Smartcuts: The Breakthrough Power of Lateral Thinking

by Shane Snow

That same year, 2009, Lady Gaga released her now-iconic “Bad Romance” music video. It quickly became YouTube’s most-watched. Phan decided to capitalize on the wave by posting a tutorial of how to re-create Gaga’s makeup from the video. Then, like Oreo, she tried to manufacture some momentum. Like a surfer arriving hours before a competition to watch the waves, “I would study the algorithm of YouTube’s front page” for months, Phan says. “I noticed that they only would post up videos with a lot of views [on the home page], and you only have 2 days to capitalize off of all these views.” However, YouTube didn’t update the home page on weekends, she realized. If she managed to get a video on there on a Thursday, “I [could] be there for an extra 2 days.” So she uploaded her Gaga video at the optimal moment and then notified her little group of fans to watch it at once. It was enough to reach the home page. This was the tiny nudge that got the snowball rolling. And, as the video hung on the homepage for those extra days, a writer from BuzzFeed noticed it and wrote a story about it.