- Duration: 20 min
- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01J56E8NJ09DKCCZGKBXHYH0X1 (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01J56E8NJ09DKCCZGKBXHYH0X1)
Transcript
[Morgan Young]: Hey, Morgan. How you doing? [Morgan Young]: Good. Sorry about that. My Google Meet tab kept crashing. No worries. [Michael Houck]: How are you? [Morgan Young]: I’m good. Just a bright sunny Tuesday here in Reno, Nevada. I love summer here. [Michael Houck]: I’ve never been to Reno, but I spent some time in Tahoe, which I think is pretty close. [Morgan Young]: Yeah, it is. Most people do not know what Reno is. It’s like very like it’s called the biggest little city in the world, and it’s like kind of Wild West ish, but it is very close to Tahoe. The people always get mixed up because they’re like, oh, you live in Nevada, so you live in Vegas. And I’m like, no, I live like eight hours away from Vegas, an hour flight. But Um, same idea, right? Desert, but we have mountains here too. So, yeah, Oahu is absolutely gorgeous. It’s definitely one of the big poles of this area. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I mean, uh, it’s funny because it’s so far from Vegas, but I would imagine everyone’s like, oh yeah, like, where else in Nevada would anyone be? But it’s like, there’s all these other places you can, you can also be. [Morgan Young]: Yeah, for real. And I mean, like, Nevada in general is just like such a fever dream because you know like there’s a lot of business owners here because of the whole you know because of tax laws and stuff um but then we also like I don’t know what this is like I was joking with my one of my colleagues because he’s like I can only describe it as like the ultimate new Reno new money stereotype because he is from California just like me and he started a company when he was like 20-something sold it and is doing very well for himself now and he kind of just like does whatever he wants now I mean he still works but he just like does whatever he wants with like startups and stuff and he he’s a big burner he like makes art for like burning man and And now that’s becoming very much a thing, where it’s a bunch of these Bay Area people, specifically guys in their 30s and 40s. They make it big in Silicon Valley, and then they get tired of it, so they move out here. And then they just do whatever they want, and then they throw Burning Man in there. And they’re all crazy Burners. And I’m just like, I don’t know what the stereotype is, but Nevada’s got its characters, for sure. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I’ve never done the Burning Man thing. I lived in SF for a while. [Michael Houck]: But yeah, never jumped into the whole live in the desert Burning Man vibe. [Morgan Young]: I will never be a Burner. I couldn’t stand being out in the desert like that for a couple of days. I can barely like, people are like, he moved to Reno, Nevada. You’re not an outdoors person. I’m like, no. [Michael Houck]: You’re like, actually just like the place. That’s it. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Morgan Young]: I do enjoy skiing though. I love, I do love Tahoe for that. Oh, cool. [Michael Houck]: Well, cool. I mean, I guess we can jump into it a little bit. Obviously, I was excited that Grace contacted us. [Morgan Young]: Yeah. And let me just say, super excited to meet you. I’ve literally followed your newsletter for so long. It was so funny because I got Instagram ads with your newsletter popping up in my feed over and over and over again. And it’s truly like, I don’t know what they say in marketing about having to see something a certain number of times before you actually take action on it. But I want to say I saw the ad at least five times before I was like, I’m kind of sick of seeing this in my feed, so I need to subscribe, because then it’ll go away.” And I did, but then the newsletter is really cool, so, and like, honestly, like, I am a pretty big newsletter person, honestly, like, I don’t know if that just says that I’m a Gen Z, because, like, newsletters are very much, like, my generation’s kind of thing, so, yeah, I’m just, I’m super cool to meet you, and you, when she said, by the way, did you pronounce your last name, like, Hoog or Hauk? [Morgan Young]: Neither, actually, it’s Hauk. [Morgan Young]: Hauk, okay. So, yeah, when she said Hauk, I was like, Wait a minute, Michael Houck? And I was like, oh, I’ve been following his newsletter forever. That’s so cool. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, we blasted the social ads pretty hard for quite a while. We might actually be starting up again next month. So apologies in advance if we do that. But no, that’s cool. I’m glad that you’re like familiar with like a little bit of my background, I guess. I guess I don’t need to spend too much time on it. But yeah, no, good to meet. Grace had a lot of great things to say and You know, we’re building this thing for the last few months now and we think it can be pretty cool. It’s growing pretty well. So happy to tell you more about sort of what that is and what we do and where we see it kind of going. And then obviously want to learn more about you two and kind of how we could partner up. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, absolutely. So go ahead. [Michael Houck]: So yeah, I mean, basically last year started this thing called Megaphone. You’ve probably seen it mentioned in the newsletter. Too much detail on it but we have a lot of people who are like coming to us now for distribution and reach right on social media in particular but also sometimes through newsletters and everyone’s asking me like hey can you just write some of my stuff for me like I want the distribution but I’m not going to create the content so I had sort of resisted creating one of these like ghostwriting agencies for a while but the demand just got too too big and so we started I guess in like April, April, May. And now we have a team of, you know, I think six writers on the team across like 10 different clients. And we’re growing that to probably by the end of this month, we’ll be at least 12 or 13. And it’s just growing fast. High demand. We have clear ways to continue growing that. My friend Blake, Blakey Ball, you might have seen him on Twitter or something. He was the first CMO of Copy AI and he started a big marketing campaign. He’s good. He’s got a big Twitter audience too. And so he’s my partner in the agency and he’s sort of like the editor-in-chief, if you will. [Michael Houck]: And I handle merchant sales and the growth and all that. And then I’m seeing writers who, you know, you get paired with certain clients and then you work with them for a period of time and create the content. So that’s how it works. It’s a pretty simple model. We do some like workshops for the team sometimes too about like, you know, how to, how to better use like hooks and things like that just to keep the writing quality super, super high. [Michael Houck]: But yeah, it’s a good crew. And so as we continue to grow over the next couple of months, we’ll definitely be looking to bring more full-timers. I was like, well, I guess we should talk. [Morgan Young]: Yeah, yeah. So do you, what do you, what exactly do you guys, do you guys specialize in like Twitter or LinkedIn or like newsletters or like, are you full service? Like what exactly do you do for these people that want ghostwriting? [Michael Houck]: Those are the three things that we do. We do Twitter, LinkedIn. We don’t do like, you know, like, Landing page copy or something like that. It’s specifically like social content And right now it’s specifically written social content. [Morgan Young]: Yeah Yeah, so just to give a little background on myself and I don’t I’m not sure what Grace told you about me But my entire background is basically in LinkedIn. I have just I’m just setting the record I have absolutely no confidence in my ability to write copy for Twitter I had a Twitter for like a short amount of time but like Still have it. I just not active on it at all Just because I don’t feel like I was on Twitter like as a like a what do you call it? It’s Luther like I wouldn’t post but I would just like read things I was like, I don’t know what makes a Twitter post successful and I think also just in general I’ve never considered myself like I don’t consider myself a social media expert. I consider myself to be really good at LinkedIn. I don’t really consider myself to be good at anything else. I got good at Instagram. I’ve grown a following there now, but LinkedIn is still like my main thing. And again, I don’t know if Grace told you this, but I currently ghostwrite for people on my own and I only do LinkedIn for them. I don’t do anything else. And the reason being is because I really feel like that’s where I could provide the most value. I’ve proven that I can grow an audience on LinkedIn and I’ve proven to my clients that I can grow their audiences. I feel like I have a really, because I literally, I quite literally spend six hours down LinkedIn and I have the phone I have the phone screen time reports to prove it because I live and breathe it because it’s like, it’s not just my job for them, but it’s like my job normally, like as a content creator, I have to constantly be understanding what’s going on in the algorithm and what’s performing well. And so I live it and breathe it, and I think that’s why I’m so good at it, but that’s also why I’m not really great at anything else, because I don’t live and breathe anything else like I do LinkedIn. And so that’s kind of like… Been my experience with LinkedIn and ghostwriting. And it’s kind of, um, I, it’s kind of cliche, but it’s also kind of a niche I’ve fallen into that I absolutely love. Most of my clients are young, uh, not quite my age. I’m 21. Uh, one of my clients is my age, but most of them are like in their twenties. And I enjoy writing for younger people just because I feel like my voice resonates with them really well. I don’t actually have to like shift that much when I’m writing for them, a little bit, because obviously, like, I’m a very, like, I’m very girly pop, especially on social media. And so sometimes I gotta like, you know, turn it down for like my male clients. But at the same time, I feel like the way that I write really resonates with them. And also, I feel like the way that they think really resonates with me. And to me, like, And I haven’t done this for a very long time, but I love doing it because I kind of feel like I’m getting free business coaching because all of these people are incredibly accomplished people and they just sit there and tell me their stories and I just listen. And then I turned it into, I turned it into stories that perform well on LinkedIn. That’s the way that I like to say it. Like, you know, I, I’m a ghostwriter or whatever, but I, the way that I like to look at it is they tell me their stories and I help them communicate it in a way that That’ll perform well on LinkedIn. Um, so that’s kind of my background and what I’ve done with ghostwriting a little bit on my background as like a creator I started creating content about my job being a Disney intern because it was like to me It was the coolest thing in the world at years old Still is the coolest thing in the world to a lot of people. And then after that, I started like kind of branching out a little bit and started writing about early careers, personal branding, and just being a young person navigating college and like being a young adult. And then I became like a LinkedIn top. [Morgan Young]: But yeah, that’s kind of been my journey as far as being in a LinkedIn space. I never saw myself doing any of this. I have a computer science engineering degree. I just graduated two months ago. And I’ve always loved creative writing, but I always thought that I didn’t want to do it for a job because I was like, if I do this for a job, I might hate it. But I was wrong. I do actually enjoy doing it as a job. And I’m pretty good at it. So it’s like, why not do something? Even though I’m an engineer and my day job is tech, why not do something that I’m good at? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, of course. Why not? I mean, especially if you enjoy it, you know, it’s like it’s a no brainer at that point. But that’s awesome to know. I think as we would get new clients kind of coming in over the next few months, you know, I’ll specifically keep an eye out for folks who are LinkedIn focused and also skew on the younger side, which, you know, we have a good mix of people. We have one guy who’s like a, you know, 40 plus year old CEO and we have another person who’s Gen Z and you know, doing Twitter threads all day. You know, that’s, that’s what they do. So, so yeah, we, we’ve mixed the clients. Can you give me a sense of like, if I were to come to you and say, I can deliver an unlimited amount of clients, like how many would you want to take on? [Morgan Young]: At this moment? I mean, it depends on how much each client wants, right? Cause like the clients that I’m working with right now, they, they’re pretty like, on the newer side slash getting into like social media content for themselves. So they’re around four to eight posts per month. So it depends on how much, how much volume each client would want, but I would say around two to three as of right now. [Michael Houck]: Okay. Yeah. I mean, most of our clients are either, um, Well, it depends on what you consider a post. If you consider a post to be like a really long form post or like just like a shorter one. Most of our clients want like one to two long form a week and then either an additional long form or a couple short form to kind of round it out. That’s sort of what they what they go for. [Morgan Young]: So does that does that end up being around like four to five posts per week? [Michael Houck]: If they’re all long form, then it’s three a week max. If it’s if they want the mix, then it’s usually like, yeah, five to seven total per week, I would say. [Morgan Young]: OK. [Morgan Young]: Yeah, so it would be the same, it would be like two to three people. It also depends on their pricing, because I’m not I am not completely like what what do you usually like charge for these? Like, do you charge flat rates? You charge per word. Do you package it like what? How do you guys do it? [Michael Houck]: It depends on the writer, some of the writers on the team, they prefer monthly flat rate, predictable income, so to speak. And that’s fine with us. That’s actually the preferred model on my side. But we can also do it, you know, per post, we could do it per week. I don’t know, we haven’t done it per word for anybody, but I’m not like opposed to that inherently. So we’re flexible on the the arrangement side for sure. [Morgan Young]: Yeah. And then what does the rate usually look like for, say, three long-form posts per week? What does that monthly package look like, [Michael Houck]: Yeah. So average is like $1,500 is what we can offer for that. That leaves us with some margin on the top so that we can fund the business, but also has been basically what most writers have asked for. So that's been our standard rate so far. [Morgan Young]: Gotcha. Okay. [Morgan Young]: I mean, I don't think I have any more questions. Um, like I think that pretty much answers everything that I was, that I was looking to ask. Do you have anything else that you wanted to ask or talk about? [Michael Houck]: Um, no, I guess like, um, I don't think specifically I was going to ask you sort of what your normal rates are to make sure that we'd be in the, in the range for that. Nope. I think you're muted. I can't hear you anymore. I just totally lost audio. [Michael Houck]: Can you hear me now? You're back. You're back. Yep. [Morgan Young]: Okay. There we go. Sorry. Could you say repeat that? You said one more time. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: I was going to say the only thing I normally ask at the end of these, aside from, you know, availability is, uh, what you normally charge so that I can make sure that, you know, we're able to be able to be on a good place there for you too. [Morgan Young]: Yeah, and so I think that might be where there is a little bit of trouble with alignment, because I charge around $250 to $350 a post, depending on. And for me, the price goes down if the person wants more posts, because then it's a discount based on bulk. But my client that I have that is probably, I would say, my number one client, he pays me $2,000 a month for eight posts. And those eight posts are usually around the $300 $400 word mark. I don’t charge him per word. I kind of know what he does. Kind of puts the creative autonomy in my hands and he’s like, I know what you, I know, you know what does well. So just write whatever you think is going to do well. Um, and so, yeah, most posts end up being 300 to 400 words. I write eight posts from a month and he pays me about two 50 a post. So it’s like a, it’s just a monthly retainer of like $2,000 month. [Michael Houck]: Right. So that would be that'd be two a week at month. 2000 And that would be and those are like what 300 for it. Give me a sense of how long that is linked in. Is that like a medium length post long form posts? [Morgan Young]: How do you think 300 to 400 words is right, like kind of bordering because around 500 is where you start hitting the character limit. And like supposedly, like I've read I read some posts, but this could be outdated because I read this, I want to say like six or seven months ago. But it said that the best posts are usually around 400 words, which is like, again, like kind of edging in on that the character limit. But like it's still like it's still a pretty hefty read. I would say on average, it takes about three or four minutes for a person to read it. [Michael Houck]: So, OK, so these would be within our long form category. So I'm thinking of this compared to how we're pricing to clients. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I mean, we would do we would probably want to do three per week. At that $2,000 level for it to make sense on our side. Otherwise, there’s, well, it’s just basically passing off the client to you. [Morgan Young]: Yeah, I get it. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I mean, one wants to explore something if there’s something new that makes sense, but I’m not sure if there’s an effort right now. [Morgan Young]: Yeah, and that’s totally fine. And that’s what this call is for, right? I think right now, I think I, I think I probably have enough on my plate right now just because I like, I, I had this, I talked to grace like a couple of weeks ago and I had an influx of inbounds this week. And so that’s probably why my brain is kind of in a different place right now. Um, because now I’m like, Oh crap, how am I going to handle all this work? Um, so I think that’s just kind of where my head’s at right now. [Michael Houck]: Cool. We’re here. Um, obviously think your stuff is great. Took a look at it earlier. So, um, yeah, I think we’d love to work together if there’s opportunities to, But for what it’s worth, sometimes we do get bigger clients who come in and they want like, you know, full packages across different people and different surfaces. And maybe there’s an opportunity to work together for LinkedIn for some part of those at some point. But let’s just stay in touch. [Morgan Young]: Yeah, absolutely. And I know you’re super busy, so I’m really appreciative of your time. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, no problem at all. Appreciative of yours, too. And we’ll try to find something that works. But good to meet. [Morgan Young]: Awesome. Thanks, Michael. Have a good rest of your week. [Michael Houck]: Thanks, Morgan. Bye. Bye.