- Duration: 20 min
- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01J5E4FTR0F7RNA8VTE475N5WS (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01J5E4FTR0F7RNA8VTE475N5WS)
Transcript
[UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: What’s up? [Max Palmer]: How are you? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Good. Michael Houck: feeling better about the naming situation? Stress me out. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Max Palmer]: You feel good about it? Um, yeah, I mean, it’s, it’s a, it’s going to be a big change, um, for, for existing people who know the brand. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. Which I’ve never really gone through a change like that. So I don’t know what to expect. Michael Houck: Yeah, I mean, I think that what works in our favor in terms of like engagement from our audience is the fact that we have the emoji in the subject line of all the emails. We’ll probably keep that, um, at least for the short to medium term. Yeah, definitely. Um, but yeah, I mean, you know, we’ve done this, I’ve done this before. It’s, it’s really more for new people. The existing people, as long as they’re still opening the emails, it’s not that big of a deal. Yeah. I’m trying to decide about transitioning the sending domain over and when that should happen. Probably in tandem with this. I don’t know, but it’s mostly just like familiarity stuff. If we, uh, it’s still the same person talking to them over email, so it shouldn’t be that big of a deal for a brand like this. Yeah. Michael Houck: Um, okay. [Max Palmer]: I’m going to try to keep thinking of other names though, too. Yeah, please. Michael Houck: Um, I think I want to try to lock it in by like end of day Monday. So if you have anything that comes to you, let me know. Yeah. [Max Palmer]: I think taking time away from it might help. Yeah. Michael Houck: It’s like you go deep on it and you think about it and then you don’t think about it and then you’re like, ah, yeah. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Max Palmer]: Hopefully that happens. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. Michael Houck: What else is going on? [Max Palmer]: Um, so, I mean, we need to get this payment through. I actually, it might, it might be good for you to send an email and say, Hey, just checked like my bank statements and our Stripe account. Still not seeing it. Let me check the mercury again. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Cause that needs to come through. Yeah. Michael Houck: They made this whole big thing about paying a certain way and then they’re, they’re not going to pay. Like what the heck? Yeah. Uh, yeah, nothing. Nothing’s been through. Okay. [Max Palmer]: You should follow up with an email today. Okay. Let me do that. Michael Houck: I’ll just do that now on the same thread that you did. Yeah, definitely. [Max Palmer]: Okay Okay, cool just done cool Yeah, I don’t have any other deals that are like close to closing unfortunately like It’s just, it’s gone cold. The people that I thought were interested, like for example, eight sleep, that guy seemed pretty interested. Great company funding. Stop responding. I found out last week, you no longer have the company. He just left the company. So I reached out to a different person in the same thread saying, Hey, I was in touch with Trent. It’s all that he’s gone. Did three emails to them. They didn’t open a single one. Started a new, uh, with a different person at eight sleep, third person at eight sleep. And they, I think they read the email and now I’ve followed up. Uh, so it’s just like things like that, where it’s just like, yeah, it’s way down. Michael Houck: It’s just way normally. I mean, not normally, but like in the past, go back like nine months when we would check in about this, you’d have like three or four different things. You were, you were chuckling. [Max Palmer]: No, I know even even just two months ago. We I mean we sold 25k two months ago. Michael Houck: Yeah, it’s true Like it’s true. It’s totally died over the summer. Michael Houck: I Mean it’s a good time to be launching a paid product that we think our audience is really gonna like that’s for sure Yeah, it’s just frustrating like it’s not like I’ve really changed anything Well, okay, so as you were looking into stuff this week, what did you find about like I things we could try. [Max Palmer]: Yeah, so I put together this little list. [Max Palmer]: I just sent it to you in Slack. It’s in Notion. So just looking at other options, and this is where I went to Paved, and I was like, okay, sucks, but like, is there more we can get from paved? And that’s where I found like their new booker settings. We should chat about that too. But yeah, just looking at a bunch of different options like clay I’ve heard of, I met with this guy who I know twice who used to work for them. And There’s kind of a lot to dig into. It’d take a lot of work to understand the platform and how to use it best. [Max Palmer]: So that’s an option. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yes. Yeah. [Max Palmer]: Sponsor leads. We already tried. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: What is Tim Takeover? [Max Palmer]: So Tim Takeover is the one I sent you earlier this week. It was these guys who run a cold email agency on Twitter One of them created this and it’s like, you know, give us 15 of your Look-alike companies that have sponsored you and we’ll give you an entire list of look-alikes And so I did it and I got a huge list like a massive list, but it’s just so like unorganized and, um, and, and it’s just massive. There’s no contacts, which is the big thing. So we’d have to have dreams go in and, and, and I’m just not sure the quality of these leads. Cause these are the same guys that sent me that other list, which had the huge bounce rate. Oh yeah. Michael Houck: Um, it’s Ryan and Jacob. [Max Palmer]: Um, well we can validate the emails, right? [Max Palmer]: Yeah. [Max Palmer]: So we would need to have dreams, find contacts for these and validate them. Um, Okay. So, you know, that’s an option to get more leads. Paved is now giving us more leads. Um, you know, even something like who sponsors stuff, I can, I can reach out and see what their pricing is. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. Michael Houck: I mean, I think that the, the takeaway here is like, we can always buy lead lists. That’s true. Uh, the clay option seems like the most unique and promising one here to me. Um, The other ones like temp takeover, you seem bearish on it, paved, who knows, right? The beehive ones, we know that those are low, low revenue and maybe more brand dilutive than the revenue is worth. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. Michael Houck: We can always buy leadless and then start reaching out to folks ourselves. But yeah, the clay thing seems like the most sort of differentiated and interesting one here. What does that, What is that exactly like I know what clay is like, how would we use it? [Max Palmer]: So yeah, it’s basically like a data curator like they curate and enrich data from all the other different data sources in one and And then you can kind of organize it and filter it in an air table style thing and then you can enrich it and that’s where I Once you start enriching contacts with work emails, that’s where it starts to use up your credits and cost more. So I was on a call with a guy and like, you know, to get to get a few thousand work emails, it’s going to cost like in their plan, which was like 350 bucks a month. So it’s not cheap. No. Michael Houck: But you know, if we get one placement for 300 bucks a month, it’s worth it, you know. Michael Houck: Um, okay. Michael Houck: It sounds like, yeah, it sounds like we don’t have any like silver bullet idea though. It sounds like it’s just hard out there right now. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Max Palmer]: I don’t know what silver bullet idea. Um, And I’m still like, I just sent out another batch this week from just the typical, you know, dreams going through newsletter sponsors and adding them to air table. So like, we’re still doing that. I’m still doing individual outreach, like for the few high quality founder newsletters that are kind of competitors and, um, and doing direct outreach, like right away. Um, And yeah, I mean this page thing like seems like it’s crazy. I don’t understand it. Yeah. I think it’s broken on their end. Michael Houck: I think they don’t have some filter on their API that they should have. Um, and it sounds like it’s just a bug, so it’ll probably be fixed at some point. Yeah. [Max Palmer]: Okay. Yeah, so that’s kind of where I’m at. I’m just like I mean trust me. It’s frustrating for me, too No, I know. Michael Houck: It’s probably super frustrating for you. You’re just banging your head against the wall I’m sending 10 follow-up emails. It’s just not getting anything Yeah, I mean the It just seems like it’s you know, it’s in a tough spot. Do you think it’ll pick up in the fall? We’ve been sort of indication that it’ll do that. I don’t know I Because we’ve had bad months before, right? We’ve had times where people just, you know, budgets haven’t reset for next quarter yet. All that stuff. It’s happened. Yeah. [Max Palmer]: And we’ve also just exhausted a lot of the big newsletter sponsors. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. Michael Houck: It’s tough because we had to pull budget away from ads because we had to fund the engineers for megaphone. But by doing that, we reduce performance and people start having worse results and therefore renewal rates went down. Yeah. [Max Palmer]: It’s not just that though. I mean like there’s a few dozen big newsletter sponsors that are great fit for us. And like we’ve worked with a lot of them, most of them. Right. Michael Houck: But my point is that what they’re looking for are newsletters where the cost benefit equation like ROI. Michael Houck: And so if we’re not replenishing our feed, with more leads for them basically, right? Michael Houck: Um, then they, they don’t see that return on investment. They don’t renew. So I think it’s fine. I think as long as the launch of the case study library goes well and like conversion to payment is good, then I’m not that concerned about it because we’ll have the revenue coming in from another source. If we don’t have the revenue coming in from that and the launch goes poorly, then we got to come up with something. Um, so that’s a problem for end of the month, early next month. Yeah. Michael Houck: But, okay. Michael Houck: Good to know that there’s basically no silver bullet. We’re just plugging along and we’ve got to just kind of continue to do that for now. [Max Palmer]: Yeah. Um, okay. So, uh, Unless I’m missing something. No, I mean, what do we want to do? We just want to keep plugging along. We want to take action on any one of these or? Michael Houck: I mean, we are taking action on the paved one as things come in. Clay, I think let’s keep exploring that, seeing what that would be. Maybe we try Cyberleads. Who sponsors stuff sounds really expensive. And also they probably get spammed those contacts. So yeah, I think that’s a tough one. Maybe we go back to sponsor leads and sponsor gap and try them again. [Max Palmer]: Yes, sponsoring cap revamp their website a bit. Michael Houck: Yeah, I mean, we’re worth another shot. But I think for now, if you also want to see if Drake can help us get some for this, I don’t know what he would do. But just brainstorm and ask for him. But Yeah, I don’t know. It just seems like it’s tough. Michael Houck: Okay, I gotta hop, but we can make a decision here later today. Okay, sounds good. [Max Palmer]: See ya. Later.