We built WP Buffs to ~$1.5M ARR without doing any meaningful social media work

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This post evolved from my comment on How did you make it without social media?, posted by @KudzaiLX

I built WP Buffs to ~$1.5M ARR without doing any meaningful social media work. We had a Twitter account, Instagram account, LinkedIn profile page, etc. But they never contributed to growth in any meaningful way.

Sure, the account currently has 4,000+ followers. That was mostly the result of scheduling a few social media posts (new blog posts, etc) and using #WordPress over the course of 5+ years.

Most importantly, very few leads mentioned Twitter as a meaningful interaction before becoming a customer.

Most of our growth came from hard marketing campaigns, mostly content marketing and affiliate marketing. They made up ~75% of our growth, with ~15% coming from word of mouth and ~10% coming from wherever.

I'm sure a few customers along the way wouldn't have worked with us because of the lost trust factor of not having social media, but I don't think it would have made a tangible difference in our growth trajectory.

I'm currently building Driftly (let me know if you want to chat product tours for your SaaS, or come livechat with me here) and the channels I've decided to put bets on initially do include some social media activity.

• My co-founder @jacobbeckerman is building in public on Twitter and I may join him for some transparency into the non-technical aspects of building the business.
• To find early adopters and initial customers, I'm using Twitter a bit. This includes stalking competitors on social media, seeing who our early customers engage with and reach out to them, etc. Not that scalable but worth doing in the early days.

Besides those two bets, I have no plans to put any meaningful time or resources towards social media. If anything, we plan to use communities like IH & MicroConf Connect as the "social media platform" where we spend time.

Being active on social media is only really important if your target market is really active there AND it's essential to build trust on that platform for your ideal buyers. If either of those aren't true, IMO there are tons of other ways to build an audience, get customers and grow a successful business without ever creating a social media account.

Onward and upward, IHers!

P.S. What wins have you had without using social media? Let's celebrate them in the comments below 👇🏽