This is how to go viral on social
Ahmet Yanik grew Mavi Gadget to more than 62 million followers with no outside funding. He treats virality as something you can mostly engineer: volume, signals, timing, and a comment section you plan before you post.
Ahmet YanikFounder, Mavi Gadget
Erdinc EkinciHostProfile ↗01A bootstrapped start
Ahmet Yanik was born in Turkey, studied in the Czech Republic and later moved to the US. His family runs a trucking business between Turkey and Europe, so building something felt natural. He did not want family money. He worked through university and built everything himself.
Mavi Gadget is a social commerce marketplace for unusual products: home decor, gift ideas, pet supplies you have not seen before. Sellers come because of the reach. The audience grew without paid ads.
The two met at a startup conference in Busan. The first part of this conversation was recorded in thirty minutes before a flight. The second part went deeper on a call.
02Quantity first, then signals
His first rule is volume. You cannot go viral with a few polished posts. Early on, quantity beats quality, because every post is a test.
The second rule is to measure everything. His team runs more than thirty accounts, from 50,000 followers to almost two million each. No person can watch them all, so they built their own analytics tool to see which post is taking off on which account, and which products are trending. A format that wins on one platform is copied to the others straight away.
Pinterest gave him the first breakthrough. He still recommends it if you sell something unusual, because people go there to discover things.
“Quantity over quality. Otherwise, you cannot go viral.”
- Post a lot
- Track comments, views and timing
- Find the format that won
- Repeat it on every platform
03What every viral video has
A post made just to post goes viral only by luck. He says you can engineer most of the result and leave a smaller part to luck. He does not pretend luck is zero. If it were, he says, he would have a billion followers.
Start from the comments. Before you publish, imagine what people will write under it. A purely informational post gives them nothing to say. A product with a surprise in how it is used gives them a reason to react.
Then pick the time. Post when your audience is on the phone and free to react, such as on the commute, and not in the middle of work. And stay to reply. Interaction in the first hours tells the algorithm the post matters.
04With no budget
For a founder with little money, his answer is time. Thirty minutes a day is not enough to think of ideas, make them and publish. Treat content as real work with real hours.
On AI-made videos, he is careful. Some reach hundreds of millions of views and earn very little, because the audience is not worth much to advertisers. People also notice when something feels fake.
05Do not overthink. Keep posting
His last advice is the simplest. If you like the content you make today, you are probably too late. You should look back in a year and not like it. That means you posted while you were still learning.
People will call it overnight success when you pass a million followers. They did not see the years of posting ideas that felt awkward. Posting those is better than not posting.
“Don't overthink. Just keep posting.”
What to take with you
- Post often. Each post is a test, not a masterpiece.
- Plan the comments before you publish.
- Pick the hour when your audience is free to react, then reply.
- Copy your own winning format to every platform.
- If you are proud of every post, you are posting too little.
This feature is an editorial summary of a public conversation hosted by Erdinc Ekinci. Quotes come from the recording and are lightly trimmed. Figures are the speaker's own. Nothing here is investment advice.
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