How Moda got 6.2M views with thousands of signups in one day
Company
Moda
Industry
AI design software
Funding
$7.5M, led by General Catalyst and Pear VC
Enagement
Launch a new product in a very competitive industry and drive tens of thousands of signups.
The Backstory
Moda is an AI design platform that lets both designers and non-designers create fully editable, brand-aligned slides, posts, ads, and documents.
Built by Anvisha, previously founders of Heap and Dover, on one bet: AI hasn't fixed design the way it fixed code, because a prompt that spits out a static image isn't design.
Real design is editable, on-brand, and made with you.
The Challenge
Moda had run a soft launch off Product Hunt and a newsletter previously. With some success, Anvisha was looking for a more powerful and significant launch to a wider audience. Shown had three weeks to take it from a product hunt launch to a category-defining launch with the primary goal of millions of views and a wide audience reach.
A company launch raises the bar for every competitor, and we were launching into a fight against existing opinion which is already difficult.
The moment people see "AI" and "design" in the same sentence, they brace for slop, the generic, soulless, low-effort output the category is now known for.
Most companies ignore that and launch with standard product marketing, "AI powered design," and hope for the best. This is the wrong way to approach any launch.
The category is extremely crowded with companies carrying far bigger budgets and built-in distribution. Some examples include:
Google had just shipped Stitch for websites and coined "Vibe Design."
Gamma had become the name people associated with AI presentations.
PowerPoint Copilot was rolling out to every enterprise seat on the planet.
Canva had been adding AI features for over a year.
Moda was walking into that as a new name without much backing. So we kept asking one question: what category could Moda create and own that none of them could credibly claim?
Viral Pillar 1: Positioning
We made Moda the anti-AI-slop platform.
Instead of defending AI design, we sat on the audience's side of the table and said slop is real, it's the problem, and it's exactly what Moda was built to solve.
That did the one thing that mattered most: it turned critics into distribution.
Positioning Moda as anti-slop and we planned to have comments like "it's still slop though,". It collects likes and replies and feeds the algorithm on X and Linkedin and builds a conversation chain right on the launch post.
The algorithms read those chains as a real conversation and pushes it further.
Anyone calling it slop was doing the distribution for us, and the demo was strong enough that anyone who watched saw they were wrong.
It also handed Moda an identity that imprints immediately. "AI powered presentations" and "your AI design assistant" wash straight past people.
"The anti-slop platform" is a position they remember, repeat, and argue about.
Viral Pillar 2: We Competed Where Google and Canva Couldn’t.
We know that huge companies like Google and Canva would never say one thing: slop.
And we know the culture of X and Linkedin, from our expertise of being chronically online.
There’s only one word that we need to use to explain what Moda does better than these multi-billion dollar companies: taste.
Taste is what separates a designer from using AI slop.
Moda is the AI agent with taste, a collaborator with opinions that understands context and produces work that looks like someone who knows what they're doing made it.
The best part of using “taste” is that everyone on X and Linkedin are already exhausted from the AI slop. Having taste is the only way to create bearable content.
"Vibe Design" sounds like a tech company trying to sound creative. "Taste" sounds like a design company that happens to use AI. This is a positioning statement Moda wanted as a must-have.
Viral Pillar 3: Focus on the customer
The demo followed one consistent customer across three use cases instead of cutting between disconnected scenarios.
In each scenario, Moda understands every customer’s pain points from experience.
For sales: here's the deck you need, here's how Moda builds it, here's the output, so a viewer in sales watched their own use case play out.
For marketing: teams need to work fast but can't afford to look generic. Positioning is the most important thing, because the viewer was promised an anti-slop platform, we had to give them the exact opposite of what they were hoping to hate on, slop.
The designer: designers are the hardest to win over and the quickest to write off an AI design tool because of how AI has notoriously given slop despite communities working together to get anything but slop.
So we showed Moda as a collaborator that accelerates the foundational work so the designer spends more time on the refinements that need human taste.
The MrBeast principle: lock audio to visual.
Every word spoken matched what was on screen, the whole way through. Most launch videos don’t do this enough. They talk about a feature over a wide shot or describing an outcome with a loading animation. If you want to keep attention on your launch, stay as far away from this as you can.
Viral Pillar 4: Invite the haters, tastefully
To make a launch successful, the #1 thing you must have is haters.
Positioning as anti-slop invites people to challenge you, which means comments, criticism, and openings.
The algorithm treats reply chains where the author shows up as high-value conversation, and each reply tells it this is a real exchange and not a broadcast, which directly affects reach.
Beyond the algorithm, answering "this is still slop" with a specific frame from the demo is proof that it’s engaging.
The Viral Flywheel
To make a launch successful, the #1 thing you must have is haters.
Positioning as anti-slop invites people to challenge you, which means comments, criticism, and openings.
The algorithm treats reply chains where the author shows up as high-value conversation, and each reply tells it this is a real exchange and not a broadcast, which directly affects reach.
Beyond the algorithm, answering "this is still slop" with a specific frame from the demo is proof that it’s engaging.
The Results
Across X and Linkedin, the launch pulled more than 4.8M views and thousands of signups within 24 hours.
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