I assumed a small X following was better than none. In 4,965 startups with verified revenue, it wasn't.

Disclosure first: I run BigIdeasDB. Around 680 people pay for it and it does a little under $9k a month. One of the datasets in it is a mirror of TrustMRR, where founders connect their Stripe or other payment provider and the revenue shown is pulled from the source, not typed in. Everything below comes from that data.

I went in to answer a question I've been arguing with myself about for a year. Every "how do I get my first users" thread here ends with some version of "build in public on X". So is a small X account better than no X account at all?

I assumed yes. Even 50 followers is 50 people who might click.

What I measured:

4,965 startups with verified revenue data and a known X status, synced between March and July 2026. I split them by the follower count on the X account they list on their profile, then checked how many made $1k or more in their last 30 days.

What the data says:

- No X account listed (1,163 startups): 17.9% made $1k+

- Under 100 followers (1,343): 12.1%

- 100 to 999 (1,569): 16.0%

- 1k to 9.9k (718): 24.9%

- 10k+ (172): 36.0%

The startups with no X account beat the ones with under 100 followers, and roughly tied the ones with a few hundred. Among startups making any money at all, the median no-account startup made $233 in the month. The median under-100 startup made $108.50.

Only past 1,000 followers does having an account clearly beat not having one.

Also worth sitting with: more founders in this set have an X account under 100 followers (1,343) than have no account at all (1,163). The most common setup is the one that did worst.

The part I didn't expect. I figured the no-account group would be mostly B2B tools that sell through other channels, which would explain it. It isn't. The B2B share is about the same in both groups (35% vs 37%), and the median startup in each is about a year old.

The gap got bigger in categories where you'd expect X to matter most. In Marketing, no-account startups hit $1k+ 26.2% of the time. Marketing startups with under 100 followers: 6.3%. Generic "SaaS" was 21.0% vs 8.1%. Those category groups are small, 61 to 124 startups each, so treat them as a direction, not a results.

My read, and it's only a read: a tiny account isn't hurting anyone directly. It's where the hours went. Posting to 60 people every day feels like distribution, and it takes the same time as cold email, SEO pages or showing up in a niche forum where the buyers are.

What didn't work on our side. We built an AI research chat on top of this exact dataset so people could ask questions like this one themselves. Since March, 25 people have used it, across 39 conversations. We have around 15,000 users. I spent real time on that feature and almost nobody found it, which is a little funny given the topic of this post.

Caveats, because there are real ones. TrustMRR is opt-in. Founders who connect their payments to show off revenue are not a random sample of startups. "No X account listed" means none on the startup's profile. Some of those founders probably post from a personal account they didn't link. And this is correlation. Founders who skip X might be the same people who are better at picking a market in the first place.

One number I can't explain. Startups with no X account listed are more likely to be listed for sale: 33.5%, against 26.6% for the under-100 group. Same age, higher revenue, and more of them are trying to sell. I don't have a good theory.

Two questions:

If you stopped posting on X to put the hours somewhere else, where did they go, and did your revenue notice within a couple of months?

And for anyone who buys or sells small SaaS: why would the startups with no social presence be the ones more often up for sale?