Julian Shapiro: observation

Transcript context

…And also for Twitter Blue, to be able to even do that. Yes, exactly. Exactly right. Like Telegram right now, they released something like Twitter Blue. I forget, I don't know what it's called. But now when you're a Telegram premium paying user, it has a little star thing next to your name that everyone else sees. "Wait, what is that? Oh, that's Telegram Pro. Let me take a look at that." Last example, which is one of my favorites, is billboarding via the nature of your product being something people are compelled to share in order to use. If I have a Calendly account, I have to share my Calendly link with the world in order to create an event on my calendar. If you're like me, you get a million Calendly links every week. That's the phenomenal form of billboarding, people are sharing it willingly. No wonder they've exploded. Same thing with Dropbox sharing file links and you're seeing the Dropbox URL, or GoFundMe, when people share the GoFundMe page. You get the gist. Billboarding costs you nothing, scales infinitely, can have compounding effects. And if your product lends itself to billboarding, it's just a phenomenal way to grow if possible. That's category three, I guess. We'll cover one last one, if you'd like me too, which is basically UGC, so user generated content. Same sort of thing. Basically I hop on YouTube or TikTok or Insta or whatever. I make content. I share it with the world. In so sharing that content, the platforms brand themselves on the content. At the end of every TikTok video on Twitter that you've ever seen or Insta, at the end it'll say, "Here's the TikTok user's account." They're billboarding themselves into the content that users themselves are generating, and the users are incentivized to share that content off platform, which brings users to the platform, because users want to get customers wherever they can. They're going to cross-sell to their YouTube channel and so on. 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 landing pages that show off the products, and they share it elsewhere, then that's an example of users making content they're sharing off platform that is useful for their own followers. Another example of UGC that people often overlook is Quora or Reddit or Stack Overflow or TripAdvisor, where you're encouraging users to create content in the form of conversation that then surface itself on Google and SEO. Basically if you just encourage users to have conversations that are publicly indexed, that increases your surface area on Google for hitting more keywords and you get way more search traffic. Basically the question that this boils down to is to leverage UGC in your product, you ask yourself, do users use my product to make content in any way, shape, or form? If so, what type of content that they make should we encourage them to then share? o leverage UGC in your product, you ask yourself, do users use my product to make content in any way, shape, or form? If so, what type of content that they make should we encourage them to then share? And then how can we make the page that they use to share the content as appealing and as easily to consume as possible? And that's basically UGC. We'll pause there, but basically that's PLA in a nutshell. The thing that all of these have in common is you're not spending a dollar. They scale super quickly. You're not reliant on, well, maybe to some extent with SEO, but you're not relying on third party volatility. It's a much healthier narrative for how you're going to grow and scale.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.