- Duration: 21 min
- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01J6SSTBT7YM46B6B2VSMYAEFN (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01J6SSTBT7YM46B6B2VSMYAEFN)
Transcript
[Max Palmer]: for him. [Manuel E Rodriguez]: Oh, cool. Yeah. Cool. Thank you for working on Labor Day, man. [Max Palmer]: Yeah, of course. [Manuel E Rodriguez]: I didn’t realize when I scheduled it, I was like, Oh, it’s Labor Day today. [Max Palmer]: Yeah. Where are you calling from Austin, Texas. Okay. I’m in New York. [Manuel E Rodriguez]: New York. Cool. Cool. [Max Palmer]: Great. So I’m excited to hear how you heard about us and what led you to taking this call. Yeah. [Manuel E Rodriguez]: So basically I, I started, I heard about Michael specifically on Spotlight well the blog or the newsletter that we have created kind of like highlighting creators that use beehive Yep, I was like, I don’t know more than a year ago because I use beehive And then after that I heard about him on growth in reverse. I think Chanel did a Deep dive on him. Yeah, I’m how he grew and then again I heard of him in newsletter operator with Matt McGarry and And then I knew that he had this megaphone, but at the time, I never really paid attention to the product until recently that I just went to the website, like, what is it? And then I realized what it was, and I was like, oh, I’m interested, because I’ve never used Twitter in my life. So that’s how I knew about Megaphone. I’m going to tell you briefly what I do. I started a newsletter in March 2023. About yogi philosophy. The format, I’m sure you’re familiar with the Daily Stoic. Daily Stoic is kind of like a similar format. That’s my inspiration. From Monday to Friday, I share like a daily newsletter with a daily reflection that ties to a yogi principle and then inspires people to have a better day, you know, and apply like simple values and things. And so I’ve been trying to grow it. I have been trying to grow it with Instagram, I don’t know, like I post a lot there and stop posting because I didn’t see any growth and also of the growth that I was having, I didn’t see it translated to subscribers because people in Instagram wants to watch videos, they don’t like to read things. So now I am about to, like I just started Twitter, a Twitter account for the first time in my life. I have zero followers. Well, I have eight now. So I’m posting three times a day. I know that it’s really hard. It’s really hard to, uh, to grow there. And I discovered megaphone and I was like, Oh, this sounds interesting. Okay. So it gets amplified by other creators. So yeah, I’m interested to see, I’m interested to see how the product works and like my budget is minimals. Like how, what is the minimum budget that I will need to really make it work? You know? [Max Palmer]: Yeah, yeah, definitely. So I can explain how the product works first. So Megaphone is a creator engagement marketplace. So we have users like yourself who are looking to grow their audience on either Twitter or LinkedIn. And then we have creators who are in a variety of different niches, and they amplify the posts of the users. So they do this by engaging with users’ posts. Typically, it’s going to be a comment. So we have creators that are in your niche, engage with your posts, and then that boosts your posts in the algorithm. So that’s how it works in a nutshell. In terms of the pricing, so there’s two parts of the pricing. The first is the monthly subscription, just to use the platform. So that’s either $49 or $89 month. [Max Palmer]: The only difference between those two is with the $89 a month plan, your posts are going to get sent to creators immediately. Whereas with the $49 month plan, as soon as you send us your posts, we’re going to delay it an hour and then we’ll send it to creators. And then once we send it to creators, they have an hour to engage with it. If they don’t engage within an hour of us sending it to them, we’ll send it to a new creator and that original creator won’t be paid. [Max Palmer]: The second part of the pricing is your budget per post. So you have to allocate a budget for every post. And this is entirely up to you. On average, people are usually spending around $30 per post. But we have people spend well over $100 for a big fundraising announcement, a new product launch, a great piece of content they think is going to do well, whatever it is. [Max Palmer]: And that’s the money that goes to paying these creators for their engagement. [Manuel E Rodriguez]: Yeah, okay. So on the other side, the creator is like, okay, it’s kind of you’re receiving inbound, I don’t know, related to niche, inbound posts, and then you decide to make extra money, right? You decide to comment or do something. [Max Palmer]: Yeah, and they’ll typically comment. When you do submit a post on Megaphone, you’ll provide context for the creators so that they know what you’ll want them to comment on. Or comment something relevant on your post, and that’ll help boost your posts in the Twitter algorithm. [Manuel E Rodriguez]: Yeah. So in the Twitter algorithm, the way it works is like if somebody with a larger following comments on you that don’t have any following, Twitter says like, oh, this must be relevant. [Max Palmer]: Exactly. Exactly. [Manuel E Rodriguez]: If nobody comments, it’s like, you know, you have to keep just posting into the void until eventually somehow you… [Max Palmer]: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So it’s high signal when big accounts in your niche are responding to you. [Manuel E Rodriguez]: Yeah. Okay. Okay. And then everything is done automatically, like through the platform? Yes. [Max Palmer]: So once you send the post on the platform, our software does it automatically. We’ll send it to creators that are in your niche, that are online at the time you’re posting, and we’ll also maximize your budget based on a follower to cost ratio. [Manuel E Rodriguez]: Okay. And then I could like, if I post three times a day, I can, out of the week, I can select three of my strongest posts, for example, right. If I have, if I’m starting with a low budget, like paying the 49 or. [Manuel E Rodriguez]: at the beginning and then eventually I can pay the other one, but yeah, and then like 30 per post or something. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. [Manuel E Rodriguez]: Sounds like it’s okay. Okay. [Max Palmer]: It’s good that you’re posting consistently. We recommend posting two to three times a day, uh, with two to three long form posts per week. So, um, that’s how you grow an account. So it’s good to hear that. [Manuel E Rodriguez]: Yeah. Yeah. That’s, uh, I’ve never tried Twitter. Like I said before, I don’t like, I don’t know why I was always reluctant to do it, but now I don’t have a choice because The few followers that I have, I have paid for all of them. Zero organic. Like I have like 2,700 all through refined ads. You know, refined. [Max Palmer]: I do know refined. Wow. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Manuel E Rodriguez]: It’s really cool. Refined is really cool because it’s an autopilot and it’s really cheap. It’s costing me like 20, 27 cents per subscriber. What? It’s, it’s crazy. Yeah. Cause they, they just launched, like they just launched, uh, a new, a new system that Connects to be hype and they can measure now. Would you just pay for engaged subscriber? So you at the beginning it they just send you a bunch of subscribers and the Unsubscribe rate was big. It was like 40% something. I was paying one one like I still I was paying like 60 cents and It turned out to be like 1.2 per subscriber. It wasn’t bad. And I have really loyal people that engage with me and reply to me. So it’s a good way to grow. You just need money. The more money you have. So it’s not sustainable. You have to build a following online. And so creating videos, it’s harder than writing. And I was creating videos and I was trying Instagram, but then I got burnt out. And I was like, you know, I’m going to try Twitter. I’m just going to schedule everything in timefully for months in advance. So, Megaphone sounds like the perfect fit. I’ll combine that with Refind ads. [Max Palmer]: Yeah, absolutely. Wow. I didn’t realize Refind ads were that cheap. How does Refind work? [Manuel E Rodriguez]: So, Refind is a newsletter that they have 500,000 subscribers and it’s kind of like an aggregator of what you subscribe and then you type in your interests and then it sends you, it curates articles from the web related to your interest and they send it to you every day. And in between those articles, they have sponsored spaces that look like articles, but they say sponsor. So for example, in my case, it would say in between the articles of self-growth, like self-help and development, it would say daily yogi, subscribe to the daily newsletter to expand your perspective on life. And then people will click and they subscribe immediately. And so it’s kind of like, it’s people that are already consuming like written material. So that’s why, and it’s in our pilot, you set your ad there and then you forget about it. And then you’re like, I received. 80, 90 subscribers a day. [Max Palmer]: It’s cool. [Manuel E Rodriguez]: Wow. Cause I have my own newsletter. [Max Palmer]: I run a soccer newsletter and I only, yeah, I only have 850 subscribers. And so, um, I’m trying to grow it. I’ve got a Twitter account that has 2000 followers, but it’s so hard to grow organically. And you said like 20, 30 a subscriber, that’s insane. [Manuel E Rodriguez]: Yeah, 27 right now, but what’s your, I’m going to follow you. I’m a soccer player all my life. I’m from Mexico. [Max Palmer]: So, so this newsletter, it’s about the MLS and U.S. Men’s national team. Let me, let me send you our Twitter account. Hold on. [Max Palmer]: There we go. Yeah. So I just sent it in the chat. That’s our Twitter account. [Manuel E Rodriguez]: Oh, thank you. [Max Palmer]: And then. [Manuel E Rodriguez]: Yeah, I’ll follow it. The newsletter, but Okay. So on Behance, well, man, do that, like try to refine that. So let me share the, the refined ads platform. So you. [Max Palmer]: Yeah. And so the, these subscribers that are coming in, they’re now good subscribers. [Manuel E Rodriguez]: Man, I have a, like, for example, one of the subscribers that came in through that, He has written, he has asked for my address and he has sent me written letters and posts. And I have exchanged like a hundred emails with him. He’s like super loyal. He’s already subscribed to my premium newsletter. Like he pays monthly $5. Wow. So it’s real people. It’s like, yeah, it’s, do you think we find has like sports stuff though? [Max Palmer]: Yeah. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Manuel E Rodriguez]: Everything, everything. It curates everything. Like, okay. You’ll see, like, let me share the, you go to refine that. You can subscribe as a, as a, as a reader in refine, but I encourage you to try refine that because of budget. Like you can start with us 40, with as low as 40 a month. Like right now I have, I mean, 40, sorry, 40 day, 40 in a budget. And right now mine is set up to 40 day spent. And 0.60 per subscriber, but per engaged subscriber. [Max Palmer]: That’s the maximum. [Manuel E Rodriguez]: Yes. Refind connects to Behive and it extracts the information. In fact, if a new subscriber doesn’t open your email in the first seven days or they unsubscribe in the first seven days after reading one of your emails, then it doesn’t count. So right now I have gotten like 800 subscribers in the past week. But out of those only like 230, I’m only paying like for 230 something. So it’s like, and it turns out like 27 cents. So it’s, it’s a great, it’s a great, uh, way of growing kind of like without thinking about it. You said it. [Max Palmer]: Yeah. And you still have a good open rate. [Manuel E Rodriguez]: And I have an upper 50% open rate. Wow. Yeah. Most of those through refine. So it works. It works. Like I said, you just need money. Like, yeah in the long run if I if I had like money to burn and extra cash I would pour that and I would I wouldn’t post in social media fuck it you know it’s much more work but but man like it’s not sustainable because if you want to grow to a hundred thousand subscribers in mind you have to spend like a hundred thousand dollars like no way or like less fifty thousand dollars no it’s a lot yeah [Max Palmer]: okay so I’m gonna start I’m gonna get started with this then for my soccer newsletter because like that’s so cheap to acquire a subscriber um yeah and so you just connect it with yeah I need to upgrade to the [Manuel E Rodriguez]: beehive paid version but yeah so so and how are you how have you grown uh that newsletter all organic all organic like how through twitter Through Twitter. All Twitter. So you’re 2,500 followers on Twitter. Out of those, 800 have subscribed to the newsletter. Yeah, pretty much. Wow, man. That’s amazing. [Max Palmer]: Yeah. A lot of people. When I get a follower on Twitter, I DM them and say, hey, I saw you’re a soccer fan. I write about the MLS and US men’s national team every week. You should subscribe. And then some of them do. Oh, cool. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Cool. [Manuel E Rodriguez]: So you have that. It’s kind of like an auto automated message, right? [Max Palmer]: It’s not even automated, dude. I just copy and paste it. [Manuel E Rodriguez]: You just copy and paste it. Okay. It doesn’t take long. I’m going to do that, man. Yeah. [Max Palmer]: Yeah. And then I did a, I did a lead magnet that got like 150 subscribers. So that was good. What was the lead magnet? It was like a list of all the best podcasts for the MLS. [Manuel E Rodriguez]: Okay. Okay. So something simple that can be consumed right away. [Max Palmer]: Exactly. Yeah. Are you, do you go to Austin FC games? [Manuel E Rodriguez]: Yeah, man. I love Austin FC. I, I, we, me and my wife bike, like when we go there, cause they have a bike ballet and then we just go and we live like 10 minutes away from the stadium biking. So it’s, we love it. We love it. Yeah, yeah. [Max Palmer]: And you’re from Mexico? I’m from Mexico, yeah. Dude, I lived in Mexico City for four months, like a few years ago. Yeah, I love Mexico. [Manuel E Rodriguez]: Wow, man. It’s a beautiful city. It’s like so many things to do. [Max Palmer]: The food is delicious. [Manuel E Rodriguez]: Do you play? Yeah, yeah. [Max Palmer]: I played soccer growing up. I love soccer. [Manuel E Rodriguez]: It’s like my first love. The pick-up there is amazing. The pick-up games, like in the streets. Yeah, that’s cool, man. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Manuel E Rodriguez]: All right, well, thank you for everything, Max. I’ll follow your newsletter, and I’ll share mine too. [Max Palmer]: Yeah, yeah, I follow it, actually. Let me subscribe. Let me share my Twitter. [Manuel E Rodriguez]: Like I said, it’s just really new. [Max Palmer]: Cool. I just subscribed to yours. [Manuel E Rodriguez]: Oh, to the newsletter? [Max Palmer]: To your newsletter, yeah. [Manuel E Rodriguez]: Yeah, the newsletter is the Daily Yogi. Yeah, it’s awesome. So yeah, I’ll give Megaphone a try. [Max Palmer]: Cool. Yeah, yeah. And just shoot us an email if you have any questions too. [Manuel E Rodriguez]: Are you used to grow your own? [Max Palmer]: Not mine, no, but how can you zip to grow his? [Manuel E Rodriguez]: Yeah. [Max Palmer]: Yeah, because we don’t have any sports creators on megaphone yet. [Manuel E Rodriguez]: Or like soccer, you know, kind of like self help. Yeah, we do. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Awesome. Yeah, I’ll give it a try right away. [Max Palmer]: Perfect, man. All right. It was good chatting with you. Have a good day, man. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Bye.