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Free Product to 10k in 3 days with Twitter Tool

4 points by yy633013 4y ago

Hi HN I'm an ex-big tech employee that moved to startups and is now working on a new project. Together with a friend of mine we put together a small bootstrapped tool to help with the mess that is Twitter Bookmarks. We launched dewey.'s latest iteration last week and it sold over $10K already. This is the first time I built a niche software product, but I'm happy to share what I learned so far, so please feel free to ask me anything. And here's dewey. if you'd like to check it out - https://getdewey.co I've made a discount code for you - HackerNews5

fIREpOK 4y ago
That's for bookmarks when using the Twitter app? Because my Firefox bookmarks of Twitter pages appear to work fine. Maybe that should be tagged as a Show HN?
ipoopmoney 4y ago
Congrats on the revenue. Interesting product but IMO very niche. I don't see this scaling to anything meaningful with Elon at the helm "disrupting". Few questions: How did you get your first users? Is this really a problem on Twitter? Plenty of tools out there to get your bookmarks. I don't see this being huge.
- yy633013 4y ago
  Thanks for the congrats. If you go and search Twitter search you'll find tens of thousands of people complaining about bookmarks being an afterthought. I personally got tired of this being the red-headed stepchild feature for the Twitter product team so built dewey. It solves my problem and we're lucky enough to have built something awesome that solves other people's problems too. Search volume around Twitter bookmarks is also steadily growing, especially with recent drama at Twitter and users trying to back up their data in case Twitter dies. Our first users came from Twitter search outreach. Find people that complain about Twitter bookmarks in a tweet or ask a question, and reply with the value prop for dewey. and a link. PaulG's things that don't scale. And yes, it really is a problem. At first Twitter Blue was shipped to give users folders (4 years after feature release) but most of our users have hundreds if not thousands of bookmarks and Twitter, in their brilliance, didn't ship search. This means that, whoops, I have folders now and I'm paying for them but I can't actually do anything meaningful with my historical bookmarks at all. No way to parse. That's why we built dewey., and we did it well before the API for Bookmarks even existed which was a fun technical challenge to overcome.
sharemywin 4y ago
I'm not much of a twitter user what is a twitter bookmark?
- yy633013 4y ago
  Twitter allows you to "like" tweets which is a public signal that people can see. A lot of people use Likes to save tweets they want to find later. But this pollutes the algorithm with social signals that are thin. Bookmarks allow you to save the tweet without imparting A) a public sign you like something and B) without pushing the algorithm directly. Bookmarks are very useful because of that. And, they are also private - accessible only to the account holder.

4 points by yy633013 4y ago

fIREpOK 4y ago

That's for bookmarks when using the Twitter app? Because my Firefox bookmarks of Twitter pages appear to work fine. Maybe that should be tagged as a Show HN?

ipoopmoney 4y ago

Congrats on the revenue. Interesting product but IMO very niche. I don't see this scaling to anything meaningful with Elon at the helm "disrupting". Few questions: How did you get your first users? Is this really a problem on Twitter? Plenty of tools out there to get your bookmarks. I don't see this being huge.

yy633013 4y ago
Thanks for the congrats. If you go and search Twitter search you'll find tens of thousands of people complaining about bookmarks being an afterthought. I personally got tired of this being the red-headed stepchild feature for the Twitter product team so built dewey. It solves my problem and we're lucky enough to have built something awesome that solves other people's problems too. Search volume around Twitter bookmarks is also steadily growing, especially with recent drama at Twitter and users trying to back up their data in case Twitter dies. Our first users came from Twitter search outreach. Find people that complain about Twitter bookmarks in a tweet or ask a question, and reply with the value prop for dewey. and a link. PaulG's things that don't scale. And yes, it really is a problem. At first Twitter Blue was shipped to give users folders (4 years after feature release) but most of our users have hundreds if not thousands of bookmarks and Twitter, in their brilliance, didn't ship search. This means that, whoops, I have folders now and I'm paying for them but I can't actually do anything meaningful with my historical bookmarks at all. No way to parse. That's why we built dewey., and we did it well before the API for Bookmarks even existed which was a fun technical challenge to overcome.

sharemywin 4y ago

I'm not much of a twitter user what is a twitter bookmark?

yy633013 4y ago
Twitter allows you to "like" tweets which is a public signal that people can see. A lot of people use Likes to save tweets they want to find later. But this pollutes the algorithm with social signals that are thin. Bookmarks allow you to save the tweet without imparting A) a public sign you like something and B) without pushing the algorithm directly. Bookmarks are very useful because of that. And, they are also private - accessible only to the account holder.