Why "virality" is not good

Do you remember the egg tower experiment from 4th grade?

The rules were something like:

• You have to get this egg above a 6-foot line by building a tower

• You can't touch it when the time is up

• Whoever gets it above the line first with a free standing structure wins

You'd have straws, pipe cleaners, marshmallows, toothpicks, etc.

And there was always that one kid who’d take the straws, slice them down the side, and try to stack them vertically straight on top of each other. 

He would build above 6 feet really fast…leaning tower of Strawza.

But of course, the straw stack could never hold the egg. 

Straws stacked like that are extremely wobbly because there's no base. Speed, but no foundation.

No matter what happened, that kid always lost. His egg cracked. He was sad. Don’t be that kid. 

That straw tower is a metaphor for “going viral” in content. 

A lot of people think when you make content, the ultimate goal is to go viral.

They think about it, dream about it, aim for it, and pray for it.

Sorry to spoil your lunch Margaret, but objectively speaking, going viral too early is one of the worst things that can happen to you.

Virality is bad for two main reasons:

1. Going viral f*cks with your brain

When you go viral too early, the dopamine hit you get is so off the charts that you’re inevitably going to chase it.

You get addicted to creating copycat content trying to go viral again. This forces you to pick ideas that are outside your niche and do things that are not valuable for your ideal viewer. The obsession with seeking repeated virality will completely melt your brain and skew your decision making.

2. Going viral negates niche

When you go viral, typically you need to make your topic more generic and widely applicable. When you do that, you bring a lot of people into your world that aren't relevant to the topics you're talking about and the offers you're selling. 

Your on-target videos, following the viral breakouts, will be volatile in performance. If you make a niche topic video, it won’t do well. If you make a general video, it’ll do better but with the wrong people.

Virality sounds intoxicating, but the truth is you actually want to be ANTI-VIRAL for as long as possible.

With my new marketing account, I'm trying intentionally to NOT go viral.

I sprinted to 10K followers in 12 days to silence the haters, but since then, I’ve throttled down the engine. I’m now at ~17.4K followers and 800K+ views in the first 35 days, while purposely not going nuclear on any one video.

My goal is to never have any video go over 1M+ views and make every one end up between 20K to 100K.

This is what I’ve determined would be extremely valuable and on-target.

When you go viral too early, you build an extremely fragile audience that will not support your mission. This warps your internal compass and nukes the audience fit with the algorithm.

What you want to do instead is build a very strong foundation. Low and slow for the first 100 videos is the name of the game.

Here’s how to do it…

1 - Stack singles

The best towers in 4th grade had all the right materials stacked in the right way. You want to go for consistent views you can rely on. Then, stack them over time.

1,000 views -> 2,000 views
2,000 views -> 3,000 views
3,000 views -> 4,000 views, etc. 

2 - Take step changes when they come

Occasionally, you will have a big step change that's 3x to 5x your usual traffic.

We call this “locally viral” or “on-target virality.”

It’s a step up, but not in a way that violates your target avatar positioning.

This gets some fresh energy in the mix. Then, you just keep stacking singles again and slowly compounding from your new floor.

That's what I call anti-viral.

If you play the game like this, you’re going to build a tower that won't fall over with the egg. 

Once you have a super strong base (50-100 on-target videos with 20,000-50,000 followers), only then should you look to test TAM expansion.

A lot of people think they want to go viral, but it turns out, going viral too early is the worst thing that could happen to you in the content game.

Be anti-viral.

Keep going 🫡

P.S. - If you want to learn the exact content system I’m running to slowly scale my marketing channel (while staying anti-viral), watch this video