How I used Twitter to validate my course idea and make $512 in 35 days

So my writing course crossed $500 in sales today morning.

I thought it would be useful to share how I used Twitter to validate the idea and pre-sell the course.

It might help someone looking to build and sell knowledge products.

Let's start 👇

The biggest challenge with launching anything on Twitter is getting eyeballs on your landing page.

Even if you have a decent audience, the moment you share a link in your Tweets, the algorithm penalizes those posts and doesn't show it to most of your followers.

And this happens even if you post the link in the 2nd or 3rd tweet, not just the 1st tweet.

I had suffered with this problem before with other projects.

I wanted to avoid it this time.

Broadly I faced 3 challenges:

• Get as many eyeballs on the landing page as possible
• Validate the need before building the actual product.
• Figure out the right pricing for the product. (This is tough if you have a small audience)

I made a basic outline of the course in Notion based on what I wanted to build.

Setup a Gumroad page for the course with the course outline.

Then I posted a tweet with the screenshot of the outline.

I even said that few people can get the course for $0.

They just have to reply with ✍️

And I will DM them the link.

I wanted to make it a no-brainer for people to check out the landing page.

That tweet got 35K impressions.

There were 90+ replies within 6 hours.

The landing page got 400+ views.

Initially I DMed everyone who replied. Once I got tired I posted the link to the course.

The first 5 people got the course for free. After that I kept raising the price as more people kept buying.

This gave me a sense of what people were willing to pay for a course like this.

Within 48 hours I had made $247 through 49 sales.

Then I started working on building the course.

After this getting sales was about building in public.

I knew I wasn't going to get a traffic spike like this again, but I had to constantly bring in some traffic regularly otherwise sales would dry up.

I had set the course launch date to be 17th April. So I made a plan on how I was going to build the whole thing by then.

And every couple of days I tweeted out progress updates on the course.

This nudged people who were on the fence to check it out and maybe buy it.

I even sent initial chapters to the pre-sale buyers as they were getting finished.

Folks loved it and shared initial testimonials.

I used these testimonials on the landing page as well as in my Tweets.

Eventually, today morning, after about 5 weeks the course has crossed $500 in sales.

I have already launched the e-book version and the community for the course.

Working on the video version now.

I'm planning to continue raise prices as I find buyers at the current price.

This gives me some sense of the right price for the product.

This course is not a one off project.

I plan to create a community of writers and possibly even a job board for creators.

Right now, for the next couple of weeks I'm focused on the video course and community.

If you're interested, you can check out the course here : Make Money With Words

Hope you found this useful.

Let me know if you have any more questions.

Happy to answer them.

Cheers,
Ayush