- Duration: 23 min
- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01J590Q29SCT70CTSMJX4HPD8C (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01J590Q29SCT70CTSMJX4HPD8C)
Transcript
[Michael Houck]: Israel what’s up, man? [Michael Houck]: Hey Mike, how’s it going? [Israel Suero]: Hey, sorry, two minutes. I just got off another call. So, you know, it’s probably that two minutes. Don’t worry about it. [Michael Houck]: All good. Good to see you. Yeah, likewise. [Israel Suero]: Hey, finally to actually meet, man, after all these years. I know. [Michael Houck]: How have you been? What’s going on? I’ve been good, man. I’ve been good. [Israel Suero]: I’m going on vacation next week. Much needed vacation. So I’m looking forward to that. Where are you headed? Oh, I’m headed to Paris, south of France, Monaco, and Berlin. So I’m going to enjoy that. That is very fun. For sure. Thanks, man. Thanks. And then after that, we’re going to celebrate my grandma’s 90th birthday. And just it’s been a good summer. It’s been a good summer. The fund is going well. It’s going well. Right. We have some good investments. We have others lined up. Right now, we’re primarily focused on fundraising, which has its challenges. Right. But that’s part of the game. Of course. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: That’s good. [Michael Houck]: Good to hear, man. Yeah. Hope we hope we can get connected and get Get that pod set up. Uh, we’ve got some episodes with really cool people lined up. So we’d love to, we’d love to have you. [Israel Suero]: And let me be clear with people like, you know, some meat, he’s very cordial individuals, some meat and Gavin, you got a triple message, Dom quadruple message, Dom. Um, more so for me, like, I mean, I’m talking to some meat right now, texting, for example, right. You got a, you know, sometimes you just have to, cause they have how many people are trying to get their attention, right. That’s really what it is. A hundred percent. [Michael Houck]: Um, we’ll keep following up, but yeah, man, I think. Was glad to hear you reply about the content writing. Let me know sort of what you’re thinking there, and I can give you some context on what we actually do, how it works, and how it might fit in. Yeah, absolutely. [Israel Suero]: So with me, I mean, I’m not a, I like social media. I have an Instagram, right? It’s my own space for, outside of my career, I use IG. I’m not an influencer or anything, but I enjoy it. You know what I mean? I’m not a TikTok guy. I’m not an ex-guy. I’m an IG guy and LinkedIn guy, right? Got it. You know, I start off the year with like a post a month, one post a month. Right. And that’s okay. I never had any LinkedIn aspirations, but now that I really, you know, would this be one thing I’ve learned about building this VC fund and just doing other, um, parallel activities, right. Business activities is very entrepreneurial. Right. And you really need to flex that muscle and building a brand is important. And so I feel. Creating content on LinkedIn. And for example, what I want to do, what I would like to do next is I would like to, like, I was on a couple, what, what changed for me was I was on a, I was a guest on a podcast a couple of months ago and I got really good feedback from him. Like, Oh, this is an Avenue that I could continue pursuing. And I really, I genuinely enjoyed it. Right. Right. Oh, I’m like, all right, this could turn into speaking engagement opportunities. But also I want to continue I want to take consulting and advisory more seriously right like for example on intro I’m not on intro, but I’ve considered it but Right before intro like I have done consulting I have a rate and all that but I go on and off with it right but now as I’m building more credibility in the VC space and amongst other things I feel like I’m I could charge I can actually charge me on a platform like intro sure and and actually have that have a substantial revenue stream from that. So with that in mind, you know, the next step would be having this conversation with you. Got it. [Michael Houck]: It makes a lot of sense because yeah, we’re driving more attention to your social account, which is like your front page. Then you could link people out to make them aware of the fund, get them to book through intro right from the reference page. Basically that makes a ton of sense. That’s like a very clear, easy to digest funnel, which is the best type of people to work with. [Israel Suero]: Yeah, for sure. So yeah, on our side, it’s pretty simple. [Michael Houck]: Basically, it’s myself, Blake Imal is my partner in the agency. I’m sure you’ve seen him on LinkedIn and Twitter. He’s the first CMO at Copy AI when they were going super viral all the time. [Michael Houck]: And we have a small team of writers that we’ve worked with in various capacities over the years, highly trusted, highly qualified folks. We match one of them with a client. But nothing gets sent to you unless we both review it. Blake and I both review it and make edits to it. We’re still a small agency, so we can still do that. But yeah, so we do one kickoff call. That’s it. We never put any other meetings on your calendar unless you want us to. We have a 30-minute call. We basically walk through, you know, what’s the voice that you’re trying to emulate? Who are some accounts of people whose content we like that we can take inspiration from who’s the audience we’re speaking to, to really learn like, okay, what do they care about, all that kind of stuff. And then we get set up in a Slack channel. And every Monday, we would send you topics and questions about those topics. And our only ask of you would be for you to reply with voice notes, just like rambling as well. [Israel Suero]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: So if you wanted us to do like additional, like call style content interviews, we’re happy to do that as well. But just with the clients that we tend to work with who are, you know, founders, builders, operators, people like that, the voice notes tend to be sufficient and work better with their schedule. That’s our primary offer. Um, And yeah, we want all that emotion, all that intonation. It really helps us capture the voice and make the content something uniquely that you could write. [Michael Houck]: And then that’s it. If we get those two from you by the middle of the week, then by the end of the week, we have a batch of content for you. And we work to build up a buffer over the first month or so so that we’re not always scrambling from week to week as well. Got it, got it. [Israel Suero]: So I’m sure you know Alex Lieberman, right? Of course. Yes. This sounds, you know, he started an agency as well. What’s the name of his agency? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, yeah. [Israel Suero]: StoryArb, right? Is this similar to StoryArb? [Michael Houck]: StoryArb is more like overall content marketing, like DesignJoy style. Like, you just give them a request, they get it back to you on that single request within 48 hours. And you don’t always get matched up with the same writer. What we do is we pair you with somebody who’s going to learn your voice over time. And give you content in weekly batches basically got it. Okay. One question. How about about this? [Israel Suero]: Is there’s a sense of and again? I’m very new to this concept so you can correct me provide me feedback Sure a sense of guilt right because I like to write I enjoy writing I tend to be verbose sometimes but I enjoy writing whether it’s a Whether it’s an email that I’m trying to convey an important matter, right? Um, as a hobby, when I journal, I go on and off sometimes, right? Like, so I want to be clear. I do like writing. I enjoy writing. I just, I have a lot of things that I do. We all do in life. Of course. Writing for some, for. For better or worse, it’s not on my top 10 things that I do on a weekly basis. It just isn’t, right? I do other things, whether it’s fitness, whether it’s training for a marathon, whether it’s traveling, whether it’s listening to podcasts, right? Whether it’s watching sports, all that, movies, shows, writing is just something that I’ll do it and then I enjoy doing it and then I’ll do it in three weeks again. And that’s all right. That’s my problem. I’ll take that flaw, right? Um, but then there’s a sense of guilt as I’m like, that’s not really me writing. Um, there’s a lack of authenticity there. So what advice can you provide me for me to break that barrier? Yeah. [Michael Houck]: What I would say is that we have some clients who, who, who feel similarly and who, uh, mentioned that early on, basically what I’d recommend is that when we deliver something to you, especially early on in the first couple of months, as we’re like learning the voice and getting everything, um, totally dialed in. During that point, you can spend the same amount of time you’d spend writing every three weeks, but just on editing and tweaking the wording to make it really feel like your voice. In that way, we’re basically providing like almost the template or the inspiration, and you’re kind of tweaking it at the end to make it feel exactly like something that you put together. And as long as the voice notes are quality, which is the input into the content, and then that last level from you just like tweaking it a little bit, It basically is what you would write, just we kind of help get the ship started. I get it. Good, good. [Israel Suero]: Thanks for that. So for example, like, do you use this service yourself, Mike, or do you, or do you write, you’re like, how does, how do you go about this? [Michael Houck]: I mean, writing is what I do for work, right? For the newsletter. So personally, I write all my own stuff. I always do social media, newsletter, everything. But if I wasn’t, there’s three or four people on our team who I’d be like, I’m going to pay you to do it. If I have, You know, if megaphone takes off and becomes a billion dollar company, I’m going to have one of our guys write my stuff. There you go. No, I get it. [Israel Suero]: Yeah, exactly. That’s your value prop. So I knew someone like you would write. Yeah, for sure. That’s your, that’s your value proposition. Um, okay. And how many posts, how many posts a week? How does it, how does that work? Kind of flexible based on what you’re, what you’d want. [Michael Houck]: Um, we have two tiers, so there’s like a light tier and a full tier. The light tier is either too long form a week. These are like really long, you know, maybe up to 500 pieces, or one long form and a few short forms. So that would be like, I think like three, four short form a week. And those would be like ones you could schedule one a day, basically. Then, if you want to go full, that would be three long form, or a mix of long form and short form, where we could potentially get up to So you have two short form per day if you really wanted to. Mm-hmm. [Israel Suero]: I like the whole one long form and then other satellite short forms. I like I like that one. [Michael Houck]: Cool Okay, depending on how many short form you’d want to do then we would either be on the light tier or the full tier if it’s like if you want like, you know, let’s say three to four short form a week and then the one long form that would be the light tier if you’re like, hey, maybe I want like seven to ten and One long form that would be the full tier Got it. [Israel Suero]: And from your clients, what is the ROI that they’re trying to get out of this? Is it, for example, speaking engagement? Is it brand building? Is it on intro consulting? What’s, what’s, what’s their end game? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, there’s really two types of clients that we see. One is sort of the personal brand building thought leadership influence, translating that into revenue for their, um, for their like creator business, something like intro or to build their brand through something like speaking engagements. The other side is, Startup founders who want to build a founder brand to advertise their product. Yeah, got it. [Israel Suero]: No for sure Bandwidth it sounds like your megaphone is growing. It sounds like you know, you guys have a huge influx of clients coming in, right? [Israel Suero]: How’s the bandwidth? How are you guys dealing with this? [Israel Suero]: It sounds like it’s a lot. [Michael Houck]: No bandwidth is good, man I mean megaphone I have a small engineering team who runs that on a week-to-week basis I’m in the weeds sort of doing the product roadmap and all that and doing demos, but they’re handling They handle the actual development of the product and then on the ghost ready megaphone studios I’m thankful to have a partner like Blake who’s able to help me out And you know share the load basically, so I’m managing our team. I’m doing growth. I’m doing sales. I’m doing account management I’ll be super in the weeds with you Especially because we already have a relationship But Blake will also be involved that helps me share that look nice nice. [Israel Suero]: I like to hear that um What’s his name Blake? I want to look him up Yeah, I’ll share his Twitter with you here, one second. [Israel Suero]: For sure, and then I’ll get his LinkedIn. [Israel Suero]: Yeah, definitely. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, he’s here. I’ll drop it in the chat here. Oh, thanks for that. [Israel Suero]: All right. Because I’ve heard the name, for sure. But I want to put, like, face to a name. He’s really great. [Michael Houck]: He’s also just, like, a good dude, like someone who, like, you want to build something with, you know? [Israel Suero]: Definitely. Thanks for that. Pricing structure, how does it work? [Michael Houck]: So the light package is $19.95 month. The full is $29.95 a month. If you ever wanted to layer a newsletter on top of that too, we could add that in as well. Depending on whether that’s weekly or bi-weekly, that would be either $34.95 because it's a little bit more robust. $19.95 like $19.95. You're not the first person. Maybe I should start changing how I say it. [Israel Suero]: No, no, no. What's your... Yeah. $1,995. [Israel Suero]: Yeah. [Israel Suero]: Which one is it? [Michael Houck]: Yeah. I was like, no, no way. [Israel Suero]: All right. Okay. I’m not the only one who asked that. Right? No, not the only one. [Michael Houck]: Not the only one. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Got it. God. Okay. [Israel Suero]: Okay. Um, I get it. I get it. Right. A month. I like that. Okay. I understand. Um, so then do you have, I’m sure you do like, let’s say spending that amount of money. Right. What is the return that your clients get in terms of they’re trying to monetize this content? Yeah, I mean, it depends what their goals are, right? [Michael Houck]: Again, some people just want to grow the user base for their product. Other people want to grow the revenue for their coaching business. We have a client on LinkedIn. I won’t say their name, of course, but on LinkedIn, who’s a fairly well known founder, coach and CEO coach. And they they use it to funnel people to their coaching practice, which is them. And they have a small team now that they’ve been able to build. Underneath them working on that. So, um, you know, our goal is whatever your goal is. If you say, Hey, we want to drive people to my Lincoln bio and get people to sign up for a newsletter. If we want to get them to book consulting calls with me or enter calls with me, we direct all the content that way. We include the CTA in the content for you. Uh, so make it as optimized as possible. Perfect. I like that. [Israel Suero]: No, no, for sure. I like that. Um, definitely, definitely. And yeah. And in terms of the content, right? Like, I don’t want to say, you know, do you guarantee virality? Do guarantee that work? How does we make no guarantees? [Michael Houck]: The algorithm is the king at the end of the day. But what you’re relying on is basically the fact that we live and breathe the algorithm. We know sort of what is working right now, what formats are doing well right now, how to extract the right stories from you that people will be interested in. That’s the expertise that we’re bringing to the table, as well as also taking the actual writing work off your plate. So we don’t make any guarantees. One thing I will say that’s different than any other agency that we have is Megaphone. So you get a free subscription to Megaphone as part of this, too. You still need to spend to have the creators engage with your post. We can’t cover that, but you don’t have to pay the subscription to use the platform itself. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Got it. [Israel Suero]: Ok, OK, got it. So listen, I’m I’m interested. Right. I’m in phase one. I’m certainly interested. Right. Because I have looked up even Megaphone as well. Yep. I’m interested. Right. I do have interest in this. Because, um, I know I’ll keep it transparent. Uh, I’m on a partner track for the VC fund. Right. Uh, yeah, thanks. I’m, um, I’m, I’ve been working on that this year, head down. Right. So now it’s then what, right. So I’ll be working on that. And then I now need to further build the brand. Right. So this is, this is a good conversation that I’m having here, but I’ve had this conversation, not in terms of services that I’m gonna, uh, that I’m going to use and utilize. More so I’m reaching out to folks in the creator space because I want to up my game After I officially once I sign the dotted line once I make partner, right? This is gonna be like phase two of my career for the next three five years, right? So this is something that is bound to happen eventually because I need to do this, right? Need different sources of income, right? So this is something that it is gonna happen in my in my for my career like it needs to right Yeah, I mean what we what I would say is that We’ll work on whatever timeline works for you. [Michael Houck]: Just keep me in the loop. Stay open communication wise, we’ll be here. The value in this is just, it’s hard for me to describe how hard it was to see Launch House go down the way it did, right? Like that was tough. When that happened, I had built this brand that I then was able to fall back on and I set up a new business in a month, right? And now here we are, almost two years later, and you know, I’m making more in revenue with this business than we did at Launch House. Yeah. What I could say is that like, whenever you’re ready to start, we’ll be here in my opinion, the sooner, the better, but you know, of course I’m going to say that. So we’ll work on your timeline, whatever you need. We’re here. No, no. Sounds good. [Israel Suero]: This is, um, what would the next conversation entail? Right. Once I get that, I mean, listen, you’ll see LinkedIn when I update my LinkedIn in terms of I may partner, whatever, you know, money’s coming, you know, money’s coming. Right. That’s not the objection is more so timeline. Right. What would the next conversation entail? I mean, let’s just, let’s just stay in touch. [Michael Houck]: Normally what happens after this call is that I’ll send you over an email with like, hey, here’s full context on the pricing, any additional questions that people tend to ask, I’d sort of proactively answer them FAQ style. And then you can complete sign up via Stripe link whenever you’re ready. And then we would do a 30 minute kickoff call with me, you, and the writer that we match you with who’d be leading the account for the long run. So that’s it. And then we just get started from there. And would the contract be month-to-month? It’s totally month-to-month. You can cancel any time. We do appreciate 30 days notice if you need to cancel, but I’m not going to be a stickler about it if there’s extenuating circumstances or something like that. And then if you wanted to do a long-term commitment, we could do a significant discount on the first month as well. Cool, cool. [Israel Suero]: And one last thing. I know that you’re on intro, right? How do you get you on it a lot? How does that work for you? I’m actually not on intro. [Michael Houck]: I’ve set up. Sort of through the newsletter. I just basically offer consulting through that and I have a stripe link for it. I keep it simple that way. I don’t need to cut them in. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Oh, there you go. [Israel Suero]: Okay. [Michael Houck]: And it’s fruitful for you, right? Yeah. I mean, it’s not my biggest revenue stream because it’s not the focus, right? Our focus is founder community, megaphone, ghostwriting, and really the three big things right now. So, um, not my focus, but you know, we do decent revenue through it. The limited amount of my time every week is spent on it. [Israel Suero]: Perfect. Okay. So good, man. Uh, we’re going to keep this conversation going. I like this. I like, I like where this is headed. I like this. Right. So, um, yeah, I think there’s something here, Mike. Cool, man. All right. [Michael Houck]: Just stay in touch. Um, I’ll reach back out in a bit. Uh, see where things are at. I’ll keep an eye on the LinkedIn update as well. Absolutely. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Absolutely. [Israel Suero]: And I will, I’m chatting with some me now. I want to, I want to get that going, man. I think it would be a great opportunity for Gavin to be on your podcast. I think so. I think there’s some, there’s potential for virality there. [Michael Houck]: Right. Yeah, I mean, we’ve got some great folks coming on. We’re launching it. We’re taking it live in like two to three weeks. And by then we will have the first like 12 episodes recorded. So we’re, we’re ready to go. We got some real heavy hitters coming on this fall. Sounds good. [Israel Suero]: All right, Mike. I’m excited. I’m excited for some partnerships we got brewing up. Cool, man. Good to chat. Good to catch up. [Michael Houck]: See you.