Flash Tags: The Escalating Opinion Scale
Four hashtags that tell people exactly how much weight to put on your opinion.
- Difficulty
- Starter
- Time to result
- ~days to results
- Steps
- 5
- Confidence
- 95%
Founders and leaders have a megaphone problem: a casual hallway opinion gets treated as a mandate and people burn months acting on it. Flash Tags solve this by attaching a discrete, escalating hashtag to every opinion, telling the recipient precisely where it sits on what Shah calls the 'dying on the hill' spectrum. Because the tags are self-descriptive and searchable, they also create an audit trail of past recommendations.
Origin
Invented by Dharmesh Shah at HubSpot to solve the founder megaphone problem. Published publicly at flashtags.org; now on the internal HubSpot wiki and used across the company daily.
Core principles
- 01As a founder you have an opinion on everything; it will not be thought through and it will often be wrong — but people will act on it anyway.
- 02Qualifying every statement in prose is inefficient and reads as false modesty; a discrete tag is cheap and unambiguous.
- 03There are no mandates — even the strongest tag is a plea, not an order, because the culture runs on autonomy and DRIs.
- 04Self-descriptive and searchable beats clever: anyone can guess what #FYI means, and you can retrieve every past #recommendation to see how it turned out.
How to run it
- 1
Use #FYI for zero-obligation information
'I came across this interesting blog post or found this news — just letting you know.' No response expected, no action expected. Go on with your life.
- 2
Use #suggestion for an unresearched thought
A thought that popped into your head and feels worth exploring. No response expected, no obligation to do it — but it is something you would at least consider if you were them.
Watch out This is the tag most opinions actually deserve. Resist the urge to escalate.
- 3
Use #recommendation when you have actually done the work
'I've thought about this a lot, done research, done digging, done soul-searching. I would do this.' Still not a requirement — but if they decide not to do it, you expect a response explaining why, what they learned, and what alternatives they considered.
Pro tip The searchability pays off here: pull your last five #recommendations and check your own hit rate.
- 4
Reserve #plea for the hill you would die on
'I have thought about this to my core, I believe in my soul this is what we should do, I am pleading with you to do this.' Still not a mandate — but it signals maximum conviction.
Watch out If you use this more than a handful of times in a company's life, it stops meaning anything. Shah can count his uses on one hand with fingers left over.
- 5
Publish the scale and use it everywhere
Put the definitions on the company wiki so the tags are commonly understood, then use them consistently in email, chat, and docs so people learn to calibrate against them.
Watch out A tag scale only works if the sender uses it honestly. Escalating everything to #plea to get your way destroys the system.
In the wild
Someone would stop Shah in a hallway with a question. He would give an off-the-cuff opinion. Because he was the founder, teams would treat it as gospel and spend months building or fixing something he had barely thought about. Flash Tags gave him a one-token way to say 'this is a passing thought, not an instruction.'
→ The tags became commonly accepted, documented on the internal wiki, used multiple times a day by Shah and others, and published externally at flashtags.org.
Common mistakes
Letting untagged founder opinions loose
Without an explicit weight, a casual opinion from a senior person defaults to maximum weight. Teams over-index and spend real calories on a throwaway thought.
Adding a 'just do it' mandate tag
The scale deliberately tops out at a plea. Adding a mandate tier collapses the autonomy the system depends on and people stop exercising discretion.
Inflating the tags
Tagging suggestions as recommendations, or recommendations as pleas, destroys the calibration that makes the scale useful in the first place.
Is it for you?
Best for
Founders, execs, and any leader whose offhand opinions carry disproportionate weight with their team, especially in written/async-first cultures.
Not ideal for
Genuinely directive contexts — safety, legal, compliance, or crisis situations where a real mandate is required and a plea would be dangerously ambiguous.
From the transcript
“it's it's like the hashtag that we all know but it's a discret set of them on an escalating set of what I call the…”
“the bottom hashtag is Hash FYI and the definition of the FYI is I came across this interesting blog post or I found this news…”
“next level up is hashtag recommendation hashtag recommendation is I've thought about this a lot I've done some research I've done some digging I've done…”
“it is remarkably effective because they're self-descriptive hashtags are searchable right”
From the episode
Zigging vs. zagging: How HubSpot built a $30B company
Dharmesh Shah (co-founder/CTO)