Alex West

June 2nd, 2025 | Launch recap

Yesterday I launched my first book.

Here's what I tried:
- Twitter / LinkedIn
- Product Hunt
- Email lists
- IndieHackers
- HackerNews

Even though I have an audience of 50k followers across all platforms, everything flopped.

Apart from one. Hackernews.

Which is ironic. Cause it's the only one that I could not use my audience to push.

Here are my realizations:

1. Having an audience is not everything.

You are who are right now.

Not your past. Not your future. Not your accomplishments.

2. You need to actually be interesting

I got my engagement and push and boosts when I had 2k followers back in 2020.

I could be that the algo hates me for being so absent for such a long time.

Or I'm just tweeted shit content.

Again, the numbers of followers does not matter.

3. I need to take this seriously.

This time last year I remember being in a similar phase.

Started tweeting, zero engagement.

Worked seriously on it for a few weeks, and then magically things started working.

Especially when I started YouTube.

That's what I have to do again. Start YouTube.

4. The fact that people resonated with the post on HackerNews is very positive.

But most of them were like "you made a million by selling books or courses".

Which is not true. Which is why probably the "How I made $1M without selling courses" could be the appropriate title.

5. Different type of posting.

I was trying a more "stream of consciousness" type of posting.

Got a good amount of followers. But no real engagement.

So thinking that less volume / more quality posts might work better.

Anyway, we'll see. Experiment. Fuck around. Iterate. And learn.