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Hey, welcome back to software social.
This week, I have someone joining me who probably needs no introduction,
but I will give one anyway.
Arvid Kahl, you probably know him from Twitter or his book zero to sold about
exiting the company he co-founded feedback Panda, or his book, the embedded
entrepreneur, or perhaps his new Twitter course called find your following, or
perhaps his blog or perhaps his podcast.
So welcome it to software, social everyone's favorite
German Canadian entrepreneur.
Arvid: Oh, thanks so much.
I really need to stop making products so we can keep these
introductions a bit shorter.
Ah,
Michele: Because a problem, right?
Like it's an addiction that this is like making things.
Arvid: That's when you just have to have really short names for everything
you do, so you can list them easier.
But yeah, it is an honestly.
Like I was trying to have a couple months of not doing anything after I released my
second book, just in the middle of 2020.
And then I just felt, I really continue doing stuff.
And, and this January, I just dove into it.
Like January 1st, I started writing.
January 31st, I released the course cause I really just
wanted to get something done.
I didn't have to.
I have my life plan is to do one thing a year, like one product a year.
Right.
Just so I can focus my attention and do the things that I want to do.
And turns out that this has now shrunk into one thing.
Not intentionally, it just happened because I didn't want
to spend like nine or 11 months in a year, not doing anything.
So it kinda, you know, you could throw on back to work when work is so enjoyable
and it's done in the community, which is like, everybody's always interacting
with me about the stuff that I love.
So it's hard to not do things.
You know, so that's why the list is growing and growing.
And I do appreciate you mentioning all the things, because it just
shows me how much I've actually done it the last couple of years.
So thank you.
Michele: You really are someone who has found their following
and found their community.
So perhaps that's a good place to start is with Twitter.
We're actually running a survey of our listeners right now because you know,
we've got more advertisers interested in us who aren't, you know, other sort of
indie companies and those advertisers want to know demographics and stuff like that.
And so we're doing this little survey that people can go on Twitter to
find the link to, it's our pin tweet.
And one of the responses to that was somebody was hoping that we could
talk a little bit about using Twitter effectively as an entrepreneur.
And this just happens to be the entire topic of your new course.
Arvid: That's right.
Conveniently, but Yeah.
I kinda fell into it.
I gotta say, like, I've been using Twitter for over a decade now,
really, because I'm a tech person.
I was a software engineer back in 2008 and nine already cause I've always been
doing software stuff, and Twitter was One of those things that people who
knew what they were doing were using.
So I was using it back in 2008 and nine, and ever since then, but I
was never using it professionally.
I was always using it just as a person looking around and looking at stuff and
reading and finding stuff interesting.
Following a couple people here or there not to intentionally, just kind of whoever
came on my radar was the person I would.
And that's showed because I think back in 2019, just after we had sold
feedback Panda, and for that story, I think people can go back to episode, I
forgot, but with Danielle y'all right.
My, my co-founder and
Michele: that was last, I guess, it would have been it's a December
2020 episode where yeah, we your co-founder and partner, Danielle.
Arvid: That was a whole thing, right.
That really occupied us for two years.
But once that was over, once we actually sold the company exited
and then had nothing to do, I kinda thought, okay, now I'm on Twitter.
I have my 400 followers that I've painfully accumulated over at that point
it must've been 10 years of doing nothing on Twitter, how can I leverage this?
How can I leverage the community that I'm already in, my personal
experience as a software entrepreneur, and as somebody who can now teach
the things that I've learned.
And then I started doing it more professionally.
I kind of just figured it out.
It's like almost everything, every entrepreneur, all day, it's just figuring
things out as they fall into your path.
Right.
And then I learned how to communicate with people more effectively and
in a way that builds relationships.
And it's not just me watching somebody do something, but
actually engaging with them.
And then building, building a following, building an audience, whatever you want
to call it, just like gathering people around you around the common cause
around the common topic of interest.
So yeah, I was really not using Twitter effectively because I didn't
care, or I didn't really know.
I don't think I knew how and that Twitter could be used in a way that I could then
leverage in a more professional sense.
So I was really just like following random people.
I was not following intentionally.
I was engaging with people when I thought I had something
really, really cool to see.
And not in any other situation, I was less responsive.
I didn't read the tweets ever.
I just, you know, and I use Twitter, like a person that didn't really
know how to use Twitter efficiently.
And that's fine, I guess, because most people don't, then everybody has a
different reason why they come to Twitter.
That's one of the first things that I went into for the course, because I
was thinking, Hey, I'm going to make a course for people who want to use Twitter
professionally, what do they need to know?
Right.
From the start.
And under the two things that I figured out in my reflection on this, I
actually, I didn't just make a course.
I wrote 42,000 words of a script and then narrate it that through a
teleprompter, into a camera, essentially.
That's what my courses, because that's how I I'm best I write first.
And then I record either for my podcast or no for this course.
So I really wrote it all out and edited it myself and thought about it.
And I think, the two main things you need to know is why am I on Twitter as the
person who wants to build an audience?
And why are the people that I want to be in my audience on Twitter, as well.
And then you need to bridge these two things, right?
Like if you're a software engineer and you really want to build a blog so that
your future employers can see how cool you are and you want to be on Twitter,
so you can build a little audience around yourself so that you can get into, I don't
know, Google or any other cool startup.
Well, then you need to know why special and what you can bring to the table
and what the people that you want to see your stuff come to Twitter
for, so you can provide it to them.
Or if you want to build a community around a particular social issue,
you need to understand what is your approach that makes you interesting.
And why do people who have also interested in that issue?
Why are they on Twitter?
What are they talking about and where are they?
And that's, you need to figure out first, because all this stuff that
you find in and Twitter advice.
It's very marketing, very salesy.
And how do I get people to follow me so that I can sell them something?
And that is fine.
You can build a Twitter audience to sell people something that's fine.
Monetizing is okay.
It's legal.
We can do this.
That's okay.
But you, you still have to be on Twitter for a reason for people to follow you
as a not just as a brand, not just as somebody who has a cool product,
but as a person that they want to engage with, because that relationship
is so much more important than any transaction you could potentially have.
And that's what I figured out at some point, people aren't on Twitter
because they want to be friends with.
They are on Twitter because they want to be friends with their peers, people
who are doing the exact same thing they're doing, or they got just a bit
ahead of them on the journey, or just a bit behind them on their journey.
They just want to connect with people.
And once you figure out that this is what people want, you learn how they
connect with people, and then you can provide things, opportunities for
them to actually connect with you.
And that's , why the course exists because I figured this out for me.
I did it in public for two years.
Been building all my stuff in public because I find that very interesting
to give people that kind of glimpse into the journey and that resonated so
much with an audience that it grew to.
Yeah.
I must be 50,000 by now.
So that.
And I'm sharing the path that worked for me.
And that I see working for other people who are doing this, like Noah brag, right?
Amazing builder in public.
He's building potion, his little notion to aesthetic websites tool in public
every day to something really cool out there where you have Matt Wensing, who you
had on the show, who's building summit.
Amazing tool in a totally different kind of SAS space, right?
Financial projection, and prediction.
And he's so good at building and public.
Everything he does on Twitter is kind of, it's a smart thing,
it's related to two businesses.
It's sometimes not, it doesn't seem related to his product, but it
kind of is, and he knows what he's doing and he's doing it so well.
There are so many great examples out there and I kind of pulled them all together.
For other people to find.
And that's why I made this course, right.
That's really why I'm doing this.
But of course the aside, I'm just super interested in those people,
in what they do and how you can leverage what are to teach.
Michele: Yeah.
So let's do a hypothetical.
Let's say that I am a developer with a side project that
does not have any customers.
And I have 15 followers on twitter, and I tweet three times a week.
And they're mostly interesting articles that I find on hacker news.
What are five things that I should do to grow my following and get
some customers for my side project.
Arvid: The first thing is stopped tweeting into a void because the fact that you have
so few followers means that whenever you tweet, when you write a tweet and send it
on Twitter, barely anybody will read it.
Like you, you can be pretty sure that only one in 10 of your followers
will ever get to see anything.
That's just how Twitter's algorithm works.
Right?
You would think you tweet and they all see it at some point in that timeline.
That's not the case.
Most people won't even get it into that timeline.
And most of the people who do will scroll over it because somebody
else that they find more interesting has something else to say that.
That resonates more with them.
So it's super tough for somebody with no audience to just tweet and hope that they
grow an audience from that doesn't work.
What does work is engaging with people where they're
already having conversations?
It's like if you go
Michele: So like replying.
Arvid: yeah,
Essentially it's,
Michele: tweet myself, but
reply to other people.
Arvid: Yeah, contributes to something like with all things in human
communication, standing there on your little soap box and yelling into the
park that you're sending in will only make people think you're kind of weird.
If you go to a party and you send in the middle of the room and you
just start talking about the things you like to, nobody in particular.
You will not attract people.
Like people will stay clear of you, but if you join the conversation with
three or four, people have gathered, and they're already talking about an
interesting topic that you just listen for a couple seconds, maybe a couple
of minutes, and then you have something that you can actually meaningfully
contribute that will make you interesting.
Right?
That's the perfect example.
Like if you go to a group of people and you listen for a second, and then
you adjust what you have to say to fit into their ongoing conversation.
They will look at you, invite you into the group and now you're one of them.
And that is essentially what Twitter is all about.
You join conversations, you join communities, you establish yourself
as a contributor to this community, by just replying to people with your ideas.
Maybe those three links that you've been posting about are something
interesting that somebody else could learn something from in an ongoing
conversation about a similar topic, and you bring it to that conversation
instead of just tweeting it into the void.
That is the most simple.
Michele: step one, don't tweet into the void, but reply to existing conversation.
Arvid: Yeah, and that kind of engagement.
That's what I kind of call it on Twitter, it's to engage with
people that can take many shapes.
That can be a nice reply where you add something that, you know,
it could just be a question.
It could be Okay.
Can you clarify this?
I didn't understand that part.
And then you get another conversation going, you get an interaction with
the extra person that tweeted, so now you have some sort of,
starting to Kindle a relationship and connection with that person by
showing interest in that conversation.
Or you can invite somebody who, you know, could benefit from being exposed
to this conversation and other expert on Twitter, into the conversation.
Or you could disseminate the conversation out by just retreating
it to your admittedly low follower account, but you would still maybe
invite a couple of more people.
There are so many ways to engage with a conversation other than just replying,
and you don't want to turn into this kind of reply guy, person that just
replies all the time to try and get into the buzz of the conversation.
So just like spread it out.
There's many different ways of giving meaning and adding something
to an ongoing conversation.
And that brings me to a second point, because that is something that you can do
when you're exposed to this conversations.
Right.
You have to see them happening to be able to engage with them and
that kind of has a prerequisite and that is following the right people.
So if you.
I don't know really where to source these interesting conversations that you want
to join, you have to start with exploring your space and following those influential
kind of you would call them influencers or nexus communicators, or community
leaders, whatever you want to call them.
People who kind of control, or at least very strongly influence the conversations
in a particular field in our space.
That would be people like Courtland Allen, who hosts.
Indie hackers, podcasts, right?
People who are super exposed to so many, many people or Rob walling who has a
startup sort of for the rest of us.
And you're kind of probably starting to understand that podcast hosts are really
interesting people to follow on Twitter because they're connected to every.
They're part of every conversation.
You, Michelle, you are one of these people.
Now, if you follow you, you get exposed to so many new people.
And if people follow me, they will also get exposed to so many people.
Now, there are certain people in any community that once you follow
them, you will be part or you at least will see in your activity,
feed interesting things happening.
So that's the first thing you have to do is to go out
there, find those nexus people.
I call this nexus discovery because the nexus to me is
where everything comes together.
And you can do this by.
Going on Twitter now and looking at who are the people with somewhat high-ish
follower counts, or at least a lot of engagement in each community, following
them, looking at their followers, seeing other people that you might
find interesting, following them, doing some kind of recursion or looking at
Twitter lists that those people are on and following the whole list, there are
many, many different ways of exposing yourself to all these these conversations.
And then you just set notifications for the people you'll find most interesting.
And you get actual engagement notifications, so you can jump
right into a conversation.
when it happens.
If you do only one thing, this is what you should do, follow the right people
and then just interact with them.
Michele: And I think something you're sort of saying here is also that it's you find
that nexus person, for example, and it's not just about replying to that nexus
person and trying to get them to follow you or apply to you, which I think you
sort of alluded to the reply guy, right?
It's actually going in there and sort of productively having the
conversation with the people who are already in those mentions, like who are
already replying to the conversation.
So not necessarily, you know, replying to your tweet, for example, and trying
to get a reply from you though, you will probably reply because you are
you, but like, you know, seeing like, oh, here's these 20 other people
who are following this conversation.
And they have interesting things to say.
And then, you know, having adding a question or adding a nice comment to that.
And I guess I think a mistake I tend to see is that people will like be critical
cause I think there's some, like there's a space for being critical, but you
know, some people are socialized in environments where you show your worth and
add value by being negative or critical.
And I don't, I'm curious to hear your perspective on this like I find that
you know, negativity or criticism on Twitter is really, really tricky
and I tend to avoid it entirely.
Arvid: Me too.
Absolutely.
Right.
Sorry for interrupting.
Do you, do you have anything else?
Michele: No, that was my question was
Arvid: Okay.
Michele: it was sort of like, what will your take on, you know, should people
reply with something critical, if they're trying to engage with others?
Arvid: So anything you do on
twitter is a performance.
That, that is one of the main things that I have also understood.
Like, even if you're just doing it in front of 20 or 30 people at public reply
to a public tweet by somebody else, gets seen by three different entities.
That is you, obviously, because you're part of it, the
person that you've applied to.
Everybody else, whoever gets to read it.
And some people forget that this group of potentially millions of people
exists out there and every single one of them will judge you for what you say.
So you always have to consider that You are interacting
with another public persona.
I have a group of people that are listening and are judgemental
in ways that you might not understand might not comprehend.
You already mentioned the fact that people are brought up in different ways.
I personally was brought up in a pretty neutral way.
Like to me, it was fine to criticize, but you should always
kind of see both Sites, right.
That was kind of the devil's advocate situation that I was socialized into.
That is okay to do if you announced that you're doing it.
So I now live with a Canadian and here this straight up devil's advocate
perspective is not much appreciated.
So I have to kind of stop myself from going there, even though it's
something that I often do and like to do, because it's interesting on an
intellectual way in our conversations in our home, it is not much appreciated.
And I it's fine because we talk about it and.
But on Twitter, you don't get to talk about this.
For two reasons, first off, the people who are listening, they don't talk to you.
They don't interact with you.
They just read, they are the lurkers, right?
The potentially millions of people that are reading this public
interaction that you're having with somebody else, they don't tell you
what they think They just judge you.
And second in the medium of text, there is no subtext.
There is no nuance.
There is no like hidden subtlety, text is text and everybody interprets
that, text the way they read it.
So that is something that is incredibly hard to pull off
if you want to be critical.
So I would never be just critical.
I would always either preface it with devil's advocate or whatever you can
do to make sure that people understand that, this is not criticality.
This is not like an ad hominem situation where you attack the person.
Okay.
I want to talk about the argument, but honestly, I don't do this at all.
I think I'm like you, I want Twitter to be an empowering and positive space and,
everything that I add to a conversation will it's supposed to be positive and
helping other people, which is that the other side of doing this as a performance.
So it's a performative act because you want to help other People If that is
my, the reason why I go to Twitter, one of my core values is empowerment
is helping other people Uh, become better at whatever they want to do.
So if that is why I'm there, then every single thing I do, at least
a little bit have that as its goal.
So just crushing somebody's dream or negating somebody's
opinion will not do this.
Right.
It's gonna need to the opposite.
It's going to be a disempowerment effect.
So I don't want to do that.
And that is why I publicly don't do this.
I don't do it privately either.
If there's something that is flat out wrong, I will still try to always see
the other person as somebody who still worth being friendly to, and just kind to
like showing them my perspective without pushing it towards them or onto them.
And that's how I go about this.
So, and, and if you're trying to build an audience, if you're trying to build
a following of kind people, a friendly people, people like you, or people who
you want to be like you, well, then don't the aggressive towards them.
Don't be critical towards some, just give them the room to be,
themselves and to have their own opinions and respect them for that.
It's really all I can say to this.
So yeah, I would definitely just caution anybody out there to be
critical because Twitter is about like helping other people succeed.
Right and PR critical stuff, rarely ever does it.
Cause it gets misinterpreted.
Michele: I think that idea that, you know, everything on Twitter is a performance.
People will be judging you and interpreting it differently than
you may be hoping for, I think that's what freaks people out about.
Arvid: Yeah, I can see that.
The thing is, it's not like that.
That's the one thing about Twitter that once you, once you live with that
for a little bit, you get used to it.
You're always both on a stage and you're on a couch at the same time.
You're on a couch with your buddies, like the four or five friends that you have.
And in any given conversation on Twitter you, you kind of, you know,
exchanging little things with them and you're having a nice conversation.
And at the same time, you're on a stage in front of the millions potentially, right?
Because it just takes one viral tweet for the thing to be exposed
to literally millions of people.
And you always have to live with the fact that you're doing both at the same time
and you don't know which is currently.
It's tough because that's just what a public medium, like Twitter does.
Like Facebook is kind of different.
If you're doing something in a Facebook group, it usually stays in the
Facebook group or in a forum, right.
It stays in this little community, but Twitter has this potential of this
breakout effect where you get out of your community and you exposed to the whole
world for good, or for bad that it makes this such a weird balance to think about.
Honestly, everything you do in marketing is performative to begin
with, and Twitter is marketing yourself, marketing your personal brand.
You're doing something intentionally.
You're sharing something because you want people to buy it or you're
sharing something because you want people to donate to a charity or
you just want to grow your, their awareness of you as a brand or as a
person or your project, whatever the reason is you're on Twitter you're
doing it for to reach a certain goal.
So any step along the way is an intentional tactical
or strategic implementation of action towards that goal.
That makes it performative to begin with.
Because you're doing it in front of an audience that you want to use in
a certain way, or you want people to react to you in a certain way.
I can understand how introverts and I consider myself one, it may not sound
like it, but I kind of feel like one and I always felt like one have a lot of
trouble with, and I'm only this outspoken about everything that I'm doing, because
I've been speaking about it for years.
Like in the beginning, I was also kind of shy, I didn't know
what to say and how to phrase it, then this is my second language.
So, You know, that's a whole other level on top of it.
But you know, like if you care about.
And you surround yourself with the right people, and I count you as one
of these people for me, like you are an amazing person that is extremely kind and
supportive, and you're the tide that lifts all the boats in our community as well.
Well, how could I not want to talk to you?
How could I not want to share things with you?
Right.
That's why I'm doing this because I've surrounded myself with wonderful people
that have the same goals that I have, which is making the internet economy,
a thing for people to explore, being a creator, being a writer, being a SaaS
entrepreneur, whatever it is making this a possibility for more people.
And if that is my goal, I can live with the fact that people are watching.
In fact, I embrace that and I try to be as authentically me as possible while
knowing that there is like 50,000 people listening to everything I'm saying it's,
it's, it's a super hard balance to strike and it definitely takes some reflecting,
but once you understand it, once you accept it, you can use it for good.
That's my perspective.
Michele: You are incredibly kind Arvid you know, it strikes me that, I've
said how I think the reason why I'm was able to write a book about interviewing
users and about active listening is because I really had to learn it myself.
I had to really get comfortable with it at a level that most people don't,
and it strikes me that perhaps you, as an introvert, you know, had to learn
marketing, had to learn this performance side of it and had to learn how, you
know, Twitter is about relationships.
And it's a sort of coffee shop, bulletin board, so to speak, like it
strikes me that, because you're an introvert you had to learn all of these
particularities sort of about how the ecosystem of Twitter works, because
it did not come naturally to you.
And I wonder how, like, I think of my example, person with 15
followers and their side project.
They're listening to this and thinking, oh my God, the whole thing
is a performance and people are going to judge me and I could go viral
and I have to reply to these famous people, but I actually don't reply
to them, I reply to the other people.
And then somehow all of this is going to get me customers for my side project.
And I'm like, where am I going to spend all this time?
Replying to people?
I already have a job and I have a family, and I don't have very much time.
Shouldn't I just be building features instead and, oh, and by the way, I could
accidentally criticize someone and then go viral, and then everyone hates me.
Like, no.
And so it kind of strikes me as, emotionally, what was the transition for
you getting comfortable with the idea of like, of putting yourself out there
more and having these conversations.
Arvid: Hm.
I'm trying not to be too, too sarcastic here, but the first thing
that came to my mind just now was, well, I noticed that nobody cared.
That's kind of my first experience was really, nobody cared.
Nobody cared about the things I said in the beginning.
And, and still to this day, nobody really seems to care about the mistakes I make.
Let me just rephrase that into a more relative terms.
When I launched my course, whitewater course, that launched tweet, I had
a typo in it and, I just noticed that like 30 seconds after I tweeted
it out and I was like oh no, I have a typo in my launch tweet, people
are going to see this forever.
And I was just about to delete the tweet when I got a notification on my phone that
the first person had bought my course.
I couldn't even delete my launch tweet fast enough for people to
not care about my typo instilled by it and purchase my info product.
I've had these moments so often, I thought, oh no, this is the worst.
I made a mistake and nobody noticed it.
And people only really cared about the thing that actually gave
them something of value right.
I let it just stay on, it's still in my pin tweet.
Like there's a quotation mark in the wrong place.
It's really not a problem.
Nobody really sees that.
And nobody cares about it.
People who care about the thing that I helped them.
Not my own insecurities about how I phrased it.
Right.
That's, that's kind of one of the things that I noticed very quickly.
And that is a recent example, but forever on Twitter that I
started writing in public and launching my blog posts and stuff.
The people who cared about it in a way that I could actually
help them in their lives, they cared about the important stuff.
They cared about the stuff that actually impacted them.
They didn't care about my shortcomings, my imposter syndrome,
my nervousness of whatever.
They just don't care about it because if everybody on this planet cares
about one person and that's mostly.
And once you understand that people don't care about what you care about,
unless you are actively preventing them from reaching their goals.
Really what it is, you can do almost anything you can
experiment with your stuff.
You can tweet about things that you find interesting.
Look at if it creates resonance With people, you can give people.
Positive or critical responses, whatever it is, people won't really
care until you step too far and you will learn this, which is why starting
with these kinds of experiments.
When you don't have many followers is actually the best thing you
can do, because then you're not exposed to hundreds of thousands of
people you're just exposed to 20.
And if you say something that nobody cares about while you will see, because
none of those people will react to it.
Say something that like three or four care about it, then you've
got to hit and then you can learn from that and write more like that.
Right?
It's like, really the people will give you a lot of leeway if
you're just friendly with them.
If you're kind to them, if you support them in what they are
doing, you can almost do anything.
And create these kinds of nightmare scenarios.
And yeah, it's the same, like in my course, I totally miss attribute
a book title to another author.
In the course, I say that Derek Sivers wrote start with why, which you obviously
didn't, that was Simon Sinek, but I just mixed it up during a recording.
My brain went into a weird state that I set the wrong name and It took people,
it took like a hundred or something students to actually start the course
two for one to figure this out.
Like the other 99 didn't care to take care more about what the
course can actually teach them.
Then the little mistake that I made while recording it.
So if that can happen at that scale, you tweeting something
weird, that will also be fine.
And the thing is about Twitter, even though it's performative.
And if you're an introvert that already is hard to talk to people,
but you can always consider Twitter, a place where you find friends.
You making friends, you finding people just like yourself, and
you're just exchanging stuff that you both find interesting.
It's like a meetup, you know, where you go,
you don't really know the people, but you know, they have to success
I'm interested because you're both going to the JavaScript meetup.
Well, I guess everybody here likes.
Right.
So it's the same on Twitter.
If you find those people, those nexus people that have the same interest
as you have, well, their audience will have the exact same interests.
So whenever you interact with the, let's say with JavaScript engineering,
you interact with somebody who's big in the JavaScript community
and you interact with their tweets.
You're now exposed to this audience of other people who also love JavaScript.
Or love, hate JavaScripts.
That's maybe not the perfect example, but you know, you're
exposing yourself to an audience of at least intersecting interests.
And that's where this audience audition concept comes in, that they
kind of hinted at earlier, right?
You're not interacting with the JavaScript influence.
So you don't want them to follow you.
You want their audience to follow you because they have 40,000
people that are following them.
You want a couple of those people to be interested in you.
That's why you interact with the influencer stuff, not to get the
influencers attention, but to get the attention of the pre filtered
audience that they have that is already really compatible with you.
And if you consider Twitter making friends with other people who are.
Then it's so much easier.
It's so much more enjoyable too, because then it becomes more of the
couch and less of the stage, right.
You always have to, at some point consider that you are in a stage,
but that really only happens when you have a couple thousand followers.
Anything below that, most people will recognize you as one of them, right?
There is no big exposure.
It's not that you are one of those huge accounts that everybody wants to follow.
You're just a person interacting with other people, and making
friends is very easy at that point.
And if you consider every interaction that you have as a potential of making
friends, Then you will also speak to people differently because if you want
to make a friend, you don't go there and tell them about your products.
Right?
Imagine that if that was how we made friends, like you go to a
person at a party and you tell them, Hey, I have this cool product.
It's only $10 when you buy it.
Nobody does that because that's not how you built a relationship with a person.
You go there.
SMA, how are you doing?
What do you do?
And what do you find?
Interesting.
How do you know the host that you asked them about themselves?
You asked them to tell them more about you so you can tell.
About yourself and, build on common ground.
That's how you do this in real life.
Why wouldn't you do it on Twitter?
Why would you post stuff?
Why would you put links to your newsletter as the very first thing you do when
you interact with the new person?
That's not how you do it.
You make friends on Twitter and once you understand that it becomes so
much easier and so much less scary.
Michele: Twitter to find friends.
Right.
I feel like wasn't that the tagline, that the place for friends was not like
Facebook or mySpace, maybe their tagline.
Right.
It was like, I think maybe
Arvid: We're kind of dating ourselves.
See, I think
Michele: Hey, my space taught me how to code.
So
Arvid: Isn't that amazing?
I think I did a couple of cool backgrounds back then as well.
Um,
Michele: But so, you know, if you want to grow your following on Twitter, if you're
on Twitter, cause you want people to buy your stuff for, you know, except your
conference pitches or whatever they are.
Be a friend.
Don't be somebody standing with a megaphone on a soapbox, you know, interact
with people, and be a real person.
And be a pleasant person, at the party, so to speak.
Arvid: That's where opportunity comes from, right?
It's not from them buying an ebook for $10.
It's from them remembering you when a, another gigantic project comes up
and they need somebody to, do copies.
Or when, a potential partnership as, as in the making and they wonder what
would be the best person to partner with.
Those are the opportunities you're seeking, not the $10 from one interaction.
That's the transactional nature of sales and marketing that is so
incompatible with relationship building.
Right.
You, you don't.
Yeah.
You don't
Michele: like build relationships on Twitter.
I feel like I heard someone say once that Twitter is the product
that LinkedIn wants to do.
Arvid: Yeah, I guess.
Yeah.
And that's because Twitter allows people to use Twitter however they want to,
like LinkedIn is very prescriptive in the way you interact with each other.
Just look at how people are even allowed to connect.
Right?
You have to allow people to connect with you.
And the moment you've got some notoriety on LinkedIn, people have to dig really
deep to connect with you bring up a reason to do it, have to link like oh, I went to
the same school as them for somebody, for some reason, that is why you want to allow
people to interact with other people.
This social graph on linkedIn is so selective and so hard to establish.
While on Twitter, you don't even need to follow an account
to get their information.
You can just follow a list with where they are on or you just follow a person
that consistently retweets from that account and you get exposed to new people.
Twitter is just so.
Oh, I have a free space that people can use in any shape they want.
And obviously that creates so much more opportunity because
it allows for serendipity.
LinkedIn does not allow for serendipity.
Allows for really, really targeted interactions, but on Twitter,
anything can happen for good or bad.
Right?
You have the whole shitstorm situation and I guess is there an opposite
of a shitstorm, like a windfall.
Love
Michele: storm.
Arvid: and lots
of love storm.
Yeah.
But where people, all of a sudden get empowered and exposed to an audience of
millions and their life changes in a day.
Right.
You have that too.
And it's one of the most wonderful things to see when people have so much success,
that they are just swept into a new level of existence, just from a tweet.
I just find that wonderful and often it's cute animals and stuff, but you
know, there are still also people who do meaningful things that have impact that
now get exposed to so much larger audience and have so much more impact for the good.
that is what Twitter allows you to do.
And obviously that is in my eyes, that for somebody who has empowerment
and support and motivation as my core values, that is the product for me.
I could not do what I'm doing on LinkedIn but I can definitely do it on Twitter.
And I I'm really grateful for that.
Michele: Twitter as an incredibly powerful platform.
And this here has been a very powerful mini masterclass in using.
Effectively.
Thank you so much for coming on today.
If people want to, well, I mean, where can people find you.
Arvid: Well, this will surprise you, but they could find me on twitter.
Well, yeah, that's obviously the jump off point for everything I'm doing.
I'm on Twitter at arvidkahl ARVID KAHL and I have a blog too.
It's called the bootstrap founder, which you know, like where I write
all my weekly blog posts and I have a podcast there as well, and all my
books and stuff are linked there, but honestly just really interact with me on
Twitter because that's what I like most.
Because that's how you build a relationship with me by coming
to a Twitter and talking to me.
And I want that because I want to, talk to you dear listener.
But honestly, because I think I can learn from every person out there, and
I hope that I can teach something to any person out there a little bit, at least.
So, yeah.
My DMS are open.
And that is something interesting when you have 50,000 followers, but I will
still try and respond to every single DM and yeah, that's where you can find me.
And that's what I would like you to meet me.
Michele: Well, Arvid I will see you and everybody else around on Twitter.
Thank you so much.
Arvid: Absolutely.
Thanks so much.
for having me.