Is There a Secret Formula to Creating Viral Content?

The other day I posted about Lemonade’s IPO and was shitting a little bit on the VC model, raising money and making no profit, and that post went viral with now over 200k views (linked below).

After that post, a client reached out if we could ideate more viral content for them. I’d love to but here’s the problem with that:

It is very hard to predict virality - I had no clue my Lemonade post would go viral before posting it. But being controversial and polarizing gives you a better chance (and you need to be thoughtfully polarizing, I’ve made the mistake of trying to be controversial for the sake of being controversial).

That means, if you want to go viral, you have to be okay with pissing some people off.

Almost any post that goes viral (unless it’s some random funny meme) attracts some degree of hate. So you need to be ok with that. (My Lemonade post got plenty of comments saying I’m a kid who has no clue what he’s talking about)

So next time you ideate content, ask yourself “Do I have an opinion/POV that goes against the established beliefs?”

If yes, make also sure you’re ok with potentially pissing off some of your connections (clients, prospects).

Even with viral posts, there is no free lunch.