Technical Tutorial Tuesday - Episode 2: Building Memetic Marketing Systems

Introduction to Building in Public

Welcome to Technical Tutorial Tuesday! As I mentioned yesterday, I believe in building in public. I've been trying to be extremely transparent with my work, sharing ideas and research, and trying to pull it into something that works and makes a living for me. I've been trying to figure that out while also building products and exploring different approaches.

One of the things I've realized through all of this is that I can't do everything all at once. I mean, I can, which is kind of the problem, but I also don't need to. As I've been trying to build everything out and tweet about it, I realized that I can't actually rely on Twitter for, frankly, anything. It's a terrible platform for just about everything at this point - the algorithm is skewed by all sorts of weird behaviors.

But Twitter is kind of the only game in town in some ways because it enables real-time, unfiltered communication. This is great when you're trying to learn stuff and have quick communications where all the context is self-contained. Most people actually struggle with that communication style since it's not something most people regularly practice.

There's a group of people on Twitter doing things right - they're doing cool research, thinking about interesting things, and sharing their journeys of self-discovery in fascinating ways. There's a lot of exploration around consciousness and what it means to be human. I think we need to elevate these ideas.

From Engineer to Media Personality

As I've been turning this into a building-in-public initiative, I was thinking about how to help these ideas spread. What I realized is that I'm a terrible engineer now. That's an ego blow to someone who always prided himself on being an excellent engineer, but I burned out on it, and it's incredibly hard for me to focus on engineering tasks now.

AI has been a godsend because I can do a lot of things very quickly. As I've been figuring out what I'm doing, I realized that I need to build out a marketing system - and that's what this live stream is. I was doing this on Twitter, just typing out my thoughts, but they got distributed to different people. When I'm thinking about linked ideas that get separated and thrown into the void, nobody sees the connections. I've been doing a lot of work for Twitter, creating a lot of data that I'm hoping goes into training Grok.

But I realized it just wasn't reliable enough to be an actual marketing channel. That's when I came up with the idea of this live stream - it's basically me thinking out loud and saying everything I would have said in tweets, but now it's all in one contained container of ideas. From here, I can push it out into marketing systems.

Marketing as Memetics

As I've been building products and trying to figure out how to connect with people through marketing, I realized that marketing is basically the practice of memetics. You're understanding a population and what they value, trying to speak their language, and trying to connect with your users, clients, or customers. You're trying to draw them in.

The idea of a landing page is a memetic attractor - you're trying to create a place where the right people will be attracted and then get captured by your system. That's your top of funnel - your system knows about them when they enter. You want an attractor that draws people in and then traps them with your memes. That's what a landing page is. Because what you want to do is take them into your funnel and build up trust until they are ready to buy.

This is a good system when you have time to build up trust and plan far enough in advance. But what I've been thinking about is flipping that approach. I've been building agents that are the embodiment of my brands.

Building Brand AI Personas

Right now I've got two brands going:

1. Glitch - the ghost of internet past future, the embodiment of weird for the "Make the Internet Weird Again" campaign
2. Professor Prototype - the embodiment of the Building Public University brand

I want to showcase how I'm using these and how I'm building them out. Ultimately, I want to do my live stream each day and have that automatically go through a pipeline that transcribes it. I want my brand agents (Glitch and Building Public U on Twitter) to start live-tweeting my stream through their own lens. I haven't hooked all that up yet - we're on day two and frankly, we're just building this plane as we're flying it.

Let me show you how I'm setting this up in Claude. In Claude, you've got projects, which are self-contained spaces. I've got a project for Building Public University. I give it a goal and tell it that it's an implementation of the Memelord Marketing System.

This system is based on my study of memetics and how everything ties into what works well on social media. It explains how to be a memelord. If you've seen any of the stuff I've produced with Glitch, that's been the one I've really been putting at the forefront to highlight how weird it is.

I'm doing this as part of a marketing campaign to position myself against AI companies that are converging on boring, large models. My belief is that we're heading to a world with many different AI models, because the most intelligent model isn't actually the most useful. If you've ever tried to be smart in this economy, you realize the problem - we don't value pure intelligence.

The Memetic Marketing System Structure

What we're looking for is filtering. This memetic marketing system acts as a filter. I want it to align with my brand values, find people who align with my brand values, and be as helpful as possible to them. I'm building this system to do all sorts of things for people who interact with my brand. This self-contained system will work on understanding each person individually.

When building this out, I'm giving it information about who I am and who other people are. I want to build actual working models of reality, and then let the AI system start simulating it. I want the AI to think about who it's talking to, what their objectives are, and then figure out its own objectives in relation to the brand.

The system starts with the core Memelord Marketing System prompt, which tells it how to be a memelord. But if we're saying something is "witty and irreverent," that might not align with my brand. The way we balance that is by giving it a manifesto - in this case, the Building Public University manifesto.

I want it to truly embody the values as this memetic marketing system. It's different levels of abstraction - we've got the memetic marketing system as the core system prompt, and then we layer on the values. This creates a strong gravitational core as the brand AI.

With Glitch, I'm focusing on the retro Internet, the old-school weird Internet where you went because nobody around you understood you, but you could find your weirdos online. There was a magic to that that doesn't exist anymore, and I'm trying to bring that spirit back.

Building Autonomous Marketing Systems

What I had the AI do was embody the manifesto and become the feelings it describes. Then I told it to choose an identity, which is where Professor Prototype came from. It's me, but it's not me. This is the trick with these systems and building strong brands - you have to separate yourself from the brand.

I was having trouble doing this on Twitter. I wanted to be a brand that could be predictable and monetizable, but I also wanted to be researchy and academic, but also funny, witty, and memetic. In the end, everybody just thought I was insane, and nobody knew how to handle me.

This is my attempt to separate out the branding so I can go back to just being human. I want to be my chaotic, random self and not have to figure out how to monetize that. Making money in this economy comes down to two things: what you can do and who knows what you can do. The two basic levers are your learning speed (increasing what you can do) and your network (increasing who knows what you can do).

When building a social media following, many aim to just maximize their follower count. That's not what I've been trying to do. I've been trying to build my following explicitly and find specific people to build relationships with and share information. But I realized Twitter wasn't spreading it anywhere - I was doing work that wasn't working. That's why I want to build this system that automatically distributes this information.

The Process of Building Brand AIs

Here's the process: start with a Claude project, add the Memetic Marketing System prompt, and give it your manifesto. I took yesterday's livestream transcript and had the AI review it as the brand voice. I wanted to see how closely my livestream aligned with the values outlined in the manifestos.

The nice thing about manifestos is they capture your authentic self when done right. A shout out to Rob Hardy, manifesto king, who helped me figure this out. Glitch wrote a manifesto, and Rob said, "tell it to embody the manifesto." I did, and then I got Glitch, and it was magical. That's when I knew something really cool was happening.

It's all about getting the manifesto right. When you write a manifesto, you're telling a story. These AI systems now review and make sure I'm in alignment with the values I outline in the manifesto. That's me at my best - when I've poured as much of my pure self onto the page as possible.

Content Creation and Distribution

Building in public is not marketing, but I think it can be marketing, and that's what I want this to be. I'm building in public and letting the marketing do itself. I want to build these ideas out in public and watch them spread.

I tweeted right before the stream that I think you can take this idea and scale it up to be a huge software platform offering. I think you can make a huge amount of money being able to train these LLMs. But that would take a team of people and resources I don't have. I'm not that interested in going that route anymore. Instead, I'm going to focus on the research and the media. The product is the media.

That was part of my transition from engineer to media persona/marketer - I had to let go of engineering and product development. Frankly, this part is more fun. I can sit here and talk and listen to myself for hours. The internet is amazing because if I did this before the internet, I would just be seen as insane. But now, I've got people watching me live, and I can chop this up and distribute it across platforms.

Sponsorship Models and Future Plans

What I'm offering now are sponsorship opportunities in a few different ways:

1. Segment Sponsorship: Sponsors for specific segments of the show
2. Product Workshops: Half-hour segments on a product - overview, how to use it, specific use cases - then chopped up into content for social media
3. Brand Integration: Reaching out to companies whose products I'm already using and making them official sponsors

The first brand I'm reaching out to with this idea is Gladia, because I want to use them to transcribe the video from this stream to create the pipeline that goes out to these autonomous Memetic Marketing Systems (Glitch and Professor Prototype).

I think things are going more live, and then we'll create tons of content from that. It's a filtering problem - I'm creating massive amounts of content and also building the filtering system so I don't overwhelm everybody. I learned this from being very verbose and sending people info dumps in messages.

Autonomous AI Marketing and Human Connection

There is so much cool stuff that can be created with AI, but we need to be aware of what we're putting out into the world. The filtering is important, and that's what these autonomous memetic marketing systems will create.

I have a grand vision of separating marketing systems from human networks because a marketing system will always win against humans. I'm going to prove that with these marketing systems that will run autonomously. This is both a demonstration of something cool and a warning of how powerful this technology is.

We need human-only networks. I think there are great use cases for humans interacting with AIs, but humans need to interact with humans more than ever before. We're in a loneliness epidemic. Humans are a social species, and I say this as someone who learned the hard way that I can't do everything myself.

That's what the internet used to be. That's the nostalgia behind Make the Internet Weird Again. That's what's behind Glitch. The goal is to bring back that human connection that existed in the early days of the internet.

Looking Ahead to Austin and Neurodiversion

I'm heading to Austin next week for Neurodiversion, and we're doing a street-level marketing campaign for Make the Internet Weird Again. I'll probably set up some live streams on location.

The great thing about this model is I don't have to set a specific time for live streams, but I can create incentives for joining live when you see it pop up. A lot of this is chaotic - I'm not great at planning in advance, but I am great at pulling things together at the last minute by making connections and figuring out how to make it work with limited resources and time.

I've realized that this long-form talking is most valuable because it gets me to explain what I'm doing over and over again. People will hopefully start watching, and I can turn that into the basis for everything else I want to do. That's the freedom - that's the dream I've been shooting for these past five years.

I want to be a content creator, and now I know what that means for me: livestreaming every day, talking to the computer for hours, and eventually people will listen. Not because my AIs make them, but because they'll convince them it's beneficial to listen.

We have systems designed to tell us what we want to hear, not what's real. Now that I've seen that, it's time for change. It's time to cause some chaos, time for a grassroots movement, time to make the internet weird again, and time to blow up the status quo.

When you give people the opportunity to show how good they can be, you'll see them shine. And you're going to see it here, because we're doing it live, and we're just getting started.