Do you need a big Twitter following to be a successful solopreneur?
How Pieter Levels, Danny Postma, Jon Yongfook, and Damon Chen generate thousands of dollars every month.
On Twitter, there’s the most exciting indie hacking community I’ve ever seen.
I enjoyed the platform back in 2009 / 2010, then I abandoned it for years.
But since 2021, when I discovered the indie hacking movement. I’ve been active on Twitter daily.
I thought “make a big audience and customers will come”. I was (partially) wrong.
Some of the most popular indie hackers with a big Twitter following are Pieter Levels (375k followers), Danny Postma (104k), Jon Yongfook (98k), and Damon Chen (63k).
At once, you might be tempted to think their entrepreneurial success is due to the big following on social platforms, but in reality it’s probably the opposite. Their following is due to their success and the way they use the platform.
Some of the factors that determined their audience size are:
they have been active on the platform for a long time, daily.
some of them embraced the build in public mindset, they keep sharing their struggles, successes, opinions, and valuable resources from time to time.
they are successful with their products, which generates interest because everyone wants to achieve the same success and capture their “secrets”
I analyzed their products to see how they get there and discovered an interesting fact, their products get organic traffic from search engines. A lot of traffic.
Just to give you and idea.
This is the result of SEO work and other tactics, like free tools that rank on Google, and it generates traffic to their products’ websites. Part of this traffic will convert into paying customers.
There are exceptions, of course.
When I built Hivoe and Inboxs, two Twitter-related products, by being active on the platform (and with no SEO effort) I was able to reach $4k MRR.
Or, if your product is a social media platform tool or a media production tool, social media might be a great place to market your products. Otherwise, you need to have alternative distribution channels. And the best way is to capture the search intent of people.
Don’t get me wrong, having an audience is a huge help, you get more visibility, you generate noise around your products, and so on. But in my opinion, you should not aim exclusively at it to grow your business.
When you are ready, I have a couple of ways to help your solopreneurial journey.
Shipped.club is the Next.js boilerplate that allows you to build, ship, and make money with your product quickly.
56 indie makers already bought it, and are shipping together in the private Discord community.
And Shipped now comes with Parity Purchasing (extra discount) depending on your country, discover your discount on the landing page.
The second is Userdesk, the AI Assistants platform to automate your leads collections and customer support for your digital business. I recently added a ton of new features and a brand-new analytics section.
That’s all for today 🙌
See you next Sunday
Luca
I’ve been curious about SEO and high-ticket items. I’ve been wondering how those convert if at all. It might be more of an authority building exercise in that case that bringing loads of traffic to the website.
With that being said, I find SEO and inbound traffic fascinating. I just love the idea of investing in content and reaping the rewards for a while!
Good analysis of organic traffic Luca. SEO is more part of the variables of success and the number of followers is part of the result