How I built and sold the Viral Post Generator 💰

2M users, 1 week to acquisition & nothing but cringe

This is the story of the Viral Post Generator: how I woke up one morning to find 1,400,000 new users used my parody tool overnight, how I sold it into a dream exit, and how I briefly became an internet and TV celebrity.

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1. 💡 One crazy idea

When Lin-Manuel Miranda first came up with the idea of the award-winning musical ‘Hamilton’, he almost ignored it → believing it was way too good an idea not to have been made already by someone else. He thought someone had already written it:

“So I Googled ‘Alexander Hamilton hip-hop musical’ and totally expected to see that someone had already written it.

But no.

So I got to work.”

That’s exactly what happened to me one summer day in 2022, as I was jogging on the beautiful beach in Tel-Aviv, and suddenly had a crazy idea: Use AI to create cringeworthy ‘viral’ LinkedIn posts. Woah.

As you can guess, my first thought was:

“Well, someone must have already done it…”

Little did I know that this crazy idea was about to change my life. 🥹

2. 😳 The cringe of Linkedin

A few weeks earlier, I scraped 100,000s of viral Linkedin posts while trying to find the “secret formula”. I wanted to reverse-engineer those high-engagement posts and reproduce them to go viral myself.

The common trait of all the viral posts was clear:

They all include a great deal of self-love, even a little narcissism.

Argh 🤦🏻‍♂️ You know what I'm talking about. Everyone on Linkedin knows what I’m talking about. The feed on Linkedin is very, very, very cringe-worthy, but everyone’s playing the game regardless (to get the job). 

So a new product came to mind:

A parody tool that generates a “viral” post based on the user’s boring inputs (and of course, a Cringe meter) ⚙️

After a little research, I was shocked to learn that no one ever created such a generator. So I decided to make one.

And thus, the Viral Post Generator was born. 🎉

3. 💻 Building the generator with no-code

The concept of the Viral Post Generator is simple:

A user is asked two questions (What did you do today? and What is your inspirational advice?), and needs to choose a ‘Cringe’ level for their desired post. Then, after a short wait of 10 seconds, they get their very own viral Linkedin post. The results are always based on real Linkedin posts that went insanely viral (1,000s of results possible).

That’s basically it: Two screens and a huge amount of templates.

I created it using the no-code platform Adalo with help from my talented brother on AWS for language processing.

4. 🤫 The button that made it go viral

Now, there was one component here that made people LOSE IT.

Can you guess what it is?

Yup, the Cringe Level! People raved on that one.

I can think of a few reasons why:

1. 👀 It’s unusual for web tools so it’s eye-catching;

2. 🧘‍♀️ It re-confirms people’s beliefs that Linkedin is cringeworthy;

3. 🕹️ It’s a fun UI thing to play with (as opposed to simple radio button choices)

Jackpot.

But I have a secret to share…

It’s fake. The cringe meter never really worked.

To this day, the slider isn’t connected to anything in the backend.

I really wanted it to be functional - but I didn’t have the time to make it happen.

My original idea was to create 10 different groups of posts that varied in ‘cringiness’. I left this task to the end of the process, and I had already sent the product to some friends as a test group while I was working on the cringe part. And they absolutely loved the cringe meter, even though it didn’t work. None of my friends noticed. So I decided to launch it as is. In retrospect, I can confidently say that even among the 2M users, no one noticed.

While we’re at it, here’s another secret:

The loading screen was fake, too.

I mean, it’s completely unnecessary here. The generator takes 0.5 seconds to work.

But I made people wait on purpose.

This friction creates anticipation and induces casino-like hormones that make users excited. Also, it creates a Labor Illusion: When people wait longer, they might think an algorithm has worked really hard behind the scenes to create the post, and that makes them appreciate it more.

I added this Lottie animation of a loading circle that takes 10 seconds (!) to complete the circle and only then redirected users to the results.

It worked beautifully. People waited 10 seconds.

And so, I was ready to launch. 

5. 💣 Launch day

Here’s how I actually launched it (and broke the internet while doing so):