No-code → $100k ARR → $3M

Sup memelords,

I used to think startup founders were geniuses.

I thought you HAD to be a Zuck to make it in tech.

And then I started working in Silicon Valley.

And wanna know what I quickly realized? Most startup founders are idiots. Which is good news. Because I’m an idiot too!

I mean sure, there’s some coding prodigies and AI PhDs, but you don’t need to be one. And those founders aren’t guaranteed success either (I’ve seen plenty fail).

You don’t need to be a genius.

You just need to work your ass off.

I have no idea how to code.

I’m not a prodigy.

And want to know who wrote my first angel check?

Zuck’s sister. Arielle Zuckerberg and her team at Long Journey Ventures.

“Everything I’m not made me everything I am” - Kanye

I used to be pissed off my parents didn’t force me to learn how to code.

I thought that I was screwed.

But this ended up being my competitive advantage.

See, unlike the cracked engineers who have been coding since they were 5, I spent my childhood making YouTube videos, making stuff on Photoshop, and getting stoned partying with my friends and chasing girls.

And I know this sounds crazy, but my reckless teenage partyboy life makes me dangerous as a startup founder. Unlike most founders who can’t make eye contact with women, I can go up to literally anyone on the street and have a conversation from random girls in the park to drinking coffee with billionaires.

My crazy high school hijinks became my superpowers!

• Making YouTube videos in middle school → “Founder-led marketing”

• Throwing parties in college → “Community-led growth”

• Dealing weed in college → “GTM/Sales”

These are all things you won’t learn in a CS class.

But you will learn at a party.

The internet is one big party and like a real party, being a smart goofball pays off.

Working with startups for 5 years, I realized the code isn’t the hard part for most startups (especially in the age of AI coding). It’s literally everything else.

• Unique design (my years of photoshop paying off)

• Managing people (hard to do when you can’t talk to women)

• Fundraising (if you can break an ounce into g’s you can sell equity)

• Vision (all my high school daydreaming pays off)

• Working long hours (Red Bull helps)

• Product (it helps I’m building memelord.com for myself as the #1 power user)

• Getting attention (btw have you tried memelord.com? 😂)

Yeah, obviously it’s crucial to have good code.

And I hired a cracked CTO (I poached him from the Department of Energy!!). But there is a lot more to being a founder than writing code.

No Code, No Problem

There, I admit it.

I don’t know how to code.

And I just raised $3M for Memelord.com because I out-hustled the genius engineers.

I built Memelord Technologies v1 on a no-code platform called Bubble with Red Bull and A LOT of all-nighters. See pitch deck slide here for proof-of-red-bull.

It was a crime of obsession.

I’d stay up all night drinking Red Bull and watching YouTube working.

This is what the inside of our meme editor looked like. 400+ workflows for adding text, rotating, whatever. I had so many workflows I’d get lost in there. It was like the diary of a madman, only I knew what anything meant.

When I finally did show the inside of Bubble to a real engineer, he wrote me an angel check because he saw how hard I work! If you’re crazy enough, you can literally out-hustle people with tens of millions more in the bank than you and 30 IQ points higher.

Fun fact: Before I even spent the time building the software, I started Memelord as a daily meme newsletter with a Google Slides with memes. I marketed it like crazy and people paid $6.9/mo to get access!!! I didn’t even invest the time building my software until I validated my idea with $1k/mo from a newsletter and Google Slides!!

Not knowing how to code is not an excuse.

No code, no problem.

At first, I was scared to bring up not knowing how to code to VCs.

I was scared to tweet about this at all, let alone write a blog post on it.

But as I got feedback from investors, not knowing how to code actually became a huge selling point. “I grew Memelord v1 on Bubble to $100k ARR with NO ENGINEERS. Imagine what I could do with engineers and money!”

I was literally 1 dude outshipping and outselling all my competitors who raised $20M and went to Carnegie Mellon computer science because I live and breathe this shit. Here’s what our lead investor Sam Lessin who wrote a $1.5M check said:

Shoutout to my wife for writing this post below.

She saw the late night Red Bull sessions. The not going outside for 3 days straight. The freakouts and screaming expletives. And stood by me through it all.

I took Memelord to $100k ARR with no-code using my superpowers (marketing, Red Bull, working stupidly hard on seemingly stupid projects). Then I hired the engineers to make it 10000x better with their superpowers so it can do shit like this!

Embrace your superpowers.

I will never be a cracked engineer.

But I can hire them.

Arielle talks a lot about this idea of “Rizz and Tizz”.

The ideal founder needs equal parts charisma and autism. Too much charisma and you’re making TikToks all day instead of building anything cool. Too much nerdy autism and you’ll never be able to make a sale. If you can master the rizz and the tizz, you can become a master of the universe.

And when you think about it, that's what memes really are.

Rizz and tizz.

It's being funny and being clever at the same time. If you could control the room of a party, then you can control the internet, the world's biggest party. As Elon says "who controls the memes controls the universe."

Wanna make people laugh? Make more sales? Get attention on the internet?

Control the universe on memelord.com.

P.S. Even if you're not naturally funny, our new AI meme generator can bring out your ideas to life. We just added an option where you can create 10 AI memes at the same time. All you have to do is type in an idea and then pick your favorites.

See full demo below!

Try free for 3 days. You can make 100s of AI memes. IDGAF! I just raised $3M. Go nuts.

Thanks for reading nerds.

Create some cool shit this week.

Jason “The Memelord” Levin

Founder of Memelord.com