Saul Fleischman’s Take on Hashtags, Career Changes, And More

Yeah, so early on when the naysayers said, “Saul, if this is worth anything, Twitter is just going to give people lots of what to do with hashtags,” Instagram won’t. What they would like us to do is pay to play, and for sure, hashtags are something they cannot take back—they didn’t invent them. Twitter doesn’t have the sense; they just had to buy TweetDeck instead of making it, because they don’t think like marketing people, yeah. But hashtags are actually counter to what they want. They want us to pay for an audience, pay for promoted tweets, whereas with hashtags, you’re doing the work. And I think in time, people will see that you get a little more. I think some people may listen to this podcast and say, “Okay, this guy is at his ninth year, and he started with RiteKit.” And I’m telling you, you’re going to get a little bit more, so you should spend next to no time—they’re going to use a hashtag generation tool.

There’s that, and I think, in general, it’s about tools that facilitate faster generation of posts. And that’s more than just hashtags—it includes images, emojis, and attribution. It’s okay to tag the author when you’re sharing their posts. Often, you’ll get a like, sometimes a retweet, a thank you, a comment—and someone will add more than what was originally in that tweet.

That’s easy because they’re using something that puts out plain vanilla posts. They’re either clicking the tweet button right on a blog or using another tool that pulls in an RSS feed and posts just the text. As I said before, it’s just the page title and the URL—that’s all it is. There are tons of things that do this, but they could do more. If you’re using something that looks for everything possible and enhances that process—like what’s included with Right Boost and Right Forge—then it’s doing it your way.

So actually, Saul believes in up to three hashtags, while Shane believes in up to two—well, he gets it his way. Saul wants his emoji; Shane doesn’t—it’s customizable, so it’s doing what you want. But they both believe in that author attribution thing, yeah, both. Ultimately, you want to look for tools that are out to save you time and automate as much of that process as possible.

There’s marketing examples. It’s something that I like. I’m really active on IndieHackers.com—although every now and then I get a little from Sawyer53—and your thing is in its ninth year. I still have that indie feeling because we started so small. We started with nothing, and we did something that your great-grandfather would understand. We put in all the time it takes to offer something that we believe is worth money. We didn’t monetize for the first year and a half at all; then we charged money for stuff, and those that needed it paid for it. And from that, we sustain and grow. But I get ideas from Product Hunt—oh yeah, I see something that is awesome as is, or I see something where they’re pretty much close to getting it, but kind of doing one thing wrong from what we’ve figured out.

You take from past experiences and bring them to what you do now, and have that.

I’m currently the only old guy on the team. We’ve had others—we’ve even had two university professors intern with us. But right now, the guys are far younger than me. Our CTO, Michal, is for sure the best teacher I’ve ever had. It’s incredible; I’m really honored to work with these guys, and I learn so much from what we see from the audience. My father wanted to sell his paintings, and he couldn’t. Keep in mind, that’s a marketing guy, Shane—if someone has a couple of paintings, it could be in a closet or on a wall in a room that no one goes into. What’s the audience for that? Right now, 402,000 people have completed registrations for our products—wow, more—over 20 million people have had one or more contacts with our products. It’s incredible to see how it’s no longer anecdotal. This type of thing—it’s no longer a couple hundred people registering per month; it’s 300 a day. So we get to see what masses of people do. This is an opportunity I’ve never had in my life.

It’s okay to be uncomfortable with understanding what you’re doing now to make a buck is not good enough for you. This is something where I see a lot of people trying to make it work—they join companies where there’s nothing to believe in and work for a boss, not a leader, and they understand that whatever they bring to the organization, they’ll never be considered for being any more than a nub on a cog on a gear in a sub-assembly in one of someone else’s many machines. And sure, you might do that just to make a living, but what I would tell the younger me is: it’s going to be bad. Through your 20s and 30s, you’re going to have jobs you can’t believe in, and you shouldn’t settle for that. Keep your eyes open.

What I wish I knew is that you can make it happen. That junk that I was telling you about, the 402,000 completed registrations and the over 20 million that have seen this. It’s not boasting—I’m hoping to inspire people. My secret mission is that I want you to have a startup. I want you to be a founder. I want you to come up with something that should be your product. I want you to find this pain point that hasn’t been adequately alleviated, and do this because I want more people to know that the work they’re doing impacts. Like a medical doctor is impacting a small number of people a day really, really well. Much more profoundly than I will in my whole life.  Or, like us, making hashtag generation go from six minutes of research to 1.8 seconds—it’s all about knowing that your work has an impact. This can’t compare to alleviating the pain that doctors do, but it’s doing it for a great mass of people. And you know your work has impact. I want more people. I want you to create your product and know that your work is impacting a heck of a lot of people.

No, no, not at all. I did a little. We all had to do two years of Pascal at my High School of Engineering and Science in Philadelphia. And then just a couple of years ago, I did a Python course that I kind of limped through. I learned that, no, Saul, you’re still not—you still do not think like a problem solver, like a developer. You’re not going to be as Ahmed, Pavel, Michal, Shank or any of the best people—Karun, sorry, Karun, Sarab, Joel—that I’ve worked with. You’re not going to catch up to them. So why don’t you do what you do?

Well, I’m sorry to force this in here, but I’d say you don’t really need to be that bright to do what I do. And: continue to earn your position. You need to appreciate what it means to affect so many people and have that inherent gratitude that comes with a bit of age. I’ve had bad jobs, really bad jobs, so I appreciate a good one.

But if you have that, then you gain the ability to do a lot of the grunt work—really menial stuff. I do all of our social myself. I do a lot of customer service myself, seven days a week.

Noam Chomsky, yeah, hello. I knew his mother, of all people, and we were really neighbors in Philadelphia—she was a seamstress. If you needed something fixed, you could go over and have it fixed. Chomped. Chomsky, and she talked about the family and… then I started getting into reading and listening to things like Manufacturing Consent and Albert Einstein. One of my favorite quotes is from Einstein: “Everyone’s a genius, but if you ask a fish to climb a ladder, it’ll spend the rest of its life thinking it’s stupid.” So I believe in that, in finding what you do well and drilling down into that. Those two come to mind. Barack Obama, yeah.

What we do is RiteKit. I wanted to leave this as a surprise and make the announcement on your podcast. We’re about to offer something I was talking about— you could use RiteKit Forward, RiteKit Boost—and then you get the hashtags from RiteTag. We’re going to offer a package at a discount; it’s the full package. Anyone who wants this, you heard this podcast, you got it from Shane Barker, and just say, “I want the package,” and I’ll tag you and get back to you. But within a couple of weeks, we will be offering a discounted package. You get everything—and a heck of a lot of it. So there’s no upsells, there’s no add-ons. It’s because our evil purpose is to have you for a long time, rather than to keep pushing up your costs. So that’s just as far as where to get in touch: RiteKit, R-I-T-E-K-I-T, will come up, hopefully still. And if you have questions, you’ll probably get me answering them. I’m a grunt.

Okay, thanks.