- Duration: 55 min
- Platform: zoom
- Source: Read.ai 01J9KGSPEJHMNXS622GSMYDKSV (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01J9KGSPEJHMNXS622GSMYDKSV)
Transcript
[Sarah Allali]: Hello, Michael. Can you hear me? [Michael Houck]: Sarah, how are you doing? Good morning. [Sarah Allali]: Good morning to you. I’m fine and you? [Michael Houck]: I’m good. Is it morning for you or where are you right now? [Sarah Allali]: It’s the afternoon. I had to come back to Paris for like a week. [Michael Houck]: I was confused when you booked the 9 a.m. Slot because you were NSF. I’m like, that’s weird. It’s 6 a.m. There’s no way. [Sarah Allali]: Yeah, I know. I wouldn’t do the call at 6 a.m. Definitely not. But yeah, I’m going back to SF in a week. And yeah, I have to come back here. I have to do a demo, basically, at StationWave in Paris. It was terrible. I shouldn’t have made the whole trip for that, but yeah, that’s done. [Michael Houck]: All good. No, I’m glad we’re able to find a time that works. Looks like Romesh is here, too, which is great. [Sarah Allali]: Hi, Romesh. Can you hear us? [Romesh khatri]: Hello, yeah. Can you guys hear me? [Sarah Allali]: Hello. Yeah, I can hear you. [Romesh khatri]: Yeah, perfect, perfect. [Sarah Allali]: Great to meet you. What time is it? 3 p.m. For me. I’m in Paris right now. [Romesh khatri]: Okay, it’s 7. Almost. [Sarah Allali]: Oh, where are you? I’m in India. You’re in India. Okay. Come on. I put like 10,000 different time zones. [Sarah Allali]: We’re both here to manage. Now that I know that, we’ll adapt. [Michael Houck]: We’re spread all over the world right now, for sure. [Sarah Allali]: Yeah, I can see that. [Michael Houck]: Well, cool. Okay, I guess I’ll maybe toss it to you guys just to do intros with each other, and then we can dive in, and Sarah, I’ll walk you through sort of what we do with new people when we’re bringing them on as clients. Basically, what the outcomes of this call will be, are hearing that explicitly from you and kind of taking notes on it about our audience, content pillars, posting cadence, and sort of our process and next steps to go to make sure that’s clear. And then we have the AI note taker in here. So it’ll be taking notes along with us. And we’ll share this in a Notion doc with you probably either later today. Our Slack channel or at the latest by tomorrow. [Sarah Allali]: Okay, perfect. Sounds good for me. [Romesh khatri]: I actually wanted to ask Sarah. I was doing some research on your competitors and I came across this company called Athena Go. Do you know them? [Sarah Allali]: Athena? The one who are providing like executive assistants, right? [Romesh khatri]: Yeah, yeah. Would you consider them your competitors? Because currently what you’re doing limited to Gmail and stuff. [Sarah Allali]: Yeah, you can consider them as or a competitor, except that they are providing human executive assistance, basically, and we are building a software. But yeah, usually, if you hire someone from Athena, you don’t use or tool. [Romesh khatri]: Yeah, but when it comes to content, we will do something similar to that. [Sarah Allali]: Um, yeah, we have at the end, a little bit of a different approach for several aspects. So the first one is they provide human, we don’t, which is like, at the end, a bit of difference. Secondly, usually when you hire human executive assistants, you hire them, like 80% of the time to help you manage calendar, email, etc. But also like to do a lot of other extra tasks that we don’t provide. At all right now. So yeah, we provide the email processing aspects of the human executable system if you want. And the very foundational basic processing right now. Yeah, so yeah, it’s a little bit of a different thing. [Romesh khatri]: Okay, yeah, that’s all I wanted to say. [Sarah Allali]: Of course. Cool, okay. [Michael Houck]: Well, I guess, yeah, Sarah, do you wanna share maybe a little bit at just high level on your background and how the company got started and all that with Romesh, and then I can dive into some of our questions. [Sarah Allali]: Yeah, of course. So I am the co-founder and CEO of Flood. Before building this company, I had a background in neuroscience and human and computer interaction. I published research papers mainly at the crossroads of AI and user cognition, so how we can build AI product adapted to each user or come to functioning instead of like doing a one size fits all. I worked at Airbnb for like three, four years, something like that. I built the first AI company in 2018, end of 2018, early 2019. And at that time, we built an AI agent for managers so they can understand their employees needs and we generated action plans, etc. So yeah, we did this for a few years. Didn’t work the way we expected. At the time, we had like three pretty decent customers like Amazon Comcast and things like that. But once we transitioned basically from the team to the company level, they needed like tools and resources that we didn’t provide it. So we stopped working on this. And then in 2022, if I remember, we started thinking about building flood. So we had 10,000 different versions of the product. And I think, Michael, when we met, we even did something totally different. We analyzed, I think, social media DMs at that time. So yeah, we did a lot of testing. We knew that we wanted to do something that is as autonomous and as personalized to the user as what we did for the first company that we had. But we didn’t know exactly the approach. And the more we tested the product, the more we just basically ended up with what we have right now, which is an AI executive assistant that processes your email for you. So the technical thing behind, we are building an AI agent, no chatbot, no code set up to set up your assistant. We really have like a whole processing when you sign up that try to understand how you process your email and mimic this. So it comes with a lot of errors that we are trying to fix. But right now we think that we have something that is pretty decent. And that’s the reason why also I wanted to work with all of you so we can start doing something a little bit more structured regarding the content, especially on Twitter and potentially on LinkedIn a little bit later. So yeah, basically this is what’s happening. The company is a company of two people, Michael Thunder and Nicholas building everything. It’s still a company. [Michael Houck]: It’s a small burn rate, right? [Sarah Allali]: Yes, a small burn rate. That said, we are doing a lot of experimentation on the AI side, and we are burning way too much on the technical aspect of the product. But yeah, this is what you need to do to figure out when you will scale wins. So yeah, small companies, we raised the pre-seed rounds early earlier this year with really nice investors like Bettaworks and Mozilla Ventures, Differential, et cetera. So we really started doing something pretty cool. We’ll potentially raise at the end of the year or early next year. Still don’t know what will happen. I’m trying to see at the end of the month several conversations that I have. And potentially at that time, we will expand a little bit more the team. But yeah, in the meantime, the goal for us is We know who we target. We have pretty decent traction conversion rate between waitlist, user, signups, paying customers, et cetera. And the goal is really kind of to replicate this with a good engaging social media content. So yeah, this is what I can say. [Romesh khatri]: And by the way, do you plan to expand beyond just email? [Sarah Allali]: Yes, at one point we will. Yeah, we will. We are starting with email, basically, because this is kind of the center of the work. And we nail the processing for the email. Then we’ll push even more of the processing with a lot of anticipation from the assistant. We will add other integration to all of your other work tools, like your CRM, for example, if you need to transfer information, et cetera. And then we’ll expand to other social media DMs. And things like that. Going back to the step number one. [Michael Houck]: Basically. Full circle. I can’t. [Sarah Allali]: Bye. But yeah. [Michael Houck]: Cool. I’ll give Romesh a second to introduce himself. But just so you know, Romesh and I, we got connected a while ago. He’s our, in my opinion, our best writer for X, especially at Threads. He’s very, very good at Viral Threads. So I think if that’s something we want to include in our mix, he’s definitely the guy to help out with that. So yeah, I think it’ll be a good match. He’s done some writing for some of our more technical clients and AI stuff. So I think that there’s some good overlap there. [Sarah Allali]: Yeah, perfect. [Romesh khatri]: I have actually written for the founder of Athena. That’s why I have that. You know the founder of Athena? Uh-huh, that’s an interesting one. I have written great stuff. [Sarah Allali]: Okay, so you know a little bit of space then. [Romesh khatri]: Yeah, I do. Perfect. Perfect. Good, good. [Sarah Allali]: This is really good to know. [Michael Houck]: Okay, so I guess let’s let’s dive in. We got a decent amount of question to get through. I don’t think it’ll take the full the full hour but we’d like to give it the hour just in just in case I think probably more like 3045 but we’ll see. We’ll see. Let’s do that. Okay, so let me share my screen. Let me do that, there we go. Where is Notion? Oh, there it is, okay. Okay, cool. Okay, so first thing is, I’ll add the recording to this call in here, so we can always look back on it, and Romesh, you’ll have it there too. Main outcomes for this meeting, just to make sure that we’re on the same page about goals, that we know who the exact audience that we’re gonna write for is. So I’m gonna push you to be as specific as possible on that. Any content pillars that we wanna focus on, we’ll get those down and then we’ll have a set of clear posting schedule and sort of process from the same page and talk about next steps. Most of the next steps we already shared in that Slack message about like, oh, some documents and things like that, but we’ll go. So as far as goals, as plainly as it can be, and you sort of alluded to this already, but what’s the number one reason that you wanna create content in general for yourself? [Sarah Allali]: So number one, I would say leads, getting leads, like for the, yeah, the committee. [Michael Houck]: Got it, okay, makes sense. So it’s specifically about building up the funnel getting folks in, because you guys said you have the funnel conversion rates in a pretty good spot, so just juicing that as much as possible. [Sarah Allali]: Yes, exactly. Basically having people getting to know us. Typically, I see, so I’m not spending hours and hours on Twitter, so take this into account, but I really, really often see people saying that, oh, is anyone building a tool to help me do this, or is anyone building, a tool to like process my emails. I know, I know the problem is here. I know people are talking about it, but in most of people’s mind, we don’t exist. And it’s just like to show that we exist and getting leads in this way. [Michael Houck]: Okay. So basically the goal is getting leads and sort of the way we think we want to do that is just building awareness, right? It’s not like this. [Sarah Allali]: Exactly. [Michael Houck]: Okay. So I’ll add this here, building awareness. For the product. We know the problem exists. That makes sense. And we think the best way to do that, to build that awareness is to sort of, I guess there’s two framings, right? One is building you up as a thought leader with like putting our content focus on, you know, building trusts and deeper relationships with an audience. The other way is let’s maximize virality and impressions and just put out content that we think will resonate on a one-off basis. People will get the impression of your profile, they’ll see the link to Flood, they’ll see it on the bottom of the thread, and they’ll check that out. So between those two, we’ll do a mix of both, but between those two, what’s your preference? [Sarah Allali]: Say again, the number one? [Michael Houck]: Number one is like deeper relationships on Twitter with your audience? Probably, I’d say the simplistic way is like, the first approach maximizes followers, the second approach maximizes impressions. [Sarah Allali]: I feel the second one would be more important. [Michael Houck]: Got it, that makes sense. And then, yeah, any other like secondary goals around your account around the business that you think tie into this? [Sarah Allali]: Um, yeah, so the second thing for it for me that was like, important is like building the whole credibility in this space, and especially showing how we think and do things differently from what you can see on the market. And this comes from like, or personal expertise, basically. So yeah, highlighting this for a would be would be important. [Michael Houck]: That makes sense. And you do have you do have the experience we should we should show that as much as possible. [Sarah Allali]: Yeah, yeah, this would be this would be great. The only thing that I’m thinking about about that is, um, let’s say we try to kind of maximize the expertise, like credibility side. So showing that I know the space, I know what’s going on. And we have like a different approach, etc. That taking a supposed to be the right one. In this way, we target more tech-savvy people, people interested in the space, etc. But these people are not necessarily 100% those they want to target for the first site, for getting more impressions and getting more leads. The easy thing to think is you get a lot of interest from people building in AI and in building AI agents and then they will sign up on the wait list and they will try the tool. But I know for sure 100% that these people are mostly here just to see what’s going on in the space, you know? So yeah, I wanna make a difference and not like just like fueling my wait list with like other AI founder friends, you know? But with people who really, really resonate with the problem. [Michael Houck]: Got it, so we wanna focus on people who are actually experiencing this sort of like productivity related problem around email and organization and things like that. What we don’t want is like the people who just, you know, they read 10 different AI newsletters and they’re just looking to learn what the most recent tool is and that’s it. [Sarah Allali]: Yes. Yeah. Cool. [Michael Houck]: I think that makes a lot of sense. Um, and then, um, yeah, I guess just like set the bar for success, right? So like six months down the road, we’ve been doing this all a while, we’ve built up your followers, we’ve driven leads to the business, like set a goal for us of what success looks like a couple months out. [Sarah Allali]: Uh, revenue. You want to speak? Money is always a success factor here. So nothing more. So yeah, mostly like revenue growth. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: Do you have a, do you have a specific like number in mind for the business broadly or specifically coming in through social that we should keep in mind? [Sarah Allali]: Yes. So for us at the end of the year, so a little bit shorter than what you say, but end of the year for us is 100K AR. Meet Okay, that’s helpful. [Michael Houck]: Can you share where we’re at right now, like where are we starting from [Sarah Allali]: Yes, we are starting at 50k ARR. [Michael Houck]: Cool. Nice. Congrats. Thank you. Wait, wait, just the beginning. No, I mean, it’s good. First 50k is harder than Okay, Romesh, any questions on gold section that we should get to before we move on? [Romesh khatri]: No, I don’t have any questions. [Michael Houck]: Okay, cool. Okay, so next up is audience. We sort of just talked about this a little bit, but I think, again, just being super specific, like, tell me who the person is that we should be writing to when we’re creating the content. [Sarah Allali]: Yes. So, CEO. [Sarah Allali]: Tech-related startup. Usually, New York. Or New York, LA, SF, based there or like working in this area, who just raised a seed or a Serie A So not before fundraising, not during fundraising, once they closed the round. Okay. We usually have a team, like remote or like hybrids team. So email is really center of the work, and who doesn’t have the budget to hire a human executive assistant right now, or doesn’t wanna pay for hiring a human executive assistant. [Michael Houck]: This is a point, yeah. They see the $3,000 fee from Athena, and they’re like, whoa, buddy. [Sarah Allali]: Yeah, exactly. They don’t wanna pay for this right now, basically. Usually they have already tried tools, either type superhuman or AI assistants that you can put on top of their inboxes. But they still feel that they have to do a lot of work, basically, to process their email. They’re still spending way too much time. They don’t have a specific system to process their email. So all people who are like really, really productivity nerd, and they’re like, to do my email, I do they have like this whole system with like a lot of integration, not our target right now. [Michael Houck]: Okay, that’s helpful. Yeah. What we’re seeing is that like the notion optimizers, and the room research optimizers, and the people who have their whole productivity systems, they, We want the people who want better productivity, but aren’t going to spend like a hundred hours setting up their personal system across everything. [Sarah Allali]: Yes, exactly. They want to be productive, but they don’t want to put the effort to be productive, you know? [Michael Houck]: Hey, that’s what AI lets us do. It lets us get more behind us, so it makes sense. Okay. I think that makes sense. And specifically CEOs, not like other execs or people who work at the startup? [Sarah Allali]: We have a lot of customers who are not CEOs. We have customers who are like a lot of different type of people. But honestly, right now, the way I do the demo and I talk about the product and I give examples regarding a very specific experience the CEO could have, I feel it resonates the most. And this is where basically we really did a lot of job. So yeah, mostly CEOs. But I guess it can be totally excluding. People won’t be, especially if they’re executives, they won’t be like, oh, this is only for CEOs and I’m just a CMO, or I’m just a CEO, and this won’t be for me. [Michael Houck]: Not qualified to handle this tool. [Sarah Allali]: Yeah, exactly, yeah. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, no, that makes sense. So I think that’ll, I ask because that’ll influence, are we speaking to CEOs directly in the content, so that makes sense. [Sarah Allali]: Yeah, okay. [Michael Houck]: Cool, okay. Dope. And then, yeah, so I guess the audience for the business is the same audience for the content. Some people have sort of different nuances or tweaks that they do, but it sounds like in this case, since our focus is leads, it’s just one right into the other and it’s the exact same. [Sarah Allali]: Yeah, it’s the exact same. I would say a little bit more nuance for credibility side. So targeting a little bit more people really interested in AI, really interested in AI agents, or like investors who are really following like what’s going on in the space, you know. But this is, I would say a little bit more secondary, and not totally excluding neither. So. [Michael Houck]: Cool, I think that makes sense, especially because we’re doing Twitter, like that’s where investors are going to It’s good to get in front of them at all times. So, okay, we’ll keep that as secondary, but we’ll keep that in mind. Romesh, any questions on audience there? [Romesh khatri]: No. [Michael Houck]: Okay, cool. I see you taking notes too. So I think we’re… [Michael Houck]: Okay, cool. So let’s, I mean, okay, Sarah, maybe is there anything else you want to share on audience? Or do you feel like this sort of covers what we, the direction that we should take. [Sarah Allali]: Honestly, I think it’s a good, it’s a good start. We can start with this and then we’ll see how we, how it evolves. But yeah. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. I mean, we’ll also see sort of who it engages with and resonates the most. So, but I think this is, this is enough to give us a perspective on what we should be putting out for sure. Okay. Now in terms of like the actual what we’re delivering to those people, right? Like, you can just rattle off different types of content formats or content pillars that you think you want to be putting out from your account to reach these people. [Sarah Allali]: Yeah, so topics. What I had in mind, so I don’t know if we need to do everything at the same time, but what I had in mind is news and short demos about the product. Now that I know that we have something a little bit more consistent in the product one change, like fundamentally, like in the two weeks, this general news about like AI agents in the prosumer space, like related to what we are doing, like really productivity prosumer are targeting like individuals productivity space, I think it would be interesting. I don’t know if, and you tell me, you’re the one who knows the space most, but sharing like personal story about like me being a founder or whatever, I guess this is something important, but what is the balance between I’m just like saying general things that everyone knows and that really you know, it’s just like copy paste like content or, you know, my life as a founder is not like fundamentally different from everyone else’s life as a founder, you know, so. [Michael Houck]: Well, that can be a positive or a negative, right? It can be a negative because maybe people don’t, it doesn’t stand out to them, but it can be a positive and relate to it, right? So again, I think down to like our goal and the way we make decisions based on that. So just looking back on our goals, which is around like lead the business. I would say in the short term it’s probably less important to like tell that personal story and instead focus on content that’s going to get a lot of impressions and going to get seen and going to get flood in front of people. And then we can drip in the personal posts and details over time as we sort of like build up an audience and they want to go deeper with you and they want to get more substantive content from you about yourself. So my My recommendation would be that we don’t start with that, but we can drip it in. Yeah. [Sarah Allali]: Okay. Yeah, I agree. I agree. I agree about that. And one other thing that I wanted to mention is, oh yeah, basically I’m starting to build partnerships with other people building AI agents. And we are discussing a lot about how we can define what it is to be productive in the SDKs with AI agent and not with traditional tools. So maybe talking about this in one way or another could be interesting. Because I don’t want my account to be a sales account. When people see my posts, I don’t want them to feel like, oh, she’s one more time trying to sell us her thing. Because this is boring. And personally, I hate that. See that, I prefer like just providing value to people. And it ends up that it fuels my waitlist and my customer, you know, then like really trying hard and pushing to get customer, you know. So yeah, I don’t know. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, the if people see your, your headshot and your name, and they think, oh, this is basically just an ad. She’s not like she doesn’t care about me in this platform. She’s just trying to extract value from it. They’re not going to follow you. They’re not going to engage. So yeah, no, we wouldn’t, we wouldn’t do that for sure. [Sarah Allali]: Okay. So yeah, basically sharing a little bit more information about like productivity side and how we can start doing things differently now that we have like different types of tools basically in the market. This is something that could be interesting. And align with what I’m doing on the more partnership company level side. [Michael Houck]: I think that gives us a lot of flexibility because I think that there’s a lot of these processes or even industries and roles and things like that that are really going to be outdated in the next few years in one way or another. Not obsolete, but changed. And so I think there’s an opportunity for us to have you be sort of a forward thinking voice in that way. One format that I was thinking of for that would be like stories, right? Like interesting stories and anecdotes that have happened and are real, not necessarily to you, but just that are relevant to the people in this space and talking about how it can and will sort of improve this in the future. Those would be, that could be pretty interesting to people. Is that something that’s interesting to you? [Sarah Allali]: Yeah, totally. Totally. And to make a link with what I said earlier about the fact that we don’t want to target people who have a whole productivity system, who spend 10 hours setting up everything on Zapier, et cetera. When we say about how we can be productive in the next age of software. For us, it’s not like spending 10 hours to save like one hour, basically. Spending 10 hours setting up something to save one hour, but it’s mostly like, especially with AI agent now, you can really have like solutions where you don’t need to set up things, especially they do the software in this way. So yeah, for me, it’s kind of linked also to that. [Michael Houck]: That makes sense. Any other sort of like, I don’t know, it can be topic, It can just be like a strong opinion that you have that you think you want to highlight kind of on a recurring basis in different ways. Like anything else you want us to add here as like a topic or a content pillar for you? [Sarah Allali]: Um, nothing more than what I say to here. We have like a pretty strong opinion about how we need to build AI agents, especially for or feel for productivity. So if you want me to this right now. I have a lot of pillars, but yeah, we are, we have like a very, very open-ended opinion, like about that. Totally different from what you can see on the market. And this is, it looks like this is where the industry is also going to, going to do so. So yeah, this is something I want to, I want to highlight. [Michael Houck]: Okay. That’s great. I think that’s something that Romesh will probably ask questions about on our weekly cadence and Slack and get some voice notes from you on, because I think that’s, that’s interesting, especially if there’s like evidence that the industry is that way, we can highlight that and really establish your credibility that way. Okay. Okay. And so then I guess more tactically on the format side, you mentioned like shorter posts, you mentioned, we talked about stories, which would be probably more as threads, just want to make sure that that we want to do a mix of sort of the shorter form and longer form content and that we’re on the same page about that. And also if you want us to mix in things like screenshot essays, which perform pretty well right now, where people have like an image and it’s like basically a longer post in the image. I’m sure you’ve seen some of those. [Sarah Allali]: I have, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, we can do that. You kind of a mix of like stories so like a long threads uh screenshots and things like that memes I’m like not really this is not this is not really who I am you know so okay no memes honestly a year ago I even didn’t know what it was so so yeah uh no no memes yeah don’t make like a boring content neither right yes We’ll make sure, no boring content. [Michael Houck]: There we go. [Sarah Allali]: Yeah, no boring content. Not something too serious or whatever. This is definitely not who I am either. But yeah, there is a balance between that. And yeah, something that you have to have in mind, which I know you know, but I’m not American. I’m French. So even sometimes when I read something on Twitter or whatever, I don’t get it usually. Because this is from a humor that I really on how you know so not trying hard to replicate something that is really not of me basically cool I I just added this do you think this is something we should [Michael Houck]: harp on uh which is like your perspective as someone who is coming from a french background who’s in sort of this sf tech scene like it’s it you know there are people who who kind of emphasize that is that [Sarah Allali]: something that you’d want to include in your content well so um my opinion about that I posted like two months ago or something like that something saying that I had my own visa on Twitter and I wrote something like sorry Prince like a bye-bye I’m kind of quitting even if I’m building something in AI and France is really trying hard to do something in AI the guy from the European Commission Terry Burton send me an email Wait, that [Michael Houck]: the the guy on Twitter, the oh my God, who is fighting with Elon Musk. Oh my God, that guy is so crazy. [Sarah Allali]: He sent me an email being like, yeah, can we have a discussion? Do you think I’m gonna have a meeting? I want to understand why you’re living in France. Yeah. And I have like a very, very negative opinion about like, startup in France, AI in France, entrepreneurship in France and in Europe in general. So if you want me to share like one or two things about why I left basically this country to build a company abroad, I can. But please, I don’t want to fight with Macron either. My prisoner, this is the limit I don’t want to get to. [Michael Houck]: Well, Terry got fired, right? So we got to we got to come up with a beef with his successor now too. [Sarah Allali]: Wow, okay, that’s a… So why not? Yeah, why not? Yeah, we can. Cool, we can include that in some way. That’s cool. Yeah, we can. [Michael Houck]: Okay, cool. Romesh, any questions from you on content pillars and formats and stuff? [Romesh khatri]: No, I was just wondering, like, can we include startup content, you know, as a broader category in content pillars? You know, like the digital trades we do on Elon Musk, we did the related to tech stuff, that kind of thing. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, Sarah, just for context, I mean, I’m sure you see these, some of the sort of threads that do the best, especially from accounts that don’t have, you know, 10,000, 20,000 something like that. And early on are like threads that are talking about whatever’s going on right now in this sort of startup, the current thing, right? The current thing. And so is that some, and you mentioned like news and stuff like that. Are those sort of threads that you’d also want or are they sort of too far outside of the niche, the AI productivity niche, that we wouldn’t want to go there. [Sarah Allali]: I guess we can expand a little bit. This is totally OK for me. Just talking about something I know a little bit, and I can easily talk about. If someone, for example, is posting a comment or asking a question about my opinion, and I’m particularly thing. I don’t know. You know? So, yeah. Giving, like, a yeah. Pretty close. Like [Michael Houck]: Cool. Okay. We’ll first submit to you. And you can always let us know. Because we’ll send topics to you on Mondays. And you can say, like, oh, not this one. Rejected. And we’ll come back with a replacement for it. So, we can always experiment with that, too. [Sarah Allali]: Okay. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. Okay, cool. I think that’s, yeah, I think that’s enough for us to get started with. We’ll see what you like as we sort of send the ideas to you. And we’ll sort of learn from each other there, too. So that makes sense. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. [Michael Houck]: Okay, as far as like tactical stuff, posting schedule, some of our clients want us to go in and like schedule and post the content for them. And others are like, no, don’t touch my account. I’ll handle that. So where do you fall in that spectrum. [Sarah Allali]: So my question before answering your question is why some people wouldn’t want you to post directly for them? [Michael Houck]: I mean, I don’t know. I would love someone to post directly for me. But a lot of people just say that they don’t want anyone else in their account, you know, they’ve got their DMS and things like that. I don’t you know, I don’t judge people. Some people just prefer to handle it themselves. [Sarah Allali]: Okay, so Yeah, I assume that you want like screen my DMs or like do whatever. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. [Michael Houck]: You can scale for me, honestly. I don’t care. One other thing that we can do is when we’re in there posting the content from your account, we can stay in the account for like 30 to 45 minutes, up to an hour, let’s say. And when people respond to the thread, we can write quick responses to those people. And also we can find a couple other thought leaders in your niche, some of the people you’ve identified maybe. [Michael Houck]: And we’ll leave comments on their most recent content too, so that people will see your replies and come to your page that way too. So that’s just something that we can offer folks. I think we talked a little bit about that on the call we did like a week ago. So yeah, let us know if you want us to do that too and just hang around for for a bit when we post the content? [Sarah Allali]: Yeah, why not? Honestly, yeah, why not? Yeah, we can see what we can do with that. I would have to imagine, yeah. I would have to imagine, like, secretly what we would say, you know? [Michael Houck]: Basically, we would just leave, like, simple replies. It wouldn’t be anything too crazy. And you can give us some guidance on what you do or don’t want us to say in those cases, too. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay, okay. [Michael Houck]: Usually we aim for something when we’re responding to other people’s content that’s like either a little bit funny or a little bit insightful because that’s what’s gonna drive the likes and the impression profile. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah, okay. [Michael Houck]: Okay, cool. And we’ll loop in someone from our ops team to help out with that. That won’t be Romesh, that’ll be someone on our ops team, probably Romesh. [Sarah Allali]: Okay, perfect. [Michael Houck]: Okay. And then, yeah, so we recommend posting Eastern. This is just, you know, basically when you post early in the morning, your content is fresh during the peak hours and more likely to be shown, because every hour that it’s been live, it degrades in terms of its likelihood of being shown in the feed, right? So we want to maximize that for you. So I know you’re probably going to be on the West Coast most of the time, but if you want, we can still get the content out in the morning Eastern time, or we can kind of wait till a little bit later as well. That’s up to you. [Sarah Allali]: We can, we can do a 30 Eastern time. [Michael Houck]: Cool. Um, and then, um, I guess this will depend a little bit based on how many posts we do on a weekly basis. Like if we’re doing two threads one week, or if we’re doing one thread and a couple of short form posts, or if we’re doing just a lot of short form posts one week, you know, it’ll vary, but do you have any days maybe that you don’t want content going out like you like weekdays only or something like that? Any preference there? [Sarah Allali]: No, I would say weekdays. Um, yeah, I would say weekdays. Um, and I guess like a mix between, uh, one long thread and like forward posts would be something interesting to start with so we can see what is, uh, what is engaging or not. So depending on that, the days, I didn’t know if there is like a real difference between if you post like a Monday or like on Thursday, I guess like, yeah, people like to over optimize I think, you know, on [Michael Houck]: Sunday afternoon, it’s you know, it is what it is. [Sarah Allali]: Yeah, yeah, I guess there will always be like people scrolling on Twitter. Day Yeah, you can imagine that on Friday, people really don’t want to work and they spend more time on Twitter. But yeah, I guess it’s like a very, very slight difference. So, yeah. [Michael Houck]: Cool. Okay. I think that’s all, like, the logistical stuff there. So, I think we have a lot of good stuff here. We’ve got very clear guidance on the audience. We’ve got a good amount of different content pillars to start with. And we’ll see how those resonate. And then I feel like we know your goals, too. So, I feel pretty good about it. Romesh, do you feel like there’s anything we didn’t cover? [Romesh khatri]: No, everything’s in perfect. [Michael Houck]: Cool. Okay. Good. Great. Okay. So then next steps, I’m going to link the notion database in here afterwards. But so basically our process from here, basically we’re going into the onboarding phase. You’ve already sent us some stuff to get started researching. So I’m actually going to dig into that. Basically tomorrow I’m going to do a loom of a profile audit. Of your page and just basically make recommendations on how we can improve every little thing to optimize it for conversion to get leads for this. So I’ll send that to you tomorrow. In the meantime, Romesh is gonna be diving into context gathering. So what that means is the more you send him, the faster he’ll be able to get up to speed. Also any voice notes, just like rambly thoughts of things that come up later that maybe we didn’t touch on as much as you wanted on this call, something you still want to share about style or audience or anything like that, just record an episode in Slack and send it to us. That’s the easiest way. And then, yeah, that’s pretty much it. So we’ll be doing research both from what you share, but also separately on our own, just like digging into the space as deeply as possible and getting ready to go. Then next week, we’ll start putting together the first batch of content. And our goal will be to have you giving us feedback on that content by the end of next week. And so basically by the early the following week, which would be the third week, we’ll have content. That’s the goal. [Sarah Allali]: Okay, okay, perfect. Would it be useful if I write for you kind of a memo style document with like what is flawed, what problem are we solving, how people are solving the problem right now, how we are different, and things like that, to give a little bit more context. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I’ll leave that to Romesh. It sounds useful to me. [Sarah Allali]: Romesh, useful? Oh, Romesh, you can hear me? I don’t hear. Yeah, you can hear me. [Romesh khatri]: OK. Yeah, we can definitely use this. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: OK. Yeah. Uh-huh. [Sarah Allali]: I can’t hear you. OK. Good. [Michael Houck]: as you’re able to put into it. Obviously, I know you’ve got a lot of other stuff going on too, but the more detail you’re able to put into it, the more nuance we’ll be able to have. So definitely would stress that. And then just like any industry news sources that you’d like to follow, any accounts that you’d like to follow, any and everything that you can send us that’s relevant, we want to know about it, newspapers even, whatever you’re going to send our way is fine. [Sarah Allali]: Okay, okay, okay. So, yeah, okay, I can prepare this to give you as much context as possible. Just a note for you, I am traveling the 21st. So, not next Monday, but the Monday after holiday. I have a long flight. [Michael Houck]: Is back to SF or what? [Sarah Allali]: Yeah, basically back to SF. I have to go to, to my father in Hong Kong, and then back to SF, basically. [Michael Houck]: Oh, wow, that is a long flight. [Sarah Allali]: Yeah, yeah, I don’t have the choice. So 21st potentially, if there is no Wi-Fi on the plane, if they have an issue, whatever, I won’t be like super, super reactive. If I have Wi-Fi, of course, I will answer directly. [Michael Houck]: Okay, cool. Well, that’ll be right around the time that we’re basically ready to start posting. So we’ll coordinate to make sure that you can be sort of, you know, I guess aware of when we’re going live. [Sarah Allali]: Yeah, okay, perfect. And yeah, last thing I wanted to tell you that I forgot. So the 23rd, I am doing TED about AI agents. And maybe we can like communicate a little bit about that in the meantime. [Michael Houck]: Sarah to share more detail on TED talk. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: Cool. Yeah, that’s really good. We should hit that that in some way too. So Romesh, just keep that in mind as we’re planning out the first couple of weeks of content. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. [Sarah Allali]: Oh, and last thing also, maybe I should like write this also on the next step. I did an interview with Robert Scabble, the guy who is doing like a lot of AI stuff with you. And he will post like a tweet about that in the video of the interview. He told me this week, I’m not really sure you want we will have time to do it this week, but yeah, this week or a week after we will have this also in that. [Michael Houck]: That’s awesome. He’s got a huge following. [Sarah Allali]: Yes. [Michael Houck]: You should definitely have your profile optimized by the time that happens. So I’ll get that audited to you for sure, like tomorrow morning. And we’ll, we’ll go from there. [Sarah Allali]: Okay, perfect. [Michael Houck]: Okay, cool. So yeah, basically just setting expectations for the process. We’re going to be sending you topics that we are interesting each week for posts on Mondays as well as some specific questions about those topics that will need your expertise on. If you have things that you want us to write about each week, please let us know on Mondays if possible. Obviously, things can change and adapt to that, but on Mondays are ideal. When you receive those from us, though, our ask is that you record those sort of like rambly voice The more emotion and intonation that we get, the more nuance that we can kind of bring into the content. So if we get those back from you, and obviously I know again, you’re super busy. If we get those back from you by Wednesday, we can get you the content by Friday. That’s sort of how the process. And then if you want revisions and things like that, we can do that as well. I will imagine that over the first few weeks or so, we’ll have revisions that will go go through and then we’ll learn what the voice you’re looking for over time. [Sarah Allali]: Yeah, yeah, honestly, I’m not I’m not really super picky neither because I never try like anything. So this is also a time for me also to find like my voice if you want, you know, something that I find acceptable or not. Because yeah, right now I just give you like pretty general thing, like just a no mean thing, for example. But yeah, this is also like a learning process for me too. So I’m happy to share as many feedback as possible. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, the more opinionated you can be, the better. And obviously, you’ll get more opinionated and see more from us and see what you like and don’t like, So we know that that’s a learning process in both directions. Yeah. [Sarah Allali]: OK. And yeah, just a last question. Do you recommend that I don’t post anything, like myself, if I want to ramble about something? No, no, no. [Michael Houck]: OK. I would recommend that as long as it’s well formatted content, that you totally post more. Because if we’re only posting, let’s say we’re doing one thread and a few short form posts per week, that’s gonna be at most one post per day during the week, right? And so if you wanna post more than that, go for it. I would say don’t post on thread days if the thread starts to do well. But other than that, I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t worry about it. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. [Sarah Allali]: Okay. Perfect. [Michael Houck]: Cool. Okay. So quick steps, just send us those accounts and dump any relevant info. Um, keep us up to date on, uh, the kind of high importance moments that are coming up. We’ll do the profile on it. I’ll finish set up and sharing this notion with you that we have set up for you. Um, and then we’ll keep going with the context gathering and idea backlog. [Sarah Allali]: Mm. Okay, it’s clear for me. [Michael Houck]: Any other questions on your side, Sarah? [Sarah Allali]: No questions for now. [Michael Houck]: Okay, cool. Well, I’m pumped. Thank you. This is gonna be great. And yeah, let’s crush this. Let’s get a lot of leads for you guys. [Sarah Allali]: Yeah, thank you very much. Thanks for, thank you. Thank you for working with me. And yeah, excited to see how it goes. I’ll try to send you all the info today, okay? [Michael Houck]: Sounds good, we’ll talk on Slack. [Sarah Allali]: Perfect. Nice. Thank you very much.