I went viral on X.

A fake hiring product, a real $100K experiment, and what both made me rethink.

A Saturday note Hey — it’s Harshith. You know Saturdays are a little different here. I want these notes to feel less like an essay and more like I am writing directly to you. So let me tell you about the stupidest thing that happened to me this week. This week, I went viral on X. The funny part? It wasn’t one of the real products I spend so much time building. It was a fake one I made up for a joke. Someone launched an AI tool that applies to jobs for you. I quote-posted it with the opposite product: The full exchange: my fake HireShield launch above Muskan’s original tryemployable.ai post. Tap to open it on X. HireShield was not real. No product. No waitlist. Nothing. Just a 15-second video and a joke. By the time I took the screenshot, the post had crossed 281,000 views, 2,600 likes, and 325 replies. Honestly, I found that hilarious. But it also made me stop and think. I spend so much time trying to explain serious ideas properly. More context. More caveats. More features. More words. Then one stupid sentence travels further than all of it. Why? Because you understand the fight immediately. Then I came across Outbid.lol. The whole product is a public leaderboard. You pay to put your product on it. Someone else pays more and takes your spot. That’s it. One leaderboard. One public price for number one. The game explains itself. It was reportedly built in three hours. Around the 48-hour mark, its public counter had crossed roughly $100,000 in gross completed payments. Again: ridiculous. Also brilliant. You understand it before the founder finishes the sentence. That is the part I keep thinking about. I do the opposite with my own work all the time. I add another feature. Another paragraph. Another explanation. I make the idea sound more complicated because I want it to sound more serious. Maybe that is backwards. I do not think the lesson is to troll more. And I definitely do not think every product needs to be a gimmick. For me, the lesson is simpler: If I cannot make you care in one clear sentence, I probably have not made the idea clear enough in my own head. I am not pretending I have distribution figured out now. I do not. But I am taking this back into everything I am building. Before I add another feature or another explanation, I want to ask: Why should you care? Can you understand it immediately? Could you tell a friend about it without me being in the room? I am still figuring this out. What are you building right now that needs a simpler story? Hit reply. I genuinely want to know.

Harshith Vaddiparthy works with founders, operators, and teams on practical AI products, workflows, advisory, training, and mentorship. This no-JavaScript version preserves the page's core information and navigation.