Turn top tweets into a newsletter?

Twitter is a great way to figure out what to write about.

Every minute, potently compact ideas get shot out into the world.

Taking a tip from Justin Jackson, I've been using Twitter as a way to throw out my own ideas to see what sticks. Turns out, it's a great way to figure out what others find interesting.

Twitter is a helpful way as an entrepreneur to ensure we're creating value in everything we communicate. It moves quickly, so any given quip isn't given too much weight — unless it is because it's particularly entertaining or valuable. Then it'll get liked and retweeted into the wider Twitterverse. So, with writing, Twitter helps ensure that a topic we'll spend time contemplating is worth spending time on.

Why spend time putting anything out no one is interested in?

So in true engineering fashion (AKA I'm lazy), I got to thinking, "Hey! What if I could just create my newsletter right from my top tweets each week?"

And so, Owl Post was born.

("Why 'Owl Post'," you ask? Because magical owls deliver the mail, of course.)

So for one hour last week (and one day over last weekend), I spent some time repurposing an old Twitter API key (Shhhh! — Don't tell Twitter) to rank my top tweets from the past seven days.

And in true Corey fashion (AKA getting carried away), I went ahead and bought two domains for it — owlpost.rocks and 🦉✨.fm.

I was thinking the shortened emoji URL would be an intriguing new way to onboard subscribers via the Twitter bio URL.

And then, in an attempt to course-correct the "getting carried away"-ness, I recorded a GIF of the basic app, threw together a quick carrd.co landing page with it, slapped a $14.99/month price tag on it (to gauge monetization potential), a MailChimp signup form (should people actually want it), and put it out into the world to see what would happen.

I was a bit surprised at the interest. It received seven signups from the curious. I received a few DMs about it — which helped me learn a bit more.

At that point, I got a bit excited. Maybe I was on to something? I was still a bit hesitant about it. The idea wasn't exactly solving a problem I knew others really needed solved. And I don't need to be spending any time on side projects as I need to keep focused on my current business, Blurt.

A bunch of ideas came to mind.

  • Be able to add commentary in between tweets for the newsletter.
  • Be able to subscribe to people to get your own weekly newsletter of their top weekly tweets.
  • How would it onboard people to subscribe to the newsletter using Twitter?
  • Maybe a cool Twitter card for pinned tweets?
  • Maybe use DMs?

Alas, these were all just fun ideas and not really solving a known customer problem other than scratching my own itch.

So, after discussing it a bit with Chris, it seemed the next smallest step I could make was to:

  1. Make the basic top tweets app public to see how others engaged with it — which I did. You can create your own with 🦉✨.fm/twitter_username (e.g. 🦉✨.fm/corey_gwin). If you want to use it on your profile, use the punny code URL on Twitter, https://xn--0ci4130n.fm, and Twitter will convert it with emojis. Plan is to see who is using it and use it as an opportunity to strike up conversations about their actual Twitter or newsletter problems.
  2. Try including my top tweets from the past week in my newsletter to see how you might enjoy it.

So without further ado, here are my top 10 tweets from the past week. :)

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

Hope sharing that process is helpful in sorting out your own projects. :)

Dig this article? Share it! coreygwin.com/hoot-tweets

— Corey Gwin, @corey_gwin

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Published almost 2 years ago
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