The Steal Club - Is Twitter a Ponzi scheme?

Hey everyone!

This is The Steal Club, a newsletter for creative entrepreneurs.

We share lessons, strategies, frameworks, and templates to grow your audience. “Stolen” from the best creators in the industry.

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👨‍🍳 Today's Menu

This is the menu we have for today:

• Deep, then wide
• How to get 5 star review
• From idea to product in 6-12h
• Is Twitter a Ponzi scheme?

Let’s dive in!

First go deep, then wide

Kieran Drew @ItsKieranDrew This year I decided to ignore every social media channel except Twitter. Some people think that’s stupid, but I get 10-15k followers a month now with zero friction. Plus, I have thousands of prevalidated ideas to post elsewhere. Ace one, then spread to more. November 27th 2022 17 Retweets 444 Likes

A recipe for success on social media: First go deep, then wide.

Focus on only one channel for 1 year.

Use that time to grow there, test ideas and find you voice.

Once that’s done, move to other platforms by repurposing tried and tested ideas.

Your growth there will be 10x faster.

This is what I did with Twitter. Went head down there for more than a year.

Then jumped over to Instagram and managed to build an 11k audience in 90 days, just by repurposing Twitter content.

I’m now focusing on doing the same on LinkedIn and Instagram 👇

🕵️‍♂️ Stolen from Kieran Drew​

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A 5 star review

Jay Clouse is the host of Creative Elements, a narrative-interview type of podcast where Jay goes behind the scenes with top creators.

He’s also one of my fav creators (that’s why I steal a lot from him).

A few weeks ago he sent an email to his list about getting more reviews for his podcast.

As a podcast, reviews are critical. And Jay was on a review hunt.

But not just any review. He wanted testimonials.

But sometimes listeners are not so inclined to leave those.

A testimonial might take just 5 minutes of your day, but it’s not as easy as just rating it 5 🌟, which takes just 10 seconds.

So Jay made a very smart move: he incentivized his audience to leave testimonials.

How?

With the email below he offered one of his workshops for free (valued at around 50$ each) in exchange for a review:

This is smart because:

• An incentive makes your audience more likely to leave that review
• Those reviews are high quality because they need to send you proof (screenshot)
• You get your audience into your funnel. If they like what you offer as an incentive, it’s likely they want more.

If you are wondering, this was positioned as a PS on his email, so it wasn’t a hard push.

This could also apply to course reviews, getting more subscribers and even service testimonials

🕵️‍♂️ Stolen from Jay Clouse​

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From idea to product in 6-12h

Pieter Levels is a serial maker.

He goes from idea to product in 6 to 12 hours.

There are two reasons he does it:

• He gets first mover advantage
• He gets to validate if the idea has legs or not

When asked what he does to find these money-making ideas, this is his reply:

@levelsio @levelsio @naishe You find ideas by trying many things and see what works, not by sitting around doing nothing Nishant Neeraj @naishe @levelsio Tech is easy, finding simple problems with money making potential is hard... or, rather, I go blank when I try to think what to build. Maybe it's just my lack of creativity. :D November 23rd 2022 6 Retweets 174 Likes

So yeah. It’s better to move fast and fail a lot that standing still, take 4 months to ship something only to find out that people don’t want it.

✋ This is my vow to incorporate more of this “ship fast” mindset into 2023.

Join me?

🕵️‍♂️ Stolen from Pieter Levels​

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Is Twitter a Ponzi scheme?

Sometimes the content that you spend hours with gets 0 attention. Then, the piece you create in a few seconds goes viral.

That happened to me this week:

Alex Llull🕵️‍♂️ @AlexLlullTW Sometimes Twitter feels like a gigantic Ponzi scheme Creators with no audience teaching creators with no audience how to build an audience (and selling them courses) so they can teach creators with no audience how to build an audience (and sell them courses) 🤷‍♂️🤷‍♂️🤷‍♂️ November 24th 2022 57 Retweets 736 Likes

But beyond going viral, what matters from this tweet it’s the conversations and buzz it generated (on the replies and on my DMs).

People seem to be fed up with the new wave of fake audience building.

Don’t get me wrong with this tweet.

I’m 100% in favor of audience building. I’m also in favor of selling your knowledge as a digital course.

What I’m not in favor of is quick $$ grabs.

Most people selling these either have no experience or they are just using it to grab a quick $$ while selling a fake dream to their audience. (Grow your audience with no effort in just 30 days!)

🤦‍♂️

These are the same people who were selling NFT courses one year ago.

This is hurtful for those who are out there building for the long term, but I’m happy that people are starting to catch on.

What do you think about this? Have you ever felt like this on Twitter (or any other platform)?

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