Grow to 20k followers on Twitter/X, 40 minutes a day

If you have known me long enough, you know I’ve been active on Twitter/X for a while now.

Through that time, I’ve learned how to stay consistent on the platform and consistently grow the community of people who follow me.

In this newsletter, I’ll show you the exact system I use to achieve my results (21k followers, constant growth).

Are you ready? Let’s get started.

First, I use a product to timebox the time I spend on X.

Social media platforms can be addictive, and easily drain all your time. When that happens, you cannot focus on other stuff, like building your product or marketing, and it’s not good if you are a solopreneur. You need to balance all the activities.

I use an indie product to timebox my tasks, called Llama Life.

Llama Life is a simple task-manager, but very effective.
These are the tasks I defined for my Twitter/X routine.

To do this, you need first to create two lists on X.
Create two lists:
Peers: are profiles similar to you in terms of the number of followers and topics
Big accounts: are accounts with a large number of followers

Now that you have the two lists, create a routine like mine in Llama Life.
When you start the routing, disable all notifications and do the following:

• Open the list Peers and spend 10 minutes replying to the tweets of your Peers, after that

• Open the list Big accounts and spend 10 minutes replying to them (the intent is to be read and seen by the followers of the big accounts, not to get a reply from them), after that

• Spend 10 minutes replying to people who replied to your posts/tweets, after that

• Spend 5 minutes replying to the DMs you might have received, after that

• Spend 5 minutes sharing your product under the “share your product” tweets (I tell you more about this)

If you use Twitter/X for a while, you’ll notice that often you lose some replies and interactions with your content. This is because the Notification section doesn’t include everything (weird, but it’s like this).

So use this search filter instead, it returns all the replies:

filter:replies to:yourhandle

My filter is “filter:replies to:ikoichi”.

I also found it useful to share my product under the “share your product”-like posts.

To find those tweets, use this filter:

("share your product" OR "share your project")

I didn’t invent most of this system, it’s heavily inspired by the course of a great indie hacker Dagobert Renouf who created a course called How to Dominate Twitter, there’s much more to learn from this course, so I strongly recommend it.

You can vary a bit in this routine, like making some tasks 15 minutes long or less, according to the amount of time you want to spend. Remember, you need to engage with others much more than posting your content, especially at the beginning of the journey.

Do this every day, and you’ll see the results, guaranteed.

Personal updates

Shipped.club is still growing. The launch of the Chrome Extension with the SaaS Boilerplate gave a good boost to sales again.

Also, something special happened.

The incredible indie hacker and YouTube influencer Simon Høiberg published a video with 5 Great SaaS Started Kits, and guess what? He included Shipped as well! 🙌

I wanted to double down on YouTube influencers but this happened out of the blue, and it was a big surprise. Of course, it led to some new sales, that I hope will continue in the upcoming days.

March is close to surpassing January and February in terms of revenues.

But it’s not enough, I will continue with the side projects technique.

I recently launched a Hacker News alternative but for indie hackers, called indiehackernews.com which is giving good results. It’s an aggregator platform of links related to indie making (products, launches, articles, stories, and so on).

This product alone is bringing a good amount of traffic (last 14 days analytics below)

That’s all for today.
See you next Sunday
Luca

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Whenever you are ready, I have a couple of ways to help your founder journey.

Shipped.club is the Next.js Startup & Chrome Extension Boilerplate for busy developers, that allows you to build, ship, and make money with your product quickly
108 makers are already shipping faster.

The second is Userdesk, the AI Assistants platform to automate your leads collection and customer support for your digital business.