Julian Shapiro

It's not clear if the biggest problem you have is 1. potential users / customers not understanding what problem you solve, 2. that the problem isn't one of their big problems, 3. that your user onboarding needs to be improved, or 4. that their current solutions are satisfactory or 5 something else. Identify it, focus on it, try things related to it.

You are likely a member of your target market - how and why would you talk to a random person or company about some problem or product?

Customer feedback is a combination of analytics, conversation, and observation. You are already getting some!

Talk with users, potential users, and people that leave and find out why. However your users want to be talked to (consider in person, conferences, video chat, differently worded or timed email, chat in the website, surveys, possibly but probably not the phone given the audience). Turn the random text based messages into bigger conversations.

Observe people using your website, signing up to use your product, using your product. What works great? What can be improved?

For getting customer feedback, look into user research and user interviews. This might involve giving people incentives e.g. gift cards to participate.

Read The Mom Test. Short summary here: https://www.slideshare.net/xamde/summary-of-the-mom-test

Other resources:

- https://www.nngroup.com/articles/ux-research-cheat-sheet/

- https://www.nngroup.com/articles/which-ux-research-methods/

- How to do a user research…

I launched ToDesktop back in April, I'm ramen profitable and I'm working on it full-time.

I don't know if I would call it a success yet. I want my revenue to reach six figures annually before I call it a success but I'm seeing good growth. Most of my growth now is coming from organic search engine traffic. I've posted some high-leverage page speed + SEO tips on Indie Hackers here: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/marketing-tools-are-damaging-your-seo-and-how-to-fix-it-ed6d6d7bb4?commentId=-LnHh1mMxpDTsMUkhf2J

I'm a product/tech person with some graphic design experience but I was really weak on sales/marketing before I started working on ToDesktop. If you're like me (strong on tech/product, weak on sales/marketing) then I would highly recommend Julian Shapiro's guide on growth marketing. It's zero-fluff and written by someone with a technical mindset: https://www.julian.com/guide/growth/intro

A one-person business is tough, it's lonely at times. It can also be tough to work on the things you should be working on (as opposed to the things you want to work on). This is enjoyable sometimes though, for example, I made my test suite dance to Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger by Daft Punk. Totally unnecessary but it renewed my enthusiasm and made for a fun tweet. https://twitter.com/DaveJ/status/1167386564240056321

Self-promo for those interested: ToDesktop automatically creates a desktop app from any web app. It's like Electron-as-a-Service with code signing, installer,…

>There are multiple studies[1] showing that lifting to exhaustion yields the same results regardless of the weight and number of reps

Worth noting: for both of the studies cited the high end of reps for light weight is 25 while the low end for reps in heavy is 8, both well within "conventional wisdom". What I mean by that is not that conventional wisdom is right, but that the truth probably lies somewhere in there, frankly the state of things is one that I hate, I'd love to be able to just take an exercise plan tested and true, the most similar thing I've found is Julian's Shapiro workout plan[1] which, from a google search, doesn't even have a good reputation in different fitness communities. Would love a larger discussion about that but it isn't that popular to begin with.

>My friend is a physical therapist and shocked me by saying almost nothing they do has been verified by double-blind trials.
I'll one-up you here. A friend of mine is a physical therapist and as such most of my friends who exercise follow her word as gospel. Said gospel states that rest times above 90 seconds are way too much and that they should be preferably kept to 40 to 60 seconds. All I can argue is that about nothing points to that being optimal but it's not my field so it gets complicated.

[1] https://www.julian.com/guide/muscle/workout-plans

Sidenote: why in the world is that site not allowing me to press the wheel to scroll by moving the cursor?

Bell Curve [http://BellCurve.com] | $40/hr USD | Growth Marketer | Remote | But must be in North America | Full-time

The position:

- We're a top startup growth agency (BellCurve.com). We run growth for several YC companies.
- We need a remote growth copywriter. We'll teach you growth. Prior knowledge not required.
- $40 USD/hr. Full-time remote, but North America only. No current students.

Requirements:

- You must be a fantastic writer and must submit writing samples when applying via email.
- Your work history must indicate an interest in marketing.

Job entails:

- Helping us create ads and assess their performance (we'll teach you how)
- Helping us A/B test our clients' sites (we'll teach you how)
- Rewriting clients' homepages to be more compelling

Next steps:

- Shoot me (Julian Shapiro) an email at jobs@bellcurve.com.
- We'll chat on Skype then progress to a quick sample project (fully paid).
- No formal job app required.

More about me: I'm the creator of Velocity.js and I write guides at Julian.com. In fact, I wrote an entire guide on growth: https://julian.com/learn/growth. Hope to hear from you!

Have you read The Mom Test? Highly recommended. Here's a summary: https://www.slideshare.net/xamde/summary-of-the-mom-test

- Exactly who is your ideal customer, and what do they care about? Veteran CEO of 4 person seed stage start up in FinTech world trying to build an MVP? Mid career hiring manager at a Series B or C company in healthcare looking to expand their team long term? Recruiter at a Series D company with 20,000+ employees trying to meet their quota of leads for the week? Someone else? Drill down here. Once you identify it and validate that through experiments, focus on as few as possible - ideally just one.

- Is it clear to your potential customer what problem you are solving for them?

- Do they think you are the best way for them to solve it? What alternatives do they use currently? What's painful about it? What's better about your solution, so compelling that they should try it?

- Is the problem they think you solve one of their current
priorities?

If the issue is with framing or marketing, here's a useful guide: https://www.julian.com/guide/growth/intro

Good luck!

Definitely, I listed a few examples of great resources to make a point on the article. Another resource that seems like it might be great that I'm currently reading is Julian Shapiro's growth marketing guide - https://www.julian.com/guide/growth/intro

It is long form text, which is an automatic -1 for me, and I dismissed this for a while, but over time it's seemed to come out as one of those "great" resources in a different domain that I muse read. After starting, I noticed

1. It reads more like vimtutor than an article; i.e. you pick your own adventure, which I can bite

2. Many people I look up to as experts have directly recommended this to me

3. It's relevant to me now - I'm working on a startup

I still dismissed the guide for a long time and wasn't convinced it was the best resource out there - but it's starting to seem like it's atleast a local maxima for me.

I hope that made sense into how I think about resources when learning. I don't yet have a coherent system in place to determine how valuable a resource is to me. I usually only know months or years later