What to do when a post goes viral

It's twenty to midnight, the post has 380,000 views, there are 640 comments, and you have nine jars in a box under the bed.

Do three things in the next hour, in this order. Work out the honest number you can actually deliver, which is smaller than your stock. Pin a comment with that number, the price and the date the next batch lands. Then stop taking orders past that number, publicly, before anyone pays you for something that doesn't exist.

The traffic will be gone in 48 hours. The obligations you accept tonight will be with you for six weeks. That asymmetry is the entire thing, and almost everyone gets it backwards on the first one, because a comment section moving that fast feels like an opportunity you'll be punished for wasting.

You won't be. Nobody remembers the thing they couldn't buy. Everybody remembers the thing they paid ₦6,500 for and received in 26 days.

The first hour

Set a timer. Do these in order. Don't reply to anyone yet.

Minutes 0 to 10. Count. Physically count finished units. Not materials, not "I could make more". Finished, packable, sellable units in the room with you.

Minutes 10 to 20. Halve your capacity estimate. Work out how many more you could make this week, then take a third off. You'll get ill, a supplier will be closed, and you'll spend six hours a day answering messages you've never had before. The reduced number is the only one you're allowed to say out loud.

Minutes 20 to 30. Fix the price and the delivery cost. Both of them, in writing, for local and for everywhere else. Do not improvise this at 2am on message 140.

Minutes 30 to 40. Write the pinned comment. Wording below.

Minutes 40 to 45. Check the link works. On mobile data, on a phone, not on your laptop. Half the disasters in this article are a link that 404s or a shop that still lists last month's price.

Minutes 45 to 60. Pin it, and post the same thing as a story and a reply on your own post. Then, and only then, start answering people.

The pinned comment

This is the single highest-value thing you'll write all week. It needs five things and no personality.

40 jars ready now, ₦6,500 each. Delivery ₦2,000 in Port Harcourt, ₦3,500 nationwide. Next batch is 22 September. Link in bio. When the 40 are gone I'll edit this comment to say so, so check here before you pay.

Five things: how many, how much, delivery cost, when the next lot is, and where to go. The last clause is the one that saves you, because it makes the comment a live status board and people will check it instead of asking you.

Edit it. Every time the number changes. "12 left" at 1am, "sold out, next batch 22 Sept" at 2am. An unedited pinned comment is worse than no pinned comment, because people trust it and then pay for something you no longer have.

Every hour you leave a fast-moving comment section without one of these, you accumulate roughly forty orders you'll have to apologise to individually.

Count what you can promise, not what you have

Stock is not the constraint. Time is.

Run this sum on paper before you promise anything.

Step	Minutes each	100 orders
Confirm payment and match it to a person	2	200 min
Pack and label	8	800 min
Write the address, arrange the rider or drop-off	3	300 min
Answer one message per order, average	4	400 min
Total	17	1,700 min, about 28 hours

Twenty-eight hours for a hundred orders, and that assumes nothing goes wrong. If you have a job, that's most of two weeks of evenings. Three hundred orders is 85 hours, which is not a busy fortnight, it's a physical impossibility with a person's name attached to every hour of it.

So the number you promise is whichever is smaller: what you can make, or what you can pack. It's almost always the second one, and almost nobody checks.

Triage the messages

Two hundred DMs is not two hundred conversations. It's about six conversations repeated.

Sort them, fast, into four piles.

1. Ready to pay. Send the link and the price. Nothing else. Do not chat.
2. Asking a question everybody is asking. Answer it once, in public, in a new pinned reply, and send those people one line pointing at it.
3. Asking something specific and expensive of your time. Custom orders, wholesale, collaborations. Answer these in a week. Say so: "I'll come back to you properly on Monday." They'll wait.
4. Not buying. Compliments, jokes, people asking where you got your shirt. Leave them. You can be gracious on Thursday.

Set an away message. Say what it is, what it costs, when the next batch is, and that you're behind on replies. That message will do more work than you will.

If the volume stays high after the spike, that's a permanent operational problem rather than a weekend one, and it has a proper solution: what to do when DMs get out of hand.

The comment section is a spreadsheet you didn't make

People will claim items in comments. "I'll take two." "Sending now." "Mine." On a post with 640 comments, sorted by whatever the platform feels like, you will lose track by 3am.

Move it out of the comments immediately. One line, repeated: "Comments aren't orders. Use the link so I don't lose you."

Then honour that. If you fill an order from a comment because someone was persistent, you've taught the whole comment section that comments work, and now you have two order systems and no reconciliation.

The full method for handling claim-in-comments selling without losing track is in selling in comments without losing track, and it's worth reading before you need it rather than during.

Delivery promises are the thing that ruins it

The lie you'll be tempted to tell is "3 to 5 days" because that's what you normally do at four orders a week.

At a hundred orders, a five-day promise means you're packing twenty a day for five days while also answering four hundred messages. You'll miss it on day two, and then you'll have a hundred people who all know exactly when they were supposed to receive something.

Promise long. Wildly, uncomfortably long. If you think ten days, say fourteen. A buyer told fourteen who receives on day nine tells people you're brilliant. A buyer told five who receives on day nine writes a review.

And put a date on it, not a duration. "By 24 September" survives being read at midnight. "In two weeks" doesn't, because nobody remembers which day they read it. Delivery times you can actually promise has the method for working out a date you'll hit.

The money, at speed

This is where manual selling either holds or falls apart, and the failure is specific.

Every manual rail on Sailo means you confirm the payment yourself. Bank transfer, cash on delivery, an order that arrives by WhatsApp or Instagram DM, all of it. Sailo never touches the money and takes nothing on those rails, which is why it costs you nothing at four orders a week. At a hundred orders in three days, "you confirm it yourself" becomes a real job with a real duration, and nothing can shortcut it. Sailo can't see your bank account. Only your bank knows a transfer arrived.

Three things that make it survivable:

A reference format, decided before the spike. Your initials plus their first name. It won't work every time. It'll turn a forty-minute reconciliation into a five-minute one.

One payment method for the rush. Not four. Every extra method is another place to look and another way to lose ₦6,500.

A running list with names, amounts and dates, updated as you go. Whatever the format. A notebook is fine. What isn't fine is reconstructing it on Sunday from three apps.

The card option exists and it's worth knowing what it costs. Card needs a Stripe account Stripe has cleared for charges, and Sailo takes 1–3% of the goods after discount, excluding delivery and tax. On a ₦6,500 jar that's about ₦33. What card actually buys you in this situation is not the fee saving, it's that the confirmation happens without you at 2am. Stripe's clearance isn't instant, though, so that's a decision for a quiet month, not for the night the post takes off.

Worked example: Chidera, Port Harcourt

Chidera whips shea butter in her kitchen. About 3,000 followers, ₦6,500 a jar, normally four to six orders a week, mostly delivered by a rider she knows, cash on delivery.

A 22-second video of her whipping a batch did 380,000 views in eighteen hours. By morning she had 640 comments and 210 DMs.

What she had. Forty finished jars. Materials for about sixty more, and a supplier who's shut on Sundays.

What she did in the first hour. Counted forty. Decided sixty more over twelve days, not the ninety she could theoretically make. Pinned the comment. Sold all forty in about ninety minutes.

The waiting list. She replaced the pinned comment with "sold out, next batch 22 September, join the list" and a link. 310 people joined. She sold 58 of the next 60 jars to that list before the batch was finished.

The delivery decision that saved her. Chidera normally does cash on delivery, which in Nigeria is what people expect and not a fallback. For orders inside Port Harcourt she kept it. For everywhere else she switched to transfer first, and said why: "I'm one person, I can't carry the cost of parcels that come back." Nobody argued. Thirty COD parcels going nationwide, with the share that get refused at the door, would have eaten the batch.

The reconciliation. Ninety-eight bank transfers over sixteen days, matched by hand against a list in a notebook. About twenty-five minutes a day. Two people paid ₦6,500 with no reference at all and it took three days to work out who they were, during which both messaged her twice.

What it made. 98 jars at ₦6,500 is ₦637,000, minus materials, delivery and a fortnight of her life. Her normal month is about 20 jars.

What it left behind. 310 addresses on a list. Followers up from 3,000 to 11,400. And two one-star comments from people who ordered on day one and received on day eleven, because she'd said seven.

The number that hurts isn't the orders you couldn't fill. It's the people who paid on day one and got their parcel on day 26, because those are the only ones who write anything down.

Days three to thirty

The traffic dies before the work does. Plan for the gap.

The hangover is real. You'll be packing boxes for a fortnight while your reach returns to normal, and it feels like failure. It isn't. It's the invoice for the good day.

Something will go wrong that you can't fix. A batch spoils, a supplier is out, you undercharged for delivery by ₦1,500 an order and it's now a real number. When that happens, message everyone affected before they message you, offer a refund without being asked, and give a new date you're certain of. What to do when you cannot fulfil has the wording, and the short version is that speed matters more than the explanation.

Refund the people who ask. All of them, immediately, no negotiation. A refund costs you one sale. An argument in public costs you the next hundred.

Do not restructure your business around one post. The temptation on day four is to order 500 units, rent a unit, and quit your job. Wait sixty days and see what the baseline settles at. Chidera's settled at about 30 jars a month, which is half again what it was and nothing like the spike.

Get ready before it happens

Most of this article is unusable at midnight if you haven't done it in advance. The prep is about ninety minutes, once.

• A pinned comment template with blanks for number, price, delivery and date.
• Delivery prices worked out for local and national, written down.
• A reference format for transfers.
• An away message you can switch on.
• A signup link for a waiting list, so the people you can't serve today are worth something in October.
• One decision made in advance: the maximum number of orders you'll accept in a week. Write it on the wall.

That last one is the item people skip and the one that matters most, because the decision is impossible to make well while a comment section is moving.

And the wider point, which is easy to lose in the adrenaline: a viral post is a distribution event, not a business. What turns it into a business is the list you captured and the second thing you sell those people. Turning an audience into income is the map for that part.

What to do this week

If you're not viral right now, write the pinned comment template tonight and put it in your notes app. Then work out, honestly, how many orders you can pack in one evening, multiply by the evenings you actually have in a week, and halve it.

Write that number down. That's your cap. When a post takes off at twenty to midnight, you won't be able to calculate it, and having it already written is the difference between a good fortnight and a fortnight of apologies.