The moment Twitter growth becomes easy... 💯

GM friends 👋

This week we’re talking about:

📈 The “Tipping Point”
🤝 Using Spaces to get your first 3,000 followers
🧱 Diary of a Founder: Hitting the Wall
🎙️ Upcoming Event: I’m speaking at NFT Melbourne
🎯 Building in Public: Newsletter Growth Update

Let’s get into it… 💯

📈 The “Tipping Point” - The Moment Growth Becomes Easy

Earlier today I was on a Twitter space and someone asked me:

“Alex, can you share what it’s like once you hit 20,000 followers on Twitter? Do you get new opportunities? Is growing easier? What’s different once you cross that milestone?”

It’s a great question, and one I’ve actually recorded a video on. But I deleted it afterwards because it felt a bit odd to talk in that way.

However, this is a newsletter about Growing Faster.

So if you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to go through the different stages of growth. This episode is for you.

Let’s start at the end of the story: 20,000+ followers

Right now I’ve just crossed 21,000 followers on Twitter. This growth has almost entirely been through two activities.

🧵 Twitter threads (occasional viral growth)

🎙 Daily twitter spaces (consistent linear growth)

What’s life like at the moment?

The biggest changes I’ve noticed since hitting this number:

• I now get invited to spaces. I don’t have to fight for a spot as much.

• Beyond spaces, I get quite a few opportunities to speak on podcasts and at events.

• People have started writing Twitter threads about me (e.g. Growth strategies I’ve spoken about, how we run our project, etc.) - Because they write a high effort piece of content, and tag me, I get organic growth from it.

• The BIGGEST most important change… If I write a good thread, it blows up, which makes growth MUCH easier. I finally feel like I can grow purely through writing threads. (There was a definite tipping point for this, which I’ll touch on in a moment).

Do I feel like I’ve made it (As cringe as that sounds)?

Do I feel like if I put a product up for sale people would buy it?

If I wasn’t running a project, could I turn 20,000 followers into a business?

Not at all. It feels very much like a middle ground. As though if I create a quality piece of content, that piece of content will blow up,

But if I was to promote something, only a core few people would be interested.

Looking at NFTInspect (the leading platform for tracking NFT twitter profile engagement), the majority of profiles that are in the top 100 have 30,000+ followers.

When I hit that number I’ll report back and give you an update.

So Alex, you mentioned a “Tipping Point” - What was the Tipping Point?

When I first started my content creation journey roughly 8 months ago with 2,000 followers, my goal was always 10,000.

I felt like once I hit that number, the NFT world would open up, and life in Web3 would become easy…

I was wrong (…kind of).

The tipping point where it started to feel easier was not 10,000.

It was 14,000.

Once I hit 14,000 followers, I found that it became MUCH easier to get a thread to blow up.

If you’re an emerging creator, your tipping point may be lower, it could be 8,000.

Or higher, like around 18,000.

But if there’s one thing I know, it’s that the grind is hardest at the beginning.

There is no feeling worse than creating a piece of content that you’re proud of, and it not getting the traction you expected.

But if you stick with it, the tipping point is waiting for you.

So keep pushing, smash those targets and find your tipping point.

🧗‍♂️ Growing Faster: Your first 3,000 followers

Okay, so we’ve spoken about hitting 14,000 subscribers. But what about your first few thousand?

If you’re on less than 3,000 followers. Right now you do not have enough reach for your content to consistently blow up.

You might write a killer post, and it gets missed because not enough people saw it for the algorithm to take over.

So how do you get your first 3,000 high quality followers. Don’t be just be a ‘reply guy’

Go on spaces, now.

When you speak on a Twitter space, you can get anywhere from 10-30 followers in 20 mins, depending on the space.

Do that 3-4 times per day, that’s 30-120 organic followers per day.

I use this website to find active spaces to speak on: https://spacesdashboard.com/

Pro-tip: Make sure to click the NFT tab, and look for spaces with more people in them.

🧱 Diary of a Founder: Hitting the Wall

I want to start to share a behind the scenes from my experience as an NFT founder. This week, I had an experience that most Web3 founders get. Burnout.

Let’s start by rewinding. How did we get here?

Late last year, I found that going on frequent Twitter spaces each week, and actively producing Web3 content got a lot of attention on our project Bricktopians.

That attention converted into sales, which converted into community growth and a higher floor price.

At the start of the year, I set a goal of consistently attending Twitter spaces each week, and maximising my content production to accelerate our project’s growth.

The grind has been awesome. We’ve been hitting our targets, and have been one of the only projects growing in this market.

To maintain this pace, it has meant back to back to back late nights, with zero days off.

And then, on Wednesday, I hit the wall.

I woke up feeling like my brain had been put in a blender.

I knew I couldn’t jump on a Twitter space, and I knew I needed a full day to myself.

But what about growth? What about the mission?

Well…

I called in the Avengers.

Rather than let the day be lost. I jumped into our group chat with our most active holders and posted a video.

I said:

“Hey guys, I’ve hit the wall. So today, I need you to be me. If you’ve never spoken on a Twitter Space, today is your day. If you’ve been holding back that post about Bricktopians, today is the day to post it.”

“If you take care of today, I’ll be back and ready tomorrow.”

I didn’t know what to expect.

I took some time away from Twitter until later that afternoon. When I checked in, my phone had blown up.

Out of nowhere, all our Bricks had rallied.

And when I went to check the group chat, I’d seen they’d spent the entire day on spaces sharing our message.

The next day, I woke up fresh, in attack mode,

And most of all, proud of our community for bringing the energy when I didn’t have it.

It’s moments like this that make the 24/7 grind all worth it.

So to my Bricktopians, if you’re reading this.

Thank you ❤️

🎙️ Speaking at NFT Melbourne

If you’re in Melbourne or Australia, I want to see you! In 2 weeks, I’ll be speaking at NFT Melbourne, sharing our insights on wearable NFTs and building sustainable growth in an NFT project.

Find out more at: https://www.nftmelbourne.xyz/

See you there 💪

🎯 Building the Newsletter

^{If you’re new here, one of the core principles of the content I share is that a newsletter is the most linear and simple business you can start in Web3. It has high sponsorship revenue and can go from being a side hustle to a full-time business in under a year. I am building this newsletter in public, to share the progress each week so that you can be a part of the journey. Now let’s get into it 👇}

This week was super positive. Let’s start with the numbers.

This Week:
Subscribers: 1,645 (+50)
Open Rate: 51.0% (Above 50% which is awesome 🏆)

How did I grow it? Purely through threads. This week I shared 3 threads (Mon, Wed, Fri), but it was my Wednesday thread on the latest Amazon Marketplace News that blew up and did the heavy lifting.

Now that I’m hitting close to 2,000 subscribers, I’m starting to get my first organic mentions of sponsorships. The first was from a newsletter sponsorship aggregator, the second being an NFT project in Australia. I’m not pursuing this yet, but it’s exciting to see the early signs of this beginning.

Tracking my near-term Goals:

🚧 Get my newsletter earlier in the week: This is an area I still need to work on with running my NFT project Bricktopians and balancing external Twitter content production.

🚂 1645 / 2,000 Subscribers: This is on track. I was happy to see moderate growth in the past week.

🚂 Expand the content categories: I’m now starting to flesh out more of what I want to speak about. If you’re wondering my process for this, it’s super simple. In Notion I have 8 headings with categories I want to create content for. I’m now filling out those categories with modules that I can include in different weeks.

It’s been a massive week, and now the grind continues. Onto the next week!

Hey, this is Alex

If you made it to the bottom, I appreciate you ❤️

I’ve been in Web3 for 8 years, ETH since $45 and am building on my NFT project Bricktopians every single day.

If you enjoy what I write about and want to be a part of what I’m building,

Grab a Bricktopian NFT and join our world.