Julian Shapiro
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.
Communication Skills
Effective writing relies on a high frequency of novelty—ideas that are new, significant, and counter-intuitive.
"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 intu..."
To ensure completion of a writing project, you must pair a clear objective (e.g., 'open people's eyes') with a personal motivation (e.g., 'get something off my chest').
"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 object..."
Growth Skills
Product-led acquisition (PLA) is the most scalable growth channel because it has zero marginal cost and is entirely within the company's control.
"Product-led acquisition, meaning the use of the product grows the product. For example, if I'm using PayPal and I'm sending $1,000 to somebody else, there is no way they will not create a PayPal accou..."
User-generated content (UGC) acts as a growth loop when users are incentivized to share their on-platform creations with their off-platform audiences.
"If you have a marketplace like eBay 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 l..."
Marketing Skills
Threads are the most effective growth mechanism on Twitter because they demonstrate a creator's ability to provide consistent, high-quality depth.
"Generally speaking, threads, despite everything I've said, are the primary way to get followers. There's a reason why people do threads as opposed to single tweets is because when people get exposure..."
Treating content as living, evergreen assets rather than one-off posts builds long-term SEO value and authority.
"I'm spending as many hours going back and rewriting old blog posts and handbooks as I am writing ones. If you come back to anything I've written over the course of a year or year and a half, it'll be..."