As a founder it can be really frustrating to hear âyou arenât posting enough on twitterâ
Youâre building a company, obviously youâre not spending all day on twitter.
As an engineer this is the approach I've taken -- the first and most important step is basically making it look like youâre terminally online when youâre not. The S tier twitter founders (Sreeram, Rushi, Anatoly, etc.) all are posting multiple times a day, consistently throughout the day.
Does this mean that you also need to be on twitter all day? No â and TBH they probably arenât either.
My brain works way better when I give it 2 hours to do 1 specific thing, instead of checking in on something for 10 minutes 10 times a day. So what I do is schedule deep work time to actually write content. Once I have written things out I use the schedule feature to roll them out incrementally throughout the day. This makes it look like Iâm constantly on twitter trying to acquire mindshare but in reality I write 90% of my tweets between 10 pm - midnight so that during the day I can actually run my company.
The next most important thing is a little counterintuitive â but you canât shill your own project. You can write about things related to your project, but nobody wants to engage with a tweet where youâre clearly pumping your own bags. The goal really is to develop respect as somebody who thinks deeply about a domain and scale that into influence over the direction that the industry builds towards.
One semi-sneaky thing you can do is actually talk in an unbiased way about cool things that other projects in the same domain are doing so that they are incentivized to amplify your post â this helps position you as a thought leader to the audience that they have put a ton of work into building. This is a long term strat and may seem counterintuitive in the short term, but honestly it can work extremely well.
But if thereâs one thing you take away from this post:
Write things of value. The algo is just too good at this point and if your posts arenât (a) informative or (b) funny then it is not going to get juiced by the algo. There are tiny tricks you can do to marginally optimize posts but by a mile the most important thing is write things of value.
Ok, well obviously, right? But what does that actually mean?
Educate people. Explain to people why the industry is going to evolve in a certain direction and back it with evidence. One style that I weirdly donât see many other founders following but has worked extremely well for me is taking frontier crypto research ideas and explaining them to people without using unnecessarily formal / complex terminology.
This is deeply related to my final point though â iterate. Constantly be A/B testing posts. Literally make it a goal to collect 7 data points a day for 1 week so at the end of the day on Friday you can do an analysis to see what got the most engagement and lean further into that the following week. Its all about collecting data on what resonates with people and what does not.
If you zoom out youâll even realize that this entire post is a psyop and is actually me A/B testing âfounder storyâ style posts to experiment past my normal engineering research oriented ones.
Final thought â donât be afraid to be cringe. It is your job to yap. Every yapper has cringe moments. I regularly delete tweets that flop lol. Get over it, rapidly A/B test, and start building your audience.