Tweeting Was My First Project
I like Twitter. I tweet a lot. Not for building a following though. In fact, I know I lose a lot of followers because I tweet a bit more than what an average user might expect. I tweet for reasons you might not have considered. As of now, I have 1095 followers.
I spoke about how I use Twitter with Matt Hartman, head of investments at betaworks, when I first met him over my Spring break. He said my approach to Twitter reminded him of how Ryan Hoover used it before he founded Product Hunt. We also discussed how we had interacted via Anchor, one of his investments, before we met in real life. I had mentioned to him that I would like to work at betaworks. I said I didn’t care what the role was.
Two and a half months later, during my finals week, Matt and his associate reached out to me to see if I was interested in doing a small project.
Guess what that project was?
Yup, it was tweeting. The task was to tweet from botcamp’s account. He asked me to do it not because I knew how to grow a huge following using hacks in short period of time. I clearly suck at growing a following. He liked how I thought about Twitter. He wanted me to push high quality content. The focus was on content, not on the followers count. While tweeting might seem like a very trivial and easy thing to do, I was expected to devote a good chunk of time to do research for finding relevant content daily.
I gladly took up the role. I had two reasons for doing so despite having three finals, two presentations and one research paper during that time. Firstly, it would help me develop a relationship with Matt. I knew from my research and my first meeting with him that he is a very product-focused investor. There was a lot to learn from him. Helping him could increase my odds of getting to work at Betaworks over the summer. Secondly, I didn’t think the task was about tweeting per se. It was about having an opportunity to learn extensively about a nascent and growing space of conversational commerce and chat products. Even if I didn’t end up getting to work at Betaworks, I knew having vast knowledge of a space that the industry is still figuring out could never hurt.
Fast forward two months. It’s been seven weeks since I started working at Betaworks. I like to think that taking up that project played a small role in betaworks deciding to hire me for the summer. I’m still tweeting. I still haven’t grown a huge following for botcamp’s account. But, when I am not tweeting, I do some other stuff too. Some of that stuff includes following —
- Studying and making the landscape of audio and chat products.
- Sourcing deals. Studying potential investments. Sitting in on pitch calls.
- Building a bot for Betaworks. Got my hands dirty.
- Bothering teams at Dexter and Poncho ( F8 launch partner) for understanding and helping with their products.
- Meeting with associates at other VC funds to discuss the bot landscape.
- Meeting with a lot of interesting well-known folks in the tech industry. The research I did for all those tweets really helped me ask the right questions to these people for having intellectual discussions about the industry.
- Distilling learnings from discussions with speakers and mentors of the botcamp program and distributing them to all the botcamp teams.
- Working with most of the botcamp teams on product strategy, roadmap, user research, competitive landscape, content, social marketing, partnerships, etc.
- Growing the skill set needed for becoming a Product Manager ( More on this some other day).
- Coming up with internal systems for streamlining a lot of processes for the botcamp program.
I am very glad that I connected with Matt via Twitter and Anchor. I’m also glad that we spoke about my Twitter usage. And that led him to assign me a small project with no certain goal of hiring me later. In hindsight, all the dots connected really well. One thing led to another. While I couldn’t have predicted what sort of work I will be doing, I knew I wanted to work at Betaworks about 7 months before I started.
Alright, I am going to go back to buffering up tweets from the botcamp account for tomorrow and the day after now.
Tweeting went from being my first project to one of my many ongoing projects.
