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I'm tweeting one productivity tip per day, and you should too.

I've started posting one productivity tip per day on Twitter (at satvikpendem).

Why? The best way to sell a product is to put it in front of an audience willing to buy. The best way to find an audience is to build it yourself. In other words, create your own community and sell to your own community.

There are many notable examples of this technique, namely Daniel Vassallo (@dvassallo) who wrote The Good Parts of AWS, and Steven Schoger and Adam Wathan (@adamwathan) who wrote Refactoring UI.

Vassallo worked at Amazon, on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) team for several years before leaving. He documented his reasons for leaving in a post called Only Intrinsic Motivation Lasts: Why I quit a $500K job at Amazon to work for myself which brought him around 3,000 followers on Twitter. Notice that there are two crucial parts of this article that worked.

First, he posted on Medium (as well as his own website, of course). He went where the audience was, not where he wanted them to be. Since he had a new blog, people weren't reading it. He posted this article, again, on places the readers would be, Hacker News, Reddit, and so on.

Second, even if he had posted something, that doesn't mean he'd have readers. Vassallo posted something provocative and unnatural, making the readers ask themselves, "Why would you leave a 500k job?" Basically, it's a more sophisticated version of clickbait, one that actually has value underneath the click.

Using his fledgling audience, he doubled down on writing blog posts and providing value, eventually growing his Twitter to currently ~35k followers. Along the way, he did another thing that was interesting: writing an ebook. He wrote The Good Parts of AWS, and people bought it precisely because he had credibility not just through his follower count but also because he worked at Amazon for 8 years and probably much of it on AWS. However, the most important reason of them all is that it solved a problem people actually faced with AWS, such as it being too complicated to understand. Through that book, he reportedly made nearly $100k in sales, and wrote a Twitter thread about how it did and what he learned. Even with this success he doubled down on sharing more information, thereby increasing his follower count even more, creating a virtuous cycle.

A similar example includes Steve Schoger and Adam Wathan, who created the Refactoring UI course. Schoger spent two years continuously posting valuable content on Twitter, design tips that are concrete rather than just theoretical. By steadily building up their audience (to ~85k Twitter followers currently for Steve and ~65k for Adam), they were eventually able to make reportedly ~$2,000,000 from it. This is the power of community-building, and I didn't even go into examples like direct-to-consumer companies like Dollar Shave Club, or celebrities like Kanye.

Given such power, in order to build up my own community to eventually sell my productivity app, a todo list + calendar, I'm posting one productivity tip a day on Twitter (twitter.com/satvikpendem), and I recommend that you do the same, perhaps not on Twitter, but build an audience any way you can.

  1. 1

    Wow, that’s awesome. World love to see your product!

  2. 1

    Great post Satvik. In the early stages, it’s important to promote yourself aggressively. You need to go get some attention, and go where people already hang around. It becomes easier eventually when people start recommending you via word of mouth. 👊

    1. 1

      I turned the post into a Twitter thread, let me know what you think!

    2. 1

      Thanks Daniel, appreciate it coming from you. Let me know if I got everything right or if there are any factual errors, I got most of this info from other posts of yours.

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