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Julian Capital

About the fund

We're seed investors who write $500K checks and make quick decisions.

We're among the best growth and design experts. When we invest, we help overhaul your customer acquisition strategy, design, and brand.

Specifically, we'll roll up our sleeves to design better webpages, we'll hop on Zoom calls to brainstorm new ways to acquire customers, and we'll help you write more compelling pitches.

We're particularly fond of these sectors: marketplaces, frontier tech, and vertical SaaS. Past investments include Ramp, Republic, Mercury, Yassir, ClassDojo, Kindred, Qyber, and Aalo.

About Julian Shapiro

I was the VP of Marketing for Webflow ($4B+ valuation). I later ran user acquisition for Heap Analytics behind the scenes for a year ($960M+ valuation), and I grew Clearbit’s Connect product ($800M+ valuation).

I then founded Demand Curve (YC S19) to help thousands of startups grow. Throughout, I helped run acquisition for Imperfect Foods, Tovala, Outschool, and others. Our agency, Bell Curve, grew Microsoft, Ancestry, TechCrunch, and more. I also wrote TechCrunch’s marketing column.

What people most know me for, however, is my longform handbooks on Julian.com. There, I've built a large audience of startup employees (Twitter) plus I write a large newsletter.

Before all this, I was an engineer. I built one of the most popular open source libraries: Velocity.js (Wikipedia, Github). For this work, I was awarded the Stripe Open Source grant and I was profiled in Forbes.

Here’s a sampling of the nice things folks have said on Twitter.

A few growth ideas for acquisition

Tactic
Example 1
Example 2
Example 3
Create an annual summit for your industry
https://www.demandcurve.com/growth-summit
Sponsor all the newsletters in your industry
https://www.paved.com/
https://sponsorgap.com/
Buy smaller content sites with quality, pre-existing traffic
Swap product plugs in a sister company’s newsletter
Host a joint webinar with a sister company; exchange leads
Pay partners to promote your free trial/sample to their audience

A few growth ideas for conversion

Tactic
Example 1
Example 2
Example 3
Create a high quality playbook and require an email to read
https://blog.wishpond.com/post/115675436300/gated-content
Add always-available live chat to your homepage
Use ProfitWell to optimize your pricing strategy
https://www.profitwell.com/
Require new users to do an onboarding call
Host a weekly educational webinar for new customers
Drip email educational series to teach users a new skill
https://perell.com/write-of-passage-course/
Your whole team takes 30 min to log growth ideas in an Airtable
Offer a free trial for 30 days
Create an SMS text list for exciting product updates
https://www.community.com/
Create the Morning Brew (newsletter) of your industry
Create a competitor comparison grid to emphasize value
Create a public demo; no registration required to try
https://twitter.com/coinbase/status/1400571428009779202?s=20
Embed a blog post (pitching the product) into the homepage
A/B test a more concise homepage that requires an email to see more
https://www.profitwell.com/
Embed the sales team’s Calendly into the homepage
Include video testimonials on the homepage
https://www.profitwell.com/
Julian Shapiro
Add on-demand video chat to your pages for specific geos
https://withe.co/
Asher Abramson