My Twitter/X Organic Growth Experiment – Zusuu

Presidential Campaign Trail & Twitter/X Core Conviction

As many of you know, in 2019-2020 I had a run on the presidential and congressional campaign trail, during which I served as senior advisor and digital director to the campaigns, and which earned me a New York Times feature – and tons of other press coverage, plenty of which I’d rather not have had.

Someday I’ll write a book about my experience in the belly of that beast…but one conviction I emerged with was the ultimate relevancy of the Twitter/X platform.

Let me table the discussion on how it’s always been the most developer-friendly, with impressive API capabilities and the most forward-thinking organizational approach to bots and spam.

Instead I’ll focus on the discussion of human behavior, which is at the root of everything I do and build as a former neuroscientist and having done over a dozen successful viral acquisition campaigns that have returned over $100M in revenue.

The fact is, when anything important in the world happens…we all go to X. When something that really matters surfaces…we intently scroll X and get information there faster than any other media technology on the face of the earth can compete with. Not only is this a remarkable human behavior in relation to technology period, but it’s an incredibly difficult one to supplant. This might make a lot of people mad, but I think X is one of the safest platforms to build an audience on if not the #1 safest. #SorryNotSorry

My SaaS Organic Growth Experiment – Zusuu

For the last 18 months I’ve been developing and piloting a unique Twitter/X organic growth tool, and I’ve called it Zusuu. I have grander plans for the tool, but for now it’s an organic growth assistant that simulates human behavior on your account and grows your X audience with relevant followers – as well as drives engaged site traffic to your link-in-bio and pinned tweets.

I’ve had it on my personal account for all 18 of these months in development. While I hardly post on that platform, I’ve grown from less than 1000 followers to over 4,500 real, relevant accounts. When I do post, my reach is wider and I get viral tweets more often. People I respect and admire have started following me as a result of the tool, and I can easily say Twitter/X has brought me the most income and revenue out of every social channel as a result, by generating inbound opportunities.

The Pilot Benchamarks

I’ve since had the tool on 7 other accounts that I’ve worked on, all with great and similar results, and so I have some fun data to share:

🔹 Accounts that use Zusuu gain 100-250 real targeted followers per month, averaging $0.67 per follower. This is all organic, so there is some variability – but for tech-focused accounts this is a very reliable range.

🔹 All of the accounts have attracted niche celebrities and real, targeted journalists as followers as a result of the tool’s activity, and observe that the followers are real and very relevant to their niche

🔹 The startup company brands who have used it have observed that Twitter becomes a top traffic source to their websites while using the tool (50% of the pilot users have been startups – the other 50% are personal brand/thought leaders)

Beta is Open

I have a ways to go in building out the user experience, so it’s definitely not ready for prime-time yet. But if you’re Twitter/X-curious and find this project interesting, I can have plenty more accounts join the beta.

Given that X does charge me for API usage, it’s a paid beta – I can’t give it away for free. I haven’t landed on a subscription price though, so I’m very interested to hear what a social growth tool like this might be worth to you.

LMK if you wanna chat about it, or if you wanna join the beta! 🚀

(Side note – if you’re aspiring to thought leadership on LinkedIn, I am 100% sure you should be cultivating an audience on X as well!)