Your next viral post is already written 🏄

3 trends will give you tons of reach right now (July 2026)

Today’s ✨ free article ✨ is sponsored by Brew.

Brew makes email easy. Describe what you want in plain English, and Brew builds the whole campaign, copy, design, automations, all on-brand. It learns your brand from your site, so every email looks like your team wrote it.

LiveFlow A/B tested a Brew email against their existing one across ~5,000 customers. The Brew version drove 136% more click-throughs to their book demo page.

I’ve been playing with it and it’s honestly wild how fast you can go from idea to sent email. Give it a try!

→ Sponsor my newsletter

---

3 viral formats are exploding right now. My feed is 90% this stuff.

Copy one of the stunts and add your brand ↓

1. Kill your physical product 💿

Sony announced this week that new PlayStation games are going digital-only - no more discs. The internet did NOT take it well. Their announcement collected 70K angry replies.

Within 2 hours, Domino’s posted an official-looking statement announcing that pizzas are going digital too: customers will download “pizza codes” and enjoy them “in an entirely virtual sense”.

488,000 likes from that one image. 🤯

Other brands followed:

• KFC Spain announced their chicken now comes “in fake PNG format” (157K likes), then followed up with “YOU WOULDN’T STEAL FRIED CHICKEN.”

• G FUEL turned its flavors into “downloadable flavor files.”

• RESPAWN switched to virtual gaming chairs (52K likes).

• Esports Awards killed physical trophies. Winners now download a JPEG (15K likes).

• GameFly swore to rent discs “until they pry the discs from our soft, moisturized hands” (58K likes).

Steal this: write your own dead-serious statement announcing your product is going digital-only (the more official the wording, the funnier it gets).

2. Digital product? Go physical 📼

Software companies flipped the same joke.

Proton announced their VPN will now fly you to one of 90+ locations, and their password manager becomes “someone who follows you around and remembers your passwords for you.” 27K likes. I’d honestly pay for the password guy.

Malwarebytes will send an employee to your doctor’s appointments, to protect you from viruses (12K likes).

And GitHub, my favorite of the wave, made it real: they’re burning your code onto actual CD-ROMs and shipping them free to the first 1,000 people who sign up. 29K likes, the front page of Hacker News, and free press everywhere.

Steal this: announce the ridiculous physical version of your software, and if you actually ship 100 of them like GitHub did, you’ll get the press coverage too.

3. “The US government shut us down” 🏛️

This meme comes from a different shutdown. The US government took Claude Fable 5 offline for 18 days, citing national security, and the announcement hit 88K likes.

The ban lifted on July 1 and Fable went insanely viral when it returned.

So founders started copying that statement word for word, for their own tiny products:

Marc Lou announced the government suspended his $21K/month analytics tool “after determining my analytics dashboard was simply too powerful”… I love it.

Steal this: copy Anthropic’s statement, swap in your product, and write it like your dashboard really is a threat to national security.

Move today ⏱️

GitHub shipped a real product in a day. Domino’s first reply went up within hours of Sony’s announcement.

In real-time marketing, speed > quality. (free RTM playbook here)

See you next week ✌️

Tom