It Blew Up #1

Five from the scoreboard, and what to have ready when it's you.

Hi, I'm Darren. Every Friday I send you small, founder-run businesses that went viral, and what it did to them. I check back on every one at 2, 6 and 12 weeks. Every number below comes from a linked source. If there's no source, there's no number.

To start, I've built a survival scoreboard of 34 blow-ups from March 2025 to October 2026. Going by the latest report or check-in on each: 16 scaled up, 9 sold out, 6 were overwhelmed, 1 crashed, and 2 are too early to tell. Here are five of them, and what each one says you should have ready.

Trigger: TikTok reviewer Gabriel Rivera (more than 2M followers) reviews food he buys through Facebook Marketplace. In May he paid Natendrea Jones $200 to make him anything she liked, got a loaded seafood pan, and posted a glowing review. Numbers: Over 300 orders overnight on her Square account. $50,000 in sales over the next two weeks, and later more than six figures (owner's figures, via Business Insider, 23 Oct 2026). Aftermath: Scaled up. Family helped early on, some orders were refunded and some customers waited up to a month. About three weeks in she paused orders for a day to catch up. She now takes pre-orders on her website with scheduled pickup windows, handles 50 to 60 orders on a busy day, and her next goal is a food truck. 🧰 Have this ready: pre-orders with scheduled pickup windows from day one. She had to pause orders for a day before she added them.

Trigger: Owner Ashley La Bomme-Benson replied to Ms Rachel's 11 August Threads post inviting Black entrepreneurs to share their businesses. The next morning Ms Rachel reposted the reply and followed her. Numbers: Her first online cookie order in more than a year, then enough sales in the first 24 hours to cover her $3,650 rent for the next month (owner's figure). 102 cookie orders and more than 330,000 views on Threads within two weeks (TheGrio, 4 Sep 2026, reporting Black Enterprise). Aftermath so far: Scaled up. She's considering a cookie subscription and, eventually, a shop. Her 12-week check-in is due 4 Nov. 🧰 Have this ready: an order form and a production plan. One repost brought 102 cookie orders in two weeks.

Trigger: Founder Layla Morris handed her jewellery-cleaning pen to Hailey Bieber in a Sydney restaurant, then posted her reaction on TikTok. Numbers: 5.4M views in four days, 800 orders from around the world, and sales up more than 2,000% (founder's figures, via SmartCompany, 17 Feb 2026). Aftermath: Scaled up. She opened international shipping, raised production and placed express stock orders, still from a spare bedroom with help from her family. 🧰 Have this ready: stock you can reorder fast and international shipping you can switch on in a day. She had to sort both out mid-surge.

Trigger: Co-founder Mairi Livsey commented under a US creator's TikTok that they were bringing chopped chicken caesar wraps to Mayfair, with no premises yet. She and her partner filmed the three-week build. Numbers: They planned to sell 50 wraps a day and sold 400 a day almost at once, with a queue seven days a week for three months (founder's figures). They now have 40 staff and opened a second site in Soho in August (Guardian, 10 Sep 2026). Aftermath: Scaled up. They hired a full-time queue manager and added a QR virtual queue. The queues have started to ease, Mayfair still averages 400 wraps a day, and they haven't yet taken any profit out. 🧰 Have this ready: a queue manager and a virtual (QR) queue. A plan for 50 a day became 400.

Trigger: Co-founder Olaf Ouwerkerk's first TikTok tested whether people remembered "trekdrop", a stretchy Dutch liquorice that left the shelves five years earlier. They had redeveloped it with a Dutch sweet factory as Strekdrop. Numbers: Almost a million views within hours and over 1,000 orders "in no time". The webshop went down for a while and the full stock sold out (FavorFlav, in Dutch, 18 Aug 2025). Aftermath: In August 2025 the founders said they were working to raise production so they'd have enough stock every week. When we checked on 29 Oct 2026, the webshop was back up with every Strekdrop size in stock, plus a StrekFruit spin-off. We found no sales or production figures, so it stays labelled "crashed" for the night the shop went down. 🧰 Have this ready: a webshop that won't fall over. Load-test your checkout and hosting before the post, and have a restock date ready to announce.

Every business on the scoreboard gets checked at 2, 6 and 12 weeks. Most of the launch set passed their 12-week mark before the site existed, so each gets one catch-up check-in, three a weekday, until 6 November. This week's results (checked 28–29 Oct):

Next week's list includes Dr Diamond, The Bomme Sweets' 12-week check-in and CZER. In the "where are they now" slot: Fishtail Coffee Cabin in Montana. The owners thanked @Starlink on X, Starlink reposted it, then Elon Musk did, and the post passed 1M views. They said "hundreds" of tourists were adding them to travel plans (KTVQ). Did the tourists actually turn up in a town of fewer than 70 people? We're finding out (due 5 Nov).

Across the 34 on the scoreboard, two routes keep coming up. One is borrowing someone else's audience: a creator review (Red's, The Dot Cakes), a celebrity (Dr Diamond, Justin Jacob Louis), a brand repost (Fishtail) or a TV slot (Flavour Bombs). The other is the owner filming something people already wanted: a nostalgic sweet, a build-in-public, a £1-an-item warehouse tour. Either way, the fixes that helped were the same short list: pre-orders, a queue system, and stock they could reorder fast. Most of them had to add these mid-surge.

Spotted a small business blowing up? If it's a small, founder-run independent (no chains or big-brand labels), submit it and we'll check back at 2, 6 and 12 weeks.

Sponsor slot: available. Affiliate links: none in this issue.

— Darren · Full scoreboard · Forwarded this? Subscribe