4天狂揽170万用户！一个“副业小项目”如何让AI搜索引擎Exa血洗全网？

3.1 🔥 第一招：制造“社交货币”，让用户免费为你打工

• ​零门槛参与​：不需要登录、授权，只要账号公开，输入用户名即可。
• ​天生分享欲​：年度关键词、最常互动的好友、搞笑人格标签……每一张生成卡片都是用户在朋友圈炫耀的“社交货币”。
• ​自带标签传播​：用户自发带上​#TwitterWrapped​分享，形成闭环病毒裂变。

这是Spotify Wrapped的逻辑复制到社交平台——谁不喜欢看自己的“数据人设”？

3.1.1 🧠 第二招：用“Demo”打广告，技术实力一次秀透

Twitter Wrapped 本质上就是​Exa搜索API的现场演示​：

• 实时抓取并分析海量推文 → 展示毫秒级语义检索能力
• 完美适配AI代理（Agent）的数据需求 → 直接打动目标用户：AI开发者

与其说这是一个小工具，不如说是一份​可交互的API产品说明书​。

3.1.2 🎯 第三招：丝滑转化路径，从“玩一下”到“用起来”

• ​流量沉淀​：结果页显著位置挂上​exa.ai​链接，引导好奇的开发者点击
• ​免费试用​：新用户直接获得基础额度的API调用权限，零成本上手测试
• ​场景延伸​：通过“社交数据分析”这个趣味场景，暗示企业客户——市场调研、竞品监控、AI知识库……你们的刚需，Exa都能做

​结果：170万泛流量中，大批AI开发者转化为真实用户。​

8.1 原文双语阅读

Exa，一款由人工智能驱动的搜索引擎，凭借viral 的“Twitter 年度总结”获得了170万用户。Exa完成了有史以来最成功的“副业项目营销”案例之一。每一位独立开发者都深知副业项目营销的力量：推出免费的小项目，来补充主产品并为其引流。也许有史以来最成功的副业项目就是Spotify年度总结。Spotify 在2016年发布了这一年度个性化回顾功能，如今已有超过2亿用户使用，并且通常能为Spotify带来20%的下载量增长——对于一个拥有超过6.26亿活跃用户的应用来说，这绝非易事。

Spotify 年度总结如此成功，以至于几乎所有人都模仿了它。苹果音乐、YouTube、《华盛顿邮报》、多邻国、Reddit、任天堂……你懂的。但奇怪的是，一直没有出现过针对 Twitter（现为 X）的版本。

结果，Ishan Goswami和他所在的Exa团队（一家为 AI 应用提供高质量网络数据的初创公司）也注意到了这个空缺，于是在12月26日推出了Twitter年度总结。

说它“走红”简直是年度最轻描淡写的说法。上线头四个小时就获得了50万次浏览，此后热度丝毫未减。仅仅四天后，那条发布的推文就有了5.9万次转发和1360万次浏览，并转化出了170万用户。

查看你的 2024 Twitter 年度总结！ 由 Exa 驱动的人工智能会找出你最喜欢的主题、热门推文，甚至判断你这一年是“调皮”还是“乖巧”😈 点击这里获取—— [链接] [图片链接]

它之所以能viral，原因和 Spotify 年度总结一样：它本质上就是一个易于分享的产品。分享你在 Twitter 上最痴迷的内容和“灵魂推友”很有趣，就像分享你最喜欢的歌曲和歌手一样。这就是为什么从 Reddit 创始人 Alexis Ohanian 到 YC 首席执行官 Garry Tan，每个人都在晒自己的结果。

而一旦 viral 的雪球滚动起来，很快就会变成一场雪崩。Ishan 一直在实时发推记录整个过程，他欣喜若狂，这完全可以理解。

显然，复制Exa的成功会很困难，但如果这个案例还不能说服你去尝试副业项目营销，那就没有什么能说服你了。对于一个偏向工程技术的创始人来说，可能没有比这更好的方式来推广自己的初创公司了。

Exa, an AI-powered search engine, gains 1.7M users with viral "Twitter Wrapped"

Exa has pulled off one of the most successful examples of side project marketing ever.

Every indie hacker knows the power of side project marketing: shipping free projects that complement and boost traffic to your main product.

Perhaps the most successful side project of all time is Spotify Wrapped. Spotify released its annual personalized recap in 2016, and today, it is used by over two hundred million users and routinely increases Spotify downloads by 20%, no small feat for an app with over 626 million active users.

Spotify Wrapped is so successful that it's been copied by basically everyone. Apple Music, YouTube, The Washington Post, Duolingo, Reddit, Nintendo... you get the point. Curiously, though, there has not yet been a version for Twitter (X).

It turns out that Ishan Goswami and his team at Exa, a startup that provides AI applications with high quality web data, also found this curious, so on December 26th they launched Twitter Wrapped.

To say it went viral would be the understatement of the year. It had half a million views in the first four hours and it hasn't slowed down since. Just four days later, the launch tweet has 59,000 reposts and 13.6M views, which has translated to 1.7M users.

See your 2024 Twitter Wrapped!

Exa-powered AI finds your favorite topics, top tweets, and even whether you’ve been naughty/nice 😈

Get yours here - https://t.co/TXGaRcdTA8 pic.twitter.com/ETNBt5U2iK

— Exa (@ExaAILabs) December 26, 2024

The reason it went viral is the same reason that Spotify Wrapped goes viral: it's an inherently sharable product. It's fun to share your Twitter obsession and twin, just like it's fun to share your favorite songs and artists. That's why everyone from Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian to YC CEO Garry Tan is posting their results.

And once the viral snowball gets going, it turns into an avalanche very quickly.

Ishan has been live tweeting the whole experience, and he is understandably euphoric.

US RIGHT NOW https://t.co/RS4JgvN63G pic.twitter.com/CDQbKFgAjj

— Ishan Goswami (@TheIshanGoswami) December 27, 2024

It will obviously be hard to duplicate Exa's success, but if this doesn't convince you to give side project marketing a try, nothing will. There's perhaps no better way for a engineering-inclinced founder to market their startup.

英文链接

8.2 exa 官网介绍

欢迎来到 Exa. Exa 是一个应用人工智能实验室，正在构建一个前所未有的搜索引擎。

我们没有广告。我们将搜索作为 API 出售，专门优化质量、延迟和可定制性。这就是为什么像 Cursor、Lovable 以及其他成千上万客户使用我们来驱动代理和工作流程的原因。

但这只是今天。Exa 的终极目标是完美搜索。

什么是完美搜索？很简单——你应该能够了解关于世界的任何信息。字面意义上的任何信息，比如：

• 找出纽约市所有写过关于哲学博客的工程师
• 找出过去一个月在欧洲爆红的全部政治片段

完美的搜索是高度可控、无偏、全面的。因为我们缺乏它，我们每个人都对几乎所有事情都有一个不完整的理解。

构建完美的搜索将极其困难。但它也是必要的。它是我们新 AI 现实的关键文明基础设施。

政治正在碎片化，战争正在肆虐，技术正在加速——我们需要工具来深刻地了解正在发生的事情。如果我们不能掌控地球的信息，我们将失去对地球的控制 。

简而言之，世界需要完美的搜索。它需要一个具有纯粹动力的组织来构建它。正是因为没有人做这件事，所以我们才必须做。

威尔·布莱克，首席执行官

Dear curious internet wanderer,

Welcome to Exa. Exa is an applied AI lab building a search engine unlike the world has ever seen.

We don't have ads. We sell our search as an API, optimized exclusively for quality, latency, and customizability. That's why customers like Cursor, Lovable, and thousands of others use us to power agents and workflows.

But that's just today. Exa's ultimate goal is perfect search.

What is perfect search? It's simple – you should be able to know anything about the world. Literally anything, like:

"Find every engineer in NYC who's written a blog post about philosophy"

"Find all the political clips that went viral in Europe in the past month"

Perfect search is highly controllable, unbiased, comprehensive. Because we lack it, we each walk around with an incomplete understanding of nearly everything.

Building perfect search will be extremely hard. But it's also necessary. It's critical civilizational infrastructure for our new AI reality.

Politics is fragmenting, wars are raging, and technology is accelerating -- we need tools that deeply inform us what's going on. If we don't gain control over the planet's information, we will lose control over our planet.

In short, the world needs perfect search. It needs an organization with pure incentives to build it. And because no one else is doing it, that's why we have to.

Will Bryk, CEO