How Jason Levin makes millions from memes

Meet Jason Levin.

Jason is 27 and the founder of Memelord.

Memelord is his life’s work, and he has accidentally been working on it since he was 7. Yes, seriously.

The story told by Jason Levin

No code - no problem

See, here’s the first thing to know about me.

Unlike probably most of the founders in this newsletter, I have no idea how to code. Instead of writing lines of code at a young age, I spent most of teenage years making “content”. Everything from crazy Photoshop art to silly YouTube videos.

All of this was practice for blowing up the internet.

Building an audience

When I turned 23, I started taking building my audience more seriously (so I wouldn’t have to work in corporate America).

I went hard on Twitter (now X), growing my audience with threads about marketing and books and whatever I was reading about. I just followed my curiosity and sent DMs and got on the phone with people I thought seemed cool. This led to me meeting new internet friends and working for a ton of startups as a ghostwriter.

While I was freelancing for startups, I had 2 big realizations that changed my life:

First realization 💡

With the rise of ChatGPT, being funny will be more important than ever. The internet is full of boring slop. The best way to stand out is to be funny.

This led to me writing my book Memes Make Millions about how memelords make money.

This book changed my life and put me on the trajectory to launch a startup. But I didn’t know that at the time. I still thought I was too dumb to build a startup.

Second realization 💡

What I realized was most startup founders are pretty stupid. Which is great because I’m stupid too. So I could probably figure out how to build software.

You don’t need to be Zuck to build a startup (and Zuck’s sister literally invested in my company). YOU NEED TO BE SCRAPPY!!!

So in June 2024, I started building Memelord.

Building Memelord

Since I didn’t know how to build software, I started Memelord with a simple daily newsletter of the newest trending memes called Meme Alerts for $6.9/mo.

The idea was to help keep marketers on top of meme trends as easy as possible. I launched the newsletter on X (see below) and saw signups come flying in.

I probably hit 100 customers within the first few week or two. (You’ve gotta remember I spent 5 years tweeting and building distribution every single day).

When Meme Alerts hit ~$1k/mo, I realized shit maybe I’m onto something. So I started watching YouTube videos on how to build no-code software. I drank more Red Bull than I’m proud to admit and screamed more expletives at 2 AM than I’d like to admit as well.

But in 3 weeks, I built the MVP for Memelord Technologies.

Then I launched it and shit went crazy.

Growing Memelords

Over the next 9 months, I grew Memelord Technologies by any memes necessary:

• I posted viral memes and plugged Memelord underneath them

• I wrote guest posts for the SEO traffic

• I posted about every new feature

• I wrote about my adventures in my newsletter

I didn’t spend $1 on paid ads.

(I suck at paid ads, I didn’t have cash to spend, and my product was too cheap)

So I leaned into my strengths (organic social) and did anything I could.

And the scrappiness worked.

Within 9 months, Memelord Technologies hit $100k ARR.

Raising 💲3M

Then 3 months later, I raised $3M to build Memelord version 2.

You’d think raising $3M solves every problem.

But it also creates new ones.

Now that I have money and engineers, this took away the problem of trying to be an engineer and marketer at the same time, but it also presented new problems like how the f*ck do I manage engineers and how the f*ck do I spend $3M to return as much capital as possible?

So that’s where I’m at now.

It’s a good problem of course.

We’re getting signups all the time. We have 1000s of marketers using us at brands like beehiiv, Morning Brew, Coinbase and more.

And our software velocity is MOVING FAST.

3 things on my mind

Right now all I’m thinking about is 3 things:

1. Build a better product
   

2. Build better systems
   The systems you need to bootstrap are very different than VC. After raising $3M all my systems are broken. So how do I build good systems? There’s an order of operations in startups and you’ve gotta follow it sometimes.
   

3. I genuinely have no idea how to do paid ads
   I’ve done scrappy organic marketing for so long that I have no clue how to do paid ads! I never needed to or had the cash to. Now I have $3M and don’t know how to spend on paid ads. Good problem to have, but honestly kinda weird lol.

I hope this shows you a few things:

1. You don’t need to know how to code to build a product people love and go raise money. You can literally start with a $6.90/mo newsletter like me. All the “rules” are fake bro.
   

2. Build distribution (yesterday).
   

3. Even when you’ve got the money and customers flying in, there’s always challenges! 1 of the things Zuck’s sister told me about Zuck was he thought it would get easier when Facebook got bigger. Instead it got harder. There’s always new bigger challenges. But as David Senra from Founders Podcast says, “The work is the reward!”

Like I said, Memelord is my life’s work.

And I am beyond grateful for the challenges: to wake up everyday and be a goofball on the internet and make millions doing it!

Wanna reach out to Jason Levin? You can find him on X and LinkedIn.

See you next time,
Thanks,
Jakob Jelling

I’m on X. Come out and play.