I'm Starting with Basically Zero Twitter Followers 🌱

Ok, so that title is a small lie. I actually have a whopping TEN twitter followers. But only 1 of my followers may be in my target market. Here’s the breakdown of my current Twitter audience.

• 1 person that might be in my target market
• 4 friends
• 4 random accounts that followed me
• My mom

In other words, I’m totally crushing it! :)

I’m an entrepreneur/developer. I’m interested in building tools to help newsletter creators. I’ve interviewed some newsletter creators and even built a prototype, but I’m still very much at the beginning of this journey. I have no online audience. I have no customers. I want to build my startup transparently but it’s tough when you don’t have much to share.

I’m sure you’ve seen, as I have, lots of posts about how entrepreneurs got a lot of signups or dollars in a short amount of time. “I made $5,000 in 7 days with my BLANK”. But it’s not until you dig deeper that you realize a little secret. They oftentimes are leveraging an existing email list or social media following that they’ve built up over time. (aside: I’m such a sucker for these posts. I always always click on them).

I don’t have an existing audience. I have 10 twitter followers. This means that anything I build in public or milestones I share will be less sensational because it will take me much longer to reach certain milestones. It might take me 7 months to make $5,000 instead of 7 days.

The only difference I think though is a point of reference. If I had built my audience before considering a business, then, when I decide to “start” my business I might happily report $5,000 in 7 days. But, if instead, I decide to “start” my business before I build my audience, then I probably have no hope of reporting such golden metrics.

I would be curious to know, for those who have built a twitter or other social media following from scratch, how did you do it? How long did it take? I haven’t read any “I got 10,000 Twitter followers in 5 days” posts that I can recall, although I’d certainly love to.

This is the absolute beginning of my journey and it looks very unglamorous. I think it’s important to remember to not compare yourself to some of the things you see online. They can be informative and sometimes they can motivate you, but you should make sure to take them with a grain of salt lest they leave you demoralized.