Makers!

Hope you are all well. My region of the world has been hit with the first heatwave of this season, so I'm writing this with a nice cold brew at my side.

I'm still working on Digest.so. Progress has been slower than I'd like as other priorities took over. But I'm back this week and I'm planning to launch the first set of digests this weekend. You can follow my journey in building my first no-code app on my Twitter.

Updates are done, let's dive into the idea.

I've been investing time into growing my Twitter audience. Having read a ton of guides and taken a few courses I can summarize the key to success in one word: consistency. As with most other things, showing up every day and engaging with fellow community members is the secret to success.

🔥 Problem

Here's the problem - consistency is hard. You are motivated in the beginning, but then you hit the valley of death. Progress is slow, engagement is down, followers are not growing. This is the time you need a helping hand. Something to keep you accountable and to show you there is a light at the end of the tunnel.

🧯 Solution

An accountability tracker. Just like you would be completing your circles with an Apple Watch, you could be completing them with your Twitter activity.

This would be a daily/weekly email summary. You connect your Twitter account, based on your existing number of followers, current engagement, etc. the app suggests a plan for you with goals to hit (just like your personal trainer would).

Every day/week you get a summary of how you did against your goals. I would even copy the circles, there's just something so satisfying about completing them.

To solve the accountability issue, I'd add an option to make the dashboard public. You can grow in public and feel a greater sense of responsibility to keep going.

👍 What are the benefits

Motivation: you get a daily reminder to keep going, some level of gamification can make this a fun activity
Accountability: you become accountable to yourself, by getting daily reminders. You become accountable to others by sharing your dashboard publicly.
Document your journey: you can easily share your grow-in-public journey with others

🤑 Are people currently spending money on this?

People are paying for courses and books on growing an audience as well as tools for posting (hyperfury.com) or stats (ilo.so). I believe there is a market for people willing to invest into their Twitter growth.

💵 Possible Monetization Stream

Monthly/Yearly SaaS model. I would try charging $19/month.

✅ What do I need to validate?

Is this system going to motivate people, help them grow their audience, and deliver actual value? (this is key if not the idea is only cool on paper).
What metrics should you track? From my experience follower growth is not that important. Your overall engagement (joining conversations by replying, amplifying other people's content, sharing valuable information) is more indicative of how you are doing in terms of growth.
Are you able to reach people interested in growing their Twitter audience?

🧰 How I'd validate?

Engage with the indie hacker community on Twitter. Almost everyone is trying to grow their audience, so this is a good place to start validating this idea. Talk to them and listen to what are their biggest pain points. If you hear motivation and consistency, dig deeper. What are they doing to resolve it today?
Once you have mapped out your target market and learned from it, you can build a landing page and pitch your idea. Create visuals of the daily/weekly summaries, so people can picture what you mean.
If you get people to sign up for a prelaunch list, you might be onto something.
Build an initial MVP. Based on my experience building digest.so, it should be possible to build this using Integromat, Airtable, and Mailgun.

🤔 How will I get my first 10 customers?

There are a lot of people selling online courses and eBooks on Twitter growth. Find the ones that are delivering actual insights and value and partner with them. Offer them a commission, split revenue, or another business model.
Or build your own audience - this will take longer, but you could start by building free resources to help people grow their audience and use that to collect emails for your future product.

📈 Will it be sustainable?

I think the biggest issue with this idea is that if it works, and people successfully grow their audience, they might not need this app anymore. So there is a potential for high churn. This can be mitigated by learning more about people with bigger audiences and building new features specifically for them.
On the other hand, for the foreseeable future, I think there will always be someone looking to build a Twitter audience.