On December 15, 2021, I launched a simple Notion template Marketing Playbook for early-stage founders who love building features on Twitter and made about $1000 in sales in 24 hours.

Why did I do it on Twitter? I keep on hearing from founders I work with complaints “we don’t have so many followers, we can’t sell out the product through social media”. I decided I’d try to get in their shoes and see, how far I can get with a little bit over 1K followers (I had 1019 on the launch day). It was an especially curious experiment, keeping in mind that about 4 months prior I had launched another info-product on Twitter. And it failed. I had about 300 followers back then and I made many mistakes. Lesson learned I decided to play it right this time.

The starting point

It all started with that failure. In August 2021 I launched a tutorial How to find a Tech Co-Founder. To basically no one. I did not plan the vent properly. I did not interact with people. I just posted a product and announced that I did it. Build it and they’ll come. Hahaha.

I sold 3 copies. But then traffic stopped. I tried Reddit ads and they did not work. I got heavy and cheap traffic to my Gumroad page but no conversions. Meaning, the campaign was good but the product sucked. I tried to play with positioning, messaging, and changing details on the page but nothing worked. Basically, because though the traffic was considerable, I wasn’t ready to go all-in with Reddit. Therefore, I could never get statistically relevant results to figure out how to make it more appealing to my target customers (however, if you're interested in setting up a proper Reddit campaign you can read about it here)

I was about to start experimenting with Facebook when my Twitter friend Dagober Renouf, a founder of Logology began really killing it with “marketing” memes. The most common plot was a founder who loves building features launching a product, gets no sales, and figures out they had to do marketing before the launch. Well, those memes were. And they received the most engagement, likes, and comments. Tech founders were like “Oh, I’m so there with you”.

Customer interviews

It gave me an idea that there are many tech founders out there who have no idea how and when to do “the marketing”. In the next 2 weeks, I spoke to several tech founders who responded to my suggestion to look at their landing page and offer 5 emotional design improvements. During our chat, I obviously asked how the business went and was upset to find out that most were…well, without any customers at all!

“Why are you so focused on the landing page when you have no customers?” — I was blunt enough to ask. And every time I heard almost the same reply: “Huh, but we don’t know what else we can do to get those customers”. That was my second ping.

Then I tweeted that I was about to write a Marketing Playbook for early-stage founders who love building features — and this tweet got the highest engagement in months plus brought me 40 new followers in a single day. People were commenting “where do I sign up” and “I want to be notified when it’s done”. That was a final stroke and I set out to build my info-product.

The tools and the content

The easy part was to split into digestible chunks everything I’ve learned in 18+ years in business, marketing my own projects. I used the layout with all available marketing tactics (from direct sales to emailing and growth loops) as a navigation menu. I also thought it would be a great idea to build a table with different marketing activities for founders and specify the average budget, tools that can be used, possible outcomes (average conversion). I wanted to make it interactive so that founders could put in their own numbers and see how far they can go if they are ready to burn some more cash.

As I worked for a Bubble developer for some time I was very much prompted to build the whole stuff on Bubble. But after the lesson with the previous info-product, I figured I’d be better off with the bare-bones MVP. That meant Notion or Obsidian. I chose Notion as it is still the most popular tool among founders.

So the tech and the structure were set up pretty fast.

Now, the content.
Again, I could not really go with just my own experience — first of all, it was not really so much in the tech sector. I did quite well with an agency business (took it to one of the top-10 nation-wide) and not so bad with retail + e-comm+ online school ( $3.8M annual revenue) and honestly, the rules of marketing are the same everywhere but I knew it would be a hard sell. I also remembered that when I tried to build my startup 2 years ago, I tried to look up some material on marketing for bootstrapped SaaS founders. But there was almost nothing. All marketing books feature companies like Apple, PayPal, Netflix, Google. Well, it’s probably easy when you have $65M to spend on initial customer acquisition (that was PayPal's budget according to Elon Musk) but what if you have less? Well, considerably less? Basically, all marketing resources I’ve managed to find are focused on cases that are either outdated or irrelevant to the indie-hackers community. I decided I’d change the trend and feature all the amazing bootstrapped founders I’ve been following on Twitter and come to admire:
— Roberto Robles and his SEO- building tool for SaaS founders Katlinks
— Dagobert
— Damon Chen and great software to capture video reviews Testimonial,
— Kalian Poulin and AI-based content creation tool Mark Copy,
— Noah Bragg and his platform that creates websites from Notion files Potion
and many others.

Obviously, I could not use their startups to explain every single marketing tactic but I made certain 90% of the cases belong to startups that are not backed by VC and don’t have deep pockets to burn cash endlessly.

Here are the bare facts:

Timing
— I spent 3 full weeks putting together the product
— 1 week — reaching out to founders featured in the Playbook and asking for their feedback. Now everyone had time to answer me (no worries!) but I got 6 positive reviews and a promise to support the launch
— 3 days to set up (more on it later)
Altogether — 5 weeks

Promo
— As I’ve mentioned, I was planning to see how far I can go with just 1K followers on Twitter — because let’s face it, most indie-founders don’t have these >50K audiences to launch their products to. So, I used only Twitter to announce the launch. I (hopefully) wasn’t too annoyed with tweeting about this project but I made 4 threads and several short tweets, tagging some of the founders who are featured in the Playbook.
— I also doubled down on the reminders about the launch during the last 7 days before the launch
— My most engaging tweet was the one where I asked the community to provide me advice on the launch. I just asked what they would suggest for me to do. This tweet received >200K impressions.

Final check (the set up)
— I put together a Gumroad page
— set up email automation with ConvertKit (sends out thank you email and an email requesting to rate the product, sent in 10 days after the first one)
— went over my info-product launch checklist (I put it together with my friend Alessandra Scicchitano's help).
I'll be happy to share this list with anyone if you DM me on Twitter

Launch Day
— I offered a $19 discount on Twitter for everyone who RT the launch announcement
— I gave away 98 codes
— I’ve got 200 new followers in 24
— I got 41 sales within the first 24 hours ($898)

The takeaway
Overall, I believe I proved that it's very much possible to start selling your product from day 1 even with a reasonably small audience. When you hear these scary words "build your audience first" you might think you would need months of hard work and 20K followers to be successful.
Probably. But just 1000 true friends is more than enough to give you an idea if you've got a product market and fuel this powerful feeling of you being able to do anything — the one that you've got only with the first paying customers. No matter how little they pay and how few they are, you need this feeling to keep going and pave your way to further achievements.

If you're interested in the Playbook you can purchase it with 50% OFF using code:
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Get with 50% OFF

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