Welcome back to the predictable revenue podcast. I'm your host, Colin Stewart. And today I'm joined by Muneeb Awan. He's the founder at PostNitro and this is another founder product market fit story. Welcome to the show. Muneeb Awan: Hello. Happy to be here. I'm glad to have you here. I'm really looking forward to learning a bit about your journey. Collin Stewart: Tell me about PostNitro and where did the idea come from? Okay. So PostNitro didn't start off as a carousel post initiation platform. We were first designing a Twitter automation platform because I was obsessed with, growing up my Twitter followers and stuff like that. And then Elon Musk happened. He added the, the, All of the APIs were paid, so we didn't have that much money. We were, working ourselves a nine to five. So we had to switch and other product, the Twitter automation platform was almost two months into development and we were giving, almost ready to give it out as an MVP to test how it, works, but
then so we stopped everything and we were, Broken completely, we had didn't know what to do, during that time I was trying to promote it. We were trying to create a wait list around the product and create awareness to see how, the market reacts to it. So I was, constantly designing infographics and carousels for it using Canva and it was really annoying. And, me and we spent a lot of time, after the Twitter thing happened, what is the next plan for post Nitro? And we, since we had a really generic name and we could go into anything related to social platforms and posting. So, we tested out and I actually constantly nagged about. Creating infographics with CIRAC, like, I can, it is really hard to, get align everything and design everything. And it was quite time consuming. So we just went into it. We saw different platforms and we thought about how can we make this easier? How can we make creating
infographics carousel posts easier? And since carousel posts are long image posts and you need to align everything and, make it seamless across the social platform. And we thought, this could be a good start. And we checked out our competitors, not daily. They weren't competitors back then, but we were just starting out different ideas and we saw that, there was a gap and we could fill it in with our own solution. And then we just go in and I think we spent about three months developing it. And then we, started creating awareness on Twitter and other platforms. And that's. How we launched post nitro. It took us about three months to, launch an MVP. It was really bare bone platform back then. And we just kept getting feedback and we kept developing it. Amazing. So before you started, did you do any like validation, any customer interviews before you started building or was this a, Hey, we're scratching our own itch. So we know what's going on. Muneeb Awan: Actually I did interview a
few people, they were close friends. So I went around, they were, Developers like myself, I am a developer. I'm, I have an experience of about 10 years now, and I have never worked on design aspect because as developers get the entire thing designed and we just need to code it. So I went to them and I thought, what's the issue that you guys face? With designing a platform. And even I went to the social media marketers, different social media marketers, and I asked them, what problems do you face? And they said, this is too time consuming. And, we need to align everything. There are too many colors in the world. So, I. Pitch this idea to them. What if we could simplify creating infographics and carousel posts for you? And that's how we, in a way validated it without actually building anything. And I asked them, what if I build you something like this, would you be willing to give it a try? And we launched, when we launched the MVP, we gave it to them, they were our first users. And I asked them that,
what do you feel? And obviously, since it was an MVP, they could find a lot of problems with the initial release. So they kept providing us with feedback and it helped us refine our platform further. So how many users did you have that you gave it a way to for free? Muneeb Awan: Okay. So the private beta that we launched was given to 10 people. Very close friends of ours and a few who, well, you know. A friend from Twitter who were just followers on Twitter. Then I would just message them. Hey, would you want to try this out? And then we launched the public beta in August and we kept it in public beta for eight months because we didn't see, I personally didn't feel like the platform was ready to, get monetized though I was working on nine to five throughout this time and financing the whole thing and the entire platform. Even the AI credits were free. So we just wanted users to provide us with their feedback so that we can improve ourselves. So even if you go right
now into a roadmap, all of the entire tickets are given to us by the users. They request a feature and we build it as fast as we can, and then we ship it. And that's how we, we started gaining momentum and it actually spread as well, because since the platform was free. And we weren't charging anyone, so they were more happy to use it. And then it everyone was talking about it and that's how we grew, especially in the Twitter built in public. Community, they guys, those guys helped us a lot because, I relied mostly on them to provide us with their feedback because we were building in public. We were, we kept sharing everything that we built and we honestly got a lot of feedback from them, public bashing off of a platform initially. And that's how we actually, got better at this. I got lots of questions. So tell me about the building in public piece. We just had Zach Barney on the show and he also did this. I believe he was on LinkedIn.
Instead of Twitter, because sales as dirty sales folks tend to gravitate towards LinkedIn, as opposed to Twitter. But I've heard arguments for and against building a public. I've heard people say, it's great. You get the message out. On the flip side, I imagine for every one founder that building in public works, there's 10 founders where they're just posting into the void on Twitter, LinkedIn, Tik TOK, I don't know, I don't know all the social platforms, but I imagine there's, you're, it can feel like you're posting into the void. Muneeb Awan: Thank you. That's actually really true. If you keep posting there, just, posting there, you might get some engagement from different founders. Or if you ask questions, some founders might reply over there, but, you need to build a reputation over there. That you are building something that you need, you are a legit person who's actually building something and wants to share their findings, not just wins. If you go into the hashtag right now, building public, or even in the
community that of the building public everyone is just sharing their wins. No one is right now sharing their losses or their learnings. Basically everyone wants to share their MRR and stuff like that. So. Over time, you start to see a decline in this, in the engagement that you get. So in our case, we were really rel legit in the, in this sense that we, shared everything that was happening in our platform. So we've got a lot of feedback and the best thing that happened through this was that, we got to engage with a lot of more seasoned founders. And, when I tweet something, they would reply to that tweet, because we had built in a reputation and we had communicated earlier. So, they would provide us with their feedback. So that helped us. So just posting there is not really. Yeah, because I imagine I, I remember hacking my followers in the early days using like tweet bots or things like that, where you
do the follow on follow thing. And I thought, okay, once I get to a certain follower count, I'll have all this engagement and I probably have, I don't know, five or 10, 000 followers and I have zero engagement predominantly. And the reason is they're low quality followers and I don't engage on the platform. So how do I go from, I don't engage at all to starting engaging, like, what does it mean to show up and be part of that community? Okay. Muneeb Awan: When I started, promoting PostNitro, I had 23 followers. Okay. And right now I have about 560 or something like that. Not really that higher number or something like that, but those are the people that I got to engage with most. Right. So, and in the start, I would just reply to everything like any interesting thing that I would find, I would reply to it and I, since I was subscribed to the pro version of Twitter. So I would create decks. So this is a secret hack that I had. So, yeah, it would help someone. So
it's okay because we are talking about building in public. So it's okay. If you are subscribed to a pro Twitter account, okay. You can create different decks. So for the platform. That you're building search terms can be saved in each deck in a separate column. Right. So create separate column for each search term, and then see the people who are posting about that. And then sort by latest and then reply to everything, in a way that you would be engaging those people would eventually reply back. Right. Because they would have awesome question or there would be anything related to your search term. So that's how actually, I started growing my Twitter account and engaging with the right kind of people that would provide the feedback for posting. And so we just helped me understand, cause I haven't been a regular Twitter user in a long time. You said with X pro, you get different decks. Tell me about that. Yes. Muneeb Awan: Yes. Okay. If you go
into the Twitter X premium account, there is X pro. Right? So you can create different decks for each name. So I have three right now, three decks that I have created. One is for marketing in which I have the different search terms. Okay. Like Instagram carousels or LinkedIn carousels. So every tweet that comes in for related to Instagram carousel or LinkedIn carousel, it's at the very top. So I see it and I reply instantly. Do it. Right. Is this like a list, like a Twitter list or is it just a Twitter list for a specific term? Muneeb Awan: It's a search term search for that keyword. Okay. Okay. Yeah. And then the other one is for competitors. So I would see what the competitors are talking about, what other people are talking about for competitors. And I would be aware of what the, what they are building next or what they are talking about. And then one is for personal use. Like all the notification and stuff like that goes into that one. So
if, you are subscribed to Twitter or X, so, and you are, paying for a complete suit of that. So you should utilize this service. And I think that, this helped us a lot and this might help someone if, someone hears this. Yes. Absolutely. What kind of volume did this bring to you? Because I imagine somebody is sitting there saying 560 followers doesn't sound like a lot, especially compared to Collins, 5, 000, but I'd argue I'm almost jealous. I'm jealous of your 5, 000, your 500, because you have 500 real people that you really engage with. And so what did that turn into in terms of volume? It was Muneeb Awan: awesome. And honestly, it was the best thing that happened for us because, there are a lot of different marketing. Tools that you can use, like, you need to work on SEO and, up your social media game, but we just, I just focused on Twitter. So Twitter was our primary, go to social platform
and, because there were real people talking about real things. So I could be honest about myself and I could write anything that I wanted and I could be myself over there. So it helped me actually engage better and connect with better people through Twitter. Nice. Cool. I love it. At what point, so you're building in public, you're sharing on Twitter you're, it's a free product at this stage. At what point did you turn on payments? Muneeb Awan: Okay. And the, we launched our pricing in May 1st, May, we launched our pricing plans. Okay. And by that time we had around, I think 15, 000 or 18, 000 signups on our platform and they were active users using the platform already 15, 000 signups. All from Twitter. Muneeb Awan: All from, mostly from Twitter. Let's say mostly from Twitter. Yes. And we, in the middle of this, we also partnered with different, we started partnering with different social media management platforms.
Because, we couldn't grow and grow without them in a way, because we are creating the infographics, but how do the users distribute them? That was a problem. And. I did not want it to our platform to go into distribution because that's a complete different level of headache. You might've heard of content studio, buffer. They are the top tier of this domain. And there are so many like them. So I did not want us to go into distribution of the, so we started partnering with them. The first partner was actually circled. And. And they too, we met on, Twitter, they had, they posted about the recent LinkedIn posting feature. I think they had just built this and they posted about it and replied to them. They, we have this, we've built this, users can do this on our platform and then they can distribute through you. How can we make this work? The founder of CircleBoom messaged me. Atta Khan, I think his name
was Atta Khan. He messaged me on Twitter. He was a, he found a platform really useful and he thought, how can we, integrate the two things together? And that's actually how we launched our SDK and CircleBoom was the first one to integrate our, we were in beta back then we hadn't even launched. And they were impressed by the platform. So they wanted to integrate us. And that's actually called Domino Effect. And we got about 40 platforms. Which are integrated with, who have integrated post 923 plus. Hell yeah, man. That's amazing. And so it started with CircleBoom and then everybody saw, oh, they did it. So now we have to. Muneeb Awan: We have Content Studio now. The big names that we have are top, the top four that I mentioned everywhere is CircleBoom, Radar, Publet, and Content Studio. Gotcha. No. Come on. Muneeb Awan: I messaged them and they were like, no, we cannot do this right now. You can build a tool that,
something like that. I couldn't stand what they were saying. Fair enough. Yeah. It's a, Muneeb Awan: I had to ask cause I'm in Vancouver and they're from Vancouver. So yeah. Muneeb Awan: Maybe you can have, maybe I've only talked to Ryan once. So I don't think it's a very strong connection. Sorry. So you turned on pricing in May of the 18, 000. Did you, was it a, everybody is now paying, everybody now has to pay. Is it, you just added a paid tier? What kind of what were the numbers or what happened? Muneeb Awan: Okay. The free, we kept the free plan. Okay. But we minimize the functionality of it and we, the paid plans had everything open. And I think in the start we had three different tiers. One was a solopreneur plan. One was small agency team and another one that I don't remember. We actually started, we are, you
Learning from them for the users and the ones that didn't weren't working out the plans that weren't working out. We started slashing them out. So, in the, initially when we got the 15 or 18, 000 users in first May and actually in the first 24. Yeah, I see it. That's cool. Ah, yeah, Oh, a hundred percent. A hundred percent. Cool. And then how, go ahead. No, go ahead.
Yeah. Yes, I hear you, my man. I'm curious where, so if Twitter was the original source, has Twitter remained the primary Muneeb Awan: source for you? . Yep.
Interesting. And how's that been going for you? ? I love it. Many. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you for sharing. If people want to learn a bit more about post nitro, where's the best place for them Muneeb Awan: To check out and it's post nitro. ai correct post nitro. ai and it's many that post nitro. ai. If you're looking to create these, if you're looking to do better on social, create the post nitro. ai. Carousels, that's the word I was looking for, great carousels and for Instagram, Tik TOK, LinkedIn, all that. I said, as soon as I saw your reply to my initial message, I forwarded it to my marketing guy, cause I know we do a