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I @'d Peter Steinberger and Got Zero Reactions in an Hour — and That's Exactly Why I'm Right

· 5 min read
#Indie Dev#Content Creation#Productivity

Yesterday I wrote a blog post: OpenClaw’s Peter Steinberger Made 449,693 Contributions in a Year — How On Earth Does He Do It?. The argument: in the AI era, indie devs should track PR output rate as a core metric.

This morning, following my own playbook, I did an “output rate” thing — I posted on X and @‘d Peter directly, asking how he actually does it.

One hour later.

Zero likes. Zero comments. Zero retweets.

A year-ago version of me would already be deleting the tweet by now. Today’s version is more convinced than ever that yesterday’s blog post was right.

A tweet that didn’t land is exactly the proof that output rate is the answer

Flip the perspective: if one tweet were enough to go viral, then “doing content” would have stopped being hard a long time ago.

Reality? 99% of tweets on X die exactly like mine just did. Behind every viral tweet you scroll past, there’s the same author with dozens or hundreds of dead tweets that went nowhere. Viral isn’t engineered. It’s filtered.

This is the same logic as another post I wrote a few days ago, Indie Dev Is Just a Math Problem:

Someone uploaded over 3,000 product listings to Amazon in a year. Fewer than ten of them turned into a real, sustainable income.

Fewer than ten. But he made the money.

The difference between the guy who shipped 3,000 listings and the guy who polished one “perfect product” and bet everything on it isn’t intelligence. It’s that the first guy admitted this is a probability game.

Tweets work the same way. Blogs work the same way. Products work the same way.

Nobody knows me anyway

This is the biggest advantage an indie developer has, not a disadvantage.

When a creator with 100k followers posts a tweet that flops, they spiral — they overthink it, they doubt their content, they wonder if they’ve lost their edge. When I, sitting at around 1,400 followers, post a tweet that flops — literally nobody notices. I carry zero baggage.

Which means I can:

  • Post 5 times a day, no problem
  • Recycle the same idea from 10 different angles
  • Fail 99 times, hit on the 100th, and nobody remembers the first 99
  • And the one that hits brings all the compounding for what comes next

This is a privilege that only small accounts, newcomers, and indie developers have. When nobody knows you, your cost of being wrong is essentially zero — but your ceiling is the same as the big accounts.

Most people waste this privilege because they want to wait until they’re “ready.” Ready is a trap. The real meaning of “ready” is fear — fear of looking dumb, fear of being laughed at, fear of being ignored. But like I just said, nobody is watching you. What exactly are you afraid of?

AI makes this game completely unfair

In the old days, “try it 100 times” meant paying the human cost 100 times over. Two hours per blog post times 100 posts is 200 hours. Most people physically can’t sustain that.

The AI era is different.

My current full pipeline for a blog post: tell the AI an idea → AI drafts it → I edit → translate → deploy → commit. 30 minutes per post. Five posts a day is physically possible.

Tweets are even easier. I take the core observation from a blog post, ask the AI to write five different angles on it, and pick one to post. Cost per tweet: 5 minutes.

That means the “100 experiments” that used to take a lifetime now fit inside a month.

That’s the real leverage of the AI era. Not “AI writes you a masterpiece.” It’s that AI pushes the marginal cost of trying down to nearly zero — making the probability game affordable for the first time.

You don’t need to be right every time. You just need to move fast enough and try often enough.

So here’s what I’m doing next

I’m not deleting that flopped tweet.

Tomorrow I’ll post again from a different angle — same core observation, different hook. Day after, another one. I’m going to spend a week posting 5–7 times on this topic and see which angle actually lands.

If a week isn’t enough, I’ll do another week.

If a month isn’t enough, then the topic itself is probably wrong and I’ll switch topics. But I won’t doubt the methodology, because the methodology is just math — run enough trials and one of them will hit.

The guy with 3,000 Amazon listings had 2,990 that didn’t work. He didn’t stop uploading because of it. He knew which game he was playing.

So do I.

And indie dev was always a math problem.