Flounder — Friendly way to gather your startup’s audience (on Twitter)

Another product by @stef at Makeshift. I like Stef's experiments. He once created a script to add people that shared his blog articles, to a Twitter list, essentially creating automatic, micro-communities. Like most Makeshift products, Flounder is super simple but could be an effective way for companies to build a Twitter following.

Thanks for sharing @rrhoover! I had this idea while travelling for the weekend, and it seemed to get a good reaction when I told a few people I was with about it. So I followed through and made the tiniest version of the idea that I could on my return. Usual limits applied - it had to be made and working in about two days of effort. Most of the code for this hack is in the Twitter API wrangling rather than in the interface. I'd be interested to hear anyone's reactions - good or bad feedback. I realise there are a few issues here about knowing who your account is going to be following, perhaps only following people who tweet with positive sentiment and ensuring transparency about what's happening. But early days!

@stef love it. I would love this to include the feature mentioned by ryan (people who shared the blog posts)

I should! It was such a shame that Medium hid all of the recommenders away in the activity feed. I wish I could get at that data!

I can imagine Flounder become a "toolkit" of different tactics for audience/community building on Twitter. My only request is to focus on providing value to both the company + Twitter users. There are so many spammy, disingenuous Twitter tools out there already. @stef - you did something clever in announcing Flounder. Would you like to share?

Yeah I'd definitely not want to do anything that would be spammy or counter-productive. Twitter has some pretty hard limits in place but I'm thinking about putting even harder ones in! Because it's all @-based I'm hoping it's just a nice serendipity engine. Oh yes! This was quite fun. @rrhoover started Producthunt on one of my other hack project http://Linkydink.io so I thought "how can this get more meta?" So I made a little landing page on one of my *other* tools, Attending, and added a feature that lets you change the button text to whatever you want. Hey presto, Attending becomes a "Who wants to try my latest hack" landing page! http://attending.io/events/flounder I quite quickly got about fifty people to sign up there, and I could message them through Attending to try it out when it was ready. So while the hack was still a shell script on my computer I was still able to gather some interest. And now, here we are on Producthunt and we have another level of meta :-) I'd not realised but actually Attending is useful for just gathering a group of people around an idea as much as it could be used for a real-world event.

There's a "yo dawg" reference there. :) For everyone else, here's the backstory @stef is referring to. Product Hunt started off as an email list using Linkydink, a Makeshift product.

That's a really cool idea @stef. I don't tweet a lot on my side project's account but I tweet a ton of my personal account. Signed up and am excited to try it out.

Being that Product Hunt's login/network is based off of Twitter, there are some creative engagement and growth opportunities I'd like to explore at some point. I like what @MagicRecs is doing. ;) cc @riccardoar

Really cool idea. Will give it a try.

Thanks folks! It seems to be working pretty well for the folks who are trying it out today. The stats for people following the startup accounts back actually seem a bit too good to be true, but I'm hoping to test that out and report back some stats soon. You guys are ace. I love Product Hunt!

@stef I expect a blog post out of you :)

@rrhoover you're on! :-)

Flounder is on my "things to try" list. :) I like the "serendipity engine" part and that "attending" can be used for projects as well. Nice job, @Stef! I second Ryan's request for a blog post. P.S. I thought the micro communities via Medium idea was GENIUS. I hope they make those recommendations accessible and visible soon.