Yannick, Co-founder of Hypefury
Growth loops, 'smart' affiliate programs, getting tons of subscribers very quickly, and much more
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🕺 Welcome to Traction, your weekly interview series with founders and operators who share their stories behind early traction.
I am excited to introduce Yannick Veys, co-founder of Hypefury. I’ll be completely honest—I don’t love Twitter threads, and Hypefury does so much more than help people write threads. It’s a superuser tool to help you grow an audience… and they’re expanding into LinkedIn.
They’re self-funded to this point and are growing, growing, growing.
Navigation
— Building an audience
— Growth experiments
— Building an affiliate program
— TikTok?
— Don’t sleep on LinkedIn
— Twitter FTW
— Tactical advice for people working on a project
*Make sure to keep an eye out for the super tactical tips
Building an audience
Joshua: So, was there any traction when you joined your co-founder Sammy?
Yannick: Yeah, Hypefury was at like $500. Literally couple of paying customers.
Joshua: And how long until you started seeing actual traction, like “this is gonna be a thing?”
Yannick: So, the first thing I did was asked the question, “what do people want?”And people don't necessarily want software that helps you schedule tweets.
They want to grow an audience. So the first thing I did was actually double down on Twitter, get my follower count up to I don't know, I think 5,000 or so within a couple of months. I grew quite quickly.
Joshua: How did you do that?
Yannick: Post a lot. Get some help from people who've been there and done that and then coached me on how to write.
And then we started a do-it-yourself/do it with us growth program. That attracted a lot of attention that build up rapidly as well.
So that that gave initial boost and all the while I was working on the blog, getting a lot of content out there, and working on email marketing.
We've been growing for 10 to 15% MoM. When we started, that was small but now that's been compounding for quite quite some time.
Growth experiments
Joshua: And you guys are fully bootstrapped, correct?
Yannick: Yep. We both put some money in beginning a. We didn't pay ourselves for the first two years or something. And I think we have 22 people working for us now.
Joshua: Wow, nice! Do you remember going from the early days to where you are now—are there any growth experiments that kind of stand out to you?
Yannick: Overall, things have been very linear. I know if you start a blog it takes six months before the needle starts moving. But we've been churning out content now for years.
Our organic traffic is pretty high. And I think what's the one thing that I think a lot of startups should do is to start an affiliate marketing program.
So there's a lot of hesitation there because people think I'm gonna get scammed or I'm giving away part of my revenue, but actually, what you're doing is you're creating an outsourced marketing agency—hundreds of people will start writing about you creating videos.
That's a tremendous help, getting your name out there. And we've seen, the number of links to our website increased dramatically. So, many things that were done two years ago.. we still benefit today.
Building an affiliate program
Joshua: Could you walk me through how you decided to build your affiliate marketing program?
Yannick: So we use First Promoter. What we do is we pay for as long as your referral stays. So it's almost a perpetual commission model.
We started at a 25% commission level and if people get in more referrals, and you know, we can raise that or we can do different thing, and we’d sometimes offer our affiliates personalized discounts, stuff like that.
Joshua: in the beginning, did you reach out to people to become affiliates or was it all self serve?
Yannick: It's all self serve. And I think one thing that really moved the needle for our affiliate program was removing friction—and so we created a single button in our app that says ‘join the affiliate program’.
They just have to click that button and we do all the backend work, and then they'll just have access to their referral URL in one second. And so we saw a huge boost in sign ups because of that people just lazy.
*SUPER TACTICAL TIP
Now what we also do is email our affiliates every week, and we have pre populated tweets, people only have to click, tweet this, and then it'll open a composer in Twitter, and then they'll have to click again. And then that tweet is out with or for link and that also, it gets us 1000s and 1000s of clicks.
TikTok?
Joshua: That's great. So, obviously Twitter has been an incredible channel. I mean, that's sort of your bread and butter. But are there other channels that seem interesting to you? Would you consider TikTok?
Yannick: At some point, we'll also add TikTok but most promising for us right now is LinkedIn.
I think a lot of people are jumping from Twitter to LinkedIn. We see that in search volumes going up from people just searching for ‘LinkedIn scheduler’ and stuff like that.
So you see that the Creator space is also moving into LinkedIn. We've been doubling down on content creation for LinkedIn as well.
Don’t sleep on LinkedIn
Joshua: I've noticed that so much—it seems LinkedIn, everyone is producing content. So now, I think the trick is, how do you create good content that resonates and stands out?
Yannick: So the hook is very important on LinkedIn. What works on Twitter definitely does not always and mostly does not work on LinkedIn and vice versa.
So you really have to look into okay, how does how does my audience won't consume content? And yeah, what I've seen is, there are so many different different ad creatives out there who do things differently…
*SUPER TACTICAL TIP
What I've seen is that images work, making a bit more personal works, especially the beginning for creators.
But if you want to get your face out there, your name out there, and create a little connection with your audience, then sharing a bit more photos of yourself really helps to make that connection.
Twitter FTW
Joshua: What about Twitter?
Yannick: Being a wordsmith helps on Twitter.
So I had this tweet. But it was something like ‘the shit of your past is a fertilizer for your future’. For me as a non-native English speaker that's really hard to come up.
If you can come up with tweets that resonate with people, being a good writer, that helps a lot. But, but mostly because that will get you a lot of engagement, but it might not get you a lot of followers because people just like that tweet—they like it and they retweet it and then they move on.
But quickly transferring knowledge that you had accumulated for years in concise tweets really helps people.
Tactical advice for people working on a project
Joshua: What advice, tips, or tools would you recommend for founders, operators, and tinkerers?
Yannick: Don't underestimate the power of email marketing. I would start sooner rather than later. Start with something with ConvertKit or something that—it just amplifies your own voice.
Also using something like Gumroad, which works really well for creating a lead magnet where people can download your content, and then you can pull them in your email list using Zapier.
Joshua: Is your Gumroad content free or paid?
*SUPER TACTICAL TIP
Yannick: It’s free. We get 1000s of email subscribers every month because people download our free twitter growth course.
I think having a presence on social giving away free stuff is important, and you can even automate that with Hypefury.
You can literally say “hey, if you comment with whatever, I'll DM you the link” and then there's an engagement loop.
You get in people's inbox. People download your freebie and get imported into your newsletter. So there's a nice little growth loop going there.
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