Living on Twitter

One of the bigger disappointments I've experienced from my time building a solo business is my experience on Twitter. At first glance, there appears to be a vibrant community of indie hackers and solopreneurs who are rallying around each other and helping them #buildinpublic their way to startup success. I thought that this would be a great way for me to find some sort of community as well as get some exposure for my business.

Instead, what I found as I dug deeper was much more spammy and incestual. Essentially, the people who were doing the most tweeting, the influencers of this group, all had something to sell to aspiring indie hackers. While the people just starting out who hadn't yet "built their audience" flail around posting screenshots of different button text options and color combinations asking for feedback.

What I think is going on, is that people who don't have an idea of what they're doing yet imitate the build in public influencers by spending a huge amount of time on Twitter. But for a lot of these people, they aren't building a product that appeals to the people who actually spend time on Twitter. So either they give up and disappear from the platform or pivot their products so that they appeal to their newfound audience. With the best of the best of this crowd rising to the top to hawk their own new course about building an audience on Twitter.

In the end, I fell into the first group of people who realized their audience wasn't best reached by tweeting about building in public and as a result I'm not active on the platform currently. I'm considering how I might interact with Twitter in the future, but I definitely do not see spending large amounts of time on Twitter as a good return on investment for the vast majority of startups and solo businesses.