No AI, no backspace reflections on my ~4 year journey with
@supermeme_ai
we made over $200k lifetime revenue. based on where you're looking from, this could be a lot or this could be nothing. But the money is lower down the ROI list for me
Context - supermeme is an ai meme generator built by three co-founders (
@ramsri_goutham @nwbotha and me) out of a whatsapp group. it's a side project for all 3 of us and we don't spend more than a few hours on it every month
In no particular order, here are the things i've personally gained or learnt from it
1. personal brand
memes was (and hopefully is) my social media identity. I built a following by sharing corporate tamil memes and creating parody sketches. building supermeme made that even more real, the fact it was revenue generating attracted a lot of podcast and speaking opportunities. it also gave me the confidence to start my own youtube channel in tamil where i talk about building microsaas products
2. product dev exposure for me
i'm not a developer. beyond to-do lists apps for online courses, i've never shipped code. supermeme was the first place where i could actually dev see work happening in real time. tech conversations between ramsri and nico used to scare me but i'm glad i got exposed to all that. eventually, with claude code and codex help, i actually started shipping things to a real live product app that was being used by thousands of people
3. building a product (vs being a product manager)
i was already a pm by the time we started building supermeme. but as a pm, you hardly feel like you're making decisions that matter - its either forced upon you or been shot down by senior engineers/designers. but with supermeme, i was responsible for many decisions we took. it was also not a one way street, many times i had to work hard to convince ramsri and nico (they don't blindly accept ideas)
4. the 'founder' tag
the tech world has hierarchies, even if we deny it. you only know about certain whatsapp groups and meetups if you carry a founder tag on linkedin. i was never too comfortable flaunting the founder tag because i was either freelancing or in a full time job but i saw that people who've done less waving their founder status all over the place, so felt better about how i was using it
5. getting attached to an idea and getting detached
i was guilty of being too attached to product ideas. even in freshworks, i would passionately (in hindsight, emotionally) campaign for an idea going all out. i was not a pm or dev, so i would be angry and pms and devs for not seeing my idea. with supermeme, i had a lot more control but it still wasn't easy to get things built. i would still get frustrated when my ideas aren't accepted - but over the years, i started getting emotionally detached from an idea or product. i started being objective and i don't know if that helped the product but it certainly helped my mental health
6. software building myths broken
after running supermeme with 3 people, no project management tools, minimal budget - i started seeing software development for what it is - rather, what it's not: a complex meeting driven year long activities. i have a fair sense of how quickly things can be done so i can spot the inefficiencies of a product/dev org from outside even if they can't
7. my unshakeable belief on seo
seo drives majority of our revenue. if i was more data driven, i could tell you how many clicks we attract but i know it's a lot. as the sole gtm person, i didn't understand SEO at the beginning but we still attracted the right traffic. it taught me that if you just build the right things and use customer language on your website, you'll attract the right audience. seo starts there, not in keyword research - those come later. later, with more nuanced understanding of seo - i was able to a do a lot more, still doing. our goal is to be the default meme generator of the internet - we can do that just with seo.
8. competitor obsession is real but not very useful
we would get competitors, some using the exact same language that we did. some would show up higher than our search results. all of this used to upset me. i would try to take counter action but it was fueled by emotions. over the years, i realized that it doesn't matter. there's enough room for everyone and our lives don't depend on this alone, it's okay. anyone can do what they want, we just have to do our thing
9. there's no one way to build or scale saas
supermeme isn't a 'successful' saas by global saas standards. our revenue staggers, degrows. we don't convert at a high percentae. sure, if we had played a few cards differently - we could've either made a lot of money or be wildly more successful but we didn't. it was deliberate.
i lucked out by having two co-founders who shared the same vision. we knew that we wanted to keep supermeme as a side project while we go on with our lives. we could've raised funds, we didn't. we could've sold it off, we didn't. we're okay with keeping it and keeping it at this scale.
10. team matters
i am grateful for both nico and ramsri, beyond their amazing engineering skills - they're just good people. no drama. high trust. willing to put in the intellectual rigor when needed. this has made the entire experience stress free. i can't say that about other teams i've been part of, i've always walked away more exhausted even if we've built something good
11. an idea doesn't have to take up your whole life
traditional startup wisdom is that you have to go 'all in'. supermeme's early days were like that for me. i was properly all in - it was my identity. slowly, it wasn't anymore. that's okay. I got interested in other things, strated a family, a new job, picked up hobbies and supermeme's relevancy in my life reduced. that's okay. i can't imagine doing this as a vc-funded founder.
this made me realize that i can still run this without it being an obsession, maybe in the future that obsession will come back and we'll do more. for now, i have the privilege of being a bootstrapped founder who can afford to take time off the project
besides this, there are so many other micro learnings and regret, but these are the broad themes. the experience was humbling in many places, we've gotten abused over email, weren't able to afford tools and products that we needed and got harsh feedback.
i'm just proud and happy that we're afloat as a business, we pay our taxes. we take a decent sum out of it every month and it feels good that it's coming from something that 3 of us built from scratch.
of course, lot more to do and we'll do it. at our own pace, at our own liking, in our own ways. but for now, i just wanna acknowledge how far we've come.