Local Memes and MrBeast Style Content Are a Recipe for Success

In this solo episode, TJ opens his notebook and walks through three ideas he thinks local media operators should be testing. The first is a "local MrBeast" play built around video for local businesses. The second is local memes. The third is a statewide newsletter. He also gives a quick tour of the Local Newsletter OS software he is building.

Doing what works nationally, in your own town

TJ starts with something he had written about two weeks earlier and heard discussed on My First Million that week: local MrBeast style content, or regional MrBeast, as he called it. His point is that local media is a creator business at heart, and that local tends to run five to ten years behind what is already working nationally. Viral video on YouTube and short form is not really happening locally yet. He sees no reason it would not work.

He is upfront that it is hard. You need the right person, the right energy and good connections with local businesses. But he says the difficulty can be your moat, because it is not something anyone can replicate overnight.

The roofer who got 700,000 views

The example comes from a friend of TJ's in South Carolina. Cole is a roofer who has gone all in on video about his roofing company. He started the channel maybe two or three months before this episode, by TJ's estimate, and already had more than 35,000 subscribers.

One video, where he jokes with a homeowner about paying for her new roof, got posted on business Twitter and took off. It reached 700,000 views in two weeks. TJ plays a clip on the episode. Cole did all of it himself, with no media company behind him.

Why a media company could do it better

TJ's twist is to picture your own town's roofer, who is not as entrepreneurial as Cole and would never think of this. Even if you told them about it, they would have no idea how to do it. A local media company could say: we do the filming, give you the concepts, tell you what to say, do the editing and share it on our channels.

The virality would then come from your media brand, which already has the eyeballs of the town. TJ thinks it could work better for a media company than it did for Cole alone. Man on the street interviews are another national format he thinks could be done locally.

The catch is the sell. Cole just gave his video away. Convincing a high ticket business, like HVAC or a big auto repair job, that this is worth doing is likely the hardest part. TJ bets that for businesses where leads and marketing are worth a lot, you can find one or two smart ones who will say yes.

Local memes, and the Kansas City example

TJ calls memes a way to get ideas across fast. He sees them all over business Twitter and crypto Twitter, and he asks the same question: why not bring that to the local level? Jacob Espinos, a past guest, told TJ he used local memes when he first started and that it worked well.

The newest example came from Kansas City Daily, covered in a recent episode. The graphic took the Stranger Things logo, made it say Kansas City and turned it upside down. TJ says it is not funny, just a smart nod to a cultural moment everyone was already talking about. It had 18,000 likes a few days after it was posted.

The other example TJ gives is a comet joke. When a comet flew by, with people saying it would not be back for about 80 years, one post said hopefully Highway 126 would finally be finished by then. TJ thinks Jacob may have started it. It did very well, and then someone else copied it and swapped in a road project from their own town. It worked there too.

TJ admits he is not funny enough to do this himself. He has talked to two comedians he found on Upwork, and he invites any funny viewer who could write jokes that work in any location to message him in the Discord.

He also showed Memelord, a tool he says gives you the background templates for trending memes so you can add your own local line. He says its founder raised a good amount of money for it.

A quick tour of Local Newsletter OS

About 12 minutes in, TJ turns on his screen for what he calls a quick sales pitch. The content manager is the center of it. You connect RSS feeds to pull in local news, then rewrite stories with your own custom GPTs. A reader form collects contributed content and ad requests, and an events section lets you rewrite listings in your style and add them to an issue.

The part he is most excited about is real estate. You type slash, pick Zillow, search by price, choose one house and apply a template. Out comes a finished card with the address, price and details. TJ says making those in Canva took about 20 minutes an issue, and now it is instant. He plans to export to Beehiiv or whichever provider you use. If you join the waitlist, he expects to launch in early January and says early signups will get a discount.

Why a state newsletter could pay better

The last idea came from Nate Spangle, who runs an Indiana newsletter along with, TJ thinks, three smaller local ones. TJ has thought about a state newsletter for a while, and says Nate's results pushed him to take it more seriously. The content would cover bigger stories, like a chip plant investment in Chandler, Arizona, or the best cool places to escape summer heat in northern Arizona.

TJ lists the pros. Your audience is far bigger so you can run ads across the whole state. There is more to write about. And the real prize is a regional media brand, because a big insurance marketing team or a utility is unlikely to care about one town.

The money is the point. A statewide marketing team has a large budget it has to spend. TJ says they probably would not run a $500 a month ad, since it is not worth their time. They would spend $2,000 or $3,000 a month, maybe more, because that is easy to justify to their bosses. He adds that a local business owner thinks of ad money as money they could spend on their family, while a marketing person at a big company has a budget to use.

TJ is not saying everyone should do it, and he is not doing it yet. Content is harder at state scale. He also floated a countrywide version for smaller European countries or Central America, and Canadian provinces, but does not think it would work in the US.