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

0:00Confession, I'm not a vibe coder. I'm way worse. So I started Meme Lord about four months before vibe coding started hitting.

0:07Jason Levin: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 RRR on Bubble without outhiring 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.

0:45Jason Levin: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.

1:13Jason Levin:Welcome back to How I AI. I'm Claire Vaux, 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 Meme Lord, 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.

1:51Jason Levin:AI has already changed how we work. tools are helping teams write better code, analyze customer data, and even handle support tickets automatically. But there's a catch. These tools only work well when they have deep access to company systems. Your copilot needs to see your entire code base. Your chatbot needs to search across internal docs. And for enterprise buyers, that raises serious security concerns. That's why these apps face intense IT scrutiny from day one. To pass, they need secure authentication, access controls, audit logs, the whole suite of enterprise features. Building all that from scratch?

2:29Jason Levin:It's a massive lift. That's where WorkOS comes in. WorkOS gives you drop-in APIs for enterprise features, so your app can become enterprise-ready and scale up market faster. Think of it like Stripe for enterprise features. OpenAI, Perplexity, and Cursor are already using WorkOS to move faster and meet enterprise demands. Join them and hundreds of other industry leaders at WorkOS.com. Start building today. 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 open claw psychosis, you messaged me and you said, I think I have the open claw use case for you.

3:14Jason Levin: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 bot father, You know, like, how do we get here in the year of our college, 2026? The world is just getting more entertaining. I think that's really the thesis that drove me to start Meme Lord. And how can you make your brand more entertaining your content is the question, right?

4:00There'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 like, that's how we got started. But how did we get here is, you know, now meme Lord has an API, and you could plug that into OpenClaw for agentic memeing.

4:39and 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.

5:16And 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.

5:33Jason Levin: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 open claw use case on the marketing side, 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.

6:08Jason Levin:And three, you have a very narrow window. And so even as a human user of meme lord, 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 HowAI 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 reduces the friction across so many things.

6:51Jason Levin:It helps you climb Cringe Mountain in a way that's very hard to do as a human. Yeah. So there's this quote from the CTO for AMP 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, trying it multiple times, changing the design of it, where the different logos bounce everything.

7:33So many redesigns and so much fun. I wrote a great article called iOS App Learnings Part 1, just about the craft of it, while knowing the entire time that agents were coming and know 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 um you know the team is using it in their open claw 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 point and seeing agents use it has been crazy and weird and magical and that's that's the power of meme lord is we you know help you find all the weirdest trends and and all the newest trends that's what we were built on is is actually meme alerts right i started meme lord and we could get into this i started just as a newsletter for six dollars and 90 cents per month sending you the newest memes and then i sent you to a google slides deck uh because i didn't know how to code and um that's really you know the evolution of meme lord 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 uh so it's you know the future no ux is the best ux and uh you know good news for sam over here is you could use it from any agent now.

9:08Jason Levin:I feel like everybody's in a DM with Sam if you're building something in AI. What I would, what I think is 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 voice and point of view. And so as a human, you get on board. But as soon as I hit the API key, I'm out. And I think we're moving to this point where the full product experience is getting to a point where you can get an API key, you paste it in an environment file, and you move on with your life.

9:54Jason Levin:And so it's going to be really interesting to see, is that onboarding going to continue to have a human aspect to it? Can we figure out agentic commerce so that agents can do that. And then the other thing that I think is really interesting about what you all have built is you package the API with skills. So when you messaged me, you were like, get an API key, use the skills, you don't have to say too much, and you're ready to go. And, you know, for product managers and designers who have been trained for years and years and on building beautiful UX and where does the button go and what's the call to action.

10:32Jason Levin:And now you're like, nope, literally describe to a sentient lobster how to use this API and like how to be fun. And that's a product. And I think that is super fascinating from a product skills development perspective. How was it writing that skill? It's exactly what you said. I was texting my engineers. I was like, how do I do this? Like, do I need your help? They're like, like, I don't know. either i was like wait why don't i just ask the lobster i was like yo how do i make a skill and it's like i'll just do it for you bro i'm like cool like go for it and then i'm like oh this looks great just publish it it's like cool and i'm like wow i didn't even need to bug my cto why am i paying him no just i love him but you know it's this is the world we're living in where me who i can't code and never have and you know uh can can publish a skill that other people can download and just plug into their sentient lobster that makes weird memes.

11:30Like it's a very strange world. And I'm thinking a lot about how do I build something agents want? And how do I make that as frictionless as possible? Because you're absolutely right. It's like we worked super hard on this beautiful onboarding and our marketing is super human. And that has always been our thing is like relate to people. And like memes and humor is like how you show you're human in a world full of slop, right? And the personal connections and throwing weird events and hanging out IRL and buying your customers coffee. Like the old skills that like people have laughed at for years are more important than ever making somebody laugh, right?

12:07But at the same time, let me sell the agents, right? Because there's a lot of money there. And because the internet's going that way, right? So it's, we're trying to constantly hit that balance. And I think at the end of the day, like the world is getting more K-shaped and bell curved or barbelled where everything's getting crazier and more extreme in different ways. And that's just another thing is you have to be extremely, extremely human and extremely good at selling to agents at the same time. It's a very strange time to be alive.

12:35Jason Levin:Well, and it's a strange time to be a builder. And I want to go back to something that you said earlier, which is, you know, your MVP for this was a newsletter. Yeah. Six bucks, like Google Sheets. I'm telling you, like my MVP of chat PRD was like a GBT on the chat, GBT chat store. It's still number three writing GBT. I have not. Sorry, guys. I have not touched this thing in two years, at least. I did a dollar a month. I was like just a dollar a month. And the speed at which you can go from like really scrappy, kind of cobbled together, no-code-ish MVP, maybe even a couple years ago, to now like full press app as a non-technical founder, which I think you are, is kind of incredible.

13:22Jason Levin:So talk to us through your journey of building and how you actually build MemeLorn. And what are some of your tips and tricks and workflows? close uh so confession i'm not a vibe coder i'm way worse um so i started meme lord about four months before vibe coding like started hitting right and you know bold and lovable were like just coming out but they were so bad that you couldn't do anything and so i was like i'm not waiting like what am i gonna do just wait until like these sentient ai models are good so i just built it on bubble and I grew it to a hundred K R on bubble without hiring engineers.

14:01This is what it looked like guys. So like, you have no idea just the amount of workflows, like, like it would be easier to like figure out Atlantis than like, look at like 395 workflows just on the editor. Right. And, you know, I was able to grow this just out of pure obsession and like a love of it. And, And, you know, there's me drinking coffee. Like we got rate limited the second day because there were so many signups and I didn't even know what rate limiting meant. And now I have an API company where people sign up for API. Like that's very weird. But yeah, so we raised the money and then I hired engineers.

14:37And now like our main flow is Cursor. You know, we have, I find Cursor to be very easy to use. It's not perfect, obviously, but like, you know, everything we do is just generally on Cursor. You know, I talked to it. I love the ask feature here and then just like turning on the Asian and letting it cook. And what this has really done is like I let the engineers handle the hard stuff, the security stuff for the most part, except for when I'm feeling a little risky at 1 a.m. and drink too much coffee and want to like, you know, try vibe coding some off stuff. But don't don't do that. And so what that lets me do and my entire marketing team.

15:19So I have a rule in Meme Lord that every marketer has to vibe code. And so what does this create is weird stuff. So let me just show you here is we have a free tools section. It's just Meme Lord dot com backslash tools. These are completely free and they are lead magnets for the business. And we just come up with weird stuff. And these have gotten us literal hundreds of thousands of emails all around the world. We were actually going viral in Turkey of all places for this filter because some kid in turkey made a tick tock about our bust down filter that makes you you know have this uh filter right like hundreds of thousands of emails from these dumb little tools that we just vibe code like i we don't have a process we're just like oh i need this tool like i really need a giga chad me maker like i don't know i had this idea i love this like design and i've always loved it since i was a kid and like you know here's my dog like i just like built this one day because it was like I just I think like it's like I just want to see 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 had my VA doing that and now it's just open claw doing that but I have them submit this And now I've had this headshot in multiple articles, uh, all from this dumb tool, right?

16:51Like 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 the Snapchat filter, um, 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 it mean. 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.

17:29And 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.

17:59Jason Levin: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's 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 cloud codes, they're great. They can 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.

18:32Jason Levin: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 a 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 um 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 tops down edict that you see in these large companies.

19:12Jason Levin:What it unlocks, which you've shown us on this free bay, which I just I love it so much, is you can like 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 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.

19:58Yeah, they are. And they drive subscriptions at the end of 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 do that occasionally.

20:33But 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 are now just as easy to do as write an e-book, which is, you know, if you're trying to collect more leads or emails for your newsletter, your business, et cetera, 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.

21:09So 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.

21:43Jason Levin:I could not I could not agree more. And again, like CEO, CTOs, like see whatever's 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 ship. But and, you know, you look at this and can you imagine in 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.

22:28I 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 three hundred thousand dollars 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, Brett Berger, the open call 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.

22:59Jason Levin:OK, I have to ask you a question. Do you have a skill that crafts these lowercase uppercase sentences or are those artisanally selected? This is all artisanally selected. This is 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.

23:42Jason Levin: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 slash howiai to learn more. I love it.

24:22Jason Levin:Okay, so just to recap for folks, taking a step back, you are a non-technical founder. You started 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 scalability perspective. Yeah. 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?

25:00Jason Levin: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 uh are there any other tools i would say like i mean we talk to claude and stuff like that a lot we spent we spend a lot of time talking to claude chat gemini uh you know we uh i think like i'm really really bullish on linear i think that's probably an unpopular take these days because they seem like they're you know gonna get eaten as like a jira task management but the amount of craft that they put into their work and now their ai agent works really well and i'm talking to that thing from open claw i'm talking to it from everywhere and they are profitable and and building for the long term uh i own no equity in linear or anything but wow i love that i love the company it's really impressive and actually one weirdly one of our inspirations i'm also like really really impressed with postogs ai i don't know if anybody here has used postog for product analytics their AI sucked about like six months ago and now it is just like oh my god um and I just ask it build me a dashboard of all the users that came from meta ads show the retention versus blah blah blah blah blah blah and I'm like oh wow so I think like both of those tools I'm I'm really really bullish on on and our team uses pretty obsessively and has no problem spending money on there every every month.

26:47Jason Levin:I have to reflect what you say. I texted the team at Linear and I just said, Linear is the perfect tasking substrate for agents. And again, going back to the best UI is no UI, I do not log into Linear anymore. My agents have access to Linear and I'm like, what's going on in there? And occasionally they'll assign me stuff in Linear, which I find quite funny. But I do think, you know, it's got really opinionated APIs and Asian experience. I think that can win in the long term. I think it's hilarious that dark mode, tiny font, minimalist, you know, linear is like your spiritual goal. If you look at that, I'm like, you're much more post-hog aligned if I had to be honest.

27:35Jason Levin:But I love that. And then we haven't heard about post-hog AI. But again, I think that most teams, if you're not doing agentic data analysis, you're missing out on the like lowest hanging fruit in terms of AI for your team. Yeah, I've been really, really impressed. I mean, look, I love Postdoc's brand and everything, but there's something about the linear philosophy and I just, it's really inspiring for me and how they think about building products forever and ever. Like they're, they're, they're building forever. And I love that's, you know i'll be making memes until i'm dead you know i've been making silly stuff on the internet since i was 10 years old um and so this is just like a forever thing for me and so i i love it i respect oh no that that means i'm going to be making prds till i dust i mean hey hey you know like i don't know i i think like another thing that people should also consider is just like you know as we're building all this cool ai stuff like also build weird stuff in the real world like it gives you so many more opportunities like all my dumb ideas like you know just this silly stuff like we we made cds of meme lord and i tell people that's how you access our api right um there's it's really good um i don't know bar barbell you know build all the weird ai stuff also build the real world stuff i rented out a movie theater to watch instagram reels last week um i mean there's a lot of ai there of the ai edits but um try to do both that's that's my philosophy i mean i will say, like zooming out a little bit, I think one of the things that AI lets us do is get out of the muck of building and free up time to do things that, again, are more human and higher impact.