Samy shipped the MVP a couple of days after his tweet and invited the people who had responded to join a closed beta.

“he invited people that responded to his original tweet to join the closed beta”

Keeping the beta limited to a small number of spots created scarcity and made early users feel like insiders, which Yannick frames as an important first step in building a loyal following before the product could do everything users wanted.

“The closed beta was limited to just a few spots and that immediately created scarcity”

They built out content/SEO over time; by the AMA (July 2021) organic search was bringing in a large, steady volume of visitors.

“Organic traffic is pretty big. Currently around 45k visitors a month.”

They tweeted frequently and plugged a free Twitter-growth course underneath posts that performed well, which fed an email funnel. Separately, the record's own storyContent and this same AMA both note that Hypefury's branding appears on the tweets sent through it, so other users see the tool being used by accounts they already follow.

“We tweet quite a bit and plug our free Twitter growth course.”

They ran an affiliate program early on, paying users and outside creators to recommend the product, which Yannick frames as outsourcing marketing to a crowd of people who only get paid on results.

“Affiliate marketing is outsourcing your marketing to the crowd.”

The same channel had a downside: some affiliates broke the program's terms of service by bidding on Hypefury's own brand name in Google Ads, which didn't bring in new users, just intercepted people already searching for the brand while costing far more per click than generic keywords.

“This is particularly damaging because it doesn't add anything to our visibility. It just sucks away value from our brand.”

They made it very easy to join their referral program (a single click gets a user a shareable referral link), which they say produced a large jump in referral volume once the friction was removed.

As of this quote, Yannick says they still barely spend on advertising and get almost all their leads organically, crediting referrals and word-of-mouth over any paid channel.