- Duration: 13 min
- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01J5BFPDBM85M62QS18Y46862V (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01J5BFPDBM85M62QS18Y46862V)
Transcript
[Bay Abbott]: If we could just run that back real quick. [Michael Houck]: No you doing, man? [Michael Houck]: I’m well. How about you? [Michael Houck]: Good to meet. So as I was just saying, for context, my background, I’m a founder. Before this, I worked in big tech. I was a First a data scientist and then a product manager, helped build Uber Eats and then Airbnb Plus for a few years. During the pandemic, started a company called Launch House. We raised our Series A from Andreessen Horowitz and then went on to raise a venture fund from some great folks as well. Been investing in startups and a lot of time out of that. And left that company about a year and a half ago. And since then have been building up my personal brand and building up a community of founders. We have an audience of tens of thousands of people across various social platforms and a newsletter audience of 80,000 folks who get two weekly emails from us. A percentage of those people join our founder community and membership, where they get access to a bunch of resources, including this new project that we’re launching, which is a library of case studies where we’ve interviewed, I think at this point, about 60 venture-backed founders about their fundraising journeys and their experiences. Want to help people learn how to fundraise. It’s sort of this kind of behind the veil sort of topic for a lot of founders when they first started. And so we think the best way to teach people how to do that is just to talk to more people who’ve done it and get the things that work, get the things that don’t, put them on paper and let our members get access to them. So the reason I reached out to Bay was because we are looking for more folks to do case studies on. And for context, everything that we talk about would be behind a paywall. So it’s not like public, you’d just be talking to other founders looking to get advice and help. So you can be super candid, unlike you would in a maybe totally public setting. [Jared Phillips]: Yeah, sure. Makes sense. [Michael Houck]: So that was the impetus for reaching out. [Bay Abbott]: Gotcha. Cool. Yeah, that’s interesting. [Bay Abbott]: Yeah, that is interesting. Can I ask how you came across us? [Michael Houck]: I don’t know. We do a lot of outreach through various channels. I personally don’t manage that. It’s our team. So I don’t know. Got it. Got you guys. [Bay Abbott]: Okay, cool. Just curious. You know, always interested to hear. [Jared Phillips]: Whenever you do a PR release, like we did Bay, we end up in a bunch of aggregators where it’s like, Hey, these guys raise money. And I’m sure that’s part of their BD flow. [Jared Phillips]: Probably. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Probably. Yeah. [Jared Phillips]: Yeah, that’s interesting. So like, You know, 80,000 people is a big number. I mean, we have big numbers in our stuff too. [Jared Phillips]: You want to help people, education, perspective, like, hey, here’s how you do it. Like you mentioned behind a paywall. So there’s an element of altruism, but also an element of like paid for access service here. So like, what’s your end game? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, we just want to deliver value to our members, right? That’s it. We have a public newsletter that we send out to founders where I share tactics, breakdowns, tips. Sometimes we interview people for that as well. But kind of the first touch point that we do with founders is these 30 minute interviews where we, or I think now we do 60 minute interviews, but that’s just to get like extra time. Basically you usually only need 30 to 45 minutes. Yeah. We do these interviews and yeah, then we just add them to the, this new case study library. We’ve only kind of launched it to existing members. We haven’t launched it publicly yet, so we’re very excited to launch that publicly in just the next couple of weeks. Interesting. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Cool. [Jared Phillips]: Um, so to this point, like, obviously I have a little bit of the context here recently. You gave me what they told me, like, not that I’m not down to help out. Don’t get me wrong. But like, what’s in it for me? I’ll do respect. You know, I’ll do respect. Like what? Like, yeah, I’m happy to help out and help out the next guy. But like, I fucking figured it out. You know, I got, you know, I’m sure other people are going to figure it out too. Like, Why do I help you build something that you sell to people? Right? Like that, I guess is the part that is helping not, not computing in my brain. [Jared Phillips]: Yeah. I mean, it’s totally, you know what I mean? [Jared Phillips]: Like it’s just, I mean, it’s great. I love that. I love what you’re doing. It’s just kind of a interesting thing. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. I mean, we’re not trying to extract anything from you. We’re not trying to take up too much of your time. Uh, it’s, it’s totally altruistic on your side if you want to do it. Great. If not, no big deal. [Bay Abbott]: Do we get the exposure in any way? Right, like I guess, is there any conversion on our end that would come out of this or? [Michael Houck]: So you guys will link to what will link to anything you want us to in the actual case study will highlight any parts of the story that you think other founders might be interested in. Maybe there’s a thought leadership angle for you. Maybe there’s other things you want to want to mention and get in front of other founders. So yeah, up to you. [Jared Phillips]: I was coming to the point where I was like, okay, I can see doing that, but like, how did most people that agree to do this? Is it like beyond altruism? Not that I’m not willing to help out. Like there’s a ton of people, honestly, like that, that’s kind of how we ended up raising was through the kindness and generosity of others where it was like, Hey, let me help you introduce you. I know you, you built this brand. Like that’s kind of how that went. But there’s always a, uh, there’s always the with them, right? [Michael Houck]: Yeah. I mean, uh, honestly, the vast majority of folks that we’ve, um, done these with so far, they’ve just been like, yeah, link to my LinkedIn or link to my Twitter, link to our company, sign up page or what have you, depending on the type of company it is, obviously. And that’s all we need. It’s typical startup culture, give and take, give back, help the next generation of founders. There’s nothing more to it than that. [Bay Abbott]: It could be a good conversion for us, Jared, thinking about the demographic, right? Founders play golf. Possibly right you’re talking about more that crowd like there could be a conversion of audiences there Maybe yeah No, I agree. [Jared Phillips]: I mean we’re very different and like it generally is in the C-suite people that do what we do or want to try to do what we do In the realm of golf. So yeah, that makes sense. Where did you get your 80,000 people from [Michael Houck]: Mostly from building up my own personal brand while I was running my last company. And since then too, we’ve gotten a lot of those people through social media. We’ve gotten a lot of them by, again, getting a lot of founder applications to the last company I was running. And then more recently we do paid ads on social media as well, highly targeted towards startup founders. And we, you know, we keep the audience pretty tight. [Jared Phillips]: Sure. Sure. Okay. Interesting. Yeah. I think that’s a, you know, we couldn’t think about what that would look like on our side, but you know, happy to help out. [Bay Abbott]: Are there 80,000 behind the paywall? Or is that 80,000 in total? And then how many are behind the paywall? [Michael Houck]: No, it’s 80,000 total. [Bay Abbott]: That’s the public newsletter audience members of the community are in the mid hundreds Okay, so would we go to the now you said that Jared’s case study would be behind the paywall, right? So would that be for the 200 people or that’d be for the 80? [Michael Houck]: They’d be for the hundreds of the hundreds of people, not the full 80k. [Bay Abbott]: Okay. [Bay Abbott]: Have you ever done like an open edition type newsletter like that? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I mean, we’ve interviewed founders before for the newsletter. Again, the case study library is something that we’ve only made accessible to members. We haven’t even announced it to non already paying members yet. This is a brand new thing that we’re doing. You guys are among the first hundred founders that would be doing this with our plan is to do it for thousands and thousands and thousands. So, yeah, no, we haven’t taken a case study that we’ve done and put it public yet because we haven’t actually launched the case study library publicly yet. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Gotcha. [Bay Abbott]: Okay. So essentially this would be like an hour to do to hopefully get like maybe 200 people to view this thing. [Michael Houck]: I mean our, our goal is to, once we launch it, grow it significantly. We think this is going to be very appealing to the audience more so than broader audience. Yeah, exactly. We’re going to put paid ads behind this. We’re going to do a whole bunch. [Bay Abbott]: Okay. I think I, yeah, I’m understanding the scope now. [Jared Phillips]: Yeah, that makes sense. Mm hmm. Cool. Well, I think that unless you have other questions us, you know, we talked about what we’d want a call to action to be and, you know, talk about how this fits in. Again, time is unfortunately now a bit more valuable resource than I ever used to be in my life before I was a founder. But of course, you know, happy to help out where we can. So now unless there’s anything else takeaway that you’d like us to have, or you know, questions that we can answer on our side, I think that I got a good idea. [Michael Houck]: No, yeah, I mean, it’s it’s your guys’s call. If you have any other questions we can answer. That’s fine. If you end up wanting to do it, great. We’d love to do one with you. If not, no big deal. [Jared Phillips]: Yeah, for sure. No, it’s good. Excuse me. I appreciate you guys popping in. It sounds really interesting. Like I said, I do try to give back where I can in any way that I can. Yeah, I think this is interesting and we’ll be in touch. [Michael Houck]: Cool. Appreciate it, Jared. Appreciate it. Thanks, guys. Thanks, guys.