I am here with Alan Goldman of loonlearning.com. I've talked about Alan on the show. Hey, so much. And Alan is doing amazing things on X on Twitter right now, getting a lot of reach, and I'm learning from watching Alan. I told Alan about three weeks ago to do Build in Public on Twitter on X. Build in Public is a movement where you share everything that you are doing with your startup, how much money it's making, what your goals are, what your MRR is, what great acquisition sources are, the failures, the successes, everything. And it inspires people, it teaches people, but it also gets your users, it gets your attention. Alan has a language learning startup, an AI language learning startup, and this is a very big niche. And so Alan is doing Build in Public on Twitter on X. And I think your niche is so big that there will be a crossover of people who like Build in Public on Twitter and X, and people who wanna learn a new language, or people who wanna switch from Duolingo, or switch from Memorize, or people who aren't using an AI language learning product, and they see Alan's Build in Public content, and they're working on apps themselves, and they wanna learn a new language, and they're like, I'm gonna try Alan's, I like his stuff. And Alan is getting so much reach that I wanted to have him on the show to talk about the things that he's learning about Twitter and X, because every time I'm on the phone with Alan, he's like, I just learned this about Twitter. I just learned this about X. Yesterday, you had your best day, your best performance. - Yeah, I had. - So how many followers on Twitter do you have right now? - I think I have about 220. - And how long ago did you start? - I started about 10 days ago. - And so yesterday you had your best performing tweet. - Yes. - So you have 220 followers? - Yeah. - And how many views did the tweet get? - The tweet that I had yesterday got 6.5,000 impressions, which is really interesting, and I actually went to the top of trending inside of Build in Public. - What is Build in Public, in terms of like, it's a community on-- - It's a community on X. It's for sharing your progress, showing all the ups and all the downs in your project, which is something that was hard for me to get used to. Usually, if I have a business that's making money, I keep that thing private. It's only for me and all people that I know. And usually I would just tell this stuff to Edward in private. And he says, you know what? The way you form the conversation, the way you talk about it, it would really be good for Build in Public. I bit the bullet, sort of got rid of that anxiety and started posting there. And I've been seeing pretty decent success. I've been getting a lot of views to my website. And one interesting thing that I found that someone posted on there was that every time you comment on a post on X, you get 1.9 views to your page, to your Twitter profile. So I treated every tweet or every repost or any message on Twitter, like an advertisement to my profile. So I created a call to action within my avatar to say follow. I simplified my name. I went and got a blue check mark. And I have all of my information in my bio very succinct and clean. And then I went out, essentially recruiting. I went out going to people's pages, going to people's tweets, engaging with them and trying to provide as much content. So they see my profile and then they're enticed to follow. And yeah, that's what got me like a pretty much 170 followers and pretty much about 10 days. And it's been exponential. So first I started out one or two, but I think the last day I got 30 or 35. It seems like X sort of ramps you up once they see that you're doing well and engagement. And I think I'm only going to grow exponentially from here. And the way I treat it is that I treat it like, I don't know, fishing. There are some messages that I use for general questions or general engagement. Then I usually try to get a person into my profile and give them a choice. Give them something that they can help me with and something that they can learn. Because once that happens, they feel that they're involved in my process. So for example, I was toiling over whether I should have this dashboard or another dashboard. And instead of just keeping that internal, wondering about that myself, I posted it there, then I engaged with designers intentionally on their pages. And then they went out and checked out my page, saw that post at the top and then commented on that. And that's how I sort of grow. I sort of have to break it up into three things. One, a choice on my own page. Two, engagement on other people's pages. And three, a very low level, easy question. So what's your SaaS built in? Or what is something you wish you could have done at the beginning of your business? Something that's very general. And sort of like in top of the funnel situation. And then I have a bottom of the funnel on my page. I don't know if that's the proper way of using it. But that's the way I see it. You get people to your page and then people see the link in your bio. You have a link in your bio. And then people click and then go and view your page and see if your product is a product that they want to F with. Yeah, pretty much. So you started just doing hashtag build in public, which is what people do when they're sharing updates to their company, like build in public is huge. Peter levels, super famous, build in public person, Mark Lou, super famous, build in public person. Literally the biggest build in public person is Elon Musk. Elon Musk does build in public. He shares updates with all of his companies and like that is build in public. That is giving people a sense of momentum from seeing what other people are doing. I personally love build in public. My handle on TikTok is build in public. I started my daily videos because I wanted to do build in public on Twitter on X. And I was finding that it was taking too much work because I was doing it wrong. I was doing it wrong. I was finding that it was taking too much work. And so I thought that maybe doing it on TikTok would be less saturated and it was. But I had been doing it wrong because Alan is growing really fast. One of the ways that you get people to check out your build in public content is you just use hashtag build in public. Lots of people search Twitter and X for hashtag build in public. I want to know and you were doing that at first. Are you still doing a hashtag build in public? No, only because there's a community for that. And there's stricter rules. Also, I find that people pay attention to the community more than the hashtag at this point. So I just stick to the community. How did you get into the community? You could just join us to open community. Go to communities. There's build in public and it's pretty much there. Did you have to get accepted into the community before you could start posting? No, they just have some rules about posting that you have to follow. I'm not sure what the exact rules that is. Just keep it on topic pretty much. You told me that people either want to see like two things and maybe there's more to this. You said they either want to see like a new customer for the day or they want to see you're testing different things in your app. The number one thing that gets people enticed is money coming in because not everyone has money coming in on their business. And there are a lot of people that want that, that want that feeling. So they sort of live vicariously through you and I feel like that's the following that you give us. That's why they come. So they live vicariously through you and also yet they're make sure that you give them something they can also participate in. It's not enough for them to just watch you. You have to give them the choice of something. Then they feel like they belong in the company they're involved. That's how you get a real follower. And what I tend to do is if someone engages with me, the same rules are in reverse. So if someone engages with me and they provide me a lot of content, I sort of trade with them. So I follow them for sure. I tell them that's why I follow them. And then I see if I can provide them with any value. And hopefully I can. I go to their page. I see what they're doing. I click on their links. And you have to remember that this is a community, right? We're all working together. So I have to provide value if I want to retain that person as a follower of me. - I thought yesterday was cool because you didn't have a customer yesterday and you're like, okay, I don't have a customer. So I can't share that. So you made a comparison of two dashboards within your app. And you didn't share a customer update. So if you're listening and you don't have any customers, this is what Alan did. He didn't have a customer yesterday. So he shows two dashboards in his app, basically conversion rate optimization, testing different dashboards. And he says like, I think he said just said, which one do you like better? And then that was your best performing post ever so far. - And what's interesting is that I didn't actually get a solution. Everyone was dead split in the middle. There was two options, air beat. I had a post a day prior or a couple of days prior. That was my second highest performing post. And it was just the real. I didn't have a sale that day either, but I was just like, hey, I'm gonna open up about that. About how sometimes an entrepreneurship, if you don't do well, it defines you. Like if you make a sale, you feel great. If you don't make a sale, you feel like you're in the dumps. And I feel like the difference between building public and just regular marketing is that you're saying the downsides as well. You're saying when you're feeling bummed out or a bad thing happens or you lose customers. So I had mentioned that like, hey, you know, feeling down because the sales haven't gone up today. A lot of people came out for that post because they can feel that. And they were like, hey, you got this. Don't worry. And I got a lot of comments on there too. So really it's heavy on the community aspect. And you have to remember that building public isn't like you're a publicly traded company. It's not a highlight reel, it's not Instagram. This is the real reel. It's telling them exactly how it goes, ups and downs. Something that I really like about building public is everyone who is in the community are pretty prolific in terms of sharing stuff. Whether that is their own updates or things that they have learned from other people or cool products that they discovered. And so if you have a product that is applicable to somebody else in the community, that person might have a blog, might have an Instagram, might have a TikTok, might have a YouTube, might have a popular Twitter of themselves. And they might share it just because they think it's cool and that's what the community does. And something that I said to Alan, so Alan right now, I really believe Alan's app is gonna make a lot. Another reason why I'm very bullish on your app is because I've talked about Sensor Tower. It's sensortower.com. Sensortower.com in the show, which shows you it's free. You don't even need to log in with your email and it will show you how much money any app is making. And Alan is constantly looking at other AI language learning apps that are making hundreds of thousands of dollars a month and to quote you, they are trash. And I looked at them myself. They are trash and Alan's app is LoonLearning.com. Alan's app is beautiful. Alan's app is beautiful LoonLearning.com. And like his market is huge, the market is great. One thing that he hasn't done yet that I think will be really big with the building public community is his language learning app doesn't teach English yet. Not yet. He doesn't have English as a language. And that's the biggest market. It's the biggest market. And lots of people who are doing building public, building public is a very international movement. It's huge in India. It's huge in Europe. It's huge with people in Bali. Many of the building public people that I see are not even in the United States. There's a lot who are in the United States and then there's a lot who are not, but a lot who are not. And so I think Alan, when you have English in your app, I think it's gonna be great. - Yeah, it's pretty much 75 to 80% of the market is English. And it's something that as an American, I should have realized. Because as an American, it's like, what language would I most wanna learn? What language do Americans most wanna learn? And not realizing that everyone actually wants to learn English across the world. And so yeah, I have to amend that. But you know, this interesting question, it's like, I know I have to add English, but then what does the base language become? Is the base language then Spanish? Is the base language then Chinese? Or is it that if I'm teaching English, I now have to support every language as a base language? Security's question, I don't know the answer. Maybe you guys could tell us the answer. But yeah, so I've been thinking possibly. - Dude, you should ask it on building public. - Yeah, you're right. It's a good question for building public. And yeah, so yeah, maybe I'll just support multiple languages, multiple bases, and just move from there. - I wanna give an example of why building public is so cool. Some of the power that you get from building public. So I've mentioned Senja, I believe it's Senja.io. It's called Senja. It is an app that shows testimonials for your product. It was started by this guy, E.U. Boyd, B-O-I-D. Senja is like one of the great building public people because they are very forward with all of their progress. Now their MRR is $30,000 a month and increasing, but there was this crazy thing that happened because the creator of Senja is Nigerian. Being from Nigeria, it's hard for him to go to other places to get a visa to go to other places. Even though he's making $30,000 a month, it's still hard for him to get a visa to go to other places. And it's hard for him to have a payment processor that's reliable. He had Stripe and randomly Stripe stopped serving him. They did it without warning and without telling him why and just shut down his account on Stripe. And so he made this long thread on Twitter on X about how hard it is being a Nigerian founder. He's been doing build in public for years. He has all these resources in terms of social capital of people who have been looking at his stuff. He had a bunch of followers, people who were inspired by him, people all over the world. So Stripe randomly stopped serving this person. He puts him to this thread about how hard it is being a Nigerian founder, using Stripe as an example and then he's saying like, he can't even go to the UK where he has tons of customers, can't even get a visa to go to the UK, puts together this long thread. Because he has a preexisting audience, it goes viral. It gets, I think, 1.2 or 1.6 million impressions. Not only does he get Stripe back the next day, he's getting a visa now to the UK and to travel and to leave Nigerian to go wherever he wants. His followers who have been inspired by him, they have a bunch of resources. They didn't even know it was a problem for this person. And now this is getting taken care of because build in public is a great movement. If you inspire people, they wanna do stuff for you. The build in public community, I think, is very, like I said, prolific, it's huge. And it's composed of builders and doers and people who like get stuff done. And that's why I like this community so much. Alan is one of these people. I'm watching Alan crush it with build in public and I'm personally, I'm learning a ton. I actually wanted to ask you about one other thing. You're learning a lot about running ads to your app. What are some of the top things that you learn running ads to learn learning? Well, I mean, I guess for everyone else, it might be pretty basic to people that are running ads. But, I mean, one thing that comes down to metrics and it comes down to, interestingly enough, trusting the algorithm that already exists. So, you know, a long time ago, you would actually target the demographic that you're looking for and then say, "This is a demographic I want." And then you would move forward from there. Actually, you have to just trust the algorithm that TikTok and Meta have discovered. So the best way to get a low cost per install or cost for acquisition is if you just give the algorithm a broad generalization and just let it run for two weeks and really test the creatives. I find that creatives that I thought would do really well, do poorly and vice versa. So having a massive number of creatives and letting the algorithm do what it does best seems to be what does well. And especially interviews, things that feel natural. Because at this point, everyone's sort of-- So interviews as videos, interviews that you're using for your ads. Yeah, to this point, like, contrived things, things that are made up that feel fake, people just don't resonate with anymore. And people resonating with real experiences, real lives, you know? You might not even need to do all the fancy cuts or edits. Just something very basic, it could work really well. Making sure that you hit the pain point properly and giving them a proper call to action means the most. And that's the stuff that I'm learning so far. And also I'm learning that Android app installs are worth nothing. It seems like when you get an install on iOS, it's worth 10 times the value compared to Android. How has that changed the way that you're doing marketing? Well, I mean, yeah, it's not even worth the effort for me at this current point to market towards Android users. I'm just going to market towards iOS users. I don't know if it's because iOS users are so trained to purchase more. Maybe they're more spend-throughs than Android users. You're in a community of other app developers. Have other people in the community express this sentiment. Oh, yeah, so much so that they actually don't even have Android apps. That's crazy. I think all of them just have iOS apps. It's not worth the extra effort. They get a developer to make sure your app works in Android. I mean, I'm using React Native, so it's easy for me. But even so, it's just not worth the effort across the board to have Android because there are some additional bugs. It is easier to program a React Native app on iOS, for some reason. It's not worth the extra effort to add Android and then mark Android just to find out Android users don't buy as much, just the way it is. That's amazing insight. Yeah. Unfortunately. Lastly, I had this brilliant idea for a series of videos that Alan can do on TikTok and Instagram that he started on today. So I put up a video about Ryan Reynolds's take on storytelling. This video is almost at a million views. I went to go see Ryan Reynolds and so many other people speak last week at the Forbes Iconocost Summit. The president of Blackstone was there. Blackstone is a private equity company with $1 trillion of assets under management. In the room of under like 300 people, there was over $20 trillion in assets under management. Michael Strahan was speaking, Lindsay Vaughn was speaking, and I was there. I put up this video of Ryan Reynolds speaking. And what I do too, actually, I think it was pretty smart because I wanted to use this to elevate my brand. So I started with an image of my face and then I turned it around to Ryan Reynolds so people could see that I'm actually in the room. But Ryan Reynolds says that like people underestimate the power of storytelling. Storytelling is so powerful in doing marketing. And Ryan Reynolds is a billionaire because he's so good at doing marketing. He has so many different portfolio companies and his companies are killing it. And it's not just because he's famous and he's promoting these companies. He knows how to tell a good story. If he was famous and he was making bad ads, people wouldn't care. People wouldn't care. So it's about storytelling. Duolingo, I've been a power user of Duolingo for a while. Duolingo, I think a year or two ago, they started working on something called Duolingo Max, which is their AI language learning solution. Duolingo Max is over four times the price of normal paid Duolingo. Normal paid Duolingo I think is $7 and Duolingo Max is $30 a month. And Duolingo Max is supposed to show you why your answer is wrong and like what you should do different. But it doesn't really do a very good job of that. What actually did a great job of that was a feature of Duolingo called forums. Forums was user-generated comments explaining answers in Duolingo. Super popular feature, people loved forums. I loved forums, I learned so much, I was learning Russian at the time then I was learning Polish, then I was using it to reinforce my Spanish because I've been traveling a lot and I would look at it and understand the meaning behind sentences, the meaning behind conjugation so much. And then Duolingo killed it. They removed this feature to push people towards their more expensive solution that didn't work well. They IPO'd and they pushed people towards this feature that doesn't work well, but that would make them more money. And they removed this feature that was actually useful. And then here we have Alan. Alan has an AI language learning startup. Alan built it himself over the course of a year and a half. This guy grinded so hard and I've been watching him make this. He has all these insights and he's excited about them and I'm excited to hear his insights which is why I wanted to have him on the show. But he builds this thing over the course of a year and a half, puts love into it. And if you go to loomlearning.com and you see the graphics, they are beautiful. Yet Duolingo has a bird, Lewin has a cat. I have a cat to eat the bird. He has a cat to eat the bird. And it's a cute cat. It's an amazing cat. It's amazing art. Alan is super talented with art. When we invented video games in crypto, when we made the first play to earn game in crypto, which was a super successful game, you can just Google like world of ether, press release if you want to see it, this guy came up with that. He came up with that. He's brilliant. He found the artist to make the monsters brilliant, create a person. And so Alan going up against Duolingo himself, solopreneur, solo developer, building this thing by himself for a year and a half to go up against greedy Duolingo. And that is the story that we were working together in the last couple of hours. We were sitting at a cafe. I was doing my suffusing his stuff. And I'm like, Alan, you need to tell this story. And that is the story that Alan's going to be exploiting. I wanted to share this because I think storytelling is so important. Clearly it is. But I think this is a story that Alan will be able to super big things with. I think it can go really viral and get millions of views. I actually think the story can go so viral that it can be covered in like the verge and wired. I think it's such a powerful story because the masses, they don't like these greedy companies that are removing features in order to push people towards more expensive solution. So you have the evil company and on TikTok and Instagram Reels, when a company gets too big, the public starts hating it. And you see that in the comments. So we have the villain. The villain is Duolingo. And then we have the Luke Skywalker going up against the empire. And that's this, and that's this, and that's the story. So what I told Alan he should do is instead of just trying to do this with like one video, make a video about it. If it doesn't pop off, tell it in a different way. If that doesn't pop off, try doing a carousel of images with music. I shared on a different episode. I'll put that episode actually in the description for this podcast. But there were these two women who started a tequila business in London. And they ran out of money as they were doing it. And they were these underdogs going up against the diagios of the world, going up against the big liquor company. They were working in corporate. They didn't have that much money, but they were funding this with their paychecks and with their savings. And then at the last moment, right before their launch, they ran out of money. And so they had to do this super humble thing. And they went to influencers doors with their tequila to hand deliver it to these influencers. And this was such a personal authentic gesture that when they launched their tequila, the influencers, all, all of them, all 30 of the influencers posted about the tequila. And that got them started on a positive upward spiral. And then what they did is they told this story with a series of images and very positive music on TikTok. It was super positive music. And you see these images of these two women starting and slowly making the tequila, delivering it to the influencers in these nice packages. Then having that be successful, scaling little by little, just scaling, scaling to where they are now. And now they have like several lines and they have cans. They have all these different things. They just got investment. That video, I think has 1.2 or 1.6 million views on TikTok. I sat down like that's something that you can do. And if it doesn't work the first time, try it again because I think storytelling and the story of like you going up against a big incumbent is so powerful. People don't want to make themselves seem weak or small. But that is a very tried and true way of getting people to love you. It's to get people to see you as the underdog and make sure I do that. Yeah, I'm like, I'm very hyped for this guy. Very happy to have him on the show. We are recording this from the South Street seaport in Manhattan. Brooklyn is over there. The Brooklyn Bridge is to my left right there. And it is a lovely day here in New York, New York. I'm here for another week. Unless you enjoy it. And then I'm out. Let's enjoy it. This is episode 359 of the Edward Show. This is my daily digital marketing podcast that I do every day. This guy, I can't believe that I do it every day. I do it every day without fail. Thank you so much for watching. Alan, thank you so much for being here. Thanks for having me. Thank you so much for listening. I will talk to you again. Oh, wait. Alan, what is your, what is your, what is your Twitter? Oh, it's Alan here at A-L-A-I-N-H-E-R-E. And Loon Learning is loonlearning.com. Talked about it on the show. Everything's going to be in the description. I will talk to you again tomorrow.
