The Long Game and the Façade of Virality:

Old School

Pockets of the country, like Boston’s North End, hold a special place in my heart. In a time when traditions and history lose out to modernity and virality, it bucks that trend.

The North End is a quintessential spot for Italian food in the US, where artisan chefs and restaurants all compete within a few blocks of each other. As you pass a new restaurant, you can’t help but think back to a simpler time, where a chef puts their lifeblood in the ingredients. There are no McDonalds, Starbucks, or Subways here.

Why? For one, they are incredibly skilled and that is not reproducible. You can not train someone in 3 days to cook like Anthony Bourdain. And if you can’t train someone to increase your output, it’s a low value business (i.e. not scalable).

One of the chefs I spoke with spent an entire year JUST chopping garlic. Now, 40 years in, the chef has zero people skills and barely speaks English. But boy, can he cook.

This is a very rare scenario.

Most businesses are now run by, or being sold to, MBAs. They care less about the quality and mostly think about profit margins and scale.

There’s nothing wrong with that, I actually spend most of my day doing that.

But scale is anathema to elite quality.

This takes us to our next point – virality!

Virality is a Lie, Sometimes

Everyone wants to go viral. If you’re seen by millions, the thought is that 1% will convert to paid customers?

That’s thousands of new customers all paying your fee. If you sell something for $20/month, you can quickly make $20-50k per month.

This is the logic that I once had: impressions are the game.

And if virality is the game, nothing succeeds at going viral more than anger.

This is the strategy originally implemented by Fox News (and now CNN, MSNBC, etc). It was perfect elaborated on by CPG Grey almost a decade ago.

The basis for that video was actually this paper, titled “What Makes Online Content Viral?” published by two UPenn professors.

The findings are summed up as, “anger or anxiety inducing articles are both more likely to make the paper’s most emailed list.”

If you get people angry or frustrated, they will share it, and that in turns this makes something go viral. Here’s an example of three ways to title a story:

If you’re ever thinking, ‘my, we are living in scary times,’ then just remember that the news is doing its job!

Alternatively, if you read the news and thought, ‘things are great,’ would you continue to read the news tomorrow??

(Overall, the world is about the same year over year and skews towards being slightly better for the average person. Hans Rosling wrote a bestseller on this exact topic).

But still, people continue to push more salacious headlines because there’s more money in it. Being right is less valuable than being viewed. Or so one would think.

Recently, this trend has even struck a chord in the reviewer community. The most famous tech reviewer in the world, Marques Brownlee, reviewed two products (Humane Pin, Rabbit R1) and gave them horrendous scores:

 The latter, he actually says is barely reviewable.

But these reviews are not the smoking gun de virality you’re looking for.

Brownlee is incredibly thorough and has even been critiqued for being too generous to tech. He even mentions some unique features of the Humane pin that I personally would like to see developed in v2.

No, the vitriol comes from those reviewing the reviewer, like Daniel Vassallo. Here tweeted:

This critique got nearly 4 times as many views as the actual review!

‘First, do not harm’ is the socratic oath you take in medical school. Brownlee is not performing surgery, he is reviewing a product. His approach is exactly what you want in a review.

Should he hurt the business selling the product, that is not particularly his fault. So why did he go out to tweet this?

Well, Vassallo sells a course on smallbets[.]com and so it made me think he’s actually just posting things to go viral, in the hope some percent will buy his course (which has 99.99% margins).

Crazily enough, he shared this information!

Now, Vassallo saw an insane amount of traffic for his post. He mentioned that he saw 12k visitors to his site after he tweeted that out.

But guess what? Not a single person converted to a paying member. ZERO.

Virality works incredibly well for free impressions but very few actually convert. You can build a business around 1% conversion. You cannot around 0.001% conversion. Recognize the difference and always seek higher quality traffic.

The Long Game

The problem with virality is it kills your long term value. Because the top of funnel is mostly noise, the quality of the buyer is very low.

Customers with money to spend are not dumb. They buy goods and services that actually make their lives better.

If you’re a one-trick pony, people catch on. Vassallo may have personally believed the review was ludicrous, but it added no value to his underlying business. In many, it probably alienated his already large base of customers who churned from the idea that ‘speaking your mind’ was problematic.

As Warren Buffett says "It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it.”