Warehouse Manager Sells Twitter-Threads-As-a-Service

This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.

[Music]

Welcome to Sinus Home School. My name is Chris Guillebeau, so glad you're tuning in. Here we are in episode 1662, every single day, a different story, case study, question or answer, tip, idea, something actionable you can use in your pursuit of a second or third source of income. Or maybe a fourth or a fifth. We don't limit people around here.

Could be any number you prefer. It's all about creating security for yourself without quitting your day job. Now today, really cool story. You have heard of software as a service, perhaps. How about Twitter threads as a service?

So this was totally new to me. If you're confused, well, stay tuned. That's what the story is about. When a warehouse manager stumbles upon Twitter threads as a way to grow his audience, he taps into an underserved market and creates a new service for businesses. We're gonna look at how this came about, how he made it happen, what the challenges were.

There was, in this case, at least one big challenge. And just kind of see what we can take away with it as inspiration and perhaps motivation for your own ideas. Also, if you use Twitter, feel free to follow me. It's just my name, Chris Gelabo, C-H-R-I-S-G-U-I-L-L-E-P-E-A-U. I've been using it for years and sometimes more consistently than others, but I try to post something almost every day.

Okay, story is called warehouse manager sells Twitter threads as a service. Stay tuned. [Music]

Matthew Alexander works as a retail warehouse manager by day. When he isn't thinking about the logistics of his job, he's hanging out online, looking for inspiration and ideas. Yet he also knows an idea is just the starting point.

Making something and marketing it is when the real battle begins. That was never more evident than his first attempt at starting a profitable project. He had the technical know-how to make a website, but he fell short on finding an audience, at least until Matthew started noticing Twitter threads. Now Twitter threads, for those who aren't familiar, are a series of related tweets that tell a story or elaborate on a topic when 280 characters isn't enough. Some people share their best tweets or connect anything they feel requires the additional text.

For example, a thread might include a series of exercise tips or tips to improve your business in a specific way. It might be political commentary, it could be anything. In relation to Matthew's project, he'd seen a lot of Twitter threads go viral and helped to significantly boost the poster's profile and number of followers. With that audience, they could monetize their service and products, at least potentially. So he set about trying it for himself with his accounts and lo and behold, things improved.

He didn't set the world on fire overnight, but his follower numbers increased after he started posting threads. Forever business-minded, Matthew saw an opportunity. If Twitter threads worked for others, as well as himself, might people be willing to pay for a service that wrote the threads for them? It was an unusual idea, so he set about testing the concept. He purchased the domain name ttaas.co, that stands for Twitter Threads as a Service, and used a free website builder called Card to launch the site quickly.

Card, in turn, allowed for easy integration with Stripe to process payments. After customers paid, Matthew would direct them to a Google Form, where they answered a few questions about their business and objectives. That was all it took to be up and running, for a cost of well under $100. Being part of online communities, such as IndieHackers, made validation a little easier. Matthew simply tugged on the strings in hopes of selling his Twitter thread service.

It didn't take too long to find his first customer, and he charged 50 bucks for the first month. In exchange, he'd create 10 threads, and also offer scheduling, as well as performance reports. Matthew analyzed the customer's content and audience, but before actually doing the work, he made a confession. He told that customer they were his first one, and he'd be using their account to learn. Feeling bad about it, he even offered a 50% refund on the purchase price.

It turns out he neededn't have worried, because after the first month, they were happy and wanted to keep going. To attract more customers, Matthew offered one free Twitter thread to prospects. If they liked it, they could sign up for his monthly package. If not, no harm done. This worked well to bring in a few more customers from those existing online communities.

During this early stage, Matthew honed the craft of creating threads. Twitter usually only shows the first and last tweet of the thread, so he knew he first had to provide an enticing hook, something compelling enough to make readers want to keep going. Then, once they started reading, he figured out how to finish with a bang. He noticed a lot of people used the last tweet in the thread to ask for a retweet. This seemed ineffective, so instead, Matthew used the second last tweet for that purpose, saving the last for a TLDR post, too long, don't read, to sum up the contents.

Does this seem like a good amount of work? Well, yes, it is a lot of work. You might say $50 is not a lot of money for all this work, and in fact, while honing the service, one thing Matthew didn't do was work on his process, his systemization. Much of the work was manual, and that was okay with just a few customers, but the problems became evident when he began further promotion. Matthew was featured in a newsletter that went out to 15,000 people, all aspiring entrepreneurs and side hustlers, basically his target audience.

That feature brought an influx of customers and a fair amount of overwhelm with it. Matthew felt flustered and unable to handle the volume effectively, especially while juggling his day job. After making some adjustments, he settled into it. He learned how to manage the overflow in part through outsourcing and developing some much needed systems. This happened right in the nick of time because his side hustle kept growing to the point where he's now making $2,000 in recurring income each month.

You might say he's managed to thread the needle between working a day job and balancing a side hustle. Matthew says this isn't his first, and it certainly won't be his last. [Music]

All right, so first of all, awesome example here. In 1600 days of side hustle school, we've never talked about Twitter threads as a service. We've never talked about anything similar to it.

I mean, we've looked at ghostwriting and social media management and similar, but this is definitely a unique twist, so I really respect it. I also think, as we kind of saw throughout the episode, it's a lot of work, and even with the systems and limited outsourcing, to do that much personalized content for customers, it's gonna be difficult to scale, which is not to say that Matthew needs to scale this. It seems like a fun experiment, an experiment that's bringing in $2,000 a month, and so I definitely look forward to hearing what he comes up with next, and I'm curious what you're gonna come up with next, right? 'Cause the whole point of these stories is to get you thinking and maybe to kind of nudge you along and to say, well, if this guy had what seems like kind of a weird idea, but it worked, well, there are lots of weird ideas that work, so maybe it'll give you the courage to move forward on a weird idea of your own. That's always my hope.

Inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is better. Today's show notes, including links to Matthew's service, anything else I mentioned in the episode, I think there was something about a website builder and other stuff, whatever it is, it'll be at sidehustleschool.com/1662. If you have a comment or question for the show, you can find a link for that on the sidehustleschool.com/questions. Thank you so much for tuning in today. I hope you'll subscribe or follow and come back tomorrow.

My name is Chris Guillebeau. You are listening to "Side Hustle School." [Music]

From the "Onward Project."