From a $6.90 newsletter to $3M API: How a non-coder built Memelord | Jason Levin

Jason Levin is the CEO and founder of Memelord, an AI-powered meme creation platform that helps brands and individuals create contextual, trending memes. He started Memelord as a $6.90-per-month newsletter sending subscribers to a Google Slides deck, grew it to $100K ARR on Bubble without hiring engineers, then raised $3M to build it into an API-first product. Listen or watch on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts How Jason grew Memelord from a $6.90/month newsletter to $100K ARR without writing a single line of code Why “no UX is the best UX” and how agents are becoming Memelord’s primary users The mandatory vibe-coding rule for his marketing team and how it unlocks unprecedented creativity Why free tools are the new PDF downloads and how they’ve generated hundreds of thousands of emails Jason’s hardware hacking projects, including a bedside keyboard that creates Linear tickets without waking his wife Why AI can be funny (but humans are still funnier) and which model is the funniest The philosophy of building hyper-personalized software just for yourself WorkOS—Make your app enterprise-ready today Persona—Trusted identity verification for any use case (00:00) Introduction to Jason Levin and Memelord (04:28) Demo: Agentic meme creation with OpenClaw (06:55) “No UX is the best UX”—building for an agent-first future (08:35) How Memelord started as a $6.90 newsletter with Google Slides (12:35) Building to $100K ARR on Bubble with 395 workflows (15:20) Demo: Free tools section that generates hundreds of thousands of emails (17:59) Why Cursor is perfect for non-technical founders (20:20) Let your marketers cook—or watch them leave (24:19) Commit graph that shows the vibe-coding inflection point (25:25) Tools: Claude, Gemini, Linear, PostHog (28:19) Build weird stuff in the real world (33:24) Creative AI use cases (39:56) Using OpenClaw for calendar analysis (43:37) Can AI be funny? Which model is funniest? (45:26) Memes are not slop (46:45) What Jason doesn’t use AI for (48:12) Final thoughts • Memelord API: https://memelord.com/api • Cursor: https://cursor.com/ • Bubble: https://bubble.io/ • OpenClaw: https://openclaw.ai • Claude: https://claude.ai/ • ChatGPT: https://chat.openai.com/ • Gemini: https://gemini.google.com/ • Grok: https://grok.x.ai/ • Linear: https://linear.app/ • PostHog: https://posthog.com/ • Zapier: https://zapier.com/ • Diego Zaks—“The best UX is no UX”: https://x.com/diegozaks/status/1966526522136649980 • Sam Lessin: https://wlessin.com/ • “Stop giving me advice”: https://stopgivingmeadvice.com • Memelord free tools: https://memelord.com/tools Twitter: https://twitter.com/iamjasonlevin Instagram: https://instagram.com/iamjasonlevin LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/iamjasonlevin/ Memelord: https://memelord.com ChatPRD: https://www.chatprd.ai/ Website: https://clairevo.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/clairevo/ Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email jordan@penname.co.