My name is Dinesh and I am the founder of TweetFull. We are working on creating a tool that helps small businesses and professionals like bloggers, coaches and artists get more people to their website and services. Since these people cannot compete with giants when it comes to spending money on social media, we have a service that helps them achieve better results with almost negligible cost. Our service finds people who are Tweeting that they are looking for a service like yours. We identify such people, and automatically like their Tweets and even follow them. They get a notification on Twitter and via email that exposes your brand to them. They get curious to learn more about you and this timely nudge results in them buying your services.
As an entrepreneur I created a lot of projects. The biggest challenges with those projects was spreading the word. We started looking at low-cost options that would help us get our services in front of targeted audience. Social media came to rescue and we found the opportunity for a startup there.
We started in 2014 and our growth has been constant since then. We are currently making around 200,000 USD ARR and we continue to grow at a constant pace.
The biggest challenge is to optimize setup for each customer. Our team constantly improves setup for our customers to make sure they get great results with TweetFull. However, with the number of customers we get every day, it is difficult to be able to setup everything for both new users as well as for the existing users.
We have helped about 100,000 businesses so far. This is one of the biggest achievement of our business so far.
We have been getting most of our traffic from organic search and word of mouth. That has worked really well for us. Once we get a user, our team goes all out to make sure they are successful. This has worked very well to retain users.
Launching TweetFull was easy. We had a small email list from our other businesses. We emailed them and let them about Tweetfull. Then we started working on our SEO to start getting Google traffic. We also started an affiliate program where people who referred others to us, they will get paid 20% of whatever that customer paid us. It was recurring so as long as the customer paid us, they kept getting paid as well.
No, those platforms are new so we did not use them at the time of launching. We have since launched on platforms like Betalist and PH, but it wasn't very helpful.
We have a subscription model (SaaS) where people pay us monthly to use our service. We do not believe in long term contracts. Our revenue growth has been satisfactory, but we are now working on our marketing to increase our revenue from different channels.
What are the biggest challenges you’ve faced and obstacles you’ve overcome? What are your goals for the future?
Since we depend on Twitter APIs, that is a big challenge. Every time they change something or introduce a new policy it affects us directly. They have made a lot of breaking changes that required us to change our offerings. We have always used Twitter's APIs and never ask our users for their password to keep our platform 100% safe.
Currently, we have affiliates who promote TweetFull. We have also invested in SEO so that is another big channel for us.
We would recommend every one to invest in customer success. These are the things that you can't really scale, but if your product is not so easy that anyone can set it up right automatically then help them see the value.
We use RecurPost for sharing content, MailChimp for email marketing, inspectlet to record usage, and ahrefs for SEO.
It is Girish Mathrubootham. I recently heard his story and got a chance to meet him and his story has inspired me to do a lot more than I can.
I don't listen to podcasts a lot. I loved "Zero to One" by Peter Thiel and recommend it to everyone.
Like any other business, startups also take time to become established. Don't assume that you will be a worldwide name in one or two years. It takes a lot of hard work to get there and you will need to pay your dues. Don't get disheartened when things don't work right away. Also, trust your gut more than anyone else's advice.
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