. Absolutely not true. It's just a function of like, did you
provide high enough signaling really high quality content, at least enough time to say
like one to three times for you to build this impression that anytime you release something
in the future, it's worth people's time to revisit you. If you can accomplish that perception,
the frequency is irrelevant. And there's so many great examples. Tim Urban, who we've
been talking about on white, but why.com like I've published is so infrequently. It's like
the world's most popular blog.
You know, people like Tim Urban, because if you read his comments on his blog, it's a
bunch of people who are angry that he's not publishing. That's right. That's how you know
your fans love you when they're like actually mad at you for not publishing. And it's kind
of like, it's kind of analogous to the podcast where you can do this experimentation thing.
Like you've got this experimenting phase with the newsletter where you're like, okay, I'm
gonna need book highlights. But like maybe book highlights won't work. Like maybe people
will love the first three. And then after that, they'll be like, that's enough book
highlights, right? Then you can just change. In the beginning of any new thing, you might
as well cast a wide net experiment with a bunch of different formats, measure and see
how people like respond and react to them. And then not narrow yourself into a corner
until like, you've actually figured out what works. Basically, explore and exploit is the
short way of saying this. And with your newsletter, it's like, I'm curious, like, do you have
alternative options if this book highlights thing doesn't work out? I like the book highlights
idea. Like I want to get highlights of books, I read a ton of books, but quite frankly,
I could read more of those to getting the highlights. But what happens if that doesn't
work? Like, do you quit the newsletter or do you try a different format?
Well, I guess I guess we have to define work. Like if I if I feel like enough people are
subscribing and retaining, and if they're not churning, then it works. If that isn't
the case, if we do see high churn, would I change the approach? Probably, because the
ROI is it just tied to am I learn is it a forcing functions? Like also, is this actually
like the opportunity costs on building an audience through some other means, or keeping
them close is real. So yeah, I'd probably switch topics if it were, if the unsubscribe
rates were super high. Because I don't think it would be because the implementations bad,
because I've already I've done enough testing and chatting with folks, I think implementation
of the idea is good. So really, what we're trying to find out is, is the idea one that
doesn't burn people out? That's the question, I think. And if so, yeah, I'd probably switch
it up. But like, when I was canvassing newsletters out there, there's a few different categories
maybe break into it, maybe it's helpful for listeners. So you have like, the long form
editorial stuff, like here's my take on why slack is going to be a huge business, right?
Then we have a news roundup. This is like six different stories from the news my quick
paragraph take, right? Then we have things that are like, personal journeys and personal
discoveries like this month, I'm gonna tell you about how I learned about x, what I've
been up to with my girlfriend, and what new supplements I'm trying and all that stuff,
right? We have a few friends who have these little newsletters that are just like that.
And there's a few others. And so in that landscape, this type of structure has the best legs.
Everything is essentially half editorial, half resource finding. So it's like, oh, that
was that was the other thing that I forgot to share. Another format is like the Tim Ferriss
five bullet Friday thing where it's like five cool links are on the web. I'm halfway between
that and an actual editorial. And I think that is a good mix.
Yeah, yeah, that sort of resource one is interesting. It's like, Tim Ferriss says five bullet Friday,
I feel like he had to be the one who started this. James Clear has 321 Thursday's like,
okay, well, here's like, three quotes, and then two ideas, then one question for you.
And it's just like super formulaic. It's the same every single time. And then you've got
like, David Perrell has like, basically the same thing. He has like two newsletters that
are kind of the same format. And like that format, I think is really cool, because it's
the easiest sort of read and skim, like, quite frankly, when I'm in my inbox, like, I don't
really want to sit down and read like a really dense essay when I'm like trying to blow through
my emails, I'm just trying to get the unread count to zero. That's what I'm trying to do.
And so it's like really skimmable. And it's really easy, I think, to write because you're
not to like rack your brain every day with a completely new story. Like, if you're Ben
Thompson from Stratecory, and you're doing editorial, and like every single week or every
other day, you've got to figure out like a new story to cover in some unique way, like
break news and no one else has had or heard like that's super hard to do. And super effortful.
Like Matt Levine does this with his column, but he basically does like business writing.
And it's mostly like finance. And he's super good at it. It's like his newsletter is awesome.
And I think he writes your Bloomberg, he's got a huge following. And I emailed him once
I was like, Oh, how do you come up with your ideas, etc, etc. I just want to kind of shoot
the shit with him. And his answer is I work very, very, very, very, very, very hard. And
it's like, well, that doesn't seem like a very fun thing. He didn't seem like he's having
a lot of fun doing it, you know, he seemed a little bit stressed out. So I like your
sort of resource sharing format the most.
Yeah, you can't do what I'm doing or what Benedict's doing. If it's like an afterthought,
it has to be integral to the other work you're already doing. Because it's just too time
consuming. And if you don't already have an audience to justify it, like the ROI, it's
like very dicey use of time. And that's why to your point, these link round up things
you can delegate that to someone on your team like it that that's probably the strongest
I know they have great subscription rates. I know they're not that hard to do. We know
their open rates are pretty good too. Because I've asked some of these newsletter folks
with indie hackers, our newsletters, it's the news roundup format. And so every issue
will be kind of like four or five stories. And the value prop from every issue should
be that like, you walk away knowing more about like what you need to know about to be an
anti hacker to be a successful anti hacker. And then the kind of like the North Star metric
is churn. People underestimate churn so much. It doesn't matter if you're like bringing
people into your newsletter, or your podcast or your website, if more people are leaving
than joining. What causes somebody to unsubscribe from a newsletter? Often you could have a
really good newsletter that people think is like awesome. Like, oh, I really love this
newsletter, but they don't read it. And so eventually after not reading it like 10 or
15 times, I just click on subscribe, because it's just cluttering up the red box and like,
this would be good if I read it, but I'm not reading it. So it sucks. And so for us, we're
like, okay, well, our newsletter is so long that people often won't read it. And so what
we did is try to like, condense the value is like, much as we possibly could, and put
it right at the top. And so we won't just have four stories that you need to take like
30 minutes to read through, we'll have four bullet points at the top, each one of which
just by reading it will like tell you something you need to know or something that's good
to know that you wouldn't have known otherwise, unless you were following the news elsewhere.
And like that in and of itself is enough for you to not unsubscribe, even if you never
read the rest of it. Yeah, a little something for everyone is actually a pretty decent approach
for newsletters in particular, I think. Like, it's too unfocused for a blog post. But there's
some channels where it just kind of makes sense. I think newsletters are one, I think
Twitter is the same thing. A little something for everyone, you know, you get a little meme
action there, a little personal narrative. How are you feeling about Twitter nowadays?
I know they they've been like experimenting a whole bunch. It's funny, I bought a bunch
of Twitter stock like last fall, because like, I think Twitter is gonna crush it. And like
out of all the holdings I have, Twitter is like doing done by far the best, they've been
absolutely crushing with their new features. They've got like a ton of people on the platform.
And I'm bringing this up, because you mentioned memes, they had Twitter sort of stories, I
forget what they called them fleets, they had fleets. And you were like so good at
posting new memes in the fleets. And now they've announced that they're getting rid of fleets.
But there's all sorts of other cool stuff, they got Twitter spaces, they got to monetize
Twitter. I think they're basically trying to make Twitter so that you don't do what
you're trying to do right now and move off of Twitter and take your audience to like
an email newsletter. So how do you feel about like the future of Twitter?
I think Twitter is the most interesting social network for information. And nothing's even
cool. Actually, I guess YouTube, but YouTube isn't really a social network. I don't think
I'd call that it's not it's like democratized media or something. But if we're looking
like these pure social networks, and maybe you could say YouTube is one. Twitter is the
most interesting, like you can you can learn enough to build a career, you can learn enough
to make a ton of money, you can learn enough, or you can like position yourself well enough
to meet amazing people. These things are really only possible right now, on Twitter that I
can think of. And also like on Twitter, like you're assessed not by your social graph.
So like, if I'm on Facebook, like my social graph determines who I meet, who's recommended
to me. And like, if I'm in the cool, cool kids club, maybe if I'm in high school sort
of thing, who's talking with me? Instagram, it's like how good are the images you post?
And LinkedIn is how good is this fucking corporate spam you post, whatever it is. On Twitter,
you're judged by the quality of your thoughts. Like that's what you populate into the firehose
of people who follow you. So if you're just in no one with really interesting, like contrarian
thoughts, or elegant thoughts, you can go so far, you'll see these people who come from
complete obscurity and skyrocket to ton of followers just purely based on their thoughts.
I think that's brilliant. I think it's an equalizer. And I think it's the most educational
and satisfying social network. So I really hope it sticks around all of these features
that they're like releasing and that are bombing or like a distraction to me. I just really
want the health of the network to exist where people feel free to share interesting ideas.
Yep, I think you just nailed it. Yeah, YouTube, YouTube is huge. YouTube is like a learning
machine, you can go to YouTube and learn anything. Twitter is the best place to discuss ideas
like you're saying it's the best place to connect with people. Instagram, I use us like
to talk to friends and sometimes to learn like I'm doing a lot of like interior design
stuff with my new apartment. And like Instagram is a lot of great accounts for like visual,
you know, inspiration. But Twitter is like, it's to me, it seems like this gold mine where
like people like you are constantly tweeting these threads full of like really great information,
or these really great insights. And like I kind of have to like be online at the right
time to catch it. Like their search sucks. Like if I could just go on Twitter and search
like, I don't know, like B2B say like sass sales, like it should pull up like the best
threads of all time, of which there will be many that talk about this topic. And like,
show me the people who are the experts on this. And let me ask them questions and talk
to them like Twitter is like poised to be able to do stuff like that. But they really
don't. And so I think like, that's not necessarily a bad thing. If you're like investing in Twitter's
future, I think that means I have a lot of room to grow. And that's you like it might
be me financially is like a public, you know, stock market investor, it's you personally
is somebody who's actually investing a lot of time into Twitter itself. And other people
are on Twitter as well. But like even without that, let's say they never build that stuff.
Your Twitter account 200,000 followers is a huge distribution channel, pretty much anything
you work on for the rest of your life. If you tweet about it, you're gonna like provide
like that initial shock of users in the front door to get them to check it out. You can
tweet about your newsletter, you'll get a bunch of subscribers. I don't know if there's
any other place that is easier to sort of grow just by sharing ideas and then use that
to sort of parlay your traffic and your following into like some other arena. All right, let's
talk about what I've been bugging you to talk about for weeks now on the podcast, our
other podcast, because we started a new show, it's called brains. I don't think I've talked
about it on Andy hackers. But now that you're here, I feel like we've got to talk about
it. Just because it's such a cool show. I guess you like pitched me this idea of doing
a podcast when like October last year, like, I think my mindset at the time was like, the
last thing on earth I want to do is another podcast. And then we started talking about
it and working on it and like became, I mean, I don't know if I've told you this, but like,
I'd be more excited about it, the more we workshopped it. And the more we sort of tinker
on stuff and workshop it and like analyze it and like try to like, figure out the best
way to make it work, like the more fun it becomes like, that's the fun of it.
That's funny. My memory is you suggested it. That's probably changing history. Yeah. Well,
the exciting part for me is seeing how relentless you are, but figuring out the right way to
structure every episode. Like we bypassed a couple years of really awful content, because
yet so many learnings from MIDI hackers. And that to me is like, even if even if the show
goes nowhere, I'm learning so much about how to construct an interesting conversation,
which is just it goes beyond the podcast. So that's very interesting to me. And yeah,
I almost every part of it started as a chore, like literally every part scheduling guests
figuring out who to schedule the recording the editing. But now there's a feedback loop.
So because enough of the episodes, I think are actually good. I'm like, Oh, this will
come out good. And the dopamine hits like, like a few feet away. I'm gonna have fun chasing
through this. And then the flip side is I've realized it's become a giant excuse to meet
awesome people. So like, there's kind of two ways to be a host on a podcast. One is kind
of like that fake an e television announcer person who's like, Hey, so glad to have you
here. Let's dive into your history. You once wrote about x and I want to learn a lot about
that. And then the other way is like, okay, let's be a person. Let's have a real conversation.
Right. And if you do the latter, then there's a good chance the guests you have on who in
our case are awesome people have always wanted to meet, actually become your friends afterward.
So that to me is like an amazing, honestly, unexpected benefit. Like I'm actually talking
with these people now. Yeah, Tyler Cowan's podcast conversations with Tyler, he's like,
he's very authentic. He'll basically read like 10 books before an episode. He's just
like an avid reader. He only invites on guests that he really cares about. And then he just
has a conversation with them that he genuinely wants to have like sometimes during this episode
as guests will be like, Oh, should we explain this concept for listeners? And we're like,
no, it's not for them. It's for us. And then they'll just like talk for 10 minutes about
something that you have no idea what they're discussing. But it's kind of fun, like as
a listener, because you get to hear what real people, I guess, in this case, like academics
and economists are actually talking about and you get to authentically be a fly on the
wall and not get this sort of like fake, you know, tailored to the audience experience.
See that that's exactly the thing is I think when a lot of people make content, they think
they have to optimize for the lay person. But lay people actually enjoy the puzzle of
figuring out what the heck is going on. And they catch up. And then it becomes a fun chase,
like in a mystery film. And if you target the lay people exclusively, then you you alienate
the intermediates in advance. But if you actually aim for intermediate to advance, everyone
enjoys the content. Like when Eric Weinstein goes on Joe Rogan, and he has these like hour
long diatribes about really hard math concepts that you don't understand any of it. But you
know, like literally, literally none of it. But the joy is watching someone who's working
in a different plane of like thought, just geek out, and then try to relate it to someone
else who they really respect. And that's a really fun thing. So I'm with you. It's like,
don't make content for lay people when you're doing a podcast. Yeah. And the other side
of that is exactly if it's education, you need to dumb it down to basically hold people's
hands and make sure they understand what's going on. Because the goal is to like teach
them something useful. But most podcasts are for entertainment, like people are listening
while they do chores, like they kind of want like a few dopamine hits of insights and learnings,
but like they're mostly listening to pass the time and so they feel good. And if you're
gonna do an entertainment show, then it's like you really do need to accept the fact
that people like to piece together puzzles, people don't always want to know exactly what
you're talking about. And I think the other side of that is, you know, I've talked to
probably a couple dozen people who started podcasts since I started Indie Hackers three
or four years ago, and almost every one of them has like subsequently quit. Because podcasting
is hard. Putting on anything on a weekly cadence is hard. A newsletter, tweeting all the time,
building your website is hard for you to do it on a consistent basis. So if you're not
doing something that you actually enjoy, you're probably gonna quit. And if you're not having
authentic conversations, if you're sort of putting on like a fake performance every single
time, then you're not really going to enjoy your show. And what's worse is you're going
to build up an audience of people who get used to the type of show that you're doing.
And then you're going to feel even more locked into doing it that way. Once you have like
a thousand or 10,000 listeners, and it's going to be hard to like go back. So the best thing
you can do is start off kind of the way that we did, which is like, let's invite the guests
that we want to talk to you and discuss the topics that we want to talk about and prep
in the way that we want to prep and like converse the way that we want to. And hopefully the
people that we like, who like us and our style listen to the show and people who don't won't
listen and like, that doesn't, that doesn't matter. They can go listen to some other show.
Yeah, I think that's the nature of being a craftsperson. Like you can't be a craftsperson
unless the process is itself the reward. And so if you can figure out how to delegate or
like batch or automate the stuff you don't like, and then really emphasize the stuff
you do love and figure out what those are, then it gets, it can be sustainable. We have
this thing in demand curve.com, you know, which maybe we'll talk about, which is this
idea of repurposing. So anytime we make content, we ask ourselves, what else can this be repackaged
for so that if this particular outlet is a failure, then at least we get some mileage
out of it. So that's what I meant by like me becoming close with these awesome guests
we have. Literally, if no one listened to this show, I at least have that. And I actually
think that alone is positive ROI. Because if you think about a podcast, it's a really,
really good, mutually self-interested excuse to meet with people who you kind of didn't
have a great excuse to before. Like if you wait for authors to come on the, the publication
circuit for their latest book, like they're self interested in going on a pod. And if
yours looks legit, and you can kind of project that there's enough sort of signal behind
it or listenership, then there's a decent chance you can get them on. And that's kind
of the wedge for meeting them. So that's such a great repurposing of the experience. And
the other is, and this, I think is the most important one, I think, particularly for you,
I think, is each episode is a forcing function for learning something. And it's like, okay,
if we're gonna do an episode today on personal finance, all right, I've always wanted to
learn that now's the time to do it. And again, if no one listens to it, at least I'll be
able to bounce my ideas off someone who's like an awesome, educated guest who can correct
me where I'm wrong.
I love this idea. It's this idea of kind of like stacking, where whatever you're doing,
instead of just trying to hit like one benefit or one value proposition, you stack multiple
benefits. So it's like, okay, let's do a podcast, potentially, you can make money from a podcast,
you can learn interesting things from your guests, you can make friends with your guests,
you can basically learn interesting things just by preparing for episodes. Like you said,
if we do personal finance, we can read a bunch about personal finance, and it's a forcing
function to do that. And there's a whole bunch of different benefits you can kind of stack.
And so for me, like one of the things that convinced me to do this show, in addition
to the fun of just working on it with you, was like all of these different stacked reasons,
like all these different benefits that create what Charlie Munger calls like the Lollapalooza
effect, when you have a bunch of different things pushing in one direction, instead of
just one benefit, you get like these outsized gains, these outsized effects. And so I wonder
what like the biggest benefits are for you, you mentioned, obviously, like becoming friends
with the guests, like we've had some pretty high profile people on the show. And like
ideally, we're going to get cooler and cooler people on the show. We had Tim Urban from
Wait But Why on, we've had James Clear and Mark Manson to like the highest, the best selling
nonfiction authors, we've had Liv Berea, who's like a super cool science educator, and she's
like, best friends with like rhymes, who else you want to have on the show? And like, what
else is like, interesting to you about doing the podcast? Because it takes up a ton of
time.
Yeah, well, that's the thing is, I think we've compressed the time down enough, because we
really have fast prep, which is great, takes like 45 minutes. And then the only time consuming
thing is really thinking about what episodes to do next, which takes way more time than
anyone listening is going to guess. And then the other one, which maybe we can talk about
another one is editing the episodes. But at least editing is kind of fun, because you're
like curating conversation, it's I don't know, I hate it. I edited the hackers podcast, like
the first year and a half. And now it's like the last thing on earth that I want to do
is edit, spend another minute of my life editing podcast, like my preference would be like
recorded and just go.
Well, when I'm editing, these are like conversations actually really fun. I don't know how much
fun you find your average new hackers pod. But like, if they don't mean much to you individually,
I can't imagine editing is anything but soul sucking. But for me, I'm like going back and
reliving this great conversation about aliens and how the world is going to end with every
day astronaut livery. And like, I have no problem revisiting that.
Yeah, it's not so much the revisiting for me, it's like the revisiting it like time
after time after time again, to edit like in one hour podcast episode, could easily
take five or six hours. And what you end up with at the end of it is like a much better
product the same way as if you were to edit an essay or an article or a tweet. Like it
definitely pays dividends. But I'm always kind of jealous of these shows where they
just like get on and riff and they don't edit. And sort of trade off there is like shows
not quite as good. But it's a little bit more fun because you're not spending time editing.
And then you get out more episodes because each episode sort of, as you were saying,
like the two big time sinks are like scheduling and picking topics and editing. And so if
you can get editing down to like zero, it's great. That's not what we're doing for our
show. And you're doing all the editing. So it kind of works out because it's like, okay,
well, I've got a co host now, which I don't have for any hackers who can do the things
that I don't like to do. If we were to switch to a format that didn't require editing at
all, riffing kind of like this, that could work. And I think I think it very well could
work. But I think for us to progress to that stage where the episodes are nonetheless very
good when doing that, I think we'll need to have like super de-risk guests who are also
like big jaws unto themselves. Yeah, does that make sense? Like it can't just be topic
based. It has to be like, I want to hear what Brad Pitt as bad example wants says about
anything on this topic, because then you kind of have them hooked and you don't have to
edit anything like Quentin Tarantino. Yeah, someone just did like a huge three and a half
hour podcast and film director, something like that. And I remember thinking, like,
if you like what he has to say, there's no point editing this. It's a good thing about
getting really good guests is like, on one hand, it's sort of like emotionally draining
because as a host, you're like, well, this isn't like me writing an article where I can
just edit and edit and edit, like, I've got one shot to record the super hard prayer for
a person who took forever to schedule with and it needs to go well. And so it's kind
of nerve wracking. But on the flip side, when you get like a really famous or talented guest,
almost every time the episode comes out amazing, because these people are like high profile
for a reason. You know, like I think our dream sort of parents like let's get Vladimir Putin
with Jerry Seinfeld, you know, like kind of as a joke, but kind of like seriously, like
a year from now, we want to have super high profile guests who are just going to be fascinating
to talk to. And if we ever do that, like our Mark Manson, James Clear episode, like we
got two of the best authors in the same room, like, instantaneously, it's a great conversation.
And we don't have to essentially worry that much about whether the conversation is going
to go well or not, because these are people who like people listen to you for a reason,
because they have a lot to say, they've trained themselves to be interesting, like their low
level of interestingness is pretty high. And they know how to turn it on during interview.
So that's that, that's, you know, in essence, the cheat code. Yeah, I mean, if I think about
like some of our best episodes, or my favorite episodes, I like the one I keep referencing
James Clear and Mark Manson. I mean, these are two guys who sold collectively close to
20 million copies of their nonfiction books, made tens of millions of dollars in the process.
How many people on earth can really speak to that at the level that they can, like almost
nobody? How often do you get to hear like, two people like that in a room, talking to
each other about like strategies for selling and writing books, like pretty much never.
And then Jason Silva and Tim Urban on storytelling. Same deal, like Tim Urban wait, but why arguably
the most popular blog on the internet, he gave the most popular TED talk on YouTube,
it's got like 40 million views, master storyteller. And then Jason Silva, like his Instagram account
and his YouTube account are huge. And he's also like this crazy, passionate storyteller,
but they have two very different styles. And so it's like, okay, what happens? You get
the two of them in a room and talk to them about storytelling. And that episode was amazing.
Like I was just like taking notes at the same time I was trying to contribute because it
was so fascinating to hear these two guys go at it.
My guess is you like the James Clear Mark Manson episode on writing books, because it
hits the ideal that you always wanted to hit from like day one, which is two world class
experts, brainstorming analytically, and with also a bit of rapport and like good humored
nature thrown in. My favorite experience was probably storytelling with Tim Urban and Jason
Silva. Yeah.
And that's kind of the brilliance of what we figured out only in hindsight. And anyone
listening who has checked out like brainspodcast.com. There have been episodes that y'all will never
see. You know, we dropped a couple at the beginning because it wasn't actually clear
to us what the heck the archetype for a good episode is. And what we realized is that there
are multiple archetypes. You can have the fun episode. You can have the analytical one
of the world class experts. And the fun ones I think are the ones people remember. Like
I've had a bunch of people tell me about the doomsday episode, like literally in all caps.
People keep saying that was in all caps fun, man. And I'm like, awesome. That's what I
want to do.
That was by far the most fun one to record. And it's like we have these different archetypes
almost because that one was just like, let's think of interesting scenarios. Let's think
of like how the world's going to end. Let's think of like the existential risk of AI. Let's
think about space travel. Let's think about UFOs. And then just like riff with like two
professional science educators about like all these different things. And like we prepped
for that one. But like, we probably didn't even have to prep because most of it is just
like us like analyzing dissecting like our favorite theories and and thoughts. And like
if I could have a conversation like that every single day, I would it was funny is I don't
think you cared for the topics in that episode, right? It's fine. I'm realizing everything
I'm saying is like digging. Yeah, I like AI. Like AI is a really cool topic for me. UFOs
I'm not that genuinely interested in. But then hearing like the three of you riff on
UFOs gave me like all these like kind of ideas and response. Like when we talked to you,
for example, Jason Silva, and I think you do this too, we were kind of like, how do
you come up with ideas for things to write? And he's like, Oh, I don't just like sit around
in a room and come up ideas like I read stuff and I listen to people. And then eventually
they says they say something that makes me want to react. And that's what I tweet. And
that's what I make videos about. Like that's kind of how I felt in that episode. It's like,
I don't really know what to say about UFOs. But then it's like you guys have these theories
like, okay, well, now I want to respond. Like that got me like super jazzed. So like, if
you're breaking down earlier, like what parts of the podcast take the most time, and then
my dream world prep would take the most time, but it wouldn't be like this sort of like
honor is, oh, we've got a podcast, like let me sit down, like prep questions, iraq my
brain, it's not that fun. It'd be much more like, let's pick a topic that I care about,
like dating and relationships, or whether or not to have kids, or you know, social media
and screen time or optimism for the future and technology. And then like, I just want
to like go consume like the best TED talks, like the best books, the best essays about
that, the same way I would just like read in my free time, because these are topics
I'm genuinely interested in. And then like come to the episode without any questions
written down, but just this background of like knowledge that I had, which sort of like
helps me become I think a better smarter person as a side effect of running the show and also
makes each episode like super fun. I think what's different about this is it's just much
more personal. It's more affinity building. And I know we've talked with this before,
like scattered across our pod and Twitter, but you like when you're just writing stuff,
that's all how people like that's the entire time how people know you right? It's pretty
cold. But if they can now hear you ramble like I am with you for an hour, it elevates
the sort of degree of how personal the relationship is. So like the more multimedia you layer
on as we've chatted about in the past, the more intimate it gets like even more intimate
than this is video even more intimate than that is that sitting around a campfire. And
so the audio is a really nice layer if you're trying to like, I don't know, build an audience
of folks who are kind of there for the long haul. A podcast can be a strategic way to
do it if you're otherwise like not on YouTube vlogging or something. Yeah, I think so too.
For any hackers have been doing kind of going up that same sort of like a Fendi ladder,
you know, like started off as just articles and stuff online, like interviews online,
and then it turned into like a community or people could respond and interact. And then
it turned into a podcast, people could actually hear each other's voices and hear my voice.
And then we started doing like in person meetups, which kind of got killed because of COVID.
I just brought it back in Seattle, at least, but they're gonna be all over the world, hopefully
in another year or two when this virus is done. But it's like it's so much more fulfilling
when you actually see people in person, you know, and it's so much more fulfilling when
people are hearing your voice over a podcast versus just tweeting. And I think that's part
of like what makes it fun for me, you know, when I meet somebody who's like actually listened
to the podcast, they have like way more to talk about. Then if I meet somebody who just
like read a tweet or something because like they kind of feel like it's hard to understate
like how how close someone could feel to you if they've had you in their ear for hours
and hours every day for months.
The question to be raised besides the fact that like this is obviously like fun to do
in the meantime is like, what is our ultimate goal with this? Like, are we gonna make money
from the podcast? Is the goal for this to help our other projects? Like I know a lot
of people who say, Oh, I've got like an app or a project or a blog or something and it's
got no traffic. Like I know I'll start a podcast. Now they have two problems. They have two projects
and have no traffic. What's the point of like our podcast? And if I ask myself, like, I
don't really know besides the fact that it's really fun to do what I really like the episodes
we're putting out. Like I don't think we have any plans to make money. Like I don't think
I want any advertisers on the podcast. Like let's say the show didn't hit huge numbers.
Like let's say we're never getting 100,000 downloads an episode. Would I under any circumstances
still be happy about the show? I think absolutely. Yes. You know, let's say we never add at we
never put ads. We never monetize. We never like, you know, bring on startup founders
and start investing in their companies, which is like one way to people monetize their podcast.
Would I still be happy about the show? Yes. Why only if what you're saying were to happen,
which is that we actually authentically became really good friends with the guests. And for
me, if I could weave it into like an actual like habit, that's part of my lifestyle that
doesn't feel like work. It just feels like a fun, uh, not even excuse to talk to cool
people, but like, uh, sort of a hack to talk to cool people where I feel like privileged
and like honored to get to talk to people who I normally never would have the chance
to sit down with. And so I think for that to happen, it's less about how many downloads
we get and how much money we're making or other things like that. And it's a hundred
percent about like what caliber of guests can we eventually get on the show and like
what topics are we discussing with them? And that's pretty much it. There's also the
chase, which is like, how can we keep escalating the difficulty of guests for getting on? That's
also fun. And that's actually what I mean more. So when I say forcing function is I'm
trying to figure out, okay, well, like how do we get Jerry Seinfeld? And I like having
to build like a back catalog of like sufficiently good podcast episode material that Jerry would
be like, Oh, hell yeah, I'm coming on this. You know, it's just like, it's just fun.
And all of this has been repurposed in so many ways. Uh, like sometimes I'll just be
into something for a month, writing a blog post on it, and that'll become an episode
for the show. Yeah. I know. I said I was gonna like be over the head with this podcast stuff
the entire time, but I gotta say the other thing I love about our show, as simple as
it is, is the title brains, which took forever for us to come up with. Like I think your
first title idea was an honest conversation, which is smart because it starts with an A.
And like, when people subscribe to podcasts and their player kind of ranks them alphabetically
most of the time. And then we had like, I was like, Oh, I don't know. I tested out the
few friends and some of them said it was good. Some of them said it sounded stale. And then
we had like a whole list of things. I was testing out tons of people and none of them
sounded quite right. Like every one of them sounded like, I don't know, compromise or
settling. And then like, I don't know where one day you're like, let's just call it brains.
And I thought that was genius. It's like the most evocative name. There is no podcast called
brains. Like we're the only one. And it kind of means whatever you want it to mean. Like
are we referring to our guests are referring to the topics like who knows, but like, for
some reason, just the name brains makes me more excited to work on it.
I think that was a good contribution yet. But yours was actually more meaningful. I
think the striking art, the monkey who's like contemplating, like paired with the name brains
is very everything's kind of charged. And just feels like what the heck is that?
I've talked about this on the show before there's this book to naming called Igor's
guide to naming. And they talk about like different categories of names and the best
category of names are like evocative, like names like Virgin, Virgin Airlines, like an
evocative name. And to get an evocative name, or an image, you don't want to be too literal.
Like if your show is called brains or ideas or something like you don't want a picture
of a brain or a picture of a light bulb. You want something that's like one or two steps
removed. So you're like, okay, brains makes me think of like thinking, which makes you
think of evolution. So let's put a picture of a monkey on there. And then like, people
see the monkey and they see the word brains. And it's kind of like what you're saying earlier,
like people don't want things necessarily explained to them like they're lay people,
they kind of want to like make the connection on their own in their heads. And so like something
about it just kind of feels right when you're a couple steps removed from what you're actually
trying to describe, which is more often, I want to have more kind of in the same way
that I want like brains to be really fun for me to run, I want any hackers to be like increasingly
fun for me to run as a podcast. And so part of that is like doing the bread and butter
interviews where I bring on, you know, entrepreneurs that I go through their story and we extract
lessons. But part of that is I want to talk to like my friends, people like you people
like Justin Mayors, people who like I know really well, we're doing interesting things
that are sort of tangential to being any hackers and put it out there and see people like it.
So hopefully you'll come on more Julian, and we'll talk about what you do in the newsletter
and Twitter and demand curve, and all sorts of other projects. I don't know if I know
anyone else who's working on as many promising projects simultaneously as you are right now.
How do you tell people Julian where they can go to find out more about what's going on
at demand curve, and your newsletter, and our podcast and anything else you want to
plug?
Sure, I'll just say Julian calm has all links to everything. And the podcast, the main Portland,
and I'm curious to find out brains podcast.com. Yeah, brains. But I'm curious, like people
who love indie hackers, what they think of brains. Yeah, I wish there was an easier way
to get feedback from podcast listeners, but people can listen, leave a review on iTunes
or Apple podcast, let us know. Julian, thanks a ton for coming on.