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How to Grow Your Business with Julian Shapiro of Bell Curve

Episode #017

Growth consultant Julian Shapiro joins me for an extra long episode in which he shares a wealth of knowledge and stories about how to make your numbers go up and to the right.

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    My Main Takeaways:

    • BEFORE you try and drive users to your app, ensure your churn is low and users are STICKING to your app!

    • Ensure you have an optimized landing page!!!

    • Julian always looks to offer first, to get in the door, (like a beneficial trojan horse)

    • Great marketing is not done by accident organically, it's manufactured by RIGOROUS testing.

    • Even if your startup gets huge press, if you have not optimised your marketing channels and funnels, the traffic will soon dry up, and you will not convert the people who land on your landing page very well ANYWAY.

    • Julien first learned how use ads and marketing hacks on his own product Velocity, then eventually he went onto do it for startups to build a reputation, and THEN he felt confident enough to start an agency.

    • Julien took his work very seriously, and became VERY good at ads, he then realised that there were bottlenecks with other components of the startups then he'd need to master too.

    • Julien started off by doing work for others (the startups he worked for), and used their marketing budgets to learn how to do stuff for himself. And a couple years of hustling later, he now has a general knowledge of how to do things for himself.

    • Julien didnt go the congested path of pitching to TechCrunch, instead he went to writers of open source software, he studied them, prewrote a post, and cold emailed them offering his article.

    • Julien theorises that Open-Source developers don't cold email people to promote their projects, like starup founders do, because Open-Source developers don't want to self-promote.

    • Marketing can be as simple as writing great organic content, for blogs that you love to read.

    • Julien used influencer marketing to grow Velocity.js by targeting influencer developers, and blogs

    • Don't just follow the status quo about growth, look at what the latest successful startups are doing to grow

    • No matter what the product or company is, there are some set of loose steps that go from getting the customer to having the customer pay you. Growth Structure: Acquisition -> Conversion -> Engagement -> Optimise Payment -> Referrals

    • A landing page should not be complicated

    • Make the heading of your landing page specific and concise, so users immediately know what your website is about

    • There's no reason to deviate from what's working well (When it comes to Landing Pages). But it's important to understand WHY it's working well.

    • The better you get at creating marketing media, the less optimisation you may need to do to find the media's most optimised version - but you will STILL need to optimise and test (you'll just get faster at finding the optimised version the more experience you gain)

    • Never just write copy once and leave it on your landing page forever. ALWAYS A/B test to find the most optimized version. (at this point Courtland has never done this)

    • Julien uses ads purely to test two pieces of copy. To use the best one his landing page.

    • Work on something you would be happy with working on for a long time

    • The earliest growth should come into play is when you have an idea, and KNOW how to execute it, but need to find out if there is an audience, and once you've found the audience, identify what EXACTLY they want out of your product.

    • The first analytics you want to set up, are event-bases analytics using something more tailored for event-based analytics than Google Analytics. And also using tracking pixels retargetting

    • Signs your product is ready for mass market: Low churn, high referrals, users paying more

    • A rule of thumb is: Cost Per Acquisition * 0.3 <= Customer Lifetime Value

    • Julien worked on an app called Service, but at first it was very broad, and unoptimized, and over time he learned this and pivoted, making it more refined and optimized.

    • Do not rely on getting traffic from Press Releases

    • When Julien realised that his own agency was failing at crowdfunding campaigns, he cold called agencies who were doing WELL in that field, and offered value to them, and in exchange asked for advice on how the were doing their job well.

    • Custom Audience: You can target people on facebook based on a list of email addresses

    • Once Julien went from poorly optimised broadly targeted Facebook ads, to targeted custom audiences, his Facebook ads finally began crushing it.

    • Reach out for an opportunity that you believe would make a great marketing/ad place, particularly if it seems like no one else is taking this opportunity. You should reach out in this situation, because if no one is using this opportunity that the space is ALL YOURS for the taking! (less competitors = better)

    • For businesses such as SaaS businesses, there is no point in making a social media to try and get people to follow you. Becuase this is a waste of a "call to action", because instead of asking them to follow you, you could be asking them to do something beneficial for the actual business, like purchasing, or an email sign up.

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    I have a lot of respect for Julian. He's a true master and inspiration.

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    A lot of good stuff here. I may actually need to listen more than once!

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    Excellent Interview, thanks Courtland and Julian for sharing the knowledge.

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    Thank you. Already implemented the Julian's cold email strategy and just improved my results :)

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    First off -- this is an awesome podcast. I want to add that I've been an IndieHackers member for about 6 months now but this is the first time I've listened to a podcast, despite being very intrigued by the topics I've seen.

    Part of that has to do with the fact that I am very close to launching my product for the first time, and I stumbled across a link to Julian's guide on an IH thread, and was absolutely entranced by the writing and advice that I found there.

    What I can say is that the funnel you created for me to engage with this podcast worked beautifully. :) Also, I just want to give a general nod to the absolute laser focus of both Julian and Courtland -- there were a few diversions in the conversation that were incredibly valuable but you always came back around and never let a good thread drop. I took notes and will be following up on several of those.

    I do have one question about the conversion pixels -- what is the best way to handle these from a GDPR standpoint? I am selling programmatically generated physical products on the Shopify platform, and I haven't seen any consent mechanisms built in for this situation. I'd like to add the pixels before I launch but don't want to run afoul of GDPR right out of the gate. Any thoughts?

    Thanks,
    Marc

    UPDATE: After some digging, I found this great app for Shopify, which handles all the GDPR banner functionality as well as provides JS blocking until users in the EU accept the cookie policy:
    https://apps.shopify.com/smart-eu-cookie-banner

    Hopefully that helps anyone doing any Shopify business. Thanks again for a great podcast!

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    Great interview! Thank you Courtland & Julian!

    question: around 9-10 minute, there are mouse click noise, example "10:16". why is that? it's not big problem but little bit annoying, :D

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