Having 100K followers won't make your product successful

I have 100K followers on 𝕏 and the startup I built for 5 years never made more than $4K/month 🤷‍♂️

I was going viral often, getting 8-10K visitors per month, but our product just wasn’t solving a big enough problem.

Building my audience did help us grow from $300 to $3,000 monthly revenue at the beginning. And at the time it was a game changer for us.

But once I reached 10K followers, I only got diminishing returns on all the time I spent.

Sales stopped growing, and I had to be 2+ hours per day on Twitter just to maintain our revenue.

At this point I should’ve taken a step back, focus on fixing my product, and built other distribution channels.

But instead of chasing sales, I started chasing followers, and tried to become an « influencer ».

Now I don’t regret it because:

• I learned to become a good writer + meme lord

• I made friends with other entrepreneurs who now support me on the journey

• I got my first taste of success thanks to a twitter course I built for my audience (and it brought them a lot of value, which I'm proud of)

But even though I got some wins, being a content creator made me miserable and led me to a massive burnout.

My dream was never to spend 4 hours a day creating content and "engaging" with other people 🤡

Even worse, chasing followers caused me to neglect doing the hard work of fixing my product, and building other distribution channels.

Now 6 years after beginning my startup journey, I may have lots of followers, but I’m barely making $1K per month.

My initial product is dead, and my twitter course progressively lost momentum, despite updates and good reviews, as X kept getting worse.

To be clear I’m not complaining about it, I even feel great right now! I enjoy starting from scratch again and learning every area I neglected in the past few years. I'm at peace 🧘‍♂️

But I just wanted to share this so that when you look at someone who is successful + has lots of followers, you don’t automatically assume it’s the reason for their success. (Unless they’re only selling info products or boilerplates)

People like @dannypostmaa and @tdinh_me , who both have 100K+ followers, are successful because:

• their products solve real problems

• they build long-term acquisition channels like affiliation or SEO

The fact that they have followers is a consequence of sharing their journey towards success, not the reason for their success in the first place.

To make it big in business, you need to solve a real problem + build a great product + figure out at least one distribution channel. There is no way around it.

Getting followers and going viral on social media won’t be the magic bullet for your startup.

Hustling to grow to a few thousand followers at the beginning is great, and I recommend every founder to do it.

You will make friends in the community, open doors for partnerships and media coverage like podcasts, and get some initial traffic for everything you build.

But once you start to be a little bit established, your time is better spent being in the trenches and doing the hard work of growing a real business.

I finally started doing that again after years of getting carried away, and I've never felt better 💪