The ex-lawyer who analyzed 100,000 LinkedIn posts, found "narcissism," built a slider for it, and sold the whole thing in a week.
It's February 2022. Tom Orbach is working a day job at a Tel Aviv data privacy startup. It's late. He's been staring at LinkedIn posts - not reading them, dissecting them. One hundred thousand of them. What makes them travel? What causes a stranger to share something they didn't write, didn't think, didn't even fully believe?
The answer, when it arrives, is not flattering: self-love. A little narcissism. Possibly a lot.
So he builds a tool. Two questions. One slider. The questions: "What did you do today?" and "What's your inspirational advice?" The slider: a "Cringe Level" dial that goes from mild humble-brag to full spiritual-awakening-from-a-delayed-flight.
He calls it the LinkedIn Viral Post Generator. He launches it in Hebrew to test the concept. Within days: 100,000 Israeli users. He translates it to English in August 2022 and posts it to Reddit's r/InternetIsBeautiful. It reaches 2 million people in hours. A single Twitter share generates 15 million impressions. At peak, 1,000 new users per minute.
"I was under astronomical pressure," he said later. "I literally couldn't sleep for a week."
Within seven days of the English launch, a company called Taplio - which builds LinkedIn creator tools - came knocking. Orbach didn't take the first offer. He proposed a 24-hour experiment: link Taplio inside the tool and measure the traffic. The results were so convincing that Taplio accepted his original asking price. No counter. No negotiation. The experiment was the negotiation.
He had one request: keep his name on it. They agreed.
Cybersecurity marketing has a personality problem. It's all threat landscapes and zero-day vulnerabilities and stock photos of hooded figures typing in basements. Tom Orbach joined Wiz with a different brief: stop acting like a B2B company.
His formula: take one expected format and combine it with one completely unexpected audience. Apply B2C drops - surprise launches, limited runs, cultural moments - to an industry that hadn't seen anything like it.
Under his leadership, Wiz grew its LinkedIn following to 365,000+. The company reached a $1B valuation in 18 months - fastest ever at the time. Then $10B in just over three years. Then Google's $32B acquisition call.
None of the campaigns required a big budget. Most required a willingness to look a little ridiculous in a room full of people who are terrified of looking ridiculous.
The Marketing Ideas newsletter lives at marketingideas.com. It started as a free weekly, built over two-plus years to 85,000 subscribers - people at Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Google, LinkedIn, Salesforce, Spotify, Netflix. Not because of a viral spike. Because Orbach shows up and actually delivers something worth reading.
In mid-2025, he launched a paid tier. In the first 72 hours: $50,000+ in revenue. 500+ paying subscribers. Substack Bestseller status within days, eventually growing past 600 paid members.
Paid subscribers get a weekly "OMG-level" marketing idea, access to 200+ battle-tested ideas, a 350-page PDF book called "Marketing Moonshots," and a private community with marketing leaders. He writes all of this alongside a full-time Director role.
Orbach's marketing philosophy isn't a philosophy - it's a collection of things he's actually tested and seen work. He calls his approach "Unconventional Marketing" - applying behavioral economics and psychology to growth instead of budget and reach.
Tom Orbach is one of those rare people who is genuinely surprised when things work. Not performatively humble - actually surprised. He launched the Viral Post Generator "just for fun," then watched it reach 1.7 million people and still described the week as "astronomical pressure" he couldn't sleep through.
He left law because it prevented him from reaching his creative potential. That sentence sounds like a LinkedIn post - but in his case, there's a record: he went from courtrooms to no-code apps, from legal briefs to children's books about cloud security, from a LL.B. to a role leading marketing at the company Google paid $32 billion for.
He doesn't use Slack or Discord. He reads Steve Martin's memoir on persistence. He co-teaches Kubernetes with golden retriever puppies. He runs marathons. He negotiates acquisitions with 24-hour experiments instead of spreadsheets.
There's a version of Tom Orbach that stays in law. Practices IP. Does fine. Never builds a cringe-level slider. Never analyzes 100,000 LinkedIn posts for patterns of self-love. Never negotiates an acquisition with a 24-hour traffic experiment.
That person doesn't exist. The person who does exist took a LL.B. and an MBA and pointed them at behavioral psychology, no-code tools, and the question of why people share things online. And then he did it again. And again. The newsletter. The Wiz campaigns. The children's books about cloud security. The fake toy store for CISOs that generated 110,000 visitors in a week.
The throughline is always the same: find where everyone is being boring and serious, and bring something unexpected. Not gimmicks - actual ideas that make the audience feel something. Usually a mix of recognition and slight embarrassment that they understood the joke.
He's currently at Google (via the $32 billion acquisition of Wiz), publishing a newsletter to 85,000 people, teaching marketing at a university, and presumably training for another marathon. The childhood domain-squatter who built flash websites on Wix is now running growth for a company that rewrote what a cloud security acquisition could look like.
The cringe slider was never the point. The point was what happened when you applied real thinking to a stupid problem and made it travel.