From a $6.90 Newsletter to $3M Funded: How a Non-Coder Built Memelord

I just listened to Lenny Rachitsky's interview with Jason Levin, the founder of Memelord, and I want every single person who has ever told themselves "I can't build that, I'm not technical" to read this. Because Jason did exactly the thing they all said couldn't be done — he went from a $6.90 a month newsletter to a $3M-funded API business without writing a line of code himself.

The MVP was a Google Slides deck. The first scaled version was on Bubble. The third version raised $3M from real investors. The founder still can't write production code.

This is the kind of story I love because it shoots a hole right through one of the most expensive lies in startup land — that you have to know how to code to build something. You don't. You have to know how to validate, ship, and listen. Jason did all three.

The Three Phases of Memelord

In the conversation, Jason walks through what's basically a textbook lean startup arc, except told by a guy who actually lived it. Let me lay it out:

Phase 1: The $6.90 Newsletter

The earliest version of Memelord wasn't a product. It was an email. Subscribers paid $6.90/month and Jason sent them a Google Slides deck full of meme templates. That's it. No app. No login. No platform. No team. Just a deck.

What that proved: people would pay him for memes. Not theoretically. With actual money. Every month.

Phase 2: $100K ARR on Bubble

Once he had paying customers, he scaled with no-code. He used Bubble to build the actual product — 395 workflows, no engineer, no co-founder writing TypeScript at 2am. Just him, a Bubble account, and customers who already wanted to give him money.

That got him to $100,000 in annual recurring revenue before he ever needed to hire a developer. Most "technical" founders would have spent the first 18 months building the platform and finished with $0 ARR. He spent the first 18 months collecting cash and finished with $100K.

Phase 3: $3M Raised, API-First

The real twist: Jason then raised $3M and pivoted Memelord from a UI-first product to an API-first product. Why? Because his thesis is that AI agents — not humans — are about to be the primary consumers of meme-generation as a service. As he put it on the show: "no UX is the best UX" when the customer is an autonomous agent reading documentation.

That's a real insight. We're already seeing AI agents call APIs to do everything from booking flights to filing invoices. The companies that get picked up by those agents are going to win the next wave. He bet on it early.

The Two Tactics I Want You to Steal

There are a couple of things he did during the growth phase that I think every business owner reading this should copy today.

1. Free Tools as the New Lead Magnet

Forget the PDF. Forget the "download my checklist." Jason built free tools — actual functional little utilities — that his audience could use without paying. Those free tools generated hundreds of thousands of email signups.

That's the next evolution of the fishbowl funnel. Instead of dangling a giveaway prize to capture an email, you build a free meme generator, or a free pricing calculator, or a free bio writer, or a free anything — and people give you their email to use it. The conversion rate destroys a static PDF lead magnet because the value is actual and immediate.

What I'd add from my own experience: if you do this, own the email list. Don't host the tool somewhere that captures the email and keeps it. Build it on your own domain, run the email through your own ESP, and treat every signup like a fishbowl entry — because that's what it is.

2. Make Your Whole Team "Vibe Code"

Jason has a rule that every marketer on his team has to be vibe-coding — using AI tools like Cursor to build features themselves. Not pitching them to engineering. Not waiting in line. Actually building.

That changes a company's velocity completely. Instead of a marketing person submitting a ticket and waiting six weeks for a developer to build a small feature, the marketing person ships it themselves over the weekend. The bottleneck moves from engineering bandwidth to creative judgment.

This is the future of every small team. If you have a 4-person company in 2026 and only one person can build, you're operating with one engine. If everyone can build, you're operating with four. Jason figured this out early and it's a huge piece of why a small team can keep up with much bigger competitors.

Why I Resonate With This Story Personally

I'll be straight with you — this is exactly the path I've been on with my own healthcare AI platform. I'm not a software engineer by trade. I've spent the last year building EMEA, an AI tool that lets care providers record themselves once and have an AI version of them answer the same 15 patient questions they get every day.

When I started, I was using ElevenLabs through their web portal, manually managing voices in my own email. To scale it, I had to learn how to work the API. I didn't sit down and become a developer — I found the smallest thing I needed to learn, learned it, shipped, and moved to the next thing.

That's the path Jason took with Memelord. Find the smallest thing you can ship, ship it, then iterate on what you learn. Don't wait for the perfect platform, perfect funnel, perfect launch. Most of my friends who are actually winning right now started with something embarrassingly small.

The Real Lesson Buried In Here

The headline of this story is "non-coder builds $3M business." That's the part that gets the clicks. But the part that matters is what's underneath:

Validation comes before infrastructure.

Most founders do this in the wrong order:

1. They build the platform first
2. They build the product on top of it second
3. They go look for customers third

That's how you spend $100K of your own money or your investors' money before you find out whether anyone wants the thing.

Jason did it in the right order:

1. He found people who would pay him for a Google Slides deck
2. He scaled it with the cheapest possible tool (Bubble)
3. He only built real infrastructure after he had a $100K business
4. He only raised money after he had real signal about where the puck was going

That sequence is the difference between a company that exists in 5 years and one that runs out of money in 18 months.

The Bottom Line

If you've been telling yourself you can't start until you find a developer, until you have funding, until you have the perfect product idea — Jason Levin's Memelord story should kill that excuse for you. He started with a $6.90 newsletter and a Google Slides deck. He scaled to $100K with no-code. He raised $3M when he had real proof. You don't need a CTO. You need a customer. Get the customer first. Build the cheap version of the thing they want. Iterate until it works. Then — only then — start thinking about real infrastructure. That's the sequence. Don't break it.