Exclusive Interview: Pop Culturalist Chats with the Team at Doing Things Media

Reid Hailey and Derek Lucas are the cofounders and creative geniuses behind Doing Things Media, a global company fueling today’s meme culture with some of the biggest brands and most-shared content on Instagram. Each day, Reid, Derek, and their team create over a hundred pieces of content. In three short years, they’ve racked up an unprecedented amount of likes and shares and over sixty million followers.

Pop Culturalist caught up with the dynamic duo to learn more about starting Doing Things Media, the secret behind what goes viral, and their meteoric rise to the top.

PC: Tell us about the history of Doing Things Media?
In 2014, while living in his parents’ basement and taking college classes, Reid Hailey created an Instagram account named @Shitheadsteve. Reid grew the account to one million followers in less than one year by creating original meme content. Reid saw it as a potential business from the onset after witnessing the rise of accounts like @FuckJerry and @TheFatJew. Reid began creating other accounts such as @Trashcanpaul and @Gamersdoingthings.

Derek Lucas has been creating meme content since 2015, with his first account being @ChampagneEmojis, and eventually wound up creating @Drunkpeopledoingthings (now @NoChaser). After about a week of making memes, he reached out to all of the “memers” he was a fan of, and almost all of them quickly responded. Those top memers reposted Derek’s content, collaborated on content together daily, and built up a strong community. One of those people that Derek worked with on a daily basis from the beginning was Reid.

Reid and Derek started making content together in an Instagram DM group frequently known as the Meme Illuminati. They added several really big celebrities as a joke, and they all started responding, John Mayer was one of them. Reid and Derek teamed up in 2017 to form Doing Things Media. At the time, their collective network reached three million followers. Today, the Doing Things Media network has approximately sixty million combined followers across its channels. The company has since worked with global brands such as Anheuser-Busch, Activision, T-Mobile, and Hulu to drive awareness and cultural relevance.

PC: Who or what has had the biggest influence on each of your careers and on the company?
Reid Hailey: Dave Chappelle, Adam Sandler, and Joe Rogan. I also really like Good Neighbor Stuff on YouTube. Dave and Adam are legends and my favorite comedians of all time. Joe Rogan is my favorite podcaster, one of my favorite comedians, and it’s really inspiring how he built an empire by having conversations with friends and doing what he loves. I feel the same way about what we’re doing at Doing Things Media. We want to make people laugh every day.

Derek Lucas: I grew up watching Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. The way that they would take real-time topics, unpack them, make them easy to digest, all while being hilarious was something I always was amazed by. Jon and Stephen inspired me to be a comedy writer, and when memes became a popular medium, I saw it as a new version of social commentary that seemed much more attainable for me. From a creative perspective, we take a lot of the same Daily Show-esque principles of taking real-time events and making them digestible for audiences on digital platforms.

PC: The company was founded back in 2017. When you look back at the past three years, has anything surprised either of you? What’s been the biggest takeaway?
Reid Hailey: It’s been amazing to see how quickly the company has grown. From the beginning, when I hit ten thousand followers on @Shitheadsteve, I knew this was the project I needed to put all of my energy into. I’ve always had the goal of growing the Doing Things Media business to a hundred-million-dollar valuation. Since 2017, we have at least doubled in size every year. It has been crazy to experience that level of growth. At the current rate, if all goes according to plan, we can very well be at that goal in three years.

Derek Lucas: The craziest thing to me is looking back to my early goals of one day having one million followers on an account and going from several thousand followers to a nice clean one million. Fast-forward and the majority of our brands are larger than that. When you’re in it every day and you watch the growth, it doesn’t feel as crazy. But when reflecting back to old goals, it’s pretty amazing.

PC: Doing Things Media is constantly creating new content each day. What is that process like? How have you all mastered what will go viral?
Reid Hailey: Our team has a really strong grasp on the type of content that will resonate with specific audiences. After spending years running pages with original and curated content, we’ve been able to learn what our audience likes and dislikes in terms of content. We have a really collaborative process for creating content. Doing Things Media operates through Slack threads and text chats with fifteen of the funniest people on the internet making the funniest content all day long. It’s really amazing and unique to Doing Things Media. Many of our creators have built audiences of their own with one million-plus followers. I’m no longer running any pages, but I still make some memes whenever I think of them. I’m more focused on building the overall business as the CEO, focusing most of my time on consumer products and original shows like All Gas No Brakes.

Derek Lucas: We have built a very collaborative process where creators are constantly throwing in images and talking about the latest trends. I think creators go through a process after years of running pages where they develop a sixth sense for the type of content that will over perform. After posting thousands of times and watching the numbers, a creator’s subconscious mind logs all that stuff and, with each post, you get a little bit better at identifying great content. As the head of Doing Things Media’s creative team, we make sure we are constantly refining our process and learning. We always want to create the highest performing and most relevant trending content.

PC: We’re living in an unprecedented time. How has COVID-19 affected your business? How have you adjusted?
Reid Hailey: Doing Things Media has been predominantly a remote media company. Our creative and brand partnerships teams are situated throughout the US. When the pandemic hit, we discussed internally how we should react in terms of content. Our team realized this was our time to stand out, especially since we exist to make people laugh and to brighten audiences’ days with great engaging content. We’ve also realized that our platform is a great way for audiences to connect with friends, especially those that are separated by distance. As a result of quarantine, our content was shared even more between friends under lockdown.

Derek Lucas: Since we have a digital-focused business, we had an easier time adjusting than most. Our company was founded remotely, and we worked that way for a while before getting an office in Atlanta.

PC: Have you noticed a shift in behavior from your target audience given the pandemic?
Reid Hailey: Our team has seen more social activity due to everyone being quarantined. Our original show All Gas No Brakes has grown 148% in Instagram followers over the last six months and currently has one million four hundred-plus followers. Our Patreon, YouTube, and Instagram have also exploded.

Derek Lucas: From a creative perspective, the pandemic has become a big topic in our content, and each brand has its own unique way of navigating that. We have seen that audiences are interested in interacting with content centered around pandemic themes.

To keep up with Doing Things Media, follow them on Instagram.