Latest / The Indie Hacker Podcast with Fexingo: Solo Developers, SaaS Side Projects, and Independent Tech / How a Solo Dev Used Twitter DMs to Hit 10K MRR
Transcript
- Lucas: If today's tech conversation gives you something usable, I want to mention something quick. Luna: Go ahead. Lucas: We deliberately don't run ads on these episodes. If you want to support that choice, the link is buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. Luna: Yeah, it's a small gesture that keeps this completely ad-free. Appreciate anyone who does. Lucas: Alright, back to today's story. I've been following a solo developer named Sarah Chen. She built a SaaS product called FormBlazer — it's a form builder with a twist: it integrates directly with Notion. And she grew it to ten thousand dollars in monthly recurring revenue in about five months. No ads, no content funnel, no TikTok. Luna: Wait, no content? That's like half the indie hacker playbook. What did she do instead? Lucas: She used Twitter DMs. Systematically. Not the spray and pray type of DM, but a very structured outreach process. And I want to walk through exactly how she did it, because the numbers are surprisingly good. Luna: I'm skeptical. DMs feel spammy. But I'm listening. What was her first step? Lucas: She built a list of about three hundred Twitter users who had tweeted something like 'I wish Notion had better forms' or 'Notion forms are clunky.' So she was finding people who already expressed the problem she solved. Luna: So signal-based prospecting. She wasn't cold-calling random accounts. Lucas: Exactly. Then she sent each person a DM. But the key was the message itself. She didn't pitch. She said something like, 'Hey, saw your tweet about Notion forms. I actually built something that might help — no pressure, just thought I'd share.' And she included a one-sentence value prop. Luna: That's smart. Low friction, no expectation. What was the response rate? Lucas: Out of the first two hundred DMs, she got about forty replies. That's twenty percent. Of those, fifteen booked a demo. And seven converted to paying customers at twenty-nine dollars per month. Luna: So seven customers from two hundred DMs. That's a three and a half percent conversion rate. Doesn't sound huge, but at twenty-nine dollars, that's two hundred and three dollars MRR from one batch. Lucas: Right. And she scaled that. Over five months, she sent about twelve hundred DMs total. That gave her roughly forty-two paying customers, bringing her to about twelve hundred MRR from DMs alone. The rest came from word of mouth and organic search. Luna: But here's my pushback: that's a lot of manual work. Twelve hundred DMs, even at a minute each, is twenty hours of just sending messages. Plus the replies and demos. Lucas: She agrees. So she automated part of it. She used a tool called TweetHunter to find the tweets with relevant keywords, then exported the list. But the actual DM sending she did manually, because she wanted each message to feel personal. Luna: Did she use any templates? Lucas: She had a loose script, but she always added a specific reference to the person's tweet. That's why the response rate stayed high. If she had copy-pasted, it would have dropped. Luna: What about scalability? If you're a solo dev, you can't send a thousand DMs a week forever. Lucas: That's the thing — she didn't need to. After five months, the organic growth from existing customers and a few blog posts started compounding. The DM outreach was just the jumpstart. She now does maybe fifty DMs a week as maintenance. Luna: So it's a launch strategy, not a long-term channel. I can see that. What about the cost of the tool? Lucas: TweetHunter is forty-nine dollars a month. She also used a cheap CRM — just a Google Sheet. So total cost per customer acquired from DMs was roughly three dollars and fifty cents. Compare that to Facebook ads, which for B2B SaaS can be fifty to a hundred dollars per customer. Luna: That's a no-brainer. But I'm wondering — did she get any negative reactions? People calling her spam? Lucas: A few. About five people told her to stop. She immediately apologized and removed them from her list. But the vast majority either ignored it or replied positively. And the ones who converted became some of her most vocal advocates. Luna: So the key is the targeting. If you're reaching people who already want what you have, it's not spam. Lucas: Exactly. And the lesson for indie hackers is: you don't need a big content machine. You need to find where your potential customers are already talking about their pain points, and insert yourself helpfully. Luna: Have you tried this yourself? Lucas: Not yet. But I'm building a small tool on the side, and I think I will. The barrier to entry is just a Twitter account and a few hours a week. Luna: I'd love to hear how it goes. Maybe we can do a follow-up in a few months. Lucas: Absolutely. For now, if you're an indie hacker stuck on growth, consider DMs. It's old-school, it's manual, but it works. Luna: And it's free, aside from a coffee subscription. Lucas: Speaking of which, we do have that coffee link. But we'll leave that in the show notes. Thanks, Luna. Luna: Thanks, Lucas. See you next time.