A lightweight system for testing audience response, engagement patterns, and meme velocity.
Built with a close collaborator, GDFP (originally “Good Day Fine People”) was a daily meme initiative that ran every day for a year. We created, posted, and tracked content performance — building a repeatable creative pipeline and learning from real-world audience behavior.
Result: 50K+ upvotes on Reddit.
This entry became our pattern baseline for understand tropes versus trends — tracked inside the GDFP spreadsheet and reused with structural variations. It helped formalize our approach to format, delivery time, and copy rhythm.
📈 Viral Signal
One post — “Kitten Expressions” — reached over 52,000 upvotes on Reddit. This meme was tagged within our system using a trend taxonomy (`trend_dont-the-kitty`, `irreverence`, `scritches`) and reflected a recurring theme in our feed: disproportionate expression with minimal captioning.
Result: Viral crossover and unexpected authorship claim.
This meme sparked discussion about authorship and attribution — the person in the photo came forward to claim ownership. It became a touchpoint for thinking about content rights and community dynamics in distributed systems.
We wrote the caption. We posted the meme. We watched it take off — and then watched it leave our hands. "Nobody even said thank you." That was the line. The image went viral across Reddit, Facebook, and Instagram, racking up millions of impressions. But the subject in the photo — not the writer — became the face of the joke.
No matter how viral something gets — the real signal comes from what you build after. I used to think I was the funny one. But working with Jeff taught me how to listen. I like to say: I was responsible for about 30,000 of our upvotes that year. Jeff was responsible for the other 970,000.
G.D.F.P. was never a company. But we treated it like a lab.
© 2025 Alex Catalano