Meet Memelord Millionaire Charlie Light

Charlie Light made $1M making tech memes.

He won the fricking internet. That’s why I interviewed him to find out his meme marketing strategies. For more memelord interviews like this, make sure you check out my book Memes Make Millions.

First question:

Q: How did you make $1 million making memes???

I started the original John W. Rich account because I was bored during the lockdowns in April 2020. Figured it would just be a fun thing to do for a few weeks, but it grew quickly to about 40k followers in 6 months.

The account was just a fun side project until January 2021 when I realized this could actually be a business. As I grew the page, CEOs messaged me asking me to ghostwrite for them. Within 2 years, I built a $40,000+/month ghostwriting agency—and then sold it for $1 million.

Q: So it’s safe to say memes make millions, right?

Memes alone don’t, but memes were definitely the start for me. B2B media is becoming more casual—people want to do two things on Twitter: laugh and learn. If you can do both, you can build a great audience on Twitter.

But I didn’t make any money for the first 8 months or so of the John Rich account. I was mostly experimenting and having fun until I realized where the real money could be made on Twitter: writing for people who want to build personal brands.

Q: How many impressions/month does John W. Rich get? What about across all accounts?

A good month for John is 50 to 100 million impressions, and a slow month would be 5 million or so. Across all the accounts I run, it’s usually in the hundreds of millions of impressions per month. But there’s usually one outlier. Often one account will make up 80% of the impressions.

Q: How do you turn a meme page into a meme brand?

Biggest key here is to make sure you develop a unique voice. John Rich has jokes that are unique to him; they just wouldn’t make sense if a generic meme page posted them. While many of the memes I post could be posted by any meme page, I made another layer for my audience by creating running jokes, like John’s never-ending marriage problems.

Q: Whose meme game do you respect?

I got started on Twitter years ago reading Senator Eloise Williams. She’s long gone, but she’ll always be the original fintwit shitposter. My favorite accounts to follow now are Trung Phan, Dr. Patel, 0xgaut, TikTok Investors, Wall St Memes, VC Brags, Soren Iverson, and so many more.

Q: Any words of wisdom for a young aspiring memelord?

Don’t copy anyone else. The only true way to break out on Twitter is to come up with something new and unique. Everytime a new account gets big, you see a rush of hundreds of people who basically copy the one original account. But no one wants to follow the copy. Come up with that new trend and lead it.

Q: There’s also a rumor that you run half of Twitter? Is this true?

I think people overestimate how many accounts I run. I really can only run one account at a time in each category. For example, I use all my best stock market & startup jokes for John, so I just wouldn’t have enough material to run another similar account well. But I do run 5 pretty big accounts in different spaces—finance, real estate, startups, etc.

Want to get viral meme templates from me and Charlie?

“I wish I got alerted when a new meme template goes viral”

Your wishes are now coming true.

Charlie and I run The Meme Alert System 🚨 

Get an alert 1x/day with new hand-picked viral trending meme templates and examples of how to use them. All for only $6.9/month.

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What to expect when you sign up:

You’ll get alerts like this!

Plus examples of how the meme is used.

Use Cases

• Social Media Managers: Help your clients go viral with the newest templates every day.

• Creators/Founders: Focus on deep work, not scrolling timelines to find the right meme templates.

• Content Agencies: Sign up with 1 workspace email for your whole team (don’t worry I won’t tell 😉).

Memes of the Week

Thanks for reading nerds.

Create some cool shit this week.

Jason Levin