Ship-to-Yap Ratio

Balancing building and marketing

Author

Jason Levin
February 02, 2025

ship, yap, woof

Sup nerds,

I spend most of my time doing 2 things:

  1. Shipping (building)

  2. Yapping (marketing)

If you want the world to see the dope stuff you ship, you need to learn to YAP!

Get more eyeballs, get an AdQuick billboard.

How’d Deepseek hit #1 on the app store?

Probably because Sam Altman didn’t buy enough AdQuick billboards.

(Ok jk maybe it’s because Deepseek actually had a normal name instead of ChatDMT or ChatDMV or whatever)

But anyways, you should not be cheaping out on trying billboards. Like literally any brand can buy a billboard. It’s not $500k minimum or whatever. And I ain’t talking on the side of the road in Nebraska. I’m talking NYC, SF, wherever baby.

With AdQuick, you can now easily plan, deploy and measure out of home (OOH) campaigns just as easily as digital ads, making them a no-brainer to add to your team’s toolbox. From building brand awareness to driving action, AdQuick is the industry standard used by the fastest growing companies to the S&P.

Shoutout to the homies over at AdQuick. The company is run by memelords and perfect for all your craziest marketing ideas.

Learn more at www.AdQuick.com

Ok so let’s talk how I ship and yap.

“How do you balance building and marketing?”

As a solo founder, it’s an impossible math question. So let me introduce you to one of my favorite terms on the internet: the Ship-to-Yap Ratio.

Shipping is building new features. Yapping is talking about them online. You can’t be all ship and no yap (otherwise you have no customers). And you can’t be all yap and no ship (otherwise you have no product). You need both, hence the ship-to-yap ratio.

Take this Tuesday morning for example:

I chugged a Red Bull and added new AI search capabilities into Memelord Technologies. Before Tuesday, if you typed in “sad” you only got templates that had the word “sad” in the meme description. Now when you search “sad” and you’ll get meme templates of Selena Gomez and Tim Walz crying. I literally built semantic search for memes: a game-changer for memelords trying to come up with ideas.

So obviously I took to the internet and yapped about it. Literally within 10 minutes of shipping, I posted a tweet and Loom about it. Ship, yap, repeat!

Then I chugged another Red Bull and worked on some video improvements for Memelord Pro. Then I went to a startup demo in NYC to yap about all my new features to 100+ people! Ship, yap, repeat! Life as a founder is a constant cycle of shipping and yapping about what you just shipped.

[🔥 tip: anytime you host an IRL event or go to one, yap about it online with pictures of you and it tends to perform very well on social media.]

Ok, back to the ship-to-yap ratio.

There’s no perfect golden ratio for shipping to yapping and every founder/startup goes through phases, but generally here’s some rules of how I think about it:

  • When your product sucks, you should shut the fuck up with the yapping and start shipping

  • When your product rocks but you are pre-revenue, you should stop building random new features no one needs and 10x your yapping!!

  • When your product rocks and you’re seeing steady revenue, you should 10x your yapping and shipping by hiring people to help you ship/yap.

Let’s take me for example:

July 2024 - September 2024: I had a full-time job and was just starting to build my meme marketing software Memelord Technologies at nights and weekends. I had never built software before so I was spending a lot of late nights drinking Red Bull, watching YouTube, and shipping. My ship-to-yap ratio was like a 10:1. Whole lotta shipping.

September 25th, 2024: Boom. I quit my job, went founder mode, and launched Memelord Technologies all in the same day. Insanity ensues.

September 2024 - November 2024: I grow quickly to 1000s of customers using a mix of growth channels, all organic and scrappy ranging from doing guest posts about meme marketing for HubSpot to doing stuff like building free SaaS tools as lead magnets. Because I was bootstrapped and now full-time on my own project, I doubled down on the yapping and had to slow down shipping new features. Ya boi had rent to pay. Revenue grew like crazy and I probably had a 1:10 ship-to-yap ratio during this time.

November 2024 - January 2024: “I HAVEN’T BEEN SHIPPING FAST ENOUGH” I scream at myself. I feel disgusted at myself that I’ve been yapping so much and shipping too slow. I also weirdly yearn for the feeling of Red Bull all-nighters so I said fuck it we ball and decided it was time to ship hard again. I built an AI Elon-as-a-Service in under 2 weeks and launched it and got 1000s of signups. Then I grinded like a motherfucker to get Memelord Pro done (our pro software plan with video editing, AI caption writing, and instant SMS alerts). Again, a lot of late nights and Red Bull. High ship-to-yap ratio with my writing falling behind and podcast coming out less frequently as I’d like. But we’re shipping hard af.

January 23rd, 2025: launch Memelord Pro. Revenue go brrrrr. Start yapping hard again. Talk about the new features all over the timeline. Do more podcast appearances. Start making daily videos on Instagram. Get my meme affiliates making moves. Giant spike in MRR. On track for biggest year of life. Hell yeah.

February 2025 → ????: How do I hit a 1:1 ship-to-yap ratio? How can I hit the golden ratio? How can I find the perfect yin and yang? Can I write a book a year, launch shows, and make millions off software all at the same time? Is it possible????

I spent this weekend in upstate New York reflecting on how to do this.

My plan to hit the golden 1-to-1 Ship-to-Yap Ratio:

  • Invest in engineering: Now that I have some capital saved up, I don’t need to build everything myself. So I hired a part-time engineer to help me with Memelord Technologies, Elon Email, and all my other new crazy software projects we’re working on. Look out for announcements this week. 😉

  • Invest in paid ads: Again, now that I have some capital, I don’t need to be as scrappy as usual. I’ve grown my entire business for 3+ years all organic and no paid ads. But now that I’m no longer a broke 22-year-old and have some capital and a software that has PMF, it’s like why am I just doing organic to feel cool? Grow up. So I hired an ad agency to help me with paid ads for my brands. I still stand by doing organic first, but hey now I got some capital and a product that has PMF, it’s time to grow like a mofo.

  • Reflect, stay accountable with my time. This is literally why I built Elon Email. As my audience and softwares are getting bigger, my time is higher-leverage and more valuable than ever. I set up the daily Elon plan for myself so everyday “Elon” asks me “What did you get done today?” I reply and then Elon gives me advice to better leverage me and my team’s time. This has been super helpful as a bootstrapped founder and first time manager with no business advisors. All I got is me and Elon.

  • Invest in mental and physical health: I’ve been grinding like a madman and need to get back on my healthy yogi vibes (fun fact: I have a yoga teaching license I got back in my college hippie days). I need to stay healthy. Got my family and employees and users relying on me and I need a clear head. Rented out a Wander this weekend upstate to reflect. Wifey got me an Oura Ring so I can sleep better. I set up a home gym. I dropped $10k on a founder’s retreat in Costa Rica with Tyler Denk from beehiiv next month. Gonna meditate, get some exercise (maybe learn how to surf???) and yeah of course work on some cool shit too with some badass founders whove raised and made millions. Gotta hit that golden ratio and golden tan too.

I’m on the quest to find the golden ratio.

Wish me luck nerds.

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Memes of the Week

ANOTHER BIG WEEK FOR ME AND MY MAFIA!!! Thank you Memelord Technologies.

Thanks for reading nerds.

Create some cool shit this week.

Jason “The Memelord” Levin

1  Yes it may look like I’m writing a lot, but what you don’t realize is I finally got the opportunity to do a big book proposal for a publisher and have been postponing it for months because of software. Writing is falling behind due to shipping. So it goes. The life of a memelord-writer-founder.