Forty days.

The time it took me to realize that we did a great job.

I'm talking about BlackTwist's launch.

It went live on July 1st, and we spent the following weeks shipping features and improvements. During this time, we've also added five new customers, even though one already churned because of inactivity on Threads.

But what amazes me is what we did before the launch.

Today, I want to walk you through the strategies and insights into how we made $3.7k in pre-sale for a tool that had yet to see the light.

It's been a wild ride, and there are plenty of lessons to share.

Ready?

What is BlackTwist?

First of all, let me introduce it so you can get a better picture of what I will talk about later.

​BlackTwist is a social media management tool designed for content creators, solopreneurs, and indie makers to grow their Threads accounts. It helps them write and schedule posts, manage multiple accounts, analyze metrics, and repurpose content.

The idea came about four months ago after a Zoom call with my friend and now co-founder, Luca.

Threads was (still is) a new land to explore, and no tool like it existed before, so we knew we could've had a first-mover advantage.

Also, it's a known topic for both of us. Three years in the trenches growing our Twitter audiences should have taught us something, after all.

So, we combined our skills to create the best social management tool for Threads.

"All good, Mattia, but how did you market it? What was the strategy?"

Okay. Follow me.

The early steps: defining the goal to achieve

Marketing starts before creating the product, right?

It starts with understanding the customer's needs and demands and sits at the intersection of product, marketing, and sales.

But we already knew what we needed from such a tool, as the first two customers ourselves.

Hence, our goal wasn't just to validate the interest but to secure early committed users and bootstrap the business.

(Those same early adopters that are now helping us shape BlackTwist.)

I've seen too many makers and companies working on their SaaS or startups in the cave, only to wonder why they failed after it was too late. I made the same mistake myself.

You want to gather people and friends around your bonfire.

You want to involve them in joining you, bringing peers, and giving feedback.

(I said peers, but even beers are okay.)

The more, the better.

(Yes, the beers.)

And that's when we went down the waiting list route.

The cool thing?

There was no name, domain, or logo on the day we announced the product. We wanted to move quickly.

"If you wait for a domain, you shipped too late," they say.

Only the bare minimum, the idea.

First step: done ✅

Let's move to the next item on the list.

Announcing early and building a waiting list

We first introduced BlackTwist on Twitter because of the 28k followers combined between our accounts.

(The alias was Threads Power Tool at the time.)

Yet, despite the initial spike in subscribers, it became crystal clear that people on Twitter wanted to avoid moving to and exploring a new social platform.

Traction needed to happen faster as we couldn't rely on it for long. So, we started posting on Threads more frequently as the natural extension of our product.

And it has been a good move.

Subscribers from there caught up fast as they fit more with the tool.

Then June came along with the name and the domain. A magical event that skyrocketed our views and gave us credibility and a boost in subs!

Right? Right?!

Well, not really.

Pushing that new update late on a Friday night broke our subscription form, and we lost a week of interested users.

Yeah, shit happens.

Second step: done ✅

Pre-selling is a delicate matter

Rolling out a pre-sale is relatively simple in itself.

The challenging part is selling something before its official release. It requires you to drum up excitement and interest, build anticipation, and tickle people's pain.

And you always wonder if you're doing it right (that's the beauty of marketing).

So, instead of announcing out of the blue, we decided to open a loop.

A teaser for the announcement. Like the unexpected event that hangs you at the end of a TV show and makes you feel eager to know what's next.

We shared a behind-the-scenes video so people could see how the product was shaping up.

Then, we promised a treat at the end of the email. The cliffhanger. If they wanted to know, they had to wait.

(The candy waiting for the unwrapping was the lifetime deal.)

Needless to say, both of those emails got a remarkable 78% open rate and paved the way.

The number #1 strategy that brought us visitors and subscribers

I always hear that build-in-public is dead.

That is far from being true.

We built BlackTwist in public on Threads, sharing sneak peeks, asking questions, and involving our (small) audience every step of the way.

And it worked. It drove eyeballs and made people curious and eager to sign up for our waiting list.

People love to follow other creators as they build their products from the idea phase up. It makes them feel part of the process.

Think about the Italian men of retirement age who watch construction sites with hands clasped behind their backs and offering unwanted advice to the workers.

Aren't they the real O.G.?

But indie makers who say build-in-public is dead usually overlook the hype train part.

​Getting a standing crowd outside takes time—a slow build-up.

You can't get out there and expect fans to be ready to cheer you up.

And 6 to 7 weeks, like we had, is an acceptable timeframe to compress the spring before the big day.

The #2 strategy that skyrocketed sales

Increasing prices.

Scarcity = giving people a real reason to act and keeping the word.

Have you ever seen products with fake evergreen discounts like "$100 off for the next XX customers?"

Yeah, nothing like this.

It's like crying wolves when there aren't.

We kicked off the pre-sale by offering a $69 Lifetime Deal to our waiting list subscribers only.

Then, a week later, we opened the pre-sale to the public at higher prices ($99 and $129) with limited seats per tier to create urgency. We anchored those prices against future subscription costs to make the offer stand out.

This brought an influx of new orders.

You can see the spike here in this chart right before the change.

The #3 strategy that helped boost conversions

By the time we opened the pre-sale, we had 60 subscribers lined up.

A week later, right before we went public and closed the signups, the waiting list doubled to a whopping 120.

Nothing fancy. An automated loop that took new subscribers by hand and presented the offer available.

But here comes the trick.

A critical factor in this success has been our email sequence.

Late subscribers had seven days from the waiting list to go down the funnel.

Hence, there has been an overlap between the public lifetime deal and the emails we sent them.

Anchoring the price to the public pre-sale made the original $69 offer a bargain. And I account for this strategy to have brought in 8 more sales.

Have we been lucky? Maybe. But we also did the right things with what we could 🙂

Behind a $3.7k pre-sale launch

Running a few numbers for you:

• 120 subscribers on the waiting list
• 30% from X, 62.5% from Threads, and 7.5% from our newsletters
• 70%+ open rate on average across all the emails
• 18 early LTD offers + 1 agency (priced at $199) = 16% email sequence CR
• 38 customers in total

What set the stage for BlackTwist's future:

• Recalibrating our ideal customer. Targeting everyone was ineffective, as many subscribers hesitated to spend money upfront. We then focused on committed users who understand the value of growing an audience on social media, as they were more likely to convert.
• Sharing openly. The initial slow pace of sales was nerve-wracking. I thought we had messed up. But we gained momentum by doubling down on what worked—building in public and engaging our audience. This generated buzz and word-of-mouth interest, bringing in more buyers.
• Timing has been crucial. We were ready to go all-in right when Meta released the Threads API. There was a lot of buzz around it as people looked at how they could have scheduled their posts. Our tool had few features, but we launched it and rode the wave anyway.

So… that's it!

I hope this journey to making $3.7k in pre-sales taught you a lot and gave you new insights for future products.

Thanks for reading The Maker Journey and being part of this adventure.

See you in the next issue!

Mattia

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