Marketing Ideas

Marketing Ideas

How to look 1000000x more popular than you are 🎩

The newest trick on social (200+ startups already use it)

Tom Orbach's avatar
Tom Orbach
Oct 01, 2026
∙ Paid

State Machines is a tiny AI startup with 1,100 followers on X.

Their launch post got 5 million views 🤯

And they’re not the only ones:

  • Offloop: 2.6M views

  • Runable: 2.4M views

  • Rene: 1.1M views

  • Catch AI: 864K views

  • Coworker: 791K views

Every one of them posted from a VERY small account.

Surprisingly - all these views are 100% real, from real people (0% bots).

So what’s the magic trick? 🪄

Let’s say you’re launching a new partnership, a new feature, or your company out of stealth, and you want to announce it on your X account.

But your account is small, so the post gets a handful of likes and looks embarrassing.

How do you launch with barely any followers? 👀

Most marketers fix it with paid ads: they pay X to “boost” the post.

But it’s a bad deal:

  1. 🚫 Ads are (very) expensive.

  2. 🚫 Virality stops when your budget does.

  3. 🚫 Your post gets an “Ad” label, and people skip ads.

  4. 🚫 A lot of people never see it at all because of ad blockers.

All the startups above did something else, and I bet you haven’t seen it before.

The better idea is this 👇

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