Memelord Technologies is growing fast.

Month-to-month growth is looking shmexy.

The best part????

My CAC (cost of acquiring customers) is $0.

That’s the power of organic growth. I’ve been working on organic growth for startups and writing about my learnings here for the last 3 years, and it feels 10000x better to apply my learnings to my own startup now!

So without further adieu, here’s some of the cool ways I’ve kept CAC at $0.

Paying for PR is worse than paying for pussy.

You should never pay to be featured in blogs or journalism outlets.

Over the last few years grinding, I’ve become friends with a bunch of other newsletter writers and creators—so when my software was ready I sent them texts asking to do posts. Every blogger wants a week off every now and then, and if you’re a good writer with something to say, you’re literally just giving them a free good post.

This is how I got guest posts in about meme marketing in HubSpot, an exclusive interview on Indie Hackers, and more for free. Literally just making internet friends. Or maybe you saw the video about Memelord Technologies by viral marketing hacker Edward Sturm who has 300k+ across socials. Well Edward is a homie I literally met online and we hook each other up as much as we can. You can’t do marketing alone, so I get by with a little help from my friends. Thank you TechCrunch, but no I won’t be paying you $1500 for a post or whatever ridiculous grift you charge to stay in business.

On top of being free, asking your friends to do posts is much more natural than paying to be featured in some publication anyways—and can have WAAAAY better results (ex. a guest post in my friend’s blog got me 10x more book sales than when I got featured in Business Insider). This is the new way of media. A random schmuck blogger like me with a cult following can have bigger sales push than Business Insider.

I’m building an affiliate army.

I built an affiliate program for Memelord Technologies (a generous 50% recurring).

Now I’m building an army of memelords.

And yes technically I’m giving up $ per affiliate sale, but it’s no risk as I only pay when I get paid. So maybe technically CAC is a bit higher than $0 for these affiliate sales, but I’m not good enough at math to figure that out!

The results have been so great so far. My memelords have been getting signups and spreading the world about Memelord Technologies! Perhaps you’ve seen them across the timeline posting their affiliate links all across the internet under their viral memes.

When I talk about memetic warfare, I’m not joking. This is war and I’m building an army of memelords. Want to join? Sign up here, become a Memefilliate.

Send more Cold DMs.

Ok if you know my career arc, you know I cold DMed my way into Silicon Valley.

I’m a college dropout. I knew zero people in startups/VC. I literally just DMed founders I thought were cool on Twitter until I got jobs writing for them. Well now that I’m the one with the startup, I’m doing the same thing in reverse.

Personally, I don’t use any software for cold DMs on X (it’s too risky with X’s API and you look like a spammer so it’s all in all not worth it). Instead I literally just send write cold DMs to founders and marketers I think are cool when I’m on the toilet or subway or my wife is watching Love Island. A little bit everyday goes a far way. Sure it’s annoying but I like making money and it gives me an excuse to talk to cool new people.

I’ve gotten some of my biggest customers doing this. Do things that don’t scale.

Become an automation freak.

All of business is just funnels and systems.

If you don’t have a funnel to get people in the door or systems to handle them once they’re in the door, you’re fucked. Thankfully, I’ve spent a lot of time working on automations with tools like Zapier and beehiiv to build 1000x leverage. 

For example, when someone buys my book about meme marketing, they get automatically added to this newsletter and a beehiiv sequence telling them about my meme marketing software. That’s the beauty of building a vertical suite of products. They can all work together. I’m taking over the meme vertical product by product.

Btw, automation may sound scary, but it doesn’t even require AI. It can be completely no-code and programmatic. Plus it’s basically free to set up minus time and software costs. Learn to think in funnels, systems, and how automations can improve the two.

Build-in-Public (aka yapping)

Build-in-Public is indie hacker playbook 101.

It’s how Pieter Levels grew his audience to 500k+ and revenue to millions. Same with Marc Lou and all the big Product Hunt makers. Literally just yap your thoughts and builder journey on the internet. Twitter. LinkedIn. Podcasts. Wherever. It’s free. If you’re not yapping about your startup, why should anyone else?

Share your success stories, your new features, your failures, etc. on the timeline. Get people along for the ride. Here’s some examples of how I do this:

Share success stories.

Share new features I’m shipping

Have fun with it.

You know how you can sense if a musician is having fun in a song?

The same is true for someone building a startup. You can just tell if they’re having a good time. You want to get people along for the journey and no one wants to be on a boring journey. So give them a damn show and have fun!

There’s $0 CAC ideas all around you.

A lot of people advocate testing products with paid ads before launching.

But those people are either VC-backed or already got cash. If you’re young and scrappy like myself, there’s no need to waste thousands anymore before you’re making money. A lot of people are very happy spending money on ads without making any back but maybe I’m just too goddamn scrappy or Jewish for that (there’s a comedy bit in there somewhere about a billionaire Jew who refuses to spend money on Meta ads).

Before you spend $1 on ads, spend 6+ months getting yappy and scrappy.

Get scrappy. Get creative. Fuck Meta ads. Zuck don’t need that money, you do. You’ll find ideas hiding in plain sight FOR FREE. When you’re profiting off organic, then go reinvest in paid. Trust me, your bank account will thank me later.

Podcasts + Videos

I talked to Dani Grant from Jam about how we hit 140k+ users!

Tech Memes of the Week

(made with memelord.tech obviously)

Thanks for reading nerds.

Create some cool shit this week.

Jason “The Memelord” Levin

Founder of Memelord Technologies, Author of Memes Make Millions

Need crazy marketing ideas? Book a call here.