I went from working with the Director of Madagascar to winning an Emmy at 21 to now making tech companies go viral.
These are the 20 hills that I’ll die on to make any company go viral.
Read this very carefully and bookmark it because if you use the info from this article you can easily get a million views on your next launch.
START WITH THE MARKET, FORGET THE PRODUCT EXISTS
1. You need to first figure out who your ICP actually is. ICP stands for Ideal Customer Profile. This is the exact person you’re selling to. Find out what they love, what they wish existed, what they hate. Your entire launch sits in the middle of those three factors. Research is underrated, Good Research is a gold mine for your launch script.
2. Get out of your head. You are not your audience. If you think about the product from your perspective, trust it will not work. You need to get inside your customers minds, think what they’re thinking, speak how they speak and ONLY then you have a shot at going viral
3. Make the grievance weirdly specific. Give the audience one specific named, dated, verifiable fact about something their market hates.
LEARN THE ART OF SELLING
4. There are some motivators which work better than others, for example : Leading with money will get you more sales than leading with Time. Compare these two : "Save your team five hours a week" or "Take your brand from $1M to $10M a month"? Which one sells more? The second. Every time. Money is a primary motivator, Time is a secondary motivator
5. Sell them the destination. Tell them what’s in it for them. Show them what the result will look like and make them picture it. Example : An AI education tool shouldn't position itself as an "AI tutor". It should position itself as "the tool that gets your kid into MIT and Harvard".
6. Stress Test all your scripts and copy through “The Mom Test”. The mom test is where the first line has to be simple enough that your mom gets it. If she doesn't, it means the line is too niche to go viral
7. You need to aim to get into the main argument of the market. Know everything your market is already talking about. The biggest conversation of the market should be in your script. For example : AI design tools get hate for being "AI slop"? Then the first line of your launch is "Kill AI slop".
8. Make it a little unbelievable on purpose. "Scales brands better than any human" holds people because they HAVE to see how that could possibly be true. The disbelief is what will keep them watching.
9. Leave a door open for disagreement. We’re firm believers in “A little hate is good for you”. When we did the launch for Brilliant, our first line was "AI is making kids dumber" . This was intentional because it makes the tech dad mad one way: my kid uses AI for everything and he's thriving, you're an idiot. It makes a second crowd mad a different way: you're an AI company and you're telling me AI rots kids? Both camps comment. And comments are velocity.
https://x.com/i/status/2060378988606878147
10. Trust the line that makes your client nervous. Brilliant's team thought the "kids are getting dumber" claim went a little too far. If we had cut that part out, there would have been no launch to write a case study about
STOP MAKING AESTHETIC VIDEOS
11. You can make as many cinematic videos as you want if it’s a TV spot or any other paid media. There you have a captive room, so it can take its time. X is earned media. Here the viewer doesn’t owe you their time, You're lucky to get someone to click, luckier if the sound is even on. So make the first few seconds count.
12. You have maybe 5 seconds to make your claim. Don’t waste them on a founder or company montage or worse "the journey". The audience came for one thing: why should I care? Show them that. If you stall them, you lose them.
13. Have you ever seen MrBeast's videos? they always open on the most insane moment from the video, because he knows about the retention cliff, he knows it sits right at the start. If you survive the cliff, people will stay and watch the whole thing.
14. Bridge every leap. Spell it out like the viewer just walked in, because they did. They know nothing about your world. Act like it.
15. Cast and coach the on camera voice. Pick a voice your audience can follow without any friction. Coach them through every line.
16. Treat day one with the same speed as the launch day. At Shown Media, literally five minutes after an idea is discussed, someone starts executing it..
17. Plenty of Oscar winning films bomb at the box office. Lots of people can make a good looking video. The goal is to make one that performs, make every decision with that goal in mind
18. Put a YouTube brain in the room. We hire launch strategists straight out of MrBeast and other huge channels. Why? Because "I can pitch an idea and it'll do 10 million views" is a muscle. And tech marketing has almost none of it.
GO BIG OR GO HOME
19. Go for the biggest possible video, even for a niche product. 1% of a hundred viewers is one customer. 1% of a million is ten thousand.
20. Put the product inside the launch. When we did the launch for Moda. We made the founder answer the comments with real decks the product built on the spot. Ask for a pitch deck in the replies, get your pitch deck back.
https://x.com/i/status/2036474296353411290
BONUS POINT (perhaps the most important one)
21. Don’t play the game blindly. About 300 people see your post first, and X will grade everything they do: do they dwell, watch-through, comment or bail. One way or another you need to pass that test. Then you unlock a bigger pool of audience, 2000 people. Each one a percentile cut.
That audience sample test is THE WHOLE GAME, I made a document with the exact prompt we run at Shown Media to grade a launch against everything above before even a dollar gets spent.
It tells you where your launch dies with the first 300, and rewrites the weak parts.
Comment "AUDIT" and I'll send it over. (You'll have to follow me so I can DM.)