- Duration: 22 min
- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01J8JH45ZJEY9M7M600TV6X1EW (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01J8JH45ZJEY9M7M600TV6X1EW)
Transcript
[Josh Arnold]: and just another busy day of working with LLMs and building new products for my main client. [Michael Houck]: How are you? I’m in New York right now, where I am most of the time. And Puerto Rico sounds pretty nice. It’s a gloomy, cloudy day over here. [Josh Arnold]: Yeah, it’s typically pretty good this time of year, other than the hurricanes that sweep through. We’ve been pretty lucky this time, but it just depends on the time of year. And of course, there’s power issues here, right? So you have even a small storm comes through, power goes out, and I’m currently in a place without a generator or water cistern. So it ends up being a hotel party for a little while when that happens. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, you’re at the mercy of the winds, basically, and the rain. Exactly. Exactly. Well, cool, man. Yeah, I’m going to be thinking about that now the rest of the day, getting down in Puerto Rico. Sounds nice. [Josh Arnold]: I always got a second bedroom. I tell anyone and everyone, I try to encourage people to come down here. So truly, and I’m pretty flexible. It’s always open. [Michael Houck]: I will definitely let you know. That’d be cool. But on the topic of ghostwriting, let me know sort of like what you’re thinking, where you’re at, what your goals are, just so I have some context and we can. Yeah, definitely. [Josh Arnold]: Well, you know, again, first, I’m glad you reached out to me and I read your newsletter religiously. I keep up with so many newsletters and but it’s one of the ones that I almost always click through most of the links because they’re, you know, typically high value links and that makes a big difference for me. Um, but yeah, so I, I do currently I have a consulting practice focusing on AI LM type stuff and, uh, been doing that type of stuff since probably 2017, 2016 on and off. Um, and I’m in the midst of spinning up a startup associated with one of my clients and it’s related to LLMs basically within construction, legal plus financial type stuff. And so it’s pretty early on that part, but I mean, my typical work week is just slammed all the time. I’m working crazy hours and that’s, you know, not even considering on top of that, trying to get this other stuff going. And so, I mean, I’ve never been a big poster, but it’s been a goal of mine, but it’s just always been one of those things I pushed off. I know that there’s a lot of value that can come from it, not only just from building an online brand, but the secondary and tertiary effects that can come from that. But again, it’s been something that I’ve never personally put effort into. That’s something I’d like to start to do. I have a Twitter. I started posting some stuff. I haven’t used it for years. And anyone who has been following me is basically, I mean, there’s a few people that are active, but currently it’s, you know, people probably from like 2012 that seems like pretty much don’t use their accounts when I see currently like engagement and there’s just no engagement. Um, and that’s, that’s fine. I know that you have to kind of work your way to that point. Some of that sort of building things through being, you know, I hate the term. I don’t hate the term. I sort of hate the concept of it too. Guy you know that kind of thing and I know some of that can kind of spin up over time also people you know you know IRL that kind of stuff can help right but you know I know it’s a slow sort of snowball to get to a place where you actually have any traction to build up engagement and so I can put my some of my time into doing that but currently you know just from my availability it’s just so low so it’s definitely something that I’ve thought about of like Trying to have at least some sort of supplementary help to get some some of that going so I can stay Focused on the things that are you [Michael Houck]: know core to what I’m doing that have the most sort of potential ROI in my life Yeah, I mean I like to tell people that you know Doing content and like actually investing in an audience and a personal brand and all that excuse me Actually doing that it’s like another job at least a part-time job sometimes even a full-time job right and it’s just like You know, I know from when I was building a venture-backed company, and then even now when I’m building sort of my holding company, it’s hard to find time to do it yourself. It just is, especially consistently, and especially if you don’t already sort of have that muscle trained and built for yourself. So that makes total sense. You mentioned Twitter. Is that the main focus, or do you see clients coming in from LinkedIn? And is the goal actually to get more clients, or what is sort of your? Great question. [Josh Arnold]: So at the moment, I’ve focused, I mean, at the moment, meaning like the last week, just starting on this, but just thinking about Twitter as the main focus. So I think there’s some sort of internal, mental, emotional type hurdles that I need to overcome for something like LinkedIn. From a client standpoint, I think that more likely than not, if the focus remains construction, uh in the future Probably more leads would be a linkedin type thing. Um, I just personally Despise linkedin. I think it’s just assessable and the idea of building a presence there makes me want to like Vomit a little bit, but I it’s something that I’m definitely open to If it makes sense to me at some point, I think initially just sort of as i’ve been kind of creeping out Into the world again with some sort of social presence that I mean, I don’t even use instagram. I mean, I don’t I I just Stay away from it all facebook. I’ve just It’s dropped it all only thing I keep up with from a social media standpoint is is twitter x and so that’s been where i’ve started first So I understand linkedin may be a client side type thing Especially like within that space. There’s a lot more. It’s a more older demographic. They’re definitely not people who are you know following twitter every day But I think from thinking about potentially where this stuff may go, I say startup, but there’s a chance that it may be something that can be sort of bootstrapped. But where I imagine potentially the most value coming from Twitter is either potential venture investment at some point, if that becomes requirement. And another, if, for example, the path that I’m considering from a startup standpoint isn’t really the path I want to explore. Or it just doesn’t work out, continuing, growing potential other consulting engagements, if and when I get time to do them, because I’m just fully booked to one client right now. That potentially could be another path for me to get some value from it. [Michael Houck]: Cool. That’s a really helpful context. Thank you for being so thorough there. Basically, we’ll save the vomit for the future. Now we’ll focus on Twitter. [Josh Arnold]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: Okay, fair enough. So, yeah, I mean, like, are you looking to, I guess, like, would you be looking to get started soon? Is this, like, an immediate thing? Is this, like, down the line? Like, where are you at in your journey? And then I can kind of share some context on here are options and what we would, what we do to get started. [Josh Arnold]: I think it’s possibly soon. It’s going to, I think some of it, you know, of course, like, can only is going to depend on, like, pricing, and also sort of some of that comes into play with like just as I’m, there’s some milestones to my current client that once they hit, they add a lot more than my hourly rate. And so once that comes in to me, I sort of feel like, oh, maybe I can start investing some of that. But yeah, so it’s a big, it depends type answer for that, I think. [Michael Houck]: Cool, that’s fine. We have capacity on the team and we’re, you know, our team is growing too. So if it’s now, great, we’re ready to go. If it’s later, that’s fine too. As far as how we work, it’s pretty simple. Everyone that we work with is like you. They’re building their own businesses, they’re super busy, they don’t have a ton of time to sit down with a writer for four hours every week to download their entire brain. So our process is pretty lightweight. What we do is, I will do one kickoff call. That’ll be probably like 30 to 45 minutes most of the time. Sometimes it goes to 60, but usually That’ll be me, you, and the writer on my team who we match you up with. And we would basically just use that to go deep on the audience you want to target, who they are, what you want them to do, what voice you want. So we’ll look at some accounts that you like the content of and some that you don’t. And we’ll get a sense of like, all right, this is what we want to do here. And we’ll also identify some accounts who have the audience you want in terms of how we can engage with those accounts for you, being a reply guy, but maybe you don’t necessarily have to do it yourself. So yeah, we’d go through that on that call. And as far as who the writer would be, this would be somebody who I match you up with. They’d be your primary point of contact, but I’m going to be sort of involved in the weeds on everything. Um, we’re still a small shop, so I still work with every single client myself. Um, and then we also have Blake email. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen him on Twitter or LinkedIn. Uh, he’s my partner in the agency, so he actually, uh, helps out on making sure all the content is up to, you know, the quality that he and I would expect. Um, I also take a look and review the content, uh, but he sort of manages the writing team is the way I like to put it. Um, and so, um, yeah, it goes past all three of us before it gets sent back to you. And on a weekly basis, then there wouldn’t need to be a call. If you wanted to do a weekly or biweekly content interview, we could totally set that up, but it’s totally your choice. Basically on Monday, we would send you in a shared Slack channel, a list of a few topics we’re thinking about for the week and specific questions about those topics that we, your kind of subject matter expertise on. And then our ask to you would be to reply those in a rambly voice note where you just give us all the context, the intonation, the emotion, anything that comes to mind. And from there, if we get those by Wednesday, then you’ll get the content back by Friday. And if you want any reviews or any revisions on the draft, that’s fine. We’re happy to do that as well. So pretty lightweight. We’ll have a notion board set up where all the content and ideas for future content will be tracked as well. And then if you wanted us to go in and take over scheduling and posting and also replying to those other accounts in your niche, we can talk about that as well. [Josh Arnold]: Got it. Cool. [Michael Houck]: On the pricing side, there’s two tiers. So there’s like a light tier and then like what we call the full tier. The light tier is $19.95 a month. And for that, you're going to get either two like long form threads per week. Or you're gonna get like zero or one long form thread a week with a few short form posts in there as well. And that depends on you. If you say, I want a daily post, that's great, we can make that happen. If you say, I want a couple kind of more impactful posts per week, we can do that too. And if we go up to the full tier, that would be 29.95. And that's for three threads per week, or again, some combination of threads and shorter form. So that's totally up to you. And we'd probably experiment from there. [Josh Arnold]: How does your work here integrate with Megaphone? So I haven't explored Megaphone too deep. But in terms of actually amplifying, for example, if today I started, I mean, maybe the algorithm is finicky with this stuff. I don't know really how it works so well. But if I were to post a super insightful, interesting thread, I would bet it gets to nobody. And maybe within a couple months, that changes. But the other path I thought about is like, well, you know, maybe for a while I start with megaphone and then I sort of expand from, from there, um, into something that's a bit more structured as you're suggesting here now. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. So interesting. You bring up megaphone. So the agency actually started as a result of megaphone cause we were kind of distributing all these people's content and they were like, well, do you just want to write the content for us? That's how it started. But yeah, if you are a client of the agency, if we're writing content for you, then you would not have to pay any megaphone subscription. It would just be free. Otherwise, it's $89 month or month, $49 depending on if you want your content sent to creators instantly, or if you're sort of okay with a one hour delay. One hour delay is not gonna be the difference between making a break and post, but it will have an impact on impressions. And so you'd still need to spend on actually the creators either way, all the money you just kind of spend goes right to them. But that's, yeah, that's it. So you could use Megaphone either way, but you wouldn't have to pay the subscription for it if we're creating content for you as well. [Josh Arnold]: Got it. And so in the content creation, there's still the content, like in terms of paying distribution through Megaphone, supplementary. Is that right? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, we, I mean, we have to pay the creators based on whatever volume you want to basically. So yeah, that's, that's an additional thing. [Josh Arnold]: Okay. And how, like, can you give me a sense of like, you know, it's hard to tell from at least from external to sign pre signing up to make a phone, like what sort of costs are involved in terms of the distribution there? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, a good way to think about it is that for every 100,000 followers a creator has, they tend to increase the cost cost of a comment by about $10. So someone with 250 would probably charge around $25 for a comment. And then things like reposts and quotes tend to vary more because different creators like them or don’t like them. Uh, I generally recommend comments as the primary engagement like choice, uh, because they’ve actually become a lot more impactful, but they’re still priced lower than, um, than reposts. [Josh Arnold]: Okay. Here’s what I’m thinking. Um, what I think I’ll try to start with is I’m going to sign up for megaphone. I’m going to spend a month playing around with distribution there a bit. I like to, in a month revisit this and I like probably like 90% there in terms of going to like trying out the basic plan and see how that, that goes. But I just want to explore a little bit on my own first to better understand how to, to, to make all this work, it would just be helpful for me to understand that personally is like a skill to acquire. And then when I actually, you know, I mean, it’s something I can’t devote time to on a monthly basis, I just spend this month to do it. And then moving forward, I’m going to set a reminder for 30 days from now, I’m going to follow up with you. And like I said, I’m like 90% there that will give the basic plan a shot. [Michael Houck]: Cool. I think that’s a really smart strategy. I think you’ll be to sort of A, understand what goes into it on the back end on our side more that way, but B, the feedback you’ll be able to give, I think will have more of your personality and opinions in it because you’ll have seen, oh, here’s what I feel good about putting out already in that first month. So I think that’s really smart. [Josh Arnold]: Okay, cool. All right, well, I will sign up today. And like I said, I’ll follow up with you in 30 days, but appreciate you taking the time to walk me through this. Sounds great. I mean, I think by the way, I think what you guys are doing is really smart, there’s not really a lot of this stuff is like very hard to find out that like the stuff that’s out there, a either seems like, at least from like a marketing standpoint doesn’t seem very well put together. It seems very scammy almost. I think you’ve done a really nice job with the megaphone site. And, and it conveys a bit more, a lot more trust than anything else out there I’ve seen. And, and I think as you expand this part of the business, there should be a lot of people interested in personally. [Michael Houck]: So thanks, man. Yeah, the, um, I appreciate that. We, we definitely building the trust with our users, super, super important. Um, we are actually launching an entirely new dashboard, uh, hopefully tomorrow might be Thursday, but, um, so when you log in, you’ll see an entirely new product basically in about 24 hours. [Josh Arnold]: Well, we’ll not go too deep. Deep today in terms of trying to understand how it works then. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. But no, excited for you to try it out. And yeah, let’s touch base in sometime in late October and we’ll go from there. [Josh Arnold]: Perfect. Yeah. Thank you, Michael. We’ll talk to you soon. [Michael Houck]: Talk soon, Josh. See ya. Bye.