The world's first {FORMAT} for {YOUR AUDIENCE} formula 🧸

How we accidentally created a viral marketing engine with $0 budget

When I joined Wiz in 2022 as Head of Growth, I had one *big* challenge:

Get security leaders to know our name before sales ever reached out.

My solution came from an unusual place - children’s toys.

We built a toy store that broke the internet 🧸

I created “CISOtopia” - the first-ever toy store for cybersecurity leaders.

No, it’s not a real store. Just a simple website featuring 3D renders of funny fake toys that only security experts would understand:

• A blindfold for your legal team during security incidents

• A panic button that relieves stress

• A Secret Rotator wheel to randomly generate new passwords

We launched it on April Fools’ Day 2023, expecting a few laughs before moving on.

Then something unexpected happened...

“FUCKING GENIUS” – an actual CISO’s reaction 🤯

The entire cybersecurity industry *lost their minds*:

• 46,733 visitors in the first 24 hours

• Over 3,500 people tried to actually buy our fake toys

• 10+ CISOs (=Chief Information Security Officers) shared it organically

• #1 on Reddit’s homepage with 500K views and 2.1K upvotes!

One famous CISO (who wasn’t even our customer yet) messaged our team:

From this experience, we accidentally discovered a powerful formula…

The Million-Dollar Marketing Formula 🧪

Here’s the ridiculously simple formula we discovered:

Create the world’s first {FORMAT} for {AUDIENCE}. 

That’s it.

Take a familiar {Format} from a completely different industry → adapt it specifically for your target {Audience} → watch it explode.

Let me explain how it works:

1) Steal a format that everyone already loves 📺

Pick something universally recognized:

• Dating App 💝

• Reality TV Show 🎭

• Museum 🏺

• Comic Book Series 🦸

• Subscription Box 📦

• Broadway Musical 💃

2) Make it absurdly specific to your audience 🎯

Now narrow it down to exactly who you’re targeting:

• For software developers

• For investment bankers

• For HR managers

• For data scientists

• For accountants

• For designers

3) Add inside jokes that make them feel seen 🗿

• A dating app for accountants (“Love at First Spreadsheet”)

• A reality show for developers (“Keeping Up with the Programmers”)

• A museum for HR managers (“The Hall of Red Flags”)

Our example: Toy store → for cybersecurity professionals → CISOtopia

Why your brain can’t scroll past this mismatch 🧠

It works because it creates an absurd cognitive dissonance.

Your brain recognizes the format (toy store) but is surprised by the context (cybersecurity).

This creates an irresistible curiosity gap that demands to be examined.

Your only job is to connect these dots in a way that feels surprising and oddly perfect:

And voilà - you got yourself a viral growth engine.

How to turn it into a long-term growth engine 🌱

Now, the real magic comes *after* the launch. Here’s how to milk it:

1. Add more content regularly (new songs for your musical, new exhibits for your museum, new toys for your store)

2. Make parts of it real (we manufactured select toys as conference swag)

3. Tie it to your product announcements (when we launched code security, we created the Shift-Left Keyboard)

4. Run social media contests around it

5. Create seasonal editions for major holidays / industry events

When your audience becomes your unofficial marketing team 💎

Two months after launching CISOtopia, during AWS re:Inforce conference, we noticed another tiny traffic spike. We hadn’t even mentioned CISOtopia in our booth - security professionals were just talking about it organically. That’s magical!

A cybersecurity leader also shared it saying: “This is why Wiz continues to be one of my favorite vendors to work with. They just ‘get it’.”

And that’s exactly the power of this formula: You’re building long-term advocates.

Your $0 roadmap to million-dollar results 🗺️

The beauty of this approach is that it costs almost nothing to execute.

Just ask yourself three simple questions:

1. 📺 What’s a format everyone recognizes from daily life?

2. 🎯 Can we make a special edition of it for our exact target audience?

3. 🗿 What inside jokes would only they understand?

Now combine them and launch.

I bet you’ll be shocked at how powerful the results can be.

This formula became our secret superpower at Wiz, and we created a couple more projects using it (the new ones had a bigger budget):

• CISOasis: the world’s first meditation app for CISOs

• CISOmusical: the world’s first musical for CISOs (just launched!)

I’ve been speaking about this formula at conferences and workshops for more than two years now. Every marketer in the audience who implemented it later told me it worked 10x better than expected.

Even Spotify is using this formula (and winning awards🏆):

They’ve created “Spreadbeats” – the first-ever music video for planners – built inside a spreadsheet using Excel functions. The campaign won 9 Cannes Lions awards.

10x better than regular marketing 💥

❌ Traditional marketing says: “Look how great we are”.

✅ This formula says: “Look how well we understand YOU”.

When you create something so specific to an industry that only they would get it, you’re not just building brand awareness. You’re creating brand love.

What will you create? 👀

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See you next week ✌️

Tom

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