Doing things that don't scale from free product to $11,777 in 3 days with a Twitter browser extension
I'm a VP, of Growth at a tech company with a side-project that has taken off and I'd love to share the journey. Together with a friend of mine we put together a small bootstrapped tool to help with the mess that is Twitter Bookmarks.
We launched a free version of dewey. in April 2021 and grew it predominantly on SEO, direct user outreach, and word of mouth referrals.
This past Sunday, we converted dewey. to a fully paid product with a 7-day trial. Within 3 days we hit over $11K in revenue from a mix of Lifetime, Annual, and Monthly subs.
The things that worked really well for us early on did not scale one bit.
Given we are a Twitter utility, all of our users are on Twitter. Twitter search was invaluable in finding users that were frustrated with Twitter bookmarks and vented publicly. Replying to these people directly with a quick, short, value prop and link drove our first thousand users.
The things that accelerated growth.
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Knowing we were a specific niche product targeting a subset of users experiencing a frustrating problem, these users had high search intent across Google and other search engines. People wanted their bookmarks exported. They wanted their bookmarks to be manageable.
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All of our videos, on-page content, etc. focused on these queries. We currently drive a substantive part of our new users from people searching for things like "Export Twitter Bookmarks".
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Additionally, we built an SEO growth loop into the product. Users can make their folders inside dewey., public. This means that their folders of bookmarks can get indexed by Google and highly niche, longtail queries can drive users to the folder in-turn driving new users to sign-up for dewey.
Question for the community
Right now our biggest challenge is scaling without deploying additional budget. We're still small and need to cover our infra costs - ads are not well aligned for now - even with a defined CAC and payback. Thoughts on what next for our little project that went free to paid?
We're thinking about affiliate programs but would love the community's advice. Ideally we can do something directly on Twitter, because again, this is where every one of our prospective users will be.
Last thing's last
This is the first time I got paid for something I bootstrapped rather than grown for someone else, so I'm still very new to this feeling. But I'm happy to share what I learned so far, so please feel free to ask me anything.
Here is a link to check out dewey. and I've created a discount code for the community - IndieHacker5 as a thank you for your motivation is starting something independent.
Well done and kudos.
My 5 cents:
If you can figure out how your current user base can drive your growth on twitter, you'd be golden.
Some basic ideas:
Give current subscribers the ability to give a month free to a number of other users and have the new users sign up with credit card.
Have some artifact on their profiles like a tag on their bio or something that promotes the product and increase sharability.
Create a "I'm using 'your product' to manage my bookmarks" tweet that uswrs can tweet / retweet when they sign up and start using the product.
The final unrelated idea is to capitalize the network value of the dataset. If you can get users to rate their fav bookmarks or have some other behaviotal metric that you can use to measure bookmark popularity, you can then create an additional feed of interesting bookmarks based on a users' existing bookmarks.
@RobotWizard these are excellent. Using the dataset is interesting. Our original plan was to create a curated marketplace of ideas. Users could share their collections around various subjects they’ve curated and if they want, charge a subscription for access as they constantly refine and update the collection. It’s somewhat aligned with your last point.
Referrals are absolutely on our radar. It’s the other side of the affiliate coin where affiliate is 1:Many with cash incentives, referral is 1:1 with usage incentives.
Very much appreciate you taking the time to suggest these. It’s good validation for some ideas we have brewing.
Great to hear your story here!
On your question: I see a ton of people sharing A ways do B, or the best X tools that help with Z. Maybe you can hook into that?
Congratulations on the success!
I'd assume dewey is dependent on the Twitter API. However, Twitter has lately introduced major changes to its API policy that broke several apps.
How are you doing with dewey with respect to the Twitter API? Do you think it's still save to build apps based on the Twitter API?
Hey Alex, we actually aren’t dependent. Our extension grabs bookmarks independent of the Twitter API which is how we’re able to grab more than the API limit.
That said, with our latest update we use a hybrid approach. Autosync, which grabs bookmarks automatically without you needing you add them to dewey. yourself does use the API. And, we initially grab your bookmarks with the API to check if you are above or below the API threshold (800 bookmarks). If you are, we recommend downloading the extension. If you aren’t you will continue using the pure API solution.
If Twitter disabled the API for all apps, our extension is robust enough to handle user’s bookmark needs without any interruption.
Great solution! Thanks for answering.
Hey @YuriyYarovoy
Congrats on the success of dewey. Long way to go for sure.
I am into organic growth and SEO, so happy to share those ideas to boost the organic growth of dewey:
1/People are asking lots of questions related to pain on Twitter Bookmarks. You can answer those questions with a link back to dewey. They will land on dewey site from Quora, and indeed some of them will end up becoming customers.
2/ It's already ranking in the top 5 for multiple queries related to "twitter bookmarks" - that's good. Content + website is of high quality. The one thing I found missing for great SEO is high-quality backlinks for the dewey site and blogs. Due to the low backlink profile, the current domain rating is 13/100. If you can manage to get some high-quality backlinks, that number can improve, and all keywords ranking on the first page and go up further in ranks; that can 2-10X your traffic because with each position jump on the first page, traffic almost doubles or triples. You can build backlinks on your own or hire a backlinks agency.
3/ I was about to suggest Product Hunt, Haha 😊 - I see you are already there; great work!
So, yeah, for now, Quora and Backlinks can help boost organic growth. Hope it helps.
Cheers!
Hey there! Congrats on all the success you've seen so far. It's great to hear that you've been able to convert your free product to a paid one.
It's awesome to hear that you're bootstrapping something on your own and seeing results. Keep up the great work!
Wishing you continued success on your journey and keep hustling!
Thanks @SaLLaSaP43! It’s been a lot of fun. We have a lot of cool ideas that I can’t wait to roll out. Right now our focus is on growth.
You have done a great thing keep i must try your product hope it will help me a lot in the twitter bookmarks. Thanks man for this amazing thing.
Thanks Ben!
Thank you for sharing with us. I genuinely hope you'll continue to improve this outstanding product!
Thank you! It means a ton. We have a lot of plans in the works now that we have some revenue to invest in infra!
Can you break down the process you used on Twitter more? That would be amazing to see if possible and super useful
Hey @alexbooth, sure!
We knew that people were actively complaining about Twitter bookmarks being a completely underdeveloped product and most of these complaints were happening on Twitter.
Step 1 - find the most common phrases used by these people.
Step 2 - search for these queries using Twitter’s search, sometimes using the advanced search to exclude certain keywords we saw indicated low quality results later on.
Step 3 - sort by latest and start replying to each user individually in the context of their original tweet. If this was a conversation happening between friends, we tried to inject ourselves casually. If this was someone searching for a solution, we pitched a little more directly.
Big thing here - don’t automate. You will look like you’re spamming and a pure shill. The goal is to genuinely at least try to provide value and here, bespoke replies create much better value than automated.
nice you have done a great work.
Perfect :-) thanks so much
Great product my man!
Thanks! It's been a lot of fun.