Viral Post Generator Sold in One Week
The Story
In 2022, Tom Orbach was growth marketing manager at Israeli privacy startup Mine when he scraped 100,000+ of LinkedIn’s most successful posts to “reverse engineer” them and figure out what made a post viral (Sources 1, 2).
The pattern that stood out: narcissism. “All of these successful posts on LinkedIn had one thing in common: they were all self-centered, even a bit narcissistic” (Source 2). “I took an insight that everyone secretly agrees upon and I just made it public” (Source 2).
He turned the insight into a parody AI tool — Viral Post Generator — that asked users two questions (“What did you do today?” and “What is your inspirational advice?”) plus a Cringe level, then generated a typical LinkedIn humble brag (Source 1). “I made it just for fun, without any expectation of making money” (Source 1).
Tom built it first in Hebrew. After it took off he replicated it in English (Source 2). In August 2022 he pushed the English version on Twitter and LinkedIn and came in third on Product Hunt’s Product of the Day. Traffic hit 10,000 users a day (Source 1).
A founder of Taplio (a LinkedIn analytics Chrome extension) reached out asking if Tom would sell. The tool was free and had no revenue (Source 1). Tom named a high asking price; Taplio refused. Tom counter-proposed: he’d put a Taplio link in the tool for 24 hours to prove how much traffic it could generate. Taplio agreed (Source 1).
“I remembered that there is some community on Reddit called r/InternetIsBeautiful where they share cool free tools from around the internet. I posted there — and boom — within a few hours it reached 2 million people” (Source 1). Taplio agreed to Tom’s original price (Source 1).
Total time from launch to acquisition: one week (Source 1). Coverage followed in BuzzFeed, Business Insider, The Guardian, and others (Source 1). The tool ultimately had 2M+ users (Source 3).
Tom used the funds to buy MarketingIdeas.com — “a ‘very expensive’ dot-com he felt would make his project instantly credible as the category king of marketing ideas” (Source 3).
The acquisition put Tom on Forbes 30 Under 30 (Source 3).
Lesson for Creators
The shortest distance to a viral product is to take an insight everyone privately agrees with and make it public. Tom didn’t invent the cringey LinkedIn post — he just held up a mirror to it. The reverse engineering matters: he didn’t guess what would go viral, he scraped real data and let the pattern emerge. The other lesson is about leverage in a sale: when the buyer says no, find a way to demonstrate the value rather than negotiate against yourself. The Reddit post wasn’t a marketing tactic, it was a sales weapon.
Related
- The 1,000-Person Waitlist Built Before Launch — what the acquisition funded
- Thompson’s Law - Viral Is Just Broadcast — the framework Tom later articulated for what he had already done
- The Wiz Drops Playbook — same “make people stop scrolling” instinct, scaled to B2B
- The Microwave-in-the-Trunk Stunt That Built $28M in Sales — Yossi Levi: a different kind of attention hack with the same audacity