Forget Going Viral

“The companies we most admire didn’t go viral. They went steady.”

Two startups launched in the same month. One made headlines across the tech press with a splashy product reveal that garnered millions of views. Investors flocked to their funding round, and their social following exploded overnight. Everyone was talking about them.

The other quietly opened their doors with a handful of committed customers. No press coverage. No viral TikToks. Just focused attention on serving those initial clients exceptionally well.

Eighteen months later, the viral sensation was shutting down. Their spectacular launch had brought temporary attention but little sustained traction. Customer acquisition costs skyrocketed after the initial buzz faded. The pressure to maintain their viral momentum pushed them to prioritise spectacle over solving real problems.

Meanwhile, the quiet startup was steadily growing. Their initial customers had become vocal advocates, bringing a consistent stream of qualified referrals. They hadn’t appeared on any “hottest startups” lists, but they’d been profitable since month eleven. They weren’t worried about their next funding round because they didn’t need one.

This isn’t an isolated anecdote. It’s a pattern that plays out repeatedly across the business landscape—one that exposes the dangerous mythology of viral growth.

The Viral Marketing Trap

We’ve been sold a dangerous narrative about business growth. The stories that dominate business media suggest that success comes through explosive viral moments—million-view TikToks, celebrity endorsements that crash websites, growth hacks that send user numbers into the stratosphere overnight.

This narrative is alluring but fundamentally deceptive.

The statistical reality is brutal: genuine virality is vanishingly rare. A study by the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute found that even for the largest brands on social media, organic reach typically extends to less than 5% of their followers. The odds of creating content that genuinely “goes viral” is similar to winning the lottery—possible, but not a sound business strategy.

More importantly, even when achieved, viral attention is ephemeral. It spikes dramatically and then vanishes just as quickly. The half-life of viral content is measured in days, sometimes hours. The media might cover you on Monday and forget you by Wednesday.

Consider the cautionary tale of Fyre Festival—perhaps the most successful viral marketing campaign in recent history. The initial promotion was masterful: gorgeous influencers, stunning Bahamian vistas, and the promise of an exclusive luxury experience generated massive attention and ticket sales.

But beneath the spectacular marketing lay an operational catastrophe. When attendees arrived, they found disaster relief tents instead of luxury villas, soaked mattresses, and sad cheese sandwiches instead of gourmet cuisine. The disconnect between the viral promise and the delivered reality wasn’t just disappointing—it was fraudulent.

Billy McFarland, the festival’s founder, is now a convicted felon who served four years in prison. The pursuit of viral attention without the gravity of actual value creation didn’t just fail as a business strategy—it became a criminal matter.

This pattern repeats with less dramatic but equally instructive examples. Elizabeth Holmes built Theranos into a £9 billion valuation through spectacular storytelling and media coverage, securing partnerships with Walgreens and Safeway before her technology was proven to work. The company’s eventual collapse wasn’t just a business failure but a stark demonstration of how the pursuit of the breakthrough story can undermine fundamental integrity.

The 2022 collapse of numerous NFT collections offers another window into this dynamic. Projects that spiked in popularity based on manufactured scarcity and celebrity endorsements crashed when the temporary attention faded, leaving buyers with digital assets that lost 90% or more of their value.

Viral isn’t a strategy. It’s a lottery ticket. And your business deserves better than a gamble.

The Hidden Costs of Virality

Beyond its ineffectiveness as a growth strategy, the pursuit of viral marketing exacts hidden costs that rarely appear in campaign retrospectives.

First, there’s the enormous opportunity cost. Resources devoted to manufacturing viral moments—creative talent, production budgets, influencer fees, executive attention—are resources not invested in improving your product, serving existing customers, or building sustainable systems.

Second, failed viral attempts can actively damage your brand. Audiences have become sophisticated at detecting manufactured “authenticity.” When your attempt at virality comes across as forced or inauthentic, you don’t just fail to gain attention—you erode trust with existing customers who recognise the disconnect between your marketing and their actual experience.

Third, viral success creates its own trap: the pressure to continually top your previous viral moments. This escalating requirement pushes businesses further from their essence and deeper into spectacle. It’s a treadmill that accelerates until you inevitably fall off.

Finally, there’s the organisational distraction factor. When the pursuit of viral moments becomes prioritised, it warps decision-making throughout the company. Product development starts to focus on what will generate shares rather than what solves customer problems. Customer service initiatives get less investment than marketing stunts.

In the language of our gravitational framework, viral marketing creates temporary attention without building sustainable attraction. It’s like trying to heat your house with fireworks—spectacular but fundamentally unsustainable.

Real Business Growth vs. Vanity Metrics

At the heart of the viral marketing trap is a fundamental confusion between metrics of attention and indicators of actual business health.

Shares, likes, views, and impressions are easy to track and impressive to report. They create the illusion of momentum. But they’re ultimately vanity metrics that have shockingly little correlation with business outcomes.

What metrics actually indicate growing gravitational pull? They’re less immediately spectacular but far more meaningful:

Retention rates: What percentage of customers stay with you over time?
Repeat purchase frequency: How regularly do customers buy again?
Referral sources: What percentage of new customers come through word-of-mouth?
Revenue per customer over time: Are you creating more value for existing customers?
Profitability trajectory: Is your business model becoming more or less efficient?

These indicators don’t make for exciting investor presentations or viral LinkedIn posts. They don’t spike overnight. But they’re the actual markers of a business building genuine gravity.

The difference is fundamental: attention is what you rent; attraction is what you own. Viral marketing might temporarily rent eyeballs, but it doesn’t build the gravitational field that pulls customers toward you naturally over time.

The Consistency Advantage

While everyone else is chasing the spectacular, there’s extraordinary power in being consistently good.

Consider Richer Sounds, the UK electronics retailer founded by Julian Richer. For over 40 years, they’ve focused on steady, customer-centric retail operations without splashy marketing campaigns. Their approach seems almost boring on the surface: treating staff exceptionally well so they provide outstanding customer service, maintaining lean operations to offer competitive prices, and solving problems promptly when they arise.

Nothing about this approach would ever “go viral.” But the results speak for themselves: profitable every year since founding, industry-leading customer satisfaction, and thousands of passionate customers who recommend them religiously. In 2019, Richer transferred 60% of the company to an employee ownership trust, the culmination of a four-decade consistency strategy that built genuine gravity.

Or look at Arup, the engineering and design consultancy founded by Ove Arup in 1946. They’ve built extraordinary gravitational pull without marketing spectacle by consistently delivering exceptional engineering work, developing deep expertise through their knowledge-sharing “Arup University,” and regularly publishing thoughtful analysis of industry challenges.

Their approach has never been “growth-hacked” or artificially accelerated. Yet they’ve grown to over 14,000 staff across 33 countries, with a reputation that naturally attracts the most complex, challenging projects and the most talented engineers. Their gravitational mass was built through thousands of consistent actions over decades, not viral moments.

Smaller businesses demonstrate the same principle. Hiut Denim revived jean manufacturing in Cardigan, Wales after larger manufacturers moved production overseas. Their “do one thing well” philosophy deliberately limits their product range to focus on quality craftsmanship. Their yearbook and customer stories create consistent touchpoints rather than viral spectacles. Without significant marketing budgets, they’ve created enough gravitational pull to develop a waiting list for their products—the surest sign of momentum.

Similarly, Australian accessories brand Bellroy has built substantial gravity through systematic product improvement rather than marketing spectacle. Their consistent incorporation of customer feedback, gradual evolution of their design language, and methodical expansion from wallets to broader carry goods has created word-of-mouth momentum without viral spikes.

The consistency advantage offers several benefits viral marketing never can:

Compound returns: Like compound interest in finance, consistent value delivery builds upon itself over time, creating accelerating returns from constant small investments.
Operational excellence: Consistency in customer-facing activities requires consistency in internal operations, creating virtuous cycles of improvement.
Trust accumulation: Regular, predictable experiences build deeper trust than occasional spectacular ones, creating the psychological safety that enables customer loyalty.
Competitive insulation: Consistency creates habitual relationships that competitors struggle to disrupt, even with temporarily better offers or flashy campaigns.
Resource efficiency: Steady approaches require less cash than spike-driven strategies, creating better unit economics and reducing funding dependency.

In a world obsessed with explosions, there’s remarkable power in the slow burn.

Building Sustainable Momentum

Shifting from a viral mindset to a consistency advantage requires a fundamental reorientation of your approach to market. Here’s how to build sustainable momentum:

1. Identify Your Rhythms

Determine sustainable frequency for key activities based on your actual capacity, not industry pressure or competitor pace:

Content creation: What publication rhythm can you actually maintain indefinitely?
Customer communication: How frequently can you meaningfully engage without becoming noise?
Product/service improvements: What development cadence allows for quality while showing consistent progress?
Community engagement: What interaction frequency builds relationships without creating burnout?

For Hiut Denim, this meant a yearbook rather than constant social content. For Bellroy, it meant seasonal product updates rather than continuous launches. For Arup, it means substantial white papers when they have something valuable to say, not on an artificial schedule.

The key question isn’t “How often should we be visible?” but rather “What rhythm can we sustain excellently without exhaustion?“

2. Create Delivery Systems

Build infrastructure that ensures consistency despite changing conditions, team transitions, or market fluctuations:

Content pipelines with work-in-progress stages that prevent gaps
Customer communication systems that don’t depend on individual memory
Improvement cycles with clear ownership and handoff processes
Knowledge documentation that preserves insights regardless of team changes

Richer Sounds has systems ensuring consistent staff training regardless of location. Arup’s knowledge management systems ensure expertise accumulates rather than departing with individual employees. Hiut’s “History Tag” system ensures the story of each pair of jeans persists independently of their marketing team.

Without systems, consistency remains an aspiration rather than an operational reality.

3. Develop Momentum Metrics

Shift your measurement focus from attention spikes to trajectory indicators:

Cohort retention analysis: Are customers staying longer over time?
Referral percentage trends: Is word-of-mouth increasing?
Engagement depth: Are customers going deeper with your offerings?
Acquisition cost trends: Is it becoming easier to attract customers?
Time-to-conversion changes: Are customers deciding more quickly?

These metrics reveal growing gravitational pull far more accurately than viral metrics like impressions, reach, or even leads generated. They measure attraction rather than just attention.

4. Build Patience Into Your Culture

Perhaps most challenging but most essential is developing organisational patience:

Celebrate consistency milestones rather than just growth metrics
Recognise steady performers as much as visible stars
Reframe “growth hacking” as “gravity building”
Create longer assessment timeframes for evaluating initiatives
Tell stories that value sustainability over spikes

This cultural shift is difficult because it runs counter to startup mythology and investor pressures. But it’s essential for building genuine gravity rather than ephemeral attention.

The Consistency Audit

How dependent is your current approach on viral hopes versus consistent reality? This brief audit will help you assess:

Marketing Reality Check

What percentage of your marketing efforts aim for viral/spectacular moments?
How many of these efforts actually produced lasting business value?
What was the opportunity cost of these pursuits?
How much of your growth strategy depends on unpredictable outcomes?

Consistency Evaluation

How predictably do you show up for your audience?
What systems ensure consistent execution despite changing conditions?
How does your consistency compare to competitors?
Where are the gaps in your consistency?

Momentum Assessment

Are you measuring spikes or trajectory?
What evidence do you have of compounding returns on consistent efforts?
How has your gravitational pull changed over time?
What would need to change to increase your consistency advantage?

Be brutally honest in your assessment. Most businesses discover they’ve been far more influenced by the viral growth mythology than they initially believed, and that their systems for ensuring consistency are far weaker than they should be.

The Quiet Power of Persistence

There’s nothing inherently wrong with receiving viral attention when it happens naturally. If your consistent excellence occasionally creates a spike of recognition, that’s wonderful—a momentary acceleration of your existing momentum.

The problem comes when we invert this relationship, pursuing viral moments as a strategy rather than focusing on the consistent value delivery that occasionally leads to broader recognition.

True gravity doesn’t spike and disappear. It accumulates and compounds.

While your competitors exhaust themselves chasing the next viral moment, you can build something far more valuable: the steady, growing gravitational pull that makes you the obvious choice in your market. Not because you trended on Twitter for a day, but because you consistently delivered excellence when no one was watching.

Virality measures how quickly something spreads. Gravity measures how strongly something attracts. Don’t confuse the two.

The companies that become truly inevitable choices in their markets—the ARMs, the Arups, the Richer Sounds—aren’t the ones that momentarily captured attention. They’re the ones that consistently rewarded attention with value, day after day and year after year.

Forget going viral. Focus on becoming the consistent, growing force of attraction that outperforms momentary sensations through the quiet power of persistence.

In the next chapter, we’ll explore how to focus this consistency on the smallest viable market—creating concentrated gravity that becomes the foundation for sustainable growth.