My name is Jason Levin and you’ve probably seen me in my Edward’s videos and podcast.
Yup, I’m the guy who gets millions of views reading funny books on the subway like “How to Live with a Small Penis” and “How to Masturbate in Your Office”.
Why would I do this?
I promise there’s a method to the madness.
I’m the author of Memes Make Millions and founder of Memelord Technologies, a software for marketers to find and create new viral memes. I run a 7-figure meme empire and I will go to any means (or memes) necessary to get views and make internet moolah!
And sometimes yes, that means taking advantage of a celebrity’s death.
Yes I’m ashamed to admit it. This week, I took advantage of a death to go viral and make money. I’m definitely going to Hell. But Hell is more fun anyways. Plus it’s a good marketing tactic that you can do too anytime somebody famous dies.
“WAIT, who died this week???,” you wonder.
Well, a little green owl named Duo.
The Death of Duo, the Duolingo Owl
On Tuesday, February 11th, 2025 Duo the Owl died.
Duolingo was pulling a genius publicity stunt building off their mascot everyone knows and loves. It was blowing up the internet. Everyone was talking about. So when I saw this press announcement was going viral, I hatched a plan:
So that same Tuesday, I cancelled my meetings, drank a Red Bull, and started cooking.
In just a couple hours and a Red Bull, I built a free brand mascot generator where anyone could build their own goofy mascot. And the best part? I made it free as a lead magnet for my meme software Memelord Technologies.
Here’s some of the mascots people have come up with:
Red Bull Builder
Pissed Off Penguin
Birthday Cake Cooking
Meditative Memelord Monkey
Wait why would I do this for free?
Don’t I have to pay like API fees or something….?
Yes, but it’s worth it. Let me explain.
The rise of “Free Tool Marketing”
Now that software is easier than ever to build thanks to AI and no-code, free tools rather than guides, PDFs, and e-books are quickly becoming the norm for lead magnets.
I wrote a full Guide to Free Tool Marketing for HubSpot’s blog in January. But the idea is simple: you find something people are searching in your niche with low keyword difficulty and then build a free tool as a lead magnet to your paid software. I did this with “meme png”, built a free meme png creator, and see signups everyday. I did this with “Valentines Day Memes” and built a free Valentine’s Day Meme Generator. I’m always trying to cook up free new tools for my memelords.
So that’s exactly what I did with brand mascot generator.
I built my brand mascot generator as a way to get people on my site and then saw signups for my paid software. Because of the Duolingo aspect, I was going to build it whether or not it had low keyword difficulty—but I looked on Ahrefs and it turned out the keyword difficulty was super low for “brand mascot”! Double win!
My personal belief: There’s no excuse anymore why you’re not building software with how fast it can be done these days. I’m non-technical and I cook up all my own software with Red Bull, no-code, and YouTube!
Ok so what happened next????
Once I had the mascot generator done, I wrote a breakdown of Duolingo’s publicity stunt.
> be Duolingo
— Jason Levin (@iamjasonlevin) February 12, 2025
> post tweet saying your mascot died
> mention Dua Lipa at the end (they sound similar)
> get 69M views on statement
> get a Dua Lipa quote-tweet
> big brands like Netflix and Halo quote-tweet
> search interest hits all-time high
> post tweet saying "In lieu of… pic.twitter.com/iceWvPUm6N
That breakdown got 178,500 views.
And as the post was blowing up, I dropped my mascot generator in the tweet below. That 2nd tweet alone has 14,000 views and 400+ link clicks.
Under the 2nd mascot Tweet, I kept adding to the tweetstorm!
I showed people all the cool mascots people came up with. Then I made some silly memes on my software with my mascot to show people all the cool creative stuff you can do with a mascot. Then I went Edward Mode and recorded a video and even dropped that in the tweetstorm! I did all of this to get people to go check out the brand mascot generator I cooked up in 2 hours with a Red Bull!
On top of tons of traffic and signups, I got:
- 100s of new followers on X (NICE)
- Someone at Duolingo reached out and said they loved the post (BOOM!)
- Someone at a public company reached out to mention me in a blog (SEO juice!)
- A good story to tell my grandkids about how I leveraged a fake owl’s death on my route to making generational wealth from dank memes
All in a few hours work and some Red Bull.
You can literally just do things.
Man I love the internet.
