Flying past $23K MRR in 2 years🦅 | Hypefury

Listen Up! IH - Episode 27

"Keep your ears and eyes open, because there are opportunities everywhere."

👆 That's Samy Dindane's advice for aspiring Indie Hackers.

Samy is the co-founder of Hypefury.

Hypefury is a Twitter growth tool that lets you schedule Tweets, Threads, Retweet your best content, and a lot more.

It has grown to more than $23K MRR in 2 years.

Samy built the MVP in August 2019, it took him just 3 days to build the basic features.

Back then he had no idea that Hypefury would grow into what it is today.

His co-founder Yannick Veys is the marketing brains behind the project.

He joined in December 2019 when they were doing $500 MRR and not enough revenue to pay themselves a salary.

Yannick did an IH Ask Me Anything (AMA) in July 2021, and Samy came on the IH podcast in August.

This is their story about building and growing the product past 23K MRR👇

Hypefury - The Product🦅

Samy doesn't see Hypefury as merely a growth tool, he looks at it as a monetization tool.

There's a difference.

Many Twitter accounts have hundreds of thousands of followers but don't make any money from them.

Meanwhile, others who are able to build profitable businesses with a few thousand Twitter followers.

This is how Samy describes it -

"There are a lot of people that have 100,000 followers and they barely make any money, 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."

Hypefury is a tool that's focused solely on Twitter.

At the time, all the other social media schedulers were doing a bit of everything - Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter.

Nobody was zeroed in on Twitter and solving critical problems for Twitter creators.

The Problem🛑

In August 2019, there was no way to schedule threads on Twitter.

Samy even tweeted asking if a tool like this existed -

Nothing came up.

Well known social media schedulers like Buffer and Hootsuite allowed you to schedule individual Tweets - but not threads.

Anybody who has a sizable Twitter audience knows that long threads bring in new followers.

Individual tweets are only good for engagement.

Creators who couldn't schedule threads were at a disadvantage.

Samy knew he was working on a real problem.

Initial Users👥

It took Samy 3 days to build a very basic MVP using Google Apps Script and Sheets.

He started a private beta and quickly got a few people from a private telegram group to give him feedback.

These users were interested in building businesses off Twitter.

So Hypefury was the perfect tool for them.

He even did 1:1 demos of the product with the initial users.

And everyone who he met, introduced him to 2 or 3 people who would be ideal for the product.

This is how he describes it -

"Do the things that don't scale, speak with people. Reach out, cold email, cold DM. Ask for introductions. It's very powerful"

"I was giving demos and the demos were 30 minutes, one hour or sometimes two hours long so I can understand what people wanted."

Initial user interviews gave Samy a fair idea of the right product to build.

So much so, that he could quickly start charging for Hypefury.

And he was pleasantly surprised when he saw people stopping their Buffer subscriptions in favor of Hypefury.

That was the ultimate validation.

Finding a Partner🤝

Samy and Yannick met through Indie Hackers!

By December 2019, Hypefury was doing $500 MRR and Samy was handling everything:

• Product development;
• User demos and onboarding;
• Customer support;
• Growth and Marketing.

That's when he realized that he needed help if he wanted Hypefury to be a real business, and not just a side project.

He started looking for a co-founder on Growth.

He then posted on Indie Hackers.

Yannick Veys found out about this and sent him an email.

Soon he flew to Paris to meet Samy and both decided to partner up.

Yannick agreed to join without any salary, it was his personal bet on the product.

They weren't making enough revenue to pay each other salaries, but both believed in the potential of Hypefury.

And it paid off!

Growth📈

The initial user feedback and subscriptions gave Hypefury product-market fit.

But to scale and grow beyond that they had to try out other channels.

Yannick describes 3 main growth strategies in his AMA:

• Organic search (this brings in 45K visitors to their site every month).
• Twitter itself, they tweet very often and plug their free Twitter growth course below the Tweets that do well.
• And Twitter word of mouth - when people see the "Hypefury" label on Tweets from influential accounts, they are naturally drawn to the product.

Yannick also writes a great monthly newsletter called Growth Notes, and they have a podcast and a private community of their top users.

Almost 2 years of continuous product improvement, great customer service, and effective growth strategies Hypefury is making more than $23K MRR today!

And they are on track for a lot more.

They recently launched a free plan for early creators, which opens up their user base massively.

Advice for Indie Hackers 🤗

Samy believes there's always room to improve and create something unique, even in a saturated market.

That's what Hypefury did in the beginning.

His advice -

"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 eyes open, because there are opportunities everywhere."

Read on for Key Lessons from Hypefury's story 👇

• 6 premium Insights📊
• 3 premium Ideas💡
• 4 premium Inspirations🤩
• 3 Primary Growth Channels and how they are using them📈
• Related Trends💹
• 4 Opportunities to tap into💰
• 7 premium Links🔗