I hate marketing.

But I need to grow my startups.

So I built a Twitter bot that extracts some data from my SaaS and posts it on Twitter.

9 days after the launch, it has 707 followers and grew revenue by 56%

Background:

I built a link-in-bio tool for developers/solopreneurs — it's called IndiePage. Customers can verify their revenue with Stripe and display it on their profiles.

It's been making anywhere from $1K to $4K/month since I launched it 1.5 years ago.

The Twitter Bot posts every time a customer of IndiePage makes money. The bot tags the maker of the startup and links to her/his website.

It gives them a little extra exposure. It gives IndiePage a little extra exposure too.

I love coding too much. So I find ways to do marketing in symbiosis with my coding drive.

— Marc

Great idea, but this works only if you have your clients Twitter accounts.

Hey HN,

I use Canny to collect customer feedback and build the right features, but…

1. It’s way too complicated for a solo dev 2. $99/month… really?

So I built a free alternative called Insighto:

- Collect feedback from your customers - Prioritize features - Build a product users love.

I built other stuff. Here are my 20+ products — marclou.com

— Marc

Congratz on your new product Marc :)

I thought I found the perfect name but you proved me wrong ah!

I would never have made the (tenuous) connection from "ZenVoice" to "invoice" without your blog post.

Because 1 customer would have to generate 49,000 invoices before I start losing money.

Too many businesses are greedy with subscriptions. I won't join the trend.

Would be very interested in self-hosting as an option.

Are you Pieter Levels from NomadList? :)

No, what made you think that?

Affiliates are getting great results, good luck!

how long is the affiliate cookie good for? i referred about 300+ people so far.

Hard to quantify. But clearly a lot, that's for sure.

I played with ads (cold audience) and it worked well too (~$15K rev for $5K spent) so the Twitter audience isn't 100%

What type of ads? Twitter or elsewhere? Google?

Noted. Do you share your learnings/stories anywhere?

No, except in random comments on HN sometimes. Perhaps indeed I should write it all up.

Correct. Although my definition of success is: 1. no partner/employee — total freedom 2. building apps all day 3. that have a purpose/use case Somehow, I'm already there and have no intent to do much more

I'd love if you made a post on the one time payment to subscription killing thing. A bit too brief, a couple of sentences explaning the details and how you came to those conclusions would be helpful! Also about first impressions, did you tweak landing page headline until it clicked? What were the results etc. Maybe worthy of a full post, seems a bit listicle-y (not saying it's bad advice)

100% with you.

It's so hard to find real problems if you spend 90% of your time finding problems.

Having a job is a great fix.

Building side projects with no purpose works too.

For instance, you can sell a boilerplate to make it faster, or get feedback from users and build for them.

Although it's much harder to start, and hard to navigate life without $ for months (years in my case)

> It's so hard to find real problems if you spend 90% of your time finding problems.

> Having a job is a great fix.

My experience differs: it is very easy to find real problems, and it is possible to implement a decent solution for at least some of them. But: many of the problems that various industries have are in my opinion self-inflicted because of their structures. What is hard is convincing potential customers that your solution would help them.

> many of the problems that various industries have are in my opinion self-inflicted because of their structures.

I would bet my entire salary you only believe this because you don't understand the constraints. When I was in my 20's and thought I knew everything I had the same attitude. I have since gained seniorship and worked in regulated industries and it's much clearer to me now. People in the industries you're talking about are generally smart and well meaning, but the constraints imposed by things like regulation and legacy systems (internal and external) make things that seem like they should be easy really hard.

> I would bet my entire salary you only believe this because you don't understand the constraints.

I would counter bet that:

i) I do know quite some of the constraints (though surely not all).

ii) Quite of these these constraints are self-imposed prisons that the respective company/industry created for itself because of historical or "political" reasons.

What you call "constraints" is something that I would rather call "the industry's preferred flavor". Well, I do have a different taste than the respective industry. :-)

Believe me: In the past, when I was frustrated of my job, I made use of an opportunity to present some ideas that I had to some former friend who has been working in business consulting for many years: he really told me that some my ideas could be as impactful for the respective industries as I imagine it, but they would be insanely hard to sell (and a huge part of his job is selling things to customers) because they so different.

To give an even different perspective: at my current emplyer's Christmas party, my boss' boss said that I am the kind of person who cannot be classified on an optimist-pessimist scale, since I don't behave like an optimist or pessimist, but rather like an statistical outlier in a data set. :-)

Once it hurts enough, people pull out their wallets.

What's that threshold? Well, that's the hard part. :)

Example: the entire software industry (to include, and perhaps especially, companies that develop software but aren’t exactly software companies) seems to have a problem with splitting tools across a bunch of vendors, many of which have heavily overlapping functionality. It adds friction to everything and makes it harder to see what’s going on, burning god knows how much productivity.

But you can’t fix it by making another multifunctional tool, because you’ll just get people using one or two of your five feature-areas, and two or three other tools for the rest, same as now.

> seems to have a problem with splitting tools across a bunch of vendors

Why is this a problem?

Adds a little overhead and friction to processes. Causes miscommunication and lost and scattered info, and worse visibility and awareness of what’s going on than could be achieved. The result is fairly significant rarely-accounted-for costs. I’ve seen it every place I’ve worked.

Of course “well just use all the tools the right way and always look where you’re supposed to and put things in the right place” but it never works out so nicely in practice.

[edit] example: paying for a half dozen services that provide, between them, two code repo hosting solutions, four CI solutions, six wiki solutions (LOL), two cloud hosting solutions, two CDNs, three issue trackers, and on and on… and mixing and matching those such that it requires daily manual upkeep to synchronize info between them (you’re not using all the features of each one, to be clear—or, if you’re really in hell, maybe you are), onboarding is messier than it could be, account management is a pain, you’re over-paying at least a bit on everything, “where did/does that go?” is a constant question, everyone needs several pinned tabs opened when they could have, like, two, et c et c. Usually the reasons for doing this aren’t even strong, it’s just how things have ended up.

The way I see it for you Marc, you spent 6 years building an audience on Twitter. Shipfa.st has a very short shelf life. The audience and trust of startup founders/lovers in the ecosystem has lasting value.

Any ideas on how to capitalize on that?

Good point.

Either I'll build an audience on YouTube

And/Or I'll build new startups

Also, my Twitter is really small so there's much more work to do there.

Any thoughts?

Note: I've been building an audience there for 2 years (the first 4 years was me building in the dark)

I think if you can focus on making informative content for YT at the same quality as your commercials it will be a smashing success. The key is focus. You have an eccentric charm that devs like myself enjoy. Your Twitter following will help you get from 0 to 1 there, but you should still be prepared for a steep curve before it generates revenue.

I do have a radical idea that I am keen to share with you in particular.

I am the Founder of RocketDevs.com. The 'amazing' thing about us is that we can ethically and reliably source GREAT developers and rent them out for $6/hr or $980/mo. This entry point is cheap for USD earners, but stil a fortune in some regions.

The market opportunity here is early startups. People have ideas, but they can't spend $7k/mo on Turing. Fivver is shit. Upwork is avg $28/hr for mid-devs. With no affordable help, non-technical founders will scramble to find a 'technical' founder. You taught yourself how to code but few are that committed. Technical founders will reliably start a project and burn out quickly due to 0 help.

Our audiences intersect strongly. My radical idea is that we work together. I use my deep technical experience to source great devs. You use your following so I can conveniently focus on the product and avoid the pain of 'building an audience' just to get the word out. Stable income for you and we're helping folks build their dreams.

Look me up at linkedin.com/in/thelastsultan if you're keen. I think im in your inbox already.

How do you find developers for $6/hr and what do you mean you rent them out?

Yeah. Which country I would very much like to know. 100% exploitation.

Any startups, in your view, nailing your advice?