give users something to brag with, and a button to post it

the play

Find the moment a user did something worth showing off. Turn it into a card or badge that looks good in a feed, and put a one-tap share button right next to it. The user posts it because it makes them look good. Your product rides along.

what happened

Wordle. A player in New Zealand started posting her results as a typed-out grid of green, yellow and black emoji squares, and others copied her. Josh Wardle saw it and, in mid-December 2021, built a share button that made the grid automatically. The NYT described it as “an automated way for players to brag about their successes in a spoiler-free way.”

date	Wordle
Nov 1, 2021	90 people played
mid-December 2021	share button added
Jan 2, 2022	more than 300,000 people played
Jan 31, 2022	The New York Times bought it for a price in the “low-seven figures”

Spotify Wrapped. Once a year Spotify turns each user’s listening into shareable story cards. Spotify’s own numbers:

year	engaged users (Spotify’s figures)
2021	120 million in Q4
2022	156 million in Q4
2023	more than 225 million in Q4
2025	over 200 million in the first 24 hours. more than 300 million engaged users and 630 million shares by the end of the campaign

why it works

lever	what it does
it’s about the user	people share things that say something good about them, like a score or a streak
it’s spoiler-free and curious	Wordle’s grid showed how you did without the answer. people who hadn’t played wanted to know what it was
one tap	Wardle automated what players were already doing by hand. the share button removed the effort
it repeats	a daily puzzle or a yearly recap gives users a fresh reason to post again
the feed does the distribution	each post reaches the user’s own followers, for free

from my calls

here’s a badge for being right. and there’s a share button for twitter for that badge.

A crypto app that runs in seasons added auto-generated share cards for its latest one. Roughly twice as many people posted about it as the season before.

What I tell teams to measure:

measure	why
posts generated from inside the product	that’s the number the card is supposed to move
A/B test the card itself	design, wording and what it shows change how often people post
referrals per week	raw signups “can be gamed very well”. referrals from posts are harder to fake

cost vs payoff

	what
cost	design and engineering time for the card generator
cost	a moment worth bragging about, which you have to design into the product
payoff	free distribution through every user’s followers
payoff	a story the press picks up when it spreads, like Wordle and Wrapped
payoff	a repeatable spike every time the moment comes round again

how to steal it

	crypto app	consumer app
the brag moment	a winning call, a PnL milestone, a rank on the season leaderboard, an early-user badge	a streak, a score, a yearly recap, a milestone
the card	auto-generated image with the result, the handle and the season	auto-generated image with the result and the user’s name
where it goes	X first, then Telegram and Farcaster	Instagram stories, X, WhatsApp
the hook to come back	a new season	a daily puzzle or a yearly recap
measure	posts from in-product share buttons, referrals per week	same

Run it like this:

Find the moment a user feels smart or lucky in your product.
Design a card that shows the result and makes the viewer curious.
Put a one-tap share button on it. Pre-fill the post.
A/B test the card. Track posts and referrals per week.

watch-outs

watch-out	what to do
nobody wants to post a boring card	the card has to say something good about the user. test it with ten users before you ship
signups can be gamed	track referrals per week, and check the referred users stay
a spammy link kills the share	Wardle left the link out of the Wordle share text. keep the post about the user
a one-off spike	tie the card to something that repeats, like a season or a yearly recap