🎯 From boring to billions

2 ways to make a boring business cool

February 26, 2025

Strategy Breakdowns Animated Logo (enable images in your email inbox to see!)

Read time: 4 minutes 50 seconds

The last time we got my friend Jason in the strategy hot-seat, he shared the blueprint he was using at Product Hunt to turn his exec team + maker community into a social media mafia.

Once I saw it, I couldn’t unsee it, and now I see it everywhere.

Fast-forward to today - a lot’s changed. He quit his job, launched a SaaS for creating memes, acquired a startup, and pulled off about 100 internet experiments that go viral each week.

When we got chatting about writing another breakdown, I challenged him to bridge 2 worlds that Strategy Breakdowns is wedged between:
→ tech growth playbooks and meme culture

Let’s see what the chef cooked up this time.

A quick word from our legendary sponsors that keep this newsletter free, then over to Jason.

Enjoy.

— Tom

AI-native CRM

Attio is the CRM for the AI era. Connect your email, and Attio instantly builds your CRM with enriched, actionable data.

Then unleash the full power of the platform — from AI-powered automations to research agents, Attio can handle some of your most complex operational processes like finding key decision makers and triaging leads.

Join industry leaders like Flatfile, Replicate, Modal, and more.

Atlassian is giving startups 50 seats for free for 12 months to help teams plan, track, and collaborate on work.

Learn how an Atlassian for Startups customer is using Jira, Confluence, and Loom to grow from $0 to revenue in 6 months.

Thank you for supporting our sponsors, who keep this newsletter free.

From boring to billions: 2 ways to make a boring business cool.

Chess Move

The what: A TLDR explanation of the strategy

Sup nerds

My name is Jason Levin and I’m the founder of Memelord Technologies, a software for marketers to find and create new viral memes.

Today I’m going to drop a case study on one of the best meme marketing brands of all time. 

Wendy’s? Nope, not as tasty. 

Duolingo? Nope, no cute owl either. 

Ryanair? Nope, it can’t fly either. 

In fact, it’s much more boring than either of these 3. 

It’s a boring, b2b finance company called Ramp. And the fact that the company is so boring is what makes their marketing even more valuable. 

It’s easy to make a fast food restaurant or silly language learning app funny, but how do you make a boring b2b finance company the talk of Silicon Valley?

You use humor and memes of course.

Breakdown

The how: The strategic playbook boiled down to 3x key takeaways

1.  The Ramp Cinematic Universe

Ok, so you know how Marvel has the Marvel Cinematic Universe?

All the Marvel characters are part of that universe. Some are more prominent than others (ie. Iron Man is more prominent than HawkEye) but they’re all part of the same universe.


The best brands do the same thing. 

Think Barstool. 

Love it or hate it, Barstool did a great job building a cinematic universe.

There’s Dave Portnoy. He’s like the Iron Man or Tony Stark. But then there’s a bunch of other Barstool characters like the goofball Tommy Smokes. They all appear in sketches together, but at the end of the day it’s Dave’s show and everyone knows it.

Well, Ramp does the same thing.

The main character is Eric Glyman, the founder. He does a ton of founder-led marketing via tweets, podcasts, going on YouTube vlogs, and more. But then there’s a bunch of other “characters” which are both a mix of employees and influencers and investors.

There’s a funny young engineer at Ramp named Joowoon who everyday for the past 3 months has been posting “Day #_ of asking Ramp for a raise”. It’s gotten to the point where the founder even painted a meme based on Joowon. 

Then there’s David Senra, the voice behind the wildly popular Founders Podcast, who reads an ad for Ramp in every episode. And then there’s the Technology Brothers—John Coogan and Jordi Hays—who feature Ramp randomly in their episodes, make memes about Ramp, and even wrote a song about Ramp. And most recently, Ramp just added NFL star Saquon Barkley to their investor list and dropped a Super Bowl commercial with him.


There’s literally an entire Ramp Cinematic Universe.

Who’s in your universe? How can you turn your investors, employees, and of course yourself into an entire cast? The office (or Zoom) is the set. The day-to-day of the business is the plot. And you’re the star baby.

To put this into perspective, here’s some of the ways I do this: 

2. Ramp’s Magnetic Meme Marketing

In 2024, Ramp “ramped” up their meme marketing.

Almost every day, their brand jumps on trends with new silly memes and sarcastic captions—all while still staying true to Ramp’s brand and core customers.

Ramp is a SaaS for finance teams, so they appeal to that ICP with goofy memes. For example, here’s 1 of a tiger looking annoyed with a caption appealing to CFOs.

And another one here. 

Again, they’re making memes for a very specific niche: CFOs. Marketers and engineers won’t find this funny, but CFOs will find it relatable. 

Ramp’s memes live and die by what I like to call “excluding the wrong people.” When you purposely exclude the wrong people, you focus 1000x on the right people. Your marketing should actually piss some people off.

It's like a strong magnet. 

You repel the wrong people (marketers, engineers, etc.) hard, but attract the right people (CFOs) equally as hard. It’s the same mentality as building a product. When you try to build a product for everyone, it ends up being for no one. Meanwhile, when you build a product for your people, you find people who are crazy in the same way as you.

When it comes to meme marketing, focus on your niche and forget about everyone else.

How me and other companies do this: 

  • I focus my memes on startups and marketing because that’s like 99% of my customer base for my software Memelord Technologies. I don’t try to make memes about fancy science or anything because I’m not trying to sell to scientists. I only focus on memes around marketing and startups as much as possible. 

  • 1up is an AI sales SaaS that gets 90% of their pipeline with memes. Seriously. And they just raised $5M. (Not to brag or anything but they’re a customer of Memelord Technologies). Since they’re a software for salespeople, they make memes about sales obviously! 

  • Fondo is an accounting SaaS that slays at meme marketing. Ok I am bragging here but they’re both a customer and I invested in them!!! If you can make accounting funny and appeal to Gen-Z, take my money!!! 

2 Steps You Can Take:

  1. Build your cinematic universe. No one needs to know you think about it like that. In fact, don’t tell anyone because they might think you’re crazy. But start thinking of yourself as the main character of your startup’s reality TV show. Start thinking of what other characters are there. What weird plot lines can you do? (I recently acquired a silly micro-startup just because it would make funny content to promote my real business).

  2. Start meme marketing to build your distribution for cheap. Memes are cheap, fast, and inherently viral. No fancy $100k commercials needed. Just start thinking about all the weird problems you face in your industry and start making memes about them. If you run a finance SaaS, that could be employees trying to take extra vacation days. If you run a sales SaaS, maybe it’s SalesForce. If you’re a founder, maybe it’s about how annoying VCs are. Whatever it is, focus on the problems in your niche. The best memes come from shared problems. 

Rabbit Hole

The where: 3x high-signal resources to learn more

[1 minute read]

My meme marketing software. Find new meme templates, make memes, and go viral in minutes. Try FREE.

[10 minute read]

I write a weekly advice column on unhinged marketing tactics for startups. Join 15,000+ readers at a16z, Notion, Shopify, and more.

[1 hour watch]

In my podcast, I talk with the coolest creatives on the internet—everyone from brilliant founders and venture capitalists to millionaire memelords and internet-famous TikTokers—all about how to blow up the internet.

That’s all from Jason. What do you think of the guest post format? Who should we get on next?

See you next week.

— Tom

Whenever you're ready, there are 3 ways we can help you:

Our flagship course on how to use free internet data to make better strategic decisions. Contains 5 years of strategy expertise, proven methods, and actionable tactics to accelerate your career with modern-day strategy skills.

We have a growing audience of 65,000+ strategists from top companies like Google, Meta, Atlassian, Stripe, and Netflix. Apply to feature your business in front of Strategy Breakdowns readers.

One of the most common questions we get asked is: “What tools do you use to run Strategy Breakdowns?” So, we’ve open-sourced our tech stack to give you an inside-look at exactly what tools we’re using to power each corner of this operation.

Reply

or to participate.