Cailyn Yong explains that consistently putting out a founder's personal story alongside product demo content can win you users, fans, and even investors — not just view counts. The key is not hoping for one big hit but designing authentic storytelling, short and powerful demos, and a community funnel that captures the people who come in. She also emphasizes that the right channel and the quality of users you can expect vary with your product's customer segment.

1. From community builder to AI startup founder

Cailyn opens her talk visibly nervous, saying it's been a while since she was on stage. But her background is already deeply rooted in community building and content distribution. She runs a startup now, but before that her main work was getting channels and products in front of many people and growing communities.

About two to three years ago she built an AI community in Korea called TenX AI Club. It started as a YouTube channel, and she ran it with about 33,000 subscribers and a group chat of around 800 people. She also held monthly offline events where founders, AI developers, and non-developers could meet and share experiences.

"I've been building communities, and I'm pretty good at distributing my channels and products to a lot of people."

At the time she made weekly videos and tutorials teaching people how to build AI applications; her most viral video reached about 200,000 views. She also ran AI courses for developers in collaboration with companies.

After roughly a year and a half of activity starting in 2023, she launched a startup called Momo last year. Momo was then a memory infrastructure platform for AI agents. It built self-updating knowledge graphs for early-stage companies, with early-stage San Francisco startups as customers. She has since pivoted and no longer runs Momo, but the distribution and branding experience she gained while getting Momo out into the world is the core material of this talk.

Because she was already used to building community channels and designing distribution strategies, she says the Momo demo videos she posted on X went viral one after another. Through those videos she landed her first pilot customer and acquired her first 600 users in a single day. Each viral video earned roughly 1,000–3,000 likes and at least 200,000 impressions.

2. In an era flooded with products, fans and brand are the moat

Cailyn believes that in a time when anyone can build a product quickly, it's hard to differentiate on product features alone. With so-called "vibe coding" producing similar products constantly, the strongest moat lies in making people feel "why should I use this product?" and "why should I root for this founder?"

"These days anyone can build a product. The only moat you have now is why people should use your product, and why they should become your fan."

She notes that this talk is better suited to people building B2C products. If you're targeting B2B companies or government customers, going viral on X may not be necessary. But if your product is aimed directly at general consumers, brand and a fan base become important assets that competitors can't easily copy.

The goal isn't simply to gather a lot of people. It's to create fans and ambassadors who will recommend your product without being paid, and to build a sustainable brand image. The results are user leads, pilot opportunities, and even investor interest. Cailyn herself raised an angel round on the back of going viral on X.

"After going viral on Twitter, I raised an angel round. There are so many benefits to building your own community and brand."

3. An honest founder story creates fans

Creating fans ultimately comes down to telling your own story comfortably, Cailyn says. First you have to understand who you are as a founder and what story you want to tell the world. Because a product and its CEO are hard to separate, you need to show persuasively why you came to care about this problem and why you are the right person to build this product.

"The product goes together with the CEO — who you are and why you're building this."

People want to see a founder's authenticity and conviction more than a feature list. In a market with countless competing products, a customer needs to feel "I should use this product because this person built it." In other words, a founder's personal experience and sense of the problem can themselves become a defensible brand asset.

To that end she recommends posting your daily process as content: what you did today, what experiments you ran, what failed and what worked, what a founder's daily life looks like. Small milestones like your first revenue, first sale, or first pilot make great content too.

She particularly advises not hiding failures and difficulties. Online you see far too much of the good stuff — fundraises, revenue growth, success stories. Showing attempts that didn't work and setbacks honestly can resonate with people much more.

"People support you more when you show vulnerability and share failure stories."

"'I tried this today and it didn't work.' When you say that, people are likely to feel 'we're in the same boat.'"

As this kind of sharing accumulates, people become not mere followers but community members who face the same problems and share solutions with each other. She explains that the Dev Korea event itself is a community that exists because people share similar problems.

Use a common enemy, but don't sell rage

One way to build a product story is to name an old problem in the market or a "common enemy." Cailyn gives the CRM startup Pylon as an example. Pylon positioned the legacy CRM company Zendesk as the outdated, inefficient old way, and positioned itself as the new CRM for the era of AI agents.

Framing the market's problem sharply like this lets people quickly understand why your product exists. However, she does not recommend rage bait content that provokes anger for views. Mocking or trash-talking competitors may draw attention briefly, but she warns it ultimately damages your brand.

"I don't recommend rage-bait content or content that speaks badly about competitors. People remember who you are, and it comes back around in the end."

The ultimate goal is to build the trust and recognition where thinking of a particular field immediately brings you and your product to mind. Back when she was running Momo, people thought of Cailyn or Momo when memory infrastructure came up, and people at networking events recognized her from the demo videos.

"When people talked about memory infrastructure, they thought of Momo or me. That connection between a product category and a founder is a very strong asset."

4. Going viral is the result of consistency and analysis, not luck

Cailyn insists that going viral is never overnight luck. You shouldn't post one video and expect it to blow up right away; you need the consistency to keep posting even when view counts are low.

"Going viral isn't luck. It's not something that happens because you posted one video."

"You can't beat consistency. Keep posting even with no views, and warm up your account."

She says she knows how hard that is, because at one point she too wanted validation from likes and impression counts. But building account credibility and getting consistent algorithmic exposure requires continuing to publish.

She also shares an extreme example from the UGC and campaign marketing world: to make a B2C product go viral, people set up multiple phones and many TikTok accounts, then run each account for a long time so it looks like a real user rather than a bot. The point isn't to recommend that approach itself, but to show that going viral demands enormous manual work and repetition behind the scenes.

"It doesn't happen overnight. It takes a huge amount of effort, and sometimes it feels linear and unscalable."

Next she recommends analyzing competitor accounts: find competitors or accounts in your market that already do social media well, and study which posts went viral. Cailyn analyzed accounts like Supernote and Hypernote in the memory infrastructure space and checked which formats and topics people responded to.

This isn't plagiarism; it's identifying the content grammar the market has already validated. If you reference the templates of viral posts and keep posting with your own product and perspective, at some point one post can spread widely.

"Analyze viral tweets, reference those templates, and keep posting. Nobody knows which post will blow up, but when one does, it can bring in your first thousand users or followers."

X also has many topic-specific communities, so tagging "Build in Public" or field-specific communities raises the odds of being discovered by the right people. If an influential figure sees your post and reposts it, the spread can be much larger. She calls this kind of method a sort of cheat code.

5. The structure of a one-minute demo video and customer-perspective storytelling

The part Cailyn shares in the most detail is the structure of a viral demo video. She says she arrived at this approach after getting feedback from the content lead at the San Francisco accelerator Founders Inc.

The most important principle is keeping the video under one minute. She frankly admits that people's attention spans today are very short and that she herself has gotten so used to short videos that she rarely watches anything over 15 seconds. Since most people won't watch a two-minute demo to the end, you have to show the core of the product in a short window.

"Keep the demo video under a minute. At two minutes nobody watches. I wouldn't watch it either, even if it were my own demo."

Video structure that grabs attention fast

Here is the basic sequence she presents.

1. First second: the hook

   • Show an unfamiliar, strong scene or sentence that stops the scroll.
   • The goal is to provoke a "what is this?" reaction among countless X posts.

2. Next five seconds: a one-liner

   • Present a short sentence that makes the product instantly understandable.
   • For Momo she used something like "you can give OpenClaw a brain."

3. Present the problem and the solution

   • Briefly mention what's wrong with the existing approach.
   • For example, pose the problem "OpenClaw's memory system doesn't really work right now," then cut straight to a scene of installing the Momo memory plugin.

4. Remaining ~45 seconds: demonstrate rather than explain

   • Don't write long text explanations; quickly show the product actually working.
   • Convey the setup process and the results visually to help users understand.

"Don't explain at length what you built. Go straight into the product demo. Visuals matter more than text."

She stresses that you shouldn't try to cram every feature into one video. Even if your product has ten features, showing all of them in a minute means the user understands nothing clearly. Pick the single coolest and most important feature for one video, and make separate videos for the others.

"Show one feature per video. If you have three features, make three videos."

Long demos aren't the only answer. A short screen recording showing a genuinely impressive screen for about ten seconds can work too. Cailyn posted a short screen recording captioned "this is my brain" and got around 1,700 likes. That too came from analyzing competitor posts and learning that the format performed well.

Brand the last second too

At the end of the video, show your product name and logo prominently so people don't forget the brand. Cailyn jokingly calls this "brainwashing people." But the point is that repeated, consistent brand exposure makes users remember the product name after watching.

"Even in the last second, people shouldn't forget what you're building."

"I kept showing the company logo and brand name large so people couldn't forget it."

Play your ICP and act out the problem

A demo video isn't for the general public — it's ultimately content for your target customer, your ICP (Ideal Customer Profile). So think first about what problem your customer faces, and it's effective for the founder to play that customer's role inside the video.

In one Momo video Cailyn played the CEO of a company that had just launched. She acted out the situation of not being able to keep track of what was happening at the company — what John on the dev team did, what Clara in sales did — and then showed how Momo organized that chaos.

"I just launched yesterday and I can't keep up with what's happening at my company. I need to know what John on the dev team did, what Clara in sales did."

This approach shows the customer's problem far more effectively than explaining product features. A real customer immediately understands: "that's my situation, and this product could solve it."

"When you show it while pretending to be the ICP, the customer instantly gets that this product could solve their problem too."

6. A funnel and channel strategy that turns viral traffic into fans

Going viral isn't the end. Cailyn repeatedly emphasizes that you must build a capture funnel to hold on to the attention you attract. Views and likes are only momentary interest; you have to convert them into GitHub stars, Discord members, X followers, YouTube subscribers, or newsletter subscribers.

"When you post content, always, always, always build a funnel to capture the traffic."

She tagged her website and company X account in her videos and included installation instructions and GitHub repository links. From GitHub she designed a path into a Discord community so people would enter a deeper relationship. The goal is to turn incoming traffic into fans who keep supporting and promoting the product, not just visitors.

Visual and verbal brand consistency matters too. Back when she was targeting B2C customers, Cailyn made a cute, memorable Momo logo and used it repeatedly across all content. The logo became a device for remembering the brand rather than mere decoration.

She went a step further and gave the Momo character a personality. From the company account she spoke in Momo's first-person voice, posting light content like "my brain is developing" or "I'll dance when we hit 1,000 followers." These small touches make a brand feel friendlier and more alive.

"I made this character visible everywhere and made people remember it."

"In the end, what matters is telling the story of why I have to be the one building this product."

She connects this to founder–market fit. Both investors and users want to know "why are you specifically the person who should build this company?" If a founder isn't convinced themselves, the content loses authenticity — and people are better than you'd expect at telling the real from the fake.

"People are really good at sensing what's authentic."

As viral demos accumulate, you can be discovered by unexpected people. Investors, potential customers, and future collaborators may see Cailyn's posts, remember them, and reach out. Whether in San Francisco or Korea, building an online presence means people already know you when you meet offline.

"People remember you and your product. An online presence opens doors very easily."

That said, she has since moved into B2B and B2G, and adds that these markets require an entirely different approach. For B2C you should actively build a presence on X, Instagram, and TikTok. For technical B2B companies X still works, but for non-technical B2B, LinkedIn — where more of your customers are — may be the better fit. The most important criterion is ultimately "where are my end users?"

Traffic quality differs by platform

She assesses that while the volume of users coming from X is high, the quality isn't necessarily. They're strangers who got curious from a short video, so there's a good chance they try the product briefly and churn quickly.

Conversely, the channel that brought Cailyn the highest-quality users was, surprisingly, YouTube. On YouTube people watch a roughly 20-minute video to the end and then join the community. They've already shown deep interest in the product and the founder's perspective, so retention is high.

"People from X often come in out of curiosity and then churn."

"The users from YouTube were the highest quality. If someone watches a long video and then joins the community, they're genuinely interested."

In short, X is good for discovery and spread through short, punchy content, while YouTube is good for building trust and high retention through long-form content. So founders should design a channel mix that fits their product and customers rather than chasing whichever channel has the most views.

7. Closing

Cailyn's talk ultimately comes down to the message that "getting your product known matters as much as building it." Consistently share your failures and experiments, draw attention with short demos focused on one feature, and pour that attention into a funnel that leads to community, subscriptions, and product usage.

The most important thing isn't provocative viral tactics but an authentic connection between founder and product. When people come to believe not just in the product but in "why this person is solving this problem," content can go beyond momentary exposure into a sustainable fan base and organic growth.