Exa, an AI-powered search engine, gains 1.7M users with viral "Twitter Wrapped"

Every indie hacker knows the power of side project marketing: shipping free projects that complement and boost traffic to your main product.

Perhaps the most successful side project of all time is Spotify Wrapped. Spotify released its annual personalized recap in 2016, and today, it is used by over two hundred million users and routinely increases Spotify downloads by 20%, no small feat for an app with over 626 million active users.

Spotify Wrapped is so successful that it's been copied by basically everyone. Apple Music, YouTube, The Washington Post, Duolingo, Reddit, Nintendo... you get the point. Curiously, though, there has not yet been a version for Twitter (X).

It turns out that Ishan Goswami and his team at Exa, a startup that provides AI applications with high quality web data, also found this curious, so on December 26th they launched Twitter Wrapped.

To say it went viral would be the understatement of the year. It had half a million views in the first four hours and it hasn't slowed down since. Just four days later, the launch tweet has 59,000 reposts and 13.6M views, which has translated to 1.7M users.

The reason it went viral is the same reason that Spotify Wrapped goes viral: it's an inherently sharable product. It's fun to share your Twitter obsession and twin, just like it's fun to share your favorite songs and artists. That's why everyone from Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian to YC CEO Garry Tan is posting their results.

And once the viral snowball gets going, it turns into an avalanche very quickly.

Ishan has been live tweeting the whole experience, and he is understandably euphoric.

It will obviously be hard to duplicate Exa's success, but if this doesn't convince you to give side project marketing a try, nothing will. There's perhaps no better way for a engineering-inclinced founder to market their startup.