From 100 followers to $1K MRR with a testimonial SaaS

Started build-in-public posting from ~100 followers in February 2022, spending the first two months mostly engaging in other people's replies rather than promoting his own product.

“I started to notice that my Twitter account slowly started to grow in the first 2 months where I spent most of my time engaging in replies & adding value to other tweets rather than creating content about my product.”

He credits giving value in other people's threads before promoting anything as what grew the audience that later fed cold outreach.

“Create value for others & give help, suggestions for free before you even think of selling something you created”

He DMed people he had already engaged with on Twitter rather than cold strangers, asking about their work and pain points before mentioning the product.

“I began to focus on cold outreach via Twitter DMs reaching out only to people whom I've engaged in the past (as people don't like DMs from strangers) to get my first customer”

The DM conversations let him explain the specific value (fast, verifiable social proof on a website) once he understood the person's situation.

“I used this to explain about why it might be helpful to have verifiable social proof integrated into their website in 2 minutes”

After finding daily social posting draining, he diversified into SEO: long-tail articles and help guides for embedding testimonials in platforms like WordPress and Notion.

“I started doing small experiments like writing articles on long tail keywords, creating help guides for embedding testimonials in platforms like Wordpress, Notion etc which garnered website traffic with good search intent”

Set up a 7-day onboarding email sequence followed by a weekly email educating signups on how to use social proof and collect testimonials.

“I set up an email onboarding sequence that customers received for the first 7 days after signing up and then went on for one email a week.”

The sequence recovered users who had abandoned the product early but later understood its value, lifting free-to-paid conversion.

“This increased the free-to-paid conversion rate even after users abandoned using the product for the first time but later understood the product's value”

Collected testimonials from Famewall's own well-known creator customers and displayed them as social proof on the Famewall landing page itself.

“I collected & used a lot of testimonials as social proof on the landing page which worked really well in terms of increasing conversions. I know right, dogfooding my own product”

He noticed an increase in people searching for the Famewall brand name directly, which he read as a referral signal.

“I also noticed an increase in branded-search queries which was a good indicator that people heard about the product from friends/colleagues and most of those who came from recommendations had a higher likelihood to convert to paid users”