ThreadStart (sold)

When I looked today I realized that ThreadStart had published over 10.000 tweets already 🤯

To think something I started for fun this year, something I feared might only be used by me would crack this mark is incredible.

For a service that schedules and publishes tweets this number is important for obvious reasons. But until now, I never stopped to think about what that means.

It means a lot of people trust in my service. They use it every day. They rely on it to grow their personal brands and companies. And it shows in the numbers.

I will take this milestone as an assignment. To keep providing them a service that they can rely on. To keep helping them grow.

Let's add a zero and get to 100k next! 🚀

ThreadStart.io got its first customer! 🎉

I recently added a generous early adopter plan with a -50% discount for annual plans. A fellow indiehacker subscribed to it and became the first ThreadStart customer.

The best part? I did not try to sell him on it. We follow each other’s journey for a while now. He saw me building the application in public, he tried it some time before & he decided to upgrade for a pro feature I recently added.

(It was the Perfect Posting Time feature 🕗)

A great day to celebrate!

Today the 100th user signed up for ThreadStart!

While it's absolutely a time for celebration, there is a downside as well: engagement. At this point ThreadStart is free to use, so sign ups happen quickly. But the majority of the users, did not even post once.

I wrote a thread reflecting on this on Twitter:

It is still an important milestone on the road to success. I know what I have to improve upon:

• show these users the value they can get from ThreadStart
• assist them in the onboarding process

From 8th to 14th of January a full week of shipping was planned to get the core of ThreadStart to work. The landing page of Phase 1 had some mocked up functionality already, but now it's time to implement.

The target:

• writing
• saving &
• publishing of Twitter threads

All of this in public, with new large-scale threads each day. To get early feedback and have accountability. One highlight of this week was a harmless but unexpectedly viral tweet on Sunday.

The week culminated on Thursday with the launch of ThreadStart 🚀🥳

You can check it out yourself here: threadstart.io

Despite having to launch a bit hasty, responses have been incredible so far. It seems to have struck a nerve with a lot of people that were fed up with the bad thread writing experience on Twitter.

What of the goal of 1 user?

Achieved! I had 15 signups on the first day 🎉

ThreadStart is built with a new approach I thought of to help me ship faster, focusing on what is important and leaving no time for anything else.

There are three phases with clear goals:

• Phase 1: 1 day to get 1 subscriber
• Phase 2: 1 week to get 1 user
• Phase 3: 1 month to get 1 customer

These limits and goals are final. Should I not achieve it, I'll stop the project. This puts some pressure on me. To focus. And to deliver.

I wrote a short description of the experiment here on my personal blog.

This is the summary of Phase 1. It was a successful!