My wife Erica went viral this week for a shitpost.

You know what they say. When you hang out at a barber shop’s office long enough, you’re gonna get a haircut. I guess the same is true for marrying a memelord. She’s officially a memelady.

We got married on May 26th, and have been in Costa Rica since May 28th exploring the jungles, hanging with monkeys, and eating way too much ceviche And during one of our deep couple honeymoon talks by the pool, Erica said one of her goals was to grow her Twitter account and help us make some internet moolah. I was like “why don’t we start now”. So we plotted out a thread that was bound to cause some controversy.

When she first posted it on Monday evening, she had 330 followers. So I retweeted it, quote-tweeted it with “she really did me dirty like this”, wrote a funny comment, and sent it around to a couple friends. When we went to bed, it had maybe 30k views, ok no big deal. When we woke up, it was at 100k.

Then on Tuesday, one of my internet homies notorious shitposter Growing_Daniel quote-tweeted it with “I'd kms if I married a girl and she posted this” and skyrocketed it into virality. When he quote-tweeted it, we were literally walking onto a boat. It had 300k views. By the time we got off the boat ride a couple hours later, the post was at 500k views and climbing. We couldn’t stop laughing. If I accidentally was getting trolled by the internet, maybe I’d be a tad upset, but this was the strategy. People trying to joke on me, I’m the mf Joker!

At this point, Erica was up to over 410+ followers (15% increase from 1 post) and I had gained 100+ followers in the process. I started looking through my new followers and saw 1 was a startup founder in NY who was launching his new product in August, so I sent him over a DM asking if he needed any help. We hopped on the phone and might start working together on ghostwriting and memes. I also saw an inflow of new followers with big accounts plus a bunch of new readers to the newsletter and book sales. All from Erica’s shitpost… It’s almost like memes make millions or something.

Erica’s post is now at almost 10M views. It made the rounds on Instagram meme pages. I even ended up on the green-line guy page because apparently my alpha-male-green-lining wasn’t good. The virality is now over, but it leaves me with some funny thoughts and learnings.

“How do you deal with all the hate comments?” my family kept asking. The internet is especially harsher on women (all the incel guys) so Erica definitely got the brunt of the hate. She’s always been more of a digital introvert so this was her first time really seeing what it’s like when your face is plastered across the internet. But she didn’t let this stop her. She wrote a good post about how to deal with internet hate as a woman. I swear my girl has more balls than most men!

As for me, how do I deal with hate on the internet?

Exposure therapy.

You get better at dealing with hate every time you go viral. Eventually, like an arachnophobe is no longer afraid of spiders, you’re no longer afraid of getting hate. Maybe you even want to play with the spiders.

And at some point, you become Spiderman. You want the hate. You want the smoke. You start embracing it, you play into the trolls because you realize social media is just a giant improv show. And since it’s all just a show, you might as well make it one that people will never forget.

How I can help:

Cyberpunk Hyperlinks:

Memes of the Week:

Thanks for reading nerds.

Create some cool shit this week.

Jason “The Memelord” Levin

Head of Growth @ Product Hunt, Author of Memes Make Millions