I don't have exp in startups, but I did experience this watching the traffic of an FOSS book I have written, when the surge started, the repo was trending on Github for two days! Now it has 1.1k stars, steadily increasing over the time.
I do not count the stars as a metric of the book's quality, I value user feedback!
In all honesty, the press -> growth -> press loop caught me up on on my first launch. When it stops, the real work starts.