is NEVER the content that goes viral Read time: 4 min
A while ago I wrote a raw post called The day I almost quit Climate Insiders.
It was the closest I have ever come to walking away from everything I had built. Six months later, people still write to me about it.
Not comments. Actual emails.
The links in that post still get clicked.
Meanwhile the posts that went viral, the ones with hundreds of thousands of impressions, vanished instantly.
That contrast taught me something important about social media and about fundraising.
The work that moves people rarely goes viral. And the work that goes viral rarely moves the people who matter.
Viral creates attention.
Viral is universal. Low friction. Low nuance. Low soul.
Which is why viral almost never helps you raise capital. Because fundraising is not about volume. It is about belief.
Investors fund what they believe. Not what they scroll past.
I once had a post hit 2,000,000 views. It generated almost nothing meaningful.
Because it did not inform.
The same pattern shows up in pitching.
Founders often arrive with information. Traction. Tech milestones. TAM. Climate metrics. IRR.
Belief comes from the shift behind the numbers.
If you show only the output they stay distant.
Example.
Version 1:Our technology improves nuclear reactor efficiency by eighteen percent.”
Version 2:“Three months ago we were ready to give up. Our system kept failing at scale and we could not figure out why. It was painful because everything depended on that breakthrough. Then we noticed one tiny assumption we had never questioned. We fixed it. Efficiency jumped eighteen percent. That shift changed more than the numbers. It changed how we saw the future of the technology.”
Version 1 gets noted.
Transformation builds trust. Trust is the real currency of fundraising.
I see founders share wins without sharing the cost of the win.
Without the truth the story feels flat. Investors do not trust perfection. They trust transformation.
It is the same on social media. The posts that actually change lives are not the flashy ones. They are the honest ones.
That same pattern is the backbone of a high conviction pitch.
A quick story.
Six months ago, I chatted with a founder who followed all the growth hacks.
He was performing instead of communicating.
Then a reader emailed him saying
That message hit him harder than any metric.
He threw everything out and rebuilt.
His impressions dropped fifteen percent.
Not because he posted more.
I feel the same pull. When a post hits twenty thousand instead of two hundred thousand views I question myself.
The messages that say
The lesson.
Your best work will probably never be your most popular work.
So the next time you write or pitch ask yourself:
Not
That is how you create resonance.
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