Change your life with a single tweet
How Twitter Opens Doors
Reading Niv Dror’s tweet from last week made me think about how Twitter specifically has opened doors for me. So yes, Anne Worsoe, time to respond to your request:
The tweet she’s referring to is my communication with jason a few years ago:
I’d tweeted about Jason’s articles and work before. Sometimes I would get lucky and he would ❤ it.
At Bastille, the LAUNCH demo day, we got to meet several other entrepreneurs and investors, and some of them we still keep in touch with now two years later! I know that many of my friends would see his tweet and then think: “I’m never going to be picked, so why bother”. At that, you’ve already lost!
At Megacool we use a term called “to throw a lucky ball”. It’s directly translated from the Norwegian word “Flaksball”. It’s about taking small initiatives, like planting small seeds, that individually don’t make up much or take up much time, but if the seed suddenly starts to grow, it can be opening up doors you could only imagine!
In plain English, this is often referred to as serendipity.
To me, Twitter is great for serendipity (or lucky balls, if you prefer 🤷♀️). It’s a casual channel to engage in discussions with people that can potentially help you a lot. It’s a place for you to be helpful, engaged and get noticed before actually reaching out to someone. That way, your chances of response is much higher.
Another Twitter story I have is the first time I reached out to Eric Seufert. I’d been an avid reader of his content over at Mobile Dev Memo.
He followed up by asking me to write about the growth of the mobile game Fun Run as a guest author. He then later mentioned Fun Run on the App Masters Podcast by Steve P. Young, who invited me to be interviewed. Now, 4 years later, I’m good friends with Eric’s wife and I meet up with Steve to talk app marketing a few times a year! Besides to doing an amazing podcast, Steve is also hosting the most valuable meetups, dinners and intimate conferences for people in the app space. There I’ve made many new friends and valuable connections. He recently invited me to speak at his App Masters Retreat, where he gave me The five minute journal. I wrote about that previously. All of this from one tiny tweet.
Twitter has also been an important channel for interacting with the Product Hunt community and team. Through Twitter we were able to engage with Ryan Hoover and Nick Abouzeid to get early access to their new product Upcoming.
Through working with GIFs, I had to know who the Product Hunt GIF master was:
Later, Niv Dror were very sporty and hunted us during our product launch. I must say that I’m very impressed with the level of engagement from the Product Hunt team 🙌 😍
This post only focused on creating opportunities on Twitter. There are several other channels, like talking to strangers, asking to volunteer at an event, sending a cold email, responding to a Medium post, asking if a conference needs an extra speaker, interacting with someone on Instagram, etc.
“I always take the middle seat in the airplane so I can talk to the people next to me. I’ve met amazing people on planes who have introduced me to other amazing people.” — Nanxi Liu
On Slack we have a channel called “#luckyballs”. This is where we share whenever we throw one, regardless of its success. This is to encourage each other to talk to strangers and seize opportunities more often. It’s then later fun to backtrack amazing opportunities to a single encounter that changed our course.
“The more you do, the easier and less scary it gets!” — Tiff Willson
As with everything, play the long game. Don’t expect things to happen right away. Stay helpful and relevant, and good things will start to happen.
I’m taking on a writing challenge to publish something new every day for a week. If you want to read what’s next, subscribe here, and check out what my partner in crime is writing on her blog. You can also help me figure out what to write about by posting questions in the comments or on twitter.
Do you have your own Twitter serendipity story?
