Maddie Tudor has been part of our marketing team at CoFi Advisors for going on four years, and this week she sits down with Wheeler and Colin to make an argument she can't always sell to her own clients: going viral is often exactly the wrong thing to chase. Before founding Maddie Tudor Consulting, Maddie built the first-ever marketing department at a major TV and film production company, running campaigns for Million Dollar Listing and RuPaul's Drag Race, a Las Vegas residency, and HBO's Liberty: Mother of Exiles. Now she works mostly with small businesses that need one-to-one client trust, not viral reach, which is exactly the position Wheeler and Colin are in with this show.

The conversation opens with the hosts' own brush with going viral: an episode that did unusually well, followed by a night of refreshing follower counts that ultimately converted almost nobody into a repeat listener. Maddie's read: a viral hit succeeds because of one random, compelling piece of content, and the audience it pulls in was never actually interested in anything else you make. Her rule of thumb: one follower who watches a video at least halfway through is worth more than a hundred who watch five seconds and scroll on.

From there, they get into what the platforms already reward (watch time, shares, and comments over raw follower count), Instagram's move to phase out impression counts entirely, and May 2026's Instagram "purge," when Meta deactivated inactive accounts and Kim Kardashian and Nike lost millions of followers overnight, revealing how hollow those numbers already were. Maddie also walks through a client story where a dormant newsletter list, not a viral moment, converted a new client within two months.

The back half widens into what's owed to anyone with a large platform: MrBeast's use of his following for charity, the "Trojan horse" strategy behind shows like Diary of a CEO, and why financial content creators in particular need to be careful given how easily retail attention can move actual markets. It closes on singer Maggie Rogers' own reflection on her breakout moment — "it's literally like a virus" — and why Wheeler and Colin have always said they want growth, just not cancerous growth.

Sources:
Maddie Tudor Consulting — maddietudorconsulting.com
Maddie Tudor, newsletter "Lesson Learned: Insights From an Entrepreneur Trying to Figure It Out"
Rachel Karten, Link in Bio newsletter, on shifting algorithm entry points and 2026 social media trends
Coverage of Instagram's May 2026 inactive-account purge and its effect on major accounts' follower counts

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Credits:
Created By: Wheeler Crowley and Colin Walker
Production, Editing and Post-Production: Tori Rothwell