From Viral Tweet to $4,530 Product in 30 Days

Hi IHers!

The last couple of months have been pretty crazy for me, all because of one viral tweet.

Here's the backstory, process and numbers behind how I produced, launched and starting making money from a digital product off the back of this momentum.

Stats as of 26th August 2020

• Product page visits: 5,455
• Copies sold: 303
• Revenue: $7,347

Backstory

I’m a web developer by trade, specialising in WordPress consultancy, JavaScript and headless WordPress using Gatsby or Next.js on the front-end.

I’ve been doing this for 11 years, and in this time, I’ve grown my freelance business to £100K+ in consistent yearly revenue.

Last year, in a move to diversify, I started sharing my knowledge around the business of freelancing on Twitter in an attempt to help others get ahead and build an audience within the space.

My aim was to start creating digital products to supplement the free content that I was sharing once my endeavours proved themselves. IE, if my ideas gained traction through an increase in followers.

Twitter tactics and growth

The overall tactic with Twitter was to share as much value as possible and make genuine connections with people that I'm interested in.

I'm leveraging automation by way of scheduling tweets to a set schedule that I tweak regularly.

People liked what I was posting which resulted in some initial success; one tweet, in particular, caught some air:

But as you'll see, 1K retweets and 3.4K likes was small-time compared to what was to come.

I've continued to share my thoughts about the business of freelancing semi-consistently for a year at this stage.

The viral tweet

The viral tweet that forced my hand to create a product off the back of the demand was, in fact, a thread of tweets.

I'd scheduled the viral thread just like any other; its slot was 12:55 on Tuesday 30th of June 2020.

I knew that the content was valuable, otherwise, I wouldn't have tweeted it, but I had no idea how much it would explode:

Here's the viral tweetstorm:

To date, it's gained 11.2K retweets, 37.2k likes, 417,025 engagements and 3,145,340 impressions.

Crazy right?

When the tweet was blowing up in real-time, I was getting more replies, direct messages and follow notifications than I could handle.

It took around a week for the rush to die down, leaving me with an increase of ~4,500 followers.

I'd always planned to write a book about pricing for freelancers and with all this attention, I felt compelled to write it there and then.

The topic had validation (the success of the tweet) and I had ideas in the bank.

The product

A couple of days into the tweet's rise, I started drafting a book that expanded on ideas and learning I'd shared.

I needed to know that I had plenty more to write.

The sections came pretty quickly and I started to flesh them out without requiring much research.

After all, the content was already there at the front of my brain because it's what I've lived for the last decade.

Wanting to capitalise on the momentum quickly, I decided to self-publish the eventual eBook, using Gumroad to do so.

A week after posting the tweetstorm that went viral, I announced that I was writing Pricing Freelance Projects.

Pre-orders

To further validate that people wanted to learn more from me about pricing their work, I set up a Gumroad pre-order product.

This involved:

• Creating a book cover
• Creating the relevant imagery for Gumroad from the aforementioned cover
• Writing the pre-order product page copy
• Picking a price for the pre-order

I set a $19 price for the eBook during the pre-order phase and detailed my plan to release the book on the 30th July 2020, 23 days after the announcement and 30 days after my original tweet thread went viral.

A just over 3-week period to write a book may seem excessive, but as I mentioned before, after being immersed in the subject daily for 11 years, I could already see the words that I'd write in my mind.

By the next morning, Pricing Freelance Projects had received 28 pre-orders and this gave me the ultimate validation and will-power that I needed to start writing intensively.

I wanted to bring my existing and new-found audience along for the ride as my primary marketing approach, so I decided to continue to document my progress on Twitter as I wrote the book.

The writing process

Based on the sections that I'd outline, I set myself an initial target of ~20,000 words.

Although I had a lot to say on the topic and I wanted the book to be in-depth, I didn't want it to be overbearing. Plus, I had to give myself a realistic chance of finishing it.

9 days after I put the product up for pre-order, I had 10,000 words and 85 pre-orders.

Things felt like they were going well. After all, I was halfway through my target with more than half of the time left toward my self-imposed deadline.

However, as writing continued, I realised that my current word-count was a poor gauge of progress. Most of the sections needed further refinement at some point.

Even as I closed in on 20,000 words with 9 days to go, I knew that I'd have to change my approach to get this out on time.

I decided to go back to the very start and re-write each section as if it were ready to be published. This tactic helped me build a clear path towards the finish line.

With 6 days to go, it became clear to me that I'd surpass my ~20,000-word goal significantly.

I was left with a choice of getting everything into the book that I'd planned by allocating extra time to work on it, or, cutting sections for an easier ride to release.

The latter was never really an option; I wanted to put my all into Pricing Freelance Projects.

I'd already paused my client work at this stage, but at this point, I completely cleared my decks and cut out all distraction.

With 6 days until my deadline, I published what would turn out to be a 95% accurate version of the final table of contents:

The pre-order count was 121 at this stage.

From this point right up to the day before launch, this figure rocketed.

Pricing Freelance Projects attained 230 pre-orders and made $4,530 in revenue while I was writing it.

30 days since my Twitter thread on pricing went viral, I had a finished product, that I could sell forever, that had already made money.

Launch

I finished creating the PDF for Pricing Freelance Projects and uploaded it to Gumroad 12 hours before the scheduled launch.

In the end, it came in at 29,570 words across 136 pages.

It was a closer call than I'd have liked, but I made it!

My pricing approach was to reward early adopters with a cheaper price, with the ultimate price being around double.

I settled on $39 for the launch after following Daniel Vassallo (@dvassallo) and Randall Kanna's (https://twitter.com/RandallKanna) recent digital product launches and considering the value that 11 years' of real-world, successful pricing experience can provide.

Standing by the value of my services has always been important to me and to carry this through to my digital products, I decided to offer a money-back guarantee on Pricing Freelance Projects if a buyer isn't happy with their purchase.

Post launch

Aside from within Twitter, I haven't done much promotion of the book apart from two things:

I launched Pricing Freelance Projects on Product Hunt which gained some traction and lead 7 sales.

I posted Pricing Freelance Projects to Show Hacker News as I noted that Philip Kiely (@philipkiely) had some success here, but this proved fruitless for my product.

Post-launch, to date (26th August 2020), Pricing Freelance Projects has sold a further 73 copies and made $2,817 in revenue.

Note: I launched the book at 12:00 and I can't split days using Gumroad's analytics feature, so I'm not counting sales made after 12:00 on launch day (30th July 2020) in the post-launch figures to date.

Updates

I offer free updates for life with Pricing Freelance Projects, having released v1.1 already, re-wording some paragraphs and fixing a couple of typos.

To date, I've also added ePub and MOBI versions of the book alongside the original PDF.

I plan to add value to the product in the future too, with new chapters and extra resources.

Other opportunities

Alongside the signal to write Pricing Freelance Projects itself, I've been invited to write pieces for high profile industry blogs and have appeared on ~10 podcasts to speak about pricing for freelancers, consultants, entrepreneurs and small businesses.

What this highlights most to me is the doors that social media can open for people when leveraged. IE, sharing ideas and making real connections with people as opposed to being used as a consumption only tool.

Can this be repeated?

Having a Twitter thread go viral then write a book of the same topic in 30 days?

Probably not, but who knows.

The Twitter thread about pricing freelance projects that went viral feels like a perfect storm scenario; the right content, seen by the right people, who liked it enough to retweet it, posted at the right time.

I've experimented since with other threads that I feel are of equally high value, with nowhere near the same level of successes.

I even used the same time slot for this one (Tuesday at 12:55):

However, I don't feel that my success in selling more eBooks in the future is linked to writing another viral tweet.

What's next?

I've managed to double my audience pretty quickly off the back of my viral tweet. It also gave me the push that I needed to complete my first paid digital product.

My freelance business is still going strong, and I'm lucky to have enough runway to allow me to do less client work and invest more time in helping other freelancers through share my knowledge by way of digital products.

I have ~5 working titles for new books and the curriculum mapped out for a course; I just need to decide which one to work on first!

Thanks for reading!

If you want to see how my Twitter strategy is playing out, or if you want to get regular nuggets of value about the business of freelancing, you can find me here: https://twitter.com/tom_hirst

If you're interested in finding out more about my book Pricing Freelance Projects, you can do so at https://tomhir.st/pfp