Tales From the Trenches: Month #3
Fewer Teeth. More Followers.
After a successful February, I expected that sustaining the same pace would be challenging. It was. March demonstrated that even simple schedules can be disrupted by “real life” and that a change of scenery, whilst good for the mind, can slow progress significantly.
Oh! I had a wisdom tooth removed too so I guess I lost a few IQ points.
The hurrier I go, the behinder I get.
As I mentioned last time, March was always going to be a tricky month; I had some personal travel to the UK, a new product to build, and a significant number of chores to get through!
After my (pleasantly) unexpected 186% follower growth in February, I was confident my approach was solid and didn’t need any major tweaks. The initial plan was basically the same:
Engage with a mixture of small, medium, and large accounts.
Stay away from rage-baity topics and mud-slinging.
Generate a couple of pieces of interesting and/or valuable content.
For the most part, I think elements (1) and (2) were achieved, and (3) was not. Without making too many excuses, I think this deviation from the plan was due to an extended period of travel to the UK and some last-minute dental surgery that required a bit of logistical juggling.
Let’s have a look at what has happened since last time.
Same old, Same old
At the start of March, I carried on as planned - engaging with a mix of small, medium, and large accounts across my interests. This provided steady growth and I was still benefitting from the tail-end of the widely-shared Stripe post.
After one week, I had gained 22 followers and lost 5 - so +17 followers.
Given my 60% growth target, I was 22% of the way through March and about 17% to my target. This wasn’t too alarming, especially since things seemed to be picking up towards the tail end of the week.
Distracted by Building
In the second week, I began to start building the MVP for another MicroSaaS product idea I’d had at the end of Feb. A tool for improving the Stripe Invoicing download workflow…
Stripe only provides users with the ability to download Invoice PDFs 1-by-1 and this gets very tedious in large numbers. I’d previously written a script for this and it felt like the sort of tiny tool I could (a) build quickly and (b) sell to a frustrated business for a few quid a month.
By adopting the latest AI coding-tools, leveraging some code I’d used for earlier projects, and adopting a less perfectionist attitude, I was able to build and launch the MVP in under 10 days - blazingly fast tbh.
P.S. For those interested, this MVP is now live » Invoice Powerup 🚀
Unfortunately, one unintended consequence of building this product so quickly, was that I didn’t maintain my efforts on Twitter and engaged less and less as the week went on.
Unsurprisingly, this lack of engagement led to pretty poor growth.
After adding 17 users in the first week, I’d only added 6 users in the second week and was now waaay behind the target (I should have been at about 45% by this point)
Jetset Lifestyle (on a Shoestring)
Normally, falling this far behind the target would have been a reason to re-evaluate and perhaps throw more time and energy into the mission. This wasn’t really possible as I had already arranged a 7-day tour of the UK to visit friends and family.
For all the right reasons (family and friends are actually important y’know!) - Week 3 was even worse than Week 2. I barely posted or replied to anything and this was reflected in my account metrics.
Honestly, at this point, I think I knew the gig was up and that March was destined to be an underperforming month in terms of account growth. I was now 67% of the way through March but only 27% of the way to my target.
Thank God for Anesthetic
As part of my UK roadshow, I also dropped into my old (and more trusted) dentist - there are a lot of good things about living in Portugal but having to navigate dental surgery in a second language is not one of my favourites!
Bad News: The dentist confirmed that I was overdue for a wisdom tooth extraction. Good News: The dentist said he could expedite my extraction if I could extend my visit for a few days.
I was keen to get the extraction done with the dentist I knew well BUT this meant I would now be in the UK for another week and, unless something drastic changed, I was probably not going to reach even 33% of my target (20% total growth)!
Despite the gloomy outlook, the ad-hoc nature of the trip extension did allow for more time to work on my own stuff (I didn’t have many planned visits in the calendar and everything was a bit more informal).
Alongside putting some finishing touches on the MVP, I tried to get back on track with my Twitter engagement and the results were actually … very good. It’s hard to know exactly why this week was successful but I think it was led by a single “funny” reply that started to receive thousands of likes, drove users to my profile and, ultimately, to follow me.
All that being said, there was no way a ‘good’ week was going to offset the terrible performance in the previous two. Nevertheless, I’m playing the long game and followers are followers. It’s all good.
I picked up 27 followers and lost 6 for a total gain of +21. A good week but, sadly, with the month virtually over, I hadn’t even hit half of my target 😔
Content is King
Without time to create any novel content, big threads, articles, or videos, I was prepared to walk away from this month at 48% of my target. You can’t do everything and life without friends, family (and painless teeth) is just not worth it.
But then, just as I’d started to pencil in a time to write this progress-report, a massive account posted about something I’d previously created content for…
The AI company Anthropic (creator of Claude) released a video a few months ago about how to write “stellar” prompts for LLMs; for whatever reason, the big account was sharing this video now (months later) and it was being well-received by his massive (200k+) follower-base.
Fortunately, it just so happened that many months ago, I’d been working through Anthropic’s Prompt Engineer Guide (if you’re techy, check the Jupyter Notebook out here) and had created a stylised illustration and summary of the guide.
The first time I posted this, it basically went nowhere and I’d written it off as a bad experiment but, since it was so directly applicable to the content posted by the big user - I thought I may as well add it into the replies.
BOOM! 💥
Completely unexpectedly, this reply turned into my most successful reply ever (in terms of followers). Hundreds of high-quality accounts started to like, bookmark, and repost the material and the followers started to flow in.
Disclaimer: Technically some of this happened on April 1st but I’m going to include it as (a) it was POSTED in March (b) the mostly-American users liking it were still IN March and (c) it’s MY blog and I don’t care what YOU think (I do really, please don’t unsubscribe!)
It still wasn’t enough to hit my monthly goals but it was a massively positive finish to an otherwise disappointing month 💪
You can see the massive jump on Apr 1 as my content was picked up on the US side and followers started to drop in.
In just 4 days, I picked up 28 followers and lost 2 for a gain of +26. As well as being a much-needed rescue package to bring the March numbers up - the final day was my best day ever in terms of new followers.
This last day brought in almost double the previous record set back in January!
And, although I didn’t quite hit my target of 60% growth I still grew by 44% (about 73% of my monthly target).
More than just the numbers, I’m now starting to see some return on investment when repurposing existing content - this is a clue that some of my content is actually quite valuable to people but that they just aren’t seeing it via my personal posts yet.
So, really, really happy with that last-minute twist 🥳
Conclusion
As I said last time, my account is still minuscule and there is a long way to go. Consistency is key and, although real life must come first, it pays to stick to a schedule and intensity where you can.
The fact that a piece of content I created months ago (with little fanfare) also turned out to be the most successful single piece of content ever, shows that it’s not the quality of my content that’s the issue but the reach and distribution - this isn’t a shock but it’s good to have things confirmed.
April is going to be a busy month!
I’m expecting a lot of financial turmoil so I will need to spend more time than usual managing and hedging some of my financial investments.
I want to get the Invoice Powerup MVP off the ground with some marketing, promotional activity and SEO work (all of which I’m a novice at)
I’ve just built a new HIIT and weight-training plan that will require a bit more personal time. Hopefully, the weather plays ball.
I’m looking into Newsletter-based businesses on Beehiiv - it won’t be for this newsletter as this is largely a personal account - it’s just an idea.
I have a neat idea for a (hopefully viral) dev tool/visualisation that I might sneak in if there’s time.
The Fractional-CTO work has been delayed for a few weeks as Loopli is making some priority changes - no bad thing as I was worried about the distraction this month anyway.
In terms of audience building, I’m going to aim for 60% again in April. It seems like a sensible number and I don’t want to give up on it just yet. I’ll also need to ensure I create fresh content this week (ideally my viral idea above will serve that purpose) as relying on replies alone doesn’t seem to be enough now.
Onwards and upwards!
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