On Generating Hype through Hate
Tales from the Twitter Archives with Zette Founder & CEO Yehong Zhu
So much happens in startupland that it’s easy to forget all the crazy stories you live through along the way. So today I wanted to take a beat to reflect on a fun and viral marketing moment from an early chapter of our company’s history.
In my past life, I used to be a product manager at Twitter. Before founding Zette, my job as a PM was to work with designers and engineers to launch new features for Twitter’s 300M+ users. Yet despite having worked on the Tweets team, it was often still a daily struggle to figure out what to tweet.
So when it came time to promote our newest product launch at Zette, I thought of a fun new marketing challenge that could leverage the potential for virality that Twitter was famous for. The idea was simple:
What if I tweeted a day in the life of me running Zette?
I knew that a lot of these “day in the life” stories online were boring by default, and I didn’t want people to fall asleep halfway through mine. So I decided to do something a little different.
I crafted the tweets to sound casual and conversational, portraying the life of a startup CEO in a funny and intimate way. I wrote about picking up business cards, approving designs, and attending meetings, all with captions that had high potential to go viral. I made sure to include Zette branding in every tweet, spending over an hour crafting it before sending it out into the world. For all my efforts, I was hopeful that I would get at least 100 likes.
I never expected that my tweets would blow up on the internet.
At first I’d gotten the 100 likes that I’d wanted. People were commenting, “Oh, this is so cool. Thanks for sharing your day.” Or, “Awesome, I just signed up for Zette.”
Then I remember being at a friend’s house, and noticing that my phone was buzzing nonstop. That’s strange, I thought — why would I have this many notifications? Upon opening Twitter, I realized that these were all from new people following me and commenting on my tweets.
I read a couple of really, really negative comments which initially took me by surprise. But with every post you’re going to get a few comments that aren’t positive, and that’s pretty normal.
What ended up happening is that everyone else piled on. It started a hate train, where people were quick to jump in and accuse me of everything from being an evil capitalist overlord to being the reason why poverty existed to having built a totally useless product. Someone told me that I needed to resign as CEO, pack up and go work in the uranium mines. Another said, “All the things that you listed, I can do them for five minutes a day while going to the bathroom.”
Multiple news publications picked up the Twitter post, re-writing the hate comments into standalone articles about me. To this day, you can still find headlines about me and about my company online — as well as multiple hateful articles — many of which were even syndicated in Apple News!
One of my angel investors texted me a screenshot of me with an unflattering title and picture attached letting me know, “You’re famous. You’re on my Apple news feed.” I just thought, how is this even news? Is this actually what the market leader in my industry is promoting as newsworthy content? I couldn’t believe how broken the media industry was if this was what people were reading in their feeds, and I was glad to be an entrepreneur in the space fixing it.
On one hand, it wasn’t fun being attacked by every stranger and anonymous account on the internet. On the other hand, our metrics were soaring! We received a 30% spike in our metrics because the tweet thread got us somewhere between 2–3 million impressions. Everyone was talking about it, everyone was retweeting it. The silver lining was that for every five hate tweets, there was one positive tweet saying, “this is a really good product actually — thanks for building this.”
I was honestly surprised by how effective our marketing strategy turned out to be. Controversy wasn’t what I was originally going for, virality was — but when I realized that this was going viral either way, I leaned into the engagement.
I was also surprised by the lengths that some strangers on the internet were willing to go to interact with me. To the point where I even got physical hate mail to our company address. Some guy had written to me on nice autumn stationery in cursive ink, writing down all the reasons why he hated Zette. I thought, wow, this is actually a lot of effort. I got a lot of virtual mail, but that was easy because anyone can send hate over a DM. But to send it in the physical? Hey, I think that’s actually an impressive step.
The moral of the story is that there are lots of ways to get attention for your product and brand. Although viral hate marketing is a very unconventional tactic, I’d argue it’s one of the more effective ones out there because ultimately we spent $0 in marketing and reached 3 million people and counting. So that’s the story of how Zette became the talk of the town for about a week on Twitter.
