Frank Niu

§ Writing — the portfolio

Essays & papers.

Things I've written for class, for Axiom Pathways, and for college applications — mostly about finance, AI, and what we owe the next set of teenagers.

  1. Aug 2026 Lesson 17: Strategy vs. Activity Social media done right — how Duolingo's TikTok grew to 16M followers by treating the account like a sitcom, not by posting more. outside
  2. Aug 2026 Lesson 16: SEO for Beginners Marketing Curriculum, Lesson 16 on Axiom Pathways. outside
  3. Aug 2026 Lesson 15: Landing Pages How to build one that converts — how Harry's got 100,000 email signups in a week from an almost-empty page. outside
  4. Aug 2026 College Supplement — Short Answers Eleven short-answer supplemental responses from college applications. college
  5. Jul 2026 Lesson 14: Your Website Is Your Storefront Problems even the president faced, and how to avoid it — how a 40% signup lift on Obama's 2008 campaign site came from two small tweaks. outside
  6. Jul 2026 Lesson 13: What Is Digital Presence The thing to consider before SEO — how Rand Fishkin built Moz to $40M/year by publishing everything he knew for free. outside
  7. Jul 2026 Lesson 12: Your Value Proposition What it is, and how to make it mean something — how Dollar Shave Club's $1 pitch got 12,000 subscribers in 48 hours. outside
  8. Jul 2026 Lesson 11: Storytelling in Marketing Facts tell, stories sell — why Steve Jobs said '1,000 songs in your pocket' instead of '5 gigabytes.' outside
  9. Jul 2026 Lesson 10: Personal Branding for Founders You are the marketing! How Ben Francis built Gymshark to unicorn status by mailing free clothes to YouTubers he genuinely watched. outside
  10. Jul 2026 AI's Impact on Marketing How to demand a 20% bonus in a saturated field — how AI is splitting marketing into people who direct it and people it replaces. outside
  11. Jul 2026 The Dangers of AI: The Hallucination Tragedy When the pursuit of automation becomes illegal — how AI-fabricated legal citations turned into six-figure court sanctions. outside
  12. Jul 2026 Lesson 09: The Six Words or Less Headline Lessons from a master copywriter — how David Ogilvy's famous Rolls-Royce headline turned three weeks of research into one line. outside
  13. Jul 2026 Lesson 08: Brand Identity on $0 Misconceptions of an overused word — how Emily Weiss built Glossier's brand for free, years before the product existed. outside
  14. Jul 2026 Lesson 07: Customer Psychology Why people buy what they buy — how Febreze failed by solving a problem nobody could smell, then won by selling a feeling. outside
  15. Jul 2026 Lesson 06: Building a Real Buyer Persona Who is your customer, really? On why most buyer personas are invented rather than researched — and how to fix that. outside
  16. Jul 2026 Lesson 05: Define Your Target Customer Things to do before spending your first dollar on ads — why narrow, specific targeting beats broad targeting every time. outside
  17. Jul 2026 The 17,784-Hour Lesson Patterns from successful founders — what the data actually says about sustainable work versus the romanticized 100-hour week. outside
  18. Jul 2026 Pitch Deck 101 You have under four minutes. Here's what actually gets read — lessons from Buffer's famous 13-slide raise. outside
  19. Jul 2026 Five Things Every Successful Startup Has in Common (Across Every Sector) A synopsis of Airbnb and beyond — the unglamorous patterns that separate startups that survive year one from the ones that don't. outside
  20. Jun 2026 Debrief #5: Arcads.ai The fastest-growing AI ad tool doesn't own its AI — a startup debrief on Arcads.ai. outside
  21. Jun 2026 A conversation with a YC founder Inside the mind of a technical CEO — a Q&A with the founder of a YC-backed biotech startup working to cure genetic diseases. outside
  22. Jun 2026 Debrief #4: RentAHuman How AI is giving jobs instead of destroying them — a startup debrief on RentAHuman. outside
  23. Jun 2026 A conversation with Cory Levy Entrepreneurial advice on finding your passion early, from the founder who cold-DM'd his way into VC before graduating college. outside
  24. Jun 2026 Debrief #3: Lovable How positioning and features can be opposites — a startup debrief on Lovable's rise to a $6.6B valuation. outside
  25. Jun 2026 Debrief #1: Starcloud How YC's fastest unicorn came to be — a startup debrief on Starcloud, which put a GPU in orbit. outside
  26. Jun 2026 Debrief #2: Cactus Compute Why a founder declined a major tech offer to build AI that runs entirely on your phone. outside
  27. May 2026 Lesson 04: It Wasn't the Product How Nutribullet, Peloton, and Gymshark won by selling an identity rather than a better product. outside
  28. May 2026 Lesson 03: Reason for Existing Why a startup needs a genuine contrarian belief to justify its existence — from New Coke's failure to Warby Parker's founding. outside
  29. May 2026 Lesson 02: What is Positioning? On Peter Thiel's "not having competition is the whole game" — how Facebook, Amazon, and Netflix all narrowed their first market before expanding. outside
  30. May 2026 Lesson 01: The Chicken and the Egg How to sell an idea without a budget — on Brian Chesky photographing Airbnb listings by hand. outside
  31. May 2026 A Quick Note about Startups How the culture of startup image (the Patagonia vest, the funding-round LinkedIn post) affects the purpose behind why people actually build. outside
  32. May 2026 How to Learn with AI AI is blurring the line between knowledge and comprehension — four ways to use a chatbot as a tool instead of a crutch. outside
  33. Nov 2025 The Case for a Federal Jobs Guarantee Why a Federal Jobs Guarantee beats both a tariff dividend and a Universal Basic Income as a way to close the wealth gap. school
  34. Nov 2025 What It Means to Own Starting from a Patek Philippe slogan and ending in intellectual property law, an argument that ownership is really the ability to control something — including the intangible. school
  35. Sep 2025 The Necessity of Artifice From a viral street-safety hand signal to Madoff, O.J. Simpson, and Animal Farm — an argument that deception is unavoidable, and the real question is only whether it's ill-intentioned. school
  36. Aug 2025 Rhetorical Analysis — Clare Boothe Luce How Luce's 1960 speech to the Women's National Press Club uses contradiction to disarm an audience before criticizing it. school