- Duration: 28 min
- Platform: zoom
- Source: Read.ai 01J99FWQVCFT9YW6RJRXPNA2D3 (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01J99FWQVCFT9YW6RJRXPNA2D3)
Transcript
[Max]: What’s up? Yo, how you doing, man? You’re back on zoom. [Michael Houck]: I don’t know. It’s just auto. When I, when I scheduled the meeting through notion calendar, it adds zoom automatically. We use zoom for the case study. So I pay for it anyway. [Max]: Oh, gosh. [Michael Houck]: Let’s see. How are you doing? You got your flight in like what, like a couple hours? [Max]: Yeah, I gotta leave at like 1230. So I’m kind of all packed. [Michael Houck]: But yeah. Cool. Well, we can be I think we talked about this a bit on Slack, at least for the first part. So I won’t take too, too long. But okay, let’s see. Viral examples already up to 35% open rate today. It’s a real newsletter. Okay, so two things we’re gonna talk about. One is SEO stuff, I’ll talk about that second. And first is more stuff about the positioning for founding journey, right? All right, let me go to, let me open up my chat with Matt too, because he sent something over this morning, I haven’t had a chance to reply Okay, so one thing he’s recommending that we haven’t talked about is doing webinars to sell it to people. What are your thoughts? [Max]: My first thought is nobody likes webinars. Webinars suck. What is a webinar? A virtual talk? Like, what’s the difference? [Michael Houck]: Well, I mean, the difference is that it’s a sales pitch, right? Like, if you’re just doing like some kind of talk, yes. A webinar is like high energy, it’s highly produced, and scripted and structured. And the goal is to like, have people hit sales points at various parts of the talk. I saw for the first time I saw someone do a one of these live was this guy, Nathan Latka, who was like at our LA house for launch house for a bit. And his energy during it was crazy and he got tons of results from it. So that’s what I, that’s like, yeah, that’s what I thought. [Max]: So the webinar is free for everyone and the goal is to sell. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. Basically on the sales page, what Matt is proposing is, have like a base price of $19.99, and then we'd say, 500 off, do this webinar to learn more. And we'd cap it at like 10 20 and then rinse and repeat, basically. [Michael Houck]: So, I don't know, there's a lot of work that we need to do to plan one of those out. [Max]: Well yeah, what's the content of the webinar? Is it just you talking about raising money? [Michael Houck]: Yes, that's pretty much it. It's me talking about raising money and how the things we offer help people with that, with screen sharing at various points, me being face-to-face with people at various points, and just continuing to remind people that, hey, there's this deal. Maybe we've even thrown a bigger deal during the webinar I don't know. [Michael Houck]: But yeah, that's what would be like a sales meeting. Essentially, yeah. [Max]: I'm not completely sold on that, but I mean, yeah. [Michael Houck]: But that's what he's proposing, so I gotta talk more about it with him and like understand why. He thinks that is so good. He also sent over some slides that he put together about like how to do a good. Webinar. Um, well, this like sample webinar in here is like two and a half hours long. That's crazy. Um, I don't know if I could do a talk for two and a half hours on how to fundraise. I mean, I could, but it might be boring. I don't know. [Max]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: Um, but okay. So I'll come back to his stuff, but as far as we were talking about, um, where's our chat? [Max]: Yeah. Everything in there that we have right now. We could bundle for Because what I realized after you sent that list of things we have right now is we have a ton of stuff, but it's all kind of disorganized. Like, yeah, it's like, OK, we have a valuation course. That's what, 200 bucks or something? Or was it 150? [Michael Houck]: I think. Yeah. [Max]: And then, OK, now we got these case studies. We have this random pitch deck database that we kind of just use for League Magnet reasons. And so we've got all this stuff and it's not all organized into one piece. And if we organized it all into one piece and packaged it, we could sell it for way more than each individual one we're selling at right now. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. I mean, we include the fundraising course as it is in the offer, but I hadn't been thinking about the lead magnets as I don't know, incredibly valuable, unique pieces. But when you kind of position them all together, it does sort of add the add the value. [Max]: Oh, this is a lot of stuff. No wonder it's 1500 bucks. It's got to be worth it. [Michael Houck]: Well, I mean, not just that, but it's like, oh, like an investor database and a pitch deck database like that stuff actually is valuable, you know? Yeah. [Max]: And is that database is the investor database updated? Like are the emails for all these investors? Validated. [Michael Houck]: We they were validated when we created it. We haven't kept it up to date, so there's probably a piece of this project which is have arena go through and like re update this, you know. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, so I probably have heard do that. [Michael Houck]: I guess the the thing I'm thinking like is there a blind spot like when you're fundraising? What do you need? You need connections to people. You need a good deck, you need a good pitch, like you need to practice your pitch sort of, objection handling. Objection handling. And what else do you need? You need like some way to track like an investor's CRM or something like that. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I mean, that's that's really it. You need to be good at the pitch. You need to have your. Maybe there's something around like how to position your product within the pitch. [Max]: Yeah, although I think what we have right now is enough to charge $1500. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: OK. [Michael Houck]: Interesting. Do you not think I don’t necessarily disagree with you. I just, uh, I think I’m, I think I have a little bit of like blowback shock from, okay, well we’re not selling it at 200 at the volume we want. So I understand we obviously changed the positioning and it come across a lot better, but right. [Max]: But you still think we might need to add stuff. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: I don’t know. Like I could be, I could be wrong. Um, especially if we throw in an advising call, like I think it, it can get there. Um, yeah. Yeah, but I just wanna make sure that we’re like, oh, I don’t want it to feel like it’s worth 1,500. I want it to feel like it’s worth like 3,000, and we’re giving it to 14. You know? Yeah, yeah, no, I know. [Max]: Yeah, I definitely think the advising call is good, because that personalizes it, it makes you meet these people, and puts a face to the whole sales page, and like, Yeah, makes it so they know who’s behind all this. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, so okay, I think there’s probably various work that we need to do on the sales page, on arena going through the investor database, and then on the funnel and the flow too. When you sign up, now you get access to all this stuff. We have to make sure that that isn’t totally overwhelming for people so they actually get value from everything. But I would say that let’s set a goal to get this in a place where we’re ready to launch it again. Not ready to launch it again, but ready to take it live again by the end of this month. So this will be a big thing for us this month. You in on a lot of this stuff individually. And we’ll go from there. OK. But I think we have a good list now of like what we need to do. [Max]: Yeah, I don’t know what else there is to add. [Max]: That that won’t come off as like gatekeeping fundraising help like you had mentioned. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I think it’s a pretty comprehensive list. I’m gonna spend a little bit of time just making sure there’s no other inventive but easy thing that we could put together this month, but I think this is a pretty good list overall. The one obvious thing that I think is pretty simple is an investor CRM template that’s maybe a little bit more useful than a Google Sheet. [Max]: Yeah, like an Airtable base that’s organized that they can duplicate and use Exactly, exactly. [Michael Houck]: And then yeah, I think about like, Other parts of Pitching. That maybe we haven’t covered explicitly enough that we have a course on valuation. Maybe we need a micro course on objection handling or something like that, you know? I don’t know, yeah. OK. Man, I’m a little under the weather. So that’s that. I’ll tag you in on stuff probably before the end of the week to get started on for that. And then for the SEO stuff, let me go back to what I shared with you on that. [Michael Houck]: Wow, where was that? [Michael Houck]: No way, it was this long ago. Oh, there it is, okay. [Michael Houck]: So we have options right now. I guess the first way to think about this is that we have the option to do SEO for Megaphone and or for founding journey, right? And within that, we have options of who to work with. So we could do it ourselves. We could like learn how to do it ourselves and do it. I’m sure that there’s free resources online that we can get. There’s, Tebow has a new SEO thing that he’s doing. [Michael Houck]: And I think for Megaphone, I have some interest in him because he’s done SEO really well in this particular space before with like social media growth tools, right? So that’s like niche expertise for like what keywords to target and how to position the articles. And there are processes that AI generate articles, edited by humans that he guides. So I’m gonna have Mahul do some like page speed stuff too on Megaphone. But the other option is that Sam Thompson’s agency, they’re creating articles for us right now for Megaphone. The articles seem fine. They’ve offered- I don’t know how to look at SEO traffic. Is it just Google Analytics I just go into or? Okay, let me open it up then. I don’t pay enough attention to this. [Michael Houck]: Megaphone, here we go. [Michael Houck]: How do I expand the time per minute? [Michael Houck]: That Google Analytics is so weird. Oh, here we go, okay. Let’s see, this calendar year, January to today. Okay, so they started in like the very beginning of May, basically. And since then, they got an initial bump but our overall traffic has been flat since then. Not bad. [Max]: Yeah, I mean that’s four or five months now. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Max]: So we should be seeing traffic. [Michael Houck]: Well, you gotta remember, we’re not adding any backlinks, so there’s no authority being added to our site. True. Even though the landing page was disconnected from how slow the dashboard was, the landing page itself is not SEO. Optimized, there’s no like hierarchical pages of products and features and things like that. [Max]: Okay. [Michael Houck]: It’s not, it’s not an SEO optimized site at all. We’re just like sort of doing the upfront work of, of putting some articles on it. But yeah, I agree. We’re not seeing any, any growth from it whatsoever. Um, yeah. User activity over time. [Michael Houck]: Can I see like where they come from like what they’re searching for? Yeah, it looks like most of the views like the vast majority of the views are just coming from Like megaphones. Like The homepage people just find the homepage. The actual views on the content itself seem pretty low. [Michael Houck]: So yeah, not. Great results so far. [Max]: Yeah. I mean, I would, I would say if we’re choosing between doing SEO, a megaphone or the newsletter, we do megaphone. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. I think so too. Um, yeah, I think that the thing, the reason I’m thinking about it for the newsletter, it’s more so for the, um, the sales Right, not like we want to get subscribers for the newsletter this way. [Michael Houck]: So like keywords about like you know how to fundraise or something like that, right? But And we do have a lot more backlinks pointed to the newsletter then. Then megaphone. But I think in terms of like, I don’t know. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I think about it for both, but I don’t know if we have the budget for both. If we also want to do paid growth experiments and stuff, so might make sense to do megaphone. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: Organic Google search clicks. Here we go. Let’s see from January to today. Most people. Search for megaphone network. Other people search for megaphone hulk. [Max]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: People search for megaphone, Twitter, and LinkedIn. And then it sort of goes down from, from there. Um, in terms of lead sources, uh, my newsletter, Twitter, Google are top three. And then from there viral examples, there it is. LinkedIn. And then. What’s the name? Mark Mark lose ranking site as well. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. OK. So as far as like what we need to do. We need. We need to build out the site like I need to have a whole basically to spend a month on SEO essentially and just build out all the pages and we write the copy for the pages and, excuse me, and just make the site like attractive to Google. [Michael Houck]: I guess like, do you know how to do like programmatic page creation and stuff? [Max]: Kind of, but not really. I’ve done SEO before. I worked for an e-commerce company, and so I did SEO with them. [Max]: But I don’t know if I, I’m not an expert on it. [Michael Houck]: Do you think? Us to pay like a Tebow to do this. And he charged like, let me see what he charged. He texted it to me. [Michael Houck]: Okay. So he would charge for 15 articles a month, he would charge $1,100 a month. And he says that that should increase non-branded search traffic by a minimum of 25% over half a year or 30 articles a month for month $1,600 with a minimum increase of 25% over 90 days. [Max]: I think that’s a really good offer. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. You think that’s good? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Max]: Yeah. Because a lot of these SEO agencies will charge you $5,000 month. Yeah. So month for 30 articles If we're getting an article a day up there and we do that for six months, we'll be in a much better, yeah, and that won't cost that much. I think it's definitely, that's the move. [Michael Houck]: But we also have to pay for backlinks too, right? So that's like additional cost. [Max]: Yeah, good point. [Michael Houck]: How much is it for, because I've talked to SEO agencies before and the one we were using, CapConvert, they were charging us, I want to say $3,700 a month for, I think it was like 10 articles and 10 backlinks or something. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: I don’t know. So like the articles obviously were more expensive with that, but I don’t know how much of that comes from the backlinks, you know? [Max]: Yeah. And they were just buying the backlinks and upcharging us. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. Yeah. The agency, Sam Thompson agency, they sent us a proposal. Let me see if I can find it. Yeah, here it is. They sent us a proposal for backlink building at the end of August. And they said they would put the backlinks around five keywords, all of which are like around increasing your audience and followers on LinkedIn. [Max]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: And for each one, they get a couple links. Like specifically targeted that keyword. And, you know, they shared how much traffic those searches get and the all in sort of cost, each one would range from 300 bucks to 1300 bucks. [Michael Houck]: So there’s that. So if we did all those at once, it would be like one, two, three, like three 3.5k yeah per month and that would no just this is a one-time thing and that would be oh that would be uh 24 [Max]: links for the 3k so approximately like 100 to 120 per link basically yeah yeah I I think that’s a good plan have tebow do the right and then buy the backlinks. [Michael Houck]: We’d need to look at like, you know, are these the right backlinks for us to target? Like we need high intent searches from them. Yeah. Like for example, on here on this list are how to increase LinkedIn followers where traffic is really low, but obviously that’s super high intent for what they provide. But then we have like LinkedIn marketing services, which is, more traffic, but maybe not as specific as we want it to be. [Michael Houck]: So maybe we pick and choose a little bit. [Michael Houck]: But yeah, okay, so this is not, this isn’t something where you’d want to sort of like, yeah, obviously buying the backlinks, we have to kind of go through people who know. [Max]: Yeah. Yeah, I think it would be better if we do it with TiVo than Okay, I will confirm that with him. [Michael Houck]: We’ll do it for Megaphone. [Michael Houck]: And if it goes well, we can try to replicate it down the line with founding journey. [Max]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: Okay, so we’re gonna do SEO for Megaphone, all in cost probably be between the 1600 like, maybe set a budget at 3000. So you have some for backlinks. [Michael Houck]: Okay. And then I’ll have Mahul do the site speed stuff. Because site speed is actually the number one. And site hierarchy and stuff are the number one. [Max]: Yeah, it’s really important too. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. Okay. So I’ll get him on that probably later this month. Because he’s got to finish up some new features first. But I think overall that sounds like a decent plan. [Max]: Yeah, I agree. [Michael Houck]: Okay. [Michael Houck]: Cool. Well, enjoy. You’re in Florida, right? [Max]: Yeah. Yeah, Naples. I’ll be available. I’m gonna work a little tomorrow, I think. So yeah, I’ll be available for the most part. [Michael Houck]: Okay, cool. Sounds good. Well, I’ll loop you in. Probably by end of day tomorrow. If not, I’ll just send you some messages over the weekend about the next steps for the founding journey step. We’ll get started on that.