I can’t say with 100% certainty that nineteen-year-old Justin Gin isn’t playing a big joke on me. In my defense, Jin’s company Giggles — which he describes as “putting a trading app and TikTok together” — started as a joke.
“It was around 2023, when there were rumors of TikTok being 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 based on an existing joke – people on TikTok see someone posting an old meme and respond, “Bro Google is banned from Giggles.” This is supposed to be the kind of place where you’ll post millennials cringe (like threads), but it’s not real. But then Jin made it real.
Jin said he created a landing page and a logo for the fake app that made it look like it could be a real Google app. The site included a field where people could sign up for the waiting list. The site got 100,000 visits a day, so Jin actually called his friend Edwin Wang to create an app.
Jin and Wang weren’t Stanford roommates, or McKinsey colleagues, or startup incubator buddies — no, Jin met his co-founder when he was a YouTuber running a shady marketplace on Minecraft that eventually got shut down for violating platform monetization rules.
The new company that ends up being created might just come from a Minecraft YouTuber who collects NFTs: a TikTok-meets-Kalashi marketplace where users can post “Brainroot” videos and invest “aura points” in the videos. Soon, the app will let users invest real cryptocurrencies instead of aura. If you invest in a meme early and it gains popularity, you get paid. Although it’s still an invite-only beta, Jin says 450,000 users have signed up.
“The goal for us is to be the first crypto app where people spend more than 30 minutes a day,” Jin said. “I think once we’re able to create a Doomscroll feed that’s really well created, it naturally takes advantage of people’s dopamine cycles, and we think that can retain users.”
A crypto-based meme trading app that takes advantage of people’s dopamine cycle? Co-founder of Minecraft YouTuber? Exactly $1,234,567 in fundraising? As I worked on this story, I became paranoid – my brain finally rotted as I wrote about Brainroot, burdened by AI-generated misinformation and the impossibility of knowing whether anything on the Internet was real anymore.
I know, it seems crazy to think that someone could create an entire app as a joke, but we’re in the age of vibe coding, and people are always trying to trick journalists. If he’s already played a joke on Google, what if TechCrunch is the next target of this strangely niche, minor insult? What if I became known as the writer who took giggles seriously, only to have my career derailed because I trusted a charismatic nineteen-year-old who told me he used to sell fidget spinners on the playground?
My suspicions were not entirely unfounded. When I researched Jin’s previous company – Mediababy, formerly Poybo – the testimonials and press clippings on the site were questionable. I asked a journalist quoted on MediaBaby’s website if his testimonial was genuine, and he had no idea what I was talking about. This perhaps symbolizes the growth of a young founder who is hacking too close to the sun, but it rubbed me the wrong way.
I started to feel like that Pepe Silvia meme, driving myself crazy, finding unrelated clues I could connect to prove a point. The launch video even includes a short clip of the Rickroll meme – could this be a hint?
Giggles’ $1,234,567 fundraise was led by 1k(x), so I reached out to some 1k(x) investors to confirm their participation, despite the fact that I was already emailing the firm’s head of marketing. Some scammers have copied the TechCrunch domain to target founders – what if Jin had done the same thing? At this point, I couldn’t trust anyone!
I finally got confirmation from 1k(x) that the deal is real. I also had food and went out. And then I felt really stupid sending those LinkedIn DMs. (You have to admit, though, those fake testimonials are weird.)
Normally, I wouldn’t have the luxury of self-indulgence in devoting half an article about a startup to my infinite worry. But in Giggles’ case, it makes some sense. This reminded me of something Jin said to me when we were talking.
“I think bots are taking over these social media platforms, and because our current advertising model for them is getting likes and impressions… I think botting is going to be a big problem,” he said. “I think people trading and speculating on what’s going viral actually creates a downstream effect of curating information.”
The next generation of social media apps will have to be built with the knowledge that they will be filled with AI-generated content and questionable bot behavior. The promise of social media is to use the Internet to bring people closer, yet we are reaching an era when we won’t be able to find each other among all the clutter. It is no surprise that Jin’s generation took a particularly nihilistic approach to humor and labeled his creations brainroot.
“Everyone can create more content easily, and people are being more truthful, because you can be anonymous — like, with Facebook or anything, you wouldn’t post brainstorming,” he said. “And honestly, I think a lot of young people have kind of gone crazy. The world is very strange right now.”
Giggles – which I’m 99% sure is a real company at this point – has eight employees, ranging in age from 19 to 38. Jin himself is the youngest.
“Starting a company is a very risky thing,” he said. “It’s basically gambling. You’re just trying to bet on yourself and think you’ll do better than something.”
I asked him if he viewed Giggles as a gambler.
He said, “I wouldn’t consider it gambling. I think lottery tickets are gambling. I think completely coincidental things are gambling. They’re pretty abstract.”
Yet, at the same time, he admits that he is essentially reinventing memecoins – cryptocurrencies based on memes with no inherent value, which are often subject to rug-pulling scams.
“A lot of people say that meme coins are kind of zero-sum, and honestly, they probably are,” Jin said. “But you see them really organizing information and providing a lot of entertainment, and I think we can be a platform that provides a lot of information to the world.”
I can’t tell you that Giggles will actually solve the bot problem and make the internet feel more human by staking crypto on brainrot memes. But I can at least tell you that Jin will be an interesting founder to keep an eye on, and he’s (probably) not kidding you.
