> I don't know if I'm in an algorithmic rabbit hole, but my Twitter shows hundreds of people like this talking about how much they are making, how many signups they are getting for their products, how many Twitter followers they have.
I’ve followed a lot of them. Maybe 100 at one point?
I love watching people build little businesses, iterate, and find success. It was really cool to see them all working on their various things, celebrating the little wins, and sharing things they learned along the way.
But to be honest, I’ve gradually unfollowed most of them. Many of them got a little too into the self-promotion angle and their content became repetitive “follow me for more content like this” bits. It felt like half of them were repeating same variations of the popular topic of the week every week, because they were! When threads were the thing to do I’d see the same topic rehashed to death in thread form for about 2 weeks by different people until
they all moved on to the next topic.
Another chunk of them slowly pivoted from their own business to selling courses, educational materials, or “pay $499 to access my private community of builders” deals. I hit the unfollow button as soon as they pivot to this stuff.
There are a few that I still follow, but if I’m being honest I don’t know that I’ve learned a whole lot. The most successful ones always have their business success wrapped up largely in their giant social media followings, which turns into a game of how well they can market to their audience without being off putting. The most famous example is the levels.io guy, who is by all means an honest and great guy but nevertheless appears to be making businesses that spread by word-of-Twitter because he has such an audience. Nothing wrong with that, really, but after watching it for a few years you realize that it’s not repeatable unless you can play the Twitter game successfully at massive scale, which is what a lot of these influencers and up trying with mixed success.