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Our fake company went viral on X: this is a complete viral marketing script
Arthur Zargaryan’s team fabricated a company from thin air—Sliceline.ai: a fake website, a fake product, and fake funding. On the day it was published, it surged to 700k views. This article fully breaks down their breakout script: how to use absurd yet believable concepts, videos designed to be watched through, and a distribution strategy built on “personal networks over influencer networks” to turn a non-existent company into a talking point.
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We invented a company, faked a product, and then launched it. 700k people watched it—we went viral. Here’s the complete playbook.
On Wednesday morning, we launched Sliceline.ai: a startup with a polished website, a product demo video, and a brand-new round of funding from fictional VC Atomik.vc.
None of it was real.
The company wasn’t real. The funding wasn’t real. The venture capital firm wasn’t real either.
By the end of that day, our launch video had already racked up more than 700k views, and our DMs were flooded with congratulations from people who thought we’d just closed this funding round.
(Fast background: We’ve been playing the “launch” game since day one. In just the past three months, the total views across our launches have already exceeded 117 million.)
The whole point of this experiment was to prove one argument: the virality of a concept and personal networks beat influencer networks.
So we deliberately constrained ourselves: limit influencer budgets, and put everything else into creativity.
More about us: launchvideo.com
We also run one of the largest launch directories on X: https：//www.launchvideo.com/directory
This concept: absurd, yet real enough to make people believe
We built Sliceline.ai like a love letter to HBO’s Silicon Valley: take something absurd, play it completely straight, then wrap it in our “launch script” and see how far it travels.
In the show, Sliceline is a pizza-delivery startup that uses a smart “algorithm” to get you fresh, hot pizza fast. We decided to create a 2026 version and sprinkle in some AI.
Sliceline.ai connects to your company’s communication tools and tracks team morale in real time. When your H.A.M.S score (Hunger Adjusts Morale Score, hunger-adjusted morale score) drops, it automatically dispatches a pizza to fix the mood. All of it is powered by our own model, PIE-1.
Absurd? Maybe……
But DoorDash actually released a CLI about an hour after we posted. So maybe we really will build something like this. Who knows?
The first step is making everything look real—well, real enough.
We used a tool called Hyperagent to generate two websites at once (sliceline.ai and atomik.vc), connected them to our GitHub, and then pushed to production with Vercel.
We were ready to launch!
This creative idea: designed to be watched through, not skipped
MrBeast boils virality down to two questions the algorithm truly cares about:
A) Did people click?
B) Did they watch?
Everything else is downstream.
“Clicks” are your click-through rate. On X, it’s the post copy and opening premise that spark curiosity and imply there’s something worth watching.
But MrBeast treats clicks as a promise, not a trick.
The copy sets an expectation, and the video has to deliver.
“Watch” is your average watch duration (AVD). It tells the algorithm: this video kept its promise, and is worth pushing harder.
There’s a trap with launch videos: either your product is novel enough to spread on its own, or your video is novel enough.
The harsh truth is that most AI companies’ differentiation isn’t enough to carry a launch on ideas alone. Originality has to come from the packaging.
How we “bait clicks” on X
We wrote the X post copy super short and super sharp—just enough to earn that one action: “click the video.”
In this case, we leaned into the absurd. Raising $6 million for AI to deliver pizza to unhappy employees sounds ridiculous—people can’t help but want to figure out what on earth is going on, instead of just swiping past.
But there’s a part everyone underestimates. It’s an industry trick nobody says out loud:
For a post with a million impressions, actual video views usually land somewhere between 10k and 100k.
That’s a 10x range—and your copy determines where you land within it.
Once the copy is polished, everything downstream gets amplified: virality, profile visits, website clicks, sign-ups, and the conversations that ultimately convert into revenue.
Tactics to drive watch-through and retention
Retention is everything. It’s the percentage of the video average people finish before they swipe away.
Just like YouTube and Instagram, X rewards content that keeps people on the platform longer.
How you win the retention battle
**Know where you’re posting: ** X has been TikTok-ified. Unfortunately, that’s true. It’s now a short-video feed wall where your fingers swipe as restlessly as TikTok. The editing tactics that win there win here too.
**Never let the feed stop: ** Keep the energy high. Not only in the opening hook, but from start to finish. The very second the energy drops, the retention curve drops with it.
Energy comes from both the speaker and the edit. In our Sliceline.ai video, we cut a new shot every 3.83 seconds. Any static shot is the one people will swipe past.
Your brain gets pulled along by motion. Every cut and zoom re-grabs it, pulling attention back in. A static image does nothing. A voiceover paired with a dull UI screenshot is a dead end.
Viral orchestration: the science behind coordinating influencers
Influencers vs personal networks
Most launches are orchestrated: paying a group of influencers to quote, repost, and comment.
This does two things: it pushes your post into a large feed wall, and sends X the signal that “this post has momentum,” so the algorithm starts pushing it to your target audience.
But here’s the catch.
If you don’t have enough real engagement, you’ll never escape the influencer echo chamber.
You can rack up millions of views that go absolutely nowhere.
That’s why the idea itself has to be genuinely interesting. Influencers can light a match, but they can’t fake the fire.
And most people, by over-allocating to quote posts (QT) and having influencers amplify their volume, miss the real thing:
X’s algorithm is open-sourced. The biggest single virality signal is comments and replies—especially replies from the original poster. X wants a conversation.
In the first few hours after the launch, I made sure every incoming comment got a reply immediately. Don’t drop the ball on the things you can control.
This is our launch secret sauce: once we had an amazing video, copy, and idea, we re-leveraged our personal network before we ever used influencers.
We built an internal tool that crawls our personal network and tells us exactly who we should reach out to for each launch.
We also built virality.studio, which tracks post performance minute by minute and separates the impact of personal network interactions from influencer interactions—so we can know exactly what’s driving the metrics.
Personal networks are where the alpha is. Everyone can reach influencers, but not everyone can reach your sphere of influence. If you do this right, you can multiply a launch’s virality by 100x.
For Sliceline.ai, we contacted friends and pulled them into the joke.
The more, the better
Quoting reposts can feel like awarding yourself a personal badge—but it greatly increases reach.
Throughout the whole event, we quoted and reposted our original content with fresh, interesting variants to drive more engagement.
Here’s an example of one of our assembled pizza-box posts.
To truly double down, take some of your influencer budget and allocate it to the quote reposts that perform best on the main post.
Have influencers, your personal network, and your own accounts engage with those posts too. This expands your reach instead of stacking everything onto a single tweet.
Bring the launch into the real world
If we had more budget, we would roll this launch out on X and bring it into the real world:
Result
Over 700k views, and still increasing—despite OpenAI, DoorDash, and Pocket all launching on the same day.
And all of this was for a company that doesn’t exist.