Lessons from my 1st startup: Grow My Dang Twitter!

4 days ago I moved to Asia to build startups full time.

I promised myself I would launch one before moving.

So here it is. My very first startup. Inspired by Levels.io.

You set a Twitter follower goal, set a deadline, and set a penalty if you don’t reach it. You pay only if you fail.

The problem

I’ve been using Twitter everyday for the past 6 months and one thing kept coming back. People have a really hard time being consistent and committing to a goal. Most lack motivation.

In the past 6 months, more than 50% of the people I was regularly tweeting with gave up. Either on Twitter as a whole or on their content creation schedule.

Everyone wants to grow, and there are a lot of resources to grow. But the one thing missing is that there is nothing that keeps them accountable if they don’t reach it

People are motivated either by punishment or by reward. But punishment motivates 3x as much according to studies.

The solution

I remembered seeing this startup Gofuckingdoit.com by Levels.io and thought…

Then, what about building an App that allows users to set a follower goal + a deadline and pledge a $$ amount for their goal? Then if they don’t reach it they have to pay.

How it works

1. Choose a Follower goal you want to reach

2. Choose a deadline

3. Enter your Twitter account name

4. Choose the amount you want to pledge to the goal

5. Enter credit card

6. Success!: You enter the leaderboard and have access to a “share-your-goal” feature for your audience

What to improve?

- Idea that solves a real pain point rather than a nice to have

- Better design and UX/UI

- Post on Twitter, Reddit, Instagram, and Youtube.

- Post on blog & newsletter

- Cold DMS to get user feedback

Learnings per category

1. Importance of organic marketing & cold DMS

Expanding to platforms like LinkedIn and Reddit where my target users are can help get the word out.

Quality content and SEO will also drive website traffic.

More cold Dms to large social media accounts that could use this tool as a fun challenge.

3. Importance of community:

When building a product in the Solopreneur community. I cannot emphasis how building relationship and community around the product is important. Most of my traffic came from personal relationships with larger creators that liked the idea.

One of them even redesigned my UI. This is super important.

Seek to have a positive mutual transaction.

The user gets value (or in this case interesting content from the challenge).

And you get traffic to your app.

2. How great UX can reduce user friction and lead to 2-3x more sales:

My landing page needs a redesign through A/B testing to boost conversions.

Integrating the new UX led to much more click through (Although most of them dropped when the credit card form popped up)

Adding a gif feature could make goal-sharing more engaging. Improving navigation will also enhance user experience.

127 people created a checkout session

3 users completed the user flow

2% conversion

100 of those checkout sessions were with the new UI.

3. Proper revenue model needs to be adapted to target user:

My current model of users losing money could deter signups. I should add a way for users to use the platform without so much friction (They have to signup with their credit cards which is a lot of friction).

4. Idea needs to solve a painful problem. Not just a cool to have:

Your idea needs to solve a painful problem. In this case, the problem solved is not painful enough and more of a “cool to have”

This is why I think only 3 users used it with more than 750 page views (0.4% conversion)

Try it out

Try it here for yourself. I’d love to hear your feedback

P.S. I'm on Twitter too if you'd like to follow more of my stories & future startups.