So for this month’s project I was going to productise a consultancy design thing.. buuut then I stumbled across something else that I find quite interesting.
🐇 Down the rabbit hole we go
Twitter says I had an account since 2017
I remember making it when I had enough of facebook & the direction they were going in (which means I haven’t used facebook, for like 6 years now 🏅)
Never really posted on twitter until this year at some point, kinda when I joined indie hackers & started thinking about switching up my consultancy services so that I can focus more on making my own products.
With everything that I started reading, it seems like the main mantra about is that you need to build an audience or else..
So I though I’d give it a go.
I went ahead, read a lot of things on how to grow an audience on twitter etc & got going. Little did I know that those “growth tactics” only apply when you already have a good number of followers to start with. Otherwise, when your only followers are your partner, brother & your own product accounts.. you pretty much end up shouting into the void and hope something will crack through.
Nothing was working so I stopped trying with twitter. Got pretty good results B2B wise directly approaching potential customers in other ways, so I cracked on ahead with that.
But then recently (I actually can’t remember what got me there) I made peace with the fact that no-one might ever read what I write & that my follower number might never reach 30 (I was at 29 for what seemed like a very very very long time 😅).
So I started posting whatever I felt like, talking to people that I might never have thought of interacting with, without filtering & re-writing stuff. And by basically letting my non-eloquent voice be free on this platform, I am actually enjoying it now. Coincidentally that was about the time that Dorsey quit twitter, but who’s to say that my writing was that bad..
🐇 So now going out the rabbit hole & back to my original train of thought..
Recently I started to notice other people, who just like me are shouting into the void, hoping something will crack through.
At about the same time I got my first NFT & I obvs posted about it into my twitter oblivion. As expected, just my brother liked my post. All normal. But then! The NFT collection account retweeted my tweet. Their followers started liking & commenting on my tweet, welcoming me to this mad & awesome community, some people started following.. it was bonkers!
Side note: if a famous person doesn’t like your tweet reply, never be mad! 85 likes, 16 comments, 6 retweets & 1 quoted tweet and it felt like my phone was made out of lava. Cannot even begin to imagine how it is to have this x1000, all the time.. absolutely fucking bonkers!
Sooo this got me thinking.. If there are other people out there who, like me, are trying to build an audience whilst shouting into the twitter void, can these people become more visible to others that would be interested in their journey, had they stumbled across them?
…
So I’ve obviously went & got a domain 😅 and started brainstorming some ideas. A few cups of coffee & notion site making tools testing later & I am proud to present the bumpinto.xyz MVP🎉
🤝 It’s a pretty simple setup. People looking for followers can add a few details about them, pay £0.99 & get listed on the website.
People looking to find accounts to follow can filter by content these people make & find accounts to follow.
The number of followers will not be displayed directly on the list, as I believe it’s currently creating a damaging limbo effect (people with a lot of followers are attracting more followers, whereas people with no followers get no followers as they are not socially validated by others & therefore less followable for most people) & because it’s a shit societal vanity metric.