When I opened my first self-storage facility, I was talking about the Sweaty Startup podcast on Reddit and had a small engaged audience there. I was working on Storage Squad at the time as well, and just liked having a platform to promote my journey and my philosophy. I really didn’t do much with Twitter at the time.
The podcast idea had come to me kind of on a whim. When my brother was in college, I had a mentorship call with him to talk about his lawn care business. I wanted to record our conversation and how we thought through things as business owners. This grew into starting the Sweaty Startup podcast, which I recorded every week for a year in 2018. The thing is, I had fewer than 20 downloads per episode that whole first year. I didn’t have much success driving traffic to the podcast.
I stumbled upon the entrepreneurship forum on Reddit and started posting and contributing and getting some traction there, and then started a forum focused on the Sweaty Startup brand and philosophy. Moses Kagan had told me that I need to get on Twitter though, saying that Reddit was low value. I thought that Twitter was just full of memes and trolls online and that nothing good happened there, but I got a call from him again six months later almost demanding that I move over.
I got on Twitter and immediately did a full deal breakdown. I had P&L statements, facility metrics, and tons of context behind one of my first self-storage facilities. Moses shared it and said that I would be worth following, and suddenly my audience grew. I was hooked. People were messaging me, reaching out, and potential investors were even trying to connect. From there, my base has grown even more as I’ve learned to really leverage the site. The value of Twitter is that people there are really in the trenches building companies, they mean real business. And that’s why I stopped posting on Reddit, because Twitter was so much more valuable and transformative.
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