- Duration: 37 min
- Platform: zoom
- Source: Read.ai 01J7H08XJZY0WNPN7X7RPS0PPK (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01J7H08XJZY0WNPN7X7RPS0PPK)
Transcript
[Michael Houck]: I’m a senior product. Marker. [Rob Caucci]: You can hear me. [Michael Houck]: Yo, what’s up man. [Rob Caucci]: Busy. What is it Wednesday. Busy Wednesday. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, sorry about that. I had the Zoom open, but I had a window on top of it, so I didn’t see that you joined. [Rob Caucci]: All good, brother. How are you doing? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Good. [Michael Houck]: Getting ready to fly out to the West Coast for like a week or so. [Rob Caucci]: What do you got going on out there? Where are you headed? [Michael Houck]: First SF. We have like a little small summit for this group I’m a part of called the Techno Freedom It’s very, you know, very like high level stuff, like abstract ways to build parallel communities and institutions in modern America. Cool. Pretty cool. Should be fun. And then from there, going to Salt Lake City, just check that out for a couple of days, and then driving up to Montana for another like conference thing. My friend, Scott, is hosting just for founders and stuff. [Rob Caucci]: Nice, man. Are you going solo or is a wife coming along for the ride? [Michael Houck]: No, just me. Just me. Too much conference activity, I think. [Rob Caucci]: I hear you. Have you gotten off that treadmill since we last spoke? Or have you just been walking for like 90 days? [Michael Houck]: I’m trying, man. But I’ve got to get my steps in somehow. But no, it’s good. I only move it out of desk when I record the podcast. That’s the only time I put the chair back here now. [Rob Caucci]: What podcast? I don’t know that I’ve seen a podcast from you yet. [Michael Houck]: It’s launching in two weeks from tomorrow. Basically, candid conversations with founders about building their startups, sort of like Lenny’s podcast, but applied to startup apps. [Rob Caucci]: Cool. That’s awesome, man. I look forward to checking it out. [Michael Houck]: Thanks, Ben. I appreciate that. What’s going on? I imagine life is only busier for you now that you guys are a larger family. [Rob Caucci]: Yeah, I mean, it’s baby is what is today? Almost eight months. She’s like seven and a half months getting big, healthy. Thank God. And, you know, it’s like when when they’re a month or two or maybe even three month old, they’re kind of like a house You don’t have kids, do you? [Michael Houck]: No, not yet. [Rob Caucci]: But and then, you know, they start to get like four or five, six months and they get personalities. They belly laugh. And it’s like, oh, my God. Tell my wife it’s like, It’s still very surreal. We’re we’re pretty adjusted, I would say, is like new parents. We have a much better idea of what we’re doing than we did earlier on. It’s a different type of exhaustion. But I was telling my wife, it’s still pretty surreal. And it’s like, I’m I hold her. I look at her and I love her so much. And I’m just like waiting for the intensity to ooze out some like, you know, that’s what makes it surreal is like, I love her so much and it’s just the intensity of it is waiting to come out, I feel like, [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I can imagine. I’m sorry. [Rob Caucci]: No, no, no. I was just saying, yeah, personal life is good. Thank God, thank you for asking. And work’s going well too. We definitely, I would say kind of contracted the top line a little bit. And at the same time, not materially, we’re down, we’ve always hovered around 20 to 25 active members. We’re currently hovering between like 15 and 20, the average ACV or the average monthly dollars spent with us has increased by over 20% since June. And that’s intense. Right? We really, when we started, it was like, oh, Sahil Bloom’s a co-founder. Like, I want to be like Sahil. I want to be a creator. I’ve found some modest success and I can afford to pay you all, but like, I really want to be kind of fucking famous, right? I want to be like Sahil. And so it took us a while and quite a bit of work with, you know, members, clients who were wannabe creators in a way. I hate using that term, but that’s kind of more what the work wasn’t tied really to business goals and outcomes. It was more kind of a personal vanity project. And I think we churned through quite a few, we figured it out with others, but really where we’ve gotten to is crystallizing who our ICP is. It’s a busy executive, a busy founder, a busy investor who doesn’t really give a shit about becoming famous. They’re working 60 to 80 hours a week trying to change the world through their work, build a business, invest in it, companies that change the world. And it’s just a shame if they don’t do something to share their insights and knowledge and lessons with the world. And that’s the role we play as a strategic communications partner that focuses on executive communications and content specifically. And we’re now doing quite a bit of corporate communications and content production work for around our 30% members today. [Michael Houck]: That’s how you learn. Right. It’s like, it’s not just this experiment for someone’s personal brand. It’s like, we want to be an arm of your business. We want to be a partner. Right. [Rob Caucci]: We want to, we want to understand what are your personal goals and your business’s goals over the next three, six, nine, 12, 24 plus months. And how do we align the work and our support to help you accomplish that? Right. What content strategy should we lay out in terms of different content pillars and the weighting of how much content volume we’re producing to align with each of those pillars that hopefully drives delivery of the goal. So definitely getting, I would say, more scientific with our approach to everything, which is exciting. We’re in the middle of updating our website. So I’d say in two weeks, we’ll be announcing the launch of a new website that very much kind of speaks to this, I don’t know, more evolved or mature position marketplace so very excited about that but yeah I mean building a business is tough ups and downs we’re certainly no exception but you know we’re happy with the way things are going we just hired another full-time graphic designer that starts next week we’re hiring another member operations associate that starts October 1 we know who we’re hiring we’ve got a final interview with her and so the company the team’s growing the company’s growing and I think we’re gonna have a pretty big Q4 and definitely a pretty big 2025. [Michael Houck]: That’s dope, dude. I mean, it sounds like you guys are like, you know, when I look at what other people in the space are doing, I think we talked about this before, the sort of like, just throw it into our pot, give us one thing at a time, we’ll spit it back at you model. I see what you guys are doing is so much like a better choice for serious, like, not creative, but serious, like business people, serious people who want to get the word out there. So I think it’s a smart approach. Yeah, not surprised to hear that you guys are crushing it. [Rob Caucci]: I mean, I didn’t say we were crushing it. I actually said revenue contracted a little bit, was one of the first things I said. But you know, it’s definitely, it’s, I think, what are we in? I think September will be the first month we haven’t had any churn, like 0%, everybody retained. So like, that’s the level of stability we want to find in our business where it’s not like, how happy is this member? Have we been doing a good job? Are they getting antsy? Cause they haven’t had a monster post lately, right? Like in all that bullshit, if you can get away from that type of account management and account strategy work and focus on exactly what you just said, I think that’s how we’ll build a great business. And I don’t want to just wax philosophically about like what we believe to be true and what we believe the future to look like as it pertains to the work we do at Alto Studios in the market, but it really is what I’ll quickly say, and then I want to figure out what’s going on and if there’s anything to talk about like specifically, but when you look at communications, corporate communications, PR, historically, it all stems from companies wanting to get a press release out at 8 a.m., 8.30, so when the market opens at that news is out there, the market’s reacting favorably or unfavorably to whatever it is. And that’s really where the traditional communications and public relations space came from And if you look at different types of media, different categories of media like entertainment, platforms like Netflix and Spotify have completely transformed the distribution and consumption media categories. You’ve got Netflix, you’ve got Hulu. And for the category of business media in particular, it really hasn’t changed that much, but we do have enabling technologies and platforms like LinkedIn and X that now make it possible for a CEO just to go to fucking Twitter and be like, we just launched this amazing new product or feature, or we just raised this round of funding. You don’t have to go through the traditional kind of pay to play channels that you historically had to, like a PR firm and drafting a press release and getting it on PR Newswire and, you know, going back and forth with different VCs on whether or not they approve of the press release or if they want edits. And so I think that long term is the future we see in this space overall. And our our role in that, I think, is to really be kind of like a modern strategic communications, and PR partner in a way. We don’t call ourselves a PR firm, we’re not, but just to enable executives, founders, or companies to directly communicate with their market, whether it’s customers, talent, investors, or otherwise, through these enabling technologies like LinkedIn. So that’s the future we see that we’re trying to create. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I mean, you’re preaching to the choir, man. [Michael Houck]: That’s definitely the beat that I see as well. [Michael Houck]: You know, when I was at Uber in 2017, press are not your friends, right? And then with Launch House, the press are not your friends. So going direct, building up own channels, but I’ve even rented channels on social media, but just having some way to go direct is, it feels like we’re late in that trend, but we’re still very, very early in it. [Rob Caucci]: feels like we’re late because of how developed the other media categories are. Right. Right. The only parallel I see is really like with traditional news media. And it’s why CNN and Fox and everybody’s having a fucking conniption fit because people are like, you’re all full of shit. I don’t believe a single fucking one of you, whether you’re on CNN or Fox. I want to go and find out what is actually happening. [Michael Houck]: I’m going, you know, like and they are and they literally are foolish. It’s not like people are saying that like they actually are. [Rob Caucci]: Yeah, they actually are. And it’s everybody. It’s not just one side or the other. Everybody’s full of shit. And people are realizing it. And it’s my point is, that’s the only media category I see a clear parallel with, as it pertains to like business media, it’s still lagging, right? Those categories are laggards. When it comes to this transformation. That’s why it feels like it’s, it’s so late, but it’s really very early for those categories. [Michael Houck]: And also it’s like people like you and me, we’ve been ahead of this trend. We’ve seen this trend. We’ve known this is true. But there’s still a lot of people out there who aren’t convinced that it’s true or don’t really understand the depth to which that it’s true. But cats are getting eaten in Ohio right now. I’ve seen the videos. It’s happening. Not to be political about it. No, no, I get it. [Michael Houck]: So it’s like, don’t lie to my face when I’ve seen that it’s a lie. You know, it’s crazy. [Rob Caucci]: Yeah. Did you watch the debate last night? [Michael Houck]: No, I didn’t watch it. I already knew it was going to be said. [Rob Caucci]: The cats came out. And the ABC moderator fact-checked the state and he said, well, we have the city manager of Springfield, you you know, know, saying that he can’t confirm that happened. Right. [Michael Houck]: It’s like, OK, that’s that’s the argument these days. It’s there’s no evidence of that. But like just because it hasn’t gone through some bureaucratic process doesn’t mean that it’s not true. [Rob Caucci]: You know, you know, anyway, anyway, how are you guys doing? What’s going on, man? I think I reached out to you about a month ago, maybe to like find time to sing. So I think that was the impetus to set this up. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: Things are good, man. [Michael Houck]: I spent the whole summer with the engineering team on this. We thought we were just going to change databases. And it turned out that because we originally built the tool, I originally built the tool before I even hired people on Airtable, we had to basically rebuild the entire application from the ground up. So we did that. It’s launching either tomorrow or Monday. [Michael Houck]: And it’ll finally be very fast. It’ll be beautiful. It’ll be like a real software product. Excited about. [Michael Houck]: And that’s going to let us sort of launch some of the features that we’ve been blocked on because of the speed of the application for quite some time. So the pace of new stuff will rapidly increase over the next few weeks and months. That means groups, so creating groups on the platform. We’ve talked about that. That means multi-user support. We’ve talked about that forever. We haven’t gotten to prioritize it, but it’s coming. It means partnering with creators on more than just engagements. So things like sponsored posts, newsletter ads, Twitter spaces, all sorts of stuff like that. [Michael Houck]: All that stuff is in the works. And I’m also toying around with the interesting idea that I know what your answer is going to be, but I’m curious to see how you would react to it. [Michael Houck]: So right now we have the subscription for access that we take, and then we have the deposits that go get spent through the network, right? Obviously, that’s not as incentive aligned as it could be between us. You’re paying me, and then you’re also paying the creators. It just sort of feels a little bit more expensive than it probably actually is because you’re paying twice. So what we’re thinking about is probably sometime in Q4, maybe Q1, getting rid of the subscription entirely and just having you pay to promote posts, basically. But we’d take some level of higher commission those make up for the revenue difference. That way, it’s more incentive aligned, simpler, feels better for you. [Michael Houck]: But I mean, that’s our hypothesis, hypothesis, at least. But we think that’ll, that’ll enable a lot of growth, especially as we launch the group’s product. So I know, what are your thoughts on that? [Rob Caucci]: Yeah, I don’t know how it all pencils for you, honestly. You know that much better than I do. I think, in general, as a non-customer, just quickly on that, I think a consumption-based model, even with a lower subscription fee for the access, is OK. I don’t think a monthly subscription is a terrible idea. Like saying that $1,200 or whatever it is a month come out of the account. I'm like, oh shit, okay, that was that. [Rob Caucci]: But I'm not like, oh my God, I'm grossly overpaying that subscription fee. And I do think like SaaS in general, instead of like a per seat model, I know that's not really exactly what you guys do. I think it's evolving to a point where it's like a lower cost of ticket to entry. So it's still paying something for the access, but really focusing the consumption, right? And for you, the consumption is the demand for the network and spend through the network, right? Yeah, I mean, I'm open to it. I think what we don't have enough insight to, and I'm not looking for you to answer this or solve it, is like, what you do, the way we use you is really kind of almost like paid media, right? And paid growth. And we're not looking at like a cost per acquisition, or cost per follower. But like at the end of the day, that's what I'm thinking about. Like, okay, is my yield on this ad spend better relative to the content level performance, follower growth? I don't really know what it is today to be honest with you in terms of attribution. Like what type of lift in terms of engagement on an average LinkedIn post do we get per dollar spent through megaflow? Promoting like that's and I just want to be clear like this is all well-known scientific stuff in the paid growth like customer acquisition world and that's very much kind of the same a similar lens we look at it through it's like what what is the yield here how is this driving results what's the lift if we do add spend here should we spend $20 a post should we spend $50 a post I don't really know what type of performance I'm gaining one way or another, if that makes sense. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. I mean, let's say that we did remove it. Do you think you'd be more likely to spend more through the network? [Rob Caucci]: Honest answer is I don't know that we would. I mean, we've defined average budgets proposed per member based on their membership tier. So it's kind of formulaic for us in terms of... [Michael Houck]: Got Got it. It. [Rob Caucci]: Execution. And so I don't know that if, what do we pay? $39 a month per account? [Michael Houck]: Yep. [Rob Caucci]: Like, I don’t know that I would look at it and be like, okay, now we’ve got 39 back. Let’s save $9 and reallocate the 30 to what is that? $15 on two posts a month. I, you know, I don’t know. [Rob Caucci]: Interesting. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. I mean, we’re just toying around with it. I don’t know if it’s something we would take live, but we’ve had people come to us different type of customer than you guys. I think we have people come to us who’ve been like, I would love this to be sort of totally done for me where I just pay you a monthly amount. You automatically allocate that and have creators show up on my posts on certain days that I tell you. And that’s it. I don’t need to share the post with you. I don’t need to pay an extra subscription fee. Just I pay one thing and then engagement show up and I think we’re probably going to do some sort of like A-B tests or experiment with that and see how it goes. But I don’t know how successful it’ll be. So just trying to collect some data points right now. [Rob Caucci]: Got it. So that could be more interesting. And I didn’t understand that’s what you were suggesting. I thought the suggestion was like, it’ll work the same way. You’ll still go. Oh, yeah. Sure, it was. So this is the budget per post. If it’s like, this is my monthly budget allocated to optimize performance, Yep. That’s probably more interesting. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. I mean, we’ll see. I’ll let you know. So we’ll probably test it with some smaller folks. But I’ll let you know if we see good results. And maybe we could test it with you guys too at some point. [Michael Houck]: But yeah, really no idea how it’ll play out just now that we’re able to ship again. The gears are turning, if you will. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Rob Caucci]: Let me know, man. I think that would potentially be interesting for us. [Rob Caucci]: We could also have an option, like an add-on option for members that wanted to dedicate a budget to monthly spend. We don’t do that. We take it out of our gross profit right now. It could align with doing something. We’ve toyed around with doing that in the past. We used to run Twitter ads when they had the follower campaign Oh, right. [Michael Houck]: You know what I’m talking about? Yeah. I did this for my account for a while. [Rob Caucci]: Yeah. And like, we got really good at it. We hired like a freelancer to work with us and he was great. We’re getting like cost per follower down to like, like fractions of pennies in some case for like North American followers to not like fucking people in Bangladesh. Not that there’s anything wrong with people in Bangladesh, but you know what I’m saying? [Michael Houck]: I know what you’re saying. [Rob Caucci]: Cost per follower varies greatly depending on where they’re coming from Of course. But then they killed it. Yvonne’s like, oh, we’re not doing this shit anymore. And so we’re like, oh, OK. But at that time, we were actually about to go to members and be like, hey, you’ve given us permission to run Twitter ads. We’ve been doing it, as I think you’re aware at this point. These are the results we’re seeing, right? We’ve got some confidence that we can predict getting to your audience to this level, this level, this level, this level with sustained levels of spend. But we are not in a position a position to spend that on your behalf? Are you interested in dedicating an ad budget to this? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Rob Caucci]: But then they killed it. So we’re like, OK, we’re not going to do that. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. I mean, I’ll let you know how things progress on our side. Feel free to test it out on your side, however you think it’ll resonate most with your members. But yeah, it could be an interesting test for like probably closer to end of the year, end of Q4 or early Q1. [Rob Caucci]: Yeah. Keep me posted, man. It’s interesting. Um, anything else top of mind? [Michael Houck]: No, not really. I mean, just chugging along. Um, we’re launching the podcast. We’re launching a, a list of a group of case studies. So basically over the summer, I interviewed like 60 founders, um, about how they fundraised and what worked, what didn’t. And we wrote up case studies about each one and we’re launching that, um, I think next week. And then the podcast is the week after that. So, um, lots of new stuff. Um, We’re all out. [Rob Caucci]: Love it, dude. What’s going on with the other thing that almost made you quit this thing? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, we’re doing early. We have a few early customers. We’ve tied it in sort of as part of Megaphone before we launched Megaphone on TikTok. We’ve been able to build up a lot of creator relationships with folks on TikTok. So when we do launch there, we’ll have a strong sort of base of creators right away. I think it can be pretty big. It’s just a matter of finding the right e-com brands who are looking to work with creators. [Michael Houck]: But again, my energy has been so distracted by this database thing for Megaphone that it’s been sucking up way more of my time than I wish to admit. But no, we’re going to be pushing that more past this initial pilot stage in Q4. Got it. [Rob Caucci]: That’s awesome, man. Excited for you. Two quick things before we go. I do have a hard stop coming up. I’ll follow up in the email thread on like the credit for the September charges. It was also for August. I’m not looking for you to dig deep into your pockets. It was for those eight accounts. They were inactive August, September. I confirmed internally that we fucked up. We did not notify you in the megaphone channel. So that is on us. Because of that, I’ve got a lot of grace here and I’ll just ask, can apply going forward. Yeah, sure. It really was eight accounts for August and September. And our team confirmed like shit, Rob, I’m sorry, we did not notify the team at megaphone that they were inactive. So that that is on us just to be clear. [Michael Houck]: No, dude, no worries. I’ll apply credit for for next month, we can at least get rid of the September charges. And so I’ll bring it down by a bit for October. So we’ll make it right. [Rob Caucci]: All right. So we’ll waive September or we’ll credit September for the eight accounts. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. Yeah. [Rob Caucci]: Okay. I’ll follow up in the email to confirm that last thing podcast. So I’m guessing you’ve got guests lined up already. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. We’ve recorded recorded six episodes and we have six or seven more scheduled for the next couple of weeks, but always looking for more folks, man. It’s just startup founders, ideally venture banks. [Rob Caucci]: Love Love it. It. [Rob Caucci]: If you have any information that you can share, just like, you know, a blurb on like, what the fuck the podcast is all about. [Rob Caucci]: That’s one area of our business that I’m very excited about ties back to the philosophy in the future. We see like this alternative business media category, like podcasts, right? Like fuck, you know, tuning into CNBC and, you know, all day long, like business podcasts, And so we’ve talked to a bunch of our members about like, hey, it’s not what you signed up for with us, but we know a ton of people with podcasts related to your industry, related to the kind of what you’re doing. If we could ever place you as a guest, not looking to charge you for it, we want to prove our ability to do this with our network of friends and partners. Are you open to that? And every single one’s like, hell yeah, dude. Like I actually have an agency retained that I pay month $2,500 to specifically for It’s different from our PR agency and they do an okay job, but the podcasts they get us on are like, you know, two fucking downloads. Nobody even watches them. And so I think, you know, podcast placement for our members, when there’s a good fit with a particular podcast for them to be a guest on it, I think it’s an obvious thing for us to start doing. [Michael Houck]: Cool. Yeah. I mean, I’ll send you a blurb. I’ll send you some info on it. We’re going to push it out in a weekly email to all of our for our newsletter subscribers, so opportunity for, you know, we’ll see when it goes out, but hopefully tens of thousands of folks are gonna check it out. [Michael Houck]: And yeah, would love to have some folks on. I’ll send it to you, you let me know who you think would be a good fit, and we can go from there. [Rob Caucci]: Sounds great. Last quick question, how’s the ghostwriting business doing? Blowing up for you, kind of the same? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, it’s been good. We have a team of five or six writers now. We have 12 active clients. I had sort of like a family crisis for the past like three, four weeks. So I haven’t been focused on growing it, but we got it up to, I think like 11 pretty quickly. And then one person just converted today. So we’ll see. We’re still sort of in that first category you talked about earlier where like, we have, I think one client who sort of brought us deeper into their business, but for everyone else, it’s just like founder brands or personal brands. So main focus has been getting an initial client base, getting a good team of writers together. I also have Blakey Mall helping out as an editor. So yeah, we’ll see. I mean, it’s sort of packaged together with Megaphone. It’s sort of its own thing. It’s hard to, it’s just sort of been this like accidental experiment that’s become a real part of the business. So yeah, we’ll see how it goes. I’m hoping to get it up probably 15, 20 clients before the end of the year. And then we’ll see where it goes from there. Cool, man. [Rob Caucci]: It’s a real opportunity out there. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, for sure, man. [Rob Caucci]: And like I said, anybody that’s not a good fit for us, it maybe is a good fit for you. I think we probably work with similar profiles of people, but like, you know, if there’s a creator type or wannabe creator type, or we’re like, eh, but you know, Hounk might be willing to do this. We’ll send them your way. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, same here, man. If we find anybody who’s looking for sort of a deeper, I’d say deeper partnership than we’re able to provide with the current state of the team and kind of how we’re structured right now, then I’ll totally send them your way for sure. Or anybody outside our ICP who sort of still fits in, like maybe execs who aren’t founders, I would probably send your way as well. Awesome. [Rob Caucci]: Appreciate you, brother. Give me a shout if you see anything, okay? [Michael Houck]: You too.