Demand Curve - How we built two 7-figure startups

​Hey there,​

Nearly 8 years ago, my high school friend, Julian Shapiro, and I started a growth agency, Bell Curve.

He lived in SF. I lived out of a backpack and was on my way to travel around Asia and Australia.

A remote company was the only option—a novelty at the time.

We landed our first client due to Julian's network in SF. We quickly raised $450k in a crowdfunding campaign for them.

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.

We had a single-page website with 200 words on it that we threw together in a couple of hours.

But then we noticed something.

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.

Ironically, the people who needed the most help were the least able to get it.

So, we started Demand Curve to teach founders how to grow their startups themselves.

We got accepted into Y Combinator shortly after.

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

#1. Julian’s personal brand

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

We’re talking a few thousand Twitter followers and 10k newsletter subs—of tech people who wanted to build muscle.

#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 quickly scaled to hundreds of thousands of views per year. It became our single best lead source for the next few years.

It was our hero piece of content. It taught people how to do what we did, and in doing so, built trust that we could do it for them even better than they could.

Then we focused on building a brand

Julian didn't want to be the face of the company forever.

So, we spent years building up the DC brand to outshine Julian.

We launched our newsletter. We built a community. We created courses. We built up our Twitter audience. And we created a bunch of content.

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

Then, 5.5 years in, Julian was stepping away to start an investment fund. And 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 relied on Julian to meet others.

And Julian was moving on, and I couldn't rely on him anymore.

So, about 2 years 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.

After a year, I hit the 50,000 follower mark on LinkedIn. And we’ve created a brand that will hit $1M part-time, UNIGNORABLE.

Why am I telling you this?

A personal audience is extremely powerful as an entrepreneur.

I can now drive as many leads to our agency and courses with a LinkedIn post as I can with an email to the ~92,000 people in our audience.

Seriously, a single post sold 30% of our first cohort.

Now, I 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.

Including people I used to consider my business idols.

And I don't necessarily plan to do this forever. The audience gives me a jumping-off point for anything I wish to do in the future.

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

It increases your optionality, your leverage, and your luck surface area.

On Jan 20th, we’re running the final cohort of our audience building cohort course, UNIGNORABLE​

Enrollment is open now until just Jan 14th at 11:59PM Pacific.

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

We'll teach you how to get customers, not just likes.

285 entrepreneurs have already joined, and it’s the last cohort we’re doing before Katelyn and I shift our focus to other projects.

Our alumni have over 4M followers combined.

We'll teach you absolutely everything we know about audience building in 5 weeks. And we've made the whole experience fun and exciting to motivate you to achieve your goal.

This is our last cohort, and it will certainly be the best.

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

Enrollment ends Jan 14th at 11:59PM Pacific.

– Neal

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