In 2020, I was laid off from my bartender job during the Covid lockdown.

Suddenly I had a lot of time on my hands, and so I decided to code up a SaaS.

My product was Zlappo, a Twitter growth tool offering a suite of tools for power users, including advanced analytics, viral tweet repository, thread previews, auto-retweets, auto-plugs, etc.

I didn’t have an email list or a Twitter following when I launched, so I had to get creative with how I got the initial word out and signed up my first 10 users.

It was a grind starting from absolute scratch.

What worked for me ($0-$1k/mo a.k.a. initial traction)

A. TWITTER GUERRILLA MARKETING

Since my product was a Twitter-specific tool, it was only natural that I started marketing on Twitter.

I employed 3 successful tactics that worked to get my first 10 paying customers:

1. Sending DMs - I searched creator/marketing Lists and just directly sent DMs to users, telling them about how my product can help them to up their Twitter game. In order to make them feel special, I created a personalized link with a personalized promo code for them to get a discount upon signing up. This boosted my response rate. I did this for hours every day until I got rate-limited for spamming, then rinse and repeat for the next day.
2. Using Twitter search - One of the defining features of my product was the ability to schedule threads, which back in 2020 was a feature gap in most leading competitors. So I bookmarked a Twitter search link for the keywords “schedule threads,” and every morning I responded to these tweets and plugged my product. This got visits to my site immediately, as I was helping them out directly with a problem that they had.
3. Tweet source label - Every tweet posted by my app borne my app name (it said “Zlappo.com”) on the bottom-right of every tweet. If you’re a Twitter user, you’re probably familiar with the “Twitter for iPhone” source label that tweets used to have – until Elon ruined it (more on this guy later…).

And just like that, I’ve seeded my app with its initial users who are using my app, paying me monthly, and offering their feedback freely and enthusiastically.

Notice how I never did any content creation, wrote threads, did profile optimization, etc.

B. REALLY FINE-TUNING THE PRODUCT

Once I got my first few initial users, I think the most important thing that really accelerated my path to $1k MRR, as a solo founder, was to focus 80-90% of my time/effort on getting the product right, transforming a wonky MVP to a passable/good-enough product that can compete in the marketplace.

Here are some specific things I did:

1. I filled in feature gaps so that my product is state-of-the-art for my product category, using customer feedback as my guide – I worked on the most-requested features first.
2. I fixed every bug reported, even if I considered it edge-case (nothing is “edge-case” if a customer encountered it).
3. I sped up the site as much as I could, rewriting/refactoring tons of my code to utilize more efficient database queries for instance, adding more RAM/processing power to my server, caching generously, enabling gzip, minification, etc. etc.
4. I continually updated the UI/UX if I had a customer emailing me about something that was unintuitive or confusing.

In my opinion, having the product on point was my #1 way of user retention and also to encourage users to proudly share my app with their friends.

What worked for me ($1k-$30k/mo a.k.a. scaling)

C. AFFILIATE PROGRAM

Once I had a small base of die-hard users, I created a generous affiliate program:

• I paid a fat 50% recurring monthly commission to incentivize my users to share and promote my product.
• I also provided double-sided incentive, in that every referred user gets 60-day free trial right off the bat (instead of the usual 30 days).

Soon enough there were users who tweeted constantly, wrote blog reviews, created YouTube reviews, and even ran paid ads to drive traffic to my site.

I assisted them by providing graphics, screenshots, copy, and also creating a simple affiliate dashboard where they can view their affiliate stats and redeem their commissions at any time using a one-click interface.

D. APPSUMO LIFETIME DEALS

I also ran an AppSumo Marketplace deal which eventually accounted for 50%-80% of my monthly revenue, depending on the month.

I could obviously sell lifetime deals on my own (which I did), but selling on AppSumo had several advantages:

1. It legitimized my nascent app.
2. It helped me garner 5-star reviews/testimonials.
3. It got affiliates to link back to my site and thus drive traffic.
4. It also increased the visibility for my brand by running paid ads on my behalf.
5. It jumpstarted word of mouth like crazy, as I later discovered “Zlappo” was mentioned so often within these lifetime deal groups on Facebook.
6. Don’t forget… the revenue! I would have never hit $30k/mo without the boost that AppSumo gave my deal during times like AppSumo week and Black Friday sales.

Absolutely worth it, 10/10.

E. EMAIL MARKETING

As my user base grew into the thousands, email marketing turned out to be massively valuable.

I now had thousands of email addresses to leverage on, to whom I could blast offers or update emails.

I wrote a custom script to send emails to my user base who have trialed but not upgraded, or churned, and I periodically send out offers, discounts, product updates, etc. to get them to re-engage with my product.

And I regained many customers this way.

My downfall ($30k/mo to $0)

My business had been humming along fine for ~3 years… until late-March this year, when Elon Musk announced that Twitter API access would no longer be free but will cost $42,000/mo.

Well shit, my entire business was built on top of Twitter, and there was no way I could pay $42k/mo.

That’s a brand-new Tesla every single month!

So with a heavy heart, and after many sleepless nights, I decided that I had to shut down Zlappo, or at least deprecate like 80% of my features, which angered a lot of users and led to massive churn (the churn is still going on as we speak).

My 3-year entrepreneurship journey had ended in failure, and to say I was sad was a massive understatement.

But god damn what a ride it was.

Lessons learned

The most important lesson I learned was to never hitch my star on another company’s wagon.

Never have all your eggs in one basket, never have a single point of failure.

If I had diversified early (and integrated Facebook, Instagram, Google My Business, LinkedIn, TikTok, etc. into my product), I might have been able to attract a broad-enough customer base who wouldn’t care too much if Twitter was deprecated.

Platform risk is very real, and, although it was a risk I undertook, it was quite unexpected that Elon Musk would buy Twitter, let alone cut off API access.

But it happened, and it can’t unhappen, so I saw only 3 ways forward for me:

1. Build my next business
2. Give up and get a job for life
3. Just pack it in, call it a good life, and take a long walk off a short pier

I’m very far from 3, I’d rather die than to settle for 2, so realistically 1 is my only option.

If you want to follow my journey as a 3rd-time founder, I’m currently building Zylvie.

If you’re a creator of any sort who sells stuff online, I invite you to please come along for the ride. 😎

Otherwise, I’m open for questions if anyone wants to know anything in particular!