How I grew my Twitter (+9K) and Newsletter (+6k) in 3-4 months. AMA.

Hey Indie hackers!

I wanted to share with you some lessons and tricks that I used to grow my social networks.

Right now I'm starting Youtube channel, this one is going to be much harder. I would appreciate it if you give me some advice here.

In exchange, here are my learnings about growth.

Twitter

Here is my daily follower growth

And here is the list of the top 5 tweets:

So let's break it down step by step.

In the beginning, I had ~1K followers. This is the organic number of followers, most of them indie hackers. A nice opportunity to get to know new people (and thus new followers) is to participate in "Let's hack Twitter" posts here, on IH. As well be active on Twitter.

Important!

When you don't have many followers, it's not reasonable to try to tweet a lot and make viral tweets. You can get a viral tweet of course, but the probability is lower. Just because not many people see your tweets because you don't have many followers.

So if the number of followers is low, the better approach is to participate in discussions, engage with others, get followers from external sources (reddit/IH/HN).

Another approach is to launch a small product on PH. It should be good enough to get to the top, but not very complex so that you don't spend months building it. If you get traction on PH, you can also get a decent number of followers.

Now, when you get your first 1-2K, you can switch to tweeting good stuff. By this time, if you tweet every (!) day, and the content won't be some random motivational BS, then you'll have organic growth ~10 followers/day.

Randomly if your tweets are very good or funny or exceptional, they can get viral. This way you can get 1-2k followers in a day. This is what actually happens very rarely, but when it does, you get a significant increase.

My path was:

1K - Organic/IH/Engagement
2K (+1K) - When I sold my product I wrote a good store over here and got some traction on Twitter
3K (+1K) - Organic (tweeting daily)
5K (+2K) - viral tweet
6K-7K (+1-2K) - viral tweet + organic
7K-9.5K - Organic + shoutouts/engagement.

And somewhere in the list above, I made 2 PH launches. One for a newsletter, another one for a free book. This of course got me maybe ~1K followers.

So yep, that's it. Now I consider ~30-40 followers / day as a good result. But the average is about ~80 due to random traction on random tweets.

Newsletter

I have 6200 subs right now. Now a big number but still.
Open rate ~40-45%.

So what I actually did is

1. Tweeted about it (~800 initial subs)
2. Made a simple landing page, where I put some of my tweets as an example of what content people should expect from me.
3. Launched it on PH (product #2 of the day). (+ ~1500-200 0subs)
4. Made a free e-book and launched it on PH and twitter (+3K)

And now I have organic growth about ~20 subs/day.