Source: Ahref Excalidraw branded search
This article was orginally posted on my Linkedin timeline
One month ago, there was a sudden spike in branded organic searches for Excalidraw, an online whiteboarding tool.
What happened that day? Andrej Karpathy released his 3.5-hour Deep Learning video that’s now hit 1.7M views.
The interesting part? He never explicitly endorsed Excalidraw. He simply used it expertly throughout his presentation. This created a more powerful impression than any other sponsored promotion ever could.
Within weeks, I watched developers on my team using it.
This got me thinking about discovery in the AI era. Yesterday, I wrote about how traditional organic channels are becoming ineffective with answering engines dominating search.
Yet people still want to discover new products.
The two core philosophies often overlooked in the GTM discussions of software startups are mimesis and signaling.
In mimesis, we imitate other people and their desires, then use signaling to show that we are like them. This loop can create enormous value for a business.
Some examples from the past:
- Obsidian, Superhuman, Notion all exploded when influencers showcased their workflows.
- Vercel/NextJS gained traction when respected developers shared their projects.
- VSCode and Figma setups were spread through tech YouTube.
As builders, we must build distribution strategies that leverage these human tendencies.