Thread by @upen946

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A big thread on "Building micro saas products around Twitter audience/Twitter APIs"

No fluffy content. If your goal is to build a $100m ARR business, this is not the right post. Here I am are NOT going to talk about building the next Facebook or Twitter.

If your goal is to make a $1K to $10K MRR, continue reading.

This will cover one SAAS area and talk about multiple niches in this space.

This also explains more on how to do tech implementation, do market analysis, how the current players are doing, and also ends with a cost analysis to understand the overall cost for 100 users.

Twitter has 340 million users.

Let's see some of the products built on Twitter.

Buffer : $21m annual revenue ( not just Twitter tool but also has other social media automation)

Tweetpi : Automate Twitter to get more followers - $3.2m - Founded in 2009 (Only for Twitter)

Tweetfull : Twitter Growth Hacking Tool - $1m revenue

OneUpApp : $12K MRR ( not just Twitter tool but also has other social media automation) - Founded in 2017

MeetEdger : $3m Revenue ( not just Twitter tool but also has other social media automation) - Founded in 2014

Hootsuite : $400m per year (not just Twitter tool, also has other social media automation) - Founded in 2008

Twilert.com : Twitter monitor for keywords, brands - $200K revenue

(Several social media automation tools not listed here making millions of $$$ in revenue)

New players: (launched in last 2 years)

Tweet.photo : Automagically post your Instagram photos to Twitter - Acquired for $30K ($10K in cash + $20K cap based on sales for next 2 years) - Started in 2018

HypeFury : Twitter automation platform - MRR $11,247 - About 16 months to reach $10K MRR - Started August, 2019

Ilo.so : Beautiful Twitter analytics - About $200 MRR and $5K revenue (via one time sales) in 3 months. - Started in August, 2020

Shoutout.so : Just started building a new platform to build a wall of love for personal Twitter. - Got lot of traction - Not yet launched.

Pikaso.me : Take beautiful screenshots of Tweets and post on other platforms.

OnlyTweets : Support the creators you love, directly on Twitter - In beta - An interesting product that you should checkout

“Everyone can build Twitter audience” - An ebook about growing your Twitter audience - made $150K sales in less than 2 years

Can you imagine just a digital product around Twitter making $150K in sales in less than 2 years? This tells us the market for Twitter tools.

Negative Nancy says: This involves platform risk.

Me: There is a platform risk because there is a platform. Having a platform means “finding users more easily”. On a side note, all the above tools are making revenues for years.

Negative Nancy says: There are already many tools around Twitter. How can you find a niche?

Me : (Continue reading the post to find niches around Twitter audience/Twitter API)

Some niches around the Twitter audience

Before we dive deep into niches, let’s wait for a second and see why do people use tools around Twitter.

There are major three reasons

It should let users make more money

It should bring in more followers on Twitter/any other social platform (more followers may bring in more revenues in flywheel effect) - either by self-analysis of Twitter status or by making more engaging posts.

It should automate cumbersome process thereby achieving either 1 or 2

Based on these three points, let's see for a second and dive deep into what HypeFury is doing that it made hugely successful.

Some important features of HypeFury.

Automatic Retweeting - Hypefury automatically retweets after X number of hours or after a certain threshold is reached - This means MORE FOLLOWERS

Automatically Add Sales Tweets - This means MORE MONEY

Image Tweets - This means more engagement and thereby MORE FOLLOWERS

Screenshots of Tweet For Instagram - This means more engagement and thereby MORE FOLLOWERS

Schedule Threads and Tweetstorms - Better AUTOMATION

So, Hypefury is satisfying all the 3 reasons mentioned above - Get more followers, Bring in more money & Automate.

So, whats Hypefury’s principle - “Do one thing and do it well (really really well)”

Now, let's see if we can find some niches around these basics.

1) Twitter + Gumroad niche : (For starters, Gumroad is a platform for selling digital products like ebooks, courses, videos) There is a lot of potential for this model. The concept is simple. User sets the Tweet via your saas tool.

Once it reaches a specific engagement threshold, add another Tweet (with Gumroad link) to the original tweet as a comment or as a thread. This could be set based on “after X hours”, “after X number of likes” etc. A lot of potential for this and Gumroad authors love this.

Further automate this by using Gumroad APIs - for example, after X number of coupons are sold, don’t promote the Tweet any more as the user can’t give any more coupons or just add a comment “All coupons are sold out”.

The whole process will keep the followers engaged and help drive more sales/traffic.

2) Twitter + Any sales product (Gumroad, Ebooks, One-off consulting, A buy me a coffee link ) - Once a tweet goes beyond a pre-set number of likes, retweets, replies - Just add a link (as part of another tweet) to that tweet.

(Similar to the above approach but instead of just Gumroad, you could allow the user to set any link, or You can get top-selling products data from APIs for Stripe, Paddle, etc as well and automate this)

3) Twitter + Content curation model: Automatically curate content that interests Twitter followers. The content could be any of the latest posts, articles, pdf, etc.

Add a choice for users to auto-approve the content to post to Twitter or to manually approve before the content goes to Twitter.

4) Twitter + Wall of love: Allow users to log in to the app. Twitter API has some restrictions and can access only X number of recent Tweets.

Once the user logs into the app, get the latest Tweets, and automatically analyze which are positive Tweets and show them in the dashboard to approve. Once approved, show the approved tweets BEAUTIFULLY on a page that the user can share or keep in profile.

This is like testimonials but not for products but real users.

5) Twitter Positive Tweets Embed: Similar to the above one but you can also provide an embeddable script that users can embed anywhere.

6) Twitter + Analytics: Allow the user to login into the App.

Then read the latest Tweets, likes, comments, and other data and just display all this data in a beautiful format/graphs/stats and create a sharable stats page that users can share. This works similar to “Open Startups” where people post data about startups publicly.

This will help users to understand how their Tweets are performing.

7) Twitter Trending Hashtags: Getting the data about trending hashtags is a major business.

This data is important for users so that they can leverage tweets on top of these trending hashtags to get more visibility (something like hashtagify.me)

Twitter mentions for brands: Brands would love to have a unified dashboard with all the Tweets they get tagged.

Building something on these lines will attract some B2B brands (something like this brand24.com but for Twitter only )

8) Twitter sentiment analysis: This is another niche for B2Bs where companies want to analyze the sentiment of the Tweets if that's a happy Tweet, sad Tweet, or a neutral one.

Based on the sentiment (and confidence score - A score that tells how strong the classification is - happy vs sad vs neutral), companies would like to assign agents/reps to handle those Tweets.

9) Twitter Ads Automation: Twitter provides APIs for Ad Management (Campaign management), Advertising Analytics. You can build a product around this. Facebook and Google Ads also have similar ads API.

Probably building a tool and integrating all these ad platforms could be a good niche for advertisers using these platforms.

What are we doing here? We are trying to niche down as much as possible.

More ideas?

10) Just see zapier.com/apps/twitter/i… -> There are more than 400 integrations possible with Twitter via Zapier. Pick anything that has some demand and create a niche from that.

Remember the principle we want to follow here - “Do one thing but do it well, really really well”.

Tweet.photo did the same - Picked up something that Zapier is already doing - Automatically post your Instagram photos to Twitter - Acquired for $30K ($10K in cash + $20K cap based on sales for next 2 years) - Started in 2018

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