Feb. 2023: A viral feature + $400 MRR

... 1000 users, mountain bliss and other updates 📈

Hi there! Lilian here ✌️

This is the first EVER monthly recap of my indie hacking journey! Exciting, huh?

Quick summary:

1. Sidebird grew by 85%

2. A feature went viral

3. Some vacations 🏔

Let’s dig in!

Me having a nice (recharging 😅) day-off, hiking in mountain

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📈 $400 MRR, 1k users

In February 2023, Sidebird has reached $414 MRR. This is a huge 82.3% jump from last month!

Needless to say that this exceeded my expectations once again! I mean… $400 MRR was the goal I set for myself but I didn’t believe the MRR could almost double in one month — I just wanted it to be ambitious.

But so there we go 😁

Now the tough question: what are the reasons?

• Twitter. This is the main acquisition channel — by far. Most customers discovered Sidebird by checking my Twitter profile. Also these are quality leads because they’re already using twitter, that’s what’s magic about it ✨

• Product hunt. As you may know, I launched Sidebird on Product Hunt in February. It got 400 votes and #2 product of the day. In terms of extra traffic, it’s not much ( ~15% ) but it surely helped!

  I already wrote a full issue about the launch strategy: check it out here

We just crossed 1000 users while I was writing this 🥳

🏆 A viral feature

On February 5, I introduced a new feature on Sidebird:

Notion page to Twitter thread. Instantly

The announcement tweet went viral, and I got a lot of great feedback from the notion community ( which is surprisingly big on twitter, btw ) — seems like people are loving it 😻

I also shipped a lot of other cool stuff, like:

1. Auto-plugs.

2. A command to quote the first tweet of your thread.

3. Support for multiple images uploads.

They’re all live right now on Sidebird!

🤷‍♂️ What about marketing?

You’re right. That doesn’t let much place for marketing 😂.

I’m constantly blaming myself for not doing enough marketing. The only “trick“ I found is to be consistent with one week of coding and one week of marketing…

Who knows what the MRR could be right now with a decent marketing strategy?

That’s why I decided to start experimenting with new things… and this newsletter is part of it!

Here are 3 experiments for next month:

1. Send more emails. For now I only have one basic sequence that people get while they’re in the free trial. I will try to add some triggered emails to convert users with an ended trial when they come back on the website.

2. Improve the onboarding. I believe this can always be improved. So I’ll try to add even more personality to it and maybe gamify it a bit… I’ll be sharing the whole process on Twitter!

3. Double down on content. As a techie, this is the hardest part for me. But I noticed that it’s becoming easier to write content each time I force myself. So my plan is just to keep “exercising“ with emails and blog articles 😁

Sad but true… but sad 😅 (credit: @dagorenouf)

💡 What’s next?

• Next week I planned to build a new feature: Sidebird slots. This will allow users to easily find the best time to tweet — depending on their engagement through the week and how much content they usually post.

  I had a lot of requests for this, so I’m super excited!

• I planned to travel in the french alps next week, so be prepared to get a bunch of snow pictures in your Twitter feed 😜

✌️ That’s it for now

Hope you enjoyed this issue.

If you like it, please feel free to share it with your twitter friends 😁

I’m always happy to hear your thoughts. Hit me up on Twitter @_justlilian and let's connect.

See you for the next issue!

— Lilian