Recently, I did something that anyone trying to build a personal brand would consider crazy: I quit Twitter, cold turkey.

X (formerly known as Twitter) is the home of several communities I’m part of:

• Indie hackers
• Bootstrapped SaaS founders
• Shopify app developers

And over the past several months, my profile has grown more than ever before, peaking around 820 followers.

If your goal is to achieve fame among other entrepreneurs, then it might be hard to understand why I would throw this all away. After all, I used to Tweet multiple times per day, and I’ve met some great people through the platform.

While it’s true I’ve found a small audience on Twitter, I have specific reasons for why I quit not just Twitter Blue, but Twitter entirely:

It’s not safe anymore

There is just way too much leeway for hate speech on X. I can’t even count the number of times I have reported racist or anti-Semitic content, or even gore, only to get an email saying, “this post doesn’t violate our guidelines.”

I want to focus

In order to keep growing my business, I want to double down on what works. For me, these have been more transactional channels such as the Shopify App Store, or middle of the funnel/problem aware channels, like the Shopify Community Forums/SEO on my company blog.

I didn’t just leave Twitter – I’ve also quit LinkedIn (at least for a week, lol), Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, and even Twitch, as ultimately, they all just distracted me.

There’s no money in it

Twitter has had a 0x ROI for me. Twitter is great if I want to reach other app developers or Shopify agencies, but in the past 1.5 years I’ve been on ecom Twitter, I can’t attribute even a single penny of revenue to that platform.

FOMO overload

Everyone on social media only posts their wins.

“I had a million Plus merchants install my app yesterday!”

“I’ve made a billion dollars on the Shopify App Store this year!”

“I’m X years old, I built a Shopify app before there were 10,000 apps in the App Store, and now I’m a trillionaire, follow for more super useful, totally not generic insights.”

It’s way too easy to fall into a trap of thinking I’m not moving fast enough, which eventually contributes to me burning out.

It doesn’t scale

In order to grow my reach on Twitter, I would have to spend many hours engaging in comments on people’s posts, which is extremely time-consuming, and only sometimes leads to interactions.

Plus, each post only gets a few chances to be seen, over maybe a 24-hour period, and then it’s not shown to anyone else. If I’m going to “Tweet into the void,” I might as well get back to posting on my personal blog, as each post has a longer shelf life.

Conclusion

It wasn’t easy to commit to leaving Twitter! I’ve tried at least 3x before in the past, but this time, I think I have enough reasons to devote my time elsewhere.