The Systematic Extrovert: An Engineer's Guide to Building in Public
In 2025, I've committed to don my thickest of thick skins, grit my teeth, and step boldly into the online marketplace/melting-pot/battleground of ideas... may God have mercy on my soul.
Much to my dismay, it appears that in 2025, one can't simply build interesting things in peaceful obscurity and expect them to take off quickly—the internet is a place of almost infinite opportunity but more and more, it also demands its pound of flesh content.
Honestly, as someone who is extremely cynical of online phenomena such as “Influencers” and “Professional Youtubers”, the prospect of engaging more with this universe is not massively attractive.
Despite my reservations, I do believe that the Creator Economy is a very legitimate concept and that, as AI begins to bathe us in synthetic content, there will be significant opportunities for people who are able to establish some sort of online social capital and build an audience that, not only trusts them, but assigns a sort of human-premium to their more authentic content.
I may not love the idea, but, if this is what it takes, I’m always happy to give something a crack.1 I absolutely draw the line at the Youtube Face though. Grim.
The Plan: Systematic Approach to the Chaos
After a rather sensible New Year’s Eve, I awoke on January 1st with a clear head and an unallocated bank holiday. So, although I don’t normally defer life changing behavioural tweaks to the start of the new year, in this case, I actually indulged a little. I bought myself a nice notebook and laid out some “Creator Economy Consistency” habits/goals for 2025.
Post to Twitter/X (three times per day)
Engage with relevant communities (three times per day)
Engage with influential accounts (three times per day)
Reply to followers or community members (daily)
I actually have a more detailed plan here but it’s overkill for this article. You’ll notice I haven’t set any targets for things like “Total Followers” and so on — there’s no good reason for that other than that any numbers I pick at this point would be complete guesswork; after a month or so of growth, I’ll re-assess and try to pin down a number that is ambitious but achievable.
Scheduling and Efficiency
I really don’t want to have to log in to Twitter three times per day, generate some content and then post it out. Organising my life around 3 strict slots would be extremely inconvenient and, if anything, I’m actually trying to have phone-free periods in each day (that’s another tale).
Fortunately, this is an easily solvable problem; just use a scheduling tool such as Typefully and consolidate all the ideation, creation and posting effort into a single block at the start of the day. I genuinely believe moving to this model will make a huge difference to my consistency and ability to hit the NY goals (above) - in fact, I think it already has.
Tracking, measuring and experimenting
A secondary benefit of using one of these scheduling tools is that they often come with a reasonably high-res view of your account engagement metrics (e.g. Follower Growth, Likes, Replies, Bookmarks etc).
Though I think it’s totally possible to ignore all the metrics and just use a more brute-force approach, it seems silly to throw away a potential goldmine of realtime data - especially if you have a tendency to be analytical by nature anyway.
If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it - W. Edwards Deming,
For anyone who was forced to went through a basic business or economics module at university, you probably already know that this is actually a famous misquoting of - “It is wrong to suppose that if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it – a costly myth.” - but, putting that pedantic side-note to one side, it’s still very much the case that people and organisations tend to do better when they adapt and refine their strategies based on objective measurements.
With that in mind, I’ll be doing regular (probably weekly or fortnightly) reviews of the data to see what seems to work better - for example:
Is a reply to a big account better than tagging the account in my own tweets?
What time of day does my target audience tend to engage the most?
Does a short, punchy tweet work better than a diligent, detailed thread?
Are my second-rate memes really as funny as I think they are?
Do I need to post more video content?
Obviously, there are lots of ways to slice the data and some times I’ll have to conduct a more formal A/B test type process to really know for sure - but you get the point, it’s an iterative thing that I’ll be using to direct my overall strategy.
When Robots Attack
I couldn’t really finish this piece without commenting on one of the more frustrating aspects of X/Twitter - the ridiculous volume of bot/fake traffic! I’ll probably write something about this specifically in due course but it really is out of control … I won’t go so far as to say it’s killing the platform, but it just makes things a bit icky.
For context, I have had my Twitter account for 7 years and it has only really become regularly active in the last few days; only two days into this active-period, my account had already amassed approximately 160 followers - that seemed very suspicious to me and so I dug a little deeper.
After screening my follower list, I removed more than 50% for being either bots, impersonators, or inactive accounts! I have to say, though it was satisfying to kill off the bots, it was also kinda depressing; I had been hoping only a small percentage of my followers weren’t real. Alas, I now have a clean slate and I’ll prune as I go.
You might ask, why I bothered to remove them in the first place? Perhaps, having a bot follower is better than not having a follower at all? Right? Well, no.
As it happens, many metrics use the Follower Count as the denominator and so, if you increase this number, but don’t increase engagement on your content (bot’s generally don’t interact much) then the algorithms will assume your content is poor-quality or uninteresting to people and bury it with all the other cruft. Perhaps counter-intuitively, it’s better to have a smaller follower base with smaller bot percentage than a higher follower base with a higher bot percentage.
Fortunately, these bots are extremely easy to detect - I’ll write about this later in more detail but basically… if an account has 2 or more of the following, it’s very likely to be a bot:
Generic (but attractive) female Profile Picture
Massive Following count but small Follower count
Zero/minimal activity on their Feed
Large number of numeric (or seemingly random) characters in their Username
Honestly, I don’t understand why the engineers at X don’t implement a simple Bot Score or similar. It seems like a few simple heuristics and a cheap image classification algorithm could eradicate the majority of simple bots - maybe there is some commercial advantage to having higher volumes of activity on the platform? Or maybe they want to push more people towards the paid/verified service? I don’t really know - but it is very annoying right now.
Wrap up
Anyway, that’s all for now. I’m cautiously optimistic that this strategy will pay off - if you’re in a similar boat, have a look at the detailed plan I linked earlier - it’s based on material collected from other (actually successful) accounts and tweaked for a Tech-based audience.
Happy New Year.
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