My side project got acquired within 1 week — 3 lessons I've learned about marketing & virality

Hey guys,

Tom here, the creator of the Viral Post Generator for Linkedin — a side-project that attracted 2M+ users within one week and got acquired for a very high price.

I want to tell the full story first, and then give 3 pieces of advice about going viral.

Behind-the-scenes: Why did I create it?

I made it just for fun. Without any expectation of making money.

The idea came up when I did some scraping for LinkedIn posts and filtered them according to high engagement in order to "reverse engineer" them - to try to understand what makes a post viral, so I can reproduce it (part of my job as a marketer in a startup).

I've used PhantomBuster.com for scraping Linkedin posts.

The common denominator that jumped out from all the viral posts was clear: they all include a great deal of self-love, even a little narcissism. If you've heard of the Linkedin post that earned its writer the nickname Crying CEO, you know what I'm talking about. Everyone on Linkedin knows there is something cringe-worthy about the entire LinkedIn feed, but they play the game regardless (to get the job).

So like any good marketer, I took an insight that everyone secretly agrees on and made it public — I made a humorous tool that generates a "viral" post based on the user's generic inputs (and of course, a Cringe meter).

I've used the no-code platform Adalo.com for building everything, with AWS Lambda for some behind-the-scenes language processing (APIs in between).

Launching my side project

I launched on:

1. Product Hunt (won 3rd place)
2. Twitter (went very well - got an influencer to share it through a random DM)
3. LinkedIn
4. Humor / LinkedIn related communities on Reddit
5. Outreached to journalists (with no avail)

People loved it and shared it, but it didn't really "explode" on a global scale. I did have around 10K users per day which was great.

Where is everybody...?

Getting the acquisition offer

The number of users dwindled day by day, and I just received a purchase offer from the founder of a startup called Taplio (which I didn't know before). They are building a chrome extension that helps grow LinkedIn. He offered to buy the generator as a nice little growth engine for them. It will bring them traffic and contribute to their branding that they support small enterprises. Totally a perfect match for my generator.

He asked for how much I was willing to sell.

I didn't plan to sell - I loved having an international baby with my name signed on it. But at this point, I kind of wanted to get rid of it. I was under astronomical pressure that something would crash on the site while thousands of visitors were trying to use it or there would be some other glitch. I literally couldn't sleep for a week because at every moment I wanted to go on Twitter and make sure everything was fine in the feedback. You see, I'm a one-man-band and there's something very tiring about being "famous on the internet" (with all modesty). I wanted to move on.

So I gave a really high price.

He said it's really not worth them for that amount. He just wrote me "no go" without elaborating too much. He didn't even give a counteroffer.

I suggested to him that I put a link to their product (Taplio) in the generator (as an advertisement) and we'll see how much impact it has in 24 hours. Then, we'll decide on a price based on the impact.

He agreed.

The final marketing push

So at this point, I have 24 hours to prove that there is high traffic here. I remember wondering: "Where else haven't I published?"

I remembered that there is some community on Reddit called r/InternetIsBeautiful where they share cool free tools from around the internet.

I posted there - and boom - within a few hours it reached 2 million people. Can't believe I didn't go to this subreddit before.

But what happened next is the real viral explosion: some random user on Reddit liked and shared it on Twitter. Within a few hours his tweet reached 15 million people. I have no idea why and how. He doesn't have many followers there.

And that was the real "viral moment". Very quickly the generator reached 1,400,000 users who generated a viral post and many of them shared it. It was psychotic. There were also 2 short crashes due to the load (one in the front and one in the AWS API).

Closing the deal

Even before the 24 hours time window was up, the Taplio founder sent me a message and agreed to the original price I offered. There was no negotiation here at all. That probably means I could have asked for even more - but no big deal. As mentioned, I wanted to get rid of it and the mental pressure that accompanied it.

So I sold. Within a week of launch.

BuzzFeed, Business Insider, The Guardian, Yahoo and several other outlets have already covered my story. And of course, I requested in the sale that my name would remain on the generator as long as it was active. So it's still my baby, I just don't have to worry about it anymore.

My lessons about virality & WOM marketing

Here's my best advice:

1. Invest in UGC

The single thing more powerful than Word of Mouth is... User-Generated Content. Because it lets people spread the word together with some "output" that is supposedly theirs (and they feel it expresses a part of their personality).

It's a phenomenal growth engine because people really like themselves. No offense. The hundreds of thousands of people who shared my generator also included their generated posts (with the link and watermark), and I doubt I would have reached these results if there wasn't a UGC dimension here.

Of course, I was the one writing the content - the users only provided inputs. Still, they thought as if the content was theirs. No worries. That's why they shared it.

2. Friction is good (sometimes)

In the generator, there is relatively a lot of friction from the moment you press the button until you get a result. The wait takes ~10 seconds. I think it made people appreciate the result much more (and therefore also share it). This is really the "illusion of labor" that is talked about in behavioral economics - the users know that there is something (a machine) behind the scenes working hard to give them pleasure, and they like it. There is also an element of a surprise box here, because you don't know what you get after the wait (just like the casino-induced hormones).

3. Virality = luck

In the end, it was a combination of a good product and a lot of luck. You never know where the big break will come from or when. Just keep trying. Even if it seems that there is no hope, even if your posts are deleted because of self-promotion (happens on Reddit a lot), even if the trend of descent does not stop. Just keep trying. There is a good chance that one day, with one coincidence, the right someone will notice you, and that will change everything. As happened to me.

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