In today's episode, we're joined again by Julian Shapiro and in the second part of a two-part episode. In this episode, Julian talks about how his past experiences building projects lead him down the Marketing path he walks today.
In today's episode, we're joined again by Julian Shapiro and in the second part of a two-part episode. In this episode, Julian talks about how his past experiences building projects lead him down the Marketing path.
If you have questions about today's episode, want to start a conversation about today's topic or just want to let us know if you found this episode valuable I encourage you to join the conversation or start your own on our community platform Spectrum.chat/specfm/developer-tea
If you'd like to connect with Julian about anything he mentioned in today's episode be sure to follow him on Twitter. Be sure to check out what he's working on over at Julian.com and his past work over at http://velocityjs.org/
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I paused and said, all of these skills I'm learning, how to get the word out systematically, they apply equally to a startup. In fact, they apply better to a startup because you can do so in service of actually earning revenue and you can put money in to put poor fuel on that growth fire. Because with Velocity, I'm at the mercy of purely my wits and my resources and my social networking, essentially, because I'm not paying for any of this coverage. And so it comes down to, well, how else can I use these skills? But most importantly, I fell in love with the process. And I realized this is the branch in my career that I'm now going to pause at and choose a direction. And I chose, yes, use these skills I've developed and pursue growth marketing. We're continuing the interview with Julian Shapiro in today's episode. We're talking about growth. Growth for developers, not just personal growth, but growing your personal projects, growing projects that you believe in. And Julian has done this. He's done it successfully. We're talking about how Julian accomplished this with his own projects and how he's doing it with other people as well. Thank you so much for listening to Developer Team. My name is Jonathan Cottrell, and my goal in this show is to help driven developers like you connect to your career purpose so you can do better work and have a positive influence on the people around you. Julian. Has figured out what his purpose is. Now, it's not something that ends. You don't find it and then stop looking for it. You don't find it and stop figuring things out. And so Julian is continuing to grow. And we talk about ways that Julian is growing and learning on these episodes, the last one and this one. So let's jump straight into the interview with Julian Shapiro. It's such an exciting story. And I think a lot of developers aspire to, you know, the opportunities. That you've had Julian. And it's easy to sit back and listen to this and think, wow, you know, Julian is he bats a thousand, right? He's he hasn't missed a beat here. But I'd love for you to take a moment before we go into this area of expertise of yours and marketing and specifically as a developer, which is particularly important to this show. You know, having the cultural understanding of, you know, having worked on an engineering project. Moving forward. Moving into marketing. I think that's, that's going to be a very interesting conversation. I want to get into that. But first I'd love for you to share maybe a moment that you felt was, you know, a dark moment for you or a huge failure, maybe a moment of uncertainty. Take us back to that moment and explain kind of how you were feeling and you know, what happened to put you there. So there was a startup I worked on a few years ago before velocity. Yeah. At the time, you were bringing your evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution idea so it was this little concoction of ego on the line and reputation on the line and i also believe strongly in idea so i was headstrong about it and it completely and utterly bombed in the most disastrous of ways like it was gaining some traction it was mildly successful that everything went wrong at once and i thought to myself i'm 23 24 and this is the fourth maybe fifth like idea i've been chewing on since i was like 16 that i took very seriously that just failed as a startup and i think part of what was such a clear signal in getting good growth marketing while working on growing velocity was the realization that the missing ingredient that entire time was the growth experience. I was building a startup in a vacuum, divorced from the reality of if you don't grow, if you don't have the methodology for growing, you don't know any tactics to grow, you are default dead, as Paul Graham would say. So I realized pretty clearly during velocity that I now had the skills to go and build something and drastically de-risk it this time around. And that was very empowering. There's actually interesting conundrum where after doing growth marketing professionally in the form of my agency bell curve for 25 companies, however many it's been so far in the last couple of years, I've been getting very good at it and increasing my confidence. And now I have so much transparency into what works and what doesn't that it's this analysis paralysis where I'm like, I know how to make this, this, this, and this all succeed to varying degrees. What's the expected value and what has the highest upside? And it's just, I don't know what to do. And so part of the fun over the last few months has been working with my team to isolate the best ideas. And now this growth agency, which first and foremost was created to help companies grow, meaning we, we become their resident VP of growth and run all their ads, AB tests, all their stuff, fix all the leaks in their so-called funnel, which we can get into. And we, we started with that and now we're slowly pivoting into other things. One of which is training people how to do that themselves and the other is building our own stuff. So this whole journey of building our own stuff, we've been able to do that. And so I'm very, very excited about this. And I'm very, very excited about this. And I'm very, very excited about this. And I'm very, very excited about this. And I'm very, very excited about this. And I'm very, very excited about this. repeated startup failures and never get anywhere with them is about to come full circle because we are about to start on a couple ideas that we feel are highly de-risked because we know what is likely to succeed or fail when acquiring customers profitably. Very interesting. And so I assume that we're going to have to wait to hear about those, about those ideas. Yeah. A little bit. One is out so far, which is really fun to do, to work on because it's way more emotionally rewarding than running ads for a startup, which is like I mentioned a moment ago, training people to be as good as we are at growth. We just, we took six months. So I merged my, my, my love for writing at julian.com and my knowledge of growth at bellcurve.com. And we built a full training bootcamp and that's been so rewarding to empower people to do all this stuff. We've done that took me four years and now they can learn the three and a half weeks, uh, figuring out the rubrics for compressing that knowledge. So that's one of these, these so-called products in the sense that it's a separate business from our ads agency. Yeah. Wow. And for people who may be skeptical, uh, of, of something like an online course, how can you, um, you know, tell me what is it that, that makes something like that, work well, you mentioned the idea of compressing that knowledge. Uh, you know, what, what kind of things would I be able to, you know, how am I, how am I jumping over the four year gap that you spent and instead how am I getting that, that knowledge quicker? Is it, is it that you went through a process of, uh, of error and, and you tried a bunch of things that didn't work and then finally arrived at the things that did work or is it something else? It's a very fair question. So it's succeeding at training people, growth marketing to our level is a product of two things. One is the quality of the training and two is how abstracted the training materials are not high level, but abstracted, meaning it's still very low level and tactical. They'll tell you exactly what to do, but it's abstracted to the degree that it can be applied universally. So we're not giving you like the step-by-step instructions to make an ad. On Facebook, which we do actually, but that's not all we're doing. So you could repeat those, that same successful Facebook ad creation across any of these so-called ad channels. So the quality of the teaching though, is the most important thing, which is, uh, essentially mentorship and deliberate feedback. So, so putting aside my growth agency entirely, I just believe strongly in these principles regardless for teaching and learning anything. And so, you know, there's a reason why pair programming is effective, both emotionally and the actual, the actual, the actual, the actual, the actual, the actual, the actual, the actual, the actual efficacy and the efficiency of training someone to learn Ruby, for example. And you can take some of those same tenants and apply them to training someone on growth, which is they write their own homepage, they rewrite it. And then we, we go on to, we go onto a Slack screen share, look at what they've done, give them real-time feedback, edit it with them, explain our internal voice, uh, that's justifying all these edits. And we do the same. And so we're in process for ad creation for going through one's onboarding flow, all these different concepts for growth. And so the deliberate nature of that feedback is you get that it's given to you. And then we say, great, try this again, but this time do it for another project. And so we don't want to beat, beat a dead horse here. We want you to keep reapplying this knowledge and we'll keep verifying whether you're incrementing. And so it's live Slack screen shares, one-on-one training mixed with heavy resources. And what's interesting is that the first thing that we're going to do is we're going to start with a project. And what's interesting about it is for it to be more considerate, you should be working on projects that are things you materially need to be working on. And so you don't want to work again in a vacuum. So if someone joins this program, or if you're learning how to pair program Ruby in both cases, you should build something you actually want for yourself. So people coming through our course are going to build a landing page and ads for the product or company actually sells today. And then people, someone learning, Ruby should try to build that cool thing. They always wanted to exist for themselves. So it's the psychology of the training and then having in-depth, but abstracted materials that I think can really elevate a training. Yeah. And I think it's important to note here, the, what you're talking about with having these, these ideas that can apply across multiple systems is, is this principles training, right? And it's not just about, you know, here is the procedure to create an ad. If that's what made people successful, then everyone who has access to YouTube, um, would be successful, right? Facebook, it doesn't have a, you know, a special route, um, for you to follow to become a successful advertiser. That's not really what this is about. It's about learning how growth happens, how people's minds work, the timing and why, right? It's a deeper understanding. And I guess I should be really explicit here that Julian is not sponsoring the show in any way. And this is not meant to be an advertisement for this course. But any time that I come across a course, I always am trying to understand, okay, what is it that's being taught here? Is this a procedure that's going to expire in a year or two? And there's some value to those courses. Don't get me wrong. Sometimes procedure is very important. But the most valuable things that you can do in your career are almost always going to be based on principles. Understanding principles, understanding mental models, systems, ways of thinking. And then the procedure is how you apply those things. If you only learn the procedure, then you're kind of doing it the backwards way. And unfortunately, that knowledge is not going to be able to stick. That's exactly right. And that's also how we're able to build a business model off of it. So just generally speaking, for us to be able to work with clients, we have to have an 80-20 approach to nearly everything. Because when you're running growth for 15 companies at a time, and each company has multiple channels, which I'll define now. So channels is usually in reference to an ad network where you can acquire users from. So Google Search or Facebook. And so when each of those 15 has seven channels in operation and half a dozen landing page A-B tests running, there's just so much to manage. And that's where, to your point, Jonathan, abstracted principles, not just from the low-level tactical perspective, but also now from the high level of how do you manage your time? What is the framework for knowing which growth projects to work on? And so. Part of growth is really project management or product management and understanding the prioritization of features and the cost that goes into each. Because sometimes we'll get really excited at an idea and we'll be honest with ourselves and say, honestly, we could just spend a tenth of that on making Snapchat ads work a bit better because they already do work. So why are we trying to spin up Pinterest ads out of the blue when we don't have any sort of precedent for it? Hmm. Yeah. That's such an interesting approach. For many reasons. I think for any developer who is considering learning about growth, you know, I think it's important to start with this understanding that this isn't about doing something that that is an add on. It's not it's not just an extra task. It's an entire discipline that people do for their entire careers. Right. This is not just a, you know, a small skill set. Right. There are a lot of things to to really struggle with and and dive into. And you can you can actually develop a true mastery level of of a career in this subject. So I'd love to know, Julian, coming as a developer into this marketing world, I'd love to know some of the things that you were able to bring over some of the mental models as a as an engineer that you were able to bring into. And I think that's a really important part of your the work with marketing that you do. Yeah. So the most the most clear parallel would be the engineering approach to product features and the engine and the engineering approach to growth or the prioritization of projects and growth. In both cases, you're trying to figure out what is the most repeatable, abstracted and highest leverage implementation. That's also the most de-risked. There's a lot of models there. But let me tie that down to something more concrete, which is I now take a growth first mindset to what I'm working on. So and this equally applies to our entire conversation on open source. And so let's start with velocity. But what do I mean by a growth first mindset? So if I were trying to repeat my steps again, I would look for something that I think first and foremost has the potential to grow. So I would look for something that I think first and foremost has the potential to grow. Now, you might make the argument, but shouldn't you start with what you're passionate about? Maybe. If you're lucky, the two things will intersect. That's what you really want. And that does happen. But if you start with what you're passionate about, you'll probably be blinded to what's actually realistic to grow. Because it's a lot. It takes a lot more more concerted effort to identify those opportunities than it takes. Oftentimes moments for you to be like, oh, yeah, there's this thing I'm super passionate about already. And so you don't really do much. You don't do. You're real canvassing of yourself emotionally. You're like, oh, but there's this thing I really want to do. And you're in the mood and you really want to get it done. That's not a good litmus test for whether you should work on something. Because if you project the half year or a year outward and let's project that far outward and let's consider the case of two different people. One person chose their passion project where they're a 10 out of 10 on how much they love that project. And the other person is a six and a half, seven and a half out of 10 on how passionate they are about their project. But the seven and a half person was growth first mindset. And the other one didn't even look at growth or consider it. Most likely, the person who didn't look at growth will go through a slog because the vast majority of startups fail and are a miserable roller coaster. And then sometimes they're not. Certainly there are ups and downs. But for very many people, if we're being honest with each other, it's pure downs. The whole startup ride sucks for a given startup. People don't like to say that, but it's absolutely the truth. And so. The if you take a snapshot, a snapshot, then one year later for both, never mind their likelihood of success is putting that aside. Even though that's my primary point, the way they're going to feel emotionally is going to be very different in my in my scenario. The person who actually pursued the thing that is growth first and is actually demonstrating traction, meaning people are using it. People are happy with it. They're giving feedback. You're iterating on the product. Even if you weren't that. Passion about that path for yourself. What actually sustains momentum in the long term, a year plus is the reward cycle. And there's no reward cycle when you're failing through a slog. But there is a reward cycle when people are using and loving your product. And eventually in the long term, the way the curves work out is passions much less relevant. And the reward cycle is way more relevant. And that is what sustains your interest. And so. That I feel very strongly about. And then eventually you can find passion and intrigue in other aspects of building a business. But if it's failing, there's not a lot of upside to find in it. And so that's the growth first mindset and why one should normally pursue it. And that's just from the open source perspective. But the but the rewards and the risks are much more tangible when you're pursuing it, pursuing it in the context of a business. Right. Where you have investor money percent, perhaps in the line or your own your own funding. And you could possibly make a lot of money and change the lives of your entire team. And so there's even more pressure to take a growth minded or growth first mindset when building a business. And what I've realized in building bell curve and looking back on all the successes is I can pattern match what is likely to succeed going forward. And I can de-risk what I what will likely fail because I have so much insight into what I'm doing. And I can de-risk what I'm doing. So not not as a pitch for bell curve, not as a pitch for bell curve training, just as an interesting realization I have myself personally, is I've been in the weeds so deep with so many founders. I've been the tactician on the front lines, tweaking the Facebook ads, tweaking the A-B tests that I have a very clear rubric for what is likely to work. And I can back out from there and say, OK, I know what most likely works for acquiring. Paid customers. Now, what does those best strategies most strongly correlate with in terms of business models and in terms of what I'm selling to people? So is it e-commerce or is it SaaS? And if it's an e-commerce business, am I selling socks or toothbrushes? I can keep backing out because I have all this data and I can say, OK, well, toothbrushes at a $20 price point being sold to women in middle America on Instagram in particular on iOS devices is probably an easy way to make a million dollars a year. At the same time, you may want toension yourijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijij this 10 minute plane ride, can you tell me, you know, what should I be thinking about? What should I be paying attention to? What are some things that I'm not doing that I'm not paying attention to that I should be? Do you have a, maybe a list of two or three things that you would respond with in that scenario? Yeah, I would say to answer that question specifically, I would say, make sure the market is big enough. Make sure that the people in that market are willing to pay you enough for what you're selling and make sure what you're selling is wanted badly enough that people are actually willing to fork over cash. And if you can find something that satisfies those three criteria, then you at least have a contender. With your contender idea, you then need the experience I have, which I distill for free on julian.com. I wrote a whole guide on growth marketing. And one of the pages is called ad channels. Another one's called ads and also the intro podcast. And I have a whole guide on growth marketing. And one of the pages is called So there's three pages in there that give you a lot of this context. And so you have your contender. And now you pair it with the context, meaning for each of these ad channels I mentioned earlier, Pinterest, Twitter, Quora, there's so many. What do they most commonly succeed with? What type of business? What is the contender that they most often produce success for? And really what we're talking about is what is the audience that is that is located on Quora, engages with Quora ads, and after clicking a Quora ad actually goes through and buy something from you. And so if you if you if you match what's being sold to the right audience to the right ad channel, that is the sort of trifecta that that's the pattern that I'm speaking of when that's when I say I'm pattern matching to de-risk things. That's what I'm doing. And I have enough data points to have enough confidence to know the likelihood of one thing being more likely to succeed than the other. And I share that with my clients. And so that's what I'm doing. And I have a lot of this on Julian.com. And so it would make a lot of sense for somebody like me running a podcast. The people who are listening to this podcast, they they are exchanging a value with me. It's it's not dollars, but it is absolutely attention. And then we have sponsors. This is the behind the scenes, really complicated business model we have going on here. But we have sponsors that that sponsor the show based on the interest that we attract. Right. And so it would make a lot of sense for me to be able to go and read about, you know, how can I pattern match and find ways to to grow the show? And I can do that on in your guide. So that's right. And so how would you get that data? How would you have enough data to pattern match off of? Right. That's the real question, because I haven't grown a podcast. That's what you're doing. And my guide doesn't talk about podcasts explicitly. So as a more abstracted approach to this problem, I'm going to have to go and read about how can I pattern match off of? Right. And so I'm going to have to go and read about how can I pattern match off of? Right. And so I'm going to have to go and read about how can I recognize what it is you're building. So you're building a podcast. Now recognize who are you selling this to? You're selling it to developers, let's say aspiring developers, or senior developers. Okay, maybe you want to make a distinction there. And then you can keep going down. Who is this audience? Where do they exist? Yeah. Once you have the audience, right, then you can figure out who is like me. So what other podcasts for one to target the same audience? And now you can start identifying the other pieces of data, the other data points that you can go and do develop customer development on, or you can just call it market research, or you can call it biz dev. And so what you're doing, because you don't have a growth agency, right, you are going to go and proactively talk to people who are already doing what it is you're doing successfully. And you're going to pick their brains, you're going to say, Hey, real quick, what are the top two things working for you, you're gonna write that down, you're then going to, you're going to go and do a pattern match across all those, or just identify the commonalities. And then you now have some sort of prioritization list for what you should be doing yourself to say, get more listeners, and or get more sponsors. And so that applies to any business, any idea, you do not want to live in a vacuum, where you say, I'm limited by the blog posts I can find through Google. Yeah, to actually know how it is I can grow myself. That's crazy. If I wanted to, repeat the success that I've seen for Belcroft clients, I would not spend a minute googling and looking for blog posts, I would go right to the people who are responsible for success at similar companies that are non competitors to my clients, or at competitors, but they've since left the competitor, right? And then I'll go and pick their brain and say, Well, what worked for you? And that is what actually, that is the answer I give very often to clients asking me, what worked for you? And I'll go and pick their brain and say, Well, what worked for you? And they'll be asking questions that are outside the scope of our services, like, Hey, how, like, how should I do x, y, or z? And I'll be blunt, I'll say, I don't have the answer, because not that's not what I work on. But go to LinkedIn, go through your network and ask people, please ask people. So don't just start from some point. And this applies to low level growth tactics on a website or anywhere. So for example, if you're trying to spin up a landing page for your open source project, don't do it in a vacuum, go look at 20 other landing pages for other open source projects, which you have some reason to believe are successful, or that that may not in itself in and of itself be enough of a signal that these pages are any good, but it's a start to proxy. And you can identify the commonalities and go from there. And so you don't need to have worked with clients like I have, you just need the, the resourcefulness and the hustle to actually go and do some competitive analysis. And quite frankly, those are the two words, this entire rambling speech comes down. And the reason I'm taking so long to sort of accentuate this is because nobody does it. It's competitive analysis is basically the most boring way to successfully de-risk anything you're working on. Yeah. And to do it in a way that is not just about differentiation, right? I think there's a little bit of a falsehood that we try to believe about ourselves or about our product that we are 100% unique. And while there is a lot of falsehood, there's a lot of falsehood that we don't believe about ourselves or about hopefully something that is unique about your product or your offering, how you differentiate yourself, right? It's almost definitely true that you have a lot more in common with somebody else than you think you do. There are other shows that cover very similar things to developer tea, right? It would be foolish for me to sit here and say, well, no, we're the only ones who do what we do, right? We may be the only ones who do all of the things that we do, but we are not the only ones who have a short podcast targeted towards engineers, for example, right? That would be ludicrous. And so the reality is if we can go, this is kind of like an accelerated form of evolution. An evolution or a formal evolution, maybe not, but in survival of the fittest, the best went out and therefore when they breed, they breed more like themselves and therefore the best continue to get better. With this strategy of looking at who is successful and you're essentially mutating to be more like the successful ones. And so without having to die, you are evolving. It's one of the amazing things that humans are able to do is we are aware, we are able to change our environments, we're able to change the things that we do, not just as a result of, you know, something that we've inherited, but also because we look around us and we can emulate the things that we see that are successful. The distinction you're making between differentiation and competitive analysis is a very astute one. So it comes down to the expression, you have to know the rules before you can break them. And you have to know what, so similarly, you have to know what is the minimum instantiation of this idea for it to be good. That is the first thing you have to know before when canvassing competitors. If you're having a podcast, it should sound decent. You should be able to articulate yourself clearly. You should have interesting topic selection and so forth. Figure out what is the minimum viable product of the thing you're doing and then worry about differentiating because no one's going to use you if you're bad to begin with, unless you're just a very, very novel, like in a very novelty way, focusing on differentiation. Maybe that works, but that's pretty much the definition of a fad. Yeah. Right. So the distinction you make is a very wise one. I think it's also like you may get lucky, right? And you've probably heard stories about people who say, the most important thing is that you're unique and they are successful somehow, right? It's not necessarily because they did it the right way. It's because oftentimes this is their survivorship bias, right? You didn't hear about all the people who tried their unique idea out that weren't successful because they aren't around anymore. They're not doing the thing that they were doing. They're not doing the thing anymore because they weren't able to sustain it just based on some unique feature. So especially if you make your unique feature something that isn't sustainable or that goes below that MVP quality. For example, if you were to go and make your selling feature that you're the cheapest whatever thing on the market and you're undercutting everybody and that's the way that you're getting any of your business in the first place, that's not sustainable. You're not going to be able to stick around with that. So it's extremely important that you think about differentiation as kind of an additional, kind of the final piece of the puzzle rather than, I don't know where that myth came from. It's a commonly passed around myth in business and in marketing that differentiation is key, but it's absolutely a color, a part of what your business is, but it can kill your business as well. That's right. And there's so many examples of startups that were almost identical to the ones that came before them, but they were the ones that took off. So many examples. And why is that? Because they grew better. They probably had a better methodology for growth. They may have just been lucky, but the through line for most of them is they had a better growth methodology. Facebook is maybe the best and biggest example of a growth first internal mindset after they built up Facebook and they started hiring their first round of execs. They put together a team that made every decision based on growth and it paid off. Yeah. I love that. I love that idea, by the way, that perhaps one of the best takeaways from today's episode, if you're writing notes or whatever, while you're listening to this episode, the idea that you start everything with growth in mind, that you, I assume you even prioritize your tasks with this idea that what are the things that are going to yield the best growth out of this list? And because you're in that situation now, where you have everything on your list yields some kind of growth, you're even saying, all right, which of these is going to yield the most growth of all of the growth things that I have on my list to do? Yeah. And again, I think it's worth calling out that we're not talking necessarily about growth for growth's sake. We're talking about growth for the purpose of implementing a healthy reward cycle so that you can actually sustain your interest in that thing. Or you can experience the evolution of evolution evolutionally evolutionally evolutionally evolutionally evolutionally evolutionally evolutionally evolutionally evolutionally evolutionally evolutionally evolutionally evolutionally evolutionally evolutionally evolutionally evolutionally evolutionally evolutionally evolutionally evolutionally To go back a couple of talking points, you were wondering, how did this myth of differentiation first come about? Almost like we can label it the differentiation first mindset, right, versus the growth first mindset. And here's just, you know, I'm just throwing this out there. I haven't thought about this very deeply, but it might be a reflection of the American individualism. And sort of everyone is a snowflake thing where individuality is heralded as a virtue. And being different is heralded as a virtue in the U.S. And maybe that carried over to this newer generation of startup founders who feel like everything they do has to be not just world changing, but also unique. Yeah, some expression of individualism. Yeah, you know how you should be unique? You should be uniquely good at growth. That's the most effective way to be. Yeah, that is. That's an extremely important reality to face that sometimes, you know, the things that we face, our egos, and I talk about this on the show all the time, our egos will absolutely get in the way of making good decisions. Even making decisions that are in our best interest, things that we really care about. Sometimes our egos will prevent us from making decisions that are healthy for us, that are good for us. And we can often, you know, fall victim to this idealism. That is at odds with our ultimate goals. And a good example of that is a lot of people, sort of a refrain among B2B enterprise founders that are young and seeing a lot of growth, is they'll say, I never, a lot of them are founded by developers. And a lot of them will say, I never thought I'd be starting a startup that sells to these old, boring enterprises. Right. And, but it is. Wildly successful, wildly interesting, and wildly rewarding. Like, you know how much fun the SigOpt guys are having and the Envoy guys are having? There's just two examples, Dropbox, three examples of young founders in the Bay Area who founded something that they never thought they'd get into. Sorry, not SigOpt, I mean Century. And so, these are selling, they're selling to huge enterprises. And they are much healthier and much higher revenue businesses. Than many of their, than the average non-B2B enterprise counterpart. That's very important that our perceptions of what a wonderful life looks like, our projections of what, you know, this plays out as, how we end up impacting the world or the things, the specifics of what we do. You know, it's probably a good idea to remain flexible in the specifics. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. The things that you want to be inflexible on are those more principle-oriented things, perhaps your values, right? The specifics of how those things play out, the more flexible you are, the more likely you're going to see those things kind of fulfilled, right? Those self-expectations or desires are long-term, like we were discussing earlier in the show, those long-term, you know, forecasts of things that you care about, if you remain flexible in the specifics of how those things play out, those are going to be fulfilled. how that happens, then that vision can kind of, you know, manifest itself a little bit easier, I think. Yeah, I think that's well said. Julian, I'd love to ask you two questions real quick to wrap this show up. First of all, though, I want to thank you so much for taking the time. I know the people who are listening to the show are going to be grateful for the candor that you are presenting with and the kind of awareness that, you know, when you come into a group of developers, they've heard everything about marketing that they want to hear oftentimes, right? It seems like developers can be at odds with marketing as a discipline. But hopefully this episode, and I know it has for me, has changed some of the perspective that developers may by default have. And I want to thank you for doing that here on the show. Oh, yeah, my pleasure. I just hope it was useful. I kind of felt like I was just rambling. So yeah, hopefully there was something there. Let me ask you these two questions. And I can assure you that I found value out of this. And I know that the people listening to the show will as well. But the first question that I want to ask you to wrap the show up is, what do you wish more people would ask you about? I wish more people would ask me to validate the growth potential of their startups. I wish more people would ask me to validate the growth potential of their startup idea because I can save them so much time. Now, it doesn't mean I'm going to be right. And I don't know everything. I haven't worked with every type of business, but I have enough of a rubric to say you're getting yourself into the hardest user acquisition strategy you possibly could or not. And because I can't literally answer everybody's questions, although I do, if you send them my way, I absolutely would love to. But if it gets to too high of a volume, what I do is I point people to Julian.com because I've written a lot about this. On the first page of my growth marketing guide, you can get a good quick feel for whether you're in the right direction. Excellent. Excellent. So send at Julian on Twitter a bunch of tweets with your startup ideas. Yeah, go for it. Go for it. I'll give it a shot. Awesome. All right. And the second question that I want to ask you is, if you had 30 seconds of advice to give to developers at all stages in their careers, young developers or seasoned developers, what would you tell them? Oh, let's see. That's a good question. Without having premeditated this, what's coming to my mind is beware the trap of inertia. So I spent most of this podcast talking about the benefits of inertia, that flow state that is in part a result of the reward cycle. But conversely, it can be a trap and is all the time for myself included. So there's no merit. There's no merit in putting your head down and hustling super hard without ever taking a breath and pausing to ask yourself, am I actually in the right direction? Is my inertia pointed in the right direction? Or has something new changed in my life? Is there a new interest, new inputs, new realities, new economic situations? Or I have to rethink the things I'm choosing to work on and my priorities of things in life. And so that is sorely unhelpful. And I think that's a really under, under executed task. I think this is actually what Elon Musk basically advocates in his wonderful interview on Wait, But Why. He talks about his process for thinking of the world in this way, where you have to repeatedly check where the outside world is and ask, are you still in the right direction with it? Always considering the context. Yeah. That is, that is extremely important. And it's important that we do this for ourselves. It's important that we do this for our employers. You know, there's some wisdom in this idea that. You know, this is the same trap that gets us into situations where we're over optimizing, right? Where we're refactoring code endlessly. And then that code all gets thrown away because it was on a temporary project. Then we put a bunch of energy into this thing that ends up being disposed of or otherwise devalued. Very important and excellent advice. Thank you so much, Julian, for your time today. Yeah. Thank you so much for having me, Jonathan. I appreciate it. Thank you for listening to. Today's episode of Developer Tea and a huge thank you to Julian Shapiro for joining me on the episode. Head over to Julian.com and sign up for updates. When Julian writes, he releases these guides. They're completely free and they're incredibly useful. Head over to Julian.com. Thank you so much for listening. If you heard anything useful, anything valuable in today's episode, then it's probably a pretty good bet for you to subscribe. Whatever podcasting app you use, because we do episodes like this one on a regular basis. Three episodes. A week. And subscribing is the best way to make sure you don't miss out on future valuable episodes. Thank you so much for listening. And until next time, enjoy your tea. Bye. Bye.