How Tom built a Viral Post Generator with 1.7 Million Users
The No-Code Exit Story of Viral Post Generator and Tom Orbach
The interview this week is with Growth Marketer Tom Orbach. Learn how:
🦠 he built a web app with No-Code that went from joke to viral hit
😈 you can use Reddit to promote your product
👯 it got acquired thanks to the huge traction (1.7M users in total)
🍿 the business that bought it is using it as side project marketing
Enjoy it.
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🔥 Maker Interview
Hello Tom, tell us a little bit about yourself.
My name is Tom Orbach, I'm 27 years old. I live in Tel Aviv, Israel. I started my career journey as a lawyer, and then I moved on to pursue my dream and become a marketer.
I felt like working in law doesn't really allow me to reach my full potential, and I could use my creative skills much better in the tech world as a marketing professional.
Regardless, I started with no-code a long long long time ago: I built flash-based websites with Wix and acquired many domains in the early 2000s when I was a kid.
Today, I'm a Senior Growth Marketing Manager at the leading cloud security company, Wiz. In addition, I'm a marketing lecturer at Reichmann University here in Israel. I love running growth experiments and testing new channels. Viral Marketing is my cup of tea.
Tell us about your product that you made?
Viral Post Generator is a humoristic tool for creating LinkedIn posts. A user is asked two questions: "What did you do today?", and "What is your inspirational advice?". The tool then prompts the user to choose a 'Cringe' level for their desired post, after which it creates a custom-made post. The results are always based on real LinkedIn posts that went insanely viral.
How did you get the idea?
That's a great story actually. In order to create viral posts on Linkedin (as part of my job as a marketer), I began scraping LinkedIn's most popular posts of all time to try to "reverse engineer" them.
I was shocked to realize that they all had one thing in common: they were all self-centered, even a bit narcissistic. For example:
A post by a CEO who fired employees — instead of describing how the employees must feel, he talked about how he felt.
A post by someone starting a new job — instead of talking about the new workplace, they discuss their own virtues and the reasons they probably got the job.
A post about helping someone in their career — again, it's not about the people they help, but rather about themselves.
Another common characteristic of really viral LinkedIn posts is that they are a bit rebellious. Whether you write about standing up to your CEO, or changing your professional photo to a human one, or putting your family/health first — you'll probably go viral.
I think LinkedIn users are aware of that. Although they know "something is wrong" with the posts they engage with, they continue to play the LinkedIn game with the hope it will help them with their careers.
So I simply hit that nerve: Just as expected from a marketer, I took an insight everyone secretly agrees upon and made it public. The "Confirmation Bias" you often read about in Behavioral Economics books is at play here. To sum up, this tool was mainly built to make everyone laugh, but also as a criticism of the "self-loving" culture on LinkedIn.
Which No-Code tools did you use ?
I built it with Adalo. Some language processing is happening behind the scenes with an API, but it's mostly no-code on top of Adalo.
While I have *some* coding background, I preferred not to deal with it at all. With Adalo and other tools, I like the fact that I can pay everything at once and get both frontend, backend, no need to take care of downtimes, etc...
Do you want to learn building apps with Adalo? Check out this masterclass.
How did you launch and grow your product?
I first launched this tool in Hebrew, which was a huge success in Israel (over 100K users), so I repeated the same process for English posts as well. I published it on LinkedIn, Twitter, Reddit, and Product Hunt and it received great reviews. In the last 72 hours (since the tool launched in English), more than 45,000 posts have been generated.
In the "result" page (after you provide your inputs), there's a prompt that invites you to take a screenshot and share. A lot of users shared their creations, and that's how most of the growth came to be. I also pushed it myself on social media and forums like Reddit.
Can you share some tips for promoting a product on Reddit?
To find the best Sub Reddit: Search Google for [industry]+site:reddit.com or [competitor]+site:reddit.com
To write a good post: here is an Airtable full of examples of successful promotional Reddit posts.
I highly recommend engaging in the comments of other posts before creating your own. Giving real value in the comments is essential and could drive huge impact to your brand (simply mention what you do in the last sentence of the comment).
Create a Reddit username with the name of your project and ideally the TLD at the end so people know where to go to access it
You can use this tool to target specific keywords and phrases to your niche, get alerted via email when you can comment on new Reddit posts
Why and how did you sell it?
Less than a week after launching the tool, the founder of Taplio saw it on Product Hunt and contacted me. He asked what's my price. I gave a really high offer and he declined (didn't even give a counteroffer). After the product blew up on Twitter and got covered by huge outlets and got 1M+ users, he came back and agreed to the original price I suggested. On the day I sold it, I had 1.7M users in total.
Why did the buyer want to buy it?
The buyer wanted to get more exposure and awareness to their own platform Taplio. Taplio is a Linkedin extension tool that helps creators and businesses. It's very clear why they wanted to buy the Viral Post Generator: People who used my product probably had LinkedIn accounts (because otherwise, it wouldn't be interesting for them) and therefore the connection to Taplio was natural.
What kind of advice would you like to share with someone who wants to sell their No-Code project?
Create a lot of traction online, and the buyer will come.
Where can we go to learn more about you and your projects?
I'm currently building Marketing Ideas — a huge library of 100+ proven marketing ideas, with real-world examples & full guides. Join the waitlist today and you'll be among the first to get access. Only a few spots remain for the closed beta group.
In addition, I'd love to connect on LinkedIn.
Thanks Tom for sharing your cool story. Keep on building!
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Thanks for sharing, Katt! Super excited to have you featuring my story 🎉