This post is easily a year late. Most companies start by talking about their vision and mission before they launch their product but we're not like most companies. We're 3 independent creators bootstrapping Supermeme.ai part-time and operating out of a Whatsapp group. The founders (Nico, Ramsri & I) have never met each other in person.
When we started building Supermeme.ai a year back, we simply had one goal in mind. We wanted to build an AI Meme Generator. That's it. It sounded cool. It's something we could brag about to our friends. After almost a year of building, iterating and laughing at all the memes AI created - we're starting to grapple with the fact that Supermeme.ai could be bigger than we thought.
Our vision
Our vision is to break the monotony in marketing and humour is the hammer we choose. Think back to all the marketing campaigns you remember (What was the first campaign that came to your mind and why was it Apple's 1984 campaign?). Almost all of them have emotions as an integral part of it. Most of them would've been funny. Because emotions stick. Humour sticks.
We get it. Not everyone can launch large scale funny campaigns or be snarky on their social media (We're looking at you @wendys) but that doesn't mean they can't find ways to infuse humour in their marketing.
Web pages doesn't always have to be about word count to meet the SEO goal.
Presentations don't have to include bullet points and boring stock images.
Social media doesn't have to be about creating polls.
Email marketing doesn't have to be about the subject lines.
There are so many ways to induce humour everywhere.
Our Mission
We want to democratise meme creation. We want to make it easy for everyone to create and share memes. While our focus is on marketing teams, we believe that every individual has something to market. We want to make it easy for them to use humour in their communication.
Why memes? A 2020 research found that on average, a meme will be seen by at least 10,000 people within the first 24 hours of being posted*
Memes are easy to consume. Memes are a really good vessel for your ideas when you want them to reach many people quickly. Plus, we know hell a lot about memes so that makes us worthy candidates to be building a meme product
The current problems in meme creation
Meme creation today is a multi-step process and also a multi-tool process
Decide what you want to create a meme about
Choose an appropriate template
Search on Google or Imgflip to find that template
Think hard about writing an appropriate caption for that template
Choose the right font, color and size and place the texts in the appropriate areas
Use an image editor to resize the meme depending on where you want to share it
Distribute it using social media tools or use directly in your content
The entire process is extremely friction-ful but we notice three major problems
Meme template discovery is flawed
Currently, the best way to find a meme template is to know exactly what you're looking for. I'm sure everyone's seen this meme, it's quite popular. But you can only find it if you search for “american chopper meme”.
Writing meme captions isn't straightforward
Writing captions for memes is slightly different from traditional copywriting. It's important to be brief but also be context aware of the template. Even the most habituated meme creators struggle here as it is very hard to decide what text.
In order to write the perfect caption for a meme, the writer must be able to connect the image and text, while providing an added value to the meme post, so that readers may be able to relate to it on an emotional level. Additionally, when writing a caption for a meme, it is important to have a good understanding of the online culture, so that the caption can be funny, snarky and in line with what other meme posts look like.
Post processing of a meme is tedious
I know how it feels to finally have that perfect meme ready to share. You want to showcase it in your presentations, blog posts, or social media accounts like Twitter or Instagram. However, the task of resizing the meme to fit each platform's specifications can be a real pain.
And we want to solve all these problems, sooner or later
Our way forward
If we want to stay true to our mission of democratising meme creation, then our path ahead is very clear. We remove the friction in each and every step of meme creation.
In our first year, we'd like to think that we've done a decent job in eliminating the friction of discovering the right meme templates and writing the caption (Thanks, GPT3). You could simply enter any text and turn that into a meme instantly. But we're just getting started.
This year, we want to move from being an "AI meme generator" to becoming the default meme generator on the internet. Eventually, we want to evolve into a meme marketing platform, the first of its kind.
AI is and always will be at the core of everything we do but just like any other technology, AI is an aid, not the goal. The goal is to democratise meme creation, to give everyone a powerful tool to spread their ideas.
We want to free people from the need to search, write and format a meme - all they need to is literally type what's on their mind and...that's it.
*ChatGPT came up with that stat but later apologised for not being accurate. I’m willing to give it some benefit of doubt because it supports my claim ;)
