Julian Shapiro

https://www.julian.com writes great long-form guides.

By the way, if you are skinny (or worse, skinny + fat), you have to gain weight by eating healthy food, otherwise you will just gain more fat. The best approach I've been able to follow has been protein shakes with body building diets. Julian from HN has a great guide on this: https://www.julian.com/guide/muscle/intro Thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12618223

Personally I'd start doing outbound. Find websites that are selling something complex, ideally B2C - like Shopify for obscure tools. You need companies that are overloaded with support tickets. Reach out to them and see if you can get them on a call. At all costs do not do this in a spammy way - you will see 0 results if you do. Take a ton of time understanding each specific website you're reaching out to and why they'd benefit. This will be a slog and the ROI on your time will likely be terrible but the feedback you get will be invaluable. As for you actual website - it's incredibly cluttered and quite ugly. I attached my favorite landing page guide. You're solving a problem, not selling features. Even more so for a customer support bot. [1] https://www.julian.com/guide/startup/landing-pages

I know others are suggesting workout here so it thought I'd contribute back. I had a lot of success following Julian Shapiro's guide I'm how to build muscle [1], like so much so that I had to get rid of a few shirts because my arms wouldn't fit anymore. It's detailed in explaining multiple faucets including nutrition and rest, I didn't follow every source he listed but he claims to have done quite a bit of research regardless everything is listed. [1] https://www.julian.com/guide/muscle/intro

Julian Shapiro put together a really solid guide on this exact topic that I highly recommend reading. We followed this pretty closely at my last co and it performed well (devtools product). https://www.julian.com/guide/startup/landing-pages

There are a lot of recommendations for Starting Strength here and I think the book is great for describing how to do a certain kind of lift. I read it and was still lost about frequency, how to minimize injury, etc. It doesn't give you the practical "do this" sort of advice a true beginner needs or at least this true beginner needed. I really like Julian Shapiro's guide for the first few months of weight lifting: https://www.julian.com/guide/muscle/intro I'd recommend the trainer part though - I tweaked my shoulder trying to just figure it out on my own.

This [1] was posted two days ago on HN, but didn't get visibility but is great to explain HN beginners how they should lift [1] https://www.julian.com/guide/muscle/intro

I know that the HN crowd were not very receptive of Julian's[1] writing style but I found him inspiring. Recently he tweeted the working style of Ed Sheeran and Neil Gaiman on how they are the top in their field by doing a whole lot of bad writing to come to a good one - Creativity Faucet. You might want to read that tweet at https://twitter.com/Julian/status/1327765347936522240 1. https://www.julian.com

This. Being able to think is the most underrated skill. There is no thinking without writing and drawing. I HIGHLY recommend reading Julian Shapiro's guide on writing: https://www.julian.com/guide/write/intro The market is shaping each generation. Unfortunately, it's pretty common to interact with engineers that don't think before doing, they just start doing with the hope of "figuring it out as we go". This leaves no room for beautiful, simple code. Is it a side-effect of the web boom? How much of this was the result of the PHP and JavaScript subcultures? Couldn't say.

Here is a great guide to growth: https://www.julian.com/learn/growth/intro Its section on Landing Pages is an awesome resource for getting some low hanging fruits right on your landing page. Very actionable advice that will most certainly improve your redesign.

If you're looking to build a great landing page, I found this resource suuuuper helpful when designing our landing page: https://www.julian.com/learn/growth/landing-pages "I want you to think of landing page optimization from the perspective of desire: Conversion = Desire (Increase this) - Labor (Decrease this) - Confusion (Decrease this) It's less work to reduce a visitor's labor and confusion than to increase desire." And here's our landing page: https://www.loopsupport.com/

Read this for starters: https://www.julian.com/learn/growth/intro Unfortunately I don't think you'll be able to find shortcuts at any point, best to just start reading those books and blogs now while also making a great product. Good luck!

Julian Shapiro (a HN member) wrote a great free guide called How to Build Muscle [0] that's a nice resource for anyone new to weight training. 0. https://www.julian.com/learn/muscle/intro

I just got back from the gym a little while ago ending my third week of this program: https://www.julian.com/learn/muscle/intro It's been great and I actually look forward to going now. I spend 45min to an hour there so it doesn't take up a ton of time. I want to move on to SL5x5 after this one but go to my apartment gym which does not have a barbell. Any suggestions/comments about a smith machine (which it does have) and/or dumbbells?

I sit ~10 hours daily, including 2+ hours driving. I'm naturally skinny but haven't done much physical exercises in recent years ("busy"). Now, at age of 34, I'm starting to realize that my body won't last forever and finally started to exercise few times per week, after I found motivating enough guide¹. It amazing how much more energized it makes you feel. [1] https://www.julian.com/learn/muscle/intro

Related with this: I found out last week that a javascript developer (http://julian.com | @shapiro) is vp of marketing in webflow and I had a similar reaction, 'wait a js dev in a marketing position?!'. Amazeballs!

I recommend anyone thinking CSS animations always outperform JS animations to have a look at Velocity.js (http://julian.com/research/velocity/).

>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?

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!

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-se… 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,…

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

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 [email protected]. - 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!

Hit the gym: https://www.julian.com/guide/muscle/intro Grind leetcode: https://leetcode.com/

You are right. The links in the top TOC seem to be broken. The links in the bottom sticky menu work though. I think this is the correct link for the supplements page: https://www.julian.com/guide/muscle/workout-supplements

For anyone that just wants a well-balanced workout plan I highly suggest checking out this guide: https://www.julian.com/guide/muscle/intro

Check out the Creativity Faucet by Julian Shapiro. It’s a brief take on the same phenomenon: you’ve got to let the tap run and let the wastewater out before getting to the good stuff. That’s because, in part, the good stuff is made out of identifying why the wastewater fell short. https://www.julian.com/blog/creativity-faucet

What do you think of this method? https://www.julian.com/guide/muscle/

https://www.julian.com/learn/growth/content-marketing This is a good resource