in today’s signal?

• 🚀 it’s time - we’ve switched to a free trial model!

• 📡 did we lie? the world’s first one-man, billion-dollar company is here…

• 🔧 we’re going all in for Q2.

• 🔥 Claude isn’t gonna make you rich

• 📈 50,000 views in ONE day…

• 📺 Nick Saraev called us out?

• 🔍 this week's tiktok trends across the top markets/industries

🚀 important announcement

Virlo now offers a free-trial for new users!

Try Virlo free for 7 days.

Full access, any plan, zero commitment.

start for $0 → virlo.ai/?via=organic

📡 what's happening in online biz

It’s kind of crazy to think that just three weeks ago we predicted:

the first billion-dollar solo company will be built by a marketer.

Everybody was talking about it - both OpenAI and Anthropic founder’s placed their bets on this. And honestly, if there was a Polymarket prediction on this, I’d be a millionaire. Because Matthew Gallagher (founder of Medvi, a telehealth company), just did it out of his LA apartment with just $20K in business funds to his name.

$401M in the first year, on point to do ~$1.8B this year.

And he only needed one employee, AI.

But his stack is actually as simple as it gets:

• Copy and messaging: Claude, ChatGPT & Grok

• Ad creatives: Midjourney + Runway

• Audio: ElevenLabs

Nothing fancy, just the simple stuff.

Claude isn’t gonna make your rich.

Look… we knew it was going to happen sooner or later this year. But I mean, THREE weeks after we predicted it?

Talk about a speed run.

And all he needed was that tech-stack. No proprietary tech, unnecessary VC hires, or a 20-person team to scale his company.

The only things he did actually delegate to third-party hires were things tasks that needed outsourcing - clinical compliance, licensing, pharmacy fulfilment.

All white-labeled.

But the part that actually made him billions was kept in-house. And that was learning, and acting on what his market responds to.

Nowadays, scrolling on slop-infested feeds like X or LinkedIn will tell you nonsense like: “RIP Ecom Agencies… Claude Code just replaced your entire offer.“ and make you install a bunch of different AI tools that build low-value systems/workflows for your business. And at this point, what business isn’t somewhat using a bit of Claude, or OpenClaw in their stack?

So, don’t limit your horizon.

What made Matt the first billion-dollar solopreneur, was setting up the same AI tools the online biz world has been raving about (Claude Code, etc.) and focusing on his what he fed it:

• Viral video hooks in the GLP-1 space

• Trending formats driving the most website traffic

• And angles that are quickly burning out for his competitors.

All before even spending a dollar on Meta Ads to scale his AI-UGC campaigns.

Why should you care?

If there’s one thing you learn from this mans success, let it be this.

In life, we have inputs, and we process them to make outputs. But regardless of our process, if we DO NOT have high-quality inputs, we will never produce our desired outputs.

Now put this into the perspective of where you currently are in life, and where Matt is.

You both have the exact same processes to scale to $100M/months: Claude Code (which if you’re not using, you are truly behind), and generative AI’s like Midjourney or ElevenLabs to produce your content.

But you do NOT have Matt’s inputs.

You’re just as low-skilled as every other failed marketer in the world, whose copy gets no sales, drives no emotions, and makes viewers swipe away in milliseconds - like an ugly Tinder match.

So focus on ensuring your systems have high-quality inputs before anything else. Or you’ll never escape from the pits of slop-hell.

If your desired outcome is to grow your business with social media marketing across platforms like TikTok, and Instagram, the ONLY input you’re missing right now is intelligence.

So we built Virlo to fill the gap.

All you have to do is sign up for free and set up a social-listening agent to:

• Spy on your competitors

• Surface viral videos in your market

• And track hooks, formats and angles that crush

Before you write a single word of copy or spend a dollar on production costs.

Matt had access to this exact intelligence… now it’s your turn.

start for $0 → virlo.ai/?via=organic

🔧 what we're building

We owe you an honest update. We got a few things wrong.

For months, we asked people to pay before they ever saw what Virlo actually does. Sign up, pick a plan, enter your card - then figure out whether the product works for you.

That's a terrible way to earn trust.

We knew the paywall was killing first-session retention. We knew the onboarding was too sparse. We knew Media Gen was clunky. We just kept shipping new features instead of fixing the front door.

So we fixed the front door.

What we shipped this week

1. Free trial - 7 days on any plan, full access, 100 trial credits - You see everything before you decide.

2. Rebuilt onboarding - The old version dropped you into a dashboard with no direction. The new flow: set up your content agent, connect creator tracking, run your first research-to-copy pipeline. All before paying.

3. Media Gen removed - Pulled entirely from the frontend. It wasn't up to standard. We're rebuilding audio, image, and video tools embedded inside real workflows. They come back when they're actually good.

Why we're telling you this

Because we'd rather tell you what we fixed than pretend it was always fine.

Every product has rough edges.

The ones worth using are the ones where the team fixes them instead of hiding them behind a changelog nobody reads.

If you bounced before because the paywall felt premature - come back. The door is open now.

start my free trial → virlo.ai/?via=organic

📊 the numbers

https://x.com/bolcoto/status/2040066585231077787?s=20

We've been testing what happens when you actually invest in a real video…not a just talking head TikTok, or a Loom video.

So we spent over $6K in production costs - scripting, filming, editing.

And this was the result.

50,000 views in the first day, and over 512 bookmarks.

Before I say ANYTHING else, check the date of the post.

Now look at this:

50k is my goal

Well he was right on the money.

I guess you could just say it’s great intuition from a great leader. But what really took us stood out to us, was the amount of bookmarks.

Think about the psychology behind what a single bookmark means on a commercial video for a software tool.

Over 500+ people saved it to show their team, check a feature, or come back when they're ready to decide.

That was our game-plan the entire time.

I’ll honestly say I think we lost a ton of conversions since we were still on a paywalled model at the time of release. But after realizing we’ve entered a world that attracts intentional marketers like yourselves - who know exactly what problems you want to solve for your business - we decided it was only right to lower the hesitation by switching to a free trial model.

If only the timing had been right.

But hey, still a win! - We’ve put ad spend into the video now on X, and also we’re looking to run a long-term campaign on YouTube.

📱 scroll-stopper of the week

https://www.youtube.com/watch?si=LFCNllkw1OIFhbKE&t=299

Last week, one of the biggest content creators in the AI-space called us out in his YouTube video, “Paperclip sucks, actually.“

Before I get into the nitty-gritty, just click the play button and hear it for yourself - only takes 60 seconds.

So… assuming you watched that little segment of him blasting these “setup-p*rn“ tools, we somehow got caught in the cross-fire. Now honestly? Thanks for the shout-out Nick, you didn’t necessarily call us out, or talk down on Virlo, as a platform.

From our perspective, it looks like he just curated a couple tweets to flame in his video, and didn’t really have a clue how our tool actually operates.

But let me make it clear, we are NOT:

an AI-slop tool that promotes building useless Claude Code/OpenClaw skills & workflows for a buck-fifty.

Twitter gurus, who’s only source of income is posting “setup p*rn“ to attract gullible customers via Build in Public communities on X.

or paying for sloppy promo to boost our traffic.

Like he said in the video, “The only thing that matters when you make videos, is if your videos are actually good.“

We agree with him 100%, and that’s why we built Virlo - for the types of marketers, entrepreneurs and content creators who KNOW they’re talented at creating content, but struggle to keep up with what their audience wants.

So we provide these guys with on-demand short-form intelligence that keeps them in the loop of their audience 24/7.

What you guys reading this probably DON’T know is that, we commented this exact point on Nick’s video, as a friendly opener to do some damage-control.

And 24 hours later, Nick deleted our comment.

At the end of the day, it just goes to show how far our tool has come.

Six months ago, nobody in this space cared enough to mention our tool.

Now they’re deleting our comments.

But hey, all is well - who knows… a month from now, he might change his mind & book a call with our team.

Psst!

We called you out too - the talented marketer, entreprenuer or content creator, who struggles to keep up with their audience.

You can keep ignoring the short-form data that’s sitting right in-front of you, or sign up for a free-trial and get full access to it.

You deserve to be at the top.

Start my free trial and get full access → virlo.ai/?via=organic

🔍 steal these viral trends for your business

this week's top tiktok trends across 7 industries

Every week we scrape thousands of short-form videos through Virlo and surface the ones that beat a creator's own baseline by 2x, 5x, sometimes 10x+. These aren't just accounts with pretty follower counts… they're the biggest outliers

Steal them for your business and replicate the winners!

This week's breakdown covers:

• SMMA - a day-in-the-life of cold emailing and signing clients. no tips, no hacks, just the grind on camera. 14.9% like rate because 1 in 7 viewers felt it in their chest.

• Ecom - 665 followers. 125K views. he taught one psychology trick about why two product options kill the "should I buy?" question. 1,109 people bookmarked it to go fix their store.

• B2B / SaaS - 761 followers. 39% of his entire audience saved one video. a solo founder confessed he built for years without validating the market, then shared the framework he wished he'd known. confession + framework = the most bookmarkable format in B2B.

• Local Business - a fudge shop in Shetland filmed four pans and a spoon. no voiceover, no face, no text. 566K views and 16,558 shares because people share craft, not products.

• Personal Brands - 6.1% bookmark rate. she didn't tell a story or give vibes - she gave a framework for building a brand people actually follow. structure beats personality for saves.

• Consumer Apps - 8.1% bookmark rate - highest in the entire dataset. taught his app idea playbook and added four words: "comment CLAUDE for masterclass." 337 comments = 337 warm leads from one video.

• Vibe Coders - 514 followers. 11 total videos. 64K views. screen-recorded a lovable app making money and the algorithm did the rest. the category is still wide open.

Each one includes the actual video, hook breakdown, why it works, and a fill-in-the-blank template you can adapt for your business today.

grab this week's outliers → https://www.notion.so/7-Creators-Who-Had-No-Business-Going-Viral-This-Week-But-Did-Anyway-Issue-003-33facf73e43a80fcab91c4f28db7aa1b?source=copy_link

btw i drop sauce like this every day on X and LinkedIn.

Follow my X → https://x.com/dsqjaffa
Follow my LinkedIn → https://www.linkedin.com/in/dsqjaffa