How Brilliant launched Koji to 5.97M views
The world's first AI graphical tutor, from zero X and Linkedin presence to thousands of sign ups and followers
Company
Brilliant
Industry
Consumer EdTech / AI learning
Funding
Founded 2012 · 10M+ learners · 5,000+ schools
Enagement
Launch of Koji, Brilliant's first interactive AI tutor
The Backstory
Brilliant has been the go-to AI tutor used by millions of families for math and science since 2012.
Sue Khim, obsessively grew Brilliant to over 10M learners. 5,000+ schools. 100,000 five star reviews. In the tech world, Brilliant is popular for being a better alternative to Khan Academy due to its ease of usability, helpfulness, and product.
The team had spent years on serious AI R&D and built Koji: an AI tutor grounded in Brilliant's own lesson system. The product is the Cursor of education.
Brilliant wanted to announce it in the biggest way possible, to the people who decide what counts as a frontier AI company: VCs, researchers, talent, and partners.
This is where they were introduced to Matt, CEO & Co-Founder of Shown Media. The real problem wasn't the product or finding users. They were growing at a rapid pace, but wanted to reach millions more. This is where Shown stepped up.
The tech world had no idea Brilliant was an AI tutoring company, and Brilliant had no distribution on X or Linkedin.
The Challenge
There were three major problems Shown found immediately:
The Audience Problem: Brilliant was running two campaigns at once. An ad campaign aimed at parents, and this one, the founder led X launch, aimed at VCs, researchers, talent, and partners. The launch had to land with the second group without losing the first.
The Muscle Problem: Brilliant is a heads down technical team with, in their own words, zero competence in amplification. No X presence, no distribution, and no feel for the platform's physics.
The Scoreboard Problem: Unlike a B2B launch, there was no demo-to-revenue line to point at. The KPI was ubiquity: after launch week, does the tech world know what Brilliant actually is.
We broke down Brilliant's launch strategy into 4 main pillars unique to their current brand presence, goals, and resources.
Viral pillar 1: Rage bait with taste
The launch opened on one claim:
"AI is making kids dumber, when it should be making them geniuses." It works because there are at least two ways to get mad at it. If you are a parent in tech whose kid uses AI for everything, you have just been called a bad parent, and you will say so in the replies.
If you notice an AI company arguing that AI makes kids dumb, you will arrive to point out the irony.
Both camps showed up, argued with each other, and built the comment chain that tells the algorithm a post is a conversation worth pushing.
We call it rage bait with taste: leave people room to get angry, never enough to get anyone doxxed.
None of it was guessed. The research said the tech world was already convinced school systems are regressing, which many families are already thinking about daily. The launch positioned Brilliant against that, and the base it riled up was already assembled.
Viral pillar 2: The 300 person test
We threw out the first 30 seconds of the film, one week before launch. The original intro was mediocre, but mediocre fails sample tests.
The 300 person test is how X decides what travels: when a launch goes live, the algorithm shows it to roughly 300 people first and studies what they do. Watch through, comment, linger, scroll. Pass and you graduate to a bigger test. Fail and the launch is over by lunch.
The opening seconds decide that test, because retention curves drop steepest at the start. The dopamine has to arrive immediately.
Seven days out we scrapped the open and re-recorded it around one idea: AI turns your brain to slop. It rots your brain. It is brain rot.
Sue's own design and graphics teams rebuilt the opening with the kind of subtle animation polish only an in-house team that cares can produce, and the film became one of the most finished things we have ever shipped.
Viral pillar 3: We sold MIT
There is a hierarchy of motivators, and "a tutor in your home, but AI" sits near the bottom of it. Outcomes sit at the top.
So we positioned Brilliant staking its claim on Brilliant's own learners: students that got into MIT at 15, Olympiad medals, and founders of billion-dollar companies.
A parent who hears about Brilliant doesn't care about educational technology. They hear what their kid could become.
"the world's smartest AI tutor" passes the only test a bold claim has to pass: someone with zero context understands it in one read and wants to know how it could possibly be true. That want is what holds them through the demo.
Viral pillar 4: The VIP network
Brilliant had little to no context in amplification. Sue relied on her biggest advantage: her network.
On launch day she hit up everyone she knew, and fourteen years of building a company means she knows some heavy hitters.
This is what we call the VIP layer.
On top of the VIP layer we ran 34 creators to interact within the first hour, which added 1.34M views on its own.
And every comment got a reply, because an author who shows up in their own replies is, to the algorithm, running a conversation.
The Viral Flywheel
Brilliant had little to no context in amplification. Sue relied on her biggest advantage: her network.
On launch day she hit up everyone she knew, and fourteen years of building a company means she knows some heavy hitters.
This is what we call the VIP layer.
On top of the VIP layer we ran 34 creators to interact within the first hour, which added 1.34M views on its own.
And every comment got a reply, because an author who shows up in their own replies is, to the algorithm, running a conversation.
The Results
The launch generated 4.6M views, 12K likes, 2.1K comments, and 10K bookmarks on X alone.
Across X and LinkedIn the launch crossed 5.97M views and 18,584 likes, with 3,245 comments of exactly the argument it was designed to start.
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