Eric Siu shows how viral content often fails to generate business value. His posts about Venezuela and Shake Shack hit millions of views with zero pipeline. Creators like Vivian Tu and Humphrey Yang face the same problem: views don't convert to revenue without a clear path to sales.
But that content, Eric would go to YPO events and people's spouses would be like, oh, I saw your article or video and you're getting a lot more brand recognition from it. But did it end up generating more revenue for you? No. And let me tell you, I'm going to give you more examples here. So it didn't generate more revenue. And by the way, like I interviewed, so there's Vivian Tu, right? Personal finance. I had Humphrey Yang, which is personal finance. I had the dating guy too. Yeah. The dating guy. I remember the dating one. Those went viral. He was like, Dude, they still get a lot of views per month right now. So one of them got like 700,000 views, the other one got 500,000 views or so. You know what's great? It did nothing for me. Let me give you another example, okay? I, on X, when the US went into Venezuela real quick for that excursion, so I saw X exploding, or not X, Threads, and I just like kept adding fuel to the fire to see if I would drive reach, and instantly it's like 2 million views. Or when you and I talk about Shake Shack, okay? And we talk about discounts. 8 million views. When you and I talked about Loro Piana, the discount store in Italy, 6 million views, okay? So no doubt we know how to drive the views, but at the end of the day, if none of it turns into pipeline, it's worthless, right? But you and I have seen smart people, okay, who are considered business people go way too far into becoming content creators where it's captured them so much that they can't get off the hamster wheel and they're afraid of losing that. And so when you focus on the business first, it's better for you because it keeps you focused on the business. Yeah.
