2023 W13: Twitter

Every week I post about one thing that happened at Rows. We're building in public!

Q1 ended. Long live Q2!!

(A quick Q1 recap: We grew our metrics quite a bit. Our Northstar metrics each grew between 40% and 100%. While that's for sure positive, it's not enough! We need to grow more. For that, we will keep pushing the boundaries of our product, and that means releasing some big, bold bets in Q2. More AI for sure.)

One thing that has been improving is our Twitter game. And I'd like to talk a bit about why it's important.

Everyone needs a Twitter mafia (especially European startups)

Historically, we've been more successful when communicating on Linkedin, but Twitter feels more important.

Founders and CEOs flock there, because it pays off to be close to the opinion makers, learn about new stuff and connect. There's no shortage of relevant VCs, entrepreneurs, managers and great ideas too.

(To prove the point, here's a few relevant accounts on twitter).

You get the idea.. Of course, those accounts have hundreds of thousands or even millions of followers. When they tweet about companies and technologies, you're assured to get a flurry of attention.

It's very hard to stand out on Twitter and grow your account given that the volume of tweets is crazy high. But there's still a benefit for smaller accounts with <10k followers. And we notice is that the more we tweet with Rows and our personal accounts, the better results we get.

Examples:

Tweeting Build in Public threads has landed us more than 2 speaking events for 100+ people just the last month.
Quite some users have DM us on twitter, asking about the product, and then converted.
This report published on the Rows platform about the Portuguese Scene has quickly climbed to the top of our spreadsheet community, which make more people see Rows.
The enthusiasm of the twitterverse over OpenAI was one of the big reasons why we launched our OpenAI integration, which keeps feeding us accounts and growth.

To zoom out a bit, over the last years I have come to notice that European founders are a bit underrepresented on Twitter, and in Portugal this is extremely evident: I found just 5 people with 5k+ followers from the 🇵🇹 tech ecosystem. Probably there's a couple more, but that's still going to be crazy low for a country which produced 6+ unicorns (Talkdesk, Feedzai, Outsystems, Sword Health, Remote.com, Farfetch).

I think Europe will eventually produce its own Twitter mafia, that is, Twitter connections that reflect the physical relationships between VCs, entrepreneurs, researches and tech pros. We have to! And when we have that set up, I think the ecosystem will grow faster still. Twitter is one of the glues that can bridge the hyper segmented EU market.

For now, it's up to each individual to engage. I recommend adding your colleagues and investors, and then start reading and commenting. Check anything OpenAI related (many great projects), or the latest bomb - Elon Musk's release of the recommendation algorithm of Twitter. If you need cheering up, head over to God's twitter and catch up to some classic twitter humor.

In short: Tweet.

Next week is Easter Week, so I'll do a shorter post.