Maximizing unplanned virality

I didn’t expect our biggest growth spike to come before we officially launched, but in April, it was time to buckle in anyways. Alix Earle, Gen Z’s it girl who boasts 12M followers across TikTok & Instagram, visited Harvard Business School and featured our startup SECONDSENSE in a TikTok documenting her day. That mention alone increased our page visits by 32,000%, user base by 116x, and seriously accelerated our first raise.

Here’s what happened, and how we maximized the moment.

⚡ The setup
I was in my last semester at HBS when Alix came to campus. She joined a few classes, visited our Retail & Luxury club, and spoke transparently about building influence into brands + conversion. Later that night, she came to a dinner hosted by a professor, where a few of us founders got to share what we were working on.

As expected, she filmed bits throughout the day, including a round robin where some of us students shared a few seconds about the companies we’re building. For a few seconds in the middle, you can see me explain SECONDSENSE — our platform that empowers shoppers with data and ease to shop luxury resale across the internet, from one beautiful search experience.

On April 16th, she posted, and the video got 3.6M views.

📈 The 48 hours after

• Our brand TikTok grew 3x to 35k followers
• We received 1000+ of comments from consumers with excitement, feedback, and questions
• Received hundreds of inbounds from job seekers, angel & institutional investors, and supply-side vendor marketplaces

People flooded the comments under her post tagging friends and saying they were checking out the site immediately. Some even said it was already in their group chats. I started getting a wave of new followers on my own TikTok too, drawn to the behind-the-scenes founder content I’d been posting already.

The best part is it didn’t feel like "influencer hype." Alix’s audience is so organically aligned with ours, that it felt like actual curiosity and interest in the product. A moment like this offers a lot to gain, but as a team of one, it’d be easy to leave a lot on the table.

💡 How we leaned into the moment
Instead of watching the moment pass, I went into sprint mode:

• Optimized for virality: I engaged Alix’s post in real time from our brand account, commented early, and encouraged shares. Timing is crucial, be ready to go in the first hour.
• Gave people something to land on: I quickly made complementary videos + TikToks that explained the product more fully, so the influx didn’t bounce away. This allowed us to generate an incremental +3M views on our own content.
• Cleaned up infrastructure: We fixed the downtime, sure — but in a larger sense, we’ve quickly leveled up the product experience to meet this audience where they are: design-first, intuitive, & trustworthy. You can check out our newly launched platform at www.secondsense.co!

💰 It even impacted our fundraising
I hadn’t actively begun fundraising conversations, though knew it was on the horizon. But after Alix’s post, we moved fast.
Investor interest started coming in, and we decided to lean in. We closed our round within a month—much earlier than planned—and began building out the team.

That wouldn’t have happened without this unexpected wave of traffic and proof-of-market energy. Jumping head first into the VC carousel so early reinforced the non-negotiability of being nimble in this stage.

🔑 Lessons for other builders

• Don’t let virality happen to you—take it by the reins. Treat it like a creative growth challenge that can strike at any moment.
• Have a protocol. You don’t need a crisis doc, but you should know what you’d do if your product went viral on TikTok, Substack, Reddit, etc.
• Speed > perfection. Virality is perishable. If you wait too long to be ‘perfect’ before showing up for the conversation, you’ve already missed it.

If you’re building something with shareability baked in, don’t assume you’ll get to plan your big moment. Just make sure you’re ready when it finds you.

While we’re still early in our journey, this has been an exciting inflection point for our now growing company, and we’re excited to see where our next arc lies.

We’re excited to be finally re-launching with our new and improved platform to better bring the power of data to our users’ shopping experience. Let us know what you think! https://www.producthunt.com/posts/secondsense-beta?utm_source=other&utm_medium=social