How I built a healthy, happy relationship with Twitter

I'll preface all of this with saying the thoughts below are my own personal experience — I'm not a Twitter guru and don't intend to be, but I hope this story encourages others who have struggled to find value and joy in Twitter to rethink their relationship with Twitter.

I'll also say that 100% of my failure to find a healthy relationship with Twitter in my first attempt was on me. I tried to be something that I'm not, misapplied lots of advice, got frustrated, and ended up sucked in by the algorithm. All on me. Based on the replies to the original post, I suspect I'm not the only one that fell into this trap.

On with the post!

My first attempt at using Twitter as a solo founder

When I first struck out on my own, I jumped into the swarm of indie hackers using Twitter because that's what it seemed like we had to do. If you want to build a business, you have to have an audience, so go get thousands of Twitter followers to be part of your tribe!

I started with zero followers and no idea what I was doing, but I followed all the big indie hacker influencers and started applying all the standard "how to grow on Twitter" advice.

Almost everyone I interacted with was pretty clearly just looking for engagement to make their follower counts go up so they could sell something to other indie hackers, or just so they could brag about having X followers/growth/etc. Finding authentic connections was very hard, even with other very small accounts.

There were tons of obvious grifters selling tools, ebooks, and courses to help indie hackers grow on Twitter. The worst $39 I have ever spent was on an ebook from a well-known Twitterati about how to grow on Twitter.

Along with the grifters was a constant stream of fake positivity, empty platitudes, and hustle porn posted by big accounts and then regurgitated over and over again by people hoping a big account would give them a retweet or like.

To make matters worse, I had basically nothing interesting or useful to add to the conversation — I was just wasting time and hoping for a miracle.

The whole experience was demoralizing for me. I thought I was working to build a business but I found myself desperately posting into the void for unclear reasons.

Like a lot of folks who are new to trying to build a business on their own, I was looking for magic bullets and following the herd right off a cliff.

In hindsight, I should have known on day one that building an "audience" following the most common Twitter growth advice was never going to work for me — I couldn't do it authentically and the energy required to keep up the facade was incredibly draining. The common advice works for some people, but it will never work for me.

Making a clean break

I eventually realized spending time on Twitter, for me, was unhealthy and I needed to break the habit. The quick dopamine hits were a constant distraction from the difficult but vital work of trying to figure out how I was going to build something of my own.

So, I deleted all of my tweets, unfollowed everyone, and deleted the app from my phone. It took a little while to break the habit of going to Twitter reflexively to procrastinate but since I followed zero accounts, there wasn't anything to see when I logged in which eventually trained my brain to break the habit.

I didn't give up on building a business, but I shut down Twitter and all other social media (including Indie Hackers!) and focused on learning, writing, and building offline relationships.

Round 2 on Twitter

In my time away from Twitter I wrote a number of technical tutorials that performed pretty well organically on Google and people were finding and sharing those articles on social without me. This felt like a good sign, so last fall, I decided that I would get back on Twitter, but this time with a very intentional approach to avoid falling back in to unhealthy habits.

I still follow 0 accounts and I post sparingly — 1 small thread for each of the 2 - 3 articles I publish each month and 1 small thread for my monthly newsletter. A few more posts each month when I have something directly related to my niche to share.

I don't have any kind of strategy beyond sharing content I create and I don't pay attention to growth or engagement metrics.

I don't use Twitter the way that most folks do — following zero people means it takes a lot of work to find and engage with interesting content. Because I don't follow anyone, if I want to see what other folks in my community are up to, I search up their account and scroll through their tweets.

I rarely reply to other people's tweets unless they're replying to me or mention me directly, and I avoid engaging with, or tweeting about anything that isn't directly related to my particular niche — anything that might send me down an unhealthy path with Twitter is out.

I occasionally DM folks to ask for thoughts or to thank them for their support/encouragement, and I get occasional DMs from people asking me for help with an article I wrote or otherwise connecting with me for advice or feedback.

Funnily enough, with this new approach, I spend almost no time or energy on Twitter but I have:

• Grown from 50ish followers to 600ish
• Sold enough copies this month of a technical book I wrote to pay my mortgage for a month. At least 60% of those sales came from Twitter, according to Gumroad
• Made a number of authentic, genuine connections with folks in my industry who add value to my professional life

I'm not getting rich from Twitter (and I never will, with this approach) but it has become a valuable piece of the puzzle for me as I work to build a business in a way that feels authentic and sustainable for me.

What I learned

Moral of the story: I found the value in Twitter once I threw away all of the toxic positivity, guru nonsense, and engagement chasing that naturally stems from a huge group of people trying to "build an audience" on Twitter in an inauthentic way.

The value came when I started using Twitter to share authentic, valuable, original content without any expectations of making the numbers go up, and with really strong guardrails to prevent myself from falling into unhealthy habits that distract me from doing the hard work I need to do to grow.

Twitter is valuable for me as a way to share my work, and as a way to connect with new people, but I had to be very intentional about finding my people there and being authentic to who I am and what I can offer others.

Following the herd wasn't for me, and trying to do so was bad for my mental health and my professional prospects.