How To Make $1M+ with Memes

What if I told you that you could make millions of dollars by posting memes on the internet? I didn't believe it either. That is, until I started following Jason Levin.

Like, everything comes down to the problems that your community is facing. Memes are a way to, like, deal with problems, like humor. And so a lot of memes you'll notice are, like, literally just, like, people trying to deal with the problems they face and, like, make a meme out of it.

Jason is a self-proclaimed meme lord who helps startups and venture capitalists blow up their business by being funny on the internet, usually through memes. Stay tuned if you wanna learn how making memes can lead to making millions on the internet. Let's dive in. Jason, I've been following your work for over a year. I read your book. I've been going through some of the resources that you have about memes. And memes are something that I laugh at a lot, but don't always understand the mechanics of it. And the thing that I'm really curious about is like, how could I start to think in memes, start to think about like how I can become a meme creator myself, a meme lord as you call it, in order to grow my audience or to get more eyeballs just to communicate in a different way.

So I'd say the number one thing is really understanding your audience. That's the first thing, right? Try paying me $100 grand to make memes about hockey. I can't do it. I don't know hockey. Startups, VC, I could do that all day. So there are meme pages dedicated to every corner of the internet. I have a friend who runs a freight meme page, literally trucking. And like, this guy runs a marketing agency helping freight companies, right? And doing 6, 7 figures just helping freight companies with marketing. So you could do it. There's, there's flower memes, there's gardening memes, there's family memes, there's dad memes. So really whatever audience is your thing, I think that would be the first thing to focus in on. The second is kind of understanding the current zeitgeist. So what's going on in the world? What events are going on in your niche? So, you know, it helps to be very online. And that's, that's actually why I started this thing called Meme Alerts, where I send people new trending meme templates, basically arbitraging on the fact that I am online all the time and I just send the meme templates. So the best place to get the new trending memes. And then third is actually making the memes, right?

Right.

And so there are There's tons of tools you could use. I just recommend free tools, like literally Google Slides, use image flip generator, use Photoshop. I mean, you don't need to pay for anything fancy. This is not 4D cinema. This is memes.

How is it like that you think about, you see a meme that's trending or you have a thought and like what's your process for then turning that into a meme that you wanna share?

Yeah, I'd say if you see a template that is getting reposted again and again, over the span of an hour, you know, an hour or 2 hours, that's going to be start popping off. And so that's why it's helpful to be online a lot. Actually now building a SaaS around meme alerts that tracks templates and sends them out so it won't be human done. It'll, it'll be AI doing that. So first to hear it here, I would say, yeah, just paying attention to what some of your favorite accounts are posting and if you see it coming up again and again, then you should probably jump on that template. And what's cool about memes, what we're talking about with how it could fit any audience, right? Like there's a meme going around right now, Simone Biles with 3 gold medals, right? And I tweeted that for like me if pissing off my wife was a sport, right? But like—

I just showed that to my girlfriend before. I was like, hey, I'm about to go record a podcast with this guy. And she's like, oh, he's right.

Yeah. My wife was very happy about that. And then, you know, but that could also apply to a founder, me, if, you know, selling my company was a sport. It could apply to a florist. I don't know like the details of florists, but like it could be anything. Like me, if my flowers stayed alive through the winter, like it could literally be applied to anything. That's why, you know, you have to understand your community and the problems. Like everything comes down to the problems that your community is facing. Memes are a way to like deal with problems. Like humor is a way to like deal with problems, right? And so a lot of memes you'll notice are like literally just like people trying to deal with the problems they face and like make a meme out of it, right? It's like a relatable problem.

It's so true. I want to ask you like around the money side of this, because the name of the book is Memes Make Millions. You just mentioned how there's agencies doing 6, 7 figures with, with freight. I'm going to keep hammering that example. Like that's incredible. I don't know if our audience or just still like the general internet understands the money side around being funny on the internet, being relatable on the internet. Can you speak to like what's been the meme either for you or for a friend that has like generated the most money or like been part of a launch? Like I just, I'm very curious about the money side of the meme world that you're in.

The book is called Memes Make Millions, but at the end of the day, memes are a lever to get attention on your products, right? It's a lot better title than memes get attention on your products that make millions, right? That's memes make millions is a lot sexier of a title. So you got to have good products that you are selling. And so for me, I've had launches where one meme goes viral and, you know, getting hundreds of dollars, thousands of dollars of signups for, for either my newsletter, for clients coming in. It's not just about that. It's also about the connections, the followers. Like, you know, I posted a Huberman meme and Andrew Huberman follows me and we start DMing, right? Same with like Marc Andreessen, right? And so like memes are kind of kind of like a weird way to like connect with people. A lot of my, you know, connections on Twitter come from posting memes and like, you know, making people laugh on the internet. And there's kind of an intangible financial amount with that. The lowest form of making money with memes is actually meme pages. Like, you know, unless you grow a really big meme page, then it's very hard. But the real money is, you know, growing a software company and then using memes to market it, or growing an e-commerce brand or whatever it might be. There's a reason why Wendy's is posting memes, why Netflix is posting memes. It's not because they're making money off the meme pages, it's because they're making money from their products. So I guess that's the first thing is like, if you really want to make the real money with memes, then my recommendation would be like, build a brand. Don't just become a meme lord, but actually build like a brand and a company with a valuable product. And then use memes to market it.

Am I allowed to like ask for a little bit of like live consulting here then on that? Just, I am in charge of Hey Creator Social at this moment, right? And it's very much like post the clips that we have from the show. In a broader sense, I feel like if I only have a certain amount of time, like I should be posting memes as like a higher leverage thing than just, than only the clips from the show, right? Right, so like, I'm not gonna ask you to make creator memes for us, but just like, can you speak to just, am I right in thinking that way? Or like, how can I do more of that?

I think you are definitely right. Memes are super high leverage in the sense that they're free to make, they're easy to make, they're quick to make. You don't even have to make them. You could hire a kid to make them, a college kid, or somebody overseas to make them for a couple bucks a meme. Like, you don't necessarily have to make them. That's why the product is so important behind it because memes are easy to make. You know, people think that it's stupid and it's because they are pretty easy to make, but it all comes down to jumping in at the right time and having a good product underneath. It would definitely be high leverage to add on top of the videos. And so take some of those memes from meme alerts and apply them to, you know, creators, right? And you could do that with anything like the Simone Biles. It's like me when my video, you gets more than 30 views, right?

Like, oh boy, that hits.

Yeah, dude. Exactly. I know. I just started on the YouTube journey now and that's a, that's a humbling journey for sure. Literally, it could be applied to anything. And the real scalability of it is crazy where once you have like a meme lord mafia, right? Like it's not just me making memes anymore. It's people helping me as well for companies that I work for and, and all that kind of stuff. And so I really recommend like hitting up some funny meme pages, some money, funny meme creators as well. It doesn't have to be you doing it. So, uh, if you want to scale your time so you could spend it on other things, that's one way to do it as well.

Where it really like stood out, or like I had a kind of a light bulb go off, like, oh, this isn't just people trying to be funny on the internet. Ryan Holiday and Daily Stoic started using like memes for their Stoicism account on Instagram. I was like, oh, that's really interesting. Most of the Daily Stoic content before they started posting memes, but it's like all like very stoic, black and white. It's very like traditional, philosophical, and now there's just like these crazy memes that are on there. Like, I don't think they're like driving to a specific like meme, meme landing page, but I bet they drive a good amount of traffic to the email list and just more followers to the, to the page.

100%. That makes me really happy to hear Ryan Holiday is making memes or somebody on his team is. Ryan's a brilliant marketer. Like I said, you can make them for any subject, any, anything that has problems. And there's always problems. Getting to know your audience, like Stoicism, for example, right? Maybe I could, I've read a couple of his books on Stoicism, but like, I don't really know it that well. Like, I don't know if I can make some Marcus Aurelius memes. Like, I don't know the quotes that well, right? Like, I mean, Epictetus is a funny name. That's all I got. Like, but if you're somebody who's deep in there and really understands the content, you could do it. So a great example is Chris Bakke. I'm sure you guys have seen him on Twitter.

Yeah, I've seen Chris.

Chris is the founder of Lasky, and he sold it for $100 million to Elon Musk and X. So how did Chris get the company attention? It was memes. So he drove over $3 million in revenue for his hiring SaaS, and he drove it with memes on Twitter and LinkedIn. As the meme was going viral, he would just plug his, his company underneath. Like it's literally that simple. And because, you know, he wanted startups all on there, he would just make memes about tech. He started by posting very, very serious stuff and then he realized a lot of that comedy was what was popping off and that was what was getting the attention. Another good way, if, you know, potentially for younger creators listening as well, I'm not sure, isn't just running a meme page. Like I said, it's, it's the service aspect of it, right? Like a lot of people want to go start a SaaS, but it takes a while to get cash flow. A lot of people want to build an e-commerce brand, also takes a while to get cash flow. But services, especially especially around, you know, viral comedy writing or video making or meme making, there's a lot of money there, right? And a lot of clients are willing to spend a lot more for that.

Yeah. And one, one thing to hit on that we've been talking about, especially in terms of the memes make millions, memes make money, is that it reminded me one of my friends, Matt Eliason. Jason, do you know Matt at all?

I'm having him on my podcast at the end of the month.

Nice. Well, Nat, I think maybe his most popular post on X, or at least one of them, a 6-figure meme-making job at a legit company. No matter how silly your kids' interests seem, don't ever tell them they should give it up for a real job because it says remote meme artist, literally says in the job title shitposter, $80,000 to $120,000. And it got over 2,300 reposts, nearly 9,000 likes. I mean, these are, these are things that it's only, it's only accelerated. Since then, and that was 3 years ago.

Yeah, that's definitely underpriced.

Yeah, because we're talking about attention. This is something that I want people to take away from this is when you can use— you can leverage attention anyway, but comedy being self-effacing is something that like people will always like laugh at and like give you credit for and like build, build trust through the comedy that you have, even if at the very least be like, okay, this person gets me.

Yeah, I think it's, it's really about knowing who your audience audiences. It's harder to do it for a broader audience. And I think Twitter definitely, uh, like part of the algorithm looks at your past posts to compare like, uh, the similarity of the industry, uh, similarity clusters is what it's called. Um, and every algorithm does that. So for me, I'm just like making memes about tech for the most part. Anytime I try to do politics, nothing pops off, and it pisses me off because they are funny, but it's just not what my account and my following is about. And like Yeah, you know, once you hit— you see like Elon and he could post about anything, but he has like 150 million followers. I would definitely say, you know, sticking to your niche, um, isn't a bad thing. Like, there's a lot you could do there, and it doesn't have to be super, super niche all the time, but I would double down on whatever you're doing because there are so many people passionate about whatever it is, uh, that you do. Like, from scrapbooking to literally hamsters. Like, my cousin is in a hamster subreddit with like 100,000 people where they just discuss hamsters. Yeah, she— I mean, she's, you know, she's a little kid, but like they love hamsters, right? And so whatever passion you have, there is hundreds of thousands to not millions of people on the internet who are also passionate about the same thing. Um, so it might feel niche to you, uh, like you might be the only scrapbooker in your town or you're friends with, but you'll find those friends on the internet. You know, I've I found some of my best friends online. Some of the groomsmen in my wedding were from Twitter. And I think being yourself is the best way to do that. Showing your real personality, your real interests, making people laugh, making them think, and just treating Twitter like it's a big group chat, you know, and just having fun with it.