Founders go viral and most of X never sees it

There's a platform right now where founders are raising capital, launching companies, and building hundred-million-dollar brands.

Most founders still think X is a political app.

Meanwhile I'm working with dozens of different 7, 8, and 9-figure founders on it every single day.

What's happening on the platform feels exactly like early YouTube, early Instagram and early LinkedIn.

The window where you could show up, build a name, and lock in an advantage that nobody could replicate later no matter how hard they tried.

3 things are happening on X right now that don't exist together anywhere else:

1. Who’s there

Instagram has 2 billion users. X has around 300 million. Most people hear that and think X is too small. That's exactly what makes it work because you're not fighting 2 billion people for attention, you're in a room where the founders, investors, and operators running real companies are concentrated in one place.

The CEO of Netflix is tweeting almost daily.

Think about the last conference you went to where the talks were fine but the hallway conversations were the entire point.

That's X every single day.

2. The algorithm

It's completely interest-based now. A founder with 500 followers can land on the feed of someone with 100,000 followers because what he said was relevant to the right people using the right keywords.

Look at Sean Frank, founder of Ridge Wallet.

He can go fully viral inside Ecom X and the rest of the platform doesn't even know it happened.

There's Ecom X, SaaS X, Agency X, AI X and each one running its own conversations, and the people in those communities know what's happening in their industry before anyone else does.

3. The culture

X is built around writing. You don't need a camera, B-roll, lighting, or an editor. You don't need to perform.

You write about what you're seeing in your business, what's working in your industry right now, and the people reading it are the founders and operators in the trenches doing the same thing you are.

When someone replies to your post, it's the CEO of a company you respect giving you their take. That doesn't happen on Instagram and it definitely doesn't happen on TikTok.

What most people miss about how names travel on this platform is they think it's about posting.

But the founders who become well-known are just the ones who show up in other people's conversations.

When you reply to someone's post and add something genuinely useful, their entire audience sees your name. When you quote a take and build on top of it with your own experience, you're borrowing their reach and stacking your authority on it.

That's how a 21-year-old named Roy Lee built Cluely, posted his launch on X, hit 10 million views in a week, signed up 70,000 users in seven days, and ended up with Andreessen Horowitz showing up at his office to hand him $15 million. The company is now valued at around $120 million.

That's how my friend Dan Koe wrote an article that got so much traction Elon Musk and the head of product at X created a million-dollar challenge directly inspired by it.

That's how Eddie Malouf who'd been quiet on X for 15 months grew from a couple thousand followers to over 8,000 in a few months once we took over his account, sold out his mentorships, and closed five of eight leads from a single post.

Every platform goes through this window. YouTube had it. Instagram had it. LinkedIn had it.

X is in it right now.

If you start posting today, a year from now you're in shape. Two years from now you're competitive. Three years from now you're dangerous. Wait three years to start and you're running the same race with zero training while everyone else has been building for the entire stretch.

Every single one of my clients tells me the same thing. They wish they'd started earlier.

What you’re going to do now:

If you're going to use X to build a name in your industry, stop thinking of it as a posting game.

The fastest way to get the right people to know who you are is by showing up in the conversations they're already having.

Here's what to do this week:

1. List 10 founders, operators, or investors in your space whose audience overlaps with the people you want to reach.

2. Open their profiles every morning. Read their last 2-3 posts.

3. On at least 3 of them, leave a reply that’s a counter-take, a specific example from your own business, a piece of context their audience doesn't have.

4. Once a week, quote one of their posts and build on it.

Do this for 30 days and the right names will start recognizing yours.

That's how you’re going to use X to build your personal brand and your business.

— Wiz