How I grew my Twitter to thousand followers

Nov 10, 2022

Hey guys.

That was a crazy week for me.

We helped to sell one startup (agency), revealed one scammer, and finally launched our concierge service to allow people to acquire digital assets safely.

This week, you'll learn how to grow your Twitter organically to thousands of followers and how to build your project with no-code tools.

I also created a post comparing Microns and Flippa. From it, you'll understand the difference between those platforms and where better to buy micro-SaaS.

👋 Welcome

Welcome to the 30 new people joining this week.

Let me know what you think of your first issue. Replying helps Google realize it’s not spam.

Prefer Twitter? Drop me a DM here.

Now let’s crack on with the newsletter ☕️

🙋‍♀️ Question from subscriber

Hi Ilya,

Great newsletter! I would be interested to hear more about how you grew your Twitter followers from 0 to 1000 just by interacting with others. What are the key learnings from there?

Thanks, Krisztian

Great question, Krisztian! To grow my Twitter, I used several techniques. First, I started following people from the startup and entrepreneur world. I read their tweets and replied with my experience or opinion. This helped me to connect with different people and learn from others.

It's worth mentioning that previously I worked on a few outsource agencies, startups and created my own software company from scratch. It gave me some experience I could share, so I started tweeting about my success and failures on Twitter. I created a few threads about building an agency: how I hire people, my async workflow, and how I manage remotely distributed teams. These threads became mainstream and gave me over 20k impressions per thread and a bunch of followers.

Further, I just repeated the process with Microns. I love transparency, so I started building the company in public: sharing testimonials, posting our stats, and asking different questions.

Later I started combining Indie Hackers and Twitter, which connected me with other intelligent and kind followers. I cross-posted some content from IH to Twitter and vice versa.

My advice for beginners:

Start small and learn first.
See what people are talking about, share your opinion, and be helpful.
When you gain some experience, share it with others by tweeting or creating threads.

🤝 Recently acquired startup

This week we helped to sell an agency business. The founder asked me not to mention statistics, ARR, and closing price, but I can tell you it was a low 5-figure deal.

This is also the first time we sold an agency business on Microns.

The most exciting part is that the deal structure differs from usual. The founder sold his project and found a partner, which I think is a double win.

The seller was running Dropshipping Agency as a solo founder. He listed his website for sale on Microns. One of our premium buyers (the owner of eCommerce Platforms) messaged the seller about the listing. The buyer was looking to launch a similar service on his website. So he bought the entire project from the seller and offered him to work as a partner on this new, rebranded project.

Ilya Novohatskyi 🇺🇦 @ilyanovohatskyi

Today one seller told me that he sold his project on Microns, and a new owner offered him to work as a partner on his new, rebranded project. Community drives the world!

I really love to hear similar success stories. It inspires me to keep running this beautiful community further and change people's lives.

🚚 Transfer service

Yesterday, I got a message on LinkedIn from one person telling me that the guy who wanted to help Microns with growth was a scammer.

I had a chat and two calls with such an "expert". At first, he tried to provide value and earn my trust. He asked for $10k to do the work, but I refused immediately. Later we had another call where he tried to sell me his service, showing me many blogs and other media assets (which turned out fake), and asked for $5k to promote Microns. I said that I needed time to think about it. My intuition whispered to me that something was wrong with this guy.

I'm glad I didn't pay him a cent, but I was close to it. After deep research, I found victims who were scammed from $5 to $100k. For example, the person who approached me on LI was scammed of $11k for investing services.

Yesterday I was shocked about this story.

This story taught me that there are good and bad actors. And you can't tell with confidence which is who before any background checks.

I'm an optimist by nature and tend to trust people. I love the Microns community: our buyers and sellers. But when the platform grows, it inconvertibly attracts different people, and sometimes they have bad intentions.

For this reason, we launched a concierge service called Transfer by Microns to make deals safely and with confidence.

The idea of the service is to provide support during the transaction for both sides. We'll help with an agreement, legal docs, handling payment, and keep everyone informed about the transaction's status.

I believe it will be valuable for buyers and sellers to transact on the platform securely. So they don't worry about stealing money or assets.

Also, we'll feature our first customers on the dedicated landing page and share their stories in this newsletter.

🔔 Microns vs Flippa

This week I prepared one blog post comparing two startup acquisition marketplaces. You'll learn the perks of buying/selling in these places and where better to acquire micro-SaaS (microns) or content site (flippa).

Microns, a top Flippa alternative: The Best Online Startup Acquisition Marketplace — www.microns.io

Microns is one of the best Flippa alternatives for buying and selling micro startups, websites, e-commerce stores, web and mobile apps. This article compares both online marketplaces to know which is better for you.