My "Failed Tweets" Inspired Me To Launch A $492K/Year Twitter Growth Tool
Hello! Who are you and what business did you start?🔗
Hey! My name’s Tom, I’m a 32 y/o French dude.
I’m also the co-founder of Tweet Hunter, an all-in-one Twitter tool focused on helping our users build and monetize their audience. We have a wide range of users, but we like to define them as ambitious individuals looking to drive results from a personal brand. Most of them fall under one of these categories: founders, freelancers, creators, influencers, or consultants.
It’s been about 10 months since we launched it from scratch, and we currently stand at approximately $60,000 MRR.
What's your backstory and how did you come up with the idea?🔗
I have about 10 years of experience in roles that involve marketing, product, and entrepreneurship. The first startup I launched was in 2014, it was a kids’ educational mobile app. Things didn’t go as well as I wanted so I moved back to “having a job” for a few years. And then my co-founder of the time reached back out to me and we decided to work together again. That was back in January of last year. I quit my job in March.
We wanted to tackle the problem founders have of finding users and customers for their products. We launched about 5 products in a month (not a joke). Things range from an “online community search engine” to a “google maps data extractor”.
And every single time, my co-founder brought in a few early sales because he had a small but high-quality audience on Twitter.
As the marketing guy, I thought: “OK, I should tweet too.” And so I did.
It was a total failure, I was spending hours thinking about what I should tweet, and then it would get close to 0 engagement or reach.
At the time, we had built up a database containing thousands of tweets. We were using it for another product we were working on. It came to our mind that I could maybe use the best-performing ones as inspiration for my tweets.
So my co-founder made a very quick prototype, I used it, and… it worked! I felt I was writing much better and quicker, and I had a higher engagement.
This was the first version of Tweet Hunter: a searchable library of high-performing tweets.
As a founder, you need to be passionate about what your product does. If not, you might create a good product, but you won’t have the energy to stay on for long enough to see it become a great company.
We went to market a few days later, got more early sales than usual, and decided this product was worth investing more effort in.
Take us through the process of designing, prototyping, and manufacturing your first product.🔗
The core idea was simple: users should be able to search for a topic, and in return get relevant tweets that overperformed.
So we build a very basic search field and tweet tiles.
As for the tech stack, it’s very much based on React and Chakra UI. But you would have to get my co-founder in here for the details.
Overall, the building of the MVP took about a week and maybe cost us $50 to make, including the domain name. To put it simply, it was a “viral tweet search engine”. No schedule, no automation. We got great initial reactions, but the main feedback was “I want to be able to schedule tweets from your tool”. So we added that within a month or two.
To be honest, we didn’t take any early validation steps. We didn’t ask people if “they were facing that problem” if “they would be interested in X” or “how much they would pay for Y”.
We feel very strongly that the only way to validate a product is through revenue. So we build quick non-optimal MVPs and try to get sales. If we do manage that, it’s an indication that we could maybe do 10x better with a more advanced product.
And this particular one took off very quickly. Within a few days we had 10 customers, then 50, then 100.
Describe the process of launching the business.🔗
There were 2 launch phases for Tweet Hunter.
We first went to the market in May 2021 with our MVP. Our launch revolved around our Twitter accounts and posting in subreddits. That’s about it.
Our landing page looked like this.
People couldn’t even sign up, they had to request access. But I think that proved to be a great marketing tactic. I know I would much rather “get access” to something than “sign up” for it. From a single post on Reddit, we got about 300 access requests.
Our overall spending for going to market was $0.
After a week we were making approximately $150 of MRR. After a month, $600. After 3 months, $3500.
Then came the second launch phase, in September. We decided to partner up with JK Molina, a Twitter ghostwriter with a huge personal audience interested in writing better tweets and growing on Twitter.
He orchestrated a launch towards his audience. In 30 days, we went from $3500 to $15K MRR.
Since launch, what has worked to attract and retain customers?🔗
We’ve done a lot of replicable things to attract customers. Here are a few of them.
We launched free side products. This is a very fun way we like to do marketing. We created free products that are related to Tweet Hunter in the problem they help solve, and for which Tweet Hunter makes a logical next step for serious users. For example, we launched a tool that unretweets everything you’ve ever retweeted. And another one that tells you the best times of the day for you to tweet on. We also have made a lot of free tweet collections on specific topics.
We launched some of them on Product Hunt, and a few keep bringing in traffic today.
Another thing we did is we gave away a share of our profits to influential people we like. It used to be just us promoting Tweet Hunter with our brand, but now we’ve developed a network of people who love the product and support us.
We also grew a community of 450+ affiliates which we have grown easily because a lot of professional affiliates use our product.
Scratch your itch. Solve a problem you’re having. Not only are you more likely to build something useful, but you’ll also have the energy to stay on for a while.
We created a Twitter growth guide that’s unlike every other growth guide. In that, it’s actionable and it says things most people don’t want to share about Twitter growth.
We organized a Twitter growth challenge for Q1 of 2022. There are prizes to win (including a piece of our profits), and over 1200 participants, 200+ of which have joined our Discord community.
As you can see, many of these are pretty indirect ways of promoting our product. But it does get people exposed to our brand, and part of them do end up signing up for a free trial.
We also invest in paid marketing, whether Google and Facebook Ads or newsletter sponsorships. But to be honest this isn’t our specialty even though we think they have great potential as channels. And we also want to ramp up our SEO in 2022.
That’s for things marketing-related, but obviously, the product itself is key to attracting and retaining people.
We went from being a tweet database to being a full-featured, all-in-one tool for Twitter growth. We added AI writing, scheduling, automation, help with engaging with others, analytics, etc. And we’re not done! All these things make our product worth it, and now we have over 1200 paying customers.
How are you doing today and what does the future look like?🔗
We’re doing great! We now have a very profitable SaaS business at nearly $600K+ ARR and high ambitions for this year. Our target is the $1M ARR mark.
In the short term, we want to keep the momentum we’ve had for the past few months with 15-20% average MoM growth. We plan to release more flagship features that are unique to our product and to keep doing marketing as we do it today: by creating original stuff that makes us stand out.
We’re not quite sure what the long-term is made of. We love the early stages of building companies, but we’ve never been in the position of taking it further. This will be a very interesting phase of our founder paths that we’ll have to figure out.
Through starting the business, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?🔗
Most people say “build an audience before you build a product”. We’ve all heard it. And to a certain extent, it’s true. But what it means is: that if you don’t have distribution channels for your product, you’re dead.
You can launch a successful product without owning the audience yourself, and instead by partnering up with the right people.
My advice for that would be to find professionals with an audience that are exactly in your niche. Not “close to your niche”. Exactly in your niche. And be humble enough to consider giving them a good deal on the partnership that reflects what you expect from them. Your product is your baby, sure. But you do want your baby to grow, right?
If you’re uncomfortable with giving away a real piece of your product to someone else, then I do suggest you build up the audience for it. And Twitter is a great place to start.
As for the personal side of things, I’ve learned that having high growth is awesome but doesn’t decrease your stress levels. If anything, it raises them because you now have a very positive outcome insight and you don’t want to mess it up. Early days are very fun because, aside from the pressure of at some point being able to pay the bills, everything else is to be created.
To account for the higher stress, I’ve changed a couple of things in my habits:
- I reserve 2 slots a day to do customer support (instead of having my email notifications on at all times).
- I try to do at least 2 high-value and long tasks per week and book slots in my calendar for that
- I stopped checking my MRR every hour and check it once a day
What platform/tools do you use for your business?🔗
We use:
- Twitter, Gmail, Slack, and Telegram for communication.
- SendInBlue for email marketing.
- Stripe for processing payments (but we are considering switching to Paddle because they handle VAT).
- Retool for internal tools.
What have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources?🔗
Weirdly, I’m not a fan of entrepreneurship podcasts and books. I like my entertainment to remain entertainment. My podcasts are French thriller stories or soccer shows, so probably not very relevant here.
There’s only one “startup book” that I read back when I was 21: The 4-Hour Work Week, by Tim Ferris. This has been a huge inspiration for me since. My personal goals were deeply affected by it. I went from wanting to be a multi-millionaire to wanting a comfortable financial situation with time on my hands to do what I want.
Advice for other entrepreneurs who want to get started or are just starting out?🔗
There’s a reason I failed my first startup: I knew nothing about the target audience.
It was an educational app to motivate kids to do their chores. I wasn’t a kid. I wasn’t a parent. I had no particular skill in education or child psychology. And I didn’t do my chores.
This was a really bad choice, but not because it affected the quality of our product. Our product was pretty awesome and had good reviews. It was a bad choice because I had no passion for it.
As a founder, you need to be passionate about what your product does. If not, you might create a good product, but you won’t have the energy to stay on for long enough to see it become a great company.
So my advice is a basic one: scratch your itch. Solve a problem you’re having. Not only are you more likely to build something useful, but you’ll also have the energy to stay on for a while.
That’s what we did for Tweet Hunter. I sucked at tweeting. We built it. It helped me. And now I’m still very much passionate about the problem we’re solving for our users.
Where can we go to learn more?🔗
If you have any questions or comments, drop a comment below!
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