Using my mantra of "A Series of Small Bets" today (Sep 12 2021), I started working on a new side project. Inspired by the SEOtweets, a website that aggregates "The best of #seotwitter wrapped up, every week."
Twitter hosts thousands of organic communities of people with shared interests. When you follow enough of the people who are a part of these communities, you get exposed to the popular tweets shared between the community members through likes and retweets.
For example, I follow enough people who are a part of the following communities to be a part of #BitcoinTwitter #JamaicanTwitter #JamaicanFinanceTwitter #DrupalTwitter #BlackTwitter #TechStartupTwitter #IndieHackerTwitter
Keeping up with each of these communities sometimes requires hours out of your week, and often I miss hot topics and trends that happen in the communities because I didn't get to spend as much time that week on Twitter.
Also, because there is no official grouping in these communities, I can miss interesting tweets because I don't follow specific influencers.
Out of all the Twitter communities I belong to, I feel most fear of missing out (FOMO) for #BitcoinTwitter. So to scratch my own itch, I chose to clone SEOtweets for Bitcoin Twitter. Besides my interest, I also saw Bitcoin Twitter as the easiest niche to monetize. It is VERY active, there are thousands of people in the community, and I already can predict what type of companies would want to pay for access to this audience.
I will be calling this project Bitcoin Thoughts. A place where you can come for curated thoughts from the Bitcoin community.
I will be logging all my actions each step of the way, so you can see what influenced my decisions and how the parts were built.
The beauty of this project is that it is a very generic application that can be white-labelled for any other Twitter niche community. I may even consider building a software-as-a-service project to allow others to create their community-specific aggregator if this turns out to be a profitable venture.
Day 1
Today is not really Day 1 because I have been researching the background, but it's day 1 of taking action and putting in the work to make it a reality.
After weeks of back and forth, I finally met up on a Google Meet conference call with the creator of SEOTweets, Adam Durrant.
I had reached out to him over Twitter and convinced him to clone his website for me for a small fee (~USD $1300). His website is a combination of no-code tools, including Webflow, Tweetpic and Zapier. The price might be a steal or a rip-off based on your perspective. I had no spare time to learn Webflow, and I always wanted to know it. I plan to make $1000/month after 12 months, and he already has a working model, so I'm sure it will work, and I can skip many of the pitfalls of doing it myself. For me, this was a fantastic deal!
If you are familiar with the concept of no-code tools, products like Webflow allow you to make pretty complex websites without knowing how to code. If you came here to follow along and build your clone of what I am building, you can do it for free! I basically traded time for money. I invested the money because I was short on time. You can invest time, to make money.
Adam and I spoke about the plans, the features and limitations of the no-code tools and our expectations.
This week, I will be sharing with Adam my design ideas so he can work on the website's appearance.
I registered the domain https://bitcointhoughts.io and the Twitter account @btc_thoughts
We are planning an October 1 launch, so we should be done with the major parts in less than 20 days. A quick micro-app, shipped and ready to grow.
How will this make Money?
We have a number of ideas for income generation. The first and most obvious one is to build a mailing list and send weekly top tweets/articles along with sponsored ad placements.
We can also use the website for ad placements.
There are companies looking to hire employees to work in Bitcoin companies, so a paid job postings are another option.
Adam has already gotten a number of offers for sponsorship so I know that the model works.
Follow me on Twitter for more updates as we make progress.
@frazras