Advice from viral Twitter memelord Chris Bakke

Sup nerds

Imagine if you drove $3 million in revenue from Twitter memes.

Well, today you’re going to read my interview with someone who did exactly that. His name is Chris Bakke and he sold 2 tech companies for $100+ million.

What’s the Twitter strategy of a multimillionaire tech founder?

Memes! Lots of them.

In fact, Chris is one of the most prolific memelords on Twitter—and has made millions directly thanks to his viral dank memes.

With the help of a cold DM, I got the chance to interview Chris about his Twitter strategy exclusively for Cyber Patterns:

Alright get ready for the interview of a lifetime.

For my thoughts and takeaways, read all the way until the end.

JASON LEVIN: So this interview is for my readers who are super focused on winning the great online game and I think you've done an excellent job of that. I remember after the OpenAI saga, it was just non-stop Chris Bakke everywhere on my timeline. If you could talk a little bit about capitalizing on The Current Thing and how to do that and how to win by doing that.

CHRIS BAKKE: I think it's helpful if you already have strong opinions on the thing. That's I think the most important thing, like it's hard to manufacture.

 I spend a bunch of time investing in and advising and working on AI stuff as part of my job, so if I have strong opinions about accelerationism versus the decel stuff and Sam Altman as a CEO and OpenAI as a company and their company structure, you have all of that information and then it becomes really easy.  

 OpenAI was the sort of rare crossover right time right place right pinions and then you're able to write hot takes, but I think it's hard to write hot takes if you don't actually feel a certain way or if you don't give a shit about what's happening in the news—which I'd say is like 99.9% of the news cycle, I just go and say who cares about this—but every once in a while there's something that comes across the timeline that's like, alright, this is my Super Bowl, like I have to I have to double down here.

JASON LEVIN: Yeah, exactly. How much were you online during that period? I remember I couldn't look away from my phone.

CHRIS BAKKE: Ah, yeah, it was crazy. I would guess that I probably spend 30 minutes to an hour outside of work stuff on X per day and that was probably like easily 4 to 5 hours that because the thing the thing moments like that is that entire OpenAI saga was only 72 hours, right?

 The funny thing about that was the news was happening, so real time. It was like a car chase. It's like the car’s turning left, he’s going on like southbound 101, up he's out of the car, he's running, he tripped. It was just like every 15 minutes there's some new insane thing happening.

 And so what's tough about memes are sort of trying to generate viral content is if you're for people who are terminally online, if you're like 20 minutes late to a meme, it's no longer funny. Like the Sam Altman announcement of him getting kicked out by the board was so viral so quickly. Like if you didn't capitalize in that first hour with some unique piece of content, you had lost that part of the plot and now the part of the plot has moved on to Who are these board members?

 You can be an hour late to something and it's just never going to trend because you have tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of memes, posts, comments that are now going in a totally different direction. I's kind of it's hard to be good in moments like that if you're not just spending an incredible amount of time on whatever platform you're posting on.

JASON LEVIN: Yeah, I feel like people underestimate how online you have to be if you really want to be in it, right? I'm curious man, do you use bookmarks? Or do you have any way of saving content or coming back to old memes that you see? Because I feel like you're really good at reusing meme formats, and yeah, I'm pretty damn good at like remembering memes, I wrote a fucking book about it, but you’re on another level, so I’m curious how you do it.

CHRIS BAKKE: I don't think I've ever told anybody this. I don't use bookmarks. I don't use nor have I ever used any sort of tweet or post scheduling software, I don't use buffer or any of those things, I also don't use drafts, so everything is like fired real time. I know Photoshop, but I don't use it. 100% of any meme or content that I've ever done has been in Google Slides. And it is chronological. I have a deck and it is called “slides”.

Someday when I retire, I'll sell it to the highest bidder but it's 400-600 slides and it’s chronological. I started posting on Twitter in late 2020 so I still have the very first image I ever edited. With a mix of background editing software plus slides, I caption everything in slides. I just do everything there because I use slides as part of my job. I'm quick at it. And I'm faster at slides than I am at Figma or Photoshop or something. So yeah, embarrassingly, or awesomely—I don't know which—everything is done in slides including some sophisticated image editing.

I will just do it live in slides and just do it on the fly like I'm editing a PowerPoint or something. Like when I have a good meme about masterclass or something like some Dave Portnoy scandal, I put “Dave Portnoy teaches you how to lose millions of dollars in a day” or something. And then that meme gets reused when Keith Raboi says something outlandish about like that. I just have these kind of moments but I think you can also now scroll through hundreds and hundreds of slides and get inspiration from that. So that's basically how I do everything.

JASON LEVIN: That's wild. I like have a dropbox folder of memes, but having it all in one place like that is pretty fantastic. I might have to try it [HINT: I did and now have a Google Slides deck]

CHRIS BAKKE: The other problem is I screenshot a lot of stuff on my phone, but I will literally like screenshot funny stuff on my phone and then I will like forward it to myself in email like I operate my entire life like a 77 year old person like I don't use any modern technology for notes. People are like oh, like you've run all these big companies, what do you use for note taking? I email shit to myself.

I have like two systems. I'm in slides, I'm in Excel, I'm in email, and that's basically my day. And so yeah, that's that's what's worked for me. And I think that that's the big thing is like, you just have to keep all the inspiration in one place. I think I've seen I've seen people use Figma for that. I think you can use some saved function. Some people use bookmarks. A lot of people you know have their favorite sub-Reddits or whatever that they're grabbing images from but yeah, I think it's just everything in one place is the is the key when you need to like grab something quickly on the fly. It's important.

 JASON LEVIN: That's so smart. That's wild. So you tweeted a little while ago about making $3 million for your company off your personal Twitter. I showed that to my parents because I was like, this is how I can ghostwrite tweets for a living, this is why people pay me to do this and nobody got that at first, right. And I feel like now it's becoming a lot more clear for founders in general. What was your strategy going into this?

 CHRIS BAKKE: I started posting again on Twitter in late 2020 because I was very bored post-acquisition of my first company. I was like a board executive during COVID at a hiring company when the entire world was being upheaved and millions of people were losing their jobs. And I knew I was gonna start something else. I wasn't thinking about building personal brand. It was just purely to have fun.

 Also, so many VCs at that point were quite prolific on Twitter and so I think for me as a founder it’d be a  great way to network with VCs. There were like 2 or 3 people in late 2020 that I can remember that were really actively, like truly shitposting like Logan Bartlett from Redpoint was doing this. But a lot of the accounts that that are now pretty prolific in in like the sort of tech like shitposting crossover were not active or had not started shitposting over writing serious content. And I actually started writing a lot of kind of serious, long form content.

 And then when all the threadboi stuff started to become funny about people just rewriting Wikipedia articles into threads, I started making fun of that. And then I was like, Hey, I'm kind of doing that a lot myself. Like I just need to double down on this shitposting thing. I think for me, it was just the the thrill of being able to post a meme, and often seeing it get 100 likes or 500 likes or 1,000 likes like in those early days with only a couple 1,000 followers. That was huge. And you could write a really serious, well-crafted, well-thought-out post and you'd get 37 likes if you're lucky. And so I was like alright, I'm just gonna optimize for anything that can get reach at this point—like that will be 90% of my content, and then 10% will be serious.

 So when we when we started Laskey (my last company) in early 2021, I just noticed from putting my company name in my bio and not doing anything else, I would have months where I would have 2 or 3 pretty viral tweets back then in a month, but from that we would get like eight leads, and we weren't doing anything else. We hadn't started email marketing, we were just getting people added to the waitlist. And then every month that my account grew, my Twitter account grew and my LinkedIn account grew. We would get more and more people and I wasn't even talking about what we were doing. I wasn't doing any of the build-in-public stuff (which I think is super smart for people that are trying to monetize it). I didn't have a thesis on how to do this, but it was just in a super organic way. It was like oh, Chris is funny, I'm gonna follow Chris. Oh, who is he? What's he working on? It was very indirect, it was very organic. But then, at the point that we started monetizing (we were building recruitment automation software for my last company), it's like yeah, this is perfect for fast-growing companies for other founders, so anytime I write a post that starts to do really well on either LinkedIn or Twitter, I'll just basically comment under it with like a free signup link to our product.

 We went from pre-launch having maybe a trickle of a dozen or so people per month that were joining our waitlist from Twitter to having individual tweets where we were converting 800 to 1,000 new leads from an individual tweet that went super viral. So yeah, we were driving like over 3 million just from my Twitter, I think a little bit more from my LinkedIn. But when you look at the way that revenue gets valued, especially in SaaS companies, if your company is trading at 10x revenue or something which we sold I think for way over 10x revenue, you're basically saying like I'm creating about like $30 million worth of like enterprise value from my Twitter account each year, which is pretty crazy.

JASON LEVIN: That is pretty insane. And so you guys sold to X and you were acqui-hired, correct?

CHRIS BAKKE: We were acquired in May of this year. We sold into Elon’s holding company because he wanted to get into the hiring space. He has a strong desire to go after LinkedIn and our company was going after LinkedIn in a small-but-mighty way. We had hundreds of 1000s of candidates on our platform. We had 1000s of companies hiring. And so taking that thing that was working pretty well on a much smaller scale 1000s of companies and hundreds of 1000s of candidates and then blowing it up to Twitter proportions made a ton of sense. And so yeah, we sort of we were like negotiating with Elon from February through I guess, April and then it took like 30 days for the deal to close. So we closed I think like May 6 or something to Twitter.

JASON LEVIN: Wow. What's funny, I've gotten all my writing jobs on Twitter since the last 2-3 years—every single one of them via DMS on Twitter. I never got a reply on LinkedIn, shit I never even got rejections! I just got nothing. I saw a tweet by Dar over at Tesla talking about how Twitter people have maybe less Ivy Leagues, but more experience and more cool projects. Why do you think that is? Is it just about our culture on Twitter or X?

 CHRIS BAKKE: I think it's very hard to change your roots culturally as a company, like there are very few companies in  the consumer or social space that were once uncool and that became cool or vice versa. Like I think the general trend is this very slow decay of companies being super cool. And if they don't do anything about it, they gradually—which takes like 15 or 20 years—they become uncool, right?

 So Facebook is the classic example. Facebook came out out in 2004 or so, they're amazing, college kids love them. By 2010, everybody's parents are on there, by 2013 your grandparents are on there by 2017 your accountant is trying to sell you stuff on there and your high school friends are running MLMs, it's like okay, it's now uncool, but it took like 12 years for that to happen. And I think culturally, Twitter was always cool. Twitter comes out of the gate at sort of a similar timeframe. It’s this mega viral sensation, hashtags were literally invented by one of Twitter's users and now that's used throughout the entire internet—but then hashtags themselves become uncool because they got to a certain point.

 I think Twitter is just a very abrasive, very honest userbase. I think that part of that is the anonymity that a lot of very successful Twitter users have of being able to say shit that's not associated to them. So there's basically no chance of blowback. You also just have this town square element that always existed where you have professional athletes interacting with professional musicians interacting with politicians interacting with brands and when brands screw up on a lot of other platforms, they would historically like give these very bullshit press release type statements, and when that happens on Twitter, everybody attacks them and goes nuts and makes it a meme, so Twitter has always been this total double-edged sword for brands and for advertisers. When you apply that to candidates, the idea is that Twitter is often way more representative of who you actually are, how you actually act, how you what you actually believe, and what you're actually into than LinkedIn is. LinkedIn and a lot of these other platforms, Facebook and everything, they're there highly polished, very uncool things that only get used really once every couple years.

I always tell people who are trying to be creators is just do whatever you think you can get out of bed every day for 2 weeks and post because that's where most people get caught up. People try to be a meme account, but they don't actually follow the meme culture. They're not actually funny. Like you should be writing long-form content because there's tons of people that write long form content, it's super serious and they crush it. Just the consistency of doing something every day for a couple of weeks on a platform is hard enough, trying to be somebody who you're not like you will inevitably give up.

But I think on LinkedIn, it’s very easy to show off your impressive titles or show off that you're working at Tesla or whatever, but when you come to Twitter, it's like are you saying cool shit or not? Are you saying funny stuff or not? Are you saying something that people care about or not? Like yeah, congrats, you went to an Ivy League school or you worked at some big company, but that doesn't mean anything because there's great and terrible people that work at every company and they've gone to every school and so let's get beyond surface level stuff. And so then I think the last piece about Twitter candidates in general is to some extent—which I think is highly valued in in areas like media, tech, finance, a lot of the categories where I think we do really well—you have to have a thick skin, like you cannot come on Twitter and be super successful without having no trolls no matter what style of content you're doing. Like Sahil Bloom has some of the most wholesome content on Twitter, but he's got armies of trolls that just hate him and hate everything he does, and comment at him all day. And it's like, you can build a very wholesome, thought-provoking brand or you can be the most degenerative shitposter in the world and you're gonna have to deal with a lot of anonymous people who you don't know and they don't know you, but they have some opinion about you. And so I think the ability to get over that kind of stuff is really important in today's world and today’s work. And so I think that there's an element of that that employers probably look for people who are actually themselves who can handle criticism, who are part of the conversation, who can contribute meaningfully when new trends and new things are coming up. And so I think for brands like Tesla that value a lot of that stuff, then they're hiring managers always come to Twitter as a go-to source.

JASON LEVIN: That's so interesting: handling failure in public, getting criticized, I've gone viral and got shit on so many times now, and I feel like all of that is a sign of willingness to do stuff again and again—which you need for side projects and for creating anything cool, right? You have to be willing to fail and Twitter is an arena for failure.

CHRIS BAKKE: It’s a great point. I remember the first time somebody tried to start an argument with me. I made the rookie mistake of giving in and trying to argue with them. And there's like 10 different oh, you're trying to like win an internet argument memes, but your mind is gonna go one of two places after the first time that happens. It's either like this is a terrible place with terrible people. And I'm losing internet arguments right and left or I'm not going to engage the trolls at all, which is generally how I am or then there's like, this third kind of hilarious the issue which is I'm doubling down on the trolls, I'm going to continue to feed them answers that will rile the masses and I don't really have the heart or the patience for that, but I very much appreciate people that can do it.

JASON LEVIN: Haha so I run an Instagram called Subway Reader and it’s blown up—like 30 million views last month— where I read offensive books on the subway, like very provocative books. And in the comments, people are calling me schizophrenic or autistic or fat or whatever. And I just go along with it. And it's so much fun, like totally making fun of myself. I’m realizing being able to laugh at yourself is a key to winning on social media. Well, we got the last couple minutes. Any last thoughts on how to win on Twitter in 2024 going into the new year?

CHRIS BAKKE: I feel like a lot of the meme stuff is very hard to break through now. I'm not declaring that memes are dead, but you just see the same memes over and over and over. I've literally seen the Dogecoin meme 1,000 times and I'm sure I'll see it 1,000 more times, but I think that only works for people that already have a following of like 100,000 or 200,000 followers on a platform, then they’re able to consistently con 1,000 of them into laughing at whatever they’re doing. I think for like new creators and also where I think some of the best voices are gonna go.

I've certainly really appreciated accounts that are digging up interesting anecdotes in an industry that everybody's talking about, whether that's in real estate or finance or tech, and then being able to talk about that perhaps in a sarcastic tone where it's sort of a shitpost or meme, but you actually learned something from it. It's kind of a fine line, but I think that that will actually be this this next important wave which is like, you know your shit not only enough to be able to take a picture of Sam Altman and add a funny caption to it and then put it in front of your audience and have it go viral, but now it's gonna be a little bit slightly longer form content that is talking about like what's happening in OpenAI or Anthropic or what's happening with valuations at these companies. And I think that type of content is what you have to be at least putting into the mix in order to get followers because I just don't think unless you're super lucky, the bar consistently gets raised with what you have to bring to the conversation in order to earn a new follower. And so I think in 2024, we're gonna see the bar get raised quite a bit. Just because the last 4 years have just been like fucking meme central and so many meme creator accounts have come out of the woodwork it's I'm just over it a little bit like, I just want something new and I think tech anecdotes or just interesting stuff about an industry that's done in a humorous way will do really well. And I've already seen a lot of those do well just on my own personal account.

JASON LEVIN: I completely agree—being able to satirize a industry or something you know very deeply shows both intelligence and humor. If you can teach somebody and make them laugh at the same time, you’re killing it.

OK, some rough thoughts from this interview:

1. GOOGLE SLIDES AS A MEME DECK 😂🤯 I was shook. I couldn’t believe it. But yup I now have a Google Slides meme deck. Highly recommend.

2. The power of plugging your products. Chris drove $3 million in revenue just from plugging his company under his viral tweets. Maybe not as big of a deal, but I sold hundreds of books and got thousands of subscribers doing the same thing. While Chris doesn’t use any auto-plugging software, I love TweetHunter because you can auto-plug your products after a tweet gets a certain amount of likes.

3. Winning on Twitter in 2024: It’s hard to break through with just memes. If you can write funny satirical posts about your industry, you can pop off and maybe even teach somebody something. I’ll be looking at brilliant, funny writers like Jack Raines and Nikita Bier for inspiration. Never underestimate the jester; he may be a king in disguise

As always, create some cool shit this week.

Jason Levin