Deep Tech Founders Guide to Twitter
Love it or hate it, twitter runs the startup world more than any other social media or news publication. Investors, founders, engineers, all congregate to share notes, hot takes, memery, and provide a constant source of deal flow discovery, problem identification, cofounder matching, and more.
In an ideal world we could all just work on our thing without having to talk about it, and have the proof of our merits be in the results. Unfortunately the ideal amount of talking about your thing is non-zero. There is a simple equation:
Social Credit = ( How you talk about it ) x ( What you actually did )
On one extreme are the grifters: people who only talk about stuff and never do anything. On the other hand are the obscure geniuses nobody knows about. The ideal ratio is different for everyone depending on your industry, your market, your target audience. But the number one trick to generating inbound interest is to be known for being the ‘go to person’ on a topic - make it the topic your company is working on.
B2B vs B2C Twitter Posting
There are roughly two kinds of content on twitter that gets engagement:
B2C content is something where you either have it or you don’t - a rizz, a virality, a knack for reading the room. The best B2C posters usually just put out a stream of consciousness stuff without much thought and somehow knock it out of the park.
B2B content is much more straightforward - you’re aiming to educate. It’s easier to do consistently and to do it well, you just have to get good at explaining things in an interesting way. Virality is impossible to engineer, but you can grind out a B2B account following consistently over months by focusing on interesting, informative, relevant, topical threads.
If you have B2C skills, go for it, but ultimately to establish yourself as a thought leader in a specific field and therefore credibility in the eyes of investors and customers you need to master the B2B content. This can be ghost written for you by another person because who has time to write threads all the time?
The highest-leverage means of becoming a B2B poster is to use Twitter as a natural ‘conversion point’ to your ongoing learning process.
Consider your own problem discovery, customer discovery, technology development, competitive mapping process as the ‘top of funnel’ for content to share to your B2B twitter audience. You’re going to be learning new things constantly - make writing about it a natural conversion point for things you learn. Learn to write well, you learn to think well, and you’ll naturally become a better storyteller for all the parts of the puzzle by constantly trying them out on an audience and seeing how well you do.
The Reward Function for Twitter is Signal-to-Noise
The number one metric that promotes your twitter following and engagement is maximizing the signal to noise in your B2B posting - rise above the slop to say something profound, unique, and succinct. Twitter is an excellent training environment to hone your skills for the simple reason:
The character limit trains succinctness, catchiness, coherence, simplicity. Naval Ravikant is perhaps the epitome of this - someone who can share a profound and unique insight with a simple short sentence. There is another key advantage in getting good at writing threads or tweets:
A single tweet is about the attention span someone has for a slide in a slide deck.
Getting good at writing a tweet or thread is the same as getting good at delivering the most important point from a slide deck succinctly and effectively. It is the exact same skill.
The marketplace is the arena for business models. Twitter is the arena for storytelling.
Getting good at twitter trains the storytelling skill well - you have to learn to read the room, anticipate an audiences interests and reactions, understand what hooks and phrasing are effective at getting and maintaining interest, and putting together a coherent explanatory narrative that balances details and abstraction to be both interesting to the outsider, and insightful to the insider.
What’s unique about Deep Tech on twitter?
Every company has a story, the competitive advantage of deep tech on twitter is this: deep tech offers the potential for the greatest, most transformative and impactful story possible. Deep down people long for supersonic air travel, nuclear fusion, genetic therapies, miracles and marvels of technology that can reshape the social and economic landscape. They want a sci-fi future to believe in more than anything, a deep-tech storyteller just has to sell to this interest.
Give the people what they want - give them a taste of the future you’re building and why it's so important and impactful. Over time you’ll develop a repertoire of the most impactful comments and insights.
When it comes to generating hype, here’s another simple formula:
Hype = ( Potential Impact ) x ( Probability of Happening ) x ( Clarity of Explanation )
The more dramatic the potential impact of your tech, the less eloquent and masterful you need to be to explain it. Likewise, if you’re truly masterful you can get people excited about beanie babies on the blockchain, if you’re engaging enough.
How to Use Twitter as a Deep Tech Founder
There’s a simple method for bootstrapping your twitter account from scratch in order to gain some street cred for being knowledgeable about something. The primary metric to focus on for growth is Quote Tweets or Re-Tweets from high follower accounts. These will suddenly bring your distribution from a few dozen, to a few hundred, or thousands or millions of views.
The thing people most want to RT or QT is either something that is hilarious and entertaining, like a viral B2C tweet, or else something that is insightful, interesting, and reflects well on them: the B2B tweet. Think of the RT or QT as someone wanting to be associated with the information you’re providing and the positionality of it in the space of ideas and opinions.
The maximal impact of using twitter as a founder is this: by building up a following over time and developing a constant stream of inbound attention: investors, customers, employees, etc, it saves all the leg work when it comes to hiring and fundraising. People have already heard of you. More than that, it kicks off a positive feedback loop - people want to hear your opinion on things, they invite you to speak at events, more people learn about you, hear you, see you, more people want to invest or work for you.
Vision is everything and narrative is how you convey that. Control your narrative and you control the world.