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I just launched my first course with $1k pre-orders and no followers

Earlier this year my twitter account was hacked and I lost around 10k followers on an account I had for years. This wasn't great timing as I was aiming to launch my first online course.

So in July in created a new twitter account and decided to try and launch my course anyway. It's still only at 300 followers, but I managed to get around 20 pre-orders, totalling just over $1k. My new twitter is here https://twitter.com/RobertJBye

Here's what I did:

  1. The course is relevant for anyone working in tech, but I decided to focus on a niche to begin with. So most people I followed were either people I knew, or no-coders
  2. I started conversations with a lot of no coders on twitter as I wanted to get to know them, hear their thoughts on tech, and see how we could help each other
  3. Many of these people were great, so we quickly started chatting via DMs and I had a few zoom calls to get to know them
  4. I then spun up affiliate links using gumroad, so we would both get some financial benefit of sharing the course
  5. They then shared the course with their followers which gained some traction and led to around 20 pre-orders within a week

If you have a tiny network, don't be daunted. Instead, do this:

  1. Focus on building real friendships, don't just leverage people for their network
  2. Spend time chatting and getting to know people. Jump on a zoom call with them if you can. Face time is much better than DMs
  3. Focus on a niche to begin with, it's easier to explain a product/course to a niche of people, not your whole addressable market.

If you're interested in the course, you can check it out here http://howtoproduct.co/#define-design-validate

  1. 2

    Man it really looks fascinating, been looking for something like this for a while

    1. 1

      Thanks! Drop me a DM on Twitter (I’m @robertjbye and I can send over a discount code as well 👌🏼)

  2. 2

    Interesting post. Good luck with the course!

  3. 1

    Thanks for the post, it’s really inspiring. We’ve only recently created a twitter account for our new project so still have a very tiny network.

    Did you only DM the people who followed you? Or did you reach out to non-followers too?

  4. 0

    This is cool but I never understood why people say "no followers" having 300 of them :-\

    :: clickbait detected ::

    1. 1

      I had no followers in July (i had to set up a new account from scratch) but it’s grown to that number by doing the steps I said above.

      1. 0

        Right, but your first tweet was not about your course, neither the second :)
        How many followers did you already have when you started selling your course? I guess, more than one :)

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