What's up everyone? This is Cortland from

EndyHackers.com, and you're listening to the Andy Hackers podcast. On this show, I

talked to the founders of profitable internet businesses, and I try to get a sense of what

it's like to be in their shoes. How do they get to where they are today? How do they make decisions, both at their companies and in their personal lives, and what makes their businesses tick? And the goal here, as always, is so that the rest of us can go on to build our own successful internet businesses. Joining me today, for the second time on the Andy Hackers podcast, is none other than growth expert Julian Shapiro.

Julian is the founder of Bell Curve, an agency that not only helps founders grow their businesses, but also trains teams so that they learn how to grow their businesses on their own. Julian, welcome back to the show, and thanks for joining me. I'm excited to be back. There's so much to cover. so much to cover the last time you came on you told the story of Belkirf and how you got started, how you became an expert of what you do. And in today's episode, I think we're going to do things a little bit differently. Rather than just telling your story, we're going to experiment with a little bit more educational content than normal. We're going to talk about the things that everybody needs to know about growing their business before they get started with their business. We're going to talk about the things that everybody needs to know about growing

their business before they get started with their business. We're going to talk about things that people should know before they even come up with the idea for their business. And you, Julian, obviously, having worked with dozens of companies to help them grow, are I think the perfect person to come on and talk about this because you've seen story after story, lesson after lesson of what works and what doesn't.

In fact, the reason I wanted to have you on in the first place is because of a tweet you sent out a few months back.

It was a little bit cryptic, but you said, quote, given equal founder skill, e-commerce and mobile apps succeed much more frequently than software as a service startup's

do. So you're stating that people are better off opening an online store and selling goods

or starting a mobile app than they are building a web app from scratch and trying to charge

a monthly fee. So let's start there. What are some things that led you to that conclusion?

So if you look at all the clients that my agency has worked with and look at the rate of success when dividing by the type of product they sell, say it's SaaS, say it's e-commerce, say it's a mobile app or even a Chrome extension, e-commerce succeeds the most frequently. Then it's probably

mobile apps, particularly those that deal with transacting finance in some way. Let's say it's a

Bitcoin app. Let's say it's a friend-to-friend payments app. Let's say it's like Robin Hood

investing. So mobile apps that help you transact money.

The third was Chrome extensions, which was super interesting to me because they're a wonderful

Trojan horse to getting easy one-click installs. And then once you have that install,

that install base, you can piggyback off that to monetize as long as you're offering value.

But the point here is the friction to install is so minimal relative to getting someone to create

a fully built out profile on your SaaS product or even downloading and installing and signing up

for a mobile app. So we can get back to that. But the point is, for our purposes here,

that the very bottom of success frequency are SaaS apps. This isn't to say don't pursue

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