🦁 Taming the beast, mid year reflections, updates on 25in25 challenge and more...

You know the Twitter algorithm is a crazy beast.

Trying to get any success on the platform is like trying to tame a wild animal. 

But the good thing is that like any animal, there are certain traits which you can study, analyze and utilize to control it and get favorable outcomes.

Even lions get caged, and perform in circuses right!

Everyday I run tiny experiments on Twitter to understand it's traits.

And I try to apply the lessons I learn to somehow tame the beast - get it to do what I want it to do.

Most of the times I fail.

Sometimes I succeed 😅

Yesterday was one such day. This is what I did - 

I just launched the 4th product in my 25in25 challenge, it's called Copy OS.

I offered it for free for the first 24 hours. And asked people to reply with a "✍️" emoji to get it.

Immediately I started getting interest from people. And within an hour the tweet was blowing up.

At the time of writing, that tweet has received 35000 impressions and more importantly, 600+ people have signed up to receive Copy OS next week.

The cherry on top is that some people actually paid for the free product, and it has already crossed $100 in revenue.

Super grateful for the support from such people, and I've started working on the product, will be done by next week.

You can get it here.

(I think it will still be free 😉)

This is the 4th time in a row that I've launched a product in this manner - by asking people to reply with an emoji.

Why do I do it?

Why launch like this?

Because of 2 reasons  - 

1.  The algorithm hates links. - You post a link in a tweet, or even in a thread, and your impressions tank. Only 10% of your followers will actually get to see your tweet, let alone converting. I have had many launches with links, and they've failed miserably, so I'm not going to do that anymore.

2. The algorithm loves engagement - When Twitter sees a bunch of people replying to a tweet, it goes crazy. It shows that tweet to many more people in the hope to get more replies, so the tweet shows up in the timeline of more people who don't follow the creator. As more people respond to it, the tweet starts to blow up. It becomes a virtuous cycle where engagement gets more engagement and eventually it becomes a viral tweets.

This gives me an opportunity to get more people in my orbit, either as a followers or as email subscribers. Exactly that happened yesterday!

That's why I launch every product like this 🤷

Yesterday's launch worked even better than the previous ones because its a free product.

But why free?

Because of 2 reasons -  

1. Last week's launch had failed miserably. I'll share a detailed breakdown on Twitter later on, but my last product, didn't do as well as I had hoped. So this week I wanted to make sure that I have an irresistible offer. Something that people can't say no to. $0 is irresistible, but only if you're still providing value. Nobody will buy a poor offer even for $0. So I'm glad I was able to craft an irresistible offer this week.

2. I had been asking for money too much. For 3 weeks now I've come to Twitter every Wednesday and asked people to pay money for a product. Which is great for me, because I either get money or I get an idea invalidated. A win in both cases. But it's bad for most of my followers. They didn't follow me just to be sold to all the time. They followed me for valuable content, and that's what I wanted to give them.

Sometimes in business, we get blinded by the race for revenue and forget that it's all actually about human connection.

How many people am I able to reach and connect with is a far more important metric for me right now than how much revenue I make 🤷

Don't get me wrong, I still want the money, I have to make a living after all 😅

And I don't prescribe anyone to give away their products for free, especially when they've worked hard for it.

No, please don't do that.

I did it because I could do it.

I know I'm going to launch many more products in the future, most of them will be paid, and possibly someone who got a free product from me today, will eventually like to pay for a product that suits them.

I see this as an investment.

I had estimated that if I had offered this as a paid product then I would have made around $200 in the first 24 hours.

Instead of that, now I am able to reach 600+ people and because of the generosity of a few, I have even made $100+ from this product.

So I see it as a win-win.

Of course, there will be many people who came in only for a free product, and will probably never buy anything from me ever.

And that's okay.

That's the game you sign up for when you decide to build an online businesses. Conversion rates on the internet are miserable, less than 10% in most industries.

So only up to 10 out 100 people who get your offer will actually pay money. That too if you're really good.

Most industries fall way below that 10% mark.

So if I convert 10% of the people to paying users, I'll be glad 😅

Anyway, let's move on - 

💡 Update on the Indie Mastermind Program

So a few weeks back I launched a mastermind program for solo founders.

We have 3 small groups of 4 entrepreneurs each meeting every week and having fruitful conversations around building solo businesses.

There's a hot seat of 1 founder every week, and the rest of the group brainstorms with them to solve the biggest challenges in their business journey.

You can find all the details about how it works on the landing page.

2 weeks in, the experience has been really good. This is something that people are finding useful, and I am enjoying doing as well.

So I've decided I'm going to run the program again in August😊

Right now sales are closed, but I will open them up sometime next week. 

There are a bunch of people on the waitlist who have locked in last month's price ($50).

I'll send them an email first when I'm ready to start sales so they can get in early, and then I will raise the price for everyone else.

If you want to join the waitlist, then make sure you share your email address here.

🤔Mid Year Reflections

I wrote a mid-year reflection post last week. 

It became a sort of a contradiction to my last year's end review post.

Back then I was totally against goals or resolutions, that post was titled - No Goals, No Resolutions, No Fucking KPIs.

But in 6 months, I've taken a U turn on the idea. I actually thing goals add a lot of meaning to life.

You can read the whole thing here - 

✍️ Pro Tip of the week

This is not the first time that I've launched a product Twitter in this manner.

I followed a similar strategy with my writing course back in March.

There I also used tiered pricing, where I kept raising the price as I got more sales.

You can read the whole case study of that launch in this post 👇

📖 Book Summary

I love books, I try to write threads and blog posts about them.

So I wrote a thread about the book "Dotcom Secrets" a while back. This week I turned it into a blog post. (And it blew up on IndieHackers)

These are important lessons for every internet entrepreneur. If you want to build an online business, you must read this book - 

👋 Bottomline

Yesterday's product launch tweet was the best of the week, but apart from that, these were my best performing tweets from last week - 

This is a thread I wrote about 16 really cool makers we all should be following (all under 5K followers) - 

Some really interesting app suggestions in the replies to this tweet - 

Shared some numbers around yesterday's launch and the crazy results from it - 

That's my time this week.  See you next week 👋

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Cheers

Ayush