Humor-based marketing is not a new concept.
Marketers have been making people laugh to sell products for centuries since ads for magical penis potions in newspapers in the 1700s. Meme marketing is just the latest iteration of humor-based marketing. And it’s officially everywhere.
From education brands like Duolingo to luxury brands like Porsche to public giants like Sony, every internet-savvy brand is finally embracing meme marketing. Even governments, political campaigns, and armies’ social accounts are posting memes! With Gen-Z and Gen Alpha becoming the next class of founders, CMOs, and social media managers, meme marketing will only accelerate.
Every brand is looking for new memes all the time in the fight for attention.
Yet no marketing software is taking memes seriously enough. There’s a lot of meme editors, but there is no B2B meme marketing tool to serve this growing industry of meme marketing from the solo memelord to the massive Fortune 100 enterprise.
I’ve built the MVP for this B2B tool with Meme Alerts.
In July, I launched Meme Alerts, a $6.9/mo daily newsletter with new viral meme templates. As of this writing on Sep 2, Meme Alerts is at $1,200+/month. That’s 150+ paid customers all driven organically on Twitter/LinkedIn for a daily meme newsletter written by my employee in India.
Once I hit profitable (my employee is $200/month), I hired a Bubble engineering agency for $3,000 to build Meme Alerts into a SaaS. The big realization for me was: because of the high repostability/remixing of memes, we don’t need to track all images posted on the internet—we just need to track the media posts of 20-30 meme accounts and then use AI to compare the images. My employee is automatically alerted of new potential viral meme templates 5-10x/day. Some are false positives (ex. a screenshot getting reposted of the stock market), so my employee approves or rejects the matches. Approved memes are then sent to paid subscribers.
Considering I’m at $1,200+/month after 3 months of purely organic marketing on Twitter/LinkedIn for a daily meme newsletter, I think I’ve just hit the tip of the motherfucking iceberg. I’m focusing on the low-hanging fruit that I know best, but I plan to put funds into paid ads and influencer marketing across Instagram/TikTok, outbound sales to marketing agencies, startups, and Fortune 500 brands, and buying business-related meme accounts to control distribution. I will also be selectively taking on investors solely from memelords with large followings to help distribute.
Getting new meme alerts is great, but 2 things would be better:
I plan to use funds to hire engineers to do both build both the meme editor/scheduler and an AI memes delivery system in which a brand inputs their info and is given a choice of memes daily.