STEEZO's Top Tips on How to Harness Going Viral

Key Takeaways:

• Protect your intellectual property by trademarking your product 
• Anticipate the concrete demand that going viral brings
• Prepare to make mistakes as an entrepreneur

How do you prepare for going viral, and how do you put this virality to good use?

When artist, entrepreneur, and advocate STEEZO came up with the idea behind TittyTape ® — a breast tape solution which made binding easier — they didn’t expect the product to immediately go viral. This virality was both a blessing and a curse, as it put the product on the map right from the beginning, but it also caught STEEZO unprepared.

"I was not ready for my viralness," STEEZO explained in an interview on my podcast, Transition of Style. "I didn’t have everything together. [...] I didn’t expect to go viral. I was just being funny on my phone. And so it’s like, going viral is good, but had I not gone viral, I would have had time to secure the bag as they say."

Drawing from that experience, STEEZO’s journey with Titty Tape teaches us some invaluable lessons on how to harness going viral to ensure your brand’s longevity and prosperity. 

Here are 3 lessons you can learn from STEEZO about preparing for virality, and making it work for your business.

Protect your intellectual property

When you come up with a brand new product that doesn’t exist on the market yet (as was the case for Titty Tape), even without taking virality into account, you may end up confronted with people stealing your idea and selling it as their own. 

This is basically what happened to STEEZO and the Titty Tape. The project came to fruition and went viral online very quickly, without any patented trademark to protect it. As a result, STEEZO, the owner and creator, was faced with many brands basically copying the product and profiting from an idea that wasn’t theirs originally. “Some of the biggest people in fashion have kind of like duped my product,” STEEZO explained.

Today, most mainstream fashion brands sell their own versions of breast tapes, under a different name but with STEEZO’s idea at the core of the product. 

You can draw from STEEZO’s experience with Titty Tape the importance of trademarking and protecting your intellectual property over your product. Even if you don’t become viral overnight, you always run the risk of other brands stealing your idea and profiting from it. To prevent that from happening, always remember to protect yourself and your brand legally.

Anticipate your virality

When a product becomes viral, you’re generally faced with an influx of orders from interested consumers, and it’s very easy to lose control of the manufacturing process. STEEZO explained that Titty Tape became viral when one of their videos gained over 500 million views in less than 24 hours.

Even if one viewer doesn’t equal one buyer, reaching this magnitude of virality always impacts the number of orders. And if you’re caught unprepared, you may lose the momentum that virality gives you. 

To make sure you’re ready, you need to have preemptively figured out the manufacturing process, the investment of capital, and the logistics of shipment and distribution. If none of these elements are under control, you’ll end up caught in a situation where the supply doesn’t meet the demand, and you won’t be able to take advantage of the opportunity of going viral.

Another important element to keep in mind is that virality is fleeting, and the level of interest and attention you reach when going viral is bound to abate at some point. Don’t rest on your laurels and expect the spotlight to always remain on you, because in most cases it won’t. You have to be prepared to adapt yourself to the ebb and flow of orders and not always expect to be functioning at the highest level of demand.

Prepare to make mistakes

Last but not least, remember that you’re never totally in control when you go viral. Getting this amount of attention and interest in a very short amount of time always brings the possibility of problems and unplanned situations, and you will most certainly end up making mistakes. 

"They say when you become an entrepreneur...you’re going to make a lot of expensive mistakes," STEEZO shared. "I made some expensive mistakes, but I learned so much."

One of those mistakes was not trademarking Titty Tape before launching it. However, this original shortcoming was corrected later on by the founder, and today, Titty Tape is still a thriving business.

Accepting the fact that you don’t have total control over the situation when one of your products becomes viral is the first step to actually putting this virality to good use. Anticipate as much as you can, but remain flexible and ready to adapt to unforeseen circumstances. 

STEEZO’s experience with their brand TittyTape ® going viral offers us important lessons on harnessing virality and making it productive in the long run. The story highlights three important takeaways: protecting your intellectual property, anticipating the technicalities of virality, and keeping in mind that mistakes are always fixable . 

In my full interview with STEEZO, we talked not only about virality but about many other interesting topics. Listen to the episode on the Transition of Style website and learn more about .