The Hustle - 🤠 Making millions with memes?

Happy Trends Tuesday!

I used to think that a short career span is a unique problem for pro athletes. After all, you only get so many years of peak physical performance.

But the tech industry — famous for its sedentary nature — isn't so friendly to aging folks either.

A recent report showed that 41% of tech workers are now under 39 years old, and even Millennials are becoming old-timers with low hire-ability.

We might be biased, but is it high time to get into business for yourself and avoid all that BS? 

In today's email…

• These furniture might help you raise an independent kid
• Memes can make you millions — follow these 5 steps
• What we’re surfin’, from Mr.Beast's YouTube guide to bootstrapping $1B businesses

Let's dive in! 

🎯 2024 BUSINESS GROWTH BLUEPRINT

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🚀 WHERE TO BUILD NEXT

Make money with Montessori furniture

If you tell my mom that a certain kind of furniture could’ve helped her raise me better, she’d probably think you’re crazy.

But a new generation of parents are taking this seriously. 

Many of them subscribe to the Montessori method, an educational philosophy that encourages independence in young children. 

And specialized furniture plays a big role in that. 

Railing-less floor beds that allow young kids to move around freely. Source: Exploding Topics

Montessori furniture is child-centric, adjustable, and designed to help kids become more independent by giving them freedom of movement.

They tend to be made from wood and other natural fibers, right up the alley of environmentally conscious Millennial and Gen Z parents. 

Here are two opportunities: 

1. Selling furniture

The kids' furniture market is valued at $34.9B in 2023, and searches for these specific pieces are taking off:  

• Montessori bookshelf: $57.8k average monthly revenue on Amazon 
  (775% growth in the last 5 years) 
• Montessori bed: $44.9k average monthly revenue
• Montessori board: $90k 

Better yet, Ahrefs ranks keyword difficulty at just 6/100 for “montessori furniture” — meaning you’ll only need backlinks from ~7 websites to rank in the top 10. 

To stand out in this market, focus on sustainable manufacturing and personalization. 

Calling my mom to ask her why I didn’t have this setup. Source: Wood and Hearts

You can also start a rental subscription service — like a Lovevery but for furniture, where pieces are updated as your child grows, and then returned to be reused. 

You could enter the lower-end space as well. 

A simple cube shelf at startup Sprout Kids (56k+ site visits/mo.) goes for a whopping $549; not everyone will want pure Baltic birch wood. Slightly older age groups are another niche: like this adjustable desk for preschoolers. 

Besides, with such a price tag, there’s an opportunity to develop a second-hand market where parents sell their used montessori furniture for cheap. 

2. Monetize via the info angle with how-to guides and links to affiliate resources.

New parents enter the market everyday, and if they haven’t heard of Montessori before, there’s a chance they’ll want the education.  

There’s clearly a demand for learning more: 

• One mom who Montessori’d her house got millions of views on TikTok
• A “How we Montessori” FB group has 104k followers
• The r/Montessori subreddit (48k members) is full of furniture-related questions

You could provide content on how to DIY the furniture, how to set up a montessori environment for kids, a Montessori-focused gift guide...

Or, zoom out to the entire montessori movement, and run training workshops for parents or teachers. 

👽 OUR LATEST OBSESSION

Embrace the cringe, and make millions with memes

Hot take: Memes are the highest leverage marketing on earth.

I know, I know. They’re kind of stupid. But they’re also: 

1. Free to make
2. Fast to make
3. An easy way to go viral

What could be higher leverage than that? 

Meme marketing leverages the power of humor to get attention on the internet, but humor-based marketing isn’t a new thing. It’s been done for hundreds of years since newspaper ads in the 1700s for magical hair growth potions.

Meme marketing is just the newest internet-native version of it. And it’s been used by the biggest brands in the world, from Duolingo to Porsche, Sony, and more.

Source: Google Trends, six-month rolling average

As Gen Z and Gen Alpha grow into the next class of founders, CEOs, and CMOs, this trend will only continue to grow.

So here’s how meme marketing works, in five steps — from Jason Levin, a guy who interviewed every memelord he could find who’s making millions on the Internet.

Step 1. Learn the industry and trends

If you tried paying Jason $100k to make memes about hockey, he couldn’t do it.

He knows nothing about hockey, but he can make memes about startups and venture capital all day, because he:

• Lives and breathes startups
• Listens to All-In and My First Million
• Goes to the tech parties
• Reads the books
• Is fully immersed in the founder/VC world

His takeaway?

You can only make memes about industries you’re deep in, because you need to know the zeitgeist and what’s going on.

Step 2. Know the problems

Good memes come from problems your industry faces.

If you’re in accounting, you meme about Excel. If you’re in startups, you meme about VCs taking the summers off to party in France.

When you’re making memes for your brand, get hyper-focused on what problems your users face. If you’re working on software for writers, for instance, you better know what problems writers face — writer’s block, not enough caffeine, crushing self-doubt, etc. (Not speaking from my personal experience at all).

Step 3. Know who you can’t offend

This is something super underrated that most social media managers don’t think about.

It’s actually okay to offend some people. This doesn’t mean using offensive language like insults or charged words — that’s never okay.

But it is okay to poke fun at a job group like accountants or YouTubers. You just have to be thoughtful and selective about who you’re offending and who you don’t want to ever offend or poke fun at.

For instance, Jason works with a startup whose product is all about helping founders, so they never try to offend founders. Instead, they pick on VCs (they’re easy targets).

At another startup, the customers were engineers, so they never tried to pick on engineers. Instead, product managers took the blow (another easy target).

Keep reading to see Jason’s two other steps of making millions with memes, from being a “cringe arbitrageur” to mastering the right tools. 

🗂️ OPEN TABS

🎬 Mogul: How this 27yo became the hottest producer of TikTok shows

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🥾 Watch: Bootstrapping a $1B+ business, and selling to the ultra-rich

🤫 ICYMI: Because you need to see the Mr.Beast guide to YouTube success