I can’t say with 100% certainty that nineteen-year-old Justin Jin isn’t playing a good joke on me. In his defense, Jin Giggles’ company – which he describes as “a business app combined with TikTok” – started as a joke.
“It was around 2023, when TikTok was rumored to be banned, and people were trying to find a new social media platform,” Jin told TechCrunch. So I started this meme about an app called Giggles, and it wasn’t real at the time, but it went viral on TikTok.
The name is a joke of an existing joke – people on TikTok could see someone write an old meme and reply, “broe is banned from google giggles.” It’s supposed to be the kind of place where you’d put a millennial cringe (like threads), only it’s not real. But then Jin made it real.
Jin said he created a landing page for the fake app with a logo that made it look like a real Google app. The site included a place where people could sign up for a waiting list. The site received 100,000 visits in one day, so Jin called his friend Edwin Wang to make an app.
Jin and Wang weren’t Stanford roommates, or McKinsey colleagues, or friends from a startup incubator — no, Jin met the co-founder when he was a YouTuber running a dubious Minecraft marketplace that was eventually shut down for violating the platform’s monetization rules.
The new company that Jin would end up creating is something that could only come from a Minecraft YouTuber who collects NFTs: a TikTok-meets-Kalshi marketplace where users can post “brainrot” videos and invest “aura points” in the videos. Soon, the app will allow users to invest in real cryptocurrencies instead of aura. If you invest in an invitation and it gets action, you will get paid. Although it’s still an invite-only beta, Jin says 450,000 users have signed up.
“Our goal is to be the first crypto app where people spend more than, like, 30 minutes a day on it,” Jin said. “I think once we’re able to be a well-designed doomscroll feed, it naturally appeals to people’s dopamine circuits, and we think this can keep users.”
Is it a crypto-based meme trading tool that has a lot of money around people’s dopamine? Co-founder and Minecraft YouTuber? Perfect fundraising for $1,234,567? While working on this story, I became a mess – my brain ended up rotting while I was writing about brainrot, collapsing under the crushing weight of false information generated by AI and the inability to know if there is anything on the internet that already exists.
I know, it seems crazy to think that someone would make an entire app as a joke, but we are in the age of vibe coding, and people are always trying to fool journalists. If he is already playing a joke on Google, what if TechCrunch is the next target of this strange niche, a little humiliation? What if I was known as the writer who took Giggles too seriously, ruining my career because I trusted an enthusiastic nineteen-year-old who told me he used to sell fidget spinners at the playground?
My suspicions were not entirely unfounded. When I researched Jin’s first company – Mediababy, formerly Poybo – the testimonials and press releases on the site were questionable. I asked the reporter quoted on the Mediababy website if their testimony was true, and they had no idea what I was talking about. That maybe it’s just a sign of a young founder big Hacking a little too close to the sun, but it rubbed me the wrong way.
I started to feel like a Pepe Silvia meme, cramming myself madly, finding unrelated facts that I could connect to prove a point. Even the launch video includes a short clip of the Rickroll meme – could that be a clue?
Giggles’ $1,234,567 fundraise was led by 1k(x), so I reached out to the other 1k(x) investors to confirm their participation, despite the fact that I was already emailing the head of the firm’s business. Some critics have defaced the TechCrunch site to target the founders – what if Jin had done the same thing? At this time, I didn’t trust anyone!
I finally got confirmation from 1k(x) that this deal is real. I had dinner again and went out. Then I felt really stupid for sending LinkedIn DMs. (You have to admit, that fake testimony is amazing, though.)
Normally, I wouldn’t be happy to content myself with devoting half an article about starting my borderline anxiety. But in the case of Giggles, it makes sense. It reminded me of something Jin told me when we talked.
“I have a feeling that bots are taking over these social media platforms, and because our current marketing model for them is getting likes and comments… I think botting is going to be a big problem,” he said. “I think the people who sell and guess what the virus is causing is the low impact of organizing the information.”
The next generation of social media tools will have to be built with the knowledge that they will be flooded with AI-generated content and questionable bot behavior. The promise of social media is to use the internet to bring people closer together, but we’re getting closer to a time when we can’t find each other in the thick of things. It is not surprising that the Jin generation adopted a unique style of humor and called their creation brainrot.
“Everybody can make things easier, and people tell the truth, because you can’t be known – like, on Facebook or whatever, you can’t post brain rot,” he said. And to be honest, I think a lot of young people are scared. The world is strange right now.
Giggles – which I am, 99% sure is a real company now – has eight employees, aged 19 to 38. Jin himself is the youngest.
“It’s a very dangerous thing, starting a company,” he said. Basically, it’s a gamble.
I asked him if he saw Giggles as a gamble.
“I wouldn’t consider it gambling. I think lottery tickets are gambling. I think things are gambling,” he said.
However, at the same time, he admits that he is still developing memecoins – cryptocurrencies based on memes that have no inherent value, which are often subject to rug-pulling theft.
“Many people say that meme coins are a zero-sum model, and now, in fact, they probably are,” Jin said. But you see them curating information and providing a lot of entertainment, and I think we can become a platform that provides a lot of information for the world.
I can’t tell you that Giggles will solve the bot problem and make the internet feel human by betting crypto on brain memes. But I can at least tell you that Jin is going to be an interesting founder to keep an eye on, and that he’s (probably) not cheating.
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