Even with AI, we’ve been overthinking what an MVP should be.

And I’d like to propose a simpler, faster, cheaper, and more agile way of figuring out if your idea has any legs.

With this new style of MVP, you could have your problem validated within just a few hours from right now.

Start with a meme. Instead of building a landing page or a traditional Minimum Viable Product to test demand, focus on capturing your problem with a funny image. Then share your meme with a community you think has the problem.

This is the Meme Viable Problem, and the results are fast, high-signal, and easy to interpret.

I can’t tell you how many meetings I’m in with like 3 different note takers clambering to join. The “do you mind if we let my notetaker in?”. Or the awkward “Paul’s Notetaker" just sitting there like a participant awkwardly before Paul’s even there. Same song and dance.

That’s why I’ve been loving Granola—their pitch is simple: a) You get the best AI notetaker in every call, b) It runs on autopilot and privately in the background without any bot joining, and c) It also allows me to jot down my own notes in their app during the meeting.

And the best part—a queryable, action-ready knowledge base you can chat with after the call ends. That’s why I tell everyone to use Granola. Try it for free

🥷 Before you build anything—no landing page, no waitlist, no prototype—capture the problem in a meme and post it where your would-be users hang out. If people resonate, the problem is real. If nobody cares, you just learned that in an afternoon, for $0.

Memes are one of the best modes of concise and thoughtful communication.

People think memes are just joke images, but don't underrate them. What makes a great joke? A deep insight and commentary on something relatable, shared with great brevity.

Memes force clarity and simplicity and prevent you from overthinking the scope of an MVP. Making one (which is super easy) also checks whether you actually understand the problem and can articulate it in a way that resonates with others.

Traditional MVPs can easily focus on the wrong things. Memes get to the heart of your main assumption, and guide you towards (1) the right audience, and (2) speaking the language of that audience.

If you can convey the problem you want to solve in a meme and people resonate with it, then the problem is real. If nobody cares for your meme, then either (a) it's not a real problem, (b) you haven't captured why people should care about it quite right, or (c) you're wrong about who has the problem.

All are excellent and validating outcomes that cost $0.

The other day, Dylan Fielder from Figma said something along the lines of “the problem with AI is it’s so good at giving you average guised in good”. It’s trained on the middle distribution of work, and it’s so easy for us to get sloppy with our thinking—accepting what AI pushes us. We’re all guilty. We end up with ok though.

That’s why Tendem, both in my capacity as a founder of this newsletter and in my work as a PM, is so interesting. Nobody else is doing a built workflow where AI starts work, then a expert human in the right category finishes it.

This human taste and human review part is really what makes standout AI work now, because when everyone can do what you do with AI, what will you do different?

See how Tendem solves that for you. Fast, surprisingly affordable, and the closest thing I've found to an on-call advisor. And you get $30 when you join here.

At the core, memes are about shared experiences. Someone has a personal experience, makes an observation about it, and believes they're not the only one who feels that way. It could be a universal insight or more of a zeitgeist thing.

The great memes that go “viral” truly do turn a picture into a thousand words.

Take this meme from a 1921 cartoon that's often considered “the first meme”:

We probably all nodded our heads inside and agreed—a good meme.

This meme identified a clear problem: people don't like how flashlight photography makes them look, and therefore, feel about themselves. If that cartoonist had an entrepreneurial spirit, he could have started pulling the solution thread… “How can I make flashlight photos better?”

Memes put problems first and path the way to product ideas.

Memes have become one of the most popular forms of communication and idea transferring on the internet. I knew they were fun, but some of these stats on business impact surprised me:

I share these numbers to say that memes are not just entertainment, and you shouldn't be dissuaded from using them by thinking that “no serious founder would use a meme to verify an idea.” Internet memes are being used by big businesses (Netflix, Tinder, Nestlé), and are one of the clearest manifestations of the fact there is such a thing as digital culture.

And companies that tap into culture are often considered the best at marketing. Culturally relevant brand material is 2.7x more effective than other ads—in part, because it shows authenticity and relatability to a community.

This takes us to where people go wrong with the classic MVP.

To be clear, this still matters 👇

But—and talking from my own mistake here—founders often do this type of MVP too early.

They have an idea, get excited about it, and start scoping what the first version of a solution could be. In the worst of cases, they do that and build something before speaking to anyone. In the better of cases, they do actual customer discovery first. In the “best” of cases, they run discovery and then test demand more creatively: a waitlist landing page, a newsletter, launching a community, a group chat, or first solving the problem by hand.

The last set of options is solid and still what I'd suggest when it's time to do an MVP. But doing any of those things takes time and work. And that means probably 90% of people who have an idea will never do anything about it. Work discourages most people.

Take creating a landing page, often considered the most basic way to start. You still need to (1) design it, (2) host and publish it, and (3) drive people to it. This is by no means the fastest way to validate something.

Bottom line #1: People think the only place to start is with a Minimum Viable Product, but because these take time and effort, most never progress past “I had this idea.”

The second problem with these classic MVPs: it's very easy to fall into siloed thinking about what you want to say. Memes always put a community first. You have to think about what you're commenting on, who you're commenting to, and how that group talks. You're forced into thinking about what others want to hear.

A subtle yet very big difference.

Bottom line #2: Memes put the community first.

The “no serious founder would use a meme” objection is nonsense.

In 2018, Mike Cessario wanted to sell canned water with death-metal branding. His observation: all the funniest, coolest marketing goes to junk food, while healthy products get boring branding.

Instead of building anything, he Photoshopped a can, spent $1,500 on a joke commercial (the can on camera was actually a Miller Lite, angled so you couldn't see the label), and put it on a Facebook page for a product that did not exist.

Four months later: 3 million views, ~80K followers—more than Aquafina had at the time—and inbound messages from distributors asking how to stock it. That reaction raised his $1.6M seed before a single can was manufactured. By 2024, Liquid Death did $333M in revenue across 133K+ retail locations. (CNBC has the full story)

Takeaway: the joke was the test. When strangers share your fake ad and ask “wait, is this real?”, the problem is real.

The inverse case. Around 2017, the internet started memeing Duo's guilt-trip notifications, turning the cute owl into a passive-aggressive menace (“Spanish or vanish”). The memes encoded the product's actual core problem: language learning is hard and everyone quits—the guilt is the retention mechanic, and users articulated that funnier than any research deck could.

And you know Duolingo leant in hard. They made the “evil owl” the official brand and energy of the company, built their entire TikTok identity on it, and rode it to being the #1 education app with one of the most-followed brand accounts anywhere. (my full breakdown here)

Takeaway: you don't always have to make the meme. If a community is already memeing a problem in your space, that's free, pre-run validation—go read the comments.

And for the “ok but I sell boring B2B software” objection: Semrush's entire social presence is basically a stream of memes about marketer struggles. Each post is a tiny problem statement, tested in public—the ones that rip tell them exactly which pain resonates hardest with their ICP. Check out the data on lifts within the first month of running the strategy. (the case study)

This isn't fringe behavior either for the crazy ones. HubSpot study, 98% of marketers have used memes in campaigns, and 78% say memes improve their social performance.

Takeaway: a meme that hits is a data point. Run them continuously and you get always-on problem discovery, not just lolz.

It's quite simple really…

When you see an opportunity, even before writing anything down, actually tell it to someone. It doesn't matter who, because the point is to help you find the right words. There's power in saying it out loud—we tend to be better at getting to the point faster verbally than with writing.

Then write down what you said in a sentence or two. Don't waste any words on context, because nobody is seeing this besides you. The goal is to be short and tight in your wording. Remember the 1921 cartoon meme? People don't like how they look with flash photography. That's the level of detail you want.

Then head to any meme-generating site. If you're not sure what image could work, try Supermeme—a free text-to-meme generator that uses AI to come up with concepts for you.

Play around with your meme. Try different copy. Try different images. Then pick the one you think captures your observation best.

Write down who you think has the problem.

If you're already part of a community of people with this problem, or know where you want to share your meme, you're set—skip to Step 3.

If not, use Perplexity, ChatGPT, or Claude to find a relevant forum or subreddit. For example, I used this prompt…

…and got a great starting point. Then head over, read the community rules, browse some posts and engage, and finally—post your meme.

If nobody engages with your meme, then either:

From here, you've wasted $0 and spent maybe an hour or two on your Meme Viable Problem. Return to the drawing board and go again.

If people do engage with your meme, your observation has legs.

Also—say you posted your meme on LinkedIn. Every person who liked, commented, or shared it is a potential ICP. You can go to their profiles, start listing commonalities, and even reach out to chat with them.

It's a win-win. You validate a problem for zero cost and find some leads.

Now you're ready to double down and approach a more traditional MVP.

› This newsletter runs on beehiiv—the open platform I moved my whole media business to. If your meme validates the problem, a newsletter is one of the best next steps to build the audience around it. You can start yours in a few minutes, and my code THEDIFF30 gets you 30% off your first three months → (Start on beehiiv)

› While Claude or Codex is grinding away in your terminal, you're mostly just watching a spinner. I built something to fill that dead air: one line to install, and it feeds you a fresh idea or a bit of news from the topics you care about, right in your status line, while the agent finishes. Learn something in the gaps instead of refreshing X. (Install bits)

› My free builder tools do the math for you — an app revenue calculator, an app health calculator, and a competition calculator (See how your app compares).

› Check out my personal app store of tools I actually use — these are the vetted products I lean on to build things and run my business (Explore my stack).