We went viral with Amália. Here's the marketing side.

So… we sort of built something viral.

A few weeks ago, Portugal launched AMÁLIA, the country's first open-source language model. The next morning, Henrique came up with the idea: there's no public interface to test the LLM. Why don't we create one?

Everyone in the team liked the idea.

What follows is the marketing timeline of that story. Not the tech side (we wrote about that here), just what we did, where we got it right and wrong, and how marketing moves when time is all the essence.

We almost ran the wrong play

Henrique shared the idea around 10 am. The first thing we did, as marketers, was reach for the obvious lever: press.

Portugal had just launched its own LLM the day before.

National outlets were already writing about it. A tidy narrative like "the studio that gave AMÁLIA a face" felt made for a press release.

So we started reaching out to journalists. It's the move you make when you assume the story is the story.

Except it wasn't.

The signal we almost missed

Around lunchtime, I was scrolling Reddit and found a post from a user who had spun up AMÁLIA on their own local machine. For a (barely) day-old model in a language ecosystem this small, the engagement was incredible. People were asking how to run it. People were asking where to try it. People were asking for a website.

Press was still our go-to move, and we were still confident it would work, so we stuck with it. But we kept in mind people were curious to test out AMALIA. So we devised the plan: ship the interface, ship it today, and put it in front of the Portuguese Media first, and later Reddit and X audiences, before someone else did.

Eight hours from idea to launch

When you have a team that’s used to moving fast, great things can happen. While the dev team was working on the interface, Design and Marketing teams started picking up on content, distribution and visual assets.

The rough timeline of that July 2:

• 10 am: Henrique shared the idea, we got started.
• 11 am: Design language and logo are in progress. We decided to keep the same colour scheme of the original https://amaliallm.pt/ website. Key marketing assets are also in progress. PR, Newsletter, social posts.
• 1 pm: Reddit signal spotted.
• 4 pm: A journalist replies to our outreach, asking a set of questions for the piece.
• 5.30 pm: interface goes live
• 6.20 pm: We decide collectively that just waiting for media outreach will take too long and we’ll miss the narrow trendy window. We bet on reddit. A single Reddit post goes live on r/portugal, immediately draws attention. Visits start flowing.
• 7.50 pm: 300 visitors land on amalia.layerx.xyz
• 9.50 pm: Screenshots of AMÁLIA conversations start showing up on X, using our interface. People are now sharing their chats with friends and followers on socials.
• 10 pm: Reddit post hits 26k views. It would then go on to reach +50k views in 24 hours, and over 75k views, 100 likes and 137 comments, at the time of writing.
• Day one brought 2,318 visitors. Day two brought 4,550. That’s nearly seven thousand people in the first 48 hours after launch.

What actually distributed it

Once traffic came in, the shape was clear. Direct was the biggest source (people typing the URL after seeing it somewhere else), followed by X and Reddit.

Reddit was the social network that got the traction going initially, but after the first few hours it was surpassed by X. Twitter’s reach was no match for a single reddit post and it spread even faster, with political figures and others sharing their conversations using our interface.

(source: https://x.com/cgpliberal/status/2072746727593910378)

Facebook and Google came next. LinkedIn and the newsletter did modest numbers (team posts on LinkedIn performed really well though).

We spoke first-hand with Sapo Tek, and national media outlets eventually picked it up. Observador, The Next Big Idea, Techenet and SIC's Polígrafo all mentioned the LLM due to our interface.

Had we stayed solely committed to a press-first plan, we'd have picked up some coverage, sure, but the compounding, word-of-mouth engine are social forums, and this was a key decision.

Twelve days in, the numbers

Just under 12,000 people used AMÁLIA through our interface, sending around 35,000 messages and getting back nearly 36,000 replies. Seventy-three percent of them were in Portugal, which is exactly who the model was built for. The rest came mostly from the US, the Netherlands, Ireland, and Spain.

People stayed. The average visit ran close to six minutes, and only 28% bounced. That's high engagement for a tool nobody had heard of two weeks earlier.

Signing up changed how people used it. Guests sent about 13 messages each before drifting off. The people who created an account sent closer to 36.

What worked and what didn’t

What worked: timing. We acted when the demand signal showed up. Twenty-four hours later, someone else would have built this. Forty-eight hours later, three other teams would have. We shipped inside the window.

What worked: production quality. The interface was polished enough that people were willing to screenshot it and share it. But above all, it worked. Even under load, when we had massive visitor spikes in the first hours, our dev team had built systems to prevent the interface from shutting down entirely. Nothing is worse than reaching peak viral timing and all of a sudden the website is down.

What we underestimated. How much people wanted to try this. We knew it had viral potential. We were thinking "some interest, some coverage." We were wrong. People really wanted to try AMALIA. That’s why we made the decision to post on Reddit right away, not just as a Plan B, and it paid off.

Why I’m sharing this

Nothing about this was a genius playbook. It’s more of a testament on how you can leverage momentum and turn it into something actionable, collectively, as a company.

Acting quick is a skill that’s often misunderstood.

Implementing products usually takes longer than expected. Engineering teams build features on top of features while the product is still in the making, instead of being in front of costumers.

Marketing, on the other hand, tries to reach everywhere. But acting as an octopus only works if you got enough prey lying around. And that doesn’t happen too often.

We had to make sure all moving parts played its role, and make last minute calls that changed the course of impact.

The playbook, if you want one, is: identify the opportunity; ship the smallest useful thing quickly; make sure it doesn’t break; and distribute it in the channel(s) where the audience actually lives.

For AMÁLIA, that was r/portugal and X, not the front page of a national newspaper.

For the next thing, it will be somewhere else. We'll be watching.