Here are 6 notes + personal takes I wrote down when reading Cluely

@openmartai and myself:

1. Everyone wants to go viral, but virality has its prerequisites: the content itself has to actually be worthy of more attention.

- Why can shitposting go viral? Because it sparks emotional resonance — it’s polarizing, or it’s so absurd it doesn’t make sense.

- Novel ideas can go viral because they use creative methods (a unique celebration post, for example) to present something ordinary (Pylon's bell ringing act)

- Genuine, high-quality videos

2. generally need 10K+ followers base, and that post itself must've reached a decent number of ppl. If it’s truly worthy of virality, then it will spread widely.

3. (My personal take) Virality rewards for those who have been preparing for a long time but haven’t yet been seen. Virality is not something easy to copy.

4. Virality is an acquisition channel — it sits at the top of the funnel, and it does not solve retention. That’s why you need to make sure you’re either in the stage of collecting feedback, or you’ve just post-PMF and need users to grow. These two scenarios are the most ideal conditions for virality. I totally agree with this

5. Even if Cluely’s social media hit several million views, those didn't translate into real downloads. You don't ask for everyone to know you — only the focus group. So maybe, you doesn’t necessarily need to become another pylon/ artisan/ fluently. If our DAU and retention are more important (which are just closer to revenue), then making knowledge content — maybe even just posting a ZoomInfo vs. Apollo comparison on reddit — would likely be more effective than trying some flashy stunts on X.

6. Virality as top-of-funnel acquisition works better for consumer products > B2B. For B2B, going viral = just branding.