What it takes to be a meme-first company

Even in his wildest dreams, Richard Dawkins did not see this coming.

Do you know what's infectious, spreads like wildfire, and has the power to create trends or even change the world? Nah, we are not talking about the flu or a catchy pop song. We’re referring to the cultural phenomenon we've all come to know, love, and share – memes.

It's a term coined by the legendary Richard Dawkins, who described memes as the cultural equivalent of genes: anything that gets passed from brain to brain, like accents, tunes, or fashions (Dawkins, we feel you). And while the internet has taken this concept to dizzying new heights, memes are so much more than just a funny picture with a snarky caption. In the modern era, memes have evolved into a powerful tool that's shaping the way we communicate, consume content, and even build businesses.

Well, it’s no surprise that we all ❤️ memes at Toplyne. Let’s dive deeper to understand how we became a meme-first company and what it takes to become one.

Time to meme

“I have a theory about memes and company culture which I am happy to share; you can measure the quality of your company’s culture by the time it takes for something to become a meme.

If a concept can morph through to a meme, let’s say within 3 hrs and become part of the company’s collective consciousness, then you can say that your company culture is exceptionally high quality and good at least in some dimension. So I believe there’s like a strong inverse correlation between time to meme and a funny culture it’s a metric that I have been following loosely in the back of my mind.

There’s a strong inverse correlation between time to meme (TTM) and company culture.” in an interview with Superhuman’s Head of Strategy & Analytics.

The average TTM at Toplyne stood at 42 minutes which is already far ahead of the industry average. However, ever since the adoption of the metric on Nov 28th, 2022. The average TTM has dropped to 27 minutes.

Time to meme is a metric that everyone at Toplyne was hell-bent to improve. The reason is fairly simple, we very firmly believe in meme-led growth.

Streamlining communication 101

There are different ways to communicate and bridge gaps. Either in a legacy format of text to convey your message OR you can make use of memes, a quick glimpse to deliver the message AND get acknowledgement. Don’t believe us? Take a look, we practice what we preach.

Not just that, memes make it easier to relate to certain situations with your teammates or in general update the team about the incidents that happened. While they might be missing context, memes act as a bridge to fill out that gap especially when you are a product with data at its core with a lot of technical fugazi, memes save the day.

Making Toplyne a fun place to work

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.

Being a people-first organization has always been a priority and always will be. We strongly believe creating, sharing and engaging with memes can also foster a sense of connection and camaraderie with peers, further contributing to a better mood. To promote this, we introduced an initiative, enter ✨memeathon✨

No pun intended, 4:20 happened to be free on everyone’s calendar

So, what’s the deal with this memeathon? Frankly, the agenda is there is no agenda. It’s a 40-minute block for people to go ham and make memes, whilst being mindful of course, sort of like a recap of what happened over the fortnight.

A few excerpts from Memeathon below 👇

Meme-led growth

Do you think Richard Dawkins or anyone as a matter of fact ever imagined that memes would evolve in the way that they did AND be used for business and marketing purposes?

Well, now you know what it takes to be a meme-first company :)