Tzakhi (00:00.29)
Hi, Anik. Excellent. Thanks so much for coming. We're at the Meet .Capital starter podcast with Anik Vey, co -founder at HypeFury. Very excited to have you on the pod. I'll just say you mentored me through Growth Mentor a while back and I've been following you and recently also started using the...
Yannick Co-founder Hypefury (00:01.997)
Hi, it's Aki, how are you? Good to be here.
Tzakhi (00:26.758)
software, which is HypeFury, which we'll hear about soon. And I'm very excited about that because I want to build a Twitter following. And you're also an awesome founder. This is your second startup. And I really want to hear your perspective for startup founders. So welcome.
Yannick Co-founder Hypefury (00:45.229)
Thank you, thank you. Excited to share my knowledge.
Tzakhi (00:50.118)
Great. Can you tell us a bit about just your background, how you got to found Hype Fury? I know you've been building it from scratch with your partner for like four years, for the last four years. But can you tell us just a bit about how you got...
Yannick Co-founder Hypefury (01:02.125)
Yep. Yep.
Yannick Co-founder Hypefury (01:08.845)
I can, I can.
So I started my business journey, I think like 15 years ago, I started at an agency, a digital agency. And I was there for about two years when I quit my job and I started freelancing at like, I could say like Fortune 500 companies here in the Netherlands. And so I helped a lot of different businesses get more traffic from their website.
versions. And then I think after about six, seven years, I was like, you know, it's been enough working for somebody else. I want to build my own business. And that's when I started my first business co -founded with a couple of other people. I think I worked there for about three years. I had a lot of fun. And then, you know, it time for me to sell my shares and I started freelancing again, I think for just about six months or so. And then I was like, you know, on the any hackers forum.
might know it. And they have a section there called like, find your co -founder or something. And I was just checking one of those posts. And one of them was from Sammy saying, hey, I'm a developer. I don't know anything about marketing. I'm looking for a marketing co -founder for my product. And so I checked out iFury. He was just, you know, started building it for a couple of months. And, you know, I sent him a message like saying, well, I know a little bit about marketing. I don't know a lot about...
Tzakhi (02:28.61)
you
Yannick Co-founder Hypefury (02:41.165)
Twitter yet. I had 600 followers, I think back then. But we started talking. I flew to Paris to meet him. We know I stayed there for the weekend, you know, and it clicked. And so right then and there, we just decided to, you know, at least give it a shot. I would work at work for hype here for two months for free just to show them that, you I wasn't just all talk, but I also knew a bit about
marketing and that went well. And after two months, we decided to like officially co -found Hyperio together. That's a little bit of the origin story there.
Tzakhi (03:21.638)
Nice, nice, yeah. And now it's an amazing platform, I'm using it myself. So it's, we've put a lot of work into building it and making it very convenient and flows, it works. And I think you're also growing in terms of subscribers and users.
Yannick Co-founder Hypefury (03:38.733)
Thank you.
Definitely, definitely. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, we've now been doing this for four years. Yeah, we've had our ups and downs as well. Like, you know, when Elon bought Twitter, he changed the API pricing totally. So beforehand we had to pay just about $0 per month to use Twitter's API. And now we pay $42 ,000 a month. So it's quite a, quite a change there. But yeah, it's...
It's taught us also not to be so reliant on one platform. So, you know, for the last year we've added a lot of like different features. So, you know, we try to, yeah, be a bit less dependent on just Twitter or X as it's called these days.
Tzakhi (04:27.75)
Okay, now let's get into...
Twitter a bit. So, you know, we are a lot, Meet Capital is on LinkedIn mostly. And we also help founders do cold outreach using LinkedIn. So that's one thing which I think LinkedIn is great for. Investors are there. You can find it there. You can reach out to them.
But I think that Twitter is also another place where a lot of founders are at and a lot of investors are at. And what do you think about founders building themselves a following on Twitter as they're building their startup and as they're fundraising?
Yannick Co-founder Hypefury (05:10.829)
Yeah. Yeah. Well, we actually did the same thing. We didn't do the fundraising part, but we did. We were, um, um, you know, people did reach out to us saying, Hey, do you want to get funding? But I think, uh, part of high for your success was building in public and just showing what you're doing. Not just like sharing what you're building currently, like new features, but also sharing your successes. And I know like.
uh, Sammy and I back in the days were like, we were almost like fighting to say who could share our newest MRR milestone. Like we're doing, I know 12 K M R 13 K M R 14. And every time we shared, we had, uh, what's called bare metrics. And so we were building a public out in the open. People could actually access our data, but we also shared those types of posts on Twitter. And I remember we got.
like hundreds of new followers every time we shared like one of those new milestones. And why? Because success attracts success. People just want to know what is this person building? That's interesting. They have such a cool growth rate, you know, 15 % month over month. They were, you know, just doing amazing things. At least that's what I thought people were thinking about us. And yeah, it was a reason for them to follow us. It was a great way to reach new people. And yeah, if you're a startup founder yourself,
Tzakhi (06:08.088)
you
Tzakhi (06:22.354)
you
Yannick Co-founder Hypefury (06:37.429)
One is gonna help you get closer to the people you wanna attract because if you share things about your startup, people are naturally gonna wanna be involved, why they love to be on somebody else's journey, as a voyeur, but also as a, this could be an interesting product for me. And so you will attract people that are interesting to your business. They could be your first clients. You can ask them, hey, what do you think about this feature?
Tzakhi (06:38.098)
you
Yannick Co-founder Hypefury (07:06.413)
but they'll also be your biggest supporters. They'll amplify anything you mentioned about your startup. So yeah, I think it's a great way.
Tzakhi (07:17.03)
I think it's, you know, building in public has become a thing that more and more people are doing.
a certain extent, Meet Capital is there though not fully. And I think it definitely makes sense when your product is a B2C. I think a lot more founders are hesitant to do that when they're either in B2B, and I'm not talking about B2B to SMB.
Enterprise.
or when they're building something.
Tzakhi (07:56.81)
different type of journey and maybe...
Yannick Co-founder Hypefury (08:18.253)
Yeah, personally, I think they do.
Yannick Co-founder Hypefury (08:24.909)
that are on Twitter are probably not so much interested in enterprise software. But in the end, we're all people, someone who's working at Google is on Twitter as much as I am, who's just a simple indie hacker slash startup founder. And so I think there's always an angle towards building a public you can use on Twitter. For example, if it's not as interesting to share like,
Tzakhi (08:34.894)
you
Yannick Co-founder Hypefury (08:54.413)
whatever you just shipped, it might be interesting to share more the background, the technical background. Like I'm using this programming language. I'm using this framework. I just solved this problem through this and share it literally with screenshots. And there are a lot of communities on Twitter around all these types of frameworks and programming languages. And it's like almost like a battle if...
PHP is the worst software out there or if it's, I don't know, some JavaScript framework, it's just, I think for developers, it's a great place to be because there's a lot of buzz around, you know, anything you're using to solve problems. So even though, you know, it might not be interesting or you might believe it's not interesting enough to share what you're shipping. I think the process of getting things shipped is interesting to a lot of people. So we definitely share that.
Tzakhi (09:39.384)
you
Tzakhi (09:51.462)
is that sometimes you can share something which is very technical and it won't get a lot of attention, but you really don't need a lot of attention. So what I mean is, especially if you're a startup founder and you're kind of first two years of your startup and you need to raise capital, one investor that has been following you and engages with you on social media and then...
invests in you or connects you to another investor can make a huge difference. So it's not that you need to have a huge account on LinkedIn or on Twitter to make an impact. Even if you have kind of like a smaller circle of people that softly follow you and once in a while, like you see them liking a post of yours or even if they're just passively viewing, that could make a difference.
Yannick Co-founder Hypefury (10:41.965)
you
Yannick Co-founder Hypefury (10:48.493)
Definitely, definitely. I think the thing people shouldn't underestimate on Twitter is there's no real discoverability. So on TikTok, if you post a video, that's great. Even if you have zero followers, it'll get organic traction. On Twitter, that's very different. You need followers in order for people to see your posts, in order for people to engage with the posts. And so if you're just starting out on Twitter,
as a startup founder, I would encourage you to follow people you admire or follow people that use the same frameworks as you do, or maybe same technical challenges as you, and share your thoughts on their posts and try and follow people who already have like thousands, thousands, tens of thousands of followers. Why? Because...
Tzakhi (11:30.438)
you
Yannick Co-founder Hypefury (11:41.677)
you know, strictly speaking, the more followers somebody has, the more their posts will be viewed. And so it's easier for you if you start engaging with them to get more impressions on your replies. And, you know, I think a lot of at least more technical founders always have an issue like they don't, they don't want to do marketing. Well, it's a great way to start getting your name out there and just add value to the conversation. Think, can I add something here? Just do it.
Tzakhi (11:46.2)
you
Yannick Co-founder Hypefury (12:10.637)
And in the beginning, not a lot of people will see your posts. So you might be, you know, have a little bit of an imposter syndrome there. You might not want to share your ideas, but don't worry. Not a lot of people are looking and by just replying, you'll get in a little bit of a cadence and you'll improve your writing. And that'll also help you with sharing things on your own timeline again. And so you'll get more people seeing your posts. You'll have more people that start following you. And then you'll also have better writing. And.
can use on your own time engine.
Tzakhi (12:45.766)
can be automated slash delegated. Because I think I can tell from my experience, a big barrier to doing these things is just time and attention. So yeah, will it help to connect with people if I start responding to posts? Yes, but it also feels like a very dangerous.
And there's always something that seems more practical or more important to do. So is there a way to kind of ease that? Or how do you think about around delegation around such a task?
Yannick Co-founder Hypefury (13:28.621)
Yeah. So I've also like delegated my, uh, content creation in the past, not so much these days, but I would say people follow people you want to, you know, you want to be genuine. So I would as much as possible, just post yourself and think about like a lot of founders are building their product and then they'll think, you know, I first need to build my product and then I'll start doing marketing, but actually the building of the product is the marketing.
And so, you know, if you just, you know, overcome a technical challenge or you ship something new or you got your first customer, that is actually very share worthy and just, and it's, it costs you a little literally probably only a minute or two to post something like that on Twitter. And so I would always, you know, tell founders like, start being there first, you know, you first have to see what's up.
kind of posts resonate with your audience, what kind of replies, and then in the end you can maybe ask a VA or a ghostwriter or anybody who can help you with like, okay, I'd like these types of posts, I know my audience is into that, but in the end you'll need to feed that with screenshots, with stories of the work you're doing, otherwise, you know, what will you share and why will people follow you?
Tzakhi (14:52.458)
Yeah. Okay. So I think you already gave the first part of it, but maybe if you can just kind of give us like, is there a kind of like a play?
Yannick Co-founder Hypefury (15:08.109)
you
Tzakhi (15:11.558)
Twitter for, and specifically, is there something for startup founders? You already said part of it, like building in public and commenting, but can you kind of give us a framework of the steps and maybe how long you can expect to start seeing something back?
Yannick Co-founder Hypefury (15:27.405)
Yeah, definitely. So in the beginning, I would like Harley posts on your own timeline, maybe once a day. I wouldn't, I wouldn't even do more than that. What's more important is finding your tribe. And so if you're a startup founder, if you're a technical person who's creating the product, follow other technical founders on Twitter. And there are lots of them. And you probably know already a couple of people and simply when you start following them and you scroll down a little bit on their
timeline, you'll actually get suggestions of other people similar to the person you just followed to follow. And there I would just spend an hour going down the rabbit hole and start following quite a few people. I know you can only follow, I don't know, maybe 50 people per hour or something, otherwise you'll get flagged. And so slowly over a couple of days, start following a few hundred people who you think are interesting and start replying to them. And so...
Tzakhi (15:59.482)
Mm -hmm.
Tzakhi (16:10.822)
you
Tzakhi (16:21.638)
you
Yannick Co-founder Hypefury (16:25.485)
Here, I would split the people you're following into two groups. One are real peers, similar followers size, similar product types, maybe like people you want to defend. Like if you would meet somebody with those credentials or that sort of people in a bar, you could say to yourself like, you know, this could become my friend. Those types of people. Add them to a list on Twitter.
And so every day you can open them or you can add them to the engagement builder and hypefury. It's like an easy way to reply, but basically the idea is the same. You add those people to a list and you want to start building connection with them. So you just want to, you know, start answering their questions, start, you know, uh, replying to their posts. And, um, the second list you create are for people who have more followers than you, lots more like thousands, tens of thousands.
Tzakhi (16:57.926)
you
Yannick Co-founder Hypefury (17:19.181)
they already have a following, they already have a lot of posts and impressions on their posts. And so if you start replying to that post, your replies will get more impressions. You'll get more people who view your profile and you'll get more people who hopefully want to follow you. And use that as like a feed into your, you know, to create a follower base of your own. And the other list of like your peers, that should be like,
Tzakhi (17:30.296)
you
Tzakhi (17:39.11)
you
Yannick Co-founder Hypefury (17:48.749)
your list of people you want to engage with, you want to like their posts, you want to repost their posts. And so hopefully they'll return the favor and that will help your own post to start surfacing a bit more. And slowly you start getting a bit more organic views and organic followers. That would be something I would do in the first couple of weeks.
Tzakhi (18:08.05)
What about what happens after that?
Yannick Co-founder Hypefury (18:17.005)
Well, as soon as you have a couple hundred followers, you can start posting a little bit more on your own timeline because your posts will get a bit more impressions. It'll actually make a bit more sense as just a time effort thing just to post more on your own timeline. You'll see a bit more traction. And I would still keep commenting. If you really take it seriously, if you...
Tzakhi (18:34.862)
Yeah.
Yannick Co-founder Hypefury (18:44.883)
I know if you don't have a real like marketing channel to sell your startup, like Twitter is great. A lot of people, you know, every time they share like, Hey, I got my first customer on my 10th or I'm doing this much MR right now. It actually attracts other people to your startup as well. It attracts more customers. And so, especially if you know, like I've either long sales cycles or long
you know, onboarding or whatever, Twitter can be a great way to get more clients. And so spending a bit, bit of time there is really valuable in the long run. And so I would spend, I would say at least 30 minutes a day.
Tzakhi (19:28.672)
you
Yannick Co-founder Hypefury (19:32.589)
a day you might think wow that's a lot but if you do that for a couple of weeks like your follower gain will start growing you'll probably gain a hundred followers a week easily maybe even more if you just
Be nice.
Yannick Co-founder Hypefury (19:52.045)
weeks you should have.
Yannick Co-founder Hypefury (19:58.477)
views on your posts and you'll start growing organically. And then it's, you know, the game starts being a bit different.
Yannick Co-founder Hypefury (20:09.773)
the influencers, the people with a lot of followers because you get more organic views. And so, yeah, you might want to tune down the amount of comments you post on those accounts. You might tune up the amount of posts you do on your own timeline. And then what you could do, but it's probably not for all startup founders, but you could say, okay, what's interesting in my niche? What do people really care about? I could create a freebie. I'm going to create...
Tzakhi (20:32.486)
you
Yannick Co-founder Hypefury (20:39.661)
Simple PDF could be a video you record and you say, well, I'm going to give this away for free. The only thing people have to do is like and comment on your posts and you know, you can automate this with hype fury, but you could also send DMS, you know, manually. It's the same. It's the same, you know, thing, but
Yannick Co-founder Hypefury (21:03.341)
It's, it works really well in the algorithm or people liking comments. So this post will get a lot of attention, a lot of engagement. And so the post will get many more views than you would normally would a lot more intention. People start following you more. And so you're basically giving away something for free in order for people to pay you with attention. And, you know, those types of posts will, you know, get you hundreds of new followers, you know,
once you start getting a bit more traction. And so.
Tzakhi (21:35.174)
sure this type of post is really good for like any type of startup founder. Like it's good for, I think it's again, this is more B2C, of course, anything that's like service oriented. Maybe if you're if your if your clients are SMBs, that's also very good.
business owners or small business owners. But for, I think for like the bigger enterprise software type of plays, I'm not sure that such a, because the selling process is really different and there's a lot more stakeholders on the way to sale and you're not really gonna be effective by getting them through that kind of channel. I think, I haven't tried it, but that's -
Yannick Co-founder Hypefury (22:22.925)
Yeah. Yeah. I think that's, that's definitely the case. I also think that there are probably ways, if you focus on like a small part of what your enterprise solution fixes, I don't know. I'm going to give it's, this is not enterprise, but just an example of how you could use this B2B. You know, if you, uh, target real estate agents, you know, you might want to start following them first, engage with them. And, okay. You could think about like, okay, what's interesting to.
all the real estate agents out there, what would they want? Like maybe have, I don't know, a 10 step framework on how to write better ads for all the real estate they post online, all the listings, I don't know, listing. It might not be directly connected to what you're selling, but it is interesting to the audience you wanna talk to. And so,
Tzakhi (23:06.606)
Listings, yeah, that's the word you're missing.
Yannick Co-founder Hypefury (23:20.685)
You might not be able to directly entice people to, you know, uh, request a demo or sign people up for a trial, but it is a way to attract the right audience to your profile. And then, you know, once they start following you, they might check you out. They might check out your product. And so it's a two -step way that could land you new customers, not directly, but probably indirect.
Tzakhi (23:47.718)
Okay.
coordinating or trying to ask people in TMs, et cetera, to follow you. Because I can say that.
Pads don't work, from what I know.
Yannick Co-founder Hypefury (24:00.031)
you
Tzakhi (24:15.11)
But the essence of the idea of a pod, which is let's go offline and let's just say to each other, let's go off the platform, just say, please follow, like my post and I'll do the same for you. In a kind of soft way is something that it's almost a must to really grow. So you have a few people that are trying to grow in the same direction and in the same space and you kind of have a...
virtual handshake, understanding that you're helping each other out. Do you do those things on Twitter as well?
Yannick Co-founder Hypefury (24:49.453)
Well, I don't do them. They're also against terms of service. I think LinkedIn is the same. So, you know, officially I don't encourage people to use them. I do.
Tzakhi (24:59.504)
I think it's against the terms of service if you kind of like make it coordinated or automated. If it's kind of like just like a friendly kind of handshake agreement, please respond to my post and I'll try to respond to yours. I don't think that's kind of something that's against anything.
Yannick Co-founder Hypefury (25:18.669)
Yeah, that's true. That's true. So I would say if you do that way, there's nothing against that. And I think that one of the one of the techniques I.
people on the list, you, when you meet in real life, you could befriend. And I think that's part of what you're saying is try to make friends, interact with their posts. And there's going to be some reciprocity there anyway. And so, yeah, that would be my way, but there are, there are other ways as in, you know, you could even, there are engagement pods. You could join telegram groups or you could pay people to reposts or interact with you.
You know, I think it still exists. It's always going to exist. But the question is, A, do you really want to go that route? You know, because are you going to get genuine followers? I don't know. Are you going to find out like what content is genuinely good or is it just because, you know, you flagged that post as please interact with that one? And so it has a lot of like negatives, I would say as well. I would definitely.
encourage people to go the route of saying, who would I want to befriend online, interact with their posts. And there are a lot of people who will just, because that's the right way, will also interact with you as much as you do with them. So.
Tzakhi (26:51.782)
I think you mentioned a lot about interacting with peers. I know that a lot of investors are on Twitter. It's also like an age thing.
still true but like say TikTok is a much younger crowd, Twitter is sort of like the age group of people and they're already investing definitely angel investing, VCs and I'm pretty sure that if you're if you're doing the things you know follow the kind of playbook that you mentioned.
then you'll get attention from investors as well. And then even if they don't directly interact with you or if they come up to you like they came, like they happened to hype Furion, they offer to invest or offer to examine an investment, that's great. But even if that doesn't happen, when you reach out to them or when you connect to them, even if it's through an intro or cold outreach, they already know something about you. They've already followed you. The door is already somewhat open, not fully, but...
It's easier. It's an easier first step.
Yannick Co-founder Hypefury (27:57.453)
Yeah, definitely. Definitely. It's like, you know, it's, it's an online resume. You're actually, you're showing who you are, not just what you're, what you're building, but you're also showing based on what you share, what you like, like they'll know a lot more about you based on what you share on Twitter. And, you know, the other thing is they'll, they can actually see, see you getting traction. See you not only, you know, uh, just money wise, customer wise, but also he's building.
He's creating new things, you know, he has grit and determination. I think things that investors would want to see in somebody to invest in. And so, yeah, I only see pluses for people who want to, you know, spend a bit of time on Twitter and building their resume, not just for their customers, but also for investors.
Tzakhi (28:49.828)
This was very useful, very helpful, very interesting. Thanks so much. I guess people should, should people reach out to you, connect to you, or should they just go to hypefury?
Yannick Co-founder Hypefury (29:01.517)
Yeah, well, you can email me, janik at highfury .com. If you Google me Janik Highfury, you'll probably find me on Twitter and some other places. So yeah, connect, it would be great.
Tzakhi (29:14.15)
All right, awesome, we'll include all those links. If you're listening, subscribe to our channel wherever you're listening to it on YouTube or Spotify, wherever.
If you haven't done it yet, subscribe to our newsletter at meet .capital. Every week we give a summary of a great talk with founders, investors, and experts, and a lot of other stuff. So see you there. Yannick, thanks so much.
Yannick Co-founder Hypefury (29:46.573)
Thanks for having me.
