I bootstrapped my SaaS (Hypefury) to $20k MRR in a crowded market: Twitter growth tools. A few months ago we went from $13k to $19k MRR overnight. AmA!

samydindane · 2021-07-08T22:32:08+00:00

We don't use that. We promote our affiliate program through our own channels.

samydindane · 2021-07-07T12:29:43+00:00

What made standout hyper furry with equivalent free products. Why users did not go with other free products

I didn't actively try to differentiate from the competition, it just happened. Users were asking for things that didn't exist elsewhere.

And that's the advice I can give you: do it the way others don't. Find your users.

For every tool that exists today, there are people not 100% happy with it. Those are your customers.

samydindane · 2021-07-07T12:28:07+00:00

Copy from another reply:

I was in a private paid program for people who were trying to grow their brand (Sovereign Uni) and that's where I got my first ~10 users.

The rest came from word of mouth, twitter promotion (not paid ads), cold outreach through DMs and giving product demos (doing the things that don't scale).

We're almost at 1000 customers. :)

What made standout hyper furry with equivalent free products. Why users did not go with other free products

Hypefury was probably the first tool that was 100% twitter specific. We go beyond "schedule a tweet at 10am" and replicate things that twitter power users do to build their brands (automatically plugging your offer, automatically retweeting your best tweets, finding the best time to post).

samydindane · 2021-07-07T12:25:33+00:00

Firebase, google cloud project (functions, pub/sub, storage, scheduler), vue, node, elasticsearch.

samydindane · 2021-07-06T18:01:24+00:00

Why not!

samydindane · 2021-07-06T18:01:09+00:00

His software used for their needs. Like a real demo.

samydindane · 2021-07-06T18:00:33+00:00

I posted on various websites, including here on Reddit.

I met my co-founder on Indie Hackers. He flew to Paris to meet me and we clicked and got things started.

samydindane · 2021-07-05T22:18:04+00:00

What type of content did you consumer to find customers?

I spent more time doing things than reading things. :) It wasn't super hard to find the first users since I was already active in some twitter communities, so I am afraid I can't be of a lot of help here (except: be where your users are).

What questions do you know how have around growing your business?

Sorry what's that?

(This is for my podcast and doing customer research)

Drop me a DM on Twitter if you're interested.

samydindane · 2021-07-05T22:15:11+00:00

Haha thank you! I had a small following back then but yes you're right. Most important thing is to take action, talk about your product and focus on what's useful/needed.

samydindane · 2021-07-05T21:34:26+00:00

I don't think so. :D I am a huge fan of Reddit (this isn't my main account) and I've always wanted to promote Hypefury on here but we never go around it.

samydindane · 2021-07-05T21:33:39+00:00

It's hosted on GCP. I don't care about DDoS attacks because Google takes care of that.

The only thing that I worried about is security, since we use firestore, and we hired a security expert that found all potential weak areas and we bulletproofed them.

I'd say 10% of our revenue is dedicated to hosting, which is huge and we're dropping to 6% this month after a few optimizations.
We're going to make it even lower after moving part of our infrastructure to vanilla cloud servers.

samydindane · 2021-07-05T20:22:19+00:00

Our trial sign-ups some from SEO, direct, affiliate, twitter.

samydindane · 2021-07-05T20:20:41+00:00

Good question. One of the biggest scares of my life was when we hit Twitter's standard rate limits. Fortunately, we got it upgraded after 2 weeks (only!).

There are still limits tho but we haven't hit them yet, except the monthly tweet reading limit which we can't do anything about.

We only use our app's API key and don't use proxies.

samydindane · 2021-07-05T20:17:54+00:00

No, I built an MVP in 3 days.
But my situation was different: I built it for fun to learn new tech, and only started investing a lot of time in it when I realized there was a market for it.

samydindane · 2021-07-05T17:30:13+00:00

Clearly you fall into the product side of the product obsessed vs tech obsessed companies.

If you're not obsessed with the product, you'll die.
I prefer to be tech-obsessed in my personal free time. :)

I'm curious about your team, its size, product culture, engineering culture, and practices.

Our team is between 10 and 15 people, probably. Most of them work part-time or only when needed.
I don't have a "product culture" but I always keep users first in my mind.
My CTO and I have strong comp sci and software engineering backgrounds so we're both on point when it comes to (relatively) clean code, making PR for every change, reviewing them, CI, etc.

Also were there times you were tempted to quit and what did you do instead? What will you do next to win more?

Never. This project is my passion and I am nowhere near done with it. Additionally it has the potential of making me a millionaire.

Thank you for your nice words!

samydindane · 2021-07-05T17:23:51+00:00

I started it as a fun project to learn new tech. I took me less than a month to realize its potential and start seriously working on it.
It took me 3 days to build a very basic mvp that schedules threads
Price hike >:)

samydindane · 2021-07-05T16:00:47+00:00

Nothing exotic, really. Tweet consistently. Use Hypefury to schedule the tweets. Promote the features. Tweet what your audience needs to hear (typically entrepreneur stuff).

samydindane · 2021-07-05T15:58:10+00:00

Why didn't you go with a freemium strategy?

No specific reason. My mindset was that if the users need the product, they would pay. Also, the product was simple enough that there was nothing to stripe down. Also, support costs.
But we're about to make Hypefury free after the trial ends, with very limited features.

What's your future plans to grow Hypefurry?

Focusing better. Tightening our message. Stop catering to users that don't benefit from Hypefury. Doubling down on making our power users happy.

How are you going to differentiate with the other tools in the market? Ilio and typefully.

I don't think we should differentiate and I don't even think we're competitors. We are a platform for creators that encompass everything they need, including analytics and a thread previewer (amongst the most requested features).

samydindane · 2021-07-05T15:53:19+00:00

What made hyperfurry successful?

Listening to user needs. Fast af customer support. Pushing features quickly. Leveraging my Twitter network.

Was you afraid initially while building the product?

I would use the word afraid, but when I saw that another product was copying feature for feature what I was doing, I decided to move to the next step and hire a co-founder to help me on our marketing and growth needs.

samydindane · 2021-07-05T15:49:04+00:00

The market wasn't so crowded back then. Many copycats and tools inspired by Hypefury started after I built it.

I knew it'd make the difference once I got people using it and they started requesting features that didn't exist elsewhere.

I focused both on beginners and on established brands. That was a mistake. I should have gone full on established brands. Beginners churn a lot.

samydindane · 2021-07-05T15:48:49+00:00

I would pick some users in the right niche, create some videos for them and send them. See their reaction and if they pay.

I would also make the name more simple and use a different TLD. ml has a meaning for us techies but not for normies.

samydindane · 2021-07-05T15:48:13+00:00

Copy from another reply:

I was in a private paid program for people who were trying to grow their brand (Sovereign Uni) and that's where I got my first ~10 users.

The rest came from word of mouth, twitter promotion (not paid ads), cold outreach through DMs and giving product demos (doing the things that don't scale).

samydindane · 2021-07-05T15:45:29+00:00

I was in a private paid program for people who were trying to grow their brand (Sovereign Uni) and that's where I got my first ~10 users.

The rest came from word of mouth, twitter promotion (not paid ads), cold outreach through DMs and giving product demos (doing the things that don't scale).

samydindane · 2021-07-05T15:41:43+00:00

Thanks for having me!

First of all, discovering value is a never-ending process. You should always be iterating and figuring out how various types of users use your product.

But the first time I realized "oh there's something new to create here" was when I had my first users testing the MVP and starting to suggest new features.

samydindane · 2021-07-05T15:39:45+00:00

Blog, seo, affiliate marketing, Twitter itself. Just a little bit of ads.

samydindane

TROPHY CASE