Hypefury

We just reached a fantastic milestone.

Here are some of the learnings

We doubled down on search

Our search traffic has continued to grow steadily.

We almost doubled our traffic compared to 6 months ago and we expect that growth to continue.

We launched an email newsletter

Our "Twitter growth notes" are sent out once a month. It's basically a mix of how to grow your account and things that happened in the past month. You can subscribe here.

Almost 5,000 people have signed up for the newsletter so far.

We mostly get new subscribers by creating threads / cool tweets. Whenever they perform well our software adds "an autoplug" that links to our free Twitter growth course. Downloading the course will opt you into our newsletter.

As a Twitter growth tool, we eat our own dog food of course.

Keep listening to our users, keep helping them as much as we can and keep implementing cool new features

One of our latest features is that we automatically change your posting schedule based on when your followers are online.

And we're pretty well known for our great customer support. We have people on call 16 hours a day during the week and 8 hours a day during weekends. And we try to help people as much as we can, whenever we can.

Our next goal is 40k MRR. We're going to double down on Affiliate & Influencer marketing. We're expanding our marketing team and adding a lot more features.

If you're active on Twitter, you should definitely try Hypefury.

Whohooo!

People are paying us over 10,000 Dollars per month! What an incredible milestone.

Hypefury has been around for over a year now and we've grown at a pretty decent rate. We help solopreneurs and Indiehackers like yourself to grow an audience faster on Twitter.

Our growth has been about 10% month over month. If we keep this pace for a few more years we'll be really happy campers. Still, a lot of work to do though! :)

Here are some of the learnings

For the past 12 months, we've seen steady growth in search traffic.

This is without 1 article we wrote though.

There was a change in the Twitter UI because of the US elections. The way you can RT has changed. We wrote an article about it because we saw lots of people talk about it.

The below graph is the same graph as above but it includes the search traffic from that article:

Massive!

We gained over 100 leads and lots of eyeballs on our brand and on Twitter.

The tweet referenced in the article was retweeted 130 times.

The lesson?

Follow industry changes and you can rank on super high volume keywords in a matter of hours. About 6 - 12 hours after I published the article search traffic was pouring in.

It took me about 30 minutes to create the article so the ROI has been great. Here a link to the article.

You need to keep engaging your affiliates

We have hundreds of affiliates and they're an important factor in our growth. But Hypefury is not that big a deal in their lives of course. They have a ton of things on their plate and Hypefury is one of them.

That's why you need to stay top of mind. Every time I send them an email I see increased activity on their end.

I try to make it as easy as possible for them to share Hypefury by creating tweets they can quickly share. It already includes their affiliate link and can basically earn money without doing any work.

Our next goal is 15k. Hopefully, our growth continues on this path and starts to accelerate a bit more as well :)

2 months ago we launched our podcast: Hypefury Presents. The podcast is for a specific niche. People who want to grow their Twitter audience and increase their revenue from Twitter.

If you, as an Indiehacker, aren't (active) on Twitter yet, you are missing out on a huge audience and a growth machine for your business.

Twitter's algorithm is still the most friendly as discoverability is concerned. If you have a great tweet, you can literally reach thousands if not hundreds of thousands of people.

I have 5,000 followers and can easily reach tens of thousands of people. What if you could do the same with your business?

That's why we started the podcast. We interview people who've seen massive growth on their Twitter account and dissect what works and what doesn't.

So far we've had 8 episodes.

#1 LifeMathMoney (Twitter account with over 180k followers) on how he grew it so fast in under 2 years. https://share.transistor.fm/s/7efd9994

#2 Jose Rosado (over 40k followers) how he started on Twitter and now makes a living off it. https://share.transistor.fm/s/f36e8729

#3 Jack Butcher (from Visualize Value) on how to find your voice on Twitter https://share.transistor.fm/s/a0877d25

#4 WellPaidGeek who went from a 16k /year dev job to a 6-figure income while starting on Twitter https://share.transistor.fm/s/50196c35

#5 @arvidkahl on how to validate your business idea and ways to grow your Twitter account https://share.transistor.fm/s/9bf4dbe1

Etc. Etc.

Learnings

We have a few more guests lined up but that's also my main learning point. Plan ahead. Contact people weeks in advance. Have multiple irons in the fire.

Finding guests isn't even the hard part. Always ask the person you interviewed if they know anyone that would be a good fit. They can even give you a warm intro (if you ask nicely ;-))

Harassing them in a friendly way is the hard part. Your recording is probably the last thing on their mind.

Make sure they know, that you know, what they want out of it. It should be a win-win and not a one-way street.

Sound quality

I hate listening to a podcast with bad sound quality. I invested in a decent microphone and I record everything with https://zencastr.com/. You get 2 audio streams so it's easy to edit the background noise.

We use an external editor to make sure everything sounds crisp.

Share your podcast (again and again)

The show ain't over once it's aired. The show has in fact just started. Email your list about it. Share it on Twitter and other social channels.

This is something we still have to improve. We're not sharing it again and again yet. Starting this week (thanks to this live reminder) we will.

Don't look at the numbers (too much)

I have a goal in mind for the end of the year for the average number of downloads. But the most important part for us is building an asset for our business. It's "create once and reuse forever".

The podcast gives us a competitive advantage over others in our industry. We're "loading" our brand. Showing people we're very serious about helping them grow. Not just with our social media SaaS but in many more ways.

Less than 12 months after launching we reached a great milestone! Hypefury is a 6-figure business!!! Yeah!

At the moment of this writing, we’re serving almost 600 customers and we’ve been growing quite steadily over the last couple of months.

Our biggest challenge is keeping our churn under control. We’re a little over 10% and that’s a bit too high.

Creating a habit-forming product

We’re implementing all sorts of features so our users have an easier time forming a habit around our product.

We don’t offer a magic pill to grow your Twitter audience but we do make it a lot easier to do.

You still need to put in the work though and we see that a lot of people just fall off because they fail to put in a consistent amount of work to create and hone tweets.

We're introducing a 1-click-schedule-a-tweet email when you're queue is empty.

We're introducing a weekly digest email to show you what your best tweets were so you can learn and improve your Twitter game.

User behavior is key

It’s not always clear to our users what value we bring outside a great way to schedule tweets.

We also didn’t really know and focus on what features people are using and what features lead to a higher CLV or lower churn.

We just implemented Amplitude which is a great way to get insights on the use of your app.

Indiehackers can apply for their scholarship program here. You can get access to their growth plan if you’re admitted which retails for $40,000 /year!!

In the coming months, we'll see how the use of different features has an impact on churn rate. We already see features that are, in our mind, under-used.

We'll create videos to explain how the feature works and, more importantly, what the benefit to the user is.

The future

We're very excited about the future! We started working with OKR's so our entire team can see how they can make an impact on revenue and churn. We've set a pretty high bar for our revenue growth in the next couple of months. We should reach 10k MRR within the next couple of weeks!

We hit another significant milestone this week. We reached $6,000 MRR after a little over six months of being in business.

Super proud so many people are finding our Twitter scheduling and automation tool super handy!

I decided to dedicate this milestone to an exciting learning all Indie Hackers can benefit from.

How affiliate marketing can accelerate the growth of your Indie Project

We’re running an affiliate marketing program that is very successful. With affiliate marketing, you’re outsourcing a considerable part of your marketing to people who can directly benefit from it. As an Indie Hacker who’s mostly into code, this gives you access to a worldwide marketing team.

You can learn a lot from what your affiliates are saying about your product. Most Indie Hackers are probably also too shy or too modest to appear on YouTube.

Below you'll find a small selection of videos created about our product on YouTube. (There are dozens)

Here I’m doing a Google search without including our domain to see how many other pages are talking about us. A big part of that is because of affiliate marketing.

Yes, we offer a significant part of our revenue to our affiliates, but a considerable gain in marketing effort is offsetting it. They are generating the awareness for our product, and we only pay a fraction we would otherwise pay if we did it all our selves.

Below you'll see the search volume and number of clicks on our branded keyword Hypefury (taken from Google Search Console).

Biggest takeaway up until here: affiliate marketing works great, and I suggest every Indie Hacker starts a program themselves. Most Indie Hackers are not that good in marketing. Luckily other people can do it for you!

The dark side of affiliate marketing.

Look back at the graph containing the brand name Google searches and clicks. Anything out of the ordinary? What’s weird about the chart? Look at April 20th and beyond. Our number of clicks drop. Not much, but you can definitely see it in the graph.

I decided to start digging in Google Analytics and found one traffic source that was sending a lot of traffic.

Someone was sending a bunch of traffic to our website… Hmm, 🤔 who could it be?? :)

If you’re running an affiliate program, the answer is usually simple—your affiliate.

I’m okay with them running Google ads on keywords like Twitter scheduler, social media tool, etc. But that’s not what happened here.

I searched for our brand name in Google and lo and behold:

We were advertising on Google!! Complete with a nice Trademark icon. It looked legit. Just like the big guns!! :)

Except this wasn’t us. This was one of our affiliates stealing our traffic. Our branded traffic.

You can advertise on your own (Indie) brand name for a penny a click. So this person is having a laugh sending all that traffic that would otherwise still visit our website via its affiliate link.

If you have an affiliate program or are planning on starting one after this post, the number one rule you must add to your affiliate terms is that they can’t advertise on your brand name and misspellings.

You can’t completely stop people from advertising on your branded searches. You can, however, prevent them from using your brand name in their ad (except for the visible URL). You have to file your trademark (as a Word, not an image). Once you receive your Trademark number, you can apply for brand name protection with Google.

Affiliates who’re doing this kind of marketing aren’t delivering extra traffic. They’re leeching off of your existing traffic. It only costs you money, and it’s the lamest form of affiliate marketing.

Doubling down on our affiliate program has been one of the key drivers of our growth, and we suggest everyone to set it up yourself. Just be vigilant because even if you have clear rules (like we do) some affiliates still try to go for the quick buck.

Stay vigilant! Happy growing!

https://hypefury.com is a social media tool to manage your Twitter account. In a nutshell, you can schedule and automate your tweets. It saves you time and increases engagement. We've been growing nicely over the past few months and are now ready to expand our team.

We went from about $1,500 MRR in February to over $4,000+ MRR in March so far (which is a nice milestone by itself 😂)

Our new MRR also means we can support a new role. We've seen a lot of competitors popup around us (which means we're doing something right 😉) but it also means we want to stay ahead of the pack. Not just by staying the biggest Twitter tool out there but also if you look at the features we provide our users.

That's why we're very excited to announce we'd like to take on a full time senior developer in our team. We can't offer Silicon Valley rates though 😂. But I think we can offer someone a nice income and a warm welcome in our team. We're fully remote and welcome digital nomads. We have a long term engagement in mind.

We're using Google Firebase for our backend and VueJS.

If you know anybody or are interested yourself, don't hesitate to contact us!

A big milestone for any Indiehacker. 100 people actually paying for your product 🎉 🎉. In our case a Twitter Scheduling and Automation tool https://hypefury.com.

Over the past few months we landed hundreds of users through various channels.

Our affiliate program https://hypefury.firstpromoter.com/ is an important part of our growth engine. We offer a percentage of revenue perpetually.

We're testing other channels right now. We landed over 150 leads from people downloading our free ebook on Gumroad about how to grow your Twitter account. https://gumroad.com/l/ahvEV

We've tried a couple of PH-like websites like 10words https://app.10words.io/archives/775/2020-01-31/10words-top-picks-from-this-week and betapage https://betapage.co/startup/hypefury 10words did pretty good. Betapage (a  Betalist.com copycat did pretty shit 🤔).

As a startup it's important to test new things but also to double down on the things that work already. We've seen some great initial traction with our affiliate program so we're expanding on that and creating custom deals with our fans that have the biggest audiences.

We're also reaching out to blog owners that talk a lot about social media to see if they're interested in our affiliate program.

A great way to find people who talk about your niche is actually Pinterest. Search for keywords in your niche and see who's writing about it. Because of the visuals you can easily identify who's a match and who's not.

In the ebook on Gumroad we're suggesting people to join our Facebook group https://www.facebook.com/groups/GrowYourTwitter/ to help each other get a bigger following on Twitter.

So far we're at 20 members and counting 😂😂 It's also another way to keep in touch with (potential/future) users.