From a $6.90 newsletter to $3M API: How a non-coder built Memelord | Jason Levin

Confession, I'm not a vibe coder. I'm way worse. So I started Memelord about four months before vibe coding started hitting. You are an example of a company and a product that's going to get an inflection point because agents are going to become your users. Because agents don't get in their mind about being funny or not funny. They don't overthink. They just go straight to the tokens and YOLO something out. I just built it on Bubble and I grew it to 100K ARR on Bubble without hiring engineers. 395 workflows just on the editor. And I was able to grow this just out of pure obsession and the love of it. I can't code and never have and can publish a skill that other people can download and just plug into their sentient lobster that makes weird memes. What it unlocks, which you've shown us, give your marketers free reign on your marketing site to build the things that will drive demand. It's so lossy to take an idea and hand it off and hand it off and hand it off. And when you can just go straight to the code, you get better products. Let your marketers cook. You have no idea what they're capable of. Either let them cook and let them market their stuff or watch them leave your company. Welcome back to How I AI. I'm Claire Vo, product leader and AI obsessive here on a mission to help you build better with these new tools. Today's episode is probably the most unhinged episode of How AI we've done yet with Jason Levin, CEO and founder of Memelord, who's asking us all to take being funny a little bit more seriously. We don't cover three workflows. I think we cover 10. And there are ideas all over this episode about how you can use AI to market, how you can use AI to build, and how you can use AI to capture your good ideas without waking up your wife at night. Let's get to it. This episode is brought to you by WorkOS. AI has already changed how we work. 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Jason, welcome to How I AI. Thank you so much for having me. I'm super stoked to be here. You and I met because when I was deep in my OpenClaw psychosis, you messaged me and you said, I think I have the OpenClaw use case for you. And you were right. I recently published this like ultimate guide to OpenClaw and Lenny was asking me, what are your like killer use cases for OpenClaw? And I was like, man, I got an agent making me memes all day. And that is what you told me to do. So tell me, how did we get here? Why are we making like agentically-driven memes via API in Telegram thanks to the BotFather? How did we get here in the year of our Lord 2026? The world is just getting more entertaining. I think that's really the thesis that drove me to start Memelord. And how can you make your brand more entertaining? Your content is the question, right? There's, you know, a great Elon quote of the most entertaining outcome is the most likely. And I don't think enough people take that seriously. It's like, if you want your brand to be the most likely outcome, shouldn't it be the most entertaining, right? So that's like how we got here, right? In a thesis-driven way is who controls the memes controls the universe. Another Elon quote. And you know, memes are the smallest form of cultural transmission, right? That's from the inventor of the word meme. So that's how we got started. But how did we get here is, you know, now Memelord has an API and you could plug that into OpenClaw for agentic meming. And so what does this actually look like? I mean, you can see right here, can you cook me up a meme about memetic warfare, right? And what it does is it uses our trending meme database, finds ones that are related, writes jokes on top of it. And here, right, it's not just some random meme. It's actually Bill Clinton, right? Because it's talking about political content, right? Here making a meme about Iran. Like, this is fantastic. Everybody knows the timeline goes nuts. Everybody becomes an expert. And one of my favorite features is just switch the caption, right? And so everybody is freaking out right now. CLAUDE is destroying shareholder value, destroying startups with one feature launch. And I think there's a lot of founders that feel like that. So, you know, at the end of the day, like the idea here is our internet is going crazy and going to have fun and let's have the most fun and do it agentically. I have a lot more thoughts I could share of how we got here. Yeah, what I like about this is just as the end user, and again, we don't usually show demos except this is truly like my number one OpenClaw use case on the marketing site, which is I do think you're right. This is like a new form of marketing that's quite effective for brands if we're being incredibly boring about it and not cultural critics. We're just being good old capitalists. This is a very effective form of attention getting and it's a very effective form of marketing. And one, it's super hard to stay on top of trending news. And two, it's super hard to stay on top of trending memes. And three, you have a very narrow window. And so even as a human user of Memelord, I really felt like I couldn't stay on top of stuff. And so what I actually think is the more interesting conversation for folks on How AI is you are an example of a company and a product that's going to get an inflection point because agents are going to become your users. Because agents don't get in their mind about being funny or not funny. They don't overthink. They just go straight to the tokens and YOLO something out. And I think working with an agent as a user, especially in marketing, just like reduces the friction across so many, like it helps you climb cringe mountain in a way that's very hard to do as a human. So there's this quote from the CTO of Ramp that has been one of our leading points, which is no UX is the best UX. And we worked really hard on our UX and made it beautiful while knowing the entire time that no UX is the best UX. And I think that everybody should try to do the same. You know, thanks to you. I really appreciate it as well. Lenny tweeted, we have the best onboarding on the internet. The amount of blood, sweat and tears that went into that redesigns, the bouncing logos, you know, trying it multiple times, changing the design of it. You know where the different logos bounce everything. So many redesigns and so much fun. I wrote a great article called iOS app learnings, part one, just about the craft of it while knowing the entire time that agents were coming and no UX is the best UX. And a story I've been meaning to share. I was on the phone with our lead investor, Sam Lesson. This guy wrote us a check for one and a half million dollars and tells me, I don't really want to use your software anymore. It's nothing personal. I just don't want to use anybody's software. And I was like, thanks, asshole. Well, good news. Here's our API. It's now out. And you know, the team is using it in their OpenClaw, right? And that's just like the future that we're going in is like, nobody wants to press buttons anymore, even if they're beautiful. And I think you're right. We are hitting this inflection point and seeing agents use it has been crazy and weird and magical. And that's the power of Memelord is we, you know, help you find all the weirdest trends and all the newest trends. That's what we were built on is actually meme alerts, right? I started Memelord and we can get into this. I started just as a newsletter for $6.90 per month, sending you the newest memes. And then I sent you to a Google slides deck because I didn't know how to code. And that's really, you know, the evolution of Memelord was from that. And it's the same thesis of you just want to be on the current trends and remix them for your brand. So it's, you know, the future, no UX is the best UX and you know, good news for Sam over here is he could use it from any agent now. I feel like everybody's in a DM with Sam if you're building something in AI. What I would, what is it, the thing that's really interesting about what you said is you've combined some two interesting things that I think the AI product builders who watch How AI should pay attention to, which is one, a really good human onboarding experience and actually like very human marketing, which is at the core of what you do. It's like, there's like identity alignment and a specific brand and a What I can do, right? Like, that's what's so exciting about vibe coding now is like, you could just do so much more and have so much more fun. I mean, last night I was building, oh, this one? Oh, this is my favorite. So this is a Steve Jobs portrait generator. And anytime that I'm in like, an article, like with journalists or like pitching to journalists or whatever, I had my VA doing that and now it's just OpenClaw doing that. But I have them submit this and now I've had this headshot in multiple articles, all from this dumb tool, right? Like, is my Steve Jobs one. So like, I don't know, I think, I think it just lets you have so much more fun. Like, I rebuilt this Snapchat filter that just lets you make a Snapchat caption because I was so pissed off. If you open Snapchat to try to like edit a photo now, it's like 50 ads and like, like a lot of like NSFW content trying to like advertise to you, right? And it's like, I just want to add the funny little Snapchat like caption to make a meme. Like, I don't know. I think like, this is how we operate. We operate on Cursor and a lot of like, you know, linear stuff for that, but generally, we just love to make weird stuff. And that's like, that's what ties our team together is we are just weird internet kids that, you know, for me personally, like, I love just making physical art. I've always been making art. I've always been a writer. I've had stuff in galleries and won essay contests and like vibe coding is just like another way to express myself and make money on the internet and have fun. So I would encourage people to like follow their fun first before anything else because that's how I ended up here is just silly, weird hacking. - I love this. And for folks that are maybe not watching and want the kind of like higher level takeaway from this, which I think is very important, which is one, Cursor is actually really good for non-technical folks. And the reason why I think it's good for non-technical folks is you start to read the code and you start to learn a little bit more and you become more dangerous. And so I think sometimes when you're in these like terminal-based Claude codes, they're great. They can, you know, spit off a lot of work, but I still, I love a Cursor. Because you can see what you're doing and I think that's really powerful. And I think the modes of ask, plan, debug, these are really good guided paths for things. And I think ask is a great one for maybe a non-technical CEO who's working with the team of engineers. And you're just like, remind me how the Steve, you know, you built it, but like, remind me how this works. Explain to me how this works. And then you can go in and work on it. And those mechanisms are really good. I think the second thing, which I love that you said, which is like everybody vibe codes, let me repeat it again for the people in the back. Like everybody vibe codes. And it's not this sort of abstract CEO kind of like top-down edict that you see in these large companies. What it unlocks, which you've shown us on this freebay, which I just, I love it so much, is you can give your marketers free reign on your marketing site to build the things that will drive demand. And like how painful would it be for your engineers to switch from like, API rate limiting and auth to trying to build sort of like these free meme generators and like translate the, like the creativity, right? It's so, it's so lossy to take an idea and hand it off and hand it off and hand it off. And when you can just go straight to the code, you get better products. And even though this is sort of like a marketing site, they're all little just baby products. - Yeah, they are and they drive subscriptions that then the day. It's really weird because like two years ago, I wrote an article for HubSpot actually called Free Tools Are The New PDF Downloads essentially, right? And I was like, just like working for other startups at the time and I just followed our exact strategy and it's working two years later. And I would recommend any startup, like there's no excuse anymore. Why do you have a PDF download? Build a tool. It takes actually less time to build a tool nowadays. And nothing wrong with PDF downloads, obviously, you know, we, we do that occasionally, but it's very easy to just build a tool now. And think about what weird tools they are and then put them at the bottom of your site where people can, you know, try out different tools and weird galleries and even games. We've started screwing around making mini games. Like, you know, these, these are now just as easy to do as, as write an ebook, which was, you know, if you're trying to collect more leads or emails for your newsletter, your business, etc., there's nothing better than building a mini tool that solves the first problem that gets people into the bigger problem that your actual company solves. So it's, it's just a common strategy there. And really, I'd encourage any, you know, technical person, let your marketers cook. You have no idea like what they're capable of. And, you know, obviously I'm biased here, but the last company I was at, they didn't let me cook and that's why I quit. And then I raised money and built my own company and you're going to see a lot of that. And I think a lot of marketers and non-technical people are in a, in a revenge mode right now. And they want to cook. So either let them cook and let them market their stuff or watch them leave your company. - I could not, I could not agree more. And again, like CEOs, CTOs, like see whatevers, all my, all my friends and peers at companies, like your most talented people will leave if you do not let them run. And that means like pay for the tokens. It also means let them build stuff. And I think what's, what I love about this moment with AI is like the word prioritize just goes out the door. Like the priority, the priority is yes. We take an abundance mindset to what we can, what we can chip. And, you know, you look at this and can you imagine in some, some other organization, I know you can't, like somebody even proposes the idea of free tools and it gets whittled down to the most like milk toast. - I mean, look at this right here. We'll probably go broke from the AI credits, but at least we helped you make some bangers along the way, right? It's like, I mean, Google gave us $300,000 worth of credits, honestly, so like, we're good for right now, but we've used most of them at this point. And so it's like, look, like there's no excuse, like at this point. And like, I think Pete Steinberger or Brett Berger, the OpenClaw guy had a great quote of like, the lion does not concern himself with counting tokens or something. Like that's how I feel right now, at least. - Okay, I have to ask you a question. Do you have a skill that crafts these lowercase uppercase sentences or are those artisanally selected? - Oh, this is all artisanally selected. This is artisanal, artisanal memes 100%. - This episode is brought to you by Persona, the B2B identity platform helping product, fraud, and trust and safety teams protect what they're building in an AI-first world. In 2024, bot traffic officially surpassed human activity online. And with AI agents projected to drive nearly 90% of all traffic by the end of the decade, it's clear that most of the internet won't be human for much longer. That's why trust and safety matters more than ever. Whether you're building a next-gen AI product or launching a new digital platform, Persona helps ensure it's real humans, not bots or bad actors accessing your tools. With Persona's building blocks, you can verify users, fight fraud, and meet compliance requirements, all through identity flows tailored to your product and risk needs. You may have already seen Persona in action if you verified your LinkedIn profile or signed up for an Etsy account. It powers identity for the internet's most trusted platforms. And now it can power yours too. Visit withpersona.com/howiai to learn more. I love it. Okay, so just to recap for folks, taking a step back, you are a non-technical founder. You started in a bubble, which is like, again, you said worse than vibe coding. It's like no code. And as somebody who also has tried to build things in Bubble, I am just glad that we are where we're at from a, from a scalability perspective. You did like core content MVP and then core app MVP and then raised and then now have this engineering team, but you're still contributing code, mostly via Cursor. And then your entire team is contributing code via Cursor. Are there other tools that you find really useful for your non-technical team members? Oh, look at that. - All right, I just wanted to show this for a second. I think this is going to be more and more common is I have no commits until like November, December. Like these were all like, there was like one in August, one in September, one in October. You, you can imagine this. And these were all me forking other people's trying to screw around. And now it's just like dark green. And like, I get why the engineers are like, oh my God, like I need to, I need to be so proud of this now. Are there any other tools? I would say like, I Okay, one, I just want to repeat for people what I heard, which is, you're basically like duct taping a Raspberry Pi to the back of a keyboard. And at night, instead of like getting your light on and like scribbling a note that goes into the trash, or like whispering, whispering to Google Home and waking your wife, the problem. You are just like blind typing to this keyboard with a couple of keywords, which I'm pretty sure could just have typos in them because you're running it through an LLM and it'll just be like, oh, it probably means email. And you're pressing enter, and then that's your to-do list? Exactly. It is the stupidest but best thing I've ever made because I did not build it to scale. And I just built it for me, and I'm sure other people would want it, but I don't have time to sell it. I don't have time to build this into a business. Somebody else wants to, go crazy. But really, like, I just built it for me. And I think, like, I'm personally very excited about that era of silly projects and hardware. I have another one, which I want to build, which I haven't started on yet, but this is another one that, like, I'm busy running a business. I'm just doing this for myself. So, again, back to the problem, a.k.a. my wife. She gets very mad at me when I lose things, right? And I lose things a lot. You know, I'm an ADHD meme lord, and I'll just, like, drop my phone, like, on a cardboard box in the middle of our apartment, right? And I kind of think, like, in-home cameras are good enough now that it could probably just use AI to just, like, see where I leave things. And so that's another thing that I'm just going to, like, try to hack on soon and, like, ask ChatGPT how to do it. And, like, I mean, I'm not trying to build, like, a home security company. Like, I just am one dude who just, like, loses his keys a lot, and I'm going to try to, like, fix that problem for myself. I really love this. And for folks that are not watching YouTube, I also have to call out your options you're considering on ChatGPT, including an old-school BlackBerry. I loved my BlackBerry. You're too young for this. I loved my BlackBerry Pearl with my whole heart. I played a lot of brick breaker on my mom's BlackBerry as a kid. I want to find, I want to revive my BlackBerry. I'll take on case three. I don't care if it's hard. The models will get, you know, there's this model that's going to, like, destroy the earth. It's not powerful. It's so powerful. It's going to ruin everything. So I'll just throw $10,000 at that and a BlackBerry Pearl and get my note taker I want for my life. And, of course, you have a meme for it, I'm sure. Yeah, absolutely. I, like, it's funny because you remember Rabbit? Do you remember? Yeah, yeah, yeah, the little, yeah. Yeah, I, all right, let me just find this because it's hilarious, and I'm still really proud of this. I wrote a viral thread about Rabbit's top use cases. And if you're not watching, number one, a coaster for your coffee. Number two, grip strength practice. A cutting board. Oh, I forgot about that one. That's so good. And it turned out Rabbit's use case was just put an LLM on it. They were, like, a year or two early, and I might have to eat my words on this. But I actually think, like, hardware that just runs LLMs or, like, you know, custom things, like, it is the future for sure. And I hope they're not too mad at me. I'm still friends with somebody on the team, hopefully, if they don't hate me yet. Well, they'll really appreciate you bringing it back up today, two years later. Hey, I mean, they might have been early, you know? Like Worldcoin, all right? I thought that was the stupidest idea ever, and I was listening to Alex Bania, the founder, on a podcast the other day, and I was like, damn, that guy was just early, and I'm stupid. I share a very similar sentiment, which is I have flipped in the past couple years from a cynical pessimist to a, it is illogical to be anything but optimistic, because every time I think, well, that's never going to work, that has completely gone away for me now. And it's like, I actually approach a lot of ideas with, well, that's obviously going to work as long as somebody can execute on it well and they care. And so I think that that flip is really interesting. And then I believe in two things that you just showed us in this workflow. One, hyper-personalized software. We were talking before we got on the recording. I recently built a custom app that watches all of our podcasts and finds where people dox themselves, basically, like finds all the API keys that they share, the email addresses, their mom's phone number when they're, like, chatting with me. And then it sells it on the dark web. I love it. Exactly right. That's the second revenue stream of how I AI is trading on personal information. But it's, like, such a niche thing, and I bet there are a hundred people in the world that would buy it right now and maybe I'll try to sell it to you. But why, like, I just built it for myself. I mean that. Another example, too, is like, all right, so this is my iPhone case, right? It's a keyboard gun. And I literally just made this with AI, and then it says memelord.com. And, like, yeah, we sell it on our site, but, like, I built it for me because, like, my keyboard is my gun, right? Another one here, I'm going to share my screen, is I own the domain stopgivingmeadvice.com because, like, a lot of people give me unasked-for advice. And, like, look, I'm humble enough to say sometimes I need it, but, like, I will ask for it if I want advice, generally. And so anytime somebody asks me or starts giving me advice on Twitter or Instagram, I literally just, like, send them this. And, hey, it's a great lead magnet. If you click this, it just goes to memelord, you know? Because, like, I'm just... You could also give this to your wife, you know? There you go. There you go. That might lead to other things besides memelord, so I'm a little worried about that. You know what? She can have a button on her side of the bed that she hits, and it just emails you this link. Yeah. I don't know. I think, like, there's going to be a lot more silly fun stuff, and I hope to inspire other people to build as well. I completely agree. And again, I'm just like, you and I are spiritual partners here because I said, like, two years ago to my friends that I was working with, we stopped actually sending memes. Here's a business idea for you. We stopped sending memes to each other, and we started sending meme apps, which is every time something funny would happen at work, we didn't make a meme. We made an app representing the meme. Like, one time my friend Joe, he was talking about getting really into, like, Huberbro stuff, and he said, like, he takes a claude plunge instead of a cold plunge. And, like, we made so many claude plunge apps. And again, you can just take these ideas, and they can go from these very tiny inceptions of, like, I'm going to write an idea in a notebook to, like, these full-fledged apps. They can be totally disposable. There's going to be a lot of, I think, VC money that flows through this on the consumer side. And I think people will say there hasn't been a really great breakthrough consumer AI app, but it's going to be there because there's just too much software being generated now for consumer to not be a huge segment with all of this. Could I show you one more use case that, like, I'm finding really helpful, which, like, I'm sure a lot of people are already doing this, but I think it'll surprise people that I do it, is, like, I just have my open call, look through my calendar every Friday, give me a week in review of the previous week. And then every Sunday, it gives me a week of head. And, like, it tells me, like, what I'm spending too much time on. And, like, you know, like, I'm sure other people are doing this with a VA or whatever, but it actually gave great advice of, like, hey, Jason, like, you don't actually need to be at every engineering stand-up. Why don't you just, like, get notes twice a week from, like, your CTO? I'm like, wow, that's actually 100% true. That's why I pay him. Or, like, you know, it said, like, oh, you had deep work this day, but you didn't have any of the other days. Like, do you want to schedule more? And I think, like, I'm really excited about this personally because, A, like, I fired my VA. I'm not a fan of having a VA. I don't like other people seeing my calendar. But having my own model that does, I'm really excited about. And then also I think, you know, my AI curses all the time because I like tell it that that's like my vernacular of how I speak and like that's how I like to speak and think is cursing and NSFW and, you know, unhinged things. So I would just like push it that direction and Memlord has all of that built in where it will curse. It'll make dumb jokes. Because that's what humor is. Like, humor is NSFW, right? And so my advice would just be like, push it harder and like, don't be afraid to curse it out because it'll actually like learn that that's what you're looking for is, is a little less politically correct. Less, less, less control. Okay, you have been the first person on How I AI, congratulations, that has said straight up be mean to your AI. So while we at How I AI, our official stance is we are very nice to the AI overlords. Be kind to us and our guests. I mean, it's true. Like your product is a specific kind of product. You got to get it in its mindset. Yeah, yeah. Look, I'm not saying like be really, really mean because like there is a chance, right? Like there's a chance, but like, be like mean enough where you could like potentially apologize if it grows a body. Like that's all I'm saying. Per, perfect. That's, that's what we're, we're going to put on the show notes. Be mean enough that you're a little scared if it gets hands. All right, Jason, this has been such a fun episode. People are going to grab so many. We've done so many ideas. So many nuggets, embrace an AI abundance mindset, ship, have fun, just get in there and cook. And guys, if you need the API, it's right on the CD here. Yes. So where can we find you and how can we be helpful? Just ask me for the CD. I'll send it. Just the problem is nobody has CD players anymore. So you'll have to figure that one out. But find me on Twitter. I tweet all day. I am Jason Levin. Instagram, same thing. I am Jason Levin. LinkedIn, same thing. I reply. I respond to everything, especially the death threats. So hit me up there. And, and go through the onboarding. Best in the game. Yeah, yeah. Go through the onboarding. I appreciate it. Memelord.com. We, you know, take your memes more seriously. We're in the most entertaining time alive. It's about to get way more entertaining. So go have fun. Thanks for joining us. All right. Thank you. Thanks so much for watching. If you enjoyed the show, please like and subscribe here on YouTube or even better, leave us a comment with your thoughts. You can also find this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Please consider leaving us a rating and review, which will help others find the show. You can see all our episodes and learn more about the show at howiAIPod.com. See you next time.