0-200 Twitter Followers in 2 Months - What We Learned from being on #buildinpublic Twitter

Jay and Lucy here a.k.a @ctrl_alt_launch. We want to start writing about our journey to reflect, document, and share our progress with you all!

This isn’t our first rodeo. We have built other products, separately and together, but what’s different this time is that we’re trying to do this as a part of the #buildinpublic community on Twitter. When we started, it seemed like a marketing hack: talk about what you’re working on and people will want to use what you’re building.

So we decided to join Twitter for this project to see if building a brand as “builders” would help us gain traction for our work.

2 months after being on Twitter, we have gained 200 followers and pre-launched an AI product. Here’s what we did and what we learned from it.

Starting out and Tweeting into the Void:

Let’s make this clear— we are not social media savvy people. There were so many things we had questions about.

Do co-founders share an account? Do we have to put a real photo of us? How do we get followers? How do we even start building-in-public??

So we studied a lot on successful Twitter accounts that inspired us and took notes. It definitely was hard to tweet into a void and get nothing back. But we figured out some tips by just observing Twitter.

So what’s the key to growing on Twitter when you’re just starting out?

The answer is not too complicated…

Comment, comment, and comment: how you engage with people. And no, don’t act like a bot. Be genuinely interested in whoever you’re responding to. That’s where true value comes from.

When you comment and engage with people from your community, and they comment and engage back with you, both accounts will be further “embedded” into the community. This will boost your tweets in the algorithm for other people in that community.

Authenticity and consistency will take you from a void to an audience.

Here are some other things that helped us:

• Pre-write your tweets for the week and tweet during peak hours
  • Peak times are 8-10AM and 6-9PM
  • Don’t schedule tweets! It forces you into the habit of organically engaging.
• Use community hashtags like #buildinpublic or #indiehackers in your tweets for better reach to your target audience.
• Make a Twitter list of big accounts to engage with and comment on those big accounts early to get visibility.
• For better engagement, tweet to people with smaller follower counts (100-200 followers)
• Tweet about your wins and losses, no matter how small they are. People will relate to you.
• Bring value to the community by sharing knowledge. Some of our best tweets were when we shared something valuable to the community. For example, we shared some simple code to use DALLE to create simple logos.

Mistakes we Made:

Numbers can be dangerous. We are super guilty of chasing the numbers. I mean how else would you track progress? But numbers can be a double edged sword.

There’s an interesting study by Ben Grosser who created a browser extension that hides all metrics on Twitter. Try it out, it really show how much you can focus on numbers when browsing. https://bengrosser.com/projects/twitter-demetricator/

Your goal shouldn’t be getting a bunch of followers, it should be building the right community around you.

We’ve seen plenty of accounts with 1k+ followers, but with little to no engagement on their posts.

I think Matthew Nguyen’s tweet summarizes it well on how virality might not be what you want.

Write in your own Voice:

There’s definitely a way of talking on Twitter. Short and snappy catches people’s attention, but it might not bring people value. Take the time to find your voice and convey the type of value you want to bring to people.

It took us some time to find our voice. And sometimes when trying to be engaging, we lost out on authenticity.

Here's an example of how our original post didn't read right with people and how engaging with people to explain cleared up misunderstandings and showed authenticity.

Act and Present as a Human:

We started our account with just our handle @ctrl_alt_launch and had just our first initials up as our name (J & L) with no banner.

The first thing that people kept asking us when we talked to them was what our names were and what we were doing. We realize how impersonal our profile felt to people.

After we changed our name and added a simple banner (that we made in Canva), people were much more open to talking.

Open your DMs:

It may sound silly but it is not obvious to those new to Twitter that by default your DMs are closed to people and you need to change that setting. We had to have someone tweet at us to figure that out. DMs allow for deeper conversations—don’t miss out on them.

So remember: be authentic and consistent. You will see results.