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I want to grow on Twitter, so I'm asking a robot to help me

First time writing an IndieHackers post and not sure where to start so I'm gonna write this like an essay.

  1. Life as a lurker
  2. The problem
  3. An idea to solve it
  4. How I built it
  5. So what
  6. What's next

{Life as a lurker}

I'm normally a lurker in online communities, reddit, twitter, IH, etc. because I have a bit of social anxiety (even online). I'm either afraid of being cringe or getting into a heated discussion with someone that ruins my reputation spirals out of control where I have to delete all of my social media presence. You know, basic anxiety stuff.

But recently I wanted to dedicate a lot of my time to building products that actually make money, grow my Twitter following, and I needed to share the process with the world #buildinpublic.

{The problem}

Twitter was definitely one of the primary channels to do it, but there was a problem, I needed help to write tweets that weren't bland, boring, or boomer-ish (I'm a millennial, but an old soul).

A disclaimer to this is yes I do recognize that writing genuine valuable tweets (or any other written content) is the surefire way to grow, tweets that provide tips, that entertain, or that have engaging stories.

To keep churning out those "5 tips to change your life" threads or some shi*.

But for someone just starting out, third-party help is definitely not a bad thing.

Not everyone has great copywriting skills. I majored in organizational communication so a decent writer imo, but should definitely be a tool out there that can help me with this. Something to help with consistency, something semi-predictable and high-quality? So I tried to look for it.

{An idea to solve it}

Consistent content creation, with a high degree of relevance, these just point to an AI tool such as Copy AI, Writesonic, and Anyword. But on testing these to see if any of them actually solved my problem, it was pretty underwhelming.

Copy AI created decent quality tweets but really sort of bland, something my 11 y.o. sister could've written. Expensive too. Anyword didn't have a custom template for inputting prompts and the output was disappointing, not bad, but disappointing.

Rewind 2-3 months before this, I forgot that I had signed up for this OpenAI beta account, and I got an email back to access beta at the same period when I was trying to grow my Twitter following (good timing universe). So naturally... I played around with it and was blown away by how.. not robotic it sounded? and.. how relevant the output actually were.

{How I built it}

Given that OpenAI's output or engine was the best I've experienced out of all the tools, I decided to build a tweet creator/maker/crutch app myself, just for me, and maybe others out there that needs you know, just some help.

I'm a product designer, and a no-code builder (primarily on Bubble), so I checked if there was a Bubble plugin already to call OpenAI APIs and luckily there was. A few pixels pushed in Figma, a few workflows created in Bubble and bing bang boom Genietweets.com was born.

The current version of GenieTweets is a MAP, a Minimum Awesome Product (don't cringe, I got this term from someone else I forgot who). It creates great content and does it better than Copy AI and the other tools imo, at least at writing tweets. But that said, it can still be improved!

{So what}

So the ultimate reason why I'm writing this post is to share about my process, share things about myself and be more open, and share Genietweets to see if someone in the IndieHackers community would maybe want to use it to grow their own Twitter following.

{What's next}

Next, I'm gonna put up paywalls cause' uhm making money is nice, and also see if it can actually grow my following.

If not then i'll just have to improve it until it does, force the OpenAI robot to submit under my will and churn out AAA content that gets me more famous than Gary Vee... That or just you know have it as a nice tool on the side to help me write startup jokes.

Check it out IH fam: Genietweets.com

Love you peeps.

on October 11, 2022
  1. 2

    hey @thegaurav03 just saw your comment in a duplicate post man, just fixed the issue thanks for the heads up

    1. 1

      the result is coming out way too much negative.

      1. 1

        sorry can you elaborate man? like what "way too much negative" means?

        1. 1

          My day is ruined and I have to live with it.

          The keyword was content creator

          1. 2

            okay that is definitely weird, i'm gonna have to build a flag feature to report tweets like this, thanks for bringing it up man, very helpful

  2. 1

    Not responsive......

    1. 1

      sacrifices need to be made in order to ship something fast lol

      1. 1

        You loose customers, not me 😁

        1. 1

          well that's a bit rude

          1. 1

            Not really. It was a fact.

  3. 1

    One of the hard things about growing on Twitter is there are different techniques for different stages.

    When you start out (at literally 0), you need to get a few followers to establish credibility. Ya know, so people don't think you're a bot.

    From 100 followers, then you need to switch to establishing your value with original tweets while also generating a lot of traffic.

    You need to grow like that until you hit 1 or 2 thousand followers.

    Then you can start extracting value.

    And it's hard! None of that is easy. It takes time, being consistent, having a brand, growing it, and being on top of social media. All while building something of value.

    That being said, Genie Tweets might be able to generate some great templates for reusable content that you tweak and post :)

    1. 1

      Yes dude I totally agree. :)

      I don't see genietweets as the primary source of content, because most people still connect with genuine emotions and personalities.

      Though it's VERY useful as a supplementary source of content for posts like:

      1. asking people what they're doing/making/up to (in x amount of ways)
      2. generating joking statements about building in public
      3. generating historical startup facts in a funny tone

      So these examples can ADD to your roster of genuine thoughts which sort of carries a lot of creative thinking work.

      It basically frees you up to make longer threads, that are thought through. :)

  4. 1

    I like the idea, but I have a critical question (something a potential user might asks):

    Your website promises Get daily Tweets that grow your following, all in 5 seconds or less

    How does it come, that the founder of the website only has 107, when his tool is that good?

    PS: On your website, there is written ** Follow GenieTweets on Twitter** but is not linked to anything.

    Anyway, I wish you all the best on your journey, sounds exciting and I will definitely check it out right now in depth.

    1. 1

      That is a good point definitely, the honest and straightforward answer is...

      I'm just getting started haha!

      It's literally only been a month since I started, but yes I agree that I need to be the main source of social proof to signal to say that "see it works guys! wink wink"

  5. 1

    You intrigued me enough to try!

    1. 1

      Hey if I get a few people to try and get feedback I'd say that this has been a successful first IH post! HAHA

  6. 1

    I am also working on few things related to twitter. I have recently read Twitter API and their library of tweets. Can be useful. Good work.

    1. 1

      fellow twitter builder, what's up man :)

      right now the features of genietweets don't actually need twitter's API yet, cause OpenAI's guidelines don't allow for direct posting to any social media

      so i haven't gone deep into twitter's API yet, any challenges you're facing with working with it?

      1. 2

        Not yet. Still initial phase. Hope to get MVP end of this month.

        1. 1

          good luck on it dude, here's to a good MVP launch for ya

          1. 1

            thanks. When something to present then I will start writing here.

            1. 1

              defiinitely the way to go!

              1. 1

                at least I got the name TWEETMAVEN :-). Few stuff in works with frontend. Will see how it goes.

                1. 1

                  TweetMaven! Love the name :)