My small snack business went viral overnight; 850k YT views. Here’s what happened/how I’m managing.

Background: I run a small international snack brand called Pop Snax, which I started 2 years ago. Initial operations were out of my apartment where snacks took up every inch of space, lol. I've grown steadily over the last year, and I'm now working out of a co-warehouse space.

Anyway, last Sunday, something wild happened. A huge influencer (Joe Bartolozzi) who randomly ordered one of my mystery snack boxes in August, unboxed it on stream. Had no idea who he was so I had no idea he was even placing an order. Within hours, my website traffic exploded. Shopify was dinging nonstop.. I got over 300 orders in two days. I was super confused at first and asked a customer how they found me, and that's when I found out about the influencer unboxing.

I cried almost constantly for the first 2 days bc this was one of those surreal “this is actually happening” moments, and I had no idea what I'd done to deserve this. Since last Sunday, orders have been heavy and consistent and the video featuring my box has hit 850k views!

While running the business, I also work a full-time job, so, I've been running on fumes trying to keep up with customer emails, packing, and fulfilling, often late into the night. It's been exciting, but also kind of chaotic.

Anyway, this viral moment has given me my first real taste of HEAVY demand at scale, but its also exposed how under-resourced I am as a solopreneur. I don’t have a team yet, or fulfillment support, and I’m still figuring out how to maintain that momentum after the viral wave calms down.

Even with the boost, I know growth won't be linear. There’s still the day-to-day grind I'm trying to figure out, i.e. running ads, improving packaging, managing costs, dealing with platform issues (looking at you, Amazon 😅), and trying to make every customer happy. I'm trying to get deep into AI, so I can offload some of that pressure/manual oversight.

Feel free to ask me anything! And if anyone else here has gone viral with a product or business, how did you handle the surge? Did you manage to sustain it afterward?