- Duration: 57 min
- Platform: zoom
- Attendees: Andrew Safranko, Dan Feshbach, Keevin O’Rourke, Michael Houck
- Source: Read.ai 01J5XQTGT1D6YB3X83B4NH0ATC (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01J5XQTGT1D6YB3X83B4NH0ATC)
Transcript
[Michael Houck]: Thanks for that. [Keevin O’Rourke]: Yeah, no worries. [Keevin O’Rourke]: Hey, Dan, are you there? [Dan Feshbach]: I’m good. Yeah. Oh, wait, I don’t know. I’m not on video. Sorry. Everybody starts different ways. I always have video on from the beginning. How are you doing, Dan? [Michael Houck]: Good to meet you. [Dan Feshbach]: Yeah, same. I’m great to meet you guys. I’m so curious. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, we’re excited to be working together and telling the story. Think there’s a lot to talk about. So it’s always the kind of clients you’d like to work with are the ones who have a lot to talk about. [Dan Feshbach]: Oh, you got to be careful about that. Keevin will restrain me. [Michael Houck]: No, it’s good. We want you to talk today. This is the point of the meeting, please. [Dan Feshbach]: Yeah. Tell me about your firm first. I’m trying to understand a little bit more about the scope and everything. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, sure. So I can give some background on me and sort of what we do, and then we can go around and do some quick intros. So yeah, so let’s see, I worked in big tech, Uber and Airbnb was part of the early team building Uber Eats, and then Airbnb Plus, product manager for that. Got laid off during COVID, started a company that ended up becoming Ventureback called Launch House. We raised about 15 million, including a 10 million Series A from Andreessen Horowitz. And we also raised a venture fund as well, invested in a ton of startups. Um, and then about a year and a half ago, I left that company and started building my personal brand. Um, that led to creating a software platform called megaphone where people can get distribution from big creators and their niche on their social media content. And that led to a lot of people asking about, uh, content creation for them as well. Cause they’re like, Oh, you have the distribution side. I’d love help on the content side too. [Michael Houck]: So we started doing that. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: What’s that? [Michael Houck]: Very nice. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, it’s been a fun journey. We did that for, we’ve been doing this for a couple months now. Uh, I’d say since like April, um, and we’ve a good team of writers, folks have, uh, you know, worked within various capacities, uh, or have been referred to me. Um, and, um, yeah, we’re growing fast. Um, super, super involved in, in the weeds, you know, I built up a following myself across social about a hundred thousand across Twitter and LinkedIn, um, and an 80,000 person, uh, founder focused newsletter. [Dan Feshbach]: Amazing. That’s cool. I actually have a lot of curiosity about that. So that’s great to hear. [Michael Houck]: We will have lots of time to talk about that for sure. But yeah, our firm is still small, but we move fast, and we’re growing fast. We have folks who do LinkedIn, folks who do X, folks who do newsletters, folks who do a combination of those. We have folks on the team who can help out with any and all of those. So yeah, that’s where we’re at. [Dan Feshbach]: Awesome. Well, and then, Andrew, tell me. Well, I guess I got a bit about obviously about you, Michael, but not. So tell me about how does Andrew fit in? Are you a writer? I am. [Michael Houck]: Andrew’s been working with us for a bit. He’s great. And he’ll be he’ll be leading the account. So we like to do when we engage with folks is, you know, unlike some other firms that when you have a content piece of content that we create for you, it just gets thrown into some pile and some writer goes and picks it up. What we actually like to do is match a writer with you so that they can learn your voice over time and know the audience. So that’s Andrew in this case. [Andrew Safranko]: So yeah, just to pick up from there, so I, and I’ll give you a bit of my background in a minute, but just real quick, yeah, there’s an interesting matchmaking that happens at Megaphone, and I’m noticing it more and more each time I’m introduced to someone new. So as I went through your profile, Dan, it was like, ah, okay, there’s that, there’s that, there’s that. So as an example, I worked in tech for like 16 years, but on the side I’ve always been a writer and so writing has now become a full-time thing for me. And so this notion of creating innovation hubs, which is what multiple looks like, partly it does. It’s something I heavily did when I was at IBM for five years. And then unbeknownst to Michael, I used to teach some lessons to kids with autism. So I have a very Yeah, I have an affinity for that. It was a very unique experience through my high school and university years. So I have an interesting perspective, and I really appreciate the work you’re doing, because I think it’s very valuable, as you guys are obviously well aware. So anyway, yeah, quick on me. But before we start, what we normally do is we have a full doc that we’ll take you through to kind of outline what we’re looking for, how to help shape what you’re looking for as well, and then just kind of get thoughts on paper in order to kind of structure how our connection and how our relationship will work. But before we do that, was there anything else potentially up front you were curious about before I dive into it, just because it’s a little bit more structured, a little bit more formal, but if there was anything else outside the norm you’re thinking of [Dan Feshbach]: All right. Now, I mean, I filled out the form a little on the late side, but I got it in before the meeting. [Michael Houck]: We got the vacation came through. Um, so yeah, I think we’ll, we’ll dive more into that. Um, after the call, we’ll follow up with any, any questions that come up as a result of that. But I think that’s just good guidance for us about the style of content that will be, will be created, but What we’re going to do on this call is Andrew will take you guys through, as he said, our deeper dive into the audience, how we want to speak to them and engage with them, and some other related questions. So he’ll take notes during this call, and we’ll also obviously have the recording of it, too, to refer back to later. And then I’ll jump in again at the end to go over next steps. [Michael Houck]: Great. [Andrew Safranko]: Cool. So, Keevin, if you’re able to provide me with permission to share. Yep, you’re good. Cool. Thank you. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. [Andrew Safranko]: So, We work pretty much predominantly in a Notion database, and it helps us kind of keep our thoughts aligned. For the purpose of this, you’ll see that it’s all in Notion. By all means, if Notion is not your cup of tea, we work also in Slack, email’s fine. You’ll see as we speak. Yeah, whatever makes sense. So real quick about me, as I mentioned, I’m actually a film major. So I graduated from university studying film, found myself at IBM, was in tech for many, many years, but always wrote on the side. I’ve written for CEOs, I write newsletters, vast amount of different things. And as I mentioned, I ran an innovation hub. So it was basically a startup office that acted as our Big shiny object for IBM that we had a bunch of startups come through as well as corporate clients. And then yeah, as I mentioned, I basically funded my university education through teaching swim lessons and had quite a few autistic kids who were actually quite a pleasure, very different experience, but quite a pleasure to teach. I will always remember that. So yeah, quite nice to speak with you today about that. So in terms of the outcomes and objectives of this meeting, you’ll see here, so ideally what we’re looking for are your primary and secondary goals in and around, you know, why you want to create content, where you want to create it, who is it for, etc. We’ll kind of take you through what that looks like, Obviously from there, it’s about identifying the audience and sort of, you know, who are you trying to attract to your contents? What are you trying to say and why should they care? We’ll look at different pillars. So, you know, keeping in mind that you don’t want to be too all over the board when it comes to writing. You want to try to stay structured. What might those pillars look like, We’ll look at a posting schedule, so understanding again, you know, how often, how many posts, etc. You’re looking to do, a month, a week, etc. And then, as Michael mentioned at the beginning of the call, you know, we’ll go through sort of our next steps and processes around how we operate, and you’ll kind of get a good perspective there. So in terms of know the initial bit so what I’ll do is I’ll just take notes as we’re going and so it’ll allow you to kind of see your thoughts on paper officially and then this will also be sort of our working document to start and then you’ll see later on like we have an actual database set up for yourself so that you’ll be able to input ideas yourself Or you can be like, hey, here’s some ideas, and I would throw them in. The goal is I will be your scribe. I will also be the one that keeps everything organized for you. So however messy or clean you like to be in terms of throwing ideas out to the world, I will happily grab and scoop and ensure they stay in a structured manner. So with that said, trying to understand from your perspective what the number one reason is you’re trying to create content for, what are you What was the inspiration around wanting to start? Or I guess, building on what you’ve already done. Like, what was it that you’re looking to achieve, you would say? Or, you know, what is it that attracted you to do this? [Keevin O’Rourke]: Evan, do you want to answer that? [Keevin O’Rourke]: Happy to. So, and this might be a unique answer because I’m answering, you know, kind of for Dan in some ways, but, I personally have seen the power of content marketing, especially brand building. That’s how I’m making all of my purchases anymore really. And I think when it comes to the nonprofit space specifically, it’s so much about storytelling and getting people. Really kind of wrapped up in the narrative, but also sharing the impact and all those things. So I give that context to say that Dan has such a wealth of experience, knowledge, stories, truly, and you’ve done so much in your career, and this is just one piece of it, that if we could tell these stories what I think will happen is we will get the right partners to want to join forces with us. And that could be funding partners. That could be ecosystem partners. We’ll also get the right startups who want to ultimately work with us and go through our accelerator because it’s clear we’ve got thought leadership and like Dan’s the man that’s the, he’s the one that everybody wants to work with and pick his brain and all the things. Um, And so, I don’t know, there’s just so much opportunity for all of these pieces to fall into place with the right content marketing strategy. [Andrew Safranko]: Got it. Makes sense. So it’s about, you know, finding the right people for your writing. It makes sense. Okay. [Dan Feshbach]: Let me add in to that or elaborate a little bit. I think we have an audience of It’s somewhat like on the funding of the organization front. There’s a lot of people we’ve talked to, many that we’ve pitched or tried to engage. [Dan Feshbach]: And we really want to have a consistent kind of communication with them and expand that group. And part of the challenge, I think, that we’ve had is, in general, and we want to explore this challenge. We want to explore these theories, these hypotheses about them. [Dan Feshbach]: I’m known as a visionary. I’m known as very creative. I’m also known as a you know, very like a non-linear, okay. I’m a classic non-linear founder. I can organize things under duress and I do. And I’ve been a CEO, you know, and I wasn’t the right guy really to be a CEO. I’ve replaced myself every time in my career that I’ve started things. So I’m very good at zero to one. And a lot of the people we talk to are much more risk averse than I am by big orders of magnitude. So there’s a need to have not only as you pointed out, a consistent message, but also it’s like reinforcing that we are, it’s a little bit like, you know, even with our current board, our current, like people that are close into us that we’re soliciting family, you know, small family office here, you know, a foundation there that, you know, we need to be speaking to them. And so of course, we want to touch founders, of course. And we really need to engage more investors as well, because we don’t have really that many people attend our events who can write checks. So there’s another audience there. A lot of them are available in people who Either follow me, or if you look at the companies that we have supported, call them anywhere from 50 to 250, depending on how you count it. Let’s just start with 50. If we know who follows them, invests in them, we can expand our rich reach. And they’re happy to be helpful. Most of them, I won’t say everyone, but most of them will be happy to be helpful. [Dan Feshbach]: I think that, so the goal here is to tap our existing audience and also to reinforce with that segment of our audience that is followers in two areas. They’re followers in putting money into us and followers in using their social capital on our behalf. [Dan Feshbach]: And then there’s a lot of people that I think are very curious that are extremely wealthy that I know. And that’s an audience that we want to be able to speak to either through, and it may be a newsletter, it may be updates, it may be things that are specially done for them. I’m not sure how to do that. OK. [Andrew Safranko]: Cool, thank you. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. [Michael Houck]: I think that gets into a couple of the later questions too. So you can just refer back to that, Andrew, when we get to those. [Andrew Safranko]: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I’m making mental notes as well. We have a few others, as you’ll see down here, like audience you want to serve you. [Andrew Safranko]: Oh, right. OK. I’m jumping ahead. So yeah. [Andrew Safranko]: No, that’s OK. I will happily brief through those ones afterwards because I’m making mental notes on those ones. So in terms of then, I guess, secondary goals, You know, I think you’ve touched upon a little bit of that, I think both yourself and Keevin. What would you say might be kind of top two for you? Is it around gaining more followers, given those, as you mentioned, specific audience groupings that are very important to you guys? Is it impressions, getting the word out and sort of having that expand and the ripple effect from there? What would you say would be important to you around kind of the quantitative, there could be actually qualitative as well, but what would be a secondary goal you think would be from this? [Dan Feshbach]: Even that’s really in your court. [Keevin O’Rourke]: Yeah, I think that Followers are cool and like having big impressions is great, but Dan hit the nail on the head and maybe this is the primary goal, but I’m more concerned on who is consuming the content than how many people. So if we can get all of the investors or kind of one degree away from our immediate network, those people who have an interest in the space and they’re the ones who are really engaging and consuming it, I think that’s incredible. Having a thought leadership strategy, I do also think will lead to some really interesting PR opportunities, I know you’ve got that in there too, that could just keep that flywheel turning with the idea of, hey, how do we get our name out there in bigger, more publicized ways? [Dan Feshbach]: One area right now, we have an opportunity, we’re working on a co-authored piece with the CEO of Autism Speaks, And we could really use help on that. So that would be a separate meeting. But the previous group we worked with is called Whiteboard Advisors. I doubt, but maybe you’ve heard of them. But they focus on ed tech a lot. And we got a piece in the Barron’s online thing. [Dan Feshbach]: I don’t know if it was an opinion or whatever, but that was, I got just huge following off of that. You know, a lot of people were, you know, when I say following, many people responded, whereas if we do an event right now, you know, it’s like we don’t get, and we want more followings for our event, but that, our events, but that’s maybe, maybe even further secondary to, to what Keevin said. I really agree with you, Keevin. [Andrew Safranko]: Mm hmm. Okay. So I heard, for me, I heard, you know, strategic PR opportunities are actually really important as well. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Dan Feshbach]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: And just to be clear and set expectations, like that’s outside of kind of the core thing that we do, we focus on the content creation, but just from, you know, in my network, I can talk to folks and see what we can do there as well, specifically for you guys having to do that. [Dan Feshbach]: Great. Great. Right. Well, the content can, you know, can lead, you know, if we get a thought leadership piece and I don’t know, do you do that? [Andrew Safranko]: Well, the content itself would definitely have a flavor of thought leadership, and we can absolutely fine tune it to be able to attract that, as Michael just mentioned, that next layer, if you will. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: Dan, if there are also specific relationships you have with folks where you’re like, oh, we want to do a piece on this site or something like that, and we want to write it in the same style, from the same perspective that Andrew is doing for you on social, we can absolutely handle any. [Dan Feshbach]: Okay, so this is heavily social. So that’s, that helps me, even though I didn’t, you know, I just kind of imagined things. So I think, increasing my followers, you know, would be another aspect of this. Maybe it’s secondary. I don’t know how we use social media exactly with our audience, but starting with our deck, I think that was one of the areas I believe you wanted to weave into our presentation about the company. [Dan Feshbach]: Do you want to speak to that, or is that a given? [Keevin O’Rourke]: Um, which so I’m working with another, uh, for context, guys, I’m working with a, uh, a fundraising coach for maybe lack of a better term, but she’s incredibly good at storytelling. Oh, okay. [Dan Feshbach]: I got it. Okay. Yeah. And I can use them. [Keevin O’Rourke]: No, no, all good. I can absolutely share that, um, with you both because I think that will, give context to the type of company that we’re trying to present as, which I imagine will influence how we’re framing Dan’s voice and how we’re presenting all of the stories, the content, the things that come out in our sessions later. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, Keevin, as one of the next steps at the end of this, I’m going to set up a shared Slack channel for us and our SCU will just be brain dump any and every link of relevant writing sample, storytelling information that we can comb through. [Keevin O’Rourke]: Yeah. Any, any documentation will happily. [Dan Feshbach]: Yeah, yeah. Okay. And then are we asking you to focus on the right things? Because for example, with social media, obviously, we maybe we should be really thinking about our following. But also, I mean, there are we go back to audiences, but, you know, expanding our generic audience so that that let’s pretend that we expanded our audience to 100,000 people or more. Within that, there will be people we want to talk to and so on and so forth. So would you say we get better results by doing something large with specified target groups, because then it increases the opportunity that someone will hear about us and reach out as well. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. Building that top of funnel, having the content exposed, having your face and your profile and your writing exposed to new folks there. The algorithm on LinkedIn, for example, will prioritize showing that to the people who are in the space and who they think would be interested in. [Dan Feshbach]: Ok. All right. That helps. Thank you. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: Just for just for context, we also can do and we do for many of our clients like newsletters and other writing pieces as well. So while we’re not limited to social, that was, I think, the context that that keeping it originally. [Dan Feshbach]: I see. OK. Now, I’m just kind of getting up to speed with how you fit into Keevin’s, you know. [Dan Feshbach]: Kind of agenda, I guess. [Andrew Safranko]: and a year and a Okay, so the last piece, real quick, what would you say, I think you’ve kind of touched upon this as well, you know, increasing followership, as an example, sounds like it’d be a great measurement of success. But what would you say maybe is the top two for you in terms of, you know, getting a structured content strategy out the door? What would you like to see from that? What’s an output, a successful measure, et cetera, that you think if you look six months from now and you said, we’ve been doing this on a weekly basis, everything’s consistent, we’re loving it, we’re loving it because of X, what would you say that X might be? [Keevin O’Rourke]: I think it’s gonna be how many real conversations come from this content. So I hear that the followers are great and all those things. But if none of those turn into either like meetings where we’re talking about potential funding or partnerships or startups who want to join the accelerator, then, you know, then it’ll be hard to really say this had a huge ROI. [Andrew Safranko]: Got it. Perfect. Sounds good. Okay, cool. We will move on. So these pieces, we’ve done a lot of speaking to us. This one should be a little bit quicker for us, which is great. But by all means, I’d love to take more. So in terms of audience, you’ve already touched upon this. So allow me to sort of mentally receive or give you back a bit of what I’ve heard. But in terms of your audience, you’ve got your funding partners. You’ve got the high net worth individual audience close to the network. You’ve got the ecosystem. Who else am I missing? [Keevin O’Rourke]: How important, Dan, would you, and I don’t know if you mentioned this, Andrew, would you say the startups are in this? [Andrew Safranko]: So startups live in ecosystems as well, right? And ones that do good work and are trending and are accelerating at a positive rate tend to get a lot of attention and a lot of shine. When they speak, a lot of people tend to listen. And so there’s definitely a pretty strong network effect that happens with startups, because what ends up happening is you have the startups that become really successful, and then you have the ones that aren’t so successful that follow the ones that become successful, because they want to say, okay, look, how did you get there? How do I make myself get in that position as well? And then as well, as I said, they all live in a They all often tend to live in a space that is very well connected. Naturally, as a startup, you’re trying to build as many connections as you can, because that hopefully will lead you to customers, building revenue, et cetera. So I’d say they’re pretty important, to be honest. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Keevin O’Rourke]: Well, so yeah, I guess in that vein, and I don’t know how the content strategy plays with all of these, but I think net worth individuals are great. Specifically ones who have like an autism connection, you know, if we can get that granular, that would be amazing. Funding partners, which could look like VCs, foundations, or grant makers. I think that could be a huge audience seeing the impact that we’re having. [Keevin O’Rourke]: And then really, yeah, the Well, also give one more corporations. So often big corporates have D and I groups or impact groups or philanthropic groups. Those are the types of organizations that want to be associated with the most credible nonprofits or most credible impact social organizations. [Andrew Safranko]: Perfect. [Dan Feshbach]: And I don’t know if we would also Within that, the foundation world has advisors. They have advisors. They have a variety of gatekeepers. They have a variety of advocates. They have their own meetings around impact or around autism. So it’s a pretty big world when you think about it. And there are also major NGOs in autism. [Dan Feshbach]: there’s something called the Frist Center, there’s Autism Speaks, there’s Autism Science Foundation, there’s Autism Society of America, and the latter has chapters. And then you have many centers of power that are large, like there’s something called Ascendigo. Almost every region has a big NGO, and also might have a university program that will likely be funded by a very wealthy set of families. So they can be hard to break into. But all it does is takes someone to say, hey, check this out. And that’s where, and obviously the same thing is true in venture. [Dan Feshbach]: And corporations, in addition to having DE&I, many, many of them have what are called employee resource groups. And those are often sponsored by an executive. [Dan Feshbach]: And the ones that are either neurodiversity or disability focused or both are usually sponsored by someone who has a family member in the space. So to the extent that we can target those and there are lots of people on the web that are just massively involved in employment, workplace, and they’re easily discoverable and some of the organizations or many are on our lists and stuff. So I don’t know how you would take our lists and make sense of them for social media. But a lot of the people do go on social media and you’re basically reinforcing that we are a safe place to put money into. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Right. [Michael Houck]: We had a ton of this at Uber, I remember, especially in like the second half of the couple of years I was there, they became really, really popular and people would even spread it and talked a lot online about it, too. So it makes sense. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Dan Feshbach]: So that’s that’s a whole world. And it kind of goes from there because when you think of, so the funding world, you know, small family foundations, even bigger ones that have special grants or whatever. So, yeah. [Andrew Safranko]: Okay. I’m going to go on a limb and say the target audience of your business currently is the target audience you want to target with your content. Is that fair to say? I could just copy and paste this over. We’ve got this long list here. [Keevin O’Rourke]: Yeah, I mean, if we can be that broad in terms of all the different groups within there, I mean, I think those are all really high potential, you know, candidates for getting our message. [Andrew Safranko]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: So I guess the motivation, too, of like, we’re going to take things that we think will appeal to different segments of this and double down on what works, basically. [Andrew Safranko]: Yeah, I think what will end up happening, just kind of going ahead of my blocking for a second, is we’ll work with you. You guys will give us ideas and things you want to write about. We’ll also go and do the research and come up with some thoughts as well around that. And then I guess in terms of the audience, yeah, technically the broader at times can be what’s the word I’m looking for? Not detrimental, but just a little bit more challenging because then it’s like, who are you really trying to reach? But this allows us to at least get a starting point to then start narrow down, okay, what actually works, right? And then to Michael’s point, like double down then on that piece, once we know what works. [Dan Feshbach]: When you say that, if we can get you lists of corporations who have autism at work programs, or that can be scraped, There are sources for that as well. Would that be helpful? [Andrew Safranko]: Yeah, I think so. Because at some point you want to be able to understand who your persona is you’re writing for as well, right? Is it the CEO of that company? Is it someone who runs the DEI components of it? Yeah, so I think that’s fair. Feel free. [Andrew Safranko]: Cut. [Andrew Safranko]: We talked a little bit about content pillars as well. But if you were to say the three to five topics that matter most to you, what would you say they might be? So if you were to start to put content out, what are some core ideas that come to mind that you would love to make sure you get covered? [Keevin O’Rourke]: I’ll spitball a little bit here. And Dan, you feel free to be like, no, I don’t want to talk about that. One that I think is like lowing fruit is just our impact. I think that would do wonders for all of the groups that we have up there. So speaking about, you know, our graduates, their progress, all the amazing things that we’re doing and how we’re changing the landscape. [Keevin O’Rourke]: Another one that comes to mind is And I haven’t even heard most of these, but I have to believe and I’m almost certain that Dan, you probably got some really cool stories being a founder and building an autism tech company. And so that I think is going to do a really good job to build authenticity, but also showcase your knowledge of the space, especially since you’ve had a big exit there too. [Keevin O’Rourke]: So stories like that also feel like, I don’t know, really powerful. [Keevin O’Rourke]: And then the last one I’ve got is we’re doing a lot of work on collecting data within the ecosystem and building reports on basically like the different verticals within autism tech and what’s the cool, most interesting things happening there. I think some of that content, if spliced up correctly, could make for really great, uh, really thought leadership, um, thought leadership posts. [Dan Feshbach]: And even teases to, you know, possibly buy something, you know, there’ll be, you know, there’ll be something premium there, you know, like you get a summary of the report, but you don’t get the startup names or we don’t even know yet, but something that would entice them to further engage. Doesn’t have to be financial either. [Dan Feshbach]: Okay, people want to be in the report. And that could tie to a newsletter. Because we have so many startups that we can feature and support. [Andrew Safranko]: Right? Yeah, sounds like it’s a pretty big ecosystem. [Andrew Safranko]: Cool. And then I guess that actually is a good segue. So in terms of formatting or formats, what do you feel most comfortable with? And this isn’t what you want to do, but rather, you know, currently or in the past, what have you felt most comfortable with? Go with in terms of format of content when you put something out to the world, whether it be social media or a blog post or what have you. Stylistically, as you see there, like long form posts, thread memes, et cetera. What do you feel most comfortable represents you as you put the content out? [Andrew Safranko]: Even. [Keevin O’Rourke]: I think it’s going to have to be long form mostly or like punchy, you know, three to four sentences in a more short form post. [Keevin O’Rourke]: I don’t think memes will resonate. Maybe some screenshots if there’s like, you know, some wins or something like that. Again, just have that like a peek behind the curtain. But generally, I think what’s going to resonate is going to be more long form or informative short form. [Dan Feshbach]: What do you what do you all think of We have some amazing content in, like, we’re doing this up-and-coming event tomorrow at 530 Pacific, and it’s four families who have been involved in clinical trials, and their children got the real thing that relates to the gut biome. The parents’ stories are amazing. I’ve heard them, I’ve interviewed them, I have those interviews, but also sliced up video so that we can take those, the entrepreneur behind the company that’s building it. [Dan Feshbach]: And each of those profiles, I imagine would attract people that hadn’t even had any idea it existed. And this kind of goes on to a number of founders. They’re doing amazing work with short video clips that would lead to someplace like Instagram where we posted stuff. [Dan Feshbach]: I imagine stories would be great on Instagram and, you know, it’s not exactly our audience, but a crazy number of people go on there for like, I, you know, they’re on it frequently. [Keevin O’Rourke]: Well, this maybe is an interesting question too, because Dan, I know you’re thinking Instagram right now, And I haven’t checked this out, but correct me if I’m wrong, I think LinkedIn just started doing a video thing in the last [Dan Feshbach]: like a month. Oh yeah, yeah, no, I’m pretty sure they do. Yeah, I think for LinkedIn is a given if it’s there or a link to it, whatever, so we can capture a name. [Michael Houck]: There’s currently a pretty big opportunity with video on LinkedIn because not a lot of people are doing it yet and they’re also pushing it really hard. Because it’s a new feature and they want to drive use of the platform. So yeah, if there’s a world where we want to take some of the work that we do and instead of having we just like optimize as a written post and turn it into like a script for then you guys to go and do a video with, we’re totally happy to do that too. And we do see an opportunity there. We’re just, you know, we’re not a video editing shop ourselves. [Dan Feshbach]: So we could give you a short, you know, one to four minute video, you could write a post around it. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. Or, and, or we could help script the video or script it. [Dan Feshbach]: Yeah, for sure. And the scripting is good. Yeah. We, we could, we could read, you know, essentially do a redo and get, get some, you know, somebody to interview them and talk to their experience and really polish it for sure. [Michael Houck]: Okay. [Andrew Safranko]: I’ll make a note of that, actually, just to make sure we revisit it. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Cool. [Dan Feshbach]: One other thing, when you mentioned topics, I’m interested in figuring out what topics resonate with our audience. But there’s a whole, you know, if you, you can break up the world of autism into kind of uber parts of our challenge areas and different, I’m going to call them different parts of the spectrum. So you’ve got people who are never going to live independently. You have people who will can live in a supported independent or on the right close to being able to do that, and then you’ve also got people who are living independently but can’t get a job, you know, can’t interview well, and you have people who are working and have either are neurodiverse and autistic and don’t either disclose it or don’t disclose it, okay? [Dan Feshbach]: So those are really different worlds. The parents of people who can get of the last part of the spectrum I mentioned, they care about jobs. They care about support. They care about housing. [Dan Feshbach]: The people with the kids who are most impacted, are ones that have the highest unmet needs. I mean, the whole thing is a mess out there, because there’s so many people that do not get jobs who are brilliant on the more independent side. But it’s so easy to forget about that child that still has meltdowns, and they’re in their 30s or older. Or who are living with their parents and they’re exhausted because they don’t have enough support and they don’t have dough to get that support. And I could be described as one of those parents, except I’m very well off. Even there, it’s hard. So you can slice the world up that way. And then there’s another dimension, which is people who are non or limited or reluctant speakers. But they have ideas and thoughts, and they’re amazing. And it’s a whole world that you can look at. And about a third of the population fit that in autism. And so you can imagine these dimensions. They don’t always fall in the challenging area, even though they are challenging. And they’re much more difficult than somebody who can speak. But they’re often brilliant, and they’re starting to get recognized as such in a big way. [Dan Feshbach]: And it’s a particular population that I think there are a lot of families in those kind of buckets of profound. But they’re all in pain. You have a child who is a brilliant financial engineer, but can’t get a job. You’ve got a person who’s a non-speaker but can use assistive devices and is a brilliant coder. [Dan Feshbach]: So it doesn’t really fit the It doesn’t fit the known kind of acknowledged pattern. Another thing we don’t believe in is we do not believe that there aren’t groups. That is, if you’ve seen one person with autism, you’ve seen one person with autism. It’s like, that is an absolute no-no for us, for me. So I just, you know, when you think about our content pillars, you know, we have to, as a group, decide where we’re focused with that. Because, you know, there’s so… I mean, we envision a very large organization here, okay? We don’t envision being a small non-profit. We envision being a very interesting global organization, like 20% of the companies come from outside the US that come to our accelerators. 40% of the companies in our database are outside the US and about 30 or 40% of the investors. So all of that is, when I think about the content pillars and topics, I need help in kind of aligning and structuring that. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Totally. [Michael Houck]: Sure. [Michael Houck]: And yeah, that’s a vision. And, you know, we want to help achieve that with you guys. So as we prove out this strategy and see results, we’ll definitely be able to grow alongside of you guys too. So yeah, very exciting. [Andrew Safranko]: Yeah, definitely, definitely. So just to be cognizant of time, because I know we were scheduled for an hour here, so we’re almost at the top of the hour. Allow me to just kind of breeze through the rest, because the rest is more of the formalities of, okay, what’s the next steps? But in terms of posting schedule real quick, because we did talk a little bit about this, a breeze through it. [Andrew Safranko]: Quick question is, how much of this would you need us to manage versus how much of it would you want to manage on your end? We have a hybrid way of working with you on this if you’d like, but would just love to understand your comfort levels in terms of you needing us to schedule posts for you, or would you be taking this on your end? [Keevin O’Rourke]: Well, what I imagine the breakdown will be is either you’re helping us with scheduling or we have Guy, Dan, he could do it. And what I’m hoping is that, Dan, you can just spend your energy on thinking through what type of content and whomever, whether it’s you guys or Guy, that all gets handled in the backend. So that’s not something that you need to occupy your brain space with. [Keevin O’Rourke]: Thank God. [Keevin O’Rourke]: Try to make it easy for everybody. [Andrew Safranko]: Okay, fair enough. So I will, for now, just meant I will just now for now say that it will be on your end. And if that needs to change, by all means, you can let us know and we will happily ensure that gets covered. Cool. And then in terms of the actual posts themselves, so we talked a little bit about this as well in terms of short form, long form. What are you looking for specifically? Is it, I know you mentioned short form and long form. Is that actually what we want to look towards or? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, like Keevin, do we want to start with like one long form a week and a couple short form? Do we want to do two long form? Just like help guide us on the first couple of weeks, what we should be thinking about. [Keevin O’Rourke]: Let’s do one long form and a couple of short form and just see, right? See what’s working. Um, see what we like, And then from there, if we need to adjust it, we can. [Michael Houck]: Cool. And then it says so on here, but I personally do post at 830 in the morning Eastern time. That’s like what I’ve found to be for my audience, the best for different people. It might be a little later in the day, especially if the audience skews West coast might be like 10 11 in the morning Eastern. [Michael Houck]: So I think having a consistent posting time can help, but definitely, we always want to get stuff out in the morning. So it has the majority of the day to be seen, because every hour that goes by after we make a post, the post is less fresh compared to other posts that could be shown in someone’s feed. [Keevin O’Rourke]: What do you think, Dan? Do you think the audience? [Dan Feshbach]: I think it’s across the country and across the world. I think the East Coast is great. What do you think about having… [Dan Feshbach]: Well, there’s two questions I have. What do you think about having reposts at a different time of day, somebody that we either, someone on our board, or somebody that just does it and makes a comment, even you guys. [Michael Houck]: So there’s a couple of ways we could tackle that. One thing I would say is that 12 hours after, or like 10 to 12 hours, but I like to do it exactly 12 hours after we make the post. Someone should go in and actually hit the repost button on it from your account so that it gets shown twice. Basically, different parts of the world, different audiences. You get kind of a second rush of engagement and stuff by doing that. As far as like coordinating with folks on your guys’s team or on the board or wherever, that’s fine. We totally encourage that. We also have Megaphone, which is our kind of distribution network where we have at this point over 400 creators across various niches, where you can basically spend to get them to amplify the post with a comment or repost or something like that. So if that’s something you wanted to explore, that’s, you know, we normally charge a subscription for people to use the service. But since you guys are working with us on content, there’s no subscription, you would just need to set budgets for the creators, basically, if you want to go down that route. [Dan Feshbach]: Might be worth a test. I mean, if you can find specifically people with autism followers. [Michael Houck]: I don’t think we have anyone who’s specifically in the autism tech space, but we do have a lot of folks who have founders, investors and people like that. So maybe there’s enough. [Dan Feshbach]: Yeah. Think about think about who would be good. And you might be surprised. There could be somebody in there that has a it’s inevitable. All right. Well, there will be at least four and probably closer to 10 and maybe even 40 autism connections. There’s no question. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, sure. But yeah, we can We can dig into that and our algorithm for the, it’s a software platform. So the algorithm will always prioritize folks who are kind of tagged on the same niches as you and who provide a good value for in terms of how much they charge relative to their audience size. Um, so yeah, even maybe take a look through the platform. We can get you set up with an account. Um, and uh, yeah, if you want, it’s an, it’s an option, no obligation, but it’s an option to test. [Michael Houck]: Okay, cool. [Michael Houck]: In the essence of time, I’ll just jump in here. Everyone’s time is super, super valuable. Andrew, can you scroll down a little bit to next steps? Yeah. So basically next steps, I’m going to set up a shared Slack channel for us. It’ll be Slack Connect. So it’ll live natively in your Slack, natively in our Slack as well. And RSTU is basically to identify accounts that you think do content really well, and also other accounts who have the audience that you want, as well as sort of dumping in all those writing samples and maybe that deck and other materials, or dandy are relevant. And then on my side, Dan, I’m gonna go through your profile tomorrow at the latest over the weekend, and I’ll record like a five to 10 minute loom video, sort of like breaking down any tweaks or changes I’d recommend making to make yourself, you know, convert people to followers and drive people to the traffic destinations that you want them to go. Andrew will set up the notion and give you access to that. And then over the next two weeks, we’re going to be devoted to research and context gathering. And at the end of that two week period, we’ll present sort of the first batch of content to you guys. And then we’ll get into a weekly cadence going forward from there. [Michael Houck]: Fantastic. [Michael Houck]: Dan, while we’re talking about it, do you do you want help with accounts or do you have an idea for who you want to emulate and all those things? [Dan Feshbach]: Well, I think we should we should just take a look out there and see who’s we think, you know, because there’s plenty and there’s some individuals who are really good that we can list, you know, Mentra gets an incredible following, that’s a company, you know, we can definitely go there and also her personality is awesome, the CEO. So we can we can put together a list of who’s, you know, who gets who I noticed, at least in who you notice that is really doing this and really leveraging social media. [Michael Houck]: We’ll also send over some sort of like, once we get that initial list from you, we’ll probably send over some example posts and be like, what do you think of this? What’s your feedback on this just to help us sort of refine? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, and I can do vice versa as well. [Andrew Safranko]: Cool. Yeah, that’d be great. Anything you think makes sense that you like, The more I know what you like, the easier it is to write for you, right? So yeah. [Dan Feshbach]: So yeah, that’s great. I would love that. [Michael Houck]: Cool. Yeah. Andrew’s going to become your second brain, Dan. [Dan Feshbach]: Trust me, I need it. Maybe he’ll add to the linear side. [Dan Feshbach]: I mean, my wife tells me I need a second brain, so I don’t know. [Michael Houck]: Somehow we’ll become one. Whatever happens. [Michael Houck]: Okay, great. We’ll get that set up. We’ll get you guys in there. We’ll keep chatting. And the weekly process is super lightweight. Basically, we’ll send over questions and topics every Monday. And all we ask from you guys is some sort of reply, whether that’s texts, whether that’s voice notes, however you want to send it back to us, just to get your subject matter sort of expertise on it. And then we’ll create the content. If we get those by midweek, then the content will get back to you by the end of the week. [Michael Houck]: Got it. And if we think there’s anybody you, we would like you to talk to, is that too, too painful? [Michael Houck]: Uh, we’re not opposed to content interviews. Uh, if there’s like a specific goal, um, not, you know, probably can’t do it like every day, but no, no, no. [Dan Feshbach]: Oh, for sure. Well, all right. We’ll, we’ll talk about that and I can always record a conversation I’m having. [Dan Feshbach]: Yes. [Dan Feshbach]: That’s amazing. That’s not an issue. Okay. [Michael Houck]: Cool. Alrighty. Any last questions for now? [Keevin O’Rourke]: Nothing on my end. [Keevin O’Rourke]: I think we’re good to go. [Michael Houck]: I’m really stoked guys. This is going to be, this is going to be great. Um, cool. Anything else on your side? [Andrew Safranko]: Uh, my end? No. Um, I’ll see you guys in Slack and then I can follow up with notion and the steps there and sort of give you a couple of screenshots of what the, there’s a couple of pieces where you just want to throw ideas in. Once you know where you throw your ideas, then you’re good to go. [Keevin O’Rourke]: One thing, actually, before we jump, this is semi-related, but Michael, I wanted to reply to your email. It’s a pain in the ass, I know, but if you could just send an invoice each month, then I’ll get it processed. It’s frustrating for me too, but… [Michael Houck]: No, man, no worries at all. Totally understand. I’ll send over the relevant info later tonight, and then starting on, I guess, the 22nd of the month, I’ll have my assistant send over an invoice each month. No problem. [Keevin O’Rourke]: Perfect. Appreciate it. [Keevin O’Rourke]: Cool. All right, guys. Talk in Slack. See you soon.