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A Twitter Scheduler Project - A Way to Learn Code and to Fill A Potential Gap

Another Twitter scheduler, oh boy.

Little intro:

The lifespan of a tweet is about 18 minutes, therefore, the visibility you gain solely off that tweet without engagement is short-lived.

A lot of apps try to solve this problem, each with its own limitations.

  • Hypefury - single account

  • Publer - difficult to queue threads

  • Buffer - difficult to queue threads

  • Zlappo - cluttered UI

  • Tweetdeck (twitter's own software) - lack of queue, manual entry of date/time

  • Typefully- the free tier is similar to Tweetdeck and requires a premium

What I am going to try to accomplish with this app is to address the following problem with a set of features:

Multiple-account support

  • Better FREE tier

  • Queueing threads

  • Easy-to-use UI

  • Link saving to allow easy drafting of drop links

While this is going to be a great learning experience to create a bigger app project in my "self-learning to code" journey, I truly believe this can address a problem that the market currently has.

I am putting this out there to see if you guys think it would be a good idea.

It would mainly be a learning project, but I definitely have thoughts that it could be monetized.

Looking forward to any input.

EA

  1. 3

    Keep us updated on this journey!

  2. 2

    Hey Ephraim,

    Welcome to the Twitter SaaS space.

    Founder of Zlappo here, and your review of Zlappo is noted. ;)

    I think you need to first understand what people are truly looking for when they invest in a Twitter scheduler, and you have to understand the user personas that use them.

    Are they business organizations? Individuals? Brick-and-mortar businesses trying to expand their online presence?

    You can't build everything for everyone, so you first need to understand the specific use cases and build only the features/UI that pleases that 1 or 2 user persona.

    It's really not just as simple as fixing what's broken in all the apps in the current market, because that hardly helps you to position/appeal to a specific user persona.

    Every app out there in this market is appealing to a specific user persona, whether you can see it or not.

    Lastly, "free" sounds good until you suddenly realize you can't grow without sufficient revenues, and, unless you're going to get a lot of inbound traffic/referrals from "free" that would convert to paid, I would caution you to join the gang of free apps out there.

    Believe it or not, the best exposure I've received from my own users are also the ones who have paid me the most money.

    1. 1

      Thank you for the awesome insight!

      I absolutely agree, and you can 100% see each app targeting a different audience.

      The main reason for my undertaking of this project is for it to be a massive learning opportunity. Profit is secondary. Albeit, I am just considering it as a possibility.

      Going forward with this I believe the features I choose to implement should be targeted towards the end-user I'm gunning for - which, at the moment, most likely overlaps with the individuals choosing to stay with Tweetdeck as opposed to your application and others.

      I am super appreciative of all the insights given in this and will continue to think on it further! Especially, when and if I choose to apply a specific revenue model.

      Thank you, again!

  3. 2

    Question
    does all those twitter apps are using Twitter API ? + proxies?
    If yes are you not afraid that Twitter can block you?

    1. 1

      All use the official Twitter API which the user has to explicitly provide permissions for.

      So long as the app doesn't break any rules - there's nothing for the user to worry about.

      1. 1

        but if many spammers will send from your system twitter will block your app , no ?
        or each request if routed through proxy ?

        1. 1

          There are tiers to the Twitter API, and each tier comes with its own limitations.

          I believe there's a hard limit they allow you to post from your app.

          Also, to get around this spamming issue is to put hard limits on posting frequency and number from free tier accounts.

          This seems to be what everyone in this space is doing.

        2. 1

          This comment was deleted 3 years ago.

  4. 2

    Hypefury's creator here.

    We support multiple accounts btw. :p

    My advice if you want to just learn (I was trying to learn new tech while building Hypefury), go for it with an open mind and no pressure, and reinvent the wheel if you feel like it.

    If you want to build a competitor for all the tools above, do what they do, differently and most importantly, that people would pay for.

    Cheers!

    1. 1

      Hey samy_!

      I did not know that aha! I guess I haven't used it in a while and you've filled it up with more features which are cool.

      That was one of my biggest challenges when I was using it in its early-ish stages and I ended up switching to Publer.

      Glad you guys have added that.

      Absolutely agree with all your points too. Thanks for the encouragement.

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