What's up, everybody?
This is Cortland from IndieHackers.com, and you're listening to the IndieHackers podcast.
More people than ever are building cool stuff online and making a lot of money in the process.
And on this show, I sit down with these IndieHackers to discuss the ideas, the opportunities, and
the strategies they're taking advantage of, so the rest of us can do the same.
Sami Dean, then welcome to the IndieHackers podcast.
Thank you.
Thank you for having me.
You are the founder of Hype Fury, which you describe as basically the ultimate Twitter
growth tool for personal brands.
How much revenue is Hype Fury doing today?
22K.
$22,000 a month, and how long ago did you start Hype Fury?
It's going to be two years and a few days.
Wow.
Cool.
Pretty good milestone.
That's $22,000 a month.
That's something like $264,000 a year, and it's been two years.
I think most people's goal is to try to get to Robin profitability in one year, and you've
gotten to that many times over in a couple years.
I wouldn't call it profitability because I wouldn't call us profitable because we're
spending a lot of money reinvesting most of the money we're making in order to grow faster.
It makes a lot of sense if your business is doing well.
I found you by looking you up on the IndieHackers product directory, and then I had seen your
posts on IndieHackers for a long time.
You have a very detailed timeline full of updates that you posted about Hype Fury.
From the very first second you came up with the idea all the way through last month when
you hit, you broke through $20,000 a month in revenue.
The whole time, you've been super focused on growth.
Even early on in your history, you hired a co-founder, a low-kill founder, to help you
focus on growth.
I'm not surprised that you're reinvesting your profits or you're reinvesting your revenues.
I think one of the cooler things about your business is that you're essentially helping
people grow their Twitter accounts.
It's a tool where you can go in, you can create threads, you can schedule tweets, you can
do all sorts of stuff.
You're not the first company to help people grow their Twitter accounts.
You're not even the first founder I found on this podcast with an app that helps you
book your Twitter accounts, and yet you've still been able, in the last couple of years,
to get your revenue at a pretty high dollar amount.
What do you think accounts for the fact that you can create something that's not 100% totally
unique and yet still do well as a bootstrapped IndieHacker?
Well, so there are two answers to this question.
First part is that I personally don't see Hype Fury as a way to grow your Twitter.
For me, it's a way to monetize your Twitter, and there's a difference, you know?
There are a lot of people who have 100,000 followers and they barely make any money,
you know?
So that's not the goal.
The goal is not to have the biggest number.
The most important thing is how to monetize your presence, you know?
And second apply to this question is, for example, all the people that are using Buffer
and Hootsuite and all these big Twitter automation tools, they are not 100% happy about the tool
they're using, you know, even though they're using it.
So there is always room to improve and to create something new and to create a new way
to do things, and that's what Hype Fury did in the beginning.
So when I started Hype Fury, at first it was just a fun project, okay?
It had no pretensions, no, like, crazy goals or anything, but I made some people try it.
And I was like, hey, I built this tool to schedule threats, do you want to try it?
And then they started giving me feedback and saying, hey, it would be great to add this,
to add that, I want to do that or this.
And then I was like, oh, there's a room for a tool, you know?
There's room for a new tool, for a new way to do things.
And in the case of Hype Fury, what we did differently is that we really focused on Twitter.
Like if you use Buffer, Buffer is a good tool.
It does a lot of things, it does Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and all these networks.
You know, it allows you to schedule in a very, like, shallow way if you wish.
It doesn't go, you know, deep into the platform.
And what I did was go in deep into Twitter.
Let's talk about the actual process of you creating Hype Fury.
I'm going to pull up your product and then the hackers and scroll down your timeline
and find your very first post where you talk about the fact that you came up with the idea.
You were already on Twitter.
You were already using other, basically, Twitter automation tools at the time.
And you wrote that basically you hadn't seen anyone else who had a tool that would let
you create Twitter threads.
So you know, Twitter supports you, not only sending one tweet at a time, but a whole thread
of tweets that are connected to, like, create a story.
And if you're using Buffer or using these other tools, you just wouldn't let you do
it.
You had to actually go to Twitter's native UI to do that.
And so you said, OK, well, the answer is nobody told you about any tool that could do this.
And you started working on it right away.
This is August 2019.
What was your goal?
Like, what did you think you're going to accomplish by building this tool that had this one feature
that no other tool had?
Sad to say, but nothing.
It was just to use it, you know, and see, OK, let's build this, see how it's gonna work,
see what I can do with it.
Back then, I had like a very complex posting workflow using Google Sheets and Google Apps
Script.
It's like JavaScript for Google Drive and Google Sheets and Google Docs.
And I used Buffer.
So I had this Zapier automation that reads from the Sheets and does some stuff and then
posts to Buffer.
And I think I remember when I literally created the MVP, I was like, oh, it would be great
if I can scale my threads.
And then later on, all this process I have on spreadsheets to put it in a software.
And well, the funny part is that it took me one year to actually build the Google Sheets,
the similarity, you know, that into high fury.
But back then, like I was trying to do fitness coaching on Twitter, you know, I was actually
doing fitness coaching.
It was my side hustle.
I wanted to do a side hustle because I had a consulting job that was pretty chill.
So I wanted to do something on the side.
And so I started using high fury to help me post.
And I also was part of communities.
That's why I tell people, joy paid communities.
I was part of something called Sovereign Uni and it's basically a group of people who want
to grow on Twitter and build new stuff on Twitter.
I remember we had a Telegram group.
So I posted high free there and I gave everyone access.
And I did something where it was like, oh, only 10 spots left or something like that.
It's so good to be part of these small groups of like people working together and motivating
each other.
Like almost everyone I know who's super successful has like some chat group where it's like them
and like five friends.
And like, you know, some people are more successful, less successful in those groups.
But it's like good just to have that cohort of people motivating you, kind of sharing
their tips, pushing each other.
Like we're social animals or social creatures, like we're not meant to do things by ourselves.
You mentioned that it took you a year to get high fear to the point where it was really
duplicating the functionality of like your own sort of ad hoc Twitter process where you're,
you know, putting tweets and spreadsheets based on what you posted about it.
Like it took you a few days.
You said, I worked, I finished the MVP.
This is three days after you posted that you came up with the idea and you were super happy
with it and you shared with a few people, but none of them used it.
And he paused a little bit more and found 10 people to join and he started getting feedback.
And I think that's remarkable because like, obviously this is a cool tool today that's
making multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in revenue.
But like it took you three days to get something out the door that actually worked and had
the feature that you sort of envisioned in the beginning.
Back then I wasn't even using like a theme.
I was doing like plain HTML and CSS.
Just try to find the users, you know?
But if you're like, yeah, I'm just gonna go build it, build it in a few days, I'm not
in a few months.
It's just hard for a lot of people because it's difficult to draw the line between like,
what do you actually need for that very first version and what do you not need?
And then a lot of the stuff you don't need is the stuff that people get the most excited
about.
Like people really want to have a flashy, clitsy website and they want to play with the colors
and they want a really good name and they want business cards and they want like this
feature and that feature and you somehow had the discipline to like not do any of that,
have a super ugly website, super bare bones thing and have only one feature, which is
the smart way to do it.
Like most veterans do it that way, but people who are new usually don't know to cut all
that other stuff out.
For five, six months, I didn't have a website, you know?
Or maybe I had like some landing page with like coming soon or something like that.
I still remember I did the website in December, so I had Twitter account, the logo was like
a Pokemon.
It was the, what is it called, the Zapados, right?
So that was the logo for six months before I got the logo.
It was just like their Twitter account, trying to hide stuff, post some gifs, post some screenshots,
but yeah, you really don't need all that stuff, all you need is users.
And if you find like, you know, three users, they can start give you feedback and then
your vision could, you know, change because high theory when I created was a thread posting
tool, but no, it's not, you know?
You can still obviously post threads, but posting threads is not like a business, you
know?
Nobody wakes up in the morning and will say like, oh, I'm going to schedule some threads,
amazing, you know?
Well, I think it's cool that you're able to start so small.
The advantage of doing that is lost on a lot of people who are super embarrassed, like
I don't want to build something and then be embarrassed to launch it.
And so I got to add all this stuff, but if you do it really small, like you can kind
of skip that whole process where you're embarrassed to launch because you can't be embarrassed
to launch something that took you three days.
You can show it to anybody and they'll be like, oh, this looks like shit.
And you can be like, yeah, it took me three days and then over the week, I'm like, oh,
okay, okay, okay, I get it, you know?
And they'll, they'll judge it based on the amount of time you put into it.
And so it's way better to keep it small.
And it also helps you like hyper focus on like, whether or not people like the value
that you're creating.
You know, if you have like all these cool bells and whistles and like 15 features, and
people kind of sort of like it, but kind of sort of don't, it's gonna take you so much
testing and questioning to figure out like what they do and don't like about it.
But if you only have, like you did, like one feature, and it's like, not even a website,
like basically nothing, then it's like, there's not that much for people to critique.
And if they stick around, like, you know, like what your killer feature is, if they
don't, you know, you need to go back to the drawing board, what was the process like for
you when you launched it and you sort of put in the hands of these 10 people and they started
giving you feedback?
Back then, it was pretty much they request something, I put it there, you know, as long
as it's not something like too crazy, you know, that doesn't make any sense.
At some point, you had to have some sort of switch in your attitude, though, I mean, like,
if you just have this curiosity you said you had, and you're like, okay, what if I built
this tool, how would that work? And then you start switching from that to collecting feedback
from users and iterating, I assume at some point you decided, you know what, this could
be an actual business, or at the very least a product that people enjoy using.
And looking at your timeline on Andy hackers, it seems like that was like sometime in the
first three months, because you built the product in August. And then by November, you
had connected it to Stripe probably or something like that, and started taking payments and
got your first 20 customers. So what was it that convinced you like this could actually
be a real business?
It was more in the first three weeks than three months. I still remember there were
some people who were using it daily, like they were using it more than I did. You know,
that's when I was like, yeah, there's something here. Like if that guy is not using Buffer
or Hootsuite, and he's using Hype Fury, well, there's something there to do there. It would
be stupid not to keep working on this project.
Did you have any vision at that point in time? But like, hey, maybe you're not going to do
fitness coaching, you're going to do this, and this is going to make tens of thousands
of dollars a month.
Not back then, I was still trying to do my fitness style hustle on Twitter. It was actually
back then when I got one expensive coaching client. That's when the coaching business
started to make sense. But I had to stop afterwards. I was speaking to a great friend who was
like, dude, stop working on this fitness thing.
Yeah, I'm looking at your Twitter. I have this app for Twitter called Twiemax. And if
I go to anybody's profile, it'll show me sort of their all time most popular tweets. And
your most popular tweet was November 2019.
So basically around...
Before and after.
Yeah, you're before and after. It was exactly around the time that you decided to start
charging for Hype Fury. So you're working on this, trying to decide whether or not to
quit your coaching business. And you've got this before and after shot of you sort of
looking pudgy and kind of sad. It's like the classic before photos. The lighting is bad,
it's dark, and you look unhappy. And then the after photo, you're shredded, you're jacked,
you have these huge muscles, you're smiling, you got a great hairdo. And you said, meet
before and after. How? Eat meat, read daily, lift weights, own your shit, don't eat for
fun, start a side hustle, wear clothes that fit, invest in your education, sleep eight
hours every night, cut out distractions while you work, and replace video games with a purpose.
But at this point, it seems like your purpose was make this Hype Fury thing into a real
business.
What was it like getting these first paying customers in the door? Because I think a lot
of people are afraid to put a price tag on something. You had this app that you've been
working on at this point for a few months. And you still hadn't even officially launched
it to the public. I don't know if anyone could like... You didn't have a website. People
can just go sign up for Hype Fury. You're inviting people and pitching people to join.
And you decided to put a sort of paywall on it or a timer. So you can use a product for
as many days or use as many features. I'm not sure how it worked. But then you released
it and it got 20 paying customers within the first few days of you turning on the building.
How did that feel?
Fucking amazing, man. But can you say it's amazing when you see that somebody is giving
you their money? That's like the ultimate validation. I knew there was something in
the product because I was seeing people using it every day. But again, when you set up the
payment, also I was relieved because I wanted to set up the billing since like so long.
But I was postponing it every time because I was busy working on features and working
on the app. So I set up the billing. I used service bot. I created my Stripe account.
I didn't create an LLC or a company or I didn't get a logo. I didn't see a lawyer. I didn't
do all that stuff.
I didn't do any of that for any hackers either. I just started building. So you at some point
decided to stop working by yourself. I'm curious, what is your skillset? You're doing all this
by yourself. You're a software engineer by trade?
Yes.
Okay. So you have the software engineering skills. Then you decided, you know what? That's
not enough. In December, so this is four months after you started Hype Fury, you made a post
on 90 hackers. You said, I'm looking for a marketing slash growth person. He said, Hype
Fury is a Twitter growth tool. It's kind of like buffer on steroids, making $500 a month
at the moment. So that's awesome. Within four months, you're already at $500 in recurring
revenue. I'm looking for a partner who can take care of the growth so I can focus on
the product and the development, which is kind of a cool post to make on any hackers.
That's one of the most common posts that people make looking for co-founders.
That's where I met my co-founder. The story was simple. I was almost burnt out. I was
working all the time and doing the development, doing the support, doing the calls because
I've been doing a lot of calls. Every person I knew, I was like, hey, please introduce
me to someone who could use Hype Fury. So I was doing this with everyone and I was giving
demos and the demos were like 30 minutes, one hour, sometimes two hours long. So I can
understand what people want, et cetera. Also, I was doing the support. Also, they were like,
it was still too young to have too many bugs, but then I started to have bugs. At some point,
I almost had PDSD from Intercom notifications. And I was like, I don't want to do that for
another year. I've done it for six months. I don't want to do it for a year. So I was
like, hey, let's build a real business here and not be the only guy that does everything
because it was obvious that as the product grows, I would have more support to do and
more bugs to fix and more features to create. So I was like, okay, let's set up the foundation
for a real business here and do something about it. Also, there were all the competitors
popping here and there. What was it like when your co-founder reached out to you? Did he
just message you on Twitter or email you? How did you actually meet?
He emailed me. We liked each other really fast. We were really a great match. He flew
to Paris a few days later. So we're both into the bootstrap mindset, not raise money or
anything, try to build a product. I spoke to many people for this co-founder position
who were like, oh, you know what? We're going to sell a course for $500 to 20 people and
then it's 10K a month. I'm like, yeah, but I want to do a SaaS. I want long-term revenue,
long-term users, recurrent revenue. I don't want to make quick cash. And Yannick, my co-founder,
wasn't into that mindset and that's something I liked about him. He promised that he'd start
after a few weeks, he'd work for free. And if it doesn't work out, it doesn't work out.
So yeah, that's how it happened.
That's pretty cool if you're able to convince him to work for free. I mean, it's not like
you had enough revenue to pay either one of you at that point in time.
Yeah, that's true. It was his personal bet into Johnny. He tweeted actually about it.
It's his words, so not mine, but it was his way of making it happen, basically.
Let's talk about the aspect of your business when you're talking to customers. You mentioned
in those first months, you were calling people constantly. And I think this tends to get
kind of neglected, like in the early days of people's businesses. Some people start
businesses and they're like, oh, it just never really worked out. I didn't get any customers.
And there's people like you and you're like, yeah, I had 20 paying customers a few days
after I launched my paywall. And yeah, I had 100 users in a few weeks. People were like,
oh, that's cool. I guess you just got lucky. I was like, no. Actually, you were calling
people dozens of times a week or a day or whatever.
Someone should totally do this. Give you an idea for a startup. First customer is a service.
You're a startup founder. You're an indie hacker. You're like, I have no customers.
You go to this website, you pay them 100 bucks or something. Suddenly, they send someone
to you to become your first customer. And you're losing money on it, but now you've
got a real person using your app. And maybe that'll get some of these developers who are
not motivated to talk to their customers or actually move the ball forward to be motivated
because it really does change like once you get that first person who's like expecting
things from you.
And it's a little bit more like a normal job. Now you have real people who care about what
you do. And your work matters to people who are more than you. And it's not just discipline
that motivates you, but it's also social accountability and excitement and status and reputation.
I mean, like you went on to, you know, obviously hit like $10,000 a month in revenue last November.
You've doubled since then to over $22,000 a month in revenue. How much of that growth
was due to like your marketing efforts and testing all these different channels, affiliate
marketing and podcasts and SEO and that kind of stuff. And how much it was to building
the right features in your product because you're talking to customers and understanding
what they want.
I think marketing is better. Because one year ago, we already had a good product. Like you
can have an amazing product if you don't have users using it and people and people don't
know about it. Like it's completely useless. So the product and the marketing should go
hand in hand.
Yeah. People underestimate that too, especially developers because it's like if you're a software
engineer or anyone who spends a lot of time on the internet, you're like you tend to know
about things pretty quickly, right? If there's some new framework that comes out, everybody
talks about it. It doesn't matter if you live in California or you live in the Middle East,
like you're going to see a post about the software framework and talk about it. We kind
of assume that that's how the entire world is. Like when new things are out, everybody
learns about it and everybody knows. But the reality is like word travel is slow and you
could have the best product for Twitter power users out there and 99.999% of Twitter power
users have no idea you even exist because you're not marketing.
I went to a restaurant actually in Seattle the other day with my buddy and we ordered
a chicken fried steak. And it's like one of the only restaurants in Seattle that has chicken
fried steak. It's just not common here, even though it's delicious and I love it. But if
you go to Texas, everybody eats all the time down there. And it's like, I don't know, for
whatever reason, the marketing for chicken fried steak just hasn't made it up to the
Pacific Northwest yet. And products are the same way. Even if something exists and it's
good, not everybody has heard of it. Not everybody is going to adopt it until you get the word
out and cause it to spread.
I'm curious how you knew how to do all the right things. How did you know how to build
an MVP? How did you know that you needed to find somebody to help you take care of the
marketing? As you already built online businesses before, were you reading books or listening
to podcasts? Or did you just sort of intuitively grasp the right decisions to make?
I still have to ask myself the right questions. Are we on the right path? We have done some
decisions that were not smart. So you can always make me say, always be asking, is what
I'm doing the right thing? Is it serving my customers? Is it serving my vision?
So you talked about marketing being super important. And I made a list of the different
growth channels that you've written about on your indie hackers timeline. You've talked
about affiliate marketing. You've talked about tweeting and creating these huge Twitter threads
that do really well and promote hype theory there. You talked about having a course that
you offer to help your users become better at Twitter. You have a newsletter, the podcast.
Out of all these channels, which one do you think has been the most useful?
We are on Twitter. We are a Twitter tool. So we have to be on Twitter. Even if it sucks,
we should be on Twitter because it wouldn't make sense for Azure not to be on Twitter.
Do the things that don't scale. Speak with people, reach out, call email, call DM, ask
for introductions. It's very powerful. If you have a user, ask them to introduce you
to two or three other people who could use the product. And that's really powerful because
since you are introduced, they are less likely to refuse to speak to you. If you ask for
free introductions, there's a big chance that one of them is going to lead to a demo and
then you can do something out of that demo. So if you want something really quick right
now, speak to people right away. Don't expect a podcast to bring you users in a few weeks.
It's impossible. A blog, SEO takes time. So do the things that don't scale. Ask for introductions.
On the product side of things, things should be kind of frustrating too. I've built productivity
tools in the past. And one of the things that people tend to underestimate is churn. If you're
building something to help people become better at their jobs or better workers, if you're
building a to-do list app, if you're building a Twitter scheduling tool or a Twitter power
tool, it actually requires your users to be pretty motivated people and to wake up every
day and say, I'm going to tweet. And if they get bored of Twitter and bored of tweeting,
then they're going to stop using your tool and you're going to have to deal with churn.
How do you deal with that at hype theory? Because I'm sure you get a lot of people who
have that exact process go down.
Don't say that word again or I'll have a heart attack. Man, churn is a nightmare and so many
people underestimate it. It's crazy because there was this SaaS frenzy, this recent SaaS
frenzy on Twitter where people are like, oh, just find 1,000 customers paying you $50 and
then you're going to make $50K a month. I'm like, yeah, sure. Of course. Yeah, churn is
it's there. It could kill you. It could kill your motivation, your psychology. At some
point we had like 12% churn. And that literally meant that when we had 800 users, 100 users
left per month, it's huge. It's a lot of people. And if you have so many people giving you
their credit cards to build them and then take it back, that means the service you're
promising is not the right thing. It's not what it is. Or you are promising something
to people who don't need it. So you need to review your product and your message. Be more
straightforward, more clear in your messaging. Don't try to serve everyone. In our case,
we were trying to serve people who are trying to start their brand. And that was a bad idea
because it's natural that most people start something fail. So we had all these people
are just starting to grow and then they just fail or just stop or just like, I don't want
to do it anymore. I want to be on Facebook. So I don't use Twitter. At that point, there's
nothing you can do. It's not about your product. Yeah, there's literally nothing you can do
about it. So it needs to start from the top. It's the messaging. Who am I trying to serve?
What is my pricing? Because if you sell a service for five bucks, of course, you're
going to have people who just want to try it out and leave afterwards. The solution
we're trying to find is increase the pricing, offer more power user features, focus less
on people who are just starting out and more on people who have not necessarily established
brands, but maybe people have enough skin in the game that won't leave tomorrow. People
have maybe 500 followers and maybe they have already a product out there like an e-book
on a camera and they're making some money and they're like, oh, this tour thing, it
really works and I need to just to put more effort into it to grow. I'm not people who
are like, oh, I'm starting from two followers who are my real life friends and I don't know
how to do this. I have no product. I have no idea where to start from. So maybe for
these people, you can offer something for free. You can offer a free product and that's
actually what we're going to do.
So you've built this company from scratch where it's just an idea. It was a curiosity
you had. I wasn't even an ambition to build a company and today you've got you and your
co-founder, you've got lots of part-time and contractor employees, full-time employees.
You're making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. What's your general advice to people
out there who are listening and who are struggling to come up with an idea, who are struggling
to get started, who are in the very early stages?
See what you like to do, what things you like, get into the niche, get into the community,
speak to people and see what they need. Keep your ears and eye open because there are opportunities
everywhere. Like before I started Hype Fury, I didn't start anything, but I always had
that mindset of what problems can I solve? And remember that there are thousands of ways
to solve a problem and a user who uses like Buffer doesn't mean he loves Buffer and he'll
never quit Buffer. And the proof is that when Hype Fury was built, I still remember a user
canceled his Buffer subscription to use Hype Fury back when I wasn't even charging for
it.
It's such a small hurdle to get over. You know, it's like a mindset shift or just the
right motivation or the right idea. And you go from thinking about building something
to finally just doing it. And then everything after that, you know, you might be fucking
great at, but it is a tragedy when people get stuck on that first step. And hopefully
people will listen to your advice and get over that hump.
Sami Dindin, thanks for coming on the show. Can you let listeners know where they can
go to find out more about Hype Fury?
Yes, Twitter, well, hypefury.com or twitter.com slash hypefury. Check out our podcasts on Spotify.
Yeah, if you don't want, if you don't know how to start, you could start with our podcast.
It's a great way. We also have an email list with actionable growth tips. So it's not like
just advertisement for Hype Fury. It's right. We try to give as much free advice as possible
because in the end help us, you know. So start with that. Hypefury.com, twitter slash hypefury.
Alright, thanks again.