Growth tactics, retention strategies, and becoming a better writer

Julian Shapiro, founder of Demand Curve and partner at Hyper, a growth strategist, writer and investor, joins Lenny to discuss growth tactics, retention, and writing. The conversation covers product-led acquisition, building user state for retention, what makes writing novel, choosing topics, and his Creativity Faucet framework for generating better ideas.

01Key learnings

• Pursue product-led acquisition by designing features where users naturally invite others, such as settling debts, sharing conversations, or billboarding the brand, rather than relying on bolt-on referral rewards.
• Build user state, like reputation, audience, or social graphs that cannot transfer off-platform, so accumulated investment makes switching costly and retention higher.
• Prefer evergreen topics and keep updating old writing, since Julian treats his handbooks and posts as living assets rather than dated content.
• Judge writing quality as novelty times resonance: first find surprising, significant, non-obvious points, then add stories, analogies and examples to make them stick.
• Test novelty by having several readers mark the sentences that surprise them, then condense the dull stretches between those points.
• Choose writing topics by pairing a clear objective, such as proving a status quo wrong, with a strong personal motivation that will sustain you to finish.
• Use the Creativity Faucet: write out bad ideas first, since emptying them trains your mind to avoid bad elements and makes good ideas arrive with better intuition.
• Be wary of engagement-bait threads; Julian argues they attract labor followers and can drive away the thoughtful readers who build real loyalty.

02Frameworks mentioned

Summary and takeaways written by PM Atlas; quotes are short excerpts. © the original author.