Alex's first users came entirely from his existing X (Twitter) audience, which he had built over 3 years of consistent content creation. In December 2024, he posted a simple message to his X followers inviting anyone interested to beta test Creator Buddy for free. This yielded approximately 150 beta testers. He then personally met with each and every one of them to walk through how the product worked, observe their behavior, and collect feedback — a highly manual, high-touch onboarding process he ran solo. During the 6–7 months of building (August 2024 to January 2025), he shared his building journey publicly on X, keeping his audience engaged and primed. This meant that by launch day (January 24, 2025), hundreds of followers were already aware of the product and ready to buy on day one. There was no cold outreach, no ads, and no SEO — it was entirely audience-driven.
Creator Buddy
AI coaching app that analyzes your tweets and helps you create better content
7 moves, in order
- Pre build (2021–2023)Twitter content creation
Spent 3 years consistently posting on Twitter about content strategy and the X algorithm, spending ~5 minutes a day tweeting. Built a personal system of tracking tweets in spreadsheets to understand what worked.
Built a large, engaged audience of content creators on X — the exact target market for Creator Buddy - Audience breakout (March 2023)Twitter viral thread
When Elon Musk open-sourced the X algorithm, Alex immediately dug into the GitHub code and wrote a detailed Twitter thread breaking down how the algorithm works, what variables drive virality, etc.
Thread went viral; retweeted by Elon Musk, engaged by Mark Cuban; earned hundreds of thousands of followers overnight - Early build / prototype (August 2024)Twitter community feedback
On day one of discovering Cursor, Alex built a working prototype and immediately posted it to his X community asking: 'What do you think? What can I add that makes this more helpful?' Iterated based on replies.
Established a feedback loop with his audience; continued iterating for 6–7 months before launch - Beta (December 2024)Twitter direct invite
Posted on X inviting followers to beta test Creator Buddy for free. Personally met with each of the ~150 beta testers to walk them through the product, observe usage patterns, and identify bottlenecks.
~150 beta testers; major product improvements from watching real user behavior; beta ran until the day before launchUsers 150 users - Pre launch announcement (January 12, 2025)Twitter launch announcement
Announced publicly on X that Creator Buddy would officially launch on January 24, 2025 — 12 days of pre-launch hype. Hosted a Twitter Spaces session the day of the announcement, talking about Creator Buddy the entire day and sharing his 6–7 month building journey.
Hundreds of followers primed and ready to buy on day one of launch - Launch day (January 24, 2025)Twitter audience
Went live with the paid product on January 24. The launch was driven entirely by his pre-warmed X audience — no paid ads. Alex went for a 45-minute walk after launch and returned to a flood of DMs about bugs, which he fixed in real time.
$100,000 ARR in the first 15 minutes; $200,000 ARR within 2 hours of launch - Post launch (within 2 weeks)Twitter audience retention
Continued engaging his X community, prioritizing community health and distribution as the core moat. Fixed bugs, shipped improvements, and maintained the relationship with subscribers.
$300,000 ARR (~$25,000 MRR) and ~500 active paid subscribers within 2 weeks of launchMRR $25k Users 500 users
Alex had a massive, highly relevant Twitter/X audience built over 3 years of content creation around the X algorithm and content strategy. His breakout moment was a viral thread in March 2023 analyzing Elon Musk's open-sourced X algorithm code, which was retweeted by Elon and engaged with by Mark Cuban — earning him hundreds of thousands of followers. His audience was precisely the target customer for a tweet-optimization AI tool, making distribution essentially free and instant.
existing_twitter_audience
No channels explicitly called out as failures. He did note that Cursor's quality felt like it dropped around October 2024, leading him to switch to Windsurf — but this was a tooling switch, not a failed growth channel.
I Built an App with Cursor and Made $100K on Launch Day
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