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Interview: The secrets behind TweetHunter's idea + launch

Intro & Background

Hi Indiehackers, I'm @orliesaurus - you probably know me from the Landing Page Feedback section of this community - today I am doing something different.

I find myself sitting down and having a chat with one of the most socially active makers around IH.

This interview aims to understand how he got started and where, with his co-founder, they aim to go!

Tibo

Introducing Thibault aka Tibo from Paris, FrancešŸ‡«šŸ‡· - who has worked on many different projects and after selling 2 startups - is now working with his co-founder on building and bootstrapping Tweethunter!

ā­ļø Leave a comment below to let Thibault know you've read the interview, and let us know if you want to read more interviews from active members of the community.

I was most surprised seeing how active Thibault is on Twitter and how fast his audience has grown and how that influenced his current project.

So let's do this!


Q. Hello Thibault ! What's your background, and what are you working on?

Iā€™ve been creating startups and products for the past 10 years. Most failed at very different stages but a few got traction and got acquired.

Q. How did you get the idea for Tweet Hunter and how did you get started?

My co-founder Tom and I decided to create a product studio called Pony Express. The goal behind every product we make is to help creators/makers reach a wider audience. We realized most of our early users were people that followed me on Twitter. And we thought: thatā€™s cool, but itā€™s hard to build a Twitter audience, how can we make it easier? And so we created Tweet Hunter.

Q. Do you have a screenshot of your first landing page you put out?

Screenshot of an old TweetHunter's homepage

Q. And today's...

Screenshot of TweetHunter's homepage

Q. Tell us about how you built your first landing page and what did you struggle with the first time:

For every landing we build, we use https://carrd.co because it lets us experiment very fast and itā€™s super cheap.
From day 0, the copy of the page was a real challenge given how different the product is. We really didnā€™t know what our USP was.

Q. What did you learn from that first landing page that youā€™ve applied in your current iteration?

We actually had a lot of learnings from previous landing pages which we applied to this one. Mainly: make it super short and do a screen recording video if you can. The advantage of not saying too much about your product in the early days is that you let users imagine what the features could be. At this point we didnā€™t really know what direction to take, and not saying bluntly what the product is makes it easier to let users steer the product in the direction they want.

And videoā€¦ This always doubled our conversion rate for every single landing page we made.

Side-Note: Wordstream reports that having a video on your landing page can increase conversion up to 80%

Q. Who wrote the copy of your first and current landing page (and why)?

The first was written by Tom, my co-founder. It was quite a quite basic copy, aimed at Twitter users in general and following a traditional page structure.

On the current version, the copy was written by JK Molina, our main partner for marketing. If you go on the website, youā€™ll see itā€™s quite unlike any SaaS landing page ever made. The reason is JKā€™s audience is more accustomed to buying courses and community access than SaaS, and theyā€™re the people we were targeting in September. So we made a course-like landing page for a SaaS.

In the coming weeks, we aim to take the best of both worlds and have a clean elegant landing page with great copy.
Weā€™re working on it.

Q. How did you get your first customers?

Twitter is amazing for this. We just tweeted who would like to crash-test it and we actually got people onboard from the very start. Then we posted on Reddit and we got a few hundred upvotes and sign ups, that was crazy and definitely helped in the idea validation process.

Q. What strategy did you use to get your testimonials?

Asking for it. It sounds stupid but it works. When you engage the conversation with a user and you ask for a public tweet as a testimonial, thereā€™s a 50% chance you get one.

Q. What advice would you give yourself 2 years ago on bootstrapping?

I would tell myself:

  • Be better at coding, itā€™s the foundation for every project
  • Build a LOT, most products will probably suck but one will stick
  • Payment is the ultimate business validation. Forget forms, surveys, market research and asking experts. Are people paying?

Q. In conclusion, what are your upcoming goals and have you got any shoutouts?

Tweet Hunter is growing very fast (more than 10% weekly growth), so keeping that growth going as long as possible would already be a nice achievement. Big shoutout to all my Twitter friends who supported us by helping in the validation, building the product and the promotion of Tweet Hunter.


If you want to learn more about Tibo's journey and Tweet Hunter here are some useful links:

Tweet Hunter -> https://tweethunter.io/
Thibault -> https://twitter.com/tibo_maker

Thanks for reading this far :) Leave a comment to let Tibo know you've read the interview. If you want to be interviewed, reach out to me via twitter!

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