What is a business asset?

Samantha Hornsby, co-founder of ERIC, a careers-focused app aimed at young people entering the creative industries, experienced a significant viral moment on TikTok. ERIC's marketing strategy includes posting daily TikTok videos that highlight a career opportunity from their app. One video about a BBC career initiative went viral, generating over a billion views and tens of thousands of likes. Samantha says, “The immediate impact on the business was that app downloads quadrupled that month. We normally get between five to 10,000 downloads a month organically, but we had nearly 40,000 downloads that month. That was kind of wild.”

Nana Crawford, the founder of JiggleFiiT, a dance company offering samba and dance fitness classes, witnessed a surge of interest when a couple of her reels demonstrating popular moves unexpectedly went viral. Nana says, “JiggleFiit went viral after I made a couple of reels demonstrating moves people have been asking me to teach. I never expected the videos to go viral. But it led to a 118% increase in website visits and a 30% rise in class sign-ups.”

Sian Evans, co-founder of Chatsworth Bakehouse in South London, launched the bakery with her partner, Tom Mathews, from their flat in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic. Their story unexpectedly gained traction on Instagram. Sian shares: “We didn’t plan to go viral. With the nature of what we do, using Instagram as a sort of shop window, people shared our story, and it grew organically. We actually started from our flat in 2020 when Tom pivoted from being a chef to a baker due to COVID. We began as an honesty bakery and opened our little shop 18 months later.” Since then, the bakery has grown significantly, adding a second site just a few doors down to increase production and meet rising demand. According to Sian, 45% of their customers are repeat visitors, and 55% are new, which reflects a balance between attracting new customers through viral reach and retaining loyal ones. “We wanted to be a neighbourhood spot that was for everyone,” she adds.

Although the increased attention brought exciting growth for her careers app, Samantha noticed a drawback - many downloads were short-lived, with users often accessing the app for a single opportunity before leaving. She reflects, “It lulled us into a false sense of security in the way we had lots of downloads very quickly, which is our main metric for success. Not all of those people stayed because they were downloading the app to access that one opportunity with the BBC and then deleted it after. We learned quickly that going viral doesn’t necessarily mean stability for a business, and that high download numbers alone aren’t enough to count on.”

For Nana’s dance company, the virality of her videos provided unexpected benefits that came with drawbacks, she explains "The comments under the viral videos were helpful for getting new ideas for further content creation. However, the rapid rise in attention also presented challenges. The pressure to keep posting to maintain the attention took a toll on my mental health.”

Despite the advantages, managing the influx of customers presented challenges for Sian, particularly with queueing. “We get lots of queues so we have to manage those and the communication around that. Queuing is never fun, but we feed people while they wait and try to make it part of the experience.” To enhance the process, Sian has hired someone specifically to manage the line and satisfy pastry lovers' appetites.