Shaan Puri's power writing framework

Shaan Puri built and sold a social media SaaS to Twitch, grew a crypto newsletter to 250k subscribers in a year and sold it for seven figures, and runs a DTC brand doing eight figures in revenue. He also co-hosts My First Million. When he teaches writing, it is worth paying attention.

The Do-Learn-Redo method

This was not officially part of the course curriculum. It was the structure Puri used to teach every session, and it turned out to be the most transferable thing in the room.

The method is simple: do the thing first, then learn about it, then do it again.

1. Write a cold email (do)
2. Study how cold emails work (learn)
3. Rewrite the email (redo)

Most people invert steps one and two. They read extensively before attempting anything, which means they have no context for what they are learning. The gap between advice and application stays wide.

Doing first gives you a specific failure to interrogate. When you then read about the technique, you are not absorbing abstract advice -- you are checking it against something you already tried. The redo step closes the loop: you apply what you learned to the exact thing you just built.

This is not a revolutionary idea. It is just rare in practice. The operators we work with who improve fastest are doing some version of this already, even when they don't name it.

The five-point cold email structure

Cold email is undersold as a skill. If you are good at it, you can reach anyone -- clients, collaborators, investors, creators with large audiences. Most people are bad at it because they focus on themselves.

Puri breaks the cold email into five points, in order:

1. Attention -- the subject line. If it doesn't get opened, nothing else matters.
2. Personal touch -- something specific to the recipient. Generic openers signal that you sent this to a hundred people.
3. Benefits to them -- not what you want from the conversation, but what they get from having it.
4. Credibility -- one line, not a resume. The minimum to be taken seriously.
5. Simple ask -- the part most people get wrong.

The ask is where cold emails die. Founders and operators routinely ask for thirty-minute calls, detailed feedback, or introductions to three people. These asks require effort and scheduling. The recipient's default is to put it off, which becomes ignoring it.

The fix: make the ask so small it can be answered with one word or one sentence. "If that sounds interesting, reply 'yes' and I'll send it over" is better than a calendar link. The recipient doesn't need to commit to anything except a syllable.

This is the same logic that applies to LinkedIn connection requests, follow-up DMs, and even the call-to-action at the end of a post. The smaller the required action, the higher the response rate.

Get clear with your elevator pitch

During one Power Writing live session, a founder volunteered to pitch their business in front of more than 200 people. After they finished, Puri asked them to explain it again. Still unclear. The room couldn't summarize what the company did.

This is a common failure mode. The person inside the business adds context layer by layer until the explanation becomes a list of features and qualifications. The listener is trying to understand the basic shape of what you do, and you are describing the architecture.

The formula Puri gives is two sentences:

1. Most [target audience] have [problem].
2. That's why we built [solution] so that [desired outcome].

"The average tech person spends three or more hours a day on email, so we built a fast Gmail client that gets you through your inbox in half the time."

No jargon. No mechanism. No history of how the idea came to be. The listener only needs to understand the problem being solved and who it is for. If your grandmother cannot understand what you do after one sentence, the explanation is not done.

This applies directly to LinkedIn bios, About sections, and the first line of any cold message. The people we audit who struggle to generate inbound often have profiles that describe their method rather than their outcome. Readers do not know why to care.

Copywork

Copywork is the practice of hand-copying writing you admire.

It sounds too simple to work. It is not. Writing is largely pattern recognition, and patterns install themselves through repetition. When you type out a paragraph that works, your hands learn the rhythm before your conscious mind does. You notice where the sentence turns, where the writer held back, where they broke the expected structure.

Puri's recommendation: spend five to ten minutes before any writing session copying a piece you find effective. It is a warm-up that doubles as instruction. The format does not matter much -- newsletters, blog posts, great cold emails. The point is to move through good writing at the pace of production, not consumption.

This connects to the broader principle of imitation before invention. Learn to cook by following recipes. Learn guitar by playing songs other people wrote. Learn to draw by tracing. The goal is not to stay imitative -- it is to absorb the rules well enough to break them deliberately.

For operators building LinkedIn presence, this means picking two or three posts from creators whose writing style earns engagement in your niche and copying them out before you draft your own. Not plagiarizing -- copying in a notebook or a blank doc to feel the structure. The difference between a post that lands and one that doesn't is often a sentence-level decision that becomes visible only when you slow down enough to notice it.

Putting it together

These four techniques work as a system. Copywork trains the eye. The elevator pitch formula clears out the noise before you write anything public. The cold email structure gives you a repeatable format for outreach. And the Do-Learn-Redo method ensures that reading about all of this actually changes how you write, rather than just what you know.

The operators we see compounding on LinkedIn are not posting more. They are writing more deliberately. They test a hook, audit why it worked or didn't, and adjust. That is Do-Learn-Redo in practice, applied to every post.

Puri's framing is worth holding onto: most people consume passively and improve slowly. The gap between them and the people who improve fast is not talent. It is the habit of testing, then learning from the test, then testing again with the new information.

For more on the writing patterns that drive LinkedIn traction, see our breakdown of 7 writing principles for short-form social and what the top LinkedIn creators share across their strategies.