Hi there! Lilian here ✌️
This is the first EVER monthly recap of my indie hacking journey! Exciting, huh?
Quick summary:
Sidebird grew by 85%
A feature went viral
Some vacations 🏔
Let’s dig in!
📈 $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
🏆 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:
A command to quote the first tweet of your thread.
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:
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.
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!
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 😁
💡 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