Memes = Growth

Hey everyone!

I wanted to share with you one of the experiments I did this week in growing an audience (twitter + newsletter).

A little back story:
I'm an ex-VC and agency owner who left to build my own business in an attempt to bootstrap my way to "never think about rent again" type of wealth.

I had taken some of the advice from some people who had produced ebooks on growing a twitter following.

The advice could be summed up as:

1. reply to large accounts in your niche
2. always bring value (e.g. insight or resource)
3. tweet ~15 times a day in the beginning

While this does bring growth, it is slow in the beginning. Not to mention the time it takes finding 15 tweets a day and responding to them while you're also trying to build your business.

Don't get me wrong, this is a good strategy. But this strategy is to audience building what basic strategy is to blackjack. It's sound and it works well in the long term.

I wanted to experiment with the content since I thought I could get more out of my effort.

I started off with two basic first principles:

1. when you have no audience, you need to get in front of others
2. people want to be educated or entertained

So the obvious answer was to make memes - particularly memes about VCs.

I took inspiration from this meme:

and made my own version:

At first this didn't blow up. And to be honest, it never would have if Jason Calacanis didn't tweet this:

When he did this, the meme became real. He loved it (partly because he's a good guy who can laugh at himself)! It wasn't until Jason picked it up that it really started to spread.

Over all stats:
Impressions: 117,233
Likes: 293
RTs: 18
New Followers: 39
Newsletter subs: 31

Directly attributable to one tweet. The week prior I had only added 15 new followers following "basic" strategy.

So, what is the takeaway?

Add some big swings into your strategy. Don't just reply to tweets, fuel growth with content that directly engages people who have similar (and larger) audiences than you do and bring them value.

Here's what I'm being cautious about:

• I don't want to be the meme guy
• I want an audience who follows for the content I produce

I'm going to continue with making memes and visual media to see how this plays out.

If you're interested in more memes or growth insights, follow me on twitter or subscribe to my newsletter

https://twitter.com/JamesSkylor
www.jamesskylor.com/newsletter