Seeing the level of virality that a platform like TikTok can be used to generate these days has got me wanting to create some type of app or technology side project that is purely focussed on getting it to go viral, with actual utility as an afterthought. Some rough ideas I’ve come up with:

• A snapchat filter that counts number of times you successfully flip a water-bottle (includes metrics like height of the flip, personal record, amount of water in the bottle)

• A filter which translates certain body movements to sound, so you can create melodies via dancing, and so there would be a 1:1 mapping between melodies and dance moves, and perhaps the dances for various song melodies can go viral (and then an app can be born from sharing these)

• An app that allows friends to collaborate in piecing together a “song puzzle” wherein a song is broken down into a series of soundbites and they try to piece it together into the complete song as quickly as possible

• An app that takes this concept (https://trademeproject.com/) and creates a social network out of it (think of a feed where you can see random things that random people are trading for, a personal timeline of your progression from your first useless starting object to a house; it will essentially be a game where people are trying to get to the house with as few trades as possible, and you can see other people’s progress)

I have more of these, but the point I’m trying to make is that these type of ideas may not be curing cancer or getting us to Mars and may sound really dumb and meaningless at first glance, but there are some examples I can point to (e.g. Geoguessr, Subway Surfers, diamond-testing kits) of real companies/industries whose success or newfound growth can be owed at least partially to their optimization of virality and the platforms (i.e. TikTok) that push it.

The fundamental idea is that social-media friendly content is generated as a result of engaging with these apps which users can (and would be motivated to) then post on places like TikTok which doubles as an advert for your app/business (esp. if you employ tactics such as watermarking the shareable material).

I like these types of ideas because a) they’re light-hearted enough to probably be fun to work on as a side-project, b) although virality can be fleeting, it gives you very clear and hard-to-miss indicators and cues of when something has potential in the market, c) network effects

Are working on these types of ideas respectable? Sustainable? Would love to hear general thoughts.