Daniel Vassallo on building an audience

Videos · Personal Branding

Created by Rishabh Srivastava

This summary was largely done for my own note-taking, sharing it just in case it adds more value to other people.

I have no affiliation whatsoever with anyone in this note. This is a summary largely taken for my own reference, and may contain errors :)

Source URL (buy the course below):

Daniel Vassallo

Keywords: Personal branding, Twitter Branding

Daniel's Background

Software Engineer at Amazon for 8 years. Had savings, wanted to leave, and quit to start working for himself

Wanted to make SaaS products. Put them online, but had no audience. Didn't know the value of having an audience online

Wanted to get attention and stumbled on an approach that worked really well

Started out tweeting in the void. But had his first big break after a post he made went viral

Credibility on Twitter

💡 People will only listen if you have credibility

Tweeting a lot without credibility = tweeting in the void

How to get credibility?

Do something interesting in real life and then describe your process+results to your audience

You don't need to be about just one thing!

If you have credibility about multiple topics, it gives you the option to talk about other things

When starting out, just build credibility on anything that can get you a quick return on investment. Eventually it will help you build credibility on other things

You don't need to imagine your target audience first. Just look at the kind of audience that is engaging with your content, and build from there

Examples that worked for Daniel

  • A blog post called "Only Intrinsic Motivation Lasts", which was about why he left his $500k/year job to work for himself. He wrote this after he had already left his job – so there was immense credibility there

What did people get after reading this? They learnt that Daniel had thought very hard about designing his lifestyle, and living a life that best matched his preferences rather than a default one

Categories this built credibility in: lifestyle design, burnout, work life balance

After building initial credibility, ratchet it up

You can build credibility on anything that you are actually good at or have done in the past

Follow up with more posts

Once your credibility is established, ratchet it up. For example, after writing his blogpost about "Only Intrinsic Motivation Lasts", Daniel followed it up with another one called "From Employee to Bootstrapper"

Self-publish your results across multiple channels

Daniel published a technical book called "The Best Parts of AWS". He made $40k in revenue after 15 days, and then shared his results on Twitter and on Reddit

He also shared his process for marketing and developing it on Twitter and Reddit

Experiment with paid marketing and see if it moves the needle for you

Daniel ran tests on reddit, and also shared results on Twitter

Measures of Success

It's not number of followers

You can have a lot of followers but minimal engagement

It's people wanting to hear what you say

  • Engagement levels of followers
  • Their trust/passion towards you

For this to happen...

  1. People should be getting something from you (utility)
  2. People should get to know you as a person (and like the person they know). Twitter is a great way to build up likeability

💡 This is hard to measure, but you'll know when it's happening. People will start sending you questions, refer you to other people etc

Twitter Funnel

  1. People find your profile (either by visiting it from a blog post you wrote, or from seeing it after someone RTed your stuff)
  2. People read your bio to see if they would want to follow you
  3. People read your timeline to see a sample of your tweets
  4. If they like what they see, they might choose to follow you
  5. Once they are already followers, they choose not to unfollow you
  6. People get value from you
  7. People get to know you as a human being

Getting followers

  • This is a very "spiky" process. Specially from viral tweets
  • People start recommending your account to their own audience

Example below:

💡 Personal note: My profile visits to new followers ratio is really low (1%)/. Probably because the same people are visiting my profile (not enough new visitors) AND because my bio and pinned tweet are not good

How to get people to find you?

  1. In the very first phase, start by promoting your credibility. Also do this outside of Twitter – Hacker News, reddit, Indie Hackers, Quora
  2. In your blog posts, have a call to action. At the very end of your blog post, ask people to follow you on Twitter. Restrict it to a single Call To Action! Not multiple ones
  3. Reply on other people's tweets if you have can add value to the original tweet. Use Tweetdeck to make this easier. But don't be too pushy. Don't start pasting links in your replies
  4. Turn on tweet notifications for certain important accounts that you want to engage with. You can get a lot of benefit from being the first to respond. For Daniel, 4000 of his first 6000 followers came from replying to other people's tweets

Setting up your bio

  1. Tell me why I should follow you
  2. Weave in your credibility
  3. Tell me what you'll tweet about

How to tweet

  • 2 types of tweets – giving something and asking for something
  • You need to do a LOT of giving before asking
  • Minimize retweets, unless they add clear value
  • Ask questions, and hope that your audience will benefit from the answers that other people in your audience provide. Can only do this if you have >1000 followers

Optimize for usefulness to audience – don't use as an "updates" space

  • Also, try to manually post tweets instead of automating them
  • Do a LOT more giving than asking

How to come up with ideas for what to tweet about?

  • Reflect at the end of the day about interesting things that happened
  • Share really interesting learnings that you've found recently
  • Share things that took you a lot of effort and a lot of energy to figure out
  • Inspiration from talking to other people
  • Inspiration from making my own decisions
  • Reposting previous top tweets with new context

What NOT to tweet

  • Things that are boring or uninteresting (like your favorite ice cream)
  • Things that can harm you (like political statements, picking a beef with someone and creating drama etc)

What not to do

  • Don't buy accounts
  • Don't follow for follow — only follow other interesting people
  • Don't tag a bunch of people hoping they'll notice you
  • Don't be a nuisance — you risk being blocked or muted
  • Don't chase RTs from bigger accounts
  • Don't ask for RTs (duh) — unless it's a close friend or someone who've worked with closely
  • Don't get banned (don't make controversial ironic jokes)
  • Don't get addicted. Specially when things look like they are beginning to work