Demand Curve - How we built two 7-figure startups

Hey there,

6.5 years ago, my high school friend, Julian Shapiro, and I started a growth agency, Bell Curve.

We raised $450k in a crowdfunding campaign for our first client.

Within 2 years, we worked with Microsoft, Segment, Envoy, Perfect Keto, and dozens of other clients. And we brought on Grammarly's first growth hire—Justin Setzer—who is now the CEO.

We wrote for Techcrunch. We gave talks at YC and Google. 

All we had was a single page website with maybe 200 words on it.

Then we noticed that early-stage startups were underserved.

Larger companies could afford to hire marketing help. But, early-stage founders had to do it themselves, and they didn't know how.

So we started Demand Curve and got accepted in Y Combinator.

Our businesses were initially built off the back of two things:

#1. Julian’s personal brand

Julian had some notoriety from launching a JavaScript library, a muscle building guide of all things, and being VP Marketing of Webflow.

We’re talking a few thousand Twitter followers, and 10k newsletter subs.

#2. The Growth Guide

Julian took the first few months of running the agency to write a comprehensive guide to "growth" part-time.

We launched it, and it got hundreds of thousands of views per year. (We’ll be relaunching this soon, for free, stay tuned.)

Then we focused on building a brand

Those two things drove a ton of our initial leads. Then we spent years building up the DC brand so it could outshine Julian.

As a result, I always purposefully hid behind that brand.

Then, 5.5 years in, I realized nobody knew who I was.

They knew DC. They knew our content. They knew my cofounder.

But nobody knew who I was.

My network was small, and I was reliant on Julian to meet others.

So a year ago, I began posting on LinkedIn, using the knowledge from our Audience Building course that Julian (300k followers) and Sahil Bloom (1.5M+) taught in 2020 and 2021.

I then worked with Katelyn Bourgoin to revive and revamp that course. I expected her to be the only teacher. But she loved my content and told me I had to be the other instructor.

A year in and I’m nearing the 50,000 follower mark on LinkedIn. And we’ve created a brand that will hit $500k after 9 months, Un-ignorable.

Why am I telling you this?

A personal audience is extremely powerful as an entrepreneur.

I’m now able to drive as many leads to our agency and courses with a LinkedIn post as I am with an email. Seriously, one post in December sold 30% of our first cohort.

Now I also get asked to be an advisor, and to speak at conferences and on podcasts basically every week. And a bunch of the people I now interact with on a day-to-day I met because of my writing.

In short, a personal audience benefits both my current and future businesses—as well as my personal life.

On Oct 11th, we’re running the third cohort of our 4-week audience building course, The Un-ignorable Challenge.

Enrollment is open now for ~3.5 days only.

We'll dive deep into everything you need to get going and build your audience of future buyers.

207 entrepeneurs have already joined in pre-sales., and it’s the last cohort we’re doing for ~6 months (so we can focus on other cool projects at DC and BC alike).

Join the cohort here: https://www.demandcurve.com/unignorable

– Neal

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