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Building $1K to $10K MRR micro saas products around Twitter audience/Twitter APIs

**I write around micro saas opportunities like this every week for 400+ subscribers at https://microsaasidea.com **

Thankyou for a huge response for my earlier post on IH

No fluffy content. If your goal is to build a $100m ARR business, this is not the right post. Here I am are NOT going to talk about building the next Facebook or Twitter. If your goal is to make a $1K to $10K MRR, continue reading.

This will cover one SAAS area and talk about multiple niches in this space. This also explains more on how to do tech implementation, do market analysis, how the current players are doing, and also ends with a cost analysis to understand the overall cost for 100 users.

Twitter has 340 million users.

Let's see some of the products built on Twitter.

Buffer : $21m annual revenue ( not just Twitter tool but also has other social media automation)

Tweetpi : Automate Twitter to get more followers - $3.2m - Founded in 2009 (Only for Twitter)

Tweetfull : Twitter Growth Hacking Tool - $1m revenue

OneUpApp : $12K MRR ( not just Twitter tool but also has other social media automation) - Founded in 2017

MeetEdger : $3m Revenue ( not just Twitter tool but also has other social media automation) - Founded in 2014

Hootsuite : $400m per year ( not just Twitter tool but also has other social media automation) - Founded in 2008

Twilert.com : Twitter monitor for keywords, brands - $200K revenue

(Several social media automation tools are not listed here making millions of dollars in revenue)

New players: (launched in last 2 years)

Tweet.photo : Automagically post your Instagram photos to Twitter - Acquired for $30K ($10K in cash + $20K cap based on sales for next 2 years) - Started in 2018

HypeFury : Twitter automation platform - MRR $11,247 - About 16 months to reach $10K MRR - Started August, 2019

Ilo.so : Beautiful Twitter analytics - About $200 MRR and $5K revenue (via one time sales) in 3 months. - Started in August, 2020

Shoutout.so : Just started building a new platform to build a wall of love for personal Twitter. - Got lot of traction - Not yet launched.

Pikaso.me : Take beautiful screenshots of Tweets and post on other platforms.

OnlyTweets : Support the creators you love, directly on Twitter - In beta - An interesting product that you should checkout

“Everyone can build Twitter audience” - An ebook about growing your Twitter audience - made $150K sales in less than 2 years (This is not a saas tool. This is a digital download product) - Can you imagine just a digital product around Twitter making $150K in sales in less than 2 years? This tells us the market for Twitter tools.

Negative Nancy

Negative Nancy says: This involves platform risk.

Me: There is a platform risk because there is a platform. Having a platform means “finding users more easily”. On a side note, all the above tools are making revenues for years.

Negative Nancy says: There are already many tools around Twitter. How can you find a niche?

Me : (Continue reading the post to find niches around Twitter audience/Twitter API)

Niches around Twitter audience
Some niches around the Twitter audience

Before we dive deep into niches, let’s wait for a second and see why do people use tools around Twitter.

There are major three reasons

It should let users make more money

It should bring in more followers on Twitter/any other social platform (more followers may bring in more revenues in flywheel effect) - either by self-analysis of Twitter status or by making more engaging posts.

It should automate cumbersome process thereby achieving either 1 or 2

Based on these three points, let's see for a second and dive deep into what HypeFury is doing that it made hugely successful.

Some important features of HypeFury.

Automatic Retweeting - Hypefury automatically retweets after X number of hours or after a certain threshold is reached - This means MORE FOLLOWERS

Automatically Add Sales Tweets - This means MORE MONEY

Image Tweets - This means more engagement and thereby MORE FOLLOWERS

Screenshots of Tweet For Instagram - This means more engagement and thereby MORE FOLLOWERS

Schedule Threads and Tweetstorms - Better AUTOMATION

So, Hypefury is satisfying all the 3 reasons mentioned above - Get more followers, Bring in more money & Automate.

So, whats Hypefury’s principle - “Do one thing and do it well (really really well)”

Now, let's see if we can find some niches around these basics.

Twitter + Gumroad niche : (For starters, Gumroad is a platform for selling digital products like ebooks, courses, videos) There is a lot of potential for this model. The concept is simple. User sets the Tweet via your saas tool. Once it reaches a specific engagement threshold, add another Tweet (with Gumroad link) to the original tweet as a comment or as a thread. This could be set based on “after X hours”, “after X number of likes” etc. A lot of potential for this and Gumroad authors love this. Further automate this by using Gumroad APIs - for example, after X number of coupons are sold, don’t promote the Tweet any more as the user can’t give any more coupons or just add a comment “All coupons are sold out”. The whole process will keep the followers engaged and help drive more sales/traffic.

Twitter + Any sales product (Gumroad, Ebooks, One-off consulting, A buy me a coffee link ) - Once a tweet goes beyond a pre-set number of likes, retweets, replies - Just add a link (as part of another tweet) to that tweet. (Similar to the above approach but instead of just Gumroad, you could allow the user to set any link, or You can get top-selling products data from APIs for Stripe, Paddle, etc as well and automate this)

Twitter + Content curation model: Automatically curate content that interests Twitter followers. The content could be any of the latest posts, articles, pdf, etc. Add a choice for users to auto-approve the content to post to Twitter or to manually approve before the content goes to Twitter.

Twitter + Wall of love: Allow users to log in to the app. Twitter API has some restrictions and can access only X number of recent Tweets. Once the user logs into the app, get the latest Tweets, and automatically analyze which are positive Tweets and show them in the dashboard to approve. Once approved, show the approved tweets BEAUTIFULLY on a page that the user can share or keep in profile. This is like testimonials but not for products but real users.

Twitter Positive Tweets Embed: Similar to the above one but you can also provide an embeddable script that users can embed anywhere.

Twitter + Analytics: Allow the user to login into the App. Then read the latest Tweets, likes, comments, and other data and just display all this data in a beautiful format/graphs/stats and create a sharable stats page that users can share. This works similar to “Open Startups” where people post data about startups publicly. This will help users to understand how their Tweets are performing.

Twitter Trending Hashtags: Getting the data about trending hashtags is a major business. This data is important for users so that they can leverage tweets on top of these trending hashtags to get more visibility (something like hashtagify.me)

Twitter mentions for brands: Brands would love to have a unified dashboard with all the Tweets they get tagged. Building something on these lines will attract some B2B brands (something like this brand24.com but for Twitter only )

Twitter sentiment analysis: This is another niche for B2Bs where companies want to analyze the sentiment of the Tweets if that's a happy Tweet, sad Tweet, or a neutral one. Based on the sentiment (and confidence score - A score that tells how strong the classification is - happy vs sad vs neutral), companies would like to assign agents/reps to handle those Tweets.

Twitter Ads Automation: Twitter provides APIs for Ad Management (Campaign management), Advertising Analytics. You can build a product around this. Facebook and Google Ads also have similar ads API. Probably building a tool and integrating all these ad platforms could be a good niche for advertisers using these platforms.

What are we doing here? We are trying to niche down as much as possible.

More ideas? Just see https://zapier.com/apps/twitter/integrations -> There are more than 400 integrations possible with Twitter via Zapier. Pick anything that has some demand and create a niche from that. Remember the principle we want to follow here - “Do one thing but do it well, really really well”.

Tweet.photo did the same - Picked up something that Zapier is already doing - Automatically post your Instagram photos to Twitter - Acquired for $30K ($10K in cash + $20K cap based on sales for next 2 years) - Started in 2018

Still, need more ideas? See Twitter APIs and samples at https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/twitter-api/tutorials

Technical chops

What are the important things we need to build this kind of Twitter-based niches?

You should know (or try to know) below.

Mandatory skills

Applying for a Twitter developer account.

Basics of OAuth : Getting a good idea of OAuth will not only help you just build the Twitter applications but also helps you build other OAuth based applications like Facebook APIs, Linked in APIs, Google APIs, etc)

Twitter APIs - There are a lot of Twitter APIs to build saas solutions for various use cases.

Optional skills

Gumroad APIs (if you are planning to pick a niche for Twitter & Gumroad similar to Hypefury)

Other APIs - Stripe API, Paddle API, etc to automate the sales for users based on Twitter engagement

A framework to show graphs around Twitter analytics

AWS/GCP AI services for niches like sentiment analysis - Don’t panic if you don't know AWS/GCP. The basics remain the same. Call Sentiment analysis API with your text and get back the emotion and confidence score. If you know calling a rest API, this is doable. AI services have grown so much on the cloud and it's pretty easy to consume most of these.

Another deep dive

Applying for a Twitter developer account: Goto https://developer.twitter.com/en/apply-for-access and apply for a Developer account. Once the account is active, you can add your app and start working on building saas around Twitter audience. See for detailed steps.

Basics of OAuth: As mentioned earlier, the basics of OAuth remain the same whether it's Twitter or Facebook, or Google. These are all open standards. See for more info on OAuth

Twitter APIs: Twitter has a lot of APIs. Learn the required APIs based on the niche that you are picking up. See Twitter APIs and Twitter Ads APIs

Gumroad APIs: See Gumroad APIs at here and here. Gumroad also primarily used OAuth authentication.

Other APIs - Stripe APIs, Paddle APIs, Magento APIs, Shopify APIs - Just understand that there are several ways you can integrate Twitter and e-commerce APIs.

A framework to show graphs around Twitter analytics - Once you let users log in to the app, you need to save the required data to the database and then show graphs based on Tweet engagement, number of replies, number of likes, etc. For this, you need to know a simple framework that displays graphs on the front end. If you have never worked on displaying graphs on screens, don't worry, it has become much easier and you could use some tools like chartjs.org

AWS/GCP AI services for niches like sentiment analysis - Don’t panic if you don't know AWS/GCP. The basics remain the same. Call Sentiment analysis API with your text and get back the emotion and confidence score. If you know calling a rest API, this is doable. AI services have grown so much on the cloud and it's pretty easy to consume most of these. See sentiment analysis basics on GCP and sentiment analysis basics on AWS

Marketing chops

Once you zero in on your niche, this will be relatively easier to find folks interested in your product. See this on how Hypefury did it.

Let's see how you can find an initial audience for each niche.

Twitter + Gumroad niche : Goto top Gumroad sellers (may be a list of 200 Gumroad sellers). Get their Twitter Ids and make a list of the number of followers for each seller. Pick the top 30 sellers who have the highest number of followers and pitch in your idea on how you could automate their Tweet process and increase Gumroad sales. Post to Gumroad groups in various forums like Reddit, Facebook groups. This is the advantage of targeting products with ready-made platforms. You can find an audience much faster and validate.

Twitter + Any sales product: Same as above. Pick any e-commerce platform that has an API integration and integrate that with Twitter APIs. Again, finding an audience should be easier once you finalize your e-commerce platform like Shopify.

Twitter + Content curation model: Find Twitter audience that wants to grow and have been sharing meaningful content from medium posts, Dev.to articles, Hackernoon articles, and pitch in your idea. This could be extended to Journalists, Market analysts, and tell them how you can curate the best articles for their niche. Curating can be done manually until you get an audience and then you could use tools like Quuu to automate.

Twitter + Wall of love: This will be good primarily for an audience like Founders, Investors, Premium sellers who want to build their brand. But you have to be building a really really cool page to show all their best tweets.

Twitter Positive Tweets Embed: Same as above. This could be good primarily for an audience like Founders, Investors, Premium sellers who want to build their brand. But you have to be building a really really cool page to show all their best tweets.

Twitter + Analytics: This could be good for the audience who want to get more insights on how their tweets are performing. See fast-growing Twitter users in your social media and pitch this.

Twitter Trending Hashtags: This is primarily for B2B audience. See companies heavily using the most recent trends and see to pitch in this. Since it's B2B, a cold email should work too with some stats on how your saas can help.

Twitter mentions for brands: Same as above. This is primarily for B2B audience. See companies heavily using the most recent trends and see to pitch in this. Since it's B2B, a cold email should work too with some stats on how your saas can help.

Twitter Ads Automation: This is easy to validate. See Twitter users/brands using Twitter ads and get in touch to pitch your saas tool that can automate the process and also email timely reports on ad performance. Your saas tool can also be automated to stop a campaign based on certain parameters.

Cost Analysis

There is some cost involved with Twitter APIs. See more info here (make sure you see this link. There are free APIs and paid API as well). Pricing depends on the kind of APIs, environments, requests, data period, etc.

For the rest of the things like storing the data, running backend APIs, displaying data on the front end shouldn’t cost more than $10 for 100 users considering you are using pay-as-you-go models for frontend, backend, and database.

When I say pay-as-you-go model for Frontend code, it can be hosted on AWS S3, GCP Hosting or Render or Vercel. Render and Vercel are free for the first 100GB download. So, it's almost considered free. For hosting your backend API on Render, it may cost you $7/m. But to avoid this you could very well use Vercel APIs, AWS Lambda (serverless functions with pay-as-you-go pricing), or GCP Cloud functions (serverless with pay-as-you-go pricing)

If you are planning to do sentiment analysis of Tweets on AWS, see AWS Comprehend pricing (AWS Comprehend is one of AWS AI tools).

Amazon Comprehend to analyze customer comments 10,000 customer comments that are 550 characters each will cost $6 USD.

(GCP - Google Cloud Platform sentiment analysis would be more or less the same as AWS)

More info - If you are picking this idea, below is a list of must-read articles.

https://medium.com/@robince885/how-to-do-twitter-authentication-with-react-and-restful-api-e525f30c62bb

https://marc.io/tweet-photo-acquired

https://helgeklein.com/blog/2020/07/twitter-automation-scheduled-tweets-from-google-sheets/

https://towardsdatascience.com/downloading-data-from-twitter-using-the-rest-api-24becf413875

https://code.tutsplus.com/tutorials/how-to-authenticate-users-with-twitter-oauth-20--cms-25713

https://github.com/twitter/twurl

https://growthlessons.co/how-twitter-automation-platform-hypefury-went-from-0-to-4-4k-mrr-in-4-months/

https://launchschool.com/books/working_with_apis/read/twitter_api

http://docs.tweepy.org/en/latest/auth_tutorial.html

Finally, have a read at https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/twitter-automation for what’s allowed and not allowed around using Twitter APIs.

PS - **For Pro subscribers, I am posting every week with 1 new niche and ideas around it with data backed analysis, technical implementation, how to find initial users and cost analysis. (Similar to this post). If you are serious about building a SAAS and reaching $1K to $10K MRR, subscribe for Pro at https://gumroad.com/l/the-next-idea-pro **

  1. 2

    This is super comprehensive nice job!

    I think you'll enjoy what @5harath and I have in store for Shoutout.so

    1. 1

      I am sure you both build an awesome product.
      Can't wait to see and celebrate.

      But yes, there is lot of potential around Twitter products. We are at an amazing time.

  2. 2

    Very nice article! I was just thinking of building a CRM on top of Twitter for companies that use Twitter as a customer service platform. What are your thoughts about that? Something like a light weight Zendesk. I’d be eager to get some feedback.

    1. 1

      Hi,

      All the sentiment analysis tool that assess the sentiment of the tweet (positive, negative, neutral) and confidence score, typically has an integration with CRM tools.

      If the Tweet is of negative nature, it automatically gets logged into a CRM tool with a ticket number and gets assigned. For example, imagine someone tweeting an airline company about missing baggage, the tweets senses the negativity in the message and gets assigned to an agent.

      So, there is lot of use to it but only when you add sentiment analysis to it. As mentioned in my post, sentiment analysis is easy using cloud services.

      Alternatively, if you dont want to use sentiment analysis and dont care about the nature of the tweet, you can log all Tweets to a certain Twitter id (or any tweets mentioning a specific Twitter id) and push the Tweets to CRM directly and let the agent/user filter them manually.

      DM is open on Twitter if you need anything specific. Would be happy to help.

      1. 1

        Thanks for the reply! I will flesh out more of my idea and definitely follow you on Twitter. Thanks for all of this valuable information!

  3. 2

    This comment was deleted 3 years ago.

    1. 2

      Thankyou. This is a Pro version of the post but going forward half of the content/ideas will be only in Pro version. Thankyou for your other points too.

      1. 2

        This comment was deleted 3 years ago.

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