I’m Julian Wan. I live in New York City, where I ideate, build, and grow digital products.

I‘ve loved solving puzzles ever since I was a kid. I remember building legos with my dad — foreseeing how each of the pieces would fit into the bigger picture. I loved watching something come to life, piece by piece.

And as a military brat, I was afforded the opportunity to live abroad. I was exposed to different cultures, languages, and ways of life. I learned to adapt quickly and to see the world from different perspectives. I saw languages, economies, customs, and conflicts as puzzles to be solved. I loved the challenge of understanding how they all fit together. Why some problems linger, or why some problems exist in one place but never in another... the world fascinated me.

In college at UCLA, thinking I was destined for law, I studied Philosophy. In hindsight, Philosophy was much more of an excuse to allow myself to linger and think on some bigger puzzles. By the time I was finished with college, I realized there were some puzzles too big to solve... I still don‘t know what the meaning of life is. However, I did solve a big puzzle of my own: I didn‘t want to be a lawyer.

To support myself in college, I had taken a job working at American Apparel as a sales associate. I would watch the flow of foot traffic and sudden waves of sales and notice patterns and opportunities. If we placed a sign here, we could increase sales by 10x, etc. Eventually I was recruited to visit stores internationally to help fledgling retail outposts increase their sales. I was hooked. I loved the challenge of solving these puzzles.

Tired of a life of traveling and feeling rootless, I finally found my way to New York City, where I became heavily involved in advertising, brand strategy, and marketing. I worked in nightlife. I planned big events. I worked with big brands. I put a god damn Ford Focus in a warehouse in Brooklyn and threw a party around it. I worked with publications like Refinery29, New York Post, Paper Magazine to host grand experiential events. I loved the challenge of creating something out of nothing and calling it marketing.

After nearly a decade of brand work, strategy, web design, writing thousands of sales decks, pitching, and hearing "yes" just enough times to justify the many "no‘s" — I decided to start a creative agency. I wanted to build something that was an expression of everything I‘d learned, and do it with a very close friend. We built a team, we built a brand, we built a business. And it worked! Until the Covid-19 pandemic hit.

With so much uncertainty and ambiguity, we dissolved the agency, and I took a full-time role at one of my best clients: Stationhead. For the past four years I‘ve worked closely with the Stationhead team to grow their business, build their brand, and create a product that people love. I‘ve been able to work on everything from marketing, to paid ads, to brand strategy, to outreach operations. We went from under 10K MAUs to over 2MM MAUs in 4x years. But I ran out of puzzles to solve. I need a new challenge. With warmth for the Stationhead team, I parted this year and am looking for a new growth marketing challenge.