How Tony Dinh Became Famous on Twitter

Hey there, my name is Tiago, and I am the host of the Wannabe Entrepreneur Podcast. I recently interviewed Tony Dihn about his journey as a full-time indie hacker!

He gave a very good explanation about how he was able to grow his Twitter account super-fast (37.8K as of now) and I want to share it with you.

Btw, this is just my own personal observation based on my chat with Toy and his tweets. Tony also documented all of his journey on Twitter in this super interesting notion page.

How did Tony Dinh become famous on Twitter?

Tony started spending more time on Twitter at the beginning of 2021. Like most of us, he started to test the waters and learn the Indie Hacker lingo like:

Build in Public, Always do Marketing, As a developer…, etc…

And, like all of us, his account was growing slowly… 🐌

Here are some of his early tweets:

Typical build in public tweets, that were good but lacked engagement.

But suddenly everything changed…

Tony Dinh’s Rise

In the interview Tony told me that he was spending a lot of his time thinking about how could he stand out on Twitter 🤔

Tony’s first viral tweet happened when he shared the results of his experience trying to simulate water in javascript. To be honest it looks really cool!

It was something unique that no one had seen before…

Playing around with Twitter’s API!

Turns out that the Twitter API is extremely powerful and allows you to dynamically update your Twitter Header.

On the 7th of March 2021 Tony shared his little Twitter game on a Tweet that reached 73 likes, 12 retweets, and 161 comments!! 😱

As a good entrepreneur, Tony was able to smell the public interest and quickly started exploring this niche.

He started by doing a poll asking if people would be interested in running their own Twitter dynamic banners:

After finding his niche, Tony’s tweets started to have more engagement and people were interested in seeing what he was going to do next…

The True Build In Public

Tony started shipping new twitter games and integrations on a daily basis…

Do you remember the Progress Bar?

Everyone wanted one…

Tony wanted to make his launch exclusive and to accomplish that he only gave access to his Twitter tools to a group of 1000 people!

This worked really well and black magic started to get a lot of attention and was being featured by other creators

Tony kept pushing new features and introducing them to his audience with little screen recordings of how they worked.

One extremely successful feature came on the 26th of May 2021…

This dynamic header was a game-changer!! This tweet alone had more than 2k likes and in the interview Tony said that he got 4k new followers from it!! 🤯

Do you want to meet other indie hackers?

Come share your journey with bootstrappers working on their web projects

Perfect Audience First Approach

With all of these cool initial features, Tony was able to capture the attention of a lot of people. He had created an audience and suddenly he was tweeting directly to his target customers.

Each new tweet was both a form of marketing and feedback collection.

This genius strategy allowed him to build the right features for which people were willing to pay and he perfectly used FOMO to his advantage. Everyone was speaking about black magic and everyone wanted to have a beta code!

With all of this traction, there is really one thing to be done next…

Product Hunt