How a 22-year-old student built Saint, the sneaker Twitter empire reaching millions of people and ta

• Matt Steiner is the founder of Saint, a Twitter account and associated website focused on sneaker and streetwear culture and news with over 173,000 followers.
• The 22-year-old grew Saint out of Supreme Saint, a sneaker botting company that helped buyers nab Supreme products at retail. 
• While platforms like Complex and Hypebeast primarily use Twitter to drive traffic to their websites, Saint focuses entirely on Twitter and regularly racks up hundreds of thousands of engagements on its posts.
• Here's how Saint is building a sneaker media empire with viral replies, exclusive content, and perfectly timed Tweets.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Matt Steiner's 19th birthday was special, but not because of the usual perks that come with turning another year older.

August 12, 2017, wasn't just another day of cake and balloons. It was the day Steiner's sneaker media account became verified on Twitter.

"It was like waking up to a birthday present," the college student, now 22, said. More than an ego boost, receiving the coveted "Blue Check" was a massive business win for the young entrepreneur looking to disrupt the world of sneaker media with Saint, his fledgling yet steadily growing sneaker news account.

With just under 40,000 followers in 2017, Saint — at the time known as "The Supreme Saint" — was still up-and-coming. Platforms like Complex, B/R Kicks, and Hypebeast were and still are considered the titans of the world of sneaker and hype-focused media, thanks to their fast and often exclusive coverage of the sector.

But for Steiner, Twitter's proverbial blue seal of approval was a "pivotal moment" in the story of Saint because his business model hinges on his success on Twitter.

A little over three years later, Saint has over 173,000 followers on Twitter and has become a leading destination for sneaker news. The account is followed by celebrities like YouTube influencer and entrepreneur Casey Neistat and TikTok star Dixie D'Amelio and regularly receives thousands of engagements on its tweets and replies.

From bot-making to sneaker media

Steiner's goal is to make Saint the first name in sneaker news.

The effort to do so has been a long time coming, though it has intensified since August when the brand acquired the @saint handle.

Saint began its life as The Supreme Saint — @TheSupremeSaint on Twitter — a botting service that Steiner co-created in 2015 to help customers nab Supreme merchandise at retail. Sneaker bots are software programs that expedite the checkout process online, allowing users to nap sneakers quickly. Some botting services, like the one Steiner ran, take care of all the technical legwork for customers.

By the spring of 2017, the botting business was slowing down, but the decent-sized Twitter account was still active. It eventually became verified in August of that year. In August, Steiner got ahold of the simple @Saint handle on Twitter by working directly with the platform. 

But even when he was still operating under The Supreme Saint, Steiner was working with influencers like Neistat to help grow his following. At the same time, the account was shifting its image to focus more on media and sneaker news.

"That was always something I wanted to do," Steiner said, "[To] make sure to be the leader in pushing content, be the first to post about it, and have big news outlets pick up my tweets."

Thus far, he's heading in the right direction. And he's using an unconventional tactic to get there.

Twitter as the starting point

While platforms like Complex and Hypebeast primarily use Twitter to drive traffic to their websites, Saint does the reverse. Twitter is the goal, in and of itself, and achieving high tweet engagement is the first priority. Everything else — including Saint's associated website that is populated with blog posts and sneaker news — is secondary.

"I'm reaching easily hundreds of thousands of people a day," said Steiner, who shared images of certain tweets and replies that have crossed the million mark in terms of impressions and engagements. 

According to Steiner, winning engagement on Twitter comes down to two factors: being first, and being correct. As Steiner put it, "If you're not first in this sector, you're last."

In some cases, Saint gets information that allows it to be the first to report on a collaboration or drop. For example, Saint worked with a company called MSCHF to be the first media outlet to report on its exclusive t-shirt drop over the summer.

In other cases, Saint just acts quickly. In February, when Supreme announced an upcoming collaboration with Oreo, Saint was one of the first media outlets to push out the news via Twitter. Steiner said he prepared the tweet in advance, knowing that Supreme was releasing images from its lookbook that day.

"An Oreo appeals to the world. Supreme appeals to the streetwear industry," he said, recalling how he anticipated that this Tweet might take off. "All I needed was the image."

The tweet exploded, racking up close to 8 million impressions and over 4 million engagements. It ended up being the sixth most quoted tweet of the day globally, according to a screenshot of Trendsmap data from that day that was shared with Business Insider. Delish and Today even attributed the news of the collaboration to Saint's tweet.

"That tweet was a huge pivotal moment where I said to myself, 'This engagement is different,'" Steiner said, adding that Saint's follower count increased by tens of thousands that day.

Saint has also recently begun working with Twitter to have Saint featured prominently when certain topics are trending. Saint's story about J Balvin's upcoming collaboration with McDonald's was featured on Twitter's homepage and news sidebar last week, which Steiner said helped solidify Saint as a major media source.

Still, Saint has fewer followers than other sneaker news pages. But to Steiner, he's winning where it matters. As he pointed out, if someone were to log into a private web browser and search "Saint" on Twitter, his account would appear first, coming in ahead of @saints, the handle for the New Orleans Saints NFL team that has almost triple the number of followers.

"This is a very tight-knit following that's super strong," Steiner said. "It continues to grow every day."

Saint also increases its presence by interacting with accounts with large followings. For example, Saint's reply to a tweet by Kanye West in July garnered almost 10,000 likes and over 1.5 million engagements, according to a screenshot of the analytics that was viewed by Business Insider.

One recent GIF reply to a McDonald's tweet garnered over 3,000 likes — and a response from the brand that racked up almost 9,000 likes. 

How social media is replacing mainstream news outlets

There's a reason Saint is taking a Twitter-first mentality. The platform already has a built-in audience of sneakerheads, thanks to how things worked in the days of sneaker culture's past. Certain hype drops used to be announced only on Twitter, so it was essential for sneakerheads to be on the platform to get in on them. The sneakerhead community on the platform today is still active,  making Twitter an ideal place for Saint to expand its audience.

Mainstream media outlets such as MTV used to be the key for propelling a voice or movement. In the era of YouTube, TikTok, and Twitter, this mainstream cultural authority is no longer relevant, Steiner and others argue. 

"There's nothing between the individual, the one creating the creating culture today, and their audience," said Neistat, who started his career as a vlogger and content creator in the early aughts and now has over 12 million subscribers on YouTube. Like Steiner, Neistat built his brand by directly connecting with audiences on a social media platform. Neistat is also the creator of Beme, a video-sharing app that he sold for a reported $25 million to CNN in  2016, which was shut down in 2018.

"Matt is uniquely able to lean into his understanding, which is a wildly nuanced, hyper-specific understanding, of a very narrow piece of fashion and culture," Neistat said. "And the difference is they don't need that mainstream outlet to lean into. Because of social media, they can create that outlet and then own the entire vertical. And I think that gets into the brilliant business acumen of what he's doing."

'It's never really been about the money'

Steiner is looking beyond Twitter, too. He purchased the @saint Instagram handle from its previous in July for $10,000. The account already has 24,500 followers, but he's thinking about how he can make a bigger impact on the platform.

Other than through some affiliate partnerships with brands and websites, Saint is not making any serious money just yet.

"It's never really been about the money for me," Steiner said. "It's more about how much power and impact can I get."

Building a media machine is essentially a full-time job, even if it's not a well-paid one, yet. And Steiner is juggling it all while finishing up his degree at Muhlenberg College. But between staying on top of the latest news and drops, he still finds time to enjoy his last college months, albeit currently remotely. 

Still, his business is always on his mind. That's the cost of success.

"I always have to be thinking about it," he said.

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