You already know it's the creator spaces show. Okay. Do you consider yourself a creator?
Yes. I consider myself a creator, but my long-term goal is to be like a full-time creator.
And so tell me what exactly do you create?
My main creative outlet is Twitter for now. And the goal is to create content, to help other creators make better content.
I think I initially saw you where we in the same ship, 30 for 30 cohort. The first thing I noticed when I first saw your stuff was the design you were doing. And so how much do you consider yourself a writer versus a designer versus a creator
with Gretchen? I don't consider myself a designer at all. So basically my design sessions are very calculated. The first one is the color and the second one, my designs are not like complex or anything. They are basically made of icons. I find all over the place.
Awesome. I did not realize that. I thought you were drawing these all year. I
wish I could.
So, how do you build your audience up now? Because I know you've made some great strides in the past few months, a year pin tweet at the time of recording is from just about a month and a half ago, two months ago. Now, maybe. And you were challenging yourself to get 4,700 new followers and 85. So we're coming up on the end of that 85 days how's progress. It has
been, the goal was never to get to 10 K the goal was to make a hard push on Twitter, learn a lot about the journey. And also for me, the main thing was to share everything that I'm learning during these, let's say Twitter push that I am doing to these followers. And
so how did you start out building your audience? How have you changed in your mindset over time?
We were in the middle of a pandemic because this happened one year ago, more or less, my mind was like, I can try to find a new job or I can try to build something by myself. And I've been a huge Twitter consumer for a long time. I've seen other creators build an audience. So I said, why not?
And so what form did that take when you were starting?
Yeah. So at the beginning it was mostly single treats, pretty bad ones. If I have to say, because I always take a look at my content and see the tweets I was putting out one year ago. It's just not very good, but that's cool because now I see the content that they put out now, and there's a huge difference. And that speaks to my evolution as a creator. I'm proud of that at least. Yeah.
And did you see a shift when you join ship 30? Did that change anything in how you go about.
Not that much, because at the time I had already like a bigger audience than most of the people that joined shift 30. So she certainly can be like a great push, especially if you have not a big audience, probably like on the one case like that, because everyone supports each other. But for me it doesn't do anything in terms of numbers.
But of course it does a lot in terms of people that retweet the content, you obviously need to create content, but my focus will be a hundred percent to engage with bigger accounts because that's how you get like attention and. On you. And when you can provide, because obviously at the beginning, you are tweeting into the void and you have zero followers. So the way to get you those eyes on you is to go to bigger accounts and leave valuable comments.
But there is like a super fine line between living a value content and being like a spammer. But if you balance it out, Then it's the quickest strategy to get like those first hundred followers. And then from there you can start to double down on content instead of engagement. If that's something that you prefer.
So we've talked a bit about audience building and now let's dig into the meat. Monetizing right now you've got twit box, which is a notion Twitter dashboard. And then I think you're doing some freelance work as well. Yep. So tell me about that and your other projects that I probably don't know.
Yeah. So basically I have to pay the products on sale. One is an e-book and it's basically how I made, like my first couple of hundred online dollars. Then he will call the Twitter thief. And it just speaks about how you can steal content from other people and still followers and stuff like that. And it's basically a Twitter growth guide, but these guys with the stealing theme, I realized early on that it's super hard to create a hundred percent original content.
I mean, in my experience, or you're not content doesn't really exist. Like we are always building and creating on top of other people's content, other people's ideas. So that's like the mindset I try to bring into like content creation. It's even encouraged in my case to get inspiration from other creators call, they ride and so on, because that's the way you'll find your own voice.
Like you drink from many sources, you put it together, you mix it with your own personal experiences and that's how you create original content. That's not really original. It's your content. That's the main thing has been like going super strong for me. And at the same time, it allows me to create like a good branding opportunity.
Awesome. I can't talk about monetization without talking about brand positioning. I think they're possibly the most important things. Now I've got a few guesses why you chose this yellow orange shade. And one of them is that it is one of the most contrast in colors against the blue of Twitter. But please explain why did you choose this
color? So like one of the first reasons was because when I started out on Twitter, one of my first follows was Jack Boucher and he has a course around this. One of the first lessons in that course, he says that you should make one decision to eliminate like a thousand. He applies it on to like the design side of things. So basically that's why his account like visualized value on the designs. He does only have like black and white.
So since I wanted to include some visuals in my content, I said, I need to like choose one color and let's stick with it until the end. The reason why I chose these yellow slash orange is because first I liked the color. Second, what you said. Yeah. I get contrasts perfectly with Twitter and also in the dark mode, which most people like browse tutor, bees it's super impactful. Like when you scroll the feed super easy to do super recognizable. Awesome.
So what's your primary source of revenue now across these different prices?
Yeah. So basically the main source of revenue is freelancing. What I do with freelancing is help usually other creators or entrepreneurs, like early stage startups with social media strategy. They come to me because they have a lot of content and they don't know what to do with it, or they don't have a set social media study in place. So basically help them with that. And that has been going quite well. I hear
you've got a waitlist.
Yeah, it really depends. I'm not trying to get my entire Workday full with clients. So when I feel it's enough, I just close my contact form and don't get any more clients. Not because I don't more clients or more. That's why I do it, but I don't want to supercharge my schedule because one of the main reasons I didn't get back to corporate work was because I wanted to work. Not as many hours as I used to. In advertising, it's usually like a super demanding industry.
I could do like 10, 12 hour days at least once every week, because there is compliance. I need delivery, stuff like that. Once I experienced that life, I said, I want to work the least amount of hours possible, or at least to make them like super impactful for the rest of my day.
What's your north star metric for success. How do you know you're on the right.
Yep. So it's time, flexibility or time freedom in the sense that I want to get to do what I want to do whenever I want, for example, if I'm in the middle of a Workday, let's say it's Tuesday and I have to go to a doctor's appointment at 11:00 AM, which is normally a time that everyone is at the office or something like that. I can just go. Yeah.
And do you plan to keep freelancing over the longer term and raise rates as demand increases? Or do you think you're going to try to transition to all products?
Yeah, the thing about freelancing, I like it because you get to work with a lot of different people and so on, but at the same time, it's the same issue than having a full-time job. Basically, you are trading your time for money and that doesn't fit very well with the lifestyle. Yeah. So
I've done you a disservice using the word freelance because the very first course I ever took online, it was called double your freelancing by Brennan Dunn. And it was like a five step email course. The first email was never calling yourself a freelancer, triple your rates, and start calling yourself a consultant.
That's a good one. I don't really know how to call it. I just say freelancing because everyone knows exactly what a freelance means. So basically that's just wording, but I agree.
So what's your current goal as a creator? I know you've got the thread out. You're working on growing to 10,000 Twitter followers. Why 10,000? What's the step from there?
The first thing I should say is that I'm always against like monetary metrics. So basically followers is just like a vanity metric and it's not really useful if those followers are not engaged, basically I'm trying to build like an engagement. I don't think I really want to be like that person that has a million followers that they have tomorrow that will be probably like too much to manage around 10,000 followers.
Feels like great number in the sense that it can bring you like more opportunities from the outside because 10 K followers, it looks good. But at the same time, it feels like the size of a community, which is quite manageable. Also. I've seen so many people that I know. I don't know why once they get to those things, a growth, like. It's a
psychological thing. I'm close enough to 10 K now where I could spend about a hundred dollars and get there on follower ads. But I've told myself no, you're going to get there organically. Yeah,
for me, it's the way, because I've usually you can buy followers or you can make ads and stuff like that, but why do you want those followers? If they are not like interacting with you and I'm not against liking it? What I am against is about buying followers, which is something that more people do than we realize.
Yeah. So you reach 10 K followers. You go into hyper growth mode. You start skyrocketing towards a hundred K what's the next product you put it.
I'm not entirely sure I've actually been thinking about it. And I think one of the things that would be wise to do right now probably is update both of my products because one, the ebook, for example, I wrote it when I had around a thousand followers. So I have now way more things to add, to expand the content. And also like the other product that I will, which is with books needs also a bit of upgrading. That's probably my next move in terms of products.
And the cool thing about having 10,000 followers is that you can experiment super quickly because you get like super fast feedback loops and stuff like that. So basically my idea is to release like smaller products. See how the audience reacts. Yeah. One of them works really well. Then maybe I can think about expanding it and creating like that flagship product that most well-known creators have something that can make sales even two, three years from now.
It's on my mind is not that easy to do because it needs to be evergreen too. That's probably like my.
If you could send a tweet back to your start, what would it be? And when would it be you get to choose the start?
That's a good question because one of the things that, that helped me more in life and also in Twitter is the notion of getting out of your comfort zone out of your comfort zone is where like the real growth happens. And even if I don't give that feeling out of my Twitter content and so on, I'm like hyper Sean. I wouldn't say an introvert because I'm not an introvert. I'm quite an extrovert, but I am an extrovert. Still gain a bit of trust and confidence to open myself to others.
When I started tweeting, I was super scared of sharing my thoughts. And the only thing that pushed me through that barrier was this notion of the real growth happens outside of your comfort zone. So that probably will be my tweet, keep pushing because that's when good things happen.