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23 Comments

Everyone Can Build a Twitter Audience: $6.5K in the first 4 hours

Hey Indie Hackers —

A few months ago I released a self-published technical ebook (my first), which I promoted mostly through my Twitter audience. That book made almost $80K in sales in its first 4 months, which I attribute mostly to my audience (some bought it themselves, some helped spread the word of mouth, etc).

I've been getting plenty of questions recently about how someone can go build an audience on Twitter from scratch, so I decided to put everything I learned into a short video course.

My background is in programming (ex Amazon), and until recently I had absolutely no social media experience. But when I left my job to work for myself in early 2019, I realized that I was unknown to the rest of the world, and I became determined to try to emerge from obscurity.

After a lot of mistakes, I stumbled on an approach that worked really well for people like me, for whom self-promotion doesn't come naturally. Over the last 14 months, I managed to grow my Twitter account to 24,000 followers, and now I believe my audience is likely my biggest asset.

Now, I've put everything I learned into this course, which unlike almost everything else out there, is not targeted to marketers and hustlers, but to makers and builders like us. I'd be honored if you checked it out. (Full refund if you don't get any value out of this. No questions asked.)

https://gumroad.com/l/twitter-audience/indiehackers

PS. I announced this 4 hours ago on Twitter and to my mailing list (880 subs), and it already sold 100 copies for $6,358 in revenue.

  1. 2

    Guys I can vouch for this. I have seen some of his journey & he was astounding. It was impressive.

  2. 2

    So impressive, congratulations! Love following your tweets on how this project is progressing, it’s very inspiring :)

  3. 1

    Congrats @dvassallo well done! Curious if you could share a rough breakdown of paid signups from your mailing list versus twitter?

    1. 2

      10 days since the release:

      Total sold: $32,538.

      From my tweets: $19,840.
      From my mailing list $7,552.
      From other sources: $5,146.

  4. 1

    I'm interested. But I'm thinking didn't you jumpstart your success after building a following while you were at AWS? What about us who will start from scratch?

    edit: should have read closer what you wrote.

    1. 1

      I didn't. I left Amazon on Feb 1, 2019 (last day), and on Feb 4 I had 151 followers on Twitter (mostly bots), and had never tweeted. The course is about what I did, and what I learned from others who followed the same system as I did.

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        ok I paid for it. I would watch it right now if it weren't 3 am local time!

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          Wonderful! Thank you! 🙏

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        yeah I read it too quickly! can I buy the upsell (spreadsheet) later if needed?

        1. 1

          Absolutely. You can get it separately from here: https://gumroad.com/l/twitter-audience-xls

  5. 1

    Saw this in the indie hacker email and it exactly addresses my twitter blind spot. I've had some success marketing with SEO, ads and reddit, but never any luck on Twitter. Can't wait to watch.

    BTW Daniel, I'd like to say hi as someone else entering the programmer education market (in my case: web dev screencasts focusing on vim, command line, and production codebases)

    1. 1

      Wonderful! If you have any questions, find me on Twitter, and I'd be happy to help if I can!

  6. 1

    That's awesome! I just checked out your Twitter profile and I admire how you keep everything high value for your followers. There's no BS. Started following!

    1. 1

      Thank you Steve! Glad to hear that!

  7. 1

    Great work, I've bought your product and am just about to study it. Thanks!

  8. 1

    That is impressive, do you have a link to your ebook (the first one) as well?
    Was interested to see that.

    Amazing work! 🔥

  9. 1

    Woah that's incredible! You get a new buyer here 👋

  10. 1

    Nice job on this. Looks like you put this course together pretty quickly!

    1. 1

      Thank you Noah. Yes, I intentionally wanted to time box this to a few hours. Minimum effective effort! 😁

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    This comment was deleted 4 years ago.

  12. 1

    This comment was deleted 4 years ago.

    1. 3

      The idea came after I launched my first self-published book. I started sharing its sales results and attributed its success to having had a decent Twitter audience. Then people kept asking me how I built my audience. The inspiration came from trying to answer those questions.

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