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34 Comments

I co-founded Hypefury and scaled it to 22k MRR. AMA

Hey everyone,

My name is Yannick and I do marketing for Hypefury. Hypefury helps people build and monetize an audience on Twitter (and other social platforms). We currently have over 1000 customers. Our most successful ones use us to consistently share great content on Twitter and plug their newsletter, course or ecom store below their best performing posts.

Samy started Hypefury in 2019 as a solo founder and developer. We actually got to know each other through the Indiehackers forum. He posted a topic saying he was looking for a marketing co-founder. I reached out. We started talking on the phone. I flew to Paris. Things clicked and we started working together. The rest is history as they say.

We currently have a team of about 15 people (not all full-time) all over the world. Two people run our customer success team. About 7 developers and 6 marketers including Samy and me.

We’re fully remote and are spread over 9 countries.

Ask me anything!

Note: @Samy_ might jump in as well to answer some more technical questions.

  1. 3

    Is there a specific process you guys went through determine what you wanted as the core features + the UX? I'd say that the UX for hypefury stands as a pretty strong point of the product so assuming you guys had a lot of testing on that.

    1. 2

      It's something that grew organically but we hired for early on. We have a very good external designer who helps us with the product and UX decisions.

      We usually prioritize the number of upvotes a feature receives except when the core user group wants changes (quick). We prioritize them over that.

      1. 1

        Gotcha! Noted on the designer, I thought it was just something that you and Samy decide on.

  2. 3

    Great progress and great product.

    I have a question on your revenue growth. Seems like you grew from $0 to $22k MRR in about two years. Can you comment on one or two periods of slow growth. Like when your growth stalled for a month, and how you reacted, or what you changed.

    I realize that your company is different than others, but any insight from your experience would be great. Thanks.

    1. 3

      We raised our prices last year. That increased our MRR by 50%. We saw quite a bit of churn after that (which we expected). Growth remained slow for a while. Our churn was over 15% at some point. We've now made improvements which reduced churn again. We're now at 7%. We're trying to get it down by a few percentage points more.

  3. 2

    That is an amazing accomplishment! Could you tell us a little bit more about the stack that you are using, and what kind of costs there are?

    1. 1

      We use Firebase, VueJS, Elastic Search. And a bunch more small things.

      All in all, I think we pay about 2k /month For our tech stack. Firebase being the most expensive. We're transitioning part of our heavy reads to elastic search. That can probably cut our cost (more than) in half.

  4. 2

    How do you deal with competition in such (from the outside) saturated market?

    1. 5

      We have a strong product and quite a big team compared to competitors. That's why we're ahead of the pack.

      We also focus on things outside our software like:

      • Growth notes. A monthly email to inspire people to create content on Twitter
      • Weekly podcast.
      • Community where we help people with their Twitter journey
      • Etc.
      1. 1

        But you said Samy started alone so he didn't have a big team then, right?

        1. 1

          Yeah, he started it alone. Did everything himself the first couple of months.

  5. 1

    Are you looking for a product manager (part time)?

    I'm a customer and would love to join the team and help.

    1. 1

      Hey man! Send me a DM on Twitter and let me know what you'd like to contribute to Hypefury!

  6. 1

    A very inspiring story. Where were you before moving to Paris?

    Congratulations and all the best!

  7. 1

    Where did the name come from?

  8. 1

    Great product. What has been your timeline i.e. when did you come up with idea, how long did it take you to build it and time to first customer

    1. 1

      August 2019 idea

      Took Samy a couple of days to build the MVP

      Onboarded the first few users into a private beta within a couple of days. Samy only integrated with a payment provider months later. He probably could've gotten people to pay sooner but he was focused on providing value first.

  9. 1

    Just want to say that I've been using hypefury to grow my twitter for about a month, and I went from 250 to 500 followers, with high engagement.

    To me it's the perfect tool as it both motivates me to tweet every day, plus comes with tons of optimization to make sure I grow as fast as possible.

    The ability to schedule tweets / retweets ahead of time allowed me to grow while on vacation for example.

    Congratulations on such a wonderful app. I'm a proud paid user!

    PS: I did plug my affiliate link in the first sentence 😅

  10. 1

    What is your growth channel?

    1. 3

      Organic traffic is pretty big. Currently around 45k visitors a month.
      Our affiliate program also gets a decent chunk.

      We tweet quite a bit and plug our free Twitter growth course. That lands us about 300 - 500 email subs a month.

      And people who see others tweet with "Hypefury". If you click on a tweet you'll see with what program it was tweeted.

      1. 1

        Thanks for the answer, Yannick.

  11. 1

    Hi Yannick, congrats on your success and the 22k mrr, that's HUGE!

    I'd love to hear what marketing tactics you used in the beginning to get your first 10 paying users? And did the strategy change as you grew to 1000 customers or did you just scale up the initial marketing activities? Any insights or anecdotes you can share on this would be awesome.

    Thanks in advance!

    1. 2

      The first 10 users Samy reached out to people who reacted to his first tweet about Hypefury where he asked if there's any tool that lets you schedule threads. There was none. A bunch of people responded and he started a private beta with them.

  12. 1

    When meeting a co-founder online, like on IH let's say, what are some of the "check the box" qualities that the person needs to have? Also, are you using the term Marketing to refer or include Sales too or do you have a separate Sales team? I know IBM used to call their sales team "Marketing" so wasn't sure if you were doing the same :P

    1. 2

      Marketing = growth = sales too yes although we don't do that a lot because our price point can't sustain a sales team.

      About the "check the box" qualities.

      I think mindset is very important. Motivation sounds nice but in a startup, you lose that sooner or later. You need to be able to grind day in day out. On good days and bad days.

      I also think there should be as little overlap as possible between co-founders. In my previous startup there was too much overlap and we were in each other's face too much.

      What's also important is that your vision for the future is aligned. We both had a stream of income next to Hypefury and we weren't in need of money. While reaching ramen profitability was nice for us we still invest a lot in the company and are only taking 1k salary each.

      We also didn't want to go the VC route. Be aware that it can take a very long time before you get any decent money from starting an Indie project.

  13. 1

    Hey Yannick,

    Could you tell us about your first sale?

    1. 2

      Samy opened the private beta and just kept improving the product. It wasn't even on his list in the first few months to add billing.

      Most of the people who were in the beta subscribed to the paid product. They helped create the product. They were already using it. Paying for it was just a logical consequence.

  14. 1

    Hey Yannick, congrats on 22k MRR! I am curious on the growth journey of your team as 15 persons (despite not all are full time) still sounds like quite a considerable team size. Is there any correlation with your revenue or other metrics?

    1. 4

      Hey!

      Our first hire was someone who did customer success for us. That was our first and worst hire 😂

      We learned from that mistake. It was a poor match and we underestimated that person's knowledge about our business. We waited too long to end that relationship though.

      After that, we hired a new more experienced CS person and from that, we actually expanded.

      Samy kept looking for new developers as our revenue grew. We hired a CTO now. He loves reviewing PR's and makes sure the team can stay efficient.

      I hired a couple of people a while back and they're still around. I don't know why but I halted hiring for a bit after that until I realized (I think through an IH podcast) that that's actually one of the things I'm pretty good at plus we really need more people to handle all the day to day activities I couldn't get around doing.

      I'm pretty much done hiring atm. From now until 30k - 40k MRR I don't think I'll hire more people. Once we reach that level I think we need a couple more senior people to come in to elevate our marketing efforts even more.

      We're self-funded so yes, there's a strong correlation between revenue and team size.

  15. 1

    This comment was deleted 3 months ago.

    1. 2

      Firebase + VueJS and Elastic Search are the main stuff.

      We're actually in the middle of changing the logo (a tiny bit).

      Curious why you'd ask about the logo? What do you think about it?

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