You Should Never Go Viral With Your AI App

Victor Stepanov does growth marketing at Every and has spent years building audiences at Netflix and BuzzFeed. He understands the seductive pull of virality, and why AI founders should resist it. In this piece, he argues that for AI products, sudden viral growth starves the feedback loops that make them better and chases away the very users that matter most. His three rules of “boring” growth—don’t overpromise, build in public, and talk to users constantly—offer a counterintuitive playbook for building an enduring business.—Kate Lee

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If you’re building an AI product, I hope you never go viral with it.

I hope you never feel the surge of thousands of new signups overnight, the rush of rocketing up Apple’s App Store downloads chart, the unmistakable jolt after your launch post blows up on TikTok or clocks a million impressions on X.

As counterintuitive as it sounds, if you’re building an AI product—especially an agent-native one, where an AI agent in the app can do anything that a human user can do—obscurity can be a hidden advantage, the quiet space where the shape of the product emerges, your best shot at finding true product-market fit.

I come from the mobile app world, but I’ve also spent years doing social media and marketing at companies like Netflix and BuzzFeed. In entertainment, the entire business depends on winning the attention game over and over again. If people aren’t watching or reading, nothing else matters. Today, that belief seems to be everywhere. My X feed is full of people explaining how to make your app go viral. The promise is that if a product gets attention quickly, the rest will sort itself out.

That mindset is powerful. It treats attention as proof and reach as validation. While that works in entertainment, where the product is the content, we’ve seen prominent examples in tech of how sudden, unexpected growth can backfire.

This is an even greater risk with AI products, which reveal and even increase their value through repeated interaction. They need the same users to return again and again—enough for the AI model or agent to learn them and vice versa. When a surge of one-time users arrives and quickly abandons, the churn starves the system of the feedback loops it needs to improve.

So what kind of marketing helps AI products succeed? It’s not really glamorous, and might even seem boring. If instead of reach, AI products thrive on retention and depth of relationship, then your growth strategy has to do the same. It comes down to a few practices that feel almost too simple but work because they compound over time, in the same way your product (hopefully) does.