ChatGPT $100 credits were less a giveaway than a user-acquisition loop disguised as a thank-you.

Most giveaways create a private transaction. A company gives you money, usage, or a discount. You take it. The interaction ends.

ChatGPT $100 credits campaign turning user praise into public distribution

This campaign asked people to publish their opinion first.

Share what you love about GPT-5.6 Sol, or explain why you switched. Submit the public X post. Get $100 in ChatGPT credits. The first 10,000 eligible participants got the offer.

There was a catch. Claiming the credits required an existing paid ChatGPT Go, Plus, or Pro account. People could not qualify by subscribing on the submission date.

OpenAI was not handing free credit straight to brand-new users. It rewarded existing subscribers, then used their public posts to reach everyone else.

That small change turned the reward into a distribution system.

The Price of Entry Was a Public Opinion

The campaign did not ask users to repost an ad. It asked them to describe something they had built or explain why the product had won them over.

That distinction matters. A repost tells people a campaign exists. A specific story tells them what the product did.

A friend saying "this restaurant is good" barely registers. Hearing exactly which dish justified a 40-minute wait can change where you eat tonight.

One developer discussed shipping a project. Another explained how GPT-5.6 handled longer tasks. Someone else compared it with a tool whose limits blocked real work.

The campaign collected all 3 kinds of proof in public.

ChatGPT $100 credits campaign instructions in three steps: share, submit, and receive credits

The claim process was simple:

1. Post on X.

2. Add the ChatGPT email and direct post URL.

3. Confirm an active Go, Plus, or Pro plan.

4. Wait for verification.

5. Receive the credits.

The people claiming the reward were already paid customers, not cold prospects sampling ChatGPT for free.

ChatGPT $100 credits campaign submission form asking for a ChatGPT email and X post URL

The reward gave people a reason to write the post. The product gave them something to write about.

Here is the first part of the loop: a useful product creates the opinion, and the incentive gets that opinion published.

X Put Every Testimonial Into Circulation

The channel fit the audience. Mark Zuckerberg owns social networks with roughly 3 billion daily active users, yet he posts on X when he wants developers to notice Meta's AI models.

That includes Muse Spark. The AI-model audience on X differs from the audience Meta reaches on Instagram.

Developers already use X to share projects, compare models, and debate which tools deserve their time.

Handing out gym passes outside a gym catches people already thinking about exercise. Doing the same in the frozen-food aisle means first persuading shoppers to care.

OpenAI did not need to teach the audience a new behavior. It placed the offer inside a stream where that behavior was normal.

X's recommendation feed carried Codex posts beyond each participant's followers.

People who had never used Codex saw project demos, model comparisons, and switching stories from accounts they did not follow.

Then the numbers stacked up.

The campaign tweet reached 6.24 million impressions, with 13.7K replies, 3.7K reposts, and 15.6K likes.

GPT-5.6 community gallery showing more than 10,000 posts across professional roles

Those replies were not empty engagement. They were the product's sales pitch, written by people who had used it.

GPT-5.6 user posts showing projects built with Codex and reasons for switching

The giveaway traveled because every participant supplied a fresh example. Each example gave the next reader another reason to investigate.

The public post did the work of a paid ad. It created awareness, supplied a claim, and pointed the audience toward the product in a single unit.

The Posts Recruited New Users, Not the Credits

The credits did not capture many new users directly. Eligibility required an existing paid ChatGPT Go, Plus, or Pro account. The recipients already paid OpenAI, and many already used Codex.

The credits had a different job. They pushed current customers to use the product more and gave them a reason to publish proof of that usage.

ChatGPT $100 credits campaign tweet asking users to share what they love about GPT-5.6 Sol

The public posts did the customer acquisition. X's recommendation algorithm filled developer feeds with Codex projects, usage charts, and Claude comparisons.

A non-user did not receive the $100. They still saw what paid users were building, again and again.

The play was simple: reward current customers for creating credible ads.

Put those ads where prospective customers spend time. Let product demonstrations create demand.

Acquisition came from the reach generated by the posts, not from the credit claims.

The Product Had to Earn Day 2

Credits only work as a growth tool when the product earns a second session.

GPT-5.6 Sol felt unusually good, and it cost less than Anthropic's Fable 5, a strong high-end competitor.

The reward lowered the cost of trying the product. Product quality gave people a reason to return after the first test.

OpenAI also reset Codex usage daily during this period. Those resets were separate from the $100 promotion, but they extended the growth moment by giving existing users more chances to run long tasks.

That changed the campaign's economics. OpenAI was buying more than a post. It encouraged extra sessions that produced the next project demo or switching story.

The screenshots show what came from those sessions: apps, games, code, and long-running projects built with Codex and GPT-5.6.

The Hockey Stick Came From Several Forces Pointing the Same Way

Stefan Streichsbier's growth chart maps Codex's weekly active users from under 500K in early February to an estimated 9 million by July 16.

Codex now has over 10 million weekly active users.

Codex growth trajectory showing weekly active users rising to 9 million

The campaign deserves credit for the sharp wave of public sharing. It made the product visible where developers talk about tools.

But the campaign did not work alone.

Product quality made the praise believable. Low pricing and enough usage made switching easier. Extra usage resets kept people building. Tighter Claude limits gave some developers another reason to test Codex.

Each force pushed the same way.

A packed bar is rarely the work of one drink special. Good music keeps people inside, fair prices make the second round easy, and the line outside tells passersby that something worth joining is happening.

Calling this a simple giveaway misses the mechanism. The credits rewarded existing paid users. Those users generated public proof.

X distributed that proof to prospective users. Some tried Codex.

The loop looked like this:

Paid users → credit-backed usage → public proof → X distribution → new user interest → more Codex usage.

The campaign's output became its next input. People did not just receive a reward. They supplied the evidence that made the next person curious.

That is the lesson from ChatGPT's $100 credits. A reward can make users explain a product in public, while the product makes those explanations believable.

Do both, and the giveaway starts paying for itself through distribution.

Top Tweets of the day

1/

Source: @keean_edward

Most people are so averse to learning, after they leave school and college, that if you know even a little bit about AI, you are way ahead of the rest of the world.

Always talk to normies and most don't have a clue on how you can use an app.

2/

Source: @RhysSullivan

The future of how you can simply fix feature requests or bugs via social media directly.

3/

Source: @ivesparrowai

Brilliant use case. You just have to curate the taste so it finds only gold.

Before AI, this took hours of scrolling & saving.

Rabbit Holes

1. The 7 deadly sins of bloated AI spend

2. How Gumclaw Works

3. Chegg and StackOverflow were both basically destroyed by LLMs, what other websites / companies have already seen their traffic go to 0 because of LLMs?

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More Startup Spells 🪄

1. InVideo's "RT + Comment" Giveaway on X, Explained (LINK)

2. Red Bull's Extreme Stunts Are the Best Marketing Playbook Nobody Copies (LINK)

3. Michelin's €26.0 Billion Content Marketing Playbook (From 1900) (LINK)

4. How Old Spice Ad Speaks To Women But Targets Men (LINK)

5. Jenni AI: A Masterclass in Bundling B2C Apps (LINK)

Every few weeks, InVideo drops a tweet with the same deal. RT + comment a keyword to win the top-tier plan. The giveaway strategy works because every entrant becomes a broadcast tower.

The format never changes. Only the partner tool. One month it's Kling o1 with 7 days of free access. Next, it's Nano Banana Pro bundled into every paid plan. The prize rotates. The mechanic stays fixed.

Invideo rt + comment giveaway tweet offering kling o1 free access on x

It's the same playbook Higgsfield AI used for near-zero CAC. InVideo just puts it on repeat.

Hitching a Ride on Existing Momentum

InVideo doesn't lead with its product. It leads with whatever AI model has momentum.

Kling o1 gets 7 days of free, unlimited access, exclusively through InVideo. That word, exclusively, does the heavy lifting.

The partner tool stops the scroll. InVideo is the vehicle. Nobody RTs free InVideo credits. But free unlimited Kling o1? That moves. It's like an indie band booking a famous headliner. People come for the star, but they stay for the whole show.

Bundling works because the offer feels bigger than one company. InVideo rides the hype of a trending model without building or marketing it.

One Entrant, One Broadcast Tower

The entry mechanic is identical every time. RT the post. Comment a keyword. VFX. Banana. Whatever fits.

Invideo nano banana pro giveaway tweet requiring rt and comment

The RT pushes the post into the participant's timeline. Their followers see it. Some enter. The loop widens.

The comment matters just as much. Hundreds of identical replies flood the thread. X reads that volume as genuine engagement. High replies + high RTs = promotion to people who don't follow InVideo.

One entrant equals one retweet equals new audience. Participants pay with attention. InVideo pays zero.

Hacking the "For You" Feed

This engagement triggers X's ranking signals. The post graduates from InVideo's followers into the For You feed.

Search from:invideoOfficial min_faves:100 "RT + Comment" on X. The results show a repeating pattern of high-engagement giveaways, all built on the same template.

X search results showing invideo giveaway posts with high engagement

Swap the brand name to reverse-engineer anyone's giveaway cadence.

The algorithm doesn't know it's promoting a contest. It just sees high engagement velocity and pushes it wider. InVideo designed the format for this exact outcome.

Credits Create Lock-In, Not Discounts

Winners get the highest-tier plan plus $1,200 in credits.

This forces usage. Usage builds habit. Winners create projects and save templates inside InVideo. When credits dry up, switching tools means starting over. It's like moving from Claude to ChatGPT. You can buy a new plan, but your skills use hooks which are only available in Claude.

Discounts attract bargain hunters. Credits attract builders.

The prize isn't generosity. It's customer acquisition cost with a friendlier name. A $1,200 credit package costs less than the ad spend needed to acquire that same power user.

And winners talk. They post creations on X, generating social proof that funds the next giveaway's credibility. The cycle feeds itself.

Top Tweets of the day

1/

Source: @DenneyDara

If the shoes cost <$170, then this is pure customer acquisition cost.

Whenever you can, give away free stuff. It's the best marketing model there is.

One reason to charge premium is you can have huge amounts of cash to kickstart new businesses by giving away free stuff. More money always makes stuff easy.

2/

Source: @vahebagdasar

Love this.

3/

Source: @thisisneer

People use your apps in ways that you can't even anticipate.

That's why it is important to track how people use your products so you can use that feature in copywriting and convert profitably.

This will absolutely do wonders on ads.

Rabbit Holes

1. Clay Beginner Guide

2. Prompts vs. Context

3. Experiment Reporting Framework

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More Startup Spells 🪄

1. Michelin's €26.0 Billion Content Marketing Playbook (From 1900) (LINK)

2. ESPN's Last Dance Marketing Playbook During COVID (LINK)

3. The A/B Testing Machine Behind Candy Crush (LINK)

4. Red Bull's Extreme Stunts Are the Best Marketing Playbook Nobody Copies (LINK)

5. How Old Spice Ad Speaks To Women But Targets Men (LINK)

Michelin's €26.0 Billion Content Marketing Playbook (From 1900)

The most famous content marketing experiment in history started when Michelin handed out 400-page guides to French motorists for free. The catch? There wasn't one, except that people drove more and bought more tyres.

Michelin Guide content marketing playbook from tyre company to restaurant authority

The Problem Was Never Tyres. It Was There Weren't Enough Cars

In 1900, France had fewer than 3,000 cars on the road. André and Édouard Michelin ran a tyre company in Clermont-Ferrand with a basic problem: how do you sell more tyres when almost nobody drives?

Their answer: make more people drive.

Not with discounts but with a 400-page booklet that told motorists where to find fuel, food, a bed, and a mechanic.

The cover read: "Offert gracieusement aux Chauffeurs" which literally means "Complimentary gift for Drivers."

1900 Guide Michelin cover offered free to drivers.

Just useful information, given away for free, to people who happened to need rubber on their wheels.

Think about the last time you planned a road trip. You checked Google Maps, skimmed Yelp reviews, bookmarked 3 gas stations along the route. All that took 10 minutes on your phone.

In 1900, none of that existed. Driving 200 kilometres meant gambling that you'd find fuel before the tank ran dry and a bed before dark.

The Michelin Guide erased that gamble. It packed every answer into one booklet you could toss in the glove box.

The logic was clean. Less anxiety meant more road trips. More trips meant more miles. More miles meant more worn-out tyres. More worn-out tyres meant a visit to the Michelin dealer.

The guide's job was to make driving itself easier and more appealing.

Free Guides Make Great Furniture Padding

In 1920, André Michelin walked into a garage and saw his guide propping up a workbench. A 400-page booklet, given away for free, reduced to furniture padding.

He had a realisation that would reshape the entire business: free things have no perceived value. People won't respect what costs them nothing.

That same year, Michelin started charging 7.5 francs for the guide. They also made 2 decisions that seem small but changed everything:

1. They removed all advertisements from the guide.

2. They began using anonymous inspectors to rate restaurants.

Removing ads was counterintuitive for a tyre company publishing a booklet. But André understood something about trust.

You trust your friend's restaurant recommendation right up until you learn the restaurant is paying her a referral fee. After that, every future recommendation sounds like a paid ad in a human costume.

Michelin saw this in 1920 and refused to let it happen. The second the guide accepted money from the restaurants it rated, every star would become a paid endorsement dressed up as an opinion.

By refusing ads and charging readers, Michelin flipped the power dynamic. The guide answered to its audience, not its sponsors.

Charging 7.5 francs turned a throwaway pamphlet into a purchase. And purchases come with expectations. People who pay for information expect that information to be right.

How Anonymous Inspectors Created the Most Feared Rating System

In 1926, Michelin awarded its first restaurant stars. Just a single star, meaning "a very good restaurant in its category." By 1931, they expanded to the 3-tier system that still runs today:

• ⭐: "A very good restaurant in its category."

• ⭐⭐: "Excellent cooking, worth a detour."

• ⭐⭐⭐: "Exceptional cuisine, worth a special journey."

Look at that language closely. "Worth a detour." "Worth a special journey." Every phrase is a polite instruction to drive farther. Every star rating is a suggestion to put more miles on your tyres. The Michelin brothers baked their business model into the vocabulary of fine dining.

The inspectors who award these stars remain anonymous to this day. They pay their own bills. They never accept a free meal.

A single inspector might eat 250 meals a year at Michelin's expense, always pretending to be a regular customer.

It's the same logic that makes surprise health inspections work. The restaurant doesn't know which Tuesday the inspector walks in, so every Tuesday has to be clean.

Michelin applied this to flavour. No chef knows which diner holds a career-ending verdict. That uncertainty forces every plate to be cooked as if it's the one that matters.

This rigour created authority that advertising alone could not. Chefs competed for Michelin stars with the desperation of athletes chasing Olympic gold because the guide could materially affect a restaurant's reputation and demand.

A tyre company became the unquestioned judge of what counts as world-class food. Not because they knew about cooking. Because they were fair, anonymous, and consistent for decades.

A Restaurant Guide That Rarely Sold The Product Directly

After 1920, Michelin said the guide abandoned paid advertisements. Yet it became the most effective marketing tool in the company's history, through a mechanism so indirect that most people still don't see it.

Michelin roadside brand advertising.

Trust transfer. A driver who trusted Michelin to rate restaurants honestly transferred that trust to Michelin tyres. If a company was rigorous enough to send anonymous inspectors to restaurants for 100 years, their tyres were probably good too.

It's the same reason you'd trust a surgeon's book recommendation. You've never seen her bookshelf, but she spent a decade proving she's careful with the things that matter. That carefulness bleeds into everything she touches. Michelin spent a century proving they were careful with restaurant ratings. That carefulness bled into how people felt about their tyres.

Brand halo. Michelin stopped being "that French tyre company" and became associated with quality, expertise, and the adventurous spirit of travel. You didn't just buy Michelin tyres. You bought into the same brand that told you which restaurants anywhere in the world were worth a special trip to.

And then there was the plain mechanical effect. "Worth a detour" put more kilometres on the odometer. "Worth a special journey" put even more. Every starred restaurant somewhere far from home was a reason to drive, and every drive wore out rubber.

The guide itself made no significant profit for decades. Michelin treated it as a marketing expense rather than a major profit center. As of 2025, Michelin reported €26.0 billion in annual sales and roughly 127,000 employees. The booklet that started as a 400-page freebie is still going, 126 years later.

126 Years Later, the Loop Still Spins

The Michelin Guide does something that no ad campaign can: it compounds.

Most marketing is a bonfire. You throw money at it, it burns bright, then it goes out. You throw more money, it burns again. Stop throwing money and there's nothing left but ash.

The Michelin Guide is a flywheel. Tyre revenue funds the guide. The guide builds authority. Authority generates trust. Trust sells tyres. And more tyre revenue funds a bigger guide.

Each rotation makes the next one spin faster. 126 years of rotations, and the thing hasn't slowed down.

André Michelin once said: "The Guide was born at the dawn of the century and will disappear with it, because the century of motoring is ours." He was wrong about the disappearing part. The guide outlived him by nearly a century.

More than 30 million Michelin Guides have been sold worldwide since inception, and the guide now spans 30+ countries. It expanded beyond restaurants into hotels, then beyond France into Tokyo, New York, and Shanghai. Michelin now publishes the Green Guide for sights and attractions, plus a digital Route Planner.

The product changed. The loop didn't. Make something useful. Build trust through rigour. Let the brand association do work that direct selling alone often can't.

Top Tweets of the day

1/

Twitter tweet

Love this. Only 2-3 hours for creating a 90-second video by a programmer is sick!

2/

Twitter tweet

Whenever a new feature drops on a social network, use it as much as you can because the algorithm is pushing for it to be seen by other people. Surf the artificial growth wave.

3/

Twitter tweet

Every wrapper is overpriced. Always go to the source so you can use more of it for less.

There is always a cheaper way without losing quality. Most people pay for branding and marketing.

Rabbit Holes

1. Influential Women in Advertising History

2. Wikipedia:Signs of AI writing

3. Dominating Reddit in 2026

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More Startup Spells 🪄

1. Red Bull's Extreme Stunts Are the Best Marketing Playbook Nobody Copies (LINK)

2. Airbnb Pro Photo Program Growth Strategy: $5,000 Camera Trick That Doubled Revenue in 30 Days (LINK)

3. The Piggyback Marketing Strategy: 5 Ways to Ride Someone Else's Viral Hit (LINK)

4. Grok's $30 Retention Offer upon Cancellation (LINK)

5. ESPN's Last Dance Marketing Playbook During COVID (LINK)

Red Bull turned extreme stunts into marketing that earns more coverage than any ad buy ever could. The company doesn't interrupt your entertainment. It builds the entertainment from scratch, slaps its logo on it, and lets the cameras roll.

Think of a bar that throws the best parties in town. Nobody goes there because of the drink menu. They go because something is always happening. Red Bull figured this out before most tech companies did.

The best example is still the one that nearly broke YouTube.

128,100 Feet Above Earth, Dressed in Red Bull Logos

On October 14, 2012, Felix Baumgartner stepped off a capsule 128,100 feet above New Mexico. He was wearing a pressurized suit covered in Red Bull logos. Below him: the entire curvature of the Earth.

Red Bull extreme stunts marketing Felix Baumgartner stepping off Stratos capsule at 128,100 feet

Felix hit 1,357 km/h in freefall. Mach 1.24. He became the first human to break the sound barrier without a vehicle. The freefall lasted about 4 minutes and 20 seconds before he deployed his parachute. Total descent: 10 minutes.

The broadcast numbers were absurd. Over 8 million people watched simultaneously on YouTube, a record at the time. The stream ran across 40+ TV networks in 50 countries.

Twitter logged over 3 million tweets during the event. Over the years, the footage has piled up close to a billion views.

All of it for an energy drink company. Most companies rent attention by buying ad slots. Red Bull built its own stadium and sold out every seat.

Real Scientists, Real Data, Real Cameras

Most branded stunts are filmed in a day. Stratos was a 5-year engineering project.

Red Bull worked with scientists, engineers, and medical researchers. The project generated real data for high-altitude escape systems and spaceflight safety research.

Felix completed multiple test jumps months before the final attempt. This was not a publicity team winging it. It was closer to an actual space program.

The production looked like it too. Dozens of cameras covered the capsule, the suit, and the ground setup. Live telemetry and biometric monitoring ran throughout.

A real-time mission control broadcast went out to the world. It looked like NASA, not advertising.

The distribution was designed from the start for global reach. The livestream was embedded across multiple platforms, not just YouTube. Broadcast hit TV and digital simultaneously.

Social media was woven into the experience with live questions and reactions from viewers.

The whole thing was built as a campaign study in how to make marketing that people actually want to watch.

The Events Red Bull Manufactures on Repeat

Stratos was not a one-off. Red Bull manufactures events across different formats, all following the same principle: build something so wild that the media covers it for free.

Here are 3 formats that prove the pattern holds.

Flugtag

Teams build homemade flying machines out of whatever they can find and launch them off a pier into water. The machines almost never fly. That is the entire point.

Red Bull Flugtag homemade flying machine launching off pier

The events run globally across Europe, the US, and Asia. They are designed to be chaotic, funny, and extremely shareable.

Nobody watches Flugtag for the engineering. They watch it because a team dressed as cows just drove a cardboard biplane off a 30-foot platform.

Near-Vertical Cliffs, Viral Every Year

Red Bull Rampage sends mountain bikers down near-vertical cliffs in the Utah desert. The riders carve their own lines into the rock. The event is known for crashes, massive drops, and clips that go viral every single year.

Red Bull Rampage mountain biker jumping off cliff in Utah desert

It is considered one of the most dangerous mountain biking competitions in the world. And Red Bull owns every second of the footage.

Imagine owning the gym where every viral workout clip gets filmed. You do not need to post anything yourself. Every athlete who walks in becomes your marketing department.

Air Race

Red Bull Air Race put pilots in small planes flying at roughly 370 km/h through inflatable pylons. Precision flying meets time trials, hosted in cities around the world.

Red Bull Air Race plane flying near helipad over water

The races turned skylines in Abu Dhabi, Budapest, and Las Vegas into racetracks. Every frame was content.

The Franchise Model for Spectacle

Red Bull GmbH is headquartered in Austria. It operates in over 170 countries. Each country has a local team that runs events regionally.

The system works like this: a central team creates the core format. Each country adapts it with local athletes, local audiences, and local culture.

Red Bull Batalla in Mexico means Spanish rap battles. Batalla in India means Hindi and English. Same structure. Different flavor.

It is like a franchise restaurant. The menu is the same everywhere, but the spice levels adjust to the local palate.

Not every event runs everywhere. Rampage only happens in Utah because the terrain demands it. Flugtag and Soapbox Race can run in any major city with a waterfront or a hill. Cliff Diving rotates through coastal stops globally.

At any given point in the year, Red Bull has a dance event running in India, a cliff diving stop somewhere in Europe, a motorsport event in the Middle East, and a flagship stunt in the US. All at the same time.

In a typical year, the calendar looks something like this: 1 Rampage in Utah, 6 Cliff Diving stops across Europe, 10+ countries hosting Batalla qualifiers, 5 to 10 cities running Soapbox or Flugtag.

Add a handful of dance and drift events scattered across Asia and the Middle East.

Red Bull did not just run one big stunt and call it a strategy. They built a machine that runs dozens of events across continents, all year, every year.

Most brands try to get in front of the crowd at a concert. Red Bull builds the stage, books the band, and prints the tickets. The logo on the drum kit is just a bonus.

The product is a $2 can of caffeine. The marketing is a story nobody can look away from.

Top Tweets of the day

1/

Source: @dsa

Most people are sleeping on Cerebras. If you want to use something fast, use this.

I use it in my Voice to Text app and it instantly transcribes. Even though I have to connect it to the internet, it is faster than local and more accurate since it uses a bigger Whisper model.

2/

Source: @adrian_horning_

Golden tip!

I recommend you to check it if you want to study SEO of high traffic'd websites.

For example, if you check Ahrefs' sitemap, you will realize how amazing it is in terms of SEO.

3/

Source: @_baretto

Insane stats & tips!

I currently have ~2 million impressions from Google but very few clicks. It ain't SEO optimized yet.

Rabbit Holes

1. The Genius Ad Strategy Behind Loop’s €126M Empire

2. From 15/hr to $2M/yr in six years with "beef as marketing"

3. TONE OF VOICE ANALYSIS v1.0

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More Startup Spells 🪄

1. The A/B Testing Machine Behind Candy Crush (LINK)

2. Lucky Strike's "It's Toasted" Ad: The 2-Word Strategy That Outsold Every Health Claim (LINK)

3. Airbnb Pro Photo Program Growth Strategy: $5,000 Camera Trick That Doubled Revenue in 30 Days (LINK)

4. The Piggyback Marketing Strategy: 5 Ways to Ride Someone Else's Viral Hit (LINK)

5. Grok's $30 Retention Offer upon Cancellation (LINK)

King tests every Candy Crush level the way a performance marketer tests ad creatives: ship variants, measure conversions, cut the losers.

The data optimization behind it is why the game still prints money 13 years later.

Candy crush data optimization system that tests every level like an ad variant

Every Level Is an A/B Test

At King, a level doesn't ship because a designer thinks it feels right. It ships because the data says it performs.

Like a restaurant that doesn't keep a dish on the menu because the chef likes it. It stays because the table turns and margin say so.

Multiple versions of the same level go out to different player groups. King measures how many attempts it takes to clear, where players quit, and when they open their wallets. If a level is too easy, nobody pays. If it's too hard, players leave. The version that hits the sweet spot between engagement and spending survives. The rest get pruned.

This isn't how most games are designed. Most studios playtest with a few hundred people, tweak based on feel, and ship. King runs what amounts to a continuous multivariate test across millions of players. The levels that exist in your game right now earned their spot through performance metrics, not creative instinct.

It's closer to how a growth team optimizes a landing page than how a game studio builds content. Booking.com runs a similar playbook at $170B+ scale. The same way a bar owner notices which drink special empties the rail by 10 PM and runs it again next Friday. Except King does it across 200 million players at once.

The Behavioral Models Running Behind Every Move

Testing individual levels produces useful signals. But King doesn't stop at the level.

Player behavior data from millions of sessions feeds into machine learning models that track patterns across the entire game. These models learn how reward timing affects retention, how failure frequency influences spending, and how progression pacing determines whether someone plays for 2 weeks or 2 years.

It's the difference between a gym that tracks which classes retain members past January and one that just posts a schedule and hopes people show up.

The Guardian reported that King operates more like a behavioral science system than a traditional game studio. AP News documented the scale of experimentation: player behavior data, machine learning models, and large-scale testing all running simultaneously.

The result is a game that adapts based on what players actually do, not what designers assume they'll do. Tech metrics reshape behavior in ways designers can't predict. If players in a certain cohort start quitting at level 47, the system learns that and adjusts. Not next quarter. Continuously. The psychology behind lasting behavior change is baked into the system itself.

The Whale Problem Nobody Talks About

Once the system understands behavior at scale, it starts sorting players into categories.

Only 2-4% of Candy Crush players ever spend money. A much smaller group within that 2-4% accounts for most of the revenue. The industry calls them whales.

Side-by-side comparison of an easy level with many power-ups versus a difficult 'Legendary Level' with a move purchase prompt.

This creates a design problem that most people don't think about. The game has to serve two completely different audiences at the same time: the 96% who will never pay but keep the game alive through social sharing and engagement metrics, and the 4% (really the top fraction of that 4%) who generate almost all the revenue.

Every nightclub works like this. Hundreds of people on the dance floor create the energy. The 6 people ordering bottle service pay the rent.

Casual players get low friction. Easy levels, frequent rewards, a sense of progress. They're the retention layer. High-spend players encounter calibrated resistance: difficulty spikes placed at moments where the data shows they're most likely to pay rather than quit.

The same game. Two different experiences. Determined by how you behave.

Like a coffee shop that gives regulars a free pastry and charges the tourist $7 for the same one. Same counter, different transaction.

Monetization Is a Precision Instrument

Monetization in Candy Crush isn't random. It's not even primarily about the items in the store.

It's about timing.

The system knows which players are likely to spend. It knows which moments produce the highest conversion rates: after a string of failures, when a timer blocks progress, when a limited-time event creates urgency. Difficulty spikes at these exact points aren't design oversights. They're the product.

Think of it as friction engineering. The frustration a player feels at level 65 after failing 8 times in a row is a calculated output of a system that tested thousands of difficulty curves and identified this specific pattern as the one that converts frustration into revenue without causing enough pain to make the player quit. Slot machines use the same psychology.

The difference between Candy Crush and a game that just makes hard levels is precision. King knows who will pay, when they'll pay, and how much pressure to apply before they break.

The Game That Never Ships a Final Version

Every purchase, every quit, every skipped level becomes a data point that re-enters the optimization pipeline.

This is the feedback loop that makes everything compound. New levels ship continuously through what the industry calls Live Ops: ongoing content updates, rotating events, limited-time mechanics. Each release generates fresh behavioral data. That data feeds the ML models. The models update segmentation. Segmentation refines monetization timing. And the cycle repeats.

There is no final version of Candy Crush. The game you play today is measurably different from the one that existed 6 months ago. Not because King redesigned it. Because billions of player interactions taught the system what to change. Like a subway system that reroutes trains based on real-time ridership data instead of running the same schedule it printed 10 years ago.

This is what separates Candy Crush from games that had one good idea and slowly declined. The system doesn't just run. It learns. Every dollar spent and every player lost makes the next iteration slightly better at extracting revenue and preventing churn.

That's why a puzzle game about matching candy generates over $1 billion a year, more than a decade after launch. Not because it found a perfect formula once. Because it keeps finding a better one.

Top Tweets of the day

1/

Source: @tedescau

Love it. Smart ones are automating their whole job. Some are just quietly raking in money while their bosses don't know that their job has become just quality control. It simply means 10 good people or 1 expert can do the job of 100.

2/

Source: @jean__gatt

TIL TikTok blocked direct links long time ago. Whenever a hack appears, exploit it as much as you can and don't talk about it until you've run it dry.

Even people who shared AI Jailbreaks have stopped sharing them publicly.

3/

Source: @clairevo

Perfect app for female beauty influencers. Massive TAM.

Whenever a new image model launches, it creates multiple little applications/use-cases like this.

Rabbit Holes

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2. Google Ads AI Agent: Complete 2025 Guide

3. AI Marketing Examples: 13 Times AI Actually Delivered

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More Startup Spells 🪄

1. ESPN's Last Dance Marketing Playbook During COVID (LINK)

2. Stealing Reddit Content That Goes Viral on X (Twitter) (LINK)

3. SlapMac Viral Marketing: How a Prank App Made $5,000 in One Week (LINK)

4. Neurogum's Cross-Channel Growth Loop: How TikTok Feeds Amazon, Google, and Retail (LINK)

5. Showtime's Churn Prevention Secret Tactic: 60-40-20 Discount Loophole (LINK)

When COVID killed every live sport in April 2020, ESPN's marketing team turned a 20-year-old Michael Jordan documentary The Last Dance into the only appointment on television.

Espn the last dance marketing strategy that turned a 20-year-old documentary into appointment television during covid

No NBA. No MLB. No NCAA tournament. ESPN's entire programming slate vanished overnight.

Like a restaurant losing its entire menu during dinner rush and having to cook from whatever's in the freezer. The network that lives on live sports had nothing live to show.

But they had something else. 500 hours of behind-the-scenes footage from the Chicago Bulls' 1997–98 championship season, filmed by an NBA Entertainment crew with full locker room access.

Michael Jordan had blocked its release for nearly two decades. Rights issues, a less-than-stellar Wizards comeback, and Jordan's own reluctance kept the tapes locked away.

Jordan finally approved the project in 2016. ESPN and Netflix spent years producing a 10-part series called The Last Dance. The original release date was June 2020.

ESPN - The Last Dance x Michael Jordan Documentary

Then the pandemic hit. ESPN pulled the premiere forward to April. A textbook case of trendjacking, except the trend was the absence of everything else.

How ESPN Made Sunday Nights Feel Like Game Nights Again

The timing wasn't the move. The positioning was.

ESPN didn't market The Last Dance as a documentary. They framed it as a live event.

Heavy teaser drops across TV and social media. Trailers cut like playoff hype reels, not film promos. Messaging centered on one idea: you have to watch this live.

In a world with zero sports, The Last Dance became the only appointment worth keeping. The premiere pulled over 6 million viewers. ESPN's biggest documentary debut ever.

Two episodes dropped every Sunday night. Not a full binge dump. Not a single weekly episode.

Like a bartender pouring two drinks at a time instead of handing you the whole bottle. Enough to keep you at the bar, not enough to send you home satisfied. Two at a time, on a fixed schedule, for 5 consecutive weeks.

The format was deliberate. Two episodes gave enough to satisfy without overfeeding. The fixed Sunday slot created appointment viewing, the same psychology that drives people to tune into playoff games.

Weekly cliffhangers were built into the narrative structure. The Squid Game S02 marketing team later ran a similar playbook. ESPN did it first.

The Last Dance averaged 6.7 million viewers across its run. It didn't decay week over week the way most series do.

It built momentum into the finale, behaving more like a playoff series than a TV show.

When SportsCenter, First Take, and YouTube All Point at The Last Dance

ESPN didn't treat The Last Dance as one show on one channel. They turned it into the operating system for the entire network.

SportsCenter led with Jordan recaps every morning. First Take ran debate segments framed around each episode. Was Jordan too ruthless? Did Pippen get disrespected?

NBA Countdown brought on former players (Scottie Pippen, Dennis Rodman, Steve Kerr) reacting in real time to the footage they'd just seen for the first time.

Every show, every day, every platform pointed at the same story. The documentary wasn't competing for attention across ESPN's lineup. It was the lineup.

Google ran a similar multi-surface blitz to steal OpenAI's spotlight years later.

This synchronization did two things at once. It generated searchable clips and debates that spread across platforms. And it drove demand for something ESPN already had in the archive: the original game footage.

The Reframing Trick That Filled ESPN's Schedule

After each documentary episode, ESPN started airing the classic Bulls games referenced in the show. Not labeled as reruns.

Positioned as "watch what you just heard about."

A 1997 NBA Finals game sitting in ESPN's library is dead inventory. That same game airing the night after a Last Dance episode about that exact series is a narrative extension. Same tape. Completely different perception.

The same principle behind content repurposing. Context changes value.

ESPN went beyond the Bulls, too. They ramped up archival programming across the schedule: classic baseball games, fan-favorite historic matchups, encore broadcasts.

The Last Dance gave them permission to reframe their entire archive as relevant content. Kapwing does the same thing with memes. Ride the trend, surface the catalog.

The loop fed itself. Viewers watching the 1998 Finals replay generated new talking points.

Those talking points fed back into the next morning's SportsCenter and First Take segments. Old content created new discussion, which created demand for more old content.

How ESPN Intercepted Every Jordan Search on YouTube

While the network ran coordinated TV coverage, ESPN flooded YouTube and Twitter with short clips: quotes, highlights, behind-the-scenes moments.

The titles and thumbnails lined up with what people were already searching. Jordan mentality. Flu Game. Jordan vs Pippen.

This wasn't promotion. It was distribution. Every clip intercepted search demand and routed it back toward the show.

A viewer who searches Michael Jordan Flu Game on YouTube finds an ESPN clip. That clip ends with a card pointing to the next episode.

Chris Williamson's clip-first podcast strategy runs the same loop. So does Drake's fan-driven clipping playbook.

Each spike in interest looped back into more discovery. The documentary generated search demand. The clips captured that demand. The clips drove new viewers to the next Sunday episode.

Calm runs the same YouTube-to-app funnel with meditation videos.

The multi-generational effect amplified it further. Older fans relived memories. Younger fans met Jordan for the first time.

ESPN's messaging bridged both: nostalgia for one audience, discovery for another. The result was an audience that extended well beyond typical sports viewers.

How ESPN Redirected 6.7M Viewers to the Next Documentary

The finale aired on May 17, 2020. ESPN didn't let the attention scatter.

During the final episodes, they promoted upcoming documentaries (Lance Armstrong, Bruce Lee) directly to the 6.7-million-viewer audience.

The Last Dance wasn't treated as a one-off. It was a launchpad for the next properties.

Netflix's content strategy works the same way. Every hit feeds the next one.

The system ESPN built during those 5 weeks outlasted the documentary itself.

They'd proven that archival content, packaged as event television and synchronized across every surface, could replace live sports.

Not permanently. But long enough to hold an audience, grow it, and redirect it when the next thing was ready.

ESPN didn't just market a documentary. They rebuilt the feeling of a live sports season using one archived story and total network coordination.

Top Tweets of the day

1/

Twitter tweet

Someone is going to make millions from a fake AI influencer built fully on top of Sora.

2/

Twitter tweet

Such a genius idea.

3/

Twitter tweet

Incentives rule the world. Government doesn't ban such products because it makes them money.

Rabbit Holes

1. $600,000 From Instagram and TikTok - In-Depth Funnel Breakdown

2. ChatPDF and PDF.ai are making millions using open source tech... here's the code

3. Playkit: Championing Community-Driven Content Creation To Build Trust

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More Startup Spells 🪄

1. Grok's $30 Retention Offer upon Cancellation (LINK)

2. 12 Velvet Rope Marketing Examples (From 1893 to a 450K Waitlist) (LINK)

3. Browse Traffic vs. Search Traffic: Study of YouTube Tutorial Channel Performance (2 Years of Data) (LINK)

4. MiniMax's Share and Earn Credits Playbook: Trade Monopoly Money for Real Testimonials (LINK)

5. Stealing Reddit Content That Goes Viral on X (Twitter) (LINK)

I subscribed to Grok for 3 days, forgot to cancel, and got charged $10. When I tried to leave, Grok hit me with a retention offer I almost couldn't refuse.

Here's how the entire funnel works, and why you should copy it to make more money for your SaaS.

How a 3-Day Free Trial Becomes a $10 Charge

Grok offered me a 3-day free trial of SuperGrok. No credit card warning, no countdown timer, no reminder email before the trial ended.

3 days passed and I forgot to cancel. $10 gone.

This is the entry point of the retention funnel. The free trial isn't really free. It's a bet that you'll forget to cancel.

Gyms do this every January, signing you up for a year knowing most people quit by February. They're not selling fitness. They're selling forgetfulness.

And for most people, that bet pays off. The friction of remembering to cancel on day 3 is enough to generate paid users who never intended to pay.

I only use Grok's free plan to skim long-form articles and occasionally research things on X. I didn't need SuperGrok but since it was 3-day free trial, I subscribed to taste a bit of Grok Imagine. But now I was a paying customer by default.

When Cancel Means Hear Me Out

On the 5th day, I went to cancel. Clicked through to the billing page. Hit cancel.

But the cancel button didn't cancel anything. Instead, a modal appeared.

One last thing: How about 3 months for the price of 1?

Grok retention offer modal showing 3 months of SuperGrok for $30 instead of $90

The system intercepted my exit. Instead of processing the cancellation, it routed me through a retention step. I came to leave. Grok had other plans.

This is cancel-intercept design. The user is at their most vulnerable here. They've already been charged. They're slightly annoyed. And now they're staring at a decision point where accepting an offer feels easier than clicking through another step to complete the cancellation. ChatGPT runs the same play: try to cancel, get 50% off for 3 months.

How $90 Makes $30 Feel Cheap

The modal shows $90 crossed out. Next to it, $30 in bold. 3 months of SuperGrok for the price of 1.

This is textbook price anchoring. The $90 number exists only to make $30 feel like a steal. Nobody coming to cancel a $10 charge is thinking about paying $90. But the crossed-out price rewires the math. Suddenly you're not spending $30. You're saving $60. The same anchoring psychology powers SaaS pricing pages across the industry.

Same trick department stores pull. Nobody walks into Zara planning to spend $80. But when the tag says $200 crossed out, $80 feels sensible.

Then the urgency kicks in. A small orange badge: Offer expires if you cancel. The deal vanishes the moment you leave. Act now or lose it forever. It's scarcity marketing at its most direct.

Below that, the value stack with 3 bullet points:

• The fastest, best answers

• 10x more Chat usage

• 50x more video and image generation

Each one designed to remind you what you're walking away from. The features you never used now feel like something you're about to lose.

The CTA That Guilt-Trips You Into Staying

Two buttons sit at the bottom. One is white, bold, and takes up the full width: Claim my one-time offer. The other is small, red text, tucked below: Lose offer and continue to cancel.

Notice the framing. The alternative to accepting isn't No thanks or Cancel my subscription. It's Lose offer. Loss-coded language. Clicking away isn't neutral. It's framed as throwing something valuable in the trash.

And buried in the fine print: Renews at $30.00/mo after 3 months. Cancel anytime before renewal.

That's the real play. The $30 promo isn't the revenue driver. It's the $30/mo auto-renewal that kicks in after 3 months. The discount is bait for recurring billing.

I didn't accept the offer. I use the free plan. But standing there, staring at that modal, I understood why it works.

4 Retention Tricks Worth Stealing

Grok's retention flow isn't original. Hulu, Adobe, Showtime's staircase discounts, and dozens of other subscription apps run similar cancel-intercept funnels. Even Claude built a retention plan when users started leaving for Codex. But Grok's version is clean enough to see the mechanics clearly.

1. Cancel-intercept modal. Route every cancel click through a retention step before processing it.

2. Anchor pricing against the full price. Cross out the original to make any discount feel massive.

3. Loss-framed CTA copy. Lose offer instead of No thanks changes the emotional weight of clicking away.

4. Auto-renewal after promo. The discount ends but the recurring billing doesn't.

The entire funnel, from free trial to retention offer, works on psychology, not product value. I never used a single SuperGrok feature. I still almost kept paying.

Top Tweets of the day

1/

Source: @notnotstorm

The pattern is obvious once you see it.

AI accuracy correlates with rule strictness:

• Tight rules → Tight, reliable output

• Loose rules → Garbage output

If you can turn it into a formula, AI will deliver it consistently.

Hence, Coding got automated first because it has:

• Instant feedback (code runs or crashes)

• Strict rules (compiler enforces them)

• Rust > TypeScript > JavaScript in order of strictness

Creative work is AI's chaos zone because:

• Vague feedback ("feels off" unless you can articulate it better. Hint: most can't)

• Few hard rules to enforce

• Output sprawls in random directions

But formulas exist everywhere. Even "creative" breakthroughs follow hidden templates:

• Movies: “Hero's Journey” movies rule box office. Like Rocky, Finding Nemo, Harry Potter, Pirates of the Carribean, Avengers: Endgame.

• Sales: Alex Hormozi's fully scripted objection-handling sales script (feels natural, but is fully formulaic)

• Newsletters: Smallest possible example but check my own headings in last few months or so. They are way better than a year ago and it only takes me <2 minutes (most of the time goes into reading and selecting them)

• Business: Hormozi's $100M Offers book has a simple formula for business. It is by far the most beautiful codification of business I've seen.

TL;DR create formulas, rules, good/bad examples, and checklists so AI can deliver consistently.

2/

Source: @hridoyreh

Simple SEO tip. Now whenever you visit a site, check the url slug and you'll know those that are doing SEO well like Ahrefs and those that are not doing it well like X.com but sites like X.com don't really need it because they have NFX (network effects).

3/

Source: @rohanpaul_ai

Still true.

Rabbit Holes

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2. My AGENTS.md file for building plans you actually read

3. Stated vs Revealed Preference

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More Startup Spells 🪄

1. The Piggyback Marketing Strategy: 5 Ways to Ride Someone Else's Viral Hit (LINK)

2. Ryanair's Social Media Marketing Strategy (LINK)

3. MiniMax's Invite and Earn Masterclass: Claude's Brain, 10x Cheaper Price (LINK)

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The piggyback marketing strategy works like drafting in cycling. When a rider tucks in directly behind a faster cyclist, the lead rider punches through the air resistance. The follower slips into the low-pressure pocket left behind and gets pulled forward with less effort.

Piggyback Marketing Strategy - Ride a viral hit like drafting in cycling

Same physics, different arena. Instead of building momentum from scratch, you attach yourself to something that already has it. A viral product, a trending topic, a competitor's campaign. You position yourself right behind it and let its energy carry you.

A cyclist does not draft from a mile back. They tuck in tight, at the right moment, on the right wheel. The piggyback marketing strategy works the same way. Read what already has wind behind it and move quickly before the slipstream dissipates.

Here are 5 playbooks that turned other people's viral hits into independent success stories.

Segment the Audience

Wordle's virality was built on a single-player, shared-social loop. One puzzle a day. 6 tries. An emoji grid you paste into group chats.

The spin-offs didn't clone the game. They segmented the audience by changing the input type.

Taylordle

Taylordle was created by the Holy Swift podcast. It replaced dictionary words with terms from the Taylor Swift universe: Lover, Blank, Swift.

It hit 1.4 million visits in its first week and eventually racked up 5.9 million plays.

Taylor Swift fan communities convert well. They even have a term for it: Swifties.

The lesson here applies to any piggyback marketing strategy. If a mechanic is viral, apply it to a high-passion niche.

Fans like Swifties, Potterheads, and the BTS Army are pre-organized communities. They have shared language, group chats, and a reason to show off. Give them a version for them and you transform a general tool into a tribal identity marker.

It is the difference between opening a coffee shop on a random street versus opening one right outside a college campus. The customers are already there, caffeinated and habitual. You just serve their specific taste.

Nerdle

Nerdle targeted the STEM crowd by swapping letters for numbers and operators. It reached 2 million daily players within weeks. The pitch was obvious: Wordle for math people.

Nerdle applied the piggyback marketing strategy to the STEM crowd by turning Wordle's word puzzle into a daily math equation game

Framed

Framed applied the 6-tries mechanic to cinema. Instead of letters, users see a single frame from a movie. Each wrong guess reveals a more obvious frame.

Framed improved on Wordle's feedback loop in a subtle way.

In Wordle, you get abstract color feedback based on your input. In Framed, you get new data (a better image) regardless of what you guess. That just one more frame pull made sharing results feel like a badge of cinematic expertise.

Framed shows progressively easier movie stills with each wrong guess, turning film knowledge into a daily social competition on Letterboxd and Twitter

It hijacked Film Twitter and the Letterboxd community, where identifying obscure shots is a point of pride. Results flooded both platforms because the audience was already congregating there.

Heardle

Heardle asked users to identify a song from increasingly long opening snippets. It reached 69 million monthly visits at its peak before Spotify acquired it.

The pattern across all 4 spin-offs: pivot the medium, not the mechanic.

• Wordle: text and vocabulary

• Nerdle: numbers and equations

• Framed: images and visual recognition

• Heardle: audio and music

Worse Quality, Better Growth

In mid-2022, OpenAI's DALL-E 2 was the hottest thing in tech. But it was behind a strict waitlist. People were desperate to try it.

Boris Dayma released an open-source, much smaller model on Hugging Face and named it DALL-E Mini. It was not affiliated with OpenAI, but the name made it the default for anyone who could not get into the official beta.

It hit 4.7 million users in 1 month.

Here is the twist: because the model was worse than the original, it produced distorted, cursed images (think Thanos eating pizza) that were actually better for meme culture than high-fidelity art.

DALL•E Mini - Thanos Eating Pizza

Users flooded social media with these bizarre creations, and each shared image became free marketing. The imperfection became the feature.

OpenAI eventually forced a name change to Craiyon, but by then the user base was already cemented. 4.7 million people were not going to re-learn a brand.

The growth lesson is simple. Whenever a viral product has a waitlist, high price, or steep hardware requirement, there is a massive under-market waiting for a good enough free version.

DALL-E Mini did not compete on quality. It competed on zero friction. That friction gap was worth millions of users. DALL-E Mini is a good example on how to build a viral clone.

When Fan Fiction Becomes a Business

While Nintendo maintains a tight grip on Pokémon, Palworld capitalized on a decades-long what if from the fanbase: what if Pokémon was a survival game with modern mechanics?

By combining familiar creature-collecting aesthetics with Minecraft-style survival and Fortnite-style combat, Palworld sold 15 million copies on Steam in its first month.

Palworld combined Pokémon-style creature collecting with survival mechanics and combat, selling 15 million copies by building what Nintendo refused to make

The growth hack was counterintuitive. They leaned into the controversy.

By positioning themselves as Pokémon with Guns, they forced the internet to debate is this a rip-off? That debate was not a threat. It was their primary marketing engine. Every tweet, every Reddit thread, every YouTube reaction video asking can they really do this? drove awareness without costing a dollar.

The lesson: if there is a feature the original creator is too afraid to build, the demand has been simmering for years. Sometimes decades. Build it.

It is the same reason food trucks thrive outside stadiums. The venue will not serve what people actually want at 11 PM. So someone parks a truck out front and sells exactly that. The demand was always there. The venue just refused to fill it.

How Lensa Packaged Free Tech Into a One-Tap Empire

When OpenAI released the ChatGPT API, thousands of startups piggybacked on the AI hype by creating specialized interfaces for the general-purpose model.

ChatPDF turned the viral power of GPT into a specific tool for students and researchers to talk to their documents.

In early 2023, ChatGPT struggled with long PDF files. ChatPDF piggybacked on that exact limitation, creating a simple upload-and-chat interface that captured the student and researcher traffic ChatGPT was failing to serve.

Lensa took the viral interest in AI-generated portraits (powered by Stable Diffusion) and made it a one-click paid app.

While Stable Diffusion was free and open-source, it required command-line skills, model selection, and prompt engineering.

Lensa packaged all of that complexity into a single Magic Avatar button. The result: millions of dollars in revenue within days.

Lensa turned the complexity of open-source Stable Diffusion into a one-click Magic Avatar feature, generating millions by wrapping free AI technology in simple UX

These tools used SEO-heavy names (AI Resume Builder, AI Headshot Generator) to ride the massive surge in Google searches for anything with AI in the name. The naming itself was the growth hack. Search intent was exploding, and whoever matched the query first won.

The strategy: find the friction in a viral tool (too technical, missing a use case, bad at a specific file type) and build a wrapper that solves that one problem.

You are not building a competitor. You are building a bridge between the hype and the people who cannot cross it on their own.

Think of it like tutoring. The textbook is free. The lectures are free. But a student will pay $50 an hour for someone who can explain the same material in 20 minutes without the jargon. That is the gist of the wrapper business model.

How to Profit When a Viral Product Dies

In 2023, the game Only Up! went viral on Twitch. Streamers like IShowSpeed turned it into rage-quit content that performed exceptionally well on TikTok and YouTube. At its peak, it hit 280,000 concurrent Twitch viewers.

Then the solo developer permanently removed it from Steam in September 2023. In a final Steam update, the developer wrote:

"I'm a solo developer and this game is my first experience in gamedev. The game has kept me under a lot of stress all these months. What I need now is peace of mind and healing."

Only Up! was a viral 2023 platformer that peaked at 280,000 Twitch viewers before its solo developer permanently delisted it from Steam

The game had earlier been temporarily delisted for copyright violations (including non-commercial 3D models, stolen sound effects from Final Fantasy VII and Minecraft, and NFT-related promotions).

Despite mostly positive reviews and an estimated $2.6 million in revenue, the developer chose to walk away.

The removal left millions of fans and thousands of streamers with no way to play the trend. That vacuum was the opportunity.

Chained Together released in 2024. It took the exact same climb to the top concept but added a co-op twist: players are literally chained to each other. One person slips, both fall. It gained 80,000 players in its first week.

Chained Together filled the vacuum left by Only Up!'s delisting, adding a co-op chain mechanic that gave streamers even better rage-quit content

The targeting done by Chained Together was specific. They went after the exact same streamers who had made Only Up! viral.

They knew that rage-gaming content performs well on TikTok and YouTube. The co-op twist gave those streamers something even better. Two people raging together is more entertaining than one.

The lesson: when a viral hit disappears, its audience does not. They are actively searching for a replacement. Be that replacement. Be the copycat startup.

3 Laws of Riding Viral Momentum: Timing, Friction, and The "Yes, And" Method

3 rules that every successful piggyback follows:

1. Timing is everything. You must launch while the main hit is still in its upward trajectory or at the peak of its controversy. Too early and the market does not exist yet. Too late and the hype has faded. You can't launch Barbie-themed marketing today because that moment has passed.

2. Reduce friction. The goal is to catch people who are already interested. Do not make them learn a new system. Use familiar UI and UX so they can start instantly. Build a one-tap app like Lensa AI rather than giving 100s of steps like Stable Diffusion.

3. The Yes, And method. Do not just clone. Offer the viral hit plus one specific thing the original is missing. Wordle, but for movies. Pokémon, but with guns. ChatGPT, but for PDFs.

You do not need to plant the entire orchard. Sometimes the smartest move is finding a tree that is already heavy with fruit and setting up your stand underneath it.

Find something with momentum, tuck in behind it, and let its slipstream accelerate your growth.

Top Tweets of the day

1/

Twitter tweet

Being Early is equivalent to being wrong.

There was a Bitcoin before Bitcoin, but it wasn't the future currency.

2/

Twitter tweet

Best way to create viral content is to copy viral content from the best.

3/

Twitter tweet

Love the phrase "pack hunters" in here. Different way of saying environment matters. Survival of the fittest.

Rabbit Holes

1. Tiktok Algorithm Changes in 7-Minutes

2. Fetching Number of Results from Google SERP

3. Two Real Ways to 10x Your Team with AI

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More Startup Spells 🪄

1. Airbnb Pro Photo Program Growth Strategy: $5,000 Camera Trick That Doubled Revenue in 30 Days (LINK)

2. LinkedIn Post Generator: How a Parody Tool Went Viral, Got 2M Users & Sold in 7 Days (LINK)

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4. How OpenArt AI engineered the perfect feature adoption loop using activity-based credits (LINK)

5. Ryanair's Social Media Marketing Strategy (LINK)

Airbnb Pro Photo Program Growth Strategy: $5,000 Camera Trick That Doubled Revenue in 30 Days

The Airbnb Pro Photo Program was such a unique growth strategy that turned a startup hemorrhaging cash into a $25.5 billion company. By late 2015, the platform was booking 78 million nights a year, nearly double the year before.

Airbnb Pro Photo Program - Professional Photography Service

Revenue hit $340 million in a single quarter, on pace for just shy of $1 billion for the year. But rewind to the summer of 2009, and none of this looked inevitable.

The fix that changed everything wasn't a new feature, a pivot, or a viral marketing stunt. It was a rented camera. Like a restaurant where the food is great but the menu photos look like mugshots. Nobody's ordering if your photos look like shit.

Air Mattresses, Obama O's, and a Horrible Idea

Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia couldn't make rent on their San Francisco apartment in 2007. So they threw 3 air mattresses on their loft floor, built a simple website, and charged $80 a night during a design conference when hotel rooms were sold out.

That first weekend brought 3 guests and a flood of emails from people around the world asking when the site would be available in Buenos Aires, London, and Japan. As Joe explained: People told us what they wanted, so we set off to create it for them.

They recruited Nathan Blecharczyk, their former roommate and engineer, to build the real product. The idea was so strange that even Paul Graham, the founder of Y-Combinator, admitted he had doubts.

I thought the idea was crazy. Are people really going to do this? I would never do this. He funded them anyway. Airbed & Breakfast joined YC's 2009 winter class.

To raise early cash, Brian and Joe designed special edition election-themed cereal boxes (Obama O's and Cap'n McCain's) and sold 500 of each for about $30,000. When the Obama O's sold out, they survived on leftover Cap'n McCain's.

That period was what they called a real low point.

The team also famously reverse-engineered Craigslist to cross-post listings and siphon off traffic. But Craigslist users only got them through the door. Keeping them required solving a completely different problem.

A $5,000 Rental That Outperformed Every Ad Campaign

In the summer of 2009, Airbnb wasn't gaining traction in New York. Brian and Joe flew out, booked rooms with 24 hosts, and spotted the issue immediately. As Joe put it: The photos were really bad. No one was booking because you couldn't see what you were paying for.

Their fix was dead simple. They rented a $5,000 camera and went door to door, taking professional shots of as many New York listings as they could. The results were immediate: 2 to 3 times as many bookings on those listings.

By the end of the month, Airbnb's revenue in New York had doubled.

What was killing conversions in New York was killing conversions everywhere: Paris, London, Vancouver, Miami. Every market had the same problem. Hosts couldn't photograph their own spaces well enough to sell them.

It's the same reason real estate agents don't let homeowners take the listing photos. A phone camera in bad lighting makes a $500,000 house look like a storage unit.

This led to the formal Airbnb Pro Photo Program, launched in the summer of 2010. Hosts could schedule a professional photographer to come shoot their space at no cost. The economics made sense: enhanced listings were 2.5 times more likely to be booked and earned hosts an average of $1,025 per month.

Airbnb Pro Photo Program chart showing booking growth after photographer program launch

The growth chart tells the story. That arrow at 2011, right after the photographer program rolled out, marks the inflection point. Airbnb went from under 2 million bookings to over 10 million in about 2 years.

A Heart Instead of a Star (and 30% More Engagement)

With listing quality fixed, the team turned to the product itself and tested everything. One experiment: swapping the generic star icon used to save properties for a heart. That single change drove a 30% increase in engagement.

As Joe told Fast Company, the star was a generic web shorthand and a utilitarian symbol that didn't carry much weight. The heart was aspirational. It led them to build Wish Lists, sharable collections of places users wanted to visit. Within months, 45% of users were engaging with them, and over 1 million had been created.

Same principle as putting candy at the checkout counter instead of the back aisle. You're not changing the product. You're changing where and how people interact with it.

Mobile was the next lever. By October 2013, about 50% of hosts were using the Airbnb app, and those hosts responded to guests 3 times faster than desktop users.

Speed matters in a marketplace where the first host to respond usually wins the booking. As Brian put it: Can you imagine if every Uber driver had to go home first to check their laptop in order to find their next ride?

Gift Language Beats Selfish Language (Globally)

By late 2013, Airbnb's referral program was, in Gustaf Alstromer's words, something the team wasn't proud of. Gustaf, their Growth Product Manager, called it underutilized and underperforming.

So they rebuilt it from scratch. 30,000 lines of code. 3 months of engineering work. Relaunched January 2014. Then they A/B tested everything. Airbnb ran hundreds of these experiments across the product, from button placement to copy.

Invites with a photo of the sender converted better because they felt personal. When testing the messaging, altruistic language beat self-interested language globally: Give your friend $25 off outperformed Get $25 when your friend books.

Airbnb referral page showing the altruistic "Give your friends $25" messaging which outperformed self-interested copy.

Think about how you actually recommend a restaurant to a friend. You don't say: I'll get a free appetizer if you go. You basically say: You have to try this place. The gift framing mirrors real word-of-mouth.

The result: hundreds of thousands of nights booked by referred users in 2014. In some markets, referrals increased bookings by 25%.

Referred users also stuck around longer, booked more future trips, and sent their own referrals. The compounding loop was real.

Boots on the Ground Beat Facebook Ads

When Airbnb expanded internationally, Rebecca Rosenfelt (who led international growth) ran a clean test. Half of the new launch cities got a physical visit from the Airbnb team. The other half got targeted Facebook ads.

The results weren't close. Cost per acquisition was 5 times better for the cities they physically visited. And those kickstarted markets kept growing 2 times faster on their own afterward.

It's like when a friend flies in from out of town. You can drop them a pin and let them figure out the subway. Or you can show up at arrivals and drive them to their hotel yourself. One gets a thanks. The other gets you remembered. Same reason Nick Gray gives free airport rides to people he wants to know. When he needs a favor 6 months or 6 years later, he's not a stranger in their inbox.

Even Elon Musk is known to fly in and out to fix the #1 constraint in person for his businesses because boots on the ground has massive advantages that being remote doesn't offer.

This is what allowed Airbnb to scale up: show up in person, fix the supply quality by hand, and the market takes off on its own.

Every one of these growth tactics mattered. But the Airbnb Pro Photo Program was the one that made all the others possible. Fix what your users see first, and everything downstream converts better.

For Airbnb, a $5,000 rented camera turned out to be the highest-ROI investment the company ever made.

Top Tweets of the day

1/

Twitter tweet

The best way to get future customers is to target kids.

2/

Twitter tweet

There's one way to reduce churn and out compete others in the same niche.

Bundle every single app in the same niche and give more value for the dollar.

Jenni AI did exactly this.

3/

Twitter tweet

Incredible psychological mechanism here.

Rabbit Holes

1. Teen From Kazakhstan Makes $1M/Year Online

2. My First 250 App Users

3. Door-to-door saleswomen are fueling Shein’s rise in Mexico

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More Startup Spells 🪄

1. Lucky Strike's "It's Toasted" Ad: The 2-Word Strategy That Outsold Every Health Claim (LINK)

2. How Alex Finn Successfully Pivoted His X Niche After Building 100K+ Followers (LINK)

3. Grammarly Monetization Case Study: How "Premium Feature Sampling" Doubled Conversions (LINK)

4. LinkedIn Post Generator: How a Parody Tool Went Viral, Got 2M Users & Sold in 7 Days (LINK)

5. Wispr Flow's Case Study Page Is a Conversion Funnel in Disguise (LINK)

In 1960, a fictional ad exec named Don Draper sat in a boardroom with no ideas, a room full of tobacco executives, and a crisis. Cigarettes had just been linked to cancer. Every competitor was scrambling to fight the science.

Don ignored all of it and wrote 2 words on a napkin. That scene from the Mad Men pilot became one of the most studied Lucky Strike "it's toasted" ad moments in pop culture. But the real strategy behind it is even better than the fiction.

Don: This is the greatest advertising opportunity since the invention of cereal. We have six identical companies making six identical products. We can say anything we want. How do you make your cigarettes?

Lee Garner, Jr.: I don't know.

Lee Garner, Sr.: Shame on you. We breed insect-repellent tobacco seeds, plant 'em in the North Carolina sunshine, grow it, cut it, cure it, toast it.

Don: There you go. There you go. [He writes: "Lucky Strike. It's Toasted."]

Lee Garner, Jr.: But everybody else's tobacco is toasted.

Don: No, everybody else's tobacco is poisonous. Lucky Strike's is toasted.

Two words. That was all it took. The room went from panic to applause. But the real brilliance wasn't the slogan itself. It was the strategy underneath it.

The Misdirection Nobody Saw Coming

Every other cigarette company in that room (fictional or not) was doing the same thing: fighting the health scare head-on. Running ads about throat doctors. Citing studies. Trying to prove cigarettes were safe.

Lucky Strike ignored all of it.

Don didn't argue that cigarettes were healthy. He didn't acknowledge the Reader's Digest article that had just linked smoking to cancer.

He changed the subject entirely. While every competitor scrambled to defend the product, Lucky Strike talked about how it was made.

"It's toasted" isn't a health claim. It isn't a lie. It's a simple, true description of a manufacturing step.

But in the context of an industry drowning in health panic, a calm, warm message about toasting felt like reassurance. As Don put it: "Advertising is about happiness. Freedom from fear."

A billboard on the side of the road that screams with reassurance that whatever you're doing is okay.

The slogan didn't say Lucky Strike was safe. It just stopped you from thinking about danger.

2 Syllables, Zero Logic, Full Buy-In

Why "toasted" specifically? Any step of the manufacturing process could have been the slogan. "It's cured." "It's sun-grown." "It's blended." None of those would have worked the same way.

"Toasted" hijacked stored memories. By the 1910s and 1920s, toasters were in nearly every American kitchen.

The word triggered images of bread, breakfast, butter melting into English muffins, mom at the kitchen table. Warm, domestic, harmless.

Not cancer sticks. Not poison. Toast.

That single word bypassed logic entirely and went straight to feeling. The brain doesn't debate feelings. It just accepts them.

It's the same reason Starbucks pumps the smell of fresh coffee through every store. The drink might be overpriced. The line might be long.

But when you walk in and catch that warm roast in the air, your guard drops. You stop calculating and start craving. "Toasted" did the same thing, just with 2 syllables instead of an espresso machine.

First-to-Claim: Own the Obvious

Here's the part that trips people up. Every cigarette brand toasted its tobacco. It was a standard step in manufacturing. Lucky Strike didn't have a unique process.

It didn't matter.

What mattered was that Lucky Strike said it first. They stamped a mundane, universal fact in all caps on their packaging: "IT'S TOASTED."

Once claimed, that phrase belonged to them. Other brands could have made the same statement, but they hadn't. And once Lucky Strike owned it, any competitor who tried to say the same thing would sound like a copycat.

It's like being the first person in class to raise your hand with the right answer. 3 other students knew it too. But you said it out loud, so the teacher remembers you. The knowledge was shared. The credit wasn't.

This is the tactic: find a true thing about your product that every competitor also does, but nobody talks about.

Then talk about it loudly, before anyone else can. The audience doesn't know it's universal. To them, it sounds like a differentiator.

The Real "It's Toasted" Story Starts in 1917

The TV version is great storytelling. But the real campaign predates it by decades. "It's Toasted" first appeared around 1917.

Susan Wagner documented the origin in her 1971 book Cigarette Country. The slogan wasn't born out of a health crisis at all. It was born out of a market share war with Camel cigarettes after World War I.

R. J. Reynolds had ridden burley tobacco to 40% of U.S. cigarette sales by 1918. Burley tasted stronger and nuttier than the Virginia tobacco most brands used. When the war cut off Turkish tobacco imports, smokers switched to Camels. American Tobacco was losing ground fast.

Their answer was Lucky Strike, a brand that had existed since 1871 (named after the California Gold Rush). As Wagner writes:

It's the marketing equivalent of a restaurant putting house-made on the menu. Every restaurant makes their food in-house. That's what a kitchen is for.

But writing it down makes it feel intentional, special, considered. Percival Hill did the same thing with toasting: took a step every factory already performed and turned it into a selling point.

The first Lucky Strike "it's toasted" ad leaned heavily into that toast imagery. A hand holding a toasting fork. A piece of bread on a circle.

The message sat next to copy that read: "Think of a cigarette served to you as appetizingly as the hot, buttered toast that comes to your breakfast table."

Lucky Strike "it's toasted" ad from 1917 showing a piece of toast with a fork

The Mad Men version cut the toast. Matt Weiner probably thought bread imagery lacked sex appeal. Fair point.

But the real campaign was more grounded than the TV version. It leaned hard on agriculture. Lucky Strike called itself "The real Burley Cigarette," and in 1917, people knew enough about tobacco varietals for that to matter.

Over the following decades, the campaign evolved. Celebrity endorsements replaced the rustic toast fork. Golfers and actors lent their faces to the "It's Toasted" line.

Lucky Strike mid-century ad featuring golfer Sam Snead with the "It's Toasted to taste better" tagline

The gamble paid off. Lucky Strikes became the best-selling cigarettes in the nation. A 1929 ad declared that "An Ancient Prejudice Has Been Removed," claiming the toasting process eliminated harmful irritants from the tobacco.

Lucky Strike 1929 ad promoting how toasting removed "harmful corrosive acrids" from tobacco

The brand is still sold in the United States today.

Some brands are like that jacket you bought in college that somehow still fits 15 years later. The stitching held. The style aged well.

Lucky Strike's slogan has been running for over a century because the strategy underneath it never went out of fashion.

Dove, Foster's, and Cookie Crisp: Same Trick, Different Product

This exact playbook shows up everywhere in modern marketing. The product doesn't change. The framing does.

Dove doesn't sell soap. Dove sells the feeling of being beautiful. Their ads focus on revealing a woman's inherent beauty by keeping her skin healthy. The soap is incidental. The emotion is the product.

Foster's beer is considered cheap in Australia. Aussies can barely stand it. In the United States, all it took was "Foster's: Australian for beer" and the brand became a hit. Same liquid, different story.

Cookie Crisp is a breakfast cereal that is manufactured to look like chocolate chip cookies. The box art would have you believe it's a healthy, nutritious breakfast.

Bill Bryson wrote about being overwhelmed in the American cereal aisle and realizing that Cookie Crisp was just a way to sell cookies at breakfast. The product didn't change. The context did.

Every one of these follows the same pattern that Lucky Strike pioneered over a century ago: take what your product already is, find the angle nobody has claimed, and say it first.

Top Tweets of the day

1/

Twitter tweet

Study a little bit of social engineering and you can get a lot of info out of your competitors easily.

And the best part is you won't get caught like this.

This 3-minute movie scene captures the best of social engineering.

2/

Twitter tweet

When you jump on trends, cash out as fast as possible.

Lovable is a good example. They would've made a killing if they sold an annual plan based on specific credit usage per month.

It is still making a killing but can easily buy out lots of LTV from customers who jumped on it based on hype.

3/

Twitter tweet

Good example vs bad example on how to write copy.

Rabbit Holes

1. Rockefeller's Autobiography

2. Gemini CLI Tips & Tricks

3. Equifax ran a trial with 1,500 employees using Gemini. 97% requested to keep their licenses when the trial ended

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More Startup Spells 🪄

1. Showtime's Churn Prevention Secret Tactic: 60-40-20 Discount Loophole (LINK)

2. How an AI Prompt-Engineering Growth Tactic Drove 31,548 GitHub Stars (LINK)

3. How Alex Finn Successfully Pivoted His X Niche After Building 100K+ Followers (LINK)

4. Grammarly Monetization Case Study: How "Premium Feature Sampling" Doubled Conversions (LINK)

5. LinkedIn Post Generator: How a Parody Tool Went Viral, Got 2M Users & Sold in 7 Days (LINK)

One of the most effective examples of Showtime's Churn Prevention tactics recently surfaced on a Reddit thread. A user documented their attempt to cancel their subscription.

It is a strategy currently being A/B tested by major players, including the recent ChatGPT Plus cancel-page discount hack.

Instead of letting the customer leave, Showtime presented a 40% discount for 6 months. When they tried to cancel again 6 months later, they were offered 4 months at the same discount.

Showtime's Churn Prevention tactics provided a 40% discount for 6 months during their first cancellation attempt

The 40% Discount Loophole

This pattern reveals a calculated strategy known as a Retention Ladder. Most companies view retention as a binary: either the user stays or they churn.

For a subscription-based giant like Showtime, retention is a spectrum of diminishing generosity.

Showtime Churn Prevention Ladder Formula

The model is designed to protect the user's lifetime value (LTV). The strategy shifts from a one-off trick to a structured descent.

By offering the highest incentive during the first cancellation attempt, they aim to stop churn early. As the user reveal themselves to be price-sensitive or gaming the system, the leash gets shorter.

It is the digital version of a bartender offering a free round to keep you at the bar, then 50% off the next, then just some free pretzels.

Protecting LTV Through Diminishing Returns

Showtime's approach follows a predictable, 3-step monetization logic. In the first stage, they offer a generous 6-month window. The goal is simple: keep the user in the ecosystem.

By the second attempt, they have identified the user as a high risk. They offer a moderate 4-month extension. By the final attempt, the offer drops to just 2 months.

A diagram showing the 3 steps of the descending retention ladder: 6 months, 4 months, and 2 months of discounts

This is a last-ditch effort before they decide the user is no longer worth over-subsidizing. Roam Research successfully demonstrated that hacking upfront LTV is critical for survival.

This isn't just generosity. It is a form of behavioral profiling. Each cancellation attempt tells the company how often you threaten to leave and if you are price-sensitive enough to be saved.

Eventually, the marginal ROI of discounting a chronic canceller drops below zero. The company lets the user go. Understanding subscription churn (101) is the first step.

The Decaying Incentive Strategy

Most marketers focus on the standard top-down funnel: awareness, consideration, and conversion. However, sophisticated subscription services build what we call a Reverse Funnel.

This model tracks the transition from an active user to one who is about to churn. Eventually, it moves them into a status of churned or reacquired.

The process follows the same SaaS retention strategies used by global unicorns.

A visualization of the reverse funnel showing how pricing changes as users move from active to churned and then reacquired

Pricing changes at every step of this journey. An active user pays full price, while a user threatening to leave is offered a discount.

If that user eventually churns, they might receive a winback email with a completely different offer.

Mapping the Subscriber Lifecycle

You won't find these cancel-to-get-discount flows explicitly documented on any public help page. Instead, Showtime builds the legal foundation in their Terms of Use.

They specify that they may provide discretionary credits or promotional offers at their sole discretion. This ability to use dynamic pricing in B2C apps is a massive advantage.

This legal framing ensures that a discount provided in 1 instance doesn't entitle the user to a credit in the future. It allows the company to A/B test pricing without making a promise of consistency.

Even third-party guides, like this one on how to cancel a Showtime subscription, acknowledge these multi-part retention sales pitches as a standard tactic.

For any subscription-based business, the strategic takeaway is clear. Do not offer 1 static price for all users. The first cancellation attempt is your moment of highest impact.

Instead of a single Save Offer, build a retention ladder that decreases in generosity over time. This approach ensures you capture the maximum LTV from every user while identifying those who are simply gaming the system.

The logic follows the economic principle of Zero Defections highlighted by the Harvard Business Review: the longer a customer stays, the more profitable they become. As tenure increases, the cost of servicing drops and the referral value rises.

However, be careful with the discount trap. As Paddle’s guide on SaaS retention strategies warns, heavy discounting can actually double your churn rate by attracting the wrong type of customer.

The Showtime ladder is a way to bridge these 2 worlds. It uses a high-incentive offer to stop immediate churn, but then systematically scales it back. The goal is to move the user back toward full-price profitability rather than letting them hide in a low-value discount loop forever.

Top Tweets of the day

1/

Twitter tweet

Copy what works.

2/

Twitter tweet

When a format works, just jump on it without thinking.

The time to action is very low compared to the potential impact of your actions.

3/

Twitter tweet

You just need 1 thread to go viral and make $20k MRR from it. The goal is to do 100s of marketing experiments to find that one.

Rabbit Holes

1. The Dinner Party Strategy: A SaaS Customer Onboarding Framework with Val Geisler

2. SEO growth loops

3. How Justin Welsh earns 193k/month

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More Startup Spells 🪄

1. Neurogum's Cross-Channel Growth Loop: How TikTok Feeds Amazon, Google, and Retail (LINK)

2. Raycast Wrapped's "Copy as Image" Strategy: Engineering Virality (LINK)

3. Wave AI's "Day-Zero Payback" Meta Ads Machine (LINK)

4. How an AI Prompt-Engineering Growth Tactic Drove 31,548 GitHub Stars (LINK)

5. How Alex Finn Successfully Pivoted His X Niche After Building 100K+ Followers (LINK)

Neurogum's Cross-Channel Growth Loop: How TikTok Feeds Amazon, Google, and Retail

Neurogum's cross-channel growth loop starts with a single bet: pour everything into TikTok and let the demand spill into every other channel.

Kent Yoshimura, co-founder and CEO, built this system over the past 3 years. It turned Neurogum into a top 50 health and household product on Amazon. They outsell 5-Hour Energy. They spend zero on Amazon ads.

The logic is counterintuitive. Instead of optimizing each channel separately, Neurogum feeds one channel aggressively and lets the rest grow on their own.

TikTok Powers 4 Revenue Channels

Most brands run their marketing in silos. TikTok team. Google team. Amazon team. Each one with its own budget, its own ROAS target, its own optimization loop.

Neurogum threw that model out. They made TikTok the single demand engine for the entire business: 80% top-of-funnel awareness, 20% bottom-of-funnel conversion.

Neurogum Cross-Channel Flywheel: TikTok to Amazon to Retail

A Nielsen Epsilon Meltwater study confirmed the results as mentioned by Kent himself. Neurogum reached 13% brand awareness across the United States. One in 7 Americans recognize the brand. The primary driver was TikTok.

Even their partnerships feed the same system. Chess.com, 100 Thieves, Steve Aoki: Kent says 70% of these deals are structured specifically so creators can turn them into TikTok content.

It's the difference between buying a billboard on a highway and buying a billboard that people photograph and text to their friends. The Chess.com sponsorship isn't the ad. It's the raw material for hundreds of ads.

Before, top-of-funnel partnerships had no clear attribution. You sponsored a chess tournament and hoped it moved the needle somewhere.

Now TikTok gives them a direct feedback signal. If a partnership produces content that performs on TikTok, it's working. If not, it isn't.

Google Captures What TikTok Creates

When TikTok drives awareness, consumers search. They type the product name into Google. That search intent is demand that Neurogum didn't have to pay for.

Neurogum runs Google Performance Max campaigns to intercept it. PMax targets search, native ads, and YouTube all at once. It captures anyone who saw a creator video and then went looking for more.

Neurogum Google Pmax demand capture funnel

Kent plans to spend millions on Google because TikTok keeps generating fresh search volume. The more awareness TikTok creates, the more intent Google captures.

Most brands miss this connection. They measure TikTok ROAS by looking at the sales that happen on TikTok itself. Neurogum measures TikTok success by looking at what happens everywhere else.

Google PMax is the bridge between seeing a video and making a purchase.

It's like a bar that puts a food truck in the parking lot. The bar pulls people in with music and drinks. The food truck catches the ones who walk outside hungry. Two businesses, one crowd.

Zero Amazon Ads. 52x ROAS.

The real test came in December 2024. Neurogum cut Amazon ad spend to zero. If TikTok awareness was already pushing people to Amazon, the paid ads on Amazon should be redundant.

It was like turning off the oven light to see if the cake was already baking on its own. If the temperature drops, the oven wasn't hot enough. If it holds, the heat was never coming from the light.

The bet paid off. Amazon ROAS hit 52x with no ad spend. They held the number 1 spot in their category and kept outselling 5-Hour Energy on the platform.

The lift showed up across the board. DTC sales went up. Retail velocity increased across 20,000+ doors. On TikTok Shop, a single creator generated $250,000 in one day during the December new arrivals event.

Neurogum multichannel revenue without Amazon ads

Before this shift, Neurogum ran separate ads on Amazon, bottom-of-funnel campaigns on TikTok, and treated each channel like its own business.

After the shift, they concentrated spend on TikTok awareness and Google PMax for intent capture. Every other channel grew organically.

How to Spend More on Less and Grow Everything

Kent shared the actual breakdown on the podcast.

TikTok takes the primary budget. 80% goes to top-of-funnel awareness, 20% to bottom-of-funnel. Google PMax gets a large and growing share to capture the search demand TikTok generates.

Facebook sits at 20 to 30% of digital marketing spend. Kent treats it as hygiene rather than a growth driver. Amazon gets zero ad spend.

Neurogum marketing budget allocation breakdown

Pushing budget into top-of-funnel TikTok reduces TikTok-specific ROAS. That number goes down. But Neurogum stopped caring about channel ROAS. They look at total revenue, total profitability, and total awareness.

When they made this shift, all 3 went up. Revenue climbed. Profitability improved. Brand awareness went from near-zero to 13% nationally.

The counterintuitive part: spending more on one channel while cutting spend everywhere else produced better results than spreading the budget across all of them.

It's the same logic as picking one skill on your resume and going deep. The intern who's OK at design, OK at code, OK at copywriting gets passed over. The one who's elite at design gets hired, and then the company teaches them everything else.

Most brands ask how do we optimize each channel? Neurogum asks a different question: which single channel creates demand that lifts everything else?

It's the same logic behind a good gym routine. You don't need 15 exercises. You need 3 compound lifts that work everything at once. The deadlift doesn't just hit your back. It hits your legs, your grip, your core. One movement, total coverage.

For them, it's TikTok. For another brand, it might be something entirely different. The principle stays the same. Find your demand engine, feed it aggressively, and let the spillover do the work.

Top Tweets of the day

1/

Twitter tweet

If you are in the advertising rabbit hole, you can easily spot an ad from a mile away, but most normies don't know that.

Only the innies know. Outies don't.

2/

Twitter tweet

One of the best things to do is calling your shot and then going viral. And then you can use that as a marketing asset.

If it doesn't work, nobody will know. If it does work, you just got a proof.

3/

Twitter tweet

Money & distribution are 2 things you need to get as much attention on anything you launch.

Its a cycle:

1. Money can get you distribution via organic, email, seo, or paid ads.

2. Distribution can get you money by making an offer.

One of the reasons startups raise $10M+ funding is because they want as much distribution as they can NOW by making 100s of people work on their thing to make even more money. And the only thing it costs them is <10% equity on a good deal.

Rabbit Holes

1. Watch Me LIVE Build a Viral UGC Strategy (Consumer Apps)

2. Fighting Infomania: Why 80% of Your Reading is a Waste of Time

3. Best Reddit Ad Examples to study (15 examples)

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More Startup Spells 🪄

1. SlapMac Viral Marketing: How a Prank App Made $5,000 in One Week (LINK)

2. How Basecamp's PR Strategy Generates Millions in Free Press (LINK)

3. How Alex Hormozi Uses the Kevin Hart Meme to Revive Dead Leads (LINK)

4. Raycast Wrapped's "Copy as Image" Strategy: Engineering Virality (LINK)

5. Wave AI's "Day-Zero Payback" Meta Ads Machine (LINK)

SlapMac Viral Marketing: How a Prank App Made $5,000 in One Week

SlapMac makes your MacBook scream when you slap it. The app's viral marketing happened by accident. One Instagram Reel, zero ad spend, $5,000 in a week.

Tonino Catapano found a GitHub repo, posted one Reel, and 2 days later had a paid macOS app pulling in thousands. No ads. No App Store. No venture capital. Just a laptop that screams when you hit it.

SlapMac viral marketing tweet by Anul Agarwal

The app does exactly what the tagline says. Slap your MacBook. It screams back. That is the entire product. And that simplicity is the reason it worked.

The Reel That Started a $5,000 Business

Tonino scrolls through GitHub and finds spank, an open-source library by taigrr. It uses the MacBook's built-in accelerometer to detect vibrations and play audio files. Slap the keyboard, you get a sound. Close the lid too hard, you get a different sound.

He records a Reel. Terminal open, code running, hand slapping the MacBook. The laptop yelps.

SlapMac viral Instagram Reel by Tonino Catapano

That single Reel hits 79,400 likes and 590 comments. One commenter with 4,580 likes writes: OnlyMacs. The comments section becomes its own entertainment.

Tonino did not plan a product launch. He posted a funny video. But the reaction told him everything he needed to know. People wanted this, yet most of them had no clue how to run a terminal command. Tonino turned a raw script into a product for them.

48 Hours From Viral Video to Paid Download

2 days after the first Reel, Tonino posts again. I had to do it. I went viral slapping my laptop. So obviously I had to build an app.

SlapMac from viral video to app launch in 2 days

He wraps the open-source library into a native macOS app called SlapMac. Launched at $3, later raised to $7 as demand grew. No App Store review process. No 30% Apple tax.

He distributes through amore.computer, a platform by Lucas Loverso that lets indie developers sell Mac apps directly.

SlapMac homepage with download button

The download is free. You install it, slap your MacBook, and it works. The app lets you verify compatibility on your own machine before asking for a license since it only works on some versions of Apple Silicon.

By the time the paywall appears, you have already confirmed the slap.

The app adds hidden Easter eggs on top of the base functionality. Different sound packs. Tonino turns a raw command-line tool into something your non-technical friend can try in 30 seconds.

Tonino Catapano announcing the SlapMac app on Instagram

The second Reel pulls 22,700 likes and 521 comments.

This is the speed that kills competition. Don't overthink for months. Find what people react to, package it, and ship before the attention fades.

The Product That Does Its Own PR

Tonino did not pitch a single media outlet. He did not DM influencers. He did not run paid promotion.

The concept sold itself because it fits in one sentence: there is an app that makes your MacBook moan when you slap it.

If you have watched BBC's Sherlock with Benedict Cumberbatch as the lead, you know the scene. Irene Adler changes Sherlock's ringtone to a moan. It keeps going off at the worst possible moments. That single gag became one of the most iconic bits in the entire series. One of my personal favourites. Devices making unexpected sounds is comedy that writes itself. SlapMac runs on the same energy.

DailyLoud tweets it. 51,000 views.

DailyLoud tweet about SlapMac going viral

Dexerto tweets it. 871,000 views.

Dexerto tweet about SlapMac earning $5k

Anul Agarwal tweets about it with the line You all are overthinking your app ideas. 5.6 million impressions. 597 retweets. 10,828 likes.

SlapMac trends on X under Explore with 559 X posts.

SlapMac trending on X with 559 posts

The earned media cascade happened because the product is its own punchline. The 3-second demo naturally engineers word-of-mouth virality without Tonino spending a dollar on distribution.

Reddit, X, Instagram, Product Hunt: All at Once

Viral attention has a short half-life. Tonino does not sit back. He seeds every platform he can reach, from Reddit to Product Hunt, tailoring each post to the specific crowd. This is the Reddit playbook for content virality in action.

Tonino Catapano sharing SlapMac analytics on X

The numbers after 1 week: 20,000 visitors, 23,000 pageviews, 46 seconds average time on page, over 7,000 app installs, and $5,000 in sales. All organic.

Google search results showing SlapMac coverage everywhere

One platform's algorithm can bury your content tomorrow. By hitting Reddit, X, Instagram, and Product Hunt simultaneously, Tonino created multiple entry points that outlasted the initial viral spike.

The Growth Loop Hiding on the Discount Page

This is the part most people miss about SlapMac. The real growth engine is not the Reels Tonino made. It is the discount page.

It is a tweet-for-discount mechanic adapted for Instagram Reels.

SlapMac discount page with refund tiers

The structure is simple. Buy SlapMac. Post a Reel about it on Instagram or TikTok. Tag @tonnozfpv and use #slapmac.

If your Reel hits 2,000 views, you get 50% back. Hit 20,000 views and you get a full refund.

It is exactly like a bar offering free drinks if you bring 5 friends on a Friday night. You aren't losing money on drinks; you are buying a packed house at a discount.

Every buyer who wants their refund becomes a content creator. They shoot a video, tag the brand, and push it to their followers. If the Reel hits the target, Tonino refunds them from their own purchase.

The refund isn't just a refund; it's a customer acquisition channel. Each buyer's Reel is a fresh chance to go viral. Content creates buyers, and those buyers create more content.

Superhuman ran the same loop with tweets instead of Reels.

Tonino sold a $7 app that makes your laptop scream, all without raising money or hiring a marketing team. Sometimes the best product is simply the one that makes people laugh hard enough to open their wallet.

Top Tweets of the day

1/

Source: @bindra_dhruv

Measure so you can improve.

2/

Source: @0beets

One of the reasons to choose B2B instead of B2C.

3/

Source: @theseoguy_

Local SEO hack!!

Whenever you think you can't game a platform, think again. Because someone is already doing it.

#1 lesson in gaming platforms: never use same phone numbers, address, person names, payment methods, etc...

Always create duplicates. It's more work, but it saves you in the long run if you get caught.

Rabbit Holes

1. THE shortest LinkedIn course you’ll ever need

2. The Trigger Technique: Turn Buyer Stories into Smarter Marketing Campaigns

3. The SEO-Driven User Acquisition Behind Zapier's Growth to $35M ARR

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More Startup Spells 🪄

1. Stealing Reddit Content That Goes Viral on X (Twitter) (LINK)

2. How Gamifying Failure Increased Chess.com Subscriptions by 20% (LINK)

3. How Basecamp's PR Strategy Generates Millions in Free Press (LINK)

4. How Alex Hormozi Uses the Kevin Hart Meme to Revive Dead Leads (LINK)

5. Raycast Wrapped's "Copy as Image" Strategy: Engineering Virality (LINK)

Stealing Reddit Content That Goes Viral on X (Twitter)

Stealing content from Reddit and posting it on X is the smartest arbitrage play in 2026.

While most creators burn out trying to write original thought pieces every morning, smart operators take a different approach. They find value in one market (Reddit) where it is abundant and move it to another market (X) where it is scarce.

Ian Nuttall's entire strategy relies on this simple truth.

Stealing content from Reddit and posting it on X strategy example

People are not everywhere at once. Only content creators are everywhere.

Ian Nuttall stealing content from Reddit

The signal advantage of niche subreddits

Reddit is a meritocracy of ideas. Subreddits like /r/ClaudeAI or /r/SaaS act as massive filters. 1000s of users upvote good content and downvote noise. By the time a post reaches the "Hot" tab on a niche subreddit, it has already been validated by 100s of humans.

You must monitor these high-signal environments. When you see a tool, a script, or a discussion gaining traction on Reddit, you know it has a high probability of working on X.

The audience on X has likely never seen it. They don't browse the specific documentation pages or GitHub repositories that Reddit users dig up. To them, you aren't a reposter. You are a curator.

Monitoring changelogs for automated news content

Manual curation is only half the strategy. You also need a system for automated content generation. Developers crave updates about the tools they use daily.

Ian built a pipeline that monitors changelogs for popular developer tools. When a tool like Claude Code or OpenAI Codex releases an update, his system catches it.

This isn't an opinion. It is news.

He pipes these updates directly into a Telegram channel called dev/changelogs. This channel serves as a holding tank and a distribution channel in itself.

Ian Nuttall's dev changelogs Telegram channel

Building a Telegram asset with automation

The Telegram channel acts as a source of truth feed. The content in this channel is purely automated. The bot scrapes the release notes and prints it nicely.

Once the system is built, the cost of content production drops to zero. The bot works while you sleep. It creates a constant drumbeat of activity that proves you have your finger on the pulse of the industry.

Turning automated logs into social posts

The final step is moving this automated content back to the public square. You take these changelogs and post them to X.

Look at the structure of these updates.

Ian Nuttall tweeting Claude Code update

He uses a consistent format:

• Headline with version number

• "Features" section

• "Fixes" section

• Screenshot of the terminal or changelog

Ian Nuttall tweeting Factory CLI update

He doesn't add fluffy commentary. He doesn't say "I'm so excited about this update!" He just presents the data.

This establishes authority. By consistently breaking news about updates for tools like Factory CLI or Claude, he becomes the go-to source for that information.

Curation is better than creation

Creators obsess over "originality." They think every tweet must be a unique insight born from hours of meditation.

This strategy proves that curation is a form of creation.

He leverages the work of others—the developers writing code, the Reddit users filtering links, the companies publishing changelogs—to build his own distribution.

You can replicate this stealing Reddit content for X loop in any niche:

• Find the subreddit where your target customers hang out

• Sort by "Top" or "Rising"

• Identify the resources they love

• Repackage those resources for X or LinkedIn

• Automate the news feed for that specific niche

The internet is fragmented. Value is trapped in silos. Your job is to build the bridge.

Top Tweets of the day

1/

Twitter tweet

Never really thought that affiliates help with SEO but it makes sense since most affiliates write blogs and make videos on your product.

That's why you need a strong affiliate plan for the first 6 months especially if the product is novel. Steal Copy AI's Affiliate Program that gave 45% for the first 6 months.

2/

Twitter tweet

Tons of good replies and a masterclass in engagement bait on social media. Use such questions where everyone can show their expertise.

3/

Twitter tweet

Everytime a bad thing happens in relation to your company you need to put out a good press release out. No matter whose mistake it is... once a narrative is established, it's hard to change it unless you apply pressure in opposite direction.

An example would be "all billionaires are bad." Its so overused by politicians like Bernie to fool the public that its accepted as a truth rather than an opinion.

Rabbit Holes

1. The 5 Levels of Market Awareness (CUSTOMER PSYCHOLOGY)

2. VEO 3 Free for everyone with LMArena

3. The Behavioral Architect (Nikita Bier)

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More Startup Spells 🪄

1. MiniMax's Share and Earn Credits Playbook: Trade Monopoly Money for Real Testimonials (LINK)

2. How Gamifying Failure Increased Chess.com Subscriptions by 20% (LINK)

3. How Basecamp's PR Strategy Generates Millions in Free Press (LINK)

4. How Alex Hormozi Uses the Kevin Hart Meme to Revive Dead Leads (LINK)

5. Raycast Wrapped's "Copy as Image" Strategy: Engineering Virality (LINK)

MiniMax wants its users to share their AI agent experience and earn credits for posting about it on social media. The credits cost MiniMax almost nothing to issue.

But every post a user creates is real social proof on a real platform, with a real person's name on it. Here's the growth loop hiding behind a simple Google Form.

GitHub's Hottest Repo Has a Cashier Position Open

MiniMax wants you to share your experience and earn credits for it, and the timing is not accidental. OpenClaw, the open-source personal AI agent created by Peter Steinberger, just crossed 300,000 GitHub stars. It went from 9,000 to 60,000 stars in a matter of days, making it one of the fastest-growing repos in GitHub history.

MiniMax didn't build OpenClaw. But they rode the OpenClaw wave. Their M2.5 model is one of the primary providers OpenClaw integrates with, and MiniMax's token usage surged 6x in February 2026 because of that integration.

That's when they launched MaxClaw, their own cloud-hosted version of the agent, and started paying users to talk about it.

MaxClaw is the consumer-facing product. You give it a name, a personality, and context about your life. It deploys in 10 seconds, runs 24/7 in the cloud, and connects to your messaging apps. Think of it as a personal AI that actually stays on.

Like hiring an intern who never sleeps, never asks for a raise, and remembers every conversation you've ever had with them.

MiniMax lets users share and earn credits through the MaxClaw Showcase Program banner showing 10,000 credits reward

The interesting part isn't the product. It's the growth loop hiding behind a Google Form.

5,000 Credits for a Social Post. 10,000 for a Video.

MiniMax just launched what they call the MaxClaw Showcase Program. The pitch: share your MaxClaw experience on social media, earn credits.

Two tiers:

• Standard Reward (5,000 credits): Post a use case or a successful example on social media. Keep it live for 24 hours. That's it.

• Creative Reward (10,000 credits): Make a video, write an article, or record a podcast. Double the credits for deeper content.

It's like a restaurant that gives you a free appetizer if you post a photo of your meal. The appetizer costs them pennies. The Instagram post brings in 3 new reservations.

MaxClaw Showcase Program Google Form showing reward tiers and participation details

The rules are straightforward. Try new MaxClaw features, show real workflows, and keep examples concrete.

How Mandatory Hashtags Become Free SEO

Here's where MiniMax turns a simple credits program into a distribution machine.

They don't just ask you to post anywhere. They tell you exactly where and how:

• X (Twitter): Tag @MiniMax_AI, use #MaxClaw #MiniMax Agent

• LinkedIn: Tag @MiniMax, use #MaxClaw #MiniMax Agent

• Reddit: Use #MaxClaw #MiniMax Agent

• YouTube: Use #MaxClaw #MiniMax Agent

Every post requires specific hashtags and brand tags. That's not a suggestion. It's a requirement for getting paid via credits. Remember, every social media platform is a search engine in disguise.

Every piece of user content becomes a branded search signal across 4 platforms simultaneously. Same mechanic as tweet for discount, just with credits instead of a coupon code.

Superhuman ran a similar play: tweet about the product, get a free month.

Giga AI gated their waitlist behind a share action while Unroll.me replaced their paywall with a sharewall.

The pattern is the same. Trade distribution for access.

Same energy as a gym that gives you a free month if you bring a friend who signs up. You think you're getting a deal. The gym just cut its customer acquisition cost by half.

The Loyalty Card Economics of AI Credits

Credits cost MiniMax almost nothing to issue. They're internal currency with no cash-out option. But to the user, credits feel like real money because they unlock compute time on the platform.

This is the same mechanic freemium games have used for years. The marginal cost of giving someone 10,000 credits is close to zero.

It's like a coffee shop loyalty card. Stamping a card costs nothing. But by the time you're 2 stamps away from a free latte, you'll walk past 3 other cafes to get there.

A genuine user testimonial posted across X, LinkedIn, Reddit, and YouTube is worth more than any credit MiniMax hands out.

MiniMax gets:

• Authentic social proof from real users

• Algorithmic visibility through mandatory hashtags and trending page

• Multi-platform distribution without paying for ads

• Content that looks organic because it is organic

The user gets credits. MiniMax gets a marketing army.

The Form That Doubles as Market Research

After posting, users fill out a submission form with their UID, email, country, industry, and a link to their post. MiniMax reviews content quality within 24 hours and adds credits to the account.

But look at what MiniMax actually collects through that form: user IDs, email addresses, countries, industries of work, and direct links to the content those users created.

That's a full user profile attached to a piece of organic marketing.

Most companies pay research firms thousands of dollars for this kind of data. MiniMax gets it for free, wrapped inside a rewards program that users volunteer for.

They know who their power users are, what industries they work in, which use cases resonate, and which platforms drive the most engagement.

The credits program is the front door. The data is the back room.

Steal This Credits-for-Content Playbook

You don't need to be MiniMax to run this play. Any product with an internal credit system can do the same thing:

1. Pick 3-4 platforms where your users already hang out

2. Define specific hashtags and tagging rules so every post feeds your brand's search footprint

3. Set 2 reward tiers: easy (share a screenshot) and deep (make a video or write something)

4. Collect submissions through a form that also captures user data

5. Review within 24 hours to keep the flywheel spinning

FireCrawl ran a similar credits-for-follows play during onboarding. OpenArt AI used activity-based credits to drive feature adoption. The mechanic scales across any product with internal currency.

The credits cost you nothing. The distribution costs you nothing. The social proof is real because real users made it.

Most companies pay agencies to manufacture testimonials. MiniMax is paying in Monopoly money and getting the real thing.

Top Tweets of the day

1/

Twitter tweet

Always be A/B testing!!!

2/

Twitter tweet

There is no reason not to do videos anymore. If you didn't want to be famous, even faceless works now.

3/

Twitter tweet

Always be learning but implement 3-5x more than you learn otherwise the knowledge evaporates.

Rabbit Holes

1. How to Master Distribution For Your AI Apps

2. You have 12 shots in life

3. How Alex Hormozi Built a 1M+ Organic Following in 6 Months

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More Startup Spells 🪄

1. Browse Traffic vs. Search Traffic: Study of YouTube Tutorial Channel Performance (2 Years of Data) (LINK)

2. Ahrefs' alternative to the boring Chrome Extension Uninstall Survey (LINK)

3. How Gamifying Failure Increased Chess.com Subscriptions by 20% (LINK)

4. How Basecamp's PR Strategy Generates Millions in Free Press (LINK)

5. How Alex Hormozi Uses the Kevin Hart Meme to Revive Dead Leads (LINK)

Most creators run a media company. They are on a treadmill. If they stop running (uploading), the electricity (revenue) cuts off.

Thomas Frank realized he didn't want a treadmill. He wanted an equity portfolio.

He pivoted from a 2.9 million subscriber channel to a tiny, unproven channel called Thomas Frank Explains. The goal wasn't just "niche down." It was a fundamental shift in business models.

He moved from Operating Expenses (OpEx) to Capital Expenditures (CapEx).

On his main channel, a vlog was an expense of time that paid out quickly and died. On his new channel, every video is an asset that compounds.

This strategy generates ~$100,000 monthly from template sales. He isn't playing the "creator economy" game anymore. He is playing the "digital real estate" game.

The "10 out of 10" Valuation Model

Wall Street values companies based on future cash flows, not just current earnings. Frank values videos the same way.

He calls this the "10 out of 10" phenomenon.

A typical YouTuber panics if a video gets 10 views in its first week. It signals algorithmic death. But for a tutorial channel, "Week 1" metrics are irrelevant.

• Week 1: 10 views (Flop)

• Month 6: 5,000 views (Traction)

• Year 3: 300,000 views (Cash Cow)

This is the Long-Tail Asset Model. A video explaining Notion formulas is a depreciating asset that unexpectedly appreciates. As long as the software exists, the video prints money.

Frank stopped chasing the dopamine of "New uploads." He started chasing the compound interest of "Total Library Value."

The "Zapier" SEO Playbook

Frank stole his smartest marketing tactic from a B2B SaaS company: Zapier.

Zapier connects apps. But they don't just write about "API integrations." They write articles like "The Best To-Do Apps for 2026." They target the problem, not the tool.

Frank applied this to his "Wider Net" content pillar.

His video on AI Voice Notes could have been titled "How to use Notion AI for transcription." That targets people who already know Notion.

Instead, he titled it to solve a universal problem: "How I Use ChatGPT to Take PERFECT Notes with My Voice."

Browse vs Search Traffic - Thomas Frank AI Voice Notes Video

He pitched the outcome (perfect notes), not the mechanism (Notion).

This captures Problem Aware users who have no idea they need Notion yet. Once they watch the video to solve their note-taking problem, Frank introduces Notion as the vehicle. He expands his Total Addressable Market (TAM) by catching users upstream.

The Search-to-Browse Pipeline

Frank originally thought this would be a search-only operation. People type "Notion task manager," watch, and leave.

He was wrong. He inadvertently unlocked the Search-to-Browse Pipeline.

YouTube's algorithm is a hybrid. It uses high-intent search data to feed low-intent browse recommendations.

When a user watches a 40-minute tutorial on Notion databases and stays until the end, that retention signal is massive. YouTube thinks: "This user loves this topic."

The algorithm then takes that "boring" tutorial and pushes it to the Home Page of users with similar interests.

High-quality search content eventually triggers browse features. You don't have to choose between SEO and virality. If you solve the user's problem effectively, the algorithm will promote you to lookalike audiences.

The 5-Pillar Content Ecosystem

Frank doesn't just make tutorials. He builds a balanced portfolio across 5 specific categories, each serving a different psychological function.

1. Fundamentals: The mechanics. (Low views, high necessity).

2. Feature Releases: Newsjacking updates. (High urgency, low shelf-life).

3. Popcorn Content: Listicles/Mistakes. (High CTR, broad appeal).

4. Wider Net: The Zapier strategy. (Top of funnel expansion).

5. Build Guides: The conversion engine.

The Build Guides (e.g., "Building a Second Brain with Notion") are the most valuable assets because they leverage the Endowment Effect.

When a viewer follows along and builds a system with Frank, they value the software more because they helped create it. They aren't just passive watchers; they are active builders. This psychological investment makes them infinitely more likely to buy his Ultimate Brain template to complete the system.

The "Growing Pie" Market Theory

Business schools teach First Mover Advantage. Frank proved it doesn't matter.

When he entered the Notion space, August Bradley and Marie Poulin already owned it. The market looked saturated.

But the Growing Pie Theory states that market share is irrelevant if the market itself is exploding.

Notion was onboarding millions of new users. Every day, thousands of people searched for "Notion tutorial" for the very first time. They didn't know who Marie Poulin was. They just wanted an answer.

Frank didn't need to steal their viewers. He just needed to stand in the river of new users.

If the underlying platform is growing, saturation is a myth.

Building a Defensive Moat with Updates

Frank creates a defensive moat by covering every single feature update, even the boring ones.

This utilizes Authority Bias. Even if a viewer prefers another creator's personality, they return to Frank for the definitive, up-to-date facts. He signals that he is the source of truth.

For tech, most people regularly look for Ben Thompson from Stratechery for his opinion pieces. Similarly, people look for Thomas Frank for new feature releases of Notion.

More importantly, it keeps his library fresh. When Notion changes a feature, old tutorials from competitors decay. Frank updates his. His assets appreciate while competitors' assets depreciate.

Expert SEOs know that Google repeatedly rewards updates for older content rather than always pumping out newer content.

Thomas Frank built a machine that compounds. Every video is a worker that never sleeps. That is the power of a software library mindset.

Source: Thomas Frank on Creator Science

Top Tweets of the day

1/

Twitter tweet

Insane stuff!

2/

Twitter tweet

The most unsaid rule in startups: retention is the mother of everything. Every business that succeeds only succeeds because they have figured out retention. Once TikTok gets you scrolling, you're done. Its just so addictive.

And the best businesses that people don't churn out of are the ones governments love. A small list of government business that don't churn:

1. Healthcare / Hospitals

2. Education (K-12, Higher Ed)

3. Insurance

4. Social Security payments

5. Defense / Military contracts

6. Transportation

3/

Twitter tweet

Sell every email.

Rabbit Holes

1. The Greatest Marketer of All Time and The Cofounder of the Michelin Family Dynasty Andre Michel

2. Chat GPT’s Smartest Features

3. 15 Times to use AI, and 5 Not to

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More Startup Spells 🪄

1. 12 Velvet Rope Marketing Examples (From 1893 to a 450K Waitlist) (LINK)

2. Z.ai's Pricing Nudge: Beating Claude With Stacked Discount (50% First Purchase + 10%/20% Off) (LINK)

3. Ahrefs' alternative to the boring Chrome Extension Uninstall Survey (LINK)

4. How Gamifying Failure Increased Chess.com Subscriptions by 20% (LINK)

5. How Basecamp's PR Strategy Generates Millions in Free Press (LINK)

Velvet Rope is a marketing strategy that uses deliberate restriction on who can buy, join, or access what you sell. The term was coined by Rajesh Jain, who developed it as a system for identifying and nurturing a brand's most valuable customers.

Velvet Rope Marketing Examples

It works because human psychology is wired to want what it can't have. When access is limited, 3 emotional triggers fire simultaneously. People fear missing out. People crave the bragging rights of owning something rare. And people want others to see them as part of an elite group. It's pure herd mentality.

Think of a crowded bar with a line out the door on a Saturday night. The bar across the street might pour the same drinks, but nobody's standing outside it. The line IS the review that the bar is high-end.

The math supports the instinct. A small segment of high-value customers consistently generates revenue that's wildly disproportionate to their size.

Global consumers now spend around $1.6 trillion every year on luxury goods and experiences, according to the 2024 Bain & Company and Altagamma luxury market study, underscoring how powerful the human appetite for status and indulgence remains.

Every velvet rope business makes the same conscious trade: a smaller audience in exchange for higher prices, stronger loyalty, and customers who market the product just by using it.

12 companies have mastered this trade.

The Waldorf Hotel: Where the Velvet Rope Was Invented (1893)

Before any of these patterns had a name, there was the Waldorf.

William Waldorf Astor opened a 450-room hotel on the site of his former Fifth Avenue mansion in 1893. He wasn't building a place for travelers to sleep. He was building a stage for New York's wealthiest families.

George C. Boldt, the general manager, understood this from the start. He furnished every room with European antiques. He installed electricity and private bathrooms (a first at the time). He introduced room service. Fresh flowers and a daily newspaper appeared in every room. His overarching rule for staff: the guest is always right.

He gave his employees 1 specific directive before the hotel opened: "Never speak abruptly to a woman guest nor be indifferent to her complaints." His reasoning was blunt. A woman's attitude in a hotel is based on 2 assumptions: that she is there to have things done for her without any trouble to herself, and that she can leave when she wants to, on 5 minutes' notice.

Oscar Tschirky, the maître d', memorized the names of New York's 1,368 millionaires before his first day. In an anonymous, rapidly growing city, being recognized was the rarest luxury of all. He was the original version of how Chewy wows its customers: giving personal attention to customers at a scale nobody else attempted.

The opening night set the template. George organized a charity gala for Mrs. William Kissam Vanderbilt's chosen charity. Despite heavy rain, 1500 people from the 400 most prominent families in New York showed up. Crowds lined the streets outside just to watch the guests arrive.

The Waldorf generated $4.5 million in its first year. That's over $100 million in today's dollars.

Every velvet rope company since has been running a version of George's playbook: make the inside irresistible, and let the line outside do the selling.

Velvet rope falls into 3 distinct patterns.

The Gatekeepers: Ferrari, Rolex, and the Art of Saying No

The first pattern is the most direct. You decide who gets in. Not the market. Not demand. You.

Companies that gatekeep access don't just set a high price. They set qualification criteria that money alone can't satisfy. The message is unmistakable: we choose you. You don't choose us.

Ferrari: The $25 Million Entry Fee

Ferrari doesn't sell hypercars. Ferrari grants permission to buy them.

Standard models? Visit a dealer, configure, wait. But for the LaFerrari or the F80, money is irrelevant. Ferrari headquarters decides who receives an allocation.

The LaFerrari required at least 5 prior Ferraris purchased new. The F80 reportedly requires 12-13, including 5-7 limited editions. Owners must service at official dealerships, avoid quick resales (there's an 18-month no-sell rule on certain models), participate in brand events like the Ferrari Challenge racing series and the Cavalcade rally, and customize through the Tailor Made and Atelier programs.

Ferrari segments clients into 3 tiers: important, VIP, and top. Only top-tier clients access the rarest cars. VIP status for the F80 reportedly requires $25-40 million in lifetime Ferrari spending.

2/3rds of all new Ferraris delivered in 2022 went to existing clients. Operating margins approach 30%, nearly unheard of in the auto industry. The more restrictive the rope gets, the more profitable the company becomes.

Rolex: The Waitlist You Can't Buy Your Way Off

Walk into a Rolex authorized dealer with $10,000 cash, point at a Submariner in the catalog, and the answer is the same everywhere: nothing available.

Rolex doesn't run a waitlist. It operates what dealers call an interest list, and being on it means nothing without a relationship. Rolex enforces a 70/30 rule with dealers. Roughly 70% of allocated inventory must be less desirable models. Only 30% are the steel sports watches everyone actually wants. Dealers have to move the entire catalog before they receive the pieces customers line up for.

Daytona wait times: 2-9 years. The grey market proves the strategy works. A steel Daytona regularly sells for 86% above retail. Rolex could produce more watches. It chooses not to. The scarcity is the brand.

Soho House: The Creative-Only Velvet Rope

Nick Jones founded Soho House in London in 1995 with a counterintuitive filter: not how much money you have, but what you create.

Filmmakers, designers, musicians, media professionals: in. Bankers, lawyers, corporate executives: explicitly out. In 2010, Soho House purged roughly 500 corporate members from its Manhattan location to preserve the creative atmosphere. The dress code includes not a suit policy.

Applicants detail their creative pursuits and secure endorsements from existing members. A committee of current members reviews every application. The club now operates 40+ locations across 17 countries with tiered membership: Every House (global access), Local House (single location), Under-27 (reduced pricing), and Soho Friends (travel benefits without full club access).

By 2024, Soho House generated $1.2 billion in annual revenue. Membership revenues grew 17.2% to $418 million. In Q2 2025, it posted its first quarterly net profit since going public, $24.9 million. In August 2025, the company announced a $2.7 billion deal to go private.

Disney Club 33: The Secret Inside the Theme Park

Walt Disney conceived Club 33 as a private space inside Disneyland for corporate sponsors and personal guests. He died 5 months before it opened in May 1967.

Located at 33 Royal Street in New Orleans Square, Club 33 was the only place in Disneyland that served alcohol for decades. The entrance is an unassuming green door with a small 33 plaque. Most of the park's millions of annual visitors walk past it without knowing it exists.

Membership is invite-only. Initiation fees range from $30,000-$100,000. Annual dues run $15,000-$30,000. The waitlist has historically been 10-18 years, with roughly 480 slots at Disneyland.

Disney doesn't disclose Club 33 revenue. The real value is what it gives the brand: mystique.

Dan Kennedy: The Consultant Who Fires Clients

Dan Kennedy built the Glazer-Kennedy Insider's Circle (now Magnetic Marketing) into a direct-response marketing empire. His personal consulting practice ran on a different model: he made it nearly impossible to hire him.

His Platinum Inner Circle mastermind capped membership at 15. Annual fee: $7,200. A higher tier, the Gems Gold Dozen, cost $60,000 per year. His consulting day rate hit $19,000. Fame made every number stick.

The money wasn't the real barrier. Dan actively disqualified prospects. He once returned an $80,000 retainer to a client he fired, saying the pain of the refund was less than the pain of a bad client relationship.

He called ideal clients whales. High-spending, high-implementing business owners who generated outsized returns. Dan proved that a personal brand could operate like a nightclub: the harder you are to access, the more people want in.

Superhuman, Raya, Apple, Hampton: 4 Waitlists, 1 Strategy

The second pattern turns waiting itself into a feature. The line doesn't just build demand. It becomes the primary marketing engine.

Superhuman: The 450,000-Person Waitlist for Email

Rahul Vohra charged $30/month for an email client in a market where Gmail is free. And 450,000 people lined up for the privilege.

Superhuman launched invite-only and screened every applicant with surveys about their email habits. If your volume was too low, you were denied. The product was built for power-emailers who spent 3+ hours daily in their inbox.

Every approved user was required to complete a mandatory 30-minute onboarding call. Like a personal tailor who measures you before you're allowed to buy a suit. The fitting takes 30 minutes. But every time you wear it, you remember why you waited.

At peak, 20 full-time staff handled nothing but these calls. During each session, a specialist migrated the user's email, demonstrated keyboard shortcuts, and ensured they immediately felt the speed difference. The estimated return per onboarding call: 60x customer lifetime value.

Every outgoing email carried a Sent via Superhuman line at the bottom. A status badge that doubled as a viral loop. Users referred an average of 3.4 people within 6 months.

By August 2021, Superhuman had 15,000 paying customers and an $825 million valuation. A velvet rope made people pay $360/year for something they could get for free.

Raya: The 8% Acceptance Rate Dating App

Raya launched in February 2015 as a dating app for people who would never use a dating app. Daniel Gendelman built it for celebrities, creatives, and high-profile professionals who needed privacy as much as connection.

The application process is intentionally opaque. Applicants submit their name, age, location, job, and Instagram handle. An anonymous committee reviews creative background, professional achievements, social media presence, and connections to existing members. A referral from a current member is almost mandatory. 87% of accepted applicants had referrals or existing connections in their contacts.

Acceptance rate: approximately 8%. More selective than Harvard Business School. The waitlist has reached 2.5 million people. Some applicants wait years. Many remain in pending status forever without an official rejection.

Inside the app, profiles feature photo slideshows set to a song. Privacy rules are absolute: no screenshots, no public discussion of members. Violations mean immediate removal. Ben Affleck, Channing Tatum, Drew Barrymore, John Mayer, Lizzo, Simone Biles, and Olivia Rodrigo have all reportedly used the platform.

Standard membership costs $24.99/month. Raya+ runs $49.99/month.

By May 2024, Raya reached $100 million in cumulative user spending with virtually zero traditional advertising. The exclusivity creates the desire. The desire creates the waitlist. The waitlist IS the marketing.

Apple: The Mass-Market Velvet Rope

Apple made exclusivity work at a scale no luxury brand had attempted. Every iPhone launch since 2007 has followed the same engineered cycle: manufactured secrecy, a cinematic keynote, pre-orders that sell out within minutes, and lines that form overnight. Apple does nothing to discourage the lines. The lines outside Apple Stores DO the marketing.

The scarcity is temporary. The perception is permanent. Apple uses pricing psychology to steer buyers toward its highest-margin Pro models. The standard iPhone is available. The Pro is harder to get. The Pro Max is harder still.

In Q4 2025, the iPhone 17 launch contributed to $102.5 billion in quarterly revenue, up 8% year-over-year.

Hampton: The Founder's Application

Sam Parr sold The Hustle newsletter to HubSpot, then launched Hampton in 2023 with co-founder Joe Speiser. The thesis: founders running real businesses ($3M+ revenue or $3M+ funding, or a $10M+ exit) need honest peer groups, not networking events.

The application requires detailed company information, references, an interview, and survives a community veto. Existing members can reject applicants. Sam and Joe review every application personally.

Acceptance rate: 4-8%. The average member's company generates $20-23 million in revenue.

Once accepted, members join Core groups of 8 local founders who meet in person 10 times a year. The culture enforces a no-jerks policy and radical transparency. Members share what they'd never say publicly. The entire value prop is that network = net worth, literally.

Hampton hit $6 million in ARR in its first year with 700 members. By late 2024: 1,000+ members, ~$8 million ARR. Members report specific outcomes. One hired a VP of Engineering in 14 days through a Hampton introduction. Another connected with exit advisors who facilitated a $100M+ acquisition. A 3rd got a 5-point margin increase in 90 days after a pricing rebuild.

Sam's stated target for Hampton: a $100 million/year business. The entire business model is built on velvet-rope marketing, only successful founders get in making it a desirable community.

Lululemon and Hermès: FOMO as a Business Model

The third pattern restricts supply, not access. Anyone can theoretically buy. But the window is so narrow and the quantity so limited that buying feels like winning a lottery.

Lululemon: FOMO for Yoga Pants

Lululemon applied a velvet rope strategy reserved for luxury goods to athletic apparel. And it worked.

The company deliberately limits production on specific colors, designs, and seasonal collections. When a product drops, it won't be restocked after sellout. No rain checks. No coming back next season. Spot an Align tank in a color you want? Buy it now or lose it permanently.

Limited-edition collections are timed to cultural moments. Lunar New Year drops, seasonal capsules, exclusive collaborations that appear and vanish within days. Lululemon rarely discounts, reinforcing the perception that availability is finite and the product is worth full price. Its membership program adds another layer: members get early access to drops, creating a 2-tier system where insiders shop before the public.

This is engineered scarcity, not a supply chain problem. Lululemon's direct-to-consumer model gives it complete control over pricing and availability.

Revenue over the last 12 months: $11.07 billion, with a 58% gross profit margin. That margin is extraordinary for a clothing brand, and it's a direct consequence of never training customers to wait for sales.

Hermès Birkin: The Most Famous Velvet Rope Product in the World

The Birkin bag started on a Paris-to-London flight in 1984. British actress Jane Birkin sat next to Jean-Louis Dumas, CEO of Hermès. Her straw bag's contents spilled everywhere. She said she couldn't find a leather bag she liked. He sketched a design on an airsickness bag. The Birkin was born. A single sketch on a sick bag created a $300,000 product.

It wasn't an instant hit. Chanel dominated the 1980s and 1990s luxury bag market. The Birkin's status exploded in the early 2000s, cemented when Sex and the City featured Samantha trying to name-drop her way past the waitlist.

Today, walking into an Hermès boutique and asking for a Birkin gets you nowhere. There is no public waitlist. Hermès eliminated it around 2010. Instead, the company runs an allocation system built on relationships and purchase history.

The process: become a regular customer at a specific boutique. Build a relationship with 1 sales associate (SA). Spend on other Hermès products. Scarves, shoes, jewelry, ready-to-wear, home goods. The unspoken pre-spend ratio ranges from 1:1 to 5:1 of the Birkin's retail price, depending on the boutique and the bag. Hermès wants genuine brand appreciation, not transparent qualification spending. Then, if the stars align, your SA offers you the chance to buy a Birkin.

It's like a restaurant where you have to eat there 50 times before they'll hand you the secret menu. The secret menu isn't better. But knowing it exists changes how the regular menu tastes.

Each bag is handmade by a single artisan over 18-48 hours. Most boutiques cap customers at 2 quota bags (Birkin, Kelly, or Constance) per year. Hermès does not sell Birkins online.

Hermès reported €15.2 billion ($16 billion) in 2024 revenue, up 15% year-over-year, defying a global luxury slowdown. The leather goods division (including the Birkin) accounts for over 40% of revenue, growing 18% in 2024. Some rare Birkins have sold at auction for over $300,000. The bag outperforms the S&P 500 as an investment asset.

Restrict → Desire → Pay → Advertise. Repeat.

12 companies. 3 patterns. 1 formula.

Every velvet rope marketing strategy, from the Waldorf's opening night in 1893 to Raya's 2.5-million-person waitlist, runs on the same engine:

Restrict access → Desire increases → Willingness to pay goes up → The people inside become the marketing for the people outside.

The specific mechanism changes. Ferrari uses a $25 million spending ladder. Superhuman uses a 30-minute onboarding call. Hermès uses a pre-spend ratio. Dan uses the word no.

But the output is always the same. Premium pricing. Higher lifetime value. And customers who market the product just by having it.

The question isn't whether this strategy works. The data from 12 examples spanning 130 years proves it does.

The question is which rope works for your business: gatekeeping, waitlists, or scarcity.

Top Tweets of the day

1/

Twitter tweet

Extremely true.

2/

Twitter tweet

This trick for apps is copied from e-commerce and games. I've seen it in both.

It's a smart hack to copy strategies from adjacent industries. There are standalone Shopify apps that literally provide this.

3/

Twitter tweet

Product-Channel Fit!!!

Every product has a natural home. One channel where everything just works. Your goal is to find that channel.

1. Make-up and beauty products. Instagram. Visual format, influencer culture, the before-and-after scroll. It all lines up perfectly.

2. AI apps for college students. TikTok. Visual format, the densest Gen-Z social media app.

3. AI video services for startups. TikTok, YouTube Shorts, Sora's own social app.

Go where your audience already goes to consume what you help them create.

Rabbit Holes

1. Todd Graves, Raising Cane’s | David Senra

2. Offline Outbound

3. Instagram Algorithm Mastery Guide: How We Hit 50.1M Views in 90 Days

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More Startup Spells 🪄

1. MiniMax's Invite and Earn Masterclass: Claude's Brain, 10x Cheaper Price (LINK)

2. How Ahrefs SEO Glossary Built an SEO Machine With One Boring Page (LINK)

3. Z.ai's Pricing Nudge: Beating Claude With Stacked Discount (50% First Purchase + 10%/20% Off) (LINK)

4. Ahrefs' alternative to the boring Chrome Extension Uninstall Survey (LINK)

5. How Gamifying Failure Increased Chess.com Subscriptions by 20% (LINK)

The MiniMax referral program uses a unique Intelligence Arbitrage strategy to scale its user base fast.

Most growth loops fail as the product value just isn't clearly worth the effort of referring a friend. MiniMax dodges this trap. They pair their referral engine with a product that acts as a significantly cheaper, faster version of Claude.

Claude Intelligence Heist by MiniMax

Anthropic recently identified a massive campaign by MiniMax to illicitly extract Claude’s capabilities.

For users, this accidental third-party validation is absolute gold. It serves as irrefutable proof. It confirms MiniMax delivers high-end reasoning at a fraction of the cost.

Think of it like a generic medication. It contains the exact same active ingredient as the brand-name drug, but it costs 70% less.

Distillation was once a purely technical term. Now, it serves as a powerful marketing proof-of-value. This is like a rival chef suing a competitor for stealing their secret sauce. The lawsuit only proves the sauce is actually worth eating.

UI Placements that Drive 10x More Invites

Product visibility marks the absolute difference between a dead feature and a viral hit. MiniMax 2.5 positions its Invite and Earn program directly in the primary navigation bar.

Minimax referral program - Navbar showing the invite and earn program

Growth is treated as a first-class UI element. They guarantee every single user is intimately aware of the mutual incentive loop from the exact moment of landing on the pricing page.

Mutual Incentive Engineering: 10% off for both sides

The minimax referral program mechanism relies on simple, irrefutable math: a 10% voucher for the inviter, and a 10% discount for the invitee.

This dual-sided reward lowers the barrier to entry for brand new users. At the exact same time, it pushes existing users to become massive active promoters.

They built a foolproof closed-loop economy. The absolute cheapest way to use the product is to advocate for it.

Strategic Defaults & 6-Tier Pricing

Pricing psychology heavily impacts long-term user retention. The MiniMax 2.5 pricing page defaults to yearly billing, instantly pitching a 2 months free value proposition.

Defaulting to an annual plan deliberately trades fast signups for long-term commitment. This is a 4D chess move in the AI coding space. A new state-of-the-art model drops almost every single month. Users who lock into a yearly subscription rarely push the product limits for all 12 months. That translates into pure profit for MiniMax.

It also anchors the pricing. When users inevitably check the monthly options, the higher cost pushes them right back to the annual deal.

Pricing plans with yearly default and 6 pricing tiers

MiniMax offers 6 distinct pricing tiers ranging from Starter to Ultra High Speed. This intentional spread captures wildly diverse user segments.

They bridge the massive gap between premium AI intelligence and an aggressive, low-cost market entry. And that combination makes the Invite and Earn loop dangerously effective.

Top Tweets of the day

1/

Twitter tweet

TIL Manus has lots of use cases for sales people who want to grab emails of founders and Manus actually finds them without any shenanigans. This thread is insightful.

2/

Twitter tweet

Lots of people are saying this.

Codex 5.2 x-high is essentially one-shotting things end-to-end.

It means you prompt and the app/site gets built with full functionality. Its available on Teams and Pro ($200) plan only but it solves the hardest of problems.

You can use 5.4 high now as it is available on Free, Go, Plus plan too and they brought the secret ingredients that made 5.2 x-high better.

2026 is a breakthrough year for AI agents.

3/

Twitter tweet

There will be entire companies built around this.

Rabbit Holes

1. NINJUTSU SEO NOBODY SHARES

2. Finding YC W21 Founders' Emails

3. Shipping at Inference-Speed

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More Startup Spells 🪄

1. Ryanair's Social Media Marketing Strategy (LINK)

2. How Claude Targets Developers With Google Ads Using Smart Bidding (LINK)

3. How Ahrefs SEO Glossary Built an SEO Machine With One Boring Page (LINK)

4. Z.ai's Pricing Nudge: Beating Claude With Stacked Discount (50% First Purchase + 10%/20% Off) (LINK)

5. Ahrefs' alternative to the boring Chrome Extension Uninstall Survey (LINK)

Ryanair developed what might be the most counterintuitive social media strategy to date to answer a brutal question.

"If your product is good enough, the marketing is easy."

CEO Michael O'Leary once stood before 100+ marketers on the floor. He presented what could be called The Product Paradox: a dilemma where a product is so cheap it sells itself based entirely on mental availability. He believed the airline would achieve massive scale and comfortably hit its target of 250 million passengers by 2026 based purely on the product alone. If the product wins on price, why market at all? Why not drop the marketing spend to zero? He asked them a simple, brutal question.

"I can probably predict that we will hit our target of 250 million passengers by 2026 just by the product alone... What's the role of marketing then for this business?"

Everyone went silent. The incoming social media team eventually figured out the answer to this challenge. If a product sells itself, marketing isn't needed to drive sales. It is needed to manage perception, reset expectations, and to entertain people so you stay top of mind when people are on a budget.

When a budget airline faces a perception crisis due to the gap between their $10 flights and millennial expectations for premium service, they usually apologize. Ryanair did the opposite.

Ryanair was democratizing travel across Europe. But the online sentiment was overwhelmingly negative. Passengers were constantly complaining about the budget airline. They treated it as a joke.

Millennials who grew up expecting premium service were furious that a flight costing the price of a takeout pizza didn't come with USB chargers and hot towels. This expectation gap caused unnecessary tension. Like walking into a $2 dive bar and complaining they couldn't make you a fresh-squeezed margarita.

Ryanair - Social Media Marketing Strategy

Instead of fighting the tide with a polished corporate routine, they leaned into the friction. Their marketing team realized that trying to look like a warm, customer-care, fluffy brand was completely unbelievable to the public.

Why Trolling Beats PR

When COVID hit and TikTok exploded, the audience grew tired of fake aesthetics found on platforms like Instagram. The internet wanted raw, unpolished reality.

Fake Instagram vs Real TikTok

Instead of hiding from their haters, Ryanair decided to amplify them. They created a Hate-Funnel. They started taking real passenger complaints and openly mocking them on their TikTok and X accounts.

When a passenger posted a photo complaining about a windowless seat, they bluntly replied: We sell seats, not windows. When another grumbled about a private suite, they mocked the passenger.

Ryanair trolling customers on X

They embraced the unhinged trends of social media to turn daily gripes into massive engagement.

Building Brand Loyalty with Insults

The genius lay in community building through shared misery. By leaning into self-deprecation, they acknowledged what everyone already knew. Flying budget is universally unpleasant. But it is incredibly cheap.

Ryanair matching audience expectations

Michael Corcoran, the former head of social media, capitalized on the polarizing playbook established by CEO Michael O'Leary. He understood that even bad publicity generates free reach. He aimed for headlines rather than buying traditional ads.

They used cultural moments to Jab, Jab, Hook. This was Gary Vee's famous one-liner, but Ryanair team uses it with a different interpretation.

Ryanair's Jab, Jab, Hook model

They mercilessly went after politicians during the UK's Partygate.

Ryanair insulting politicians

They roasted competitors. They brought a human, audacious voice that resonated deeply with younger audiences.

This unhinged approach didn't just win over TikTok. It captured the attention of the exact people who mattered most. CEO Michael O'Leary and Ryanair's investors don't scroll through TikTok. They read the Financial Times and the Sunday Times.

When those publications printed full-page articles citing the airline's social media as a masterclass, the C-suite finally saw it. The team received a handwritten note of approval from O'Leary himself. The social team wasn't doing anything new. They were simply replicating O'Leary's old-school, polarizing PR tactics in a new digital medium.

Setting Expectations to the Floor

This relentless trolling caused a psychological shift: it set customer expectations to the absolute floor. If a passenger expects a terrible experience, their bar for satisfaction drops to simply arriving safely.

It is like buying a used textbook off Facebook Marketplace labeled 'heavily water damaged.' When it shows up and you can still read most of the pages, you feel like you won the lottery. After all, the goal was knowledge, not luxury.

Ryanair highlights their own drawbacks: narrow seats, strict baggage limits, secondary airports, and pay-to-use facilities. By turning strict cost-cutting into a punchline, they ensure customers focus solely on price.

If a passenger doesn't want to pay for a window, they won't get one. If they expect business-class treatment, they are reminded that their fare was cheaper than a pizza. Expectation management became the true marketing hook.

The ROI of Being Unhinged

Ryanair abandoned the customer is always right doctrine. They acted like a club bouncer who doesn't care if you claim to 'know the promoter' because everyone gets the exact same treatment and waits in the same line. Because of this, they became TikTok royalty. They amassed a following 7 times larger than Easyjet, proving the immense benefits of organic reach.

The bold strategy paid off spectacularly after a massive slump in 2021 and 2022 which definitely co-incided with the pandemic.

Ryanair airline passengers in millions

In 2024, they carried 184 million passengers. They solidified their status as Europe's largest airline. In 2025, they carried over 200 million passengers.

They proved that if the core product is cheap and serves a distinct need reliably, the marketing doesn't need to apologize. It just needs to entertain. And for Ryanair, the haters are footing the bill for the entertainment.

Top Tweets of the day

1/

Twitter tweet

Stop using social media for just 2 weeks and watch out your behaviour. It will be positively improved.

Turns out, all the knowledge you need is in old books.

You can even hire a VA to curate specific posts for you in your niches of interest. Or train an AI agent on it.

14 days is all you need to start seeing results from dopamine detox.

Only exception to use social media is to building your own brand in the early days. AI is good enough to curate your taste now.

2/

Twitter tweet

Golden tip for getting reviews. You should always ask for a review the moment the job is done. Nobody cares after it is done. Just do it then and there.

I remember going to buy a Windows Laptop and as I was leaving, the guy asked me for a review. And I did it plus installed some app for credits then and there because of good customer service.

3/

Twitter tweet

Compound interest works if you have skills to compound. Early teens or 20s are the best time to do it.

If you are older, you're screwed. Just kidding.

"Never too late to start all over again." ~ Benjamin Button

Rabbit Holes

1. Stop Telling Claude Code What To Do

2. Why YouTube Is The Better Ad Traffic Source

3. How I’ve 10x’d My Podcast Growth Year Over Year

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More Startup Spells 🪄

1. How OpenArt AI engineered the perfect feature adoption loop using activity-based credits (LINK)

2. How to Reverse-Engineer Hacker News for Your Startup Launch (LINK)

3. How Claude Targets Developers With Google Ads Using Smart Bidding (LINK)

4. How Ahrefs SEO Glossary Built an SEO Machine With One Boring Page (LINK)

5. Z.ai's Pricing Nudge: Beating Claude With Stacked Discount (50% First Purchase + 10%/20% Off) (LINK)

How OpenArt AI engineered the perfect feature adoption loop using activity-based credits

OpenArt AI uses activity-based free credits to walk new users through its product the way free samples work at Costco. You grab one, then another, and before you know it you have walked through the entire store. The result is a growth loop that drives both feature adoption and social follows at the same time.

The omnipresent token reminder

A persistent nudge sits in the bottom right corner of the OpenArt AI interface. This subtle but ever-present Follow us to earn more credits prompt ensures that every single visitor is aware of the opportunity to extend their usage without pulling out a credit card.

It functions similar to a casino handing out complimentary chips just as you walk near the high roller tables.

OpenArt AI's UI showing an activity-based free credits nudge in the bottom right corner

This intentional placement acts as a constant reminder. It turns casually browsing users into engaged participants looking for their next reward.

Turning feature discovery into a quest

OpenArt AI encourages its users to thoroughly explore the core product by rewarding them with activity-based free credits.

Instead of just giving away a lump sum of tokens upfront, they gamify feature discovery.

A dashboard detailing how users can earn credits by completing specific feature-related tasks

Simple tasks, like creating your first image, making a video, generating audio, or designing a character, each yield 50 credits. More complex actions, like creating a full story, are rewarded with 200 credits.

To maximize engagement, there is a completionist incentive. Finishing all of the guided tasks unlocks a massive 500-credit bonus. This effectively ensures users try every single feature the platform has built.

Paying a premium for B2B eyeballs

Beyond feature discovery, this section acts as a powerful social growth loop. OpenArt AI actively rewards users for following their brand on social platforms. They distribute 20 credits each for joining Discord, subscribing on YouTube, or following on Twitter/X and Instagram.

A rewards menu offering varying amounts of credits for following the company on different social platforms

Notably, following the company on LinkedIn grants a massive 100-credit reward. This lopsided incentive structure suggests that B2B or professional networking is a significantly higher-value channel for their specific growth model.

Free credits cost OpenArt AI nothing to distribute, but they buy something expensive: a user who has tried every feature and follows the brand on 5 platforms. That is the real return on a well-structured credit system.

Top Tweets of the day

1/

Twitter tweet

Pro-tip: Use a female name.

A guy on X known as Nikita once shared that he used to have a 100% VC strike rate.

Wonder why? Best part you get advantages without the disadvantages as a guy with a mostly female name.

2/

Twitter tweet

Nano Banana Pro is GOAT'd.

3/

Twitter tweet

I recently learned that Claude can only understand 100-150 instructions at the same time.

This is much worse for smaller models.

Rabbit Holes

1. Why HubSpot Lost 20M Clicks (and How They Plan to Recover)

2. The 2026 SEO Playbook – Maximize Coverage

3. Automating Competitor Research with Firecrawl: A Comprehensive Tutorial

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More Startup Spells 🪄

1. Wispr Flow's Case Study Page Is a Conversion Funnel in Disguise (LINK)

2. James Clear's Newsletter Conversion Strategy (2M+ Subscribers) (LINK)

3. How to Reverse-Engineer Hacker News for Your Startup Launch (LINK)

4. How Claude Targets Developers With Google Ads Using Smart Bidding (LINK)

5. How Ahrefs SEO Glossary Built an SEO Machine With One Boring Page (LINK)