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I made a Twitter Bot which converts tweets to a shareable blog

2 weeks ago I did a mini-hackathon of my own and created my first Twitter bot ever, in 48 hours. I wrote about it on indiehackers here That bot responds to Tweets about stocks, and includes a generated stock graph showing the price of the stock over time.

Through making that bot, I had many ideas on how I could make other cool services to support the Twitter ecosystem. So over the last two weekends, I made this new service.

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What I made?
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For this project, I made a service called Saved

my image

The idea of Saved is, while you are on Twitter you can save tweets which you really like, and they get saved onto a personal Saved blog. Here's an example of my saved tweets

For these blogs to be generated, users simply mention the twitter account @savedsolink and include the word "save" in that tweet, and the first post in the tweet thread will be added to the blog, like this

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Why I made this?
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I've just started using Twitter seriously this year and think it's a great place. I quickly found myself "liking" 10-30 tweets a day.

Some tweets were "fun" likes, the others were really amazing tweets.

The problem was, I wasn't able to go back and find those tweets that REALLY brought me a ton of value.

And these liked tweets aren't really searchable. So I'd have to spend minutes scrolling back through all of my liked tweets, hitting control+F to see if I could find the tweet I was looking for.

I thought there had to be a better way.

Additionally, I was listening to a podcast by Sam Parr creator of Trends.co/ The Hustle and Shaan Puri who host a weekly show called My First Million, where they were talking about how they wish they had a way to share things which they found really interesting.

If you guys listening to their show, you'll know they are often riffing on a 5-10 business ideas pretty much every episode.

So I really made this with those two guys in mind, as well as bunch of other newsletter creators/podcast hosts who use Twitter to source content ideas.

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How I made this?
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I've been teaching myself Python since the start of this year.

While it took 4-5 days of work, it ends up being only about 200 lines of code for the whole thing.

Here are the tools that I used to create Saved:

  • Twitter API
  • Stripe
  • Google Cloud Platform
  • Ghost CMS
  • Namecheap
  • HeroIcons

Namecheap: This is where I bought the domain name from for $60

HeroIcons: For the logo design

Twitter API: My account watches for mentions and the word "save". If these two criteria are met, the Tweet is saved to a "database".

Ghost: This is the content platform which I'm using to display the content. When a user goes through the sign-up process, a new post is created on the site for that user. in my case it would be saved.so/stusim, indiehackers (if they signed up) would be saved.so/IndieHackers etc. Currently, the sign-up process is manual on my end but I'm sure I could automate it soon...I'm new at this ;)

Google Cloud Platform: This is where all of my code is saved. Right now I've got two Cloud functions (essentially python scripts).

The first script, runs every minute to check for mentions on Twitter and saves them to a Firestore collection, which is essentially a database inside of GCP.

The second script, runs every 10 minutes. This downloads all of the tweets from Firestore. It also downloads all of the posts on Saved. It then updates each post based on the tweets which have been saved.

Stripe: On the landing page, there is a button to purchase a subscription to use Saved, currently the launch price is $5/year but I'm going to be raising this soon as I make the product better.

In the short term I think it will be around $30-$60/year for consumers.

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What's next?
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As always, while creating Saved, I thought of a bunch of great new features.

Not to mention making the initial version of Saved even better, there are a couple of really nuanced parts of the process which I know I could solve, but that might take 40+hours to really fine tune it. Right now, it's good and it works. Yes it could be great, but I'm not buying into that "perfectionist" bs.

I could have kept adding these for ages before launching but chose to share it with the world first.

I think there's actually a pretty strong business use-case for this where I could charge $100/$250month once I add my next set of features.

I'm only 6months in to learning how to code, so if there's a developer that would like to work with me on this 5/10hours a week, I'd be happy to have a discussion on that.

Of course, I welcome any feedback on this and would love to support any IndieHackers who are on Twitter and out there making content.

All the best,

  1. 2

    Hi Stuart, congrats on your latest Twitter-based product launch! I'm glad that you managed to work around those issues you had with the GraphTD bot.

    I'm currently saving the most interesting tweets to Notion which works quite well for me. However, there is definitely some room for improvement there for something like Saved!

    EDIT: typo

    1. 1

      Thanks very much for the inspiration to use Firebase @tgel0 , this was a great opportunity to test it out based on what you shared with me so thank you so much!!

  2. 2

    Hi Stuart,

    Congrats with your launch! Cool to see you made a simple MVP without a lot of effort :) A couple of feedback points:

    • The link on your homepage is missing a tld: http://saved/so/naval
    • Is readwise a product of yours as well? If not, remove the link, put up an email subscribe form and keep people up to date with your product. Maybe they're not ready to convert right now yet, but they might be in the near future.
    • Perhaps change the keyword 'save' to save a tweet to '#save' or '#saveso'. This way you also generate exposure.
    • I wouldn't recommend using the example of http://saved.so/IndieHackers . At first, I thought your site was broking or something.

    Keep up the nice work!

    1. 1

      Thanks @MrAtiebatie , you bring up some good points. I should clarify Naval/IndieHackers are just examples.

      Readwise is not mine, they are a competitor, don't mind linking to them for now given their cost compared to me, but you are probably right.

      Thanks for the detailed feedback!

      1. 2

        I think the Readwise thing is a bold move but I kind of like it. Maybe just make it even more obvious that, compared to RW, signing up for Saved is a no-brainer.

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