Twitter and Your Target Customers
This is a tale of two startup launches: League Galaxy and AgileZen. League Galaxy is a startup of mine that makes life easier for those who manage amateur sports teams, while AgileZen is Nate Kohari’s company that makes lean project management easier. Both were launched around the same time and in the same fashion, but the outcome has been radically different.
First Some History
Before I get into this, you need a little background. You see, Nate and I worked together for awhile at Telligent. During Nate’s interview process, I was in the loop to interview him and we hit it off right away. I knew of Nate beforehand from his work with Ninject, but didn’t know him on a personal level. Once he was hired, we worked pretty closely together on a couple product iterations and became good friends, which continues to this day.
While at Telligent, we both ended up with the itch to do our own thing, me with League Galaxy and he with AgileZen. As a completely unplanned, yet now-kind-of-funny coincidence, we each left Telligent on the same day in June 2009.
Now that you’ve had a brief history lesson, let’s continue.
The AgileZen Launch
Nate launched AgileZen in early July 2009, about a month after leaving Telligent. He had been working on it in his spare time for awhile up to that point and it was ready to go. Naturally, Nate wrote a blog post about it and made the announcement on Twitter, which at the time he had about 2,000 followers (or close to it).
Nate is pretty well-known in the development community and most of the people who followed Nate, and I assume still do, are developers. This is a critical piece of information because AgileZen is a product made for developers. It’s not just for developers of course, but developers are a primary target audience for AgileZen.
Think about that for just a minute. From the start, Nate, and therefore AgileZen, had about 2,000 potential customers. It sometimes takes companies months, if not years, to attract 2,000 potential customers, but there they were from the outset. Twitter lit up like a Christmas tree with tweets and retweets from all over the place.
And as many of you know, the rest is history. AgileZen had sales from the very first day and continued to grow at a high rate. It found success quickly and was acquired by Rally Software in March 2010, a mere 9 months after its launch.
The League Galaxy Launch
Contrast the AgileZen launch with how League Galaxy went out the door. I launched League Galaxy in mid August 2009, about a month after AgileZen launched. I did the same thing Nate did with AgileZen – I wrote a blog post and announced it on Twitter.
However, there were a couple notable differences. My follower count on Twitter wasn’t nearly as high as Nate’s was (nor continues to be), with around 600 followers at the time if I remember correctly. But the number isn’t important. What’s important is that not a single follower of mine was a potential customer for League Galaxy.
Like Nate, most of my followers are in the developer community. They care about all things software-related, not a website to manage amateur sports teams. Sure, there might be a few followers who coach their son’s baseball team and have a fleeting interest, but that’s about it.
And because of this, my announcement on Twitter largely fell on deaf ears.
Like everything else in hindsight, the obviousness of this fact didn’t hit me until a few months later. I made the mistake of thinking League Galaxy would generate a few sales based on my Twitter followers, but that was never the case. The target audience for League Galaxy does not follow me on Twitter.
Are Your Twitter Followers Your Target Customers?
Before you launch your next great startup and plan on using Twitter as an announcement platform (which you should do), think hard about your Twitter followers. If you’re in Nate’s situation, then chances are you’ll have some early success. But if you’re not, you simply can’t rely on Twitter and think that’s all there is. You’ll have to work much harder than that.
And remember, the number of followers isn’t as important as to why they follow you in the first place.
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Courtney Wiley
