How to make a boring product go viral in a dull category

Pick the category on its economics before its excitement: look for old incumbents who make easy money and have stopped competing on anything interesting. Bryan Kujawski, speaking with Etgar Shpivak on Founders' Marketing Compass, weighs market size first, asking whether the market is broad and obvious or small and hard to win, and how costly the customer is to reach over time. A big, obvious market a plain product can reach cheaply beats a clever niche.

Ordinary products go viral more easily than clever ones, because the surprise is doing the work. Kujawski points to Dollar Shave Club: a plain razor delivered cheaply, wrapped in branding that made a boring product funny, and built so customers would pass it on. The product stayed plain; the pitch and the sharing were the whole event.

Founders fall in love with the product they built and stop hearing the customer, which distorts their read of demand. Kujawski put it directly: "Founders love their products so much that their view becomes distorted of how truly viable or adopted or well-matched their product-market fit actually is." Product-market fit here means proof that a real market wants the thing. The fix is to test the plain benefit on real customers before spending behind it.

Boring categories are cheap to enter because the incumbents stopped trying and the products are cheap to make. Kujawski's read on Dollar Shave Club is that a category of old, uncreative brands left room to be the only interesting voice, on a razor that cost little to produce and carried a wide margin. When a shareable pitch does the reaching, customer acquisition, what it costs to win a buyer, stays low without a big media budget.

Marketing KPIs, the few numbers a team is judged on, follow the business goal, and no single list fits every stage. Kujawski's split is simple: if you raised to grow, track customer acquisition at almost any cost; if the goal is awareness, track engagement; if it is revenue, track the cost of winning a customer, conversion rate (the share who buy), and revenue. Etgar Shpivak adds that one number a founder acts on beats a fuller scoreboard.

Measure marketing two ways at once, against your own goals and against the market. Kujawski told Etgar Shpivak to set targets at the start of a plan and track against them, then map the same results against outside benchmarks, so "you can police one another with those two perspectives." A number that beats your goal but trails the market is thinner than it looks.

The product was never the story: an ordinary razor, cheap, delivered to the door. What they added on top was a funny, irreverent brand, on blogs and social video when that was still novel. The whole thing was built for customers to pass on, and that joke became the moat. The old category simply couldn't answer a plain, loud pitch.

A pitch like that has a clock on it: it works only until a comfortable incumbent decides you're worth copying. For Dollar Shave Club that took years; in a smaller category it can take a quarter. Once the old rival wakes up and copies you, the edge of being the only interesting voice on the shelf is gone.

The size that makes a broad market cheap to enter is the same size that makes it worth an incumbent's response. A big market is accessible and cheap to start in, but once you take a real bite, a comfortable brand with deep pockets takes notice. Pick a market big enough to be cheap, and plan for the answer that will come.

The benefit has to survive being said in one sentence, with no caveats and no careful language. If you can't say it out loud without cringing, it's probably still buried under phrasing that's too serious. A plain benefit hidden under careful language reads as a shot not taken, even when the product itself is genuinely good.

A founder can spot the boring-category angle alone, but the blind spot is the product they love, which is what an outside read is for. Etgar Shpivak, a marketing consultant, works directly with seed and Series A founders, pressure-testing the plain benefit and the category choice before the budget goes out. The value is an honest answer to whether the plain thing is worth being loud about.

In a category where the rivals are serious, gray, and not trying to be interesting, nerve and humor are the one thing they don't keep in stock. That gives you the only voice that stands out on the shelf, and bored buyers pass it on for free. It holds as long as the old rival stays too comfortable to copy you, which usually takes time.