Arvid Kahl
@arvidkahl
Followers
141,415
Following
17,769
Media
8,430
Statuses
77,128
Building in Public. Raising all the boats with kindness. 🎙️ · ✍️ · 🗞️ · 📚
Ontario, Canada
Joined July 2011
Don't wanna be here?
Send us removal request.
Explore trending content on Musk Viewer
Cohen
• 182726 Tweets
$GME
• 118464 Tweets
MY LOVE IS LIKE
• 61352 Tweets
Aziz Yıldırım
• 55815 Tweets
GameStop
• 55023 Tweets
Ali Koç
• 44458 Tweets
Roaring Kitty
• 33719 Tweets
Vance
• 30845 Tweets
gracie
• 30676 Tweets
Square Enix
• 24299 Tweets
Atiku
• 23086 Tweets
$AMC
• 20585 Tweets
Ravens
• 19914 Tweets
सुशील मोदी
• 19234 Tweets
TREASURE IS COMING
• 15223 Tweets
Tuberville
• 15071 Tweets
Tyson
• 14801 Tweets
McDavid
• 14755 Tweets
Carlos Vives
• 13859 Tweets
DIAMOND HANDS
• 12903 Tweets
Vitor Roque
• 11907 Tweets
GPT-4o
• 10514 Tweets
Pinned Tweet
Hey there, thanks for stopping by! New here?
Let me introduce myself, my work, and what you can expect from me on this platform.
26
6
201
The nuance here is important: people want to post their experiences, not re-live them.
Projection, not reflection.
Surface, not depth.
It’s a strange trend that we have collectively agreed to enjoy things a little less so that our peers can see us perform enjoyment.
The shift from “having to be there” to “having to post it”
85
199
886
132
2K
9K
If a tire company can publish a globally recognized restaurant guide, then you’re allowed to work on your completely unrelated side projects.
100
1K
8K
Genius. They wrote a script to make a PDF look like it's printed, signed, and then scanned again. Because digital signatures are still not accepted in many places while a signed and scanned printout is.
This is hacking bureaucracy. I love it!
75
3K
7K
Cancelled my Midjourney account today, not using it enough.
I was very pleasantly surprised when they offered me a choice: cancel at the end of the subscription or right now and get a refund.
That’s EXTREMELY customer-friendly and leaves a massively positive last impression!
72
72
3K
Okay call me a noob, but I just had a life-changing experience with PHP.
I installed Laravel, then Laravel Jetstream, and then Laravel Spark. After ~2 minutes of configuring, I have a dashboard, a fully working Stripe integration with users, teams, 2FA, and API auth.
WHAT?! 🤣
212
165
3K
I just launched my second book, The Embedded Entrepreneur. 📚🚀🥳
In this book, you will learn how to:
🔎 Find your audience
🗺 Explore their communities
🩺 Discover their problems
📣 Build a following and a business
Read on for the full story! 🧵👇
193
261
2K
I'm still not over just how massive this is.
2.5h of audio transcribed in under 2 minutes.
This means that for every single podcast episode, roughly an hour in length, we can have a full transcript, a summary, highlights, and "does this appeal to me" information in 1 minute 🤯
53
96
1K
I have just released my book Zero to Sold! 🎉🎉🎉
It's now available on Amazon and Gumroad, in Print, eBook, and ePDF.
It's everything I know about bootstrapping, every learning, strategy, failure, and tactic. Six months of work, 498 pages, 105k words.
128
156
1K
Oh wow, the top post on Hacker News is about a disillusioned indie founder giving up due to mental health issues.
“I am done. I give up”
It’s a hard read, but an important one. Protect your mental health. What this founder experiences is very common.
130
130
1K
I think more people would take up entrepreneurship if they understood that making money is a direct consequence of helping people.
64
165
1K
Apple’s on-device LLMs are out.
And we get to play with them.
I am so excited to jump into this and see just how well they perform and what we can expect from iOS devices to come.
26
80
969
Fellow bootstrappers!
I just published "Zero to Sold", a 25.000-word guide to starting, running, and selling a sustainable bootstrapped business.
53
156
934
Interesting learning about MySQL: it's not very smart.
These queries are semantically the same (skip is a non-nullable boolean column with an index) yet the raw count takes several minutes while the weird second one runs in 1/4th of a second.
Uhm...
🙃
SELECT(*), SELECT(1),…
94
70
910
Your first business doesn't need to change the world. It just needs to change yours.
43
129
869
Hey there, thanks for stopping by! New here?
Let me introduce myself, my work, and what you can expect from me on Twitter.
56
90
774
Productivity hack: get a dog.
Your day will never start later than 6:30.
147
31
820
@levelsio
As a language model, I can't comment on philosophical questions like this.
However, here are a few ideas:
14
19
811
A lot of "Twitter 2-factor authentication removal" outcry on my feed right now.
Apparently, there are phone companies out there creating massive amounts of bot accounts to be able to charge Twitter for SMS fees.
How many? 390 companies! Causing 60mil in damages per year!
👇
59
130
786
Being an entrepreneur is hard.
Not being an entrepreneur is worse.
66
82
780
Systems you should never build yourself when bootstrapping a SaaS: Authentication, Payment, Invoices, Tax Calculations.
Bite the bullet and pay others, it will save you so much pain in the end.
Wrap them in abstractions to change them later. But never build them yourself.
74
90
749
Building software is the easy part. The hard part is making money from it.
Coding is fun. Finding customers less so. But without them, you have a hobby project.
44
72
683
Usually, I am not of fan of notifications. Today, that’s a bit different.
42
13
666
Making money is a consequence of making a difference in people's lives.
82
92
664
I regularly get asked by founders what tech stack I recommend.
My answer? “The one you used for your last project.”
When you start a new business, it’s the worst time to choose new and unfamiliar technology.
Instead, go with what you know.
Here is why: 🧵
53
95
669
It's not a Real Business™ until you implement CSV import or export.
63
59
662
To be an entrepreneur, you must get comfortable with a certain baseline amount of chaos.
58
85
653
This is probably the most impressive video I have seen this year.
"Ice Ice Baby" sung and acted(!) by the cast of Matrix (1999). And Wilford Brimley for some reason.
Generative AI is incredible. The video part freaks me out, especially.
42
177
649
Entrepreneurship is 20% acting on advice, 80% making it up as you go, and 5% breaking the rules.
47
80
643
My SaaS is now officially a 4-figure business 🥰
Alright. Back to work!
LET'S GO! 🚀
103
9
638
People will be willing to pay good money for something that:
- ⌛️saves them time
- 🏦saves them money
- 💸makes them money
Find a problem where a solution does one or more of these things, and you're well on the way to a sustainable business.
If it does all three, jackpot.
46
77
626
Surreal. Zero to Sold is now the
#1
best selling book on in the Small Business category.
What!?
59
18
625
Employees work towards their vacations.
Freelancers work towards being able to take vacations whenever they want.
Founders work towards a life they don't want to take a vacation from.
35
82
613
I've come to understand consistency being at the core of growth. I've been writing a blog post, sending a newsletter, and recording a podcast every week for a year now. I didn't have an audience, then I had a few people, then a few hundred, and now it's a few thousand.
43
52
601
Whenever you choose a third-party service for your SaaS, you add risk.
If you build the feature yourself, you add at least ten times the risk.
40
83
618
My Twitter course "Find your Following is" now available!
Grow an authentic Twitter presence with intentional relationships and a following that trusts and respects you.
Find your following, build your brand in public, and create your own opportunities.
94
86
582
If you can have fun when things get hard, you’ll make a great entrepreneur.
54
63
528
Making money is a consequence of making a difference in people's lives.
32
59
515
Building a business as a side project while having a day job is a legitimate way of validating your entrepreneurial efforts. You don't need to go full-time on an idea immediately.
55
46
519
As an entrepreneur, you have to completely unlearn all the things that schools and universities have taught you about failing.
Trial and error includes mistakes. You’re supposed to make them. It’s the best way to learn. They are part of the journey.
52
73
510
You want recurring revenue? Solve a recurring problem.
If my users cannot use my product more than a few times a week, I wouldn't build it.
11
5
87
26
63
512
If you're considering quitting your day job to pursue building a business, consider building it as a side project first.
You'll feel much less pressure financially, and you will quickly learn to maximize the impact of your work when you only have a few hours every week.
54
44
509
I'm writing a book about Building in Public. I'll write it… in public!
It will be an actionable and pragmatic book about building a business by sharing your journey. The journey of the book will happen here on Twitter.
Here is what's in it for you:🧵👇
50
62
515
Here are 50 bite-sized Twitter growth tips that I have used to build a following of over 66k followers.
Every day for the last 50 days, I made a short video explaining one key concept, from fundamentals to specific frameworks and tools.
Here they are, all in one mega-thread.
59
60
510
To be an entrepreneur, you must get comfortable with a certain amount of chaos around you at all times.
53
80
503
A few people have been asking me why I sell a 500-page book for $9.99 when it could sell for 4x that.
I want Zero to Sold to be affordable AND contain everything I know about building businesses. I want as many people as possible to read the book. That's it. Money is secondary.
46
29
505
When
@levelsio
looks at fresh-to-market software products and sees "beautiful design" — fancy gradients, animated borders, he gets suspicious.
Why? You'll find out this week on The Bootstrapped Founder:
69
37
566
For
@levelsio
, the tech agency world looks like a Ponzi scheme — at least when it comes to the kinds of tech they use, advertise, and evangelize.
Meanwhile, Pieter uses the bare minimum — and still hits almost $250k MRR.
Just saying. Here's Pieter's take:
53
49
499
If you want to build a reliable SaaS product, use a traditional database like PostgreSQL. It won't be exciting, but you won't need to switch out your database when you grow and it can't handle basic operations at that scale.
64
44
491
I turned 38 last week. As a LotR fan, I follow the Hobbit tradition & GIVE gifts instead of getting them.
Here’s my birthday gift to YOU: for the next 24 hrs, my books & course are "Pay What You Want", $1 minimum.
15.000+ copies sold; go check ‘em out!
135
83
486
At any given point of the day, my AI transcription backend is running ~15 or so concurrent speech-to-text conversions that fuel the monitoring system and populate my ever-growing database of never-before-transcribed podcasts.
Sometimes, I just watch this:
57
22
488
Customer service shouldn’t be an afterthought. Customer service is the whole point of a business.
43
82
476
You don't need to be perfect to have success, you just need to not quit when everyone else does.
71
61
477
I often heard people saying "That's never going to work."
Yeah yeah, whatever.
If it fails, you tried and know much more than most other people about the subject.
If it works, it works.
Win-win. You're now an expert, either way. Repeat until you find something that works.
32
65
475
You don't need more features. You need more (paying) customers.
85
30
468
60.000 background jobs per minute, easily handled by a Hetzner server running PHP and Redis.
is currently gobbling up a several thousand new podcasts per minute to make sure users will find details to EVERY podcast out there.
🚀🎙️
65
18
475
Instead of wanting to "explode on Twitter", focus on becoming a valuable voice in a community (that is also on Twitter).
Let your follower count reflect the number of people whose lives you touch, not how many you convinced to follow you. A subtle but important difference.
33
48
460
Hrm.
So, I can rent a GPU instance on AWS for $500 per month with the same compute capacity as a Mac Mini for $800.
So... uhm.. Should I just buy like 4 Mac Minis and run my own compute farm? 🤣
90
10
463
got funded by
@calmfund
! 🥳
I said no to many offers, but I said yes to this one.
@tylertringas
' Calm Company fund offered a bootstrapper-compatible deal I couldn't resist.
Here's why I agreed, how it went & what will happen now:
126
9
459
The secret is showing up every day and not looking for secrets.
35
55
456
I have reached an incredibly important milestone: I have now sold over $50.000 worth of books, audiobooks, and courses on
@gumroad
!
Wow! 🥰 Thank you for getting me there, dear readers :)))
71
4
456
Making friends on Twitter has changed my life.
I highly recommend it.
58
19
449
Sometimes, when facing a problem, you just need to take a little nap. Let your brain reset and rewire your internal representation of the problem. I usually find solutions much faster post-nap.
80
60
447
You know what's not down? Many thousand little SaaS apps.
Cheers to all those small teams and solopreneurs keeping their stuff running year round.
19
19
452
Your mental health is what ultimately decides if you will be successful or not.
Don't neglect it.
48
55
442
This is INCREDIBLY good news for indie hackers all over the world.
ChatGPT and Whisper, the speech-to-text AI tool, are now offering API access.
What will you build?
34
32
440
People will be willing to pay good money for something that:
- ⌛️ saves them time
- 🏦 saves them money
- 💸 makes them money
Find a problem where a solution does one or more of these things, and you're well on the way to a sustainable business.
If it does all three, jackpot.
45
48
433
To become an expert in any field, you have to be an ambitious learner first. Every expert started out as a curious novice once.
23
85
432
If people don’t buy your thing, it’s not a “market problem” — it’s a marketing problem.
47
67
428
Yesterday, I gave a copy of my book to a delivery person.
He was maybe 18 and chatted with me about the company name that's on our doorbell while he was dropping off a few boxes. I explained to him I'm working in SaaS, and he said he's just finishing school.
🧵
36
32
433
Broke through $500 MRR.
$1k, here we come.
Working on Podscan has been incredibly motivating. And I'm talking about work like CSV support 🤣
47
5
432
I love learning. I judge most opportunities by how much I can learn from them.
45
35
428
No-code is removing gatekeepers and introducing new ones. Learning how to code is replaced by learning how to connect tools.
It turns out you can learn how to use no-code tools within a few days. It takes years learning how to code well.
It's an incredible leap forward.
36
45
418
To anyone building a product, a business, or a dream: I'm looking forward to watching your success story unfold.
77
23
416
Successful people are the ones who resist the urge to quit while they’re struggling. Everyone struggles.
I never met anyone successful who wasn't strugglingly preparing for years before an opportunity came.
20
297
2K
34
56
419
Here's my year in review:
The year had 52 weeks.
I released 52 newsletters, 52 podcast episodes, and wrote 52 blog posts.
And that's my year in review. :D
91
4
416
You can’t hack building relationships. It’s not like a podcast that you can run at 2x speed.
The hack is consistency. Show up every day, contribute every day, and give people time to fall in love with your generosity.
37
58
417
Regular people celebrate 100k.
I, a proud indie hacker, celebrate 128k. 🤓🥳
Thank you, every single one of you, for being part of my journey here on Twitter. It's a blessing, and I am full of gratitude today. 🥰
Keep shipping. Keep building. And keep cheering for others! 🥰
90
7
408