Mar. 2023: The end for Sidebird?

New rules, new moves.

Hi there, happy April fools’ 🐠 day.

Today I’m delighted to share with you this monthly report of my indie hacking journey.

Some highlights:

• 💸 Sidebird hit $700 MRR

• 💀 Twitter s*cks

• 🌳 New rules, new moves

Ready?

I’m a productivity guru now.

Btw: if you don’t want to receive these emails anymore, that’s fine. You can unsubscribe here.

💸 Sidebird hit $700 MRR

Last month, Sidebird grew from $414 to $786 MRR.

The biggest month so far.

The initial goal for March was to grow it to $600 MRR, so needless to say it completely crushed my expectations once again.

Things that helped this growth the most:

• I shipped a highly-requested feature: tweet slots. People kept asking for this for a long time. I also pushed it a step further by suggesting them the best times to tweet, based on when their followers are on Twitter. The launch tweet didn’t get as viral as expected, but it added a great ‘wow‘ effect to the app and helped improving the conversions quite a lot.

• I’ve noticed a significant increase in word-of-mouth: more traffic from people searching “Sidebird“ on google, more testimonial tweets, more affiliates.

• Now people can also install the tool as an app (PWA).

• Building in public, this never gets old 🕺

Having that said, it’s not all sunshine and rainbows… the upcoming change in Twitter API pricing is getting my tool in big trouble. I’ll bring some details in the next section.

“Trigger-based emails” experiment

Here comes marketing.

Yeah, I did my homework this time

Now when someone comes back on the app after his trial has ended, he will get a trigger-based email sequence.

The main goal is to show new features to old users ( and hopefully convert them ).

You like my messy copy, don’t you?

To be honest: I’m not sure of the results this will bring, but as it didn’t take more than 3h to setup I thought it was worth trying.

It will either make me a millionaire or prove these marketing gurus wrong 😂

💀 Twitter s*cks

Yep, I know.

In case you missed this tsunami: Twitter announced their new API pricing plans and the least I can tell is that the pill is hard to swallow.

Hear me out: no time to complain.

To explain this complex problem in a simple manner, I will have to reduce significantly the number of requests that my app makes to twitter if I want the business to survive.

A ton of unanswered questions. Still.

Here’s my action plan:

1. Remove some strategic features

2. Migrate everything to the v2 endpoints

3. Add more limitations in the free trial

Even if all this succeeds, I would be limited in how far it the business can grow — but considering the current situation, it would still be a huge win 🤞

Wish me luck.

🌳 New rules, new moves

Having that said, I can’t procrastinate starting new projects any longer.

The positive spin: I’ll finally allow myself to experiment through my monstrous Notion list of ( mostly shitty ) startup ideas.

Can’t wait to start new stuff!

However, this bad experience with platform-risk has completely changed the way I imagine, brainstorm and evaluate startups.

Here are my new criterias:

• 🥷 not relying on a third-party ( or at least not a single one, for obvious reasons )

• 💸 no sales under $20. That’s another lesson I’ve learned with Sidebird: cheap plans means more marketing, more support and less time to do what I actually enjoy: improving my product.

• 🌿 ability to leverage multiple acquisition channels. Twitter is great but it’s a lot of work. I’d like to get started with things like SEO and email marketing to reduce the pressure of making engaging tweets everyday.

My brain when I wrote “new startup“

🤿 By the way…

I’ve (finally) found a decent name for this newsletter, I might get bored of it in literally 3 days but for now it makes me quite happy — I’d love to hear your thoughts.

But so thanks for reading “Lilian ships“ 😄

✌️ 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