Misra: Testing social virality validates product demand before building anything
Gaurav Misra · How to win in the AI era: Ship weekly, embrace technical debt, ruthlessly cut scope, and more · Mar 27, 2025 · at 12:03
Gaurav Misra, CEO of AI video company Captions, explains how startup teams can prioritize features and avoid shiny object syndrome in the generative AI era.
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“Our general framework for it is to look for user demand, right? And actually the easiest way to check for user demand is to just see what has virality, right? Usually what has virality. What people want to share and talk about. There's something at the core of it that actually is interesting. Now, it may not always be interesting in a way that's like, you know, maybe it's not, maybe it's a one-time use case. Maybe it's not something that people would do repeatedly. Maybe it's not something you'd build like a subscription business off of, but oftentimes there's something, some core sort of element of it that has resonated with people. And if you can identify that core and then, you know, mold it into Fitting into your business. It's actually a great way to identify like what actually works. And we have these tools right now. We don't have to build anything. You can just kind of talk about it and people will share it, share the idea. And you can kind of measure how well the product might be received even before you've built anything.”
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