#211 with Julian Shapiro - The 3 Cheat Codes Startups Use to Print Cash

**Shaan Puri** (0:00)
All right, there's this amazing book called Getting Everything You Can Out Of All You've Got. I read it a few years ago and it changed my life.
And the reason I loved it was because it basically talks about how to get and make more money using things that you already have.
Coincidentally, today's podcast is brought to you by Business Made Simple. It's a podcast by Donald Miller, who I'm gonna tell you about in a second, but he has this amazing episode that's all related to this book and the things that I learned in this book. It's called How To Make Money With What You Already Have. It's an incredible episode. It talks about all the stuff that I learned in this book. The host is Donald Miller. I didn't know who Donald Miller was up until recently, but over the last 12 months, this is totally by coincidence. It was all separate people. They said, you have to check out Donald Miller. He's amazing. So I'm happy that he's part of HubSpot's Podcast Network. You can check it out, Business Made Simple Podcast. It's where he coaches you on how to build your business like an airplane, where the cockpit is your leadership, the body is your overhead, the right engine is your marketing, the left engine is your sales.
You have to check it out. This guy's amazing. It's called Business Made Simple with Donald Miller.

**Julian Shapiro** (1:02)
If you can't make the economics of an ad channel exciting, can you at least A, not burn money, while B, building a huge lead database that likes you because of your free thing or your cheap thing.

**Shaan Puri** (1:27)
I'm actually surprised you haven't been on this before. I feel like you're made for this in a way.

**Julian Shapiro** (1:35)
Maybe. I mean, I was doing pods for a while. Like I was trying like purposely to get on podcasts.
For like indie hackers. Yeah, for like getting the word out about the man curve. Then at some point I'm like, this is cringe, man. Like I don't like listening back to myself.
And so it took the process of actually starting a podcast, you know, in part thanks to also watching you do your magic. To be like, you know what? I can just totally be myself and not have to worry about as much. And then it stopped being cringe. So now I'm all for it.

**Shaan Puri** (2:07)
And how has it been since you launched the pod? So you launched, what's it called? Brains, right? Brains with the S or without the S?

**Julian Shapiro** (2:14)
Yeah, brains with the S. It's been good. It's been, I guess it's rare to have reasons in your life to be very seriously self-reflective about whether or not you're boring the shit out of people.
So like I have to be so deliberate about, can I be charismatic? Can I be interesting? And I'm not saying I'm there yet, but I'm saying I'm at least thinking about it, in the context of trying to not bore people on a podcast. So it's been a really good forcing function.

**Shaan Puri** (2:40)
Okay, I like that. And has it been, so you launched this podcast, you did it very methodically. You recorded like eight episodes with badass people ahead of time. And so I feel like you were pretty thorough about how you went about it, or more so than me at least.
Did it go the way you wanted to, or what did you learn?

**Julian Shapiro** (3:01)
Yeah, I was thorough because I felt that I kind of had no choice. Because I listened to a bunch of podcasts and found most of them to be like un-listenable. And then when I heard My First Million, I'm like, there's something special here, but I don't actually know what it is. And so my co-host on the podcast, Cortland from IndieHackers, he's like, what's going on here that special is they're not asking boring interview questions. They're literally just riffing on ideas collaboratively and making charged statements and letting other people respond to them.
And the net effect is it feels way more like rapport, like a dinner conversation you're overhearing. So we really rolled with that. And then we try to be deliberate about, well, how do we choose guests that can actually play into that? Can they speak spontaneously? Are they willing to play ball on bad ideas around, right? So I feel like it's probably a lot of the stuff that you're thinking about as well. And yeah, it's been great. So we're basically, in a way, we're My First Million, but for everything outside of business, like writing a book, being a storyteller.