The Bootstrapped Founder

Hey. It's Arvid, and this is the Bootstrap founder. I recently had a consulting call, and it was with a founder who asked me the question that I've heard countless times before, how can I write posts that go viral? And I answered it in a way that I was hoping for it to be supportive for that founder because many founders need to be supportive here because they chase virality, because they believe it will increase their number of customers and prospects or collaborators. They dream of creating this kind of content that gets millions of views and they hope to find value in those numbers so they focus on hitting that one kind of content.

Right? This one post and they try again and again and again, but I have learned that for us indie hackers and creators in our little solopreneur and independent business owner world, chasing my reality is not just ineffective, but it's actively harmful to our businesses. And here's why. First, unless you have a naturally polarizing personality and generally enjoy a controversy, creating viral content consistently requires you to kind of fake that, because you will need to be polarizing all the time, Because that's kind of what reality needs. It happens when something is so appealing that people feel compelled to interact with it either because they completely agree or they totally disagree and they really want to tell you.

So if you're like most of us, someone with like a moderate nuanced opinion on most things, who believes in the good of everybody, who wants to be kind, who thinks there is no right programming language out there and everybody should use what works best for them, that kind of stuff. You won't be edgy enough to create virality reliably through polarization. There are people in our community and I'm thinking about people like Peter Levels that have really really strong opinions and have no problem holding them back. They don't need to. They could just voice it and then deal with the fallout.

That is because they've done this for many many years and developed this super thick skin and don't take stuff personally. But if you're reasonable and you have thoughtful takes, well that won't go viral. Unless they express some kind of wisdom in a way that's never been phrased before, which is super rare, because most things already have been said and there are people who've said it in a more polarizing way. So, here's the real danger with all of this. Even if you manage to create viral content and I just mean in the first place, not necessarily reliably, but just write a viral piece.

The dynamics behind virality are inherently problematic for people wanting to build an audience or a reputation. The algorithms that determine what goes viral are opaque. They're black boxes. We can't really see what's going on in there. You don't know why one of your posts takes off while another one with similar potential doesn't.

You might post the same thing at two different times a day and one of them gets a lot of attention the other one zilch nothing happens. And this one certainly leads to people becoming desperate trying to chase it. It's desperate looking behavior because you pump out content hoping something will stick and people watch you and think like what's going on? Like what is this person trying to accomplish? And people have been on social media long enough to see somebody being a try hard in the most negative sense.

Not trying hard to get stuff done but trying so hard to get this virality happen and it's really really desperate. I've seen how this desperation affects your existing audience in founders because people notice when you're trying too hard to go viral and it pushes away the very people who would follow you for your genuine work. Imagine somebody saw your post on something and a couple dozen people saw it and they engaged with it. They wrote a message, they wrote a comment and engaged in a conversation with you. And now the next thing you post is an attempt at virality.

And they're like, that's weird, but that's fine. And then the next thing you post is you trying to write another thread where you get a lot of views and here are five things I learned and, you know, that kind of stuff. And the person's like, I really don't wanna see this. And they unfollow you. Or they stick around a little bit longer, but they will eventually unfollow you because it's just not the stuff that they would like to connect with.

Let me explain what happens when the post actually goes viral because there's a problem here. You get exposed to this massive temporary audience and that might sound great, but it usually invites the wrong audience for the wrong reasons. People discover your content not because of its inherent quality and because, you know, they follow you for a long time and they know what you're doing. They see you for the very first time and your content for the very first time because their friend or peer or somebody liked them shared it or liked it, engaged with it. When they didn't follow you and later see your regular content, they're often disappointed because it lacks the specific quality that initially attracted them, and that tends to be a quality of affiliation.

It's not necessarily even the quality of your work. It's like who they got kind of exposed to it through, and you can't recreate this. Take an example here. If I were to post that PHP is the perfect programming language for beginners because it has the ecosystem of Laravel and Symfony with decades of plugins and community support, and that thing went viral for some reason. What would happen?

Well, the majority of developers who see it probably wouldn't be PHP developers from my kind of vicinity, my ecosystem. Right? They would be somebody else. And then they would start commenting, flood the comments, arguing for their preferred languages. And suddenly, I have a problem.

The valuable insights about PHP accessibility for beginners would be lost in an ocean of contentious responses by people who got exposed to me, not because they're already in my world, kind of, very adjacent, but because they saw something and really felt like they needed to tell me I'm wrong. And this is a problem that I call the distortion effect of reality. Like, if you have an audio signal with too much gain, the meaning of this content gets distorted by the noise around it. It's just too loud. Things get clipped off.

Your thoughtful contribution becomes buried under layers of misunderstanding and argument. It becomes reduced to a point of contention, another thought further worth exploring. And the most insidious part is that while virality might boost your follower count and initial interactions, in that moment, it is a short term gain that almost guarantees long term losses. Because if you look at your audience, the percentage of your audience that truly understands who you are and values what you offer actually decreases with a viral post. Right?

Let's say you have a hundred followers and 50 of them get you. Now all of a sudden you do something viral and you get 400 new followers but only 50 of them get you. Now you have 500 followers a hundred of them get you that's 20% used to be 50 but now it's significantly reduced. Your signal to noise ratio gets worse not better every time you post something viral Because you invite the wrong people who follow you for the wrong reasons and it's very, very hard to make them stick as an audience that actually wants to connect with you. When you build an audience organically, something happens along the way of you being exposed to people because people typically see you multiple times before engaging.

They might notice your posts like 10 or 15 times you're at someone in their timeline interacting with the people they know but they don't really pay too much attention and then they start recognizing your name and then maybe five ten more times they start recognizing the picture, your profile picture and they start reading what you have to say. It gives them context for who you are and what you represent because you interact with others in front of them. It's kind of a trial. They have a trial connection with you, a trial relationship through others, mediated through their peers that they already trust. But viral exposure dumps thousands of first time viewers onto your profile simultaneously.

And it's hard to connect with thousands of people at the same time. These people don't really know you. They don't really understand yet who you are, how you interact with people, what your quirks are, what your perspectives are. These people will fill in the blanks about who you are with a lot of assumptions and that leads to misunderstandings and negative initial interactions. Because if people don't know, they will likely assume not the worst, but maybe not the best in you.

Right? Because you're a stranger on the Internet. Like, we've met a lot of those and there tends to be a problem occasionally with people like this. So this matters because audience strength comes from connections, individual connections, not numbers. You can have tens of thousands of followers, but if they don't care about who you are, what your message is, or engage meaningfully with your content, they might as well not be there at all.

There's no benefit, not to you clearly, but also not to them because if they don't care about you, why should your content be in front of them? So So what's the alternative here to chasing virality? Well, focus on building a reliable engaged audience with a high percentage of people who get you that genuinely values your contributions every time you make them. Not when they get big, but every single time. A smaller or medium sized audience that consistently engages with you and your content is far more valuable than this massive following you're dreaming about through viral posts.

Like, it just does not work. This approach might not give you the dopamine hit maybe of watching the follower count tick and explode overnight, but it certainly creates sustainable growth and meaningful relationships, which are the foundations of finding more customers. Finding people who try the thing you do, your service or want to collaborate with you or talk about you to their peers. That's the kind of stuff you want. Right?

Not people who kinda look at you and think, followed that guy for a joke. Now I kinda hate him. Now you're not gonna get recommendations from people like this. So don't chase virality. Virality is not inherently bad when it happens naturally.

But chasing it actively poisons your audience, it muddies your message, and it ultimately destroys the value in your business that you could have from an audience. So sometimes the best way to grow is to focus on being consistently valuable rather than occasionally viral. And that's it for today. Thank you so much for listening to the Bootstrap founder. You can find me on Twitter or x as as the kids call it, at AvidKahl, a r v I d k a h l.

If you wanna support me in this show, please share podscan.fm, my software business, with your professional peers and those who you think will benefit from tracking mentions of their brands, their businesses, and names on all the podcasts out there? I think we're up to 3,800,000 podcasts watched at this point simultaneously every single day, every week, every episode. PodScan is a near real time podcast database with a stellar API, so please share the work with those who need to stay on top of the podcasting ecosystem. Thanks so much for listening. Have a wonderful day, and bye bye.