How Startups Get Viral

Tech people adore Stripe. Linear’s old branding infected GenAI so much all its landing pages look purple. Arc Browser received glowing coverages from top-tier outlets even for basic features.

Some companies get viral while their competitors struggle to break through the ice. Why?

This is a question that bothers many founders and marketers wishing to promote their companies or clients. What’s curious is it often have little to no connection to the financial success. Adyen is as big as Stripe, but only the latter is the Silicon Valley darling. There are immensely successful tech companies out there, entire unicorns whose founders have only a few hundred followers.

Arc is the perfect example of a viral product. The reason I know is because I’ve become a user and a fan, but before this, me and my team were leading communications for one of their competitors, Sidekick, which was acquired by Perplexity.

We were against not the wind, but a storm. Had to spend weeks coming up with dozens of ideas and pitching hundreds of reporters just to get something meaningful (and we had some great stories in the end). Meanwhile, Arc was getting covered by The Verge even for minor updates. There are many stories written about their brand and what made it work. It’s a combination of the top-down strategy, dedicated pros thinking about storytelling, which funnily enough was all about centering people to create a relatable brand. But also flawless execution, with every simple feature made with a degree of care few others would go to. All of this led to news stories like titled “Arc is the best web browser to come out in the last decade”.

At the time, Arc didn’t generate any revenue. The viral tech companies stand out not just for their financial success (many more companies are financially successful than viral), but for deeply resonant brand strategies and product philosophies coupled with excellent execution that their competitors often lack.

But Arc had a lot of users! First early adopters started talking, then influencers, then I saw it slowly spreading outside the US. All this demand served as a validation for reporters, who felt they were reporting on the phenomenon, not merely covering a feature launch. There are many companies whose products people find OK and few that they truly love. With Sidekick, we had 15,000 of them, and even though a significant share were already paying, it only constricted the number of people who could rave about us. Meanwhile, Arc’s fans were everywhere.

This is the first requirement for virality and the most obvious: users. But you need more than users, you need hardcore fans and you need them to be publicly vocal. I’d say that you need to have a concentrated set of users: better to capture a single tribe but completely, then expand afterward. Startup founders and VCs are one example of a good audience, because they can pay and have a lot of clout. That’s why apps like Superhuman and or Granola were so successful in capturing them. And suddenly everyone uses the “thing” and you’re behind, which creates FOMO for others. Raving users are the first pillar of virality.

Arc was built by the company with a highly unusual name: The Browser Company. Far from the usual nouns (sometimes with skipped or added letter), that’s how people name their businesses in late 1800s, not 2020s. It was truly unique and burnable, because anybody trying to follow them would instantly become a copycat (Jordi Hays had a great post on this). It’s quirky, it’s fun and it hints at their main goal: building a new redefined browser, the first company launched to do so since Mozilla.

Each viral company clearly communicates its purpose and values, which makes their brands memorable and engendered loyalty among users, investors, and even talent. And the brand is one thing competitors can’t copy. This is the second pillar: great storytelling. Stripe isn’t a card acquiring platform, they’re growing the GDP of the Internet. Lovable’s tagline is “building the last piece of software”. You don’t necessarily have to have grand views. Linear calls itself a purpose-built tool for planning and building products. Straight and to the point, just like everything is about them. Every startup is unique.

And most of these companies need the enemy. It can be a single product, a company, or an entire faceless industry. For Linear it was Jira. For Stripe it was the the very challenge of accepting payments on the web. With Arc, Josh Miller gave talks on why you need a better browser than Chrome.

Along with brands like Stripe and Linear, Arc proves that viral startups are obsessed with product taste, a rigorous attention to form and function that goes far beyond what’s common in traditional enterprise software. Early adopters and powers users definitely care for delightful software, which is why they share praises and screenshots publicly, which fuels the growth further.

If your product solves the pain but hard to use, you will not get public praises, and then you won’t be able to launch a flywheel of generating new users and referrals. Superhuman famously built a major part of their brand around the need to get all interactions down to 100ms or less, which is supposedly the border where people notice delays. That extreme love to the product among its small but powerful subset of users picked everyone’s curiosity, acquired tastemakers, and later converted into the demand from truly profitable market of enterprise customers.

Superhuman also came up with the PMF metric that perfectly defines delightful and useful products: asking how disappointed would the users be if they could no longer use the app (good if over 40% of them are very disappointed). Although, it can be slightly misleading in case of unique monopolistic products you can’t replace (don’t like using it but don’t want it gone anyway). So now we have the third pillar: delightful product.

Don’t all companies care about their user experience and try to bring delight? Everyone wishes they’d do this, few have the capacity. The hardest thing, of course, is that you can’t copy this by hiring an agency. It’s something the company must have internally and the direction should come from the founders themselves. Any friction ruins the experience. You might even have a good product, but if it’s considered “heavy” or “laggy” you will never get the laurels.

The best viral companies hire and empower people with a natural sense of what makes software elegant, intuitive, and delightful. It’s hard to find such people and even harder to hire them in the first place, because they have many opportunities open. Usually they were involved in building similarly great products before, even if those didn’t work out. Cursor, a $30Bn AI coding IDE, specifically hires great people over great candidates:

At Cursor, the recruiting process looks like this: post the name of someone really, really good in the #hiring-ideas channel in Slack, swarm that person with attention, conduct team interviews (wide range of “process” here), and if the desire is mutual, they start on Monday.

A product that end-users can easily touch helps a lot. Indeed, Adyen has grown its processing volume and revenue in lock step with Stripe, but focuses on larger merchants, meanwhile any developers can sign up for Stripe and connect it to their personal blog if they wished to do so.

The real truth is none of these metrics can be faked. Either you have raving users or you don’t. You technically could care a lot about the story you tell, but your ability to execute this is what’ll be the blocker. The same goes for the delightful product: a desire to make one doesn’t necessarily translate in your ability.

What else?

There’s a fourth quality at the intersection of the first three: built-in shareability. Viral startups play status games and embed virality loops directly into their product in various ways. Sometimes it’s very obvious, like with Superhuman, which had two specific things. First, it literally added “Sent via Superhuman” to people’s signature by default. Anyone could do this, but what matters is who were the people sending emails with such a signature: founders of sought-after startups, powerful executives, popular venture capitalists. Second, it allowed all of their users to refer their contacts to Superhuman directly, one by one, which fueled both FOMO and their feeling of importance.

Sometimes it’s just the opposite. The first AI notetakers, like Otter and Fireflies, used the same model of sending a bot to join your calls. Instant virality, since they join all your calls and other see them. Granola differentiated itself specifically by not doing this. At the same time, many of its users (ideally all of them but that wouldn’t be truthful) disclosed they were recording the calls to their contacts, which made those curious and interested. Alex Konrad covered Granola and said:

Granola is the first AI note-taking app that I’ve actually enjoyed using – and didn’t feel like a gimmick or more work. It’s still small, but gaining super fans in VC and founder circles.

Shareability might come in a myriad ways. A YouTuber producing endless content about their Notion dashboard is sharing and promoting the product itself. But the most straightforward way is when you can either share some content with others via a link or ideally collaborate with them — Figma built their entire product on top of this idea.

So, here are the must-have pillars for viral products:

1. Raving users
2. Great storytelling
3. Delightful product
4. Built-in shareability

These seem to be necessary, but aren’t sufficient. Companies that are already hugely successful have their advantages baked-in. But the real question is at what point do they receive it? How do you actually start from scratch if you want to build a viral startup?

I don’t think anybody can have a clear answer of this. Most of these companies weren’t too obvious shortly after inception as well. Lovable now has $200M in ARR and looking to raise funding at a $6Bn valuation, but this very idea is the team’s third pivot. And Stripe famously had only 50 users two years after launch.

Patrick Collison: “If you’re working on a startup that’s a bad idea, it’s going to feel like slow-going. But if you’re working on a startup that’s a good idea, it may feel like slow-going too”.

And the end of the day, it was a lot of work done by very smart people willing to go through this mud of early stage.

All viral companies are united by the fifth quality: they are unreasonable about something. One or a few very particular things at least. You need cornerstones, the ideas you uniquely believe in and ready to commit fully. Cornerstones help to define everything you do and bring unique taste to it. They bring believers and fans, candidates and users. This is the magic that people see in products and the reason why they love them. Because of this, viral companies tend to go the extra mile and do things that surprise people.

Stripe realized that their actual users were developers and committed to being a developer-first company. All other payment processing services focused on the business; when a deal was made, developers would be required to integrate regardless. But Stripe decided they’d have the best API and the best docs, so that developers on the ground might either make a decision themselves or support Stripe in front of the stakeholders.

This is also why Stripe launched Stripe Atlas, their company registration tool, and Stripe Press, their own publishing. Both support their mission of growing the GDP for the Internet (and generate more clients for them along the way), and are generally quite unusual for any tech company and specifically for their area of work. But they did it anyway, because this is what makes them a magnet and a mission worth associating with.

A good method for understanding whether something is unreasonable is trying to imagine this happening at a regular corporation. Most corporations are like cakes: they are built from countless levels of hierarchy and approvals. Can you spend an unreasonable amount of time on polishing a feature to perfection? Or can you approve and put up a billboard in 8 hours like Ramp can? As a startup, you main advantage is speed and the quality of execution, along with the hope that you won’t lose it as you grow. The most successful viral companies are the ones that preserve it for many years.

Superhuman’s first deck looked very different from all other startup presentations. It was basically a collection of screenshots, a vision board of their taste, with no charts or forecasts at all, all supported by their core belief that all interactions should take 100ms or less. The founders repeated this talking point so often others started believing it too — and associated their product with taste and speed.

Lovable itself decided to focus on transparency and speed of iteration for their community engagement. They shared casual behind-the-scenes updates and stories of both successes and failures. They turned their day-to-day work into social media content. When a user reported a bug, they’d rush to fix it and report about this publicly and mention the time that it took for everyone to see. Lovable wanted its users to cheer the process.

An early stage startup often doesn’t have too many things to be proud of. But you can always take pride in being unreasonable about something. About your customers, your developers, your design, your speed or something else. Figure out that cornerstone and turn it into artifacts you can share through product features, emails and social media posts. Show how much you’re doing for your customers or how much money you’re saving for them. Show your best designs and explain what unreasonable process you took to end up with them. Show how fast you’re willing to move.

Be unreasonable about something and people will remember this.