Sup memelords,

Remember PEMDAS???

“Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally”. Parentheses/Exponent, Multiplication/Division, Addition/Subtraction. Lately, I've been thinking a lot about it and the idea of “order of operations” in business. I keep saying it to myself like a mantra.

I know this might not be what you expect from goofball Mr. Memelord.

But if you’ve been reading my work long enough, you know I’m obsessed with building systems for my business. I read books about it. I journal about it. I lose sleep over it. And after raising $3M, all my systems were fucking broken.

The same systems I had in place as a bootstrapper drinking Red Bull 24/7 are not the same systems you need when you’re VC-backed with $3M in the bank and a team. So now all I’m thinking about is systems. And what I’m finding more and more everyday is the importance of an order of operations. PEMDAS, baby.

Let me give you 2 examples I’ve been thinking about non-stop.

P.S. I included a list of tools and a couple of my favorite books about building systems at the end of the post! Ok example time.

Ex. 1 — Millions of Views or Millions of Dollars???

From 2023 to early 2024, I was going hard on Instagram.

Getting millions of views on my NYC pranks. And then I totally quit and stopped.

Why???

Because I was up all night drinking Red Bull and building Memelord.com.

I realized filming pranks and street interviews was probably not the highest-leverage use of my time or brainpower, so I locked the fuck out of Instagram/TikTok and locked the fuck into building software. I literally deleted IG from my phone. People told me “I fell off” in the comments section, but they had no idea I was falling into a rabbithole that would make me millions.

What I learned from this experience: You can literally just lock out of something that isn’t important at a given time and come back when you’re ready.

People think you’ll quit.

They’ll say you fell off. And yes, I knew I was sleeping on millions of views on Instagram, but if I was so focused on getting millions of views on Instagram, I wouldn't have been able to raise $3M for Memelord.

It's an order of operations.

Now that Memelord.com v2 is launched and incredible to use, I’m back going hard as fuck on marketing. I started posting daily videos about memes and the business 3 weeks ago and already have videos hitting 50K views and driving sales.

I spend about 20 minutes/day filming it then back to the grind.

You can literally just lock in and lock out.

Even as a viral marketing madman obsessed with views and dopamine, I’ll be the first to admit it’s worth it locking out of marketing to lock in on a better product. I mean look at what we have now. I couldn’t have done this if I was prioritizing subway videos all day.

Ex. 2 — Design → Engineer → Market

Memelord.com is a design-led company in every sense of the word.

My designer or I design something. Engineers write the code. Then me and the marketing team market the living fuck out of it. Repeat everyday until dead. Switch around the order and you’re also dead.

Why????

If the designs aren't clear or certain, then we waste the engineer's time and piss him off. And the engineer is the most expensive person on the team doing the hardest work. And he’s also usually pretty sleep deprived in our case ❤️. So if you hand him bad designs, you’re wasting their time, letting them down, and pissing them off.

You end up with shit like this meme (by one of our memelord.com users ofc)

This has been a huge learning for me.

When I was solo building Memelord v1 in Bubble, I was the designer, engineer, and marker all-in-one. Because it was no-code, I would just drag and drop my designs and then press build. Then I would tweet about it and market it. Now I realize how much the design needs to come first, then the engineering, then the marketing.

And it's not just the engineer's time that you could waste.

If you start marketing a shitty product, then you're wasting the marketer's time plus your marketing budget. Sure, you just got 10,000 new signups, but who cares if nobody actually uses the product and everybody churns. Waste of money.

This has been a huge learning for me.

I've had to shut the fuck up and go silent some days just to work on product or journal. As a generational yapper and marketing person first, it's been a huge change.

My engineer appreciates it. He literally told me the days that I take offline and come back the next day are when I come back with the clearest instructions and best ideas. When you're a design-led company or really any company where product is the main thing, you need clarity of vision over everything. Otherwise, you waste everybody's time.

There needs to be an order of operations.

2 tools/books for building systems:

1. Work The System by Sam Carpenter. I read this book when I first started Memelord. Extremely helpful. He gives you exercises and examples breaking down your business into systems and micro-systems that work for anything from restaurants to software.

2. Linear. We manage our entire design and engineering on Linear. I'll create a task, assign it to the designer, designer done, assigns it back to me. I approve, I assign it to engineer. Engineer finishes it, assigns it back to me to approve. Boom, we're done. Linear is really powerful if you spend the time on it. You only get out what you put in.

Thanks for reading memelords.

Create some cool shit this week.

Jason “The Memelord” Levin

Founder of Memelord.com