- Duration: 21 min
- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01J8JJZ7923A2BT5PEGQZWH499 (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01J8JJZ7923A2BT5PEGQZWH499)
Transcript
[Michael Houck]: How are you? [Vidhi Raval]: Good. How are you? I’m okay. [Michael Houck]: I’m getting a little slow, slow day over here today, but not too bad. We’re, uh, we’re launching a podcast on Thursday. So basically just in prep mode for that. [Vidhi Raval]: How about you? Okay, what’s the podcast about is it a part of Megaphone or is it something you’re doing independently? [Michael Houck]: It’s for my newsletter. So it’s It’s basically candid conversations with founders About their journey like their full sort of entrepreneurial Journey, so it’s a Yeah, it’s pretty cool. We’ve done some episodes with some really great people, and we’re excited to get it out there. It’s been in progress for longer than I wanted it to be, but… [Vidhi Raval]: Really? Okay. Looking forward to it. I have the podcast too, so I understand when you’ve been like working at it for a long time and then you just want it out. Yeah. To see how people receive it. [Michael Houck]: Fingers crossed. But how are you? What’s going on? [Vidhi Raval]: I’m good. It’s been a busy morning, super busy morning. So yeah, I’m just been running around and trying to get my head into the correct space for every meeting. So yeah. [Michael Houck]: Cool. We’ll make sure not to take up too much of your time then on a busy day. So yeah, I guess let’s talk content creation. Where are you at? What are your goals? Like, how do you see us fitting in? Just set the landscape for me and then I can I can dive in from there. [Vidhi Raval]: Yeah, sure. I think the last we spoke I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do and where. And I think I kind of figured out the niche. I’m sort of building, still in the ideation and testing phase, but building for South Asian mental health. So wherein we are bringing therapists from countries of origin, so like India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and then hopefully expand it to more immigrants, because there’s a dire need of having culturally relative support and therapy. That’s the aspect that I’m trying to target and build a business out of and which is why I need a lot of thought leadership and personal branding around that space especially to attract the immigrant audiences and initially the South Asian audiences and so far I think I did some effort with the content strategist last year on LinkedIn but I don’t think that went that well because it was more about using my personal pictures on LinkedIn, which I wasn’t really comfortable with most of the times. And I don’t think the content hit the mark, which is why I then stopped putting in effort because I was then figuring out the idea. And I stopped. Yeah, bothering about it altogether, and moved on to the podcast and like video portion of things. So yeah, that is me. [Michael Houck]: I like the idea. I think it’s interesting market because you’re basically taking a similar sort of model that you see with a lot of these companies that are popular right now in other sectors like Athena, Micro One for like engineers, right? Like it’s that same sort of model, but you’re applying it in a way that I think can be a really, really sticky and powerful market. So I think it’s cool. [Vidhi Raval]: Hopefully. [Michael Houck]: Fingers crossed, right? So early. Cool. Okay. A lot of sense to me. I get the concept sort of right away and why that’s important for people. As far as platform, you mentioned LinkedIn, I assume this would still be on LinkedIn, you want the content created for LinkedIn specifically? Are you thinking Twitter, newsletter, or just stay LinkedIn? [Vidhi Raval]: I think LinkedIn and Twitter, mostly, not anything else. I think I write the newsletter by myself at the moment, because there’s a community running. So I don’t something at the moment I need help in that space. [Michael Houck]: Cool. Okay. Sounds good. Um, well, what we’d probably do then is whichever platform you want to focus primarily on between LinkedIn and Twitter, we’d probably initially write the content for that platform and then we could adapt it to the other one fairly, fairly easily. So you’d have consistent content across, uh, across both. Um, as far as how we work, it’s pretty lightweight because you know, everyone we work with is a founder and they’re super busy and you know, like a ton of time for a bunch of meetings with a writer. So basically after this call, I would go and talk with our team, see who has bandwidth and also see who has like knowledge of the space. And then what we’d do is we’d set up a call with them, me and you for either later this week or next week. And we would basically use that as our sort of like call to get context on, go deeper on the specific audience, the type of content you want to put out, what pillars of like topics and things like that you want to specifically talk about. And it would be kind of brainstorming. So you don’t need to have all this kind of ready to go, but the more, the more direction you give us obviously the better, but yeah, we go deep on that there. We’d also ask you for examples of like accounts who have the type of content that you that you want to emulate and also accounts that have the audience that you want. So if we were going to go engage with people’s content on your behalf, we want to know who that is too. And then we’d also get examples of content you don’t like, So we would know what not to. So, yeah, I think that’s always the most fun one, but yeah, so we’d do that. We’d probably spend like somewhere between 30 60 minutes on that. And that would be really the only time of yours that we would ever need. If you wanted to do like content interviews, we could totally do that. Our writers are up for it. It’s just our default is keep it as lightweight for the founders as possible, basically. But yeah, so from there then what we would do is we’d get on a weekly cadence where every Monday we’d send you like a list of a couple topics that we’re thinking about within the space, and also specific questions about those topics where we sort of need your subject matter expertise. And our ask would be that you reply with sort of like a very rambly voice note, just give us like the emotion, the intonation, let it spill out stream of consciousness style. That gives us the best context to write content that is like, could only come from you. Basically. If we get that by Wednesday, then we’ll get the content back to you by Friday. And if you want revisions and things like that, that’s fine. We can totally do that too. We’d build up sort of like an initial buffer where we’d spend a week or two kind of doing initial research and getting a list of topics. And then we’d move to a full weekly delivery cadence from that point on. And that would be in a shared Slack channel. So super like native, don’t need to worry about getting lost anywhere else. We would have a notion board as well, if you wanted to dive in and sort of see the progress of individual pieces and things like that, but most communication will just happen in Slack. And then as far as pricing goes, there’s basically two tiers. So there’s like a light tier and then what we call the full tier. And with both tiers, you actually get a subscription to Megaphone totally for free. So you wouldn’t need to, You still need to pay the creators to amplify the post, but the subscription would go away. And the light tier would be $19.95 a month. And for that, you would get either two long-form, in-depth content pieces per week, or less than two, but with an additional bunch of short-form posts as well. And that would be up to you. You’d tell us what you want us to do on a week-to-week basis. And then with the full tier, go up to three per week, or again, some combination of long and short. So that would be totally up to you. [Vidhi Raval]: Yeah. Got it. OK. I think I have questions around the kind of people you’ve supported so far. Like, have there been, A, any South Asians, and B, audiences that are specific to attracting the immigrant churn wheel? Like at any point? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, so we do work with, I can’t say specific names of course, we would do the same for you. I wouldn’t say that you’re working with us to anybody. We do have one client who also works with that community for one side of their marketplace, let’s say. So similar sort of set up there. And then we also have one other client who specifically has that background, although their company doesn’t like serve that demographic necessarily, but they also have that background. [Vidhi Raval]: Got it. Okay. And then is the research done to like, um, understand. So say, I guess what I understood was that we develop like two or three pillars or topics that we are targeting. And then would there be research and stuff being done around that on like, what can hit this audience perfectly within this topic and nation. What I mean is, you might have already seen him, but I’m writing his name on the chat. I think Didi Das, I think he- Oh, yes, I have seen him. Yeah. So he has a lot of content on Twitter, I think, and then now on LinkedIn. And he really has that army of attracting the immigrant audiences because he talks about, okay, Indian audience, earning this much money, whatever. Or like struggling with deciding between India and here kind of deal. So I think they kind of playing with the notion of attracting the South Asian immigrant audiences and what they want. I think that piece is essential because I think that attracts the crowd in terms of use and engagement. And I’m curious if like you all do the research in that aspect of things as well. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, that’s a big part of what we do. So both in the sort of initial like one to two week period where we’re mostly just focused on research and on topic ideation and things like that, that would be a big thing that we’re doing. But then we’d also be doing it on a week-to-week basis based on the new topics and new ideas that we come up with. So that’s a big part of the writer’s job. And also just one piece of context for you that I like to share is that while I’m not the one who’s going to be personally writing the content for you, I do review everything before it gets sent to you too. So you get that set of eyes. And also we have Blake email, who you might know from Twitter, he’s my partner in the agency. So he’s also part of the editing process again, before we send it to you. So there’s like multiple layers of, of quality check that gets done before before it gets sent to you. [Vidhi Raval]: Okay, nice. Yeah, because I think as far as I understand, talking a lot about tech, I think on Twitter works, because like, that’s just how the how Twitter is made. And I think LinkedIn is kind of similar was sort of different. Which is why I know you can’t talk about the people you support but I think it might just help in the kind of pillars that you all have targeted for me to understand on you know the niches and topics you all are like experts in. [Michael Houck]: Yeah and I think another thing that we would do is we can have someone on our team like an operations person basically go into your account and when you tell us hey you know Didi is one of these guys maybe there’s like three or four other people who you’re like, they have the audience that I want, they talk about the topics that I want, we can engage with their content for you. So that so that their audience gets exposed to you and you know, they’d be like thoughtful or funny, maybe comments on their posts. You’d get some impressions from that and therefore some, you know, some followers from that as well. [Vidhi Raval]: Got it. Okay. And then are there any KPIs and stuff that you will follow like a number of followers that you’ll keep track of over like month over month. And that’s what we go towards or like lead gens and stuff. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, we’ll, we’ll basically work with you on the first call to like to learn like, what is your North Star? Is it leads? Is it just impressions? Is it followers, right? And then that’ll kind of dictate the style of content that we put together and also the frequency that we recommend. So yeah, that’s definitely part of it. And we have like a reporting process well, we’re at the end of each month, we’ll do a check in, I’ll send you a message with like, hey, here’s our updated metrics. And if you want to chat about anything, changing our goals, changing our approach, whatever, you and I can hop on a call at that time, if you’d like, that’s fine. [Vidhi Raval]: Okay, got it. Makes sense. And there’s nothing that you can share about the people you support, I guess. [Michael Houck]: I can’t, unfortunately, but all I would say is that, like, you know, that I put out high quality content, and you know, that Blake puts out high quality content, too. That’s the same, you know, quality of stuff that we’re going to be putting out for you. So we know how to get results and we have to prove it and kind of track record to back it up, but I can’t share specific people just. [Vidhi Raval]: Yeah. Okay. Yeah. I just wanted to understand like how the views and engagement has worked for the people you have worked previously with and like what kind of founders have they been? Because I think here we’re targeting two things, right? Like the founder and who they are and at the same time what they’re building. So kind of combining both those components. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. I mean, we’ve had, talk about one person. We’ve had one person who, you know, they’ve basically used, they’ve turned LinkedIn into their primary growth channel for their business with us. Um, but before they had been doing a lot of cold email, uh, and the content’s just really blown up. So LinkedIn is actually become the number one thing. And we’re actually talking with them right now about expanding not only from their account, but also to their co-founder, uh, and one of their other like higher level employees as well. So, um, Yeah, LinkedIn can work really well if leads is the goal. It can also work well if awareness is the goal, because there’s just like less high quality content on LinkedIn than I think other platforms. So yeah, I think we’re on the same page there. [Vidhi Raval]: Okay, great. Cool. So I guess within the tier plans, the engagement and stuff remains the same? Or like, is there a breakdown between the two if you can like, [Michael Houck]: I mean, more posts is generally going to give on goal which could lead to more results, right? But it’s not, you know, you could do the lighter tier and one post could really blow up and it could be different, right? So we don’t make any like guarantees on that or anything. But what I would say is that in terms of, are you asking about our, us engaging with other people’s content? Ah, okay, okay. Sorry, I misunderstood. Yeah, so we can do that on both tiers. We normally charge an additional fee to do it because there is some some time, but I’d actually be happy to do it just just for you because, you know, because we know each other a bit. So we can just include it. It’s just one of our members who would go in basically after we post the content. They’d stay. They’d stay on the account for like a half hour, 45 minutes and just go engage with some other people’s content as well, as well as the replies to yours. [Vidhi Raval]: Got it. I know we are almost at time, but I just had one question, which is about like, do you all use engagement pods or like that? Or how does the thing work? Like how does it circulate so that we make sure that a number of views and things happening? [Michael Houck]: Yes, so if you want to use megaphone as well, that’s why we give the subscription for free. That’s totally your prerogative. We don’t. Excuse me, we don’t sort of use anything outside of megaphone. So if you want to do that, you’re more than welcome to and there would be no subscription to do it. [Vidhi Raval]: Okay. Got it. Cool. Thanks. This was informative. I will follow up via email, but if there’s anything else I need to know, please do let me know via email if I don’t understand. [Michael Houck]: I think that’s it for now. I’ll follow up later. I have an email that I’ll send you with full breakdown of the pricing just so it’s in front of you and everything. Did you have any other questions, any hesitations, anything we should talk through that would stop you from getting started? [Vidhi Raval]: No, I think I was just curious to understand other profiles, not mainly to know who they are, but just to understand how the engagement pulse and stuff worked before you started with someone and then after they worked with you and what it looked like, like the differences. But I think I’ve gotten some of it from the things that you explained. So yeah, now I just need to sit through and think what and how this will work for me. [Michael Houck]: Cool. Yeah, sounds good. I guess the last thing I would add is that there’s no long term commitment with us. We don’t lock you in. Obviously, we appreciate 30 days notice before you’re going to cancel. But you know, I’m not gonna, I’m not gonna come chasing after you with a with a stick or something. So yeah, it’s month to month. So yeah, sounds good. [Vidhi Raval]: Okay. And oh, yeah. One more question. Have you ever worked with females in this, like to grow their LinkedIn profiles? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, we have a, I won’t say who, but we have a pretty well-known female executive coach who we work with. And her account is specifically speaking to women in leadership roles and who are founders and things like that. And we’ve been able to have a lot of success with her account, so. [Vidhi Raval]: Amazing, okay. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, and we have a couple, if you want, we do have a couple male writers and we have a couple female writers. So if that’s something that matters to you, we can adapt and we can make that happen too. [Vidhi Raval]: Okay. No, I was just talking from the context of like, when we write about mental health stuff, I know the initial audience that we’ll get leads out of is going to be females than males. So within the immigrant population, though, I wouldn’t want to bias that, but that’s something that I feel will be the case, but we’ll see if that turns out to be it or not. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, we’ll do some trial and error. We’ll find out. But yeah, I’ll send you over an email with some context. And we’ll go from there. [Vidhi Raval]: Okay, thank you. [Michael Houck]: Thanks, Biddy. Good to talk.