- Duration: 28 min
- Platform: zoom
- Source: Read.ai 01J9Q0DBR3P1J751ZW26XGASYF (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01J9Q0DBR3P1J751ZW26XGASYF)
Transcript
[prestontroutt]: Hey man, how’s it going? Oh, I think you’re muted. [Michael Houck]: There we go. Um, yeah, I’m good, man. How are you? You seem, uh, you seem swamped. Things are good. [prestontroutt]: Yeah. No, it’s, uh, I go to Japan tomorrow. Oh shit. Yeah. I go to Japan tomorrow. And then South Korea, and I’ve been traveling, literally nonstop. It’ll be fun though. We’re going with a number of YouTubers that we’ve gotten really close with. They do like kind of an annual trip. And so, yeah, I got like a group of like 15, them. One of them’s a huge guy here in Dallas. He’s got a Preston Arsement. Prestontroutt plays, he’s like, he’s huge, but he’s like, the one I’m close with who invited us. So it’ll be fun. We head out tomorrow though. [Michael Houck]: So it’s kind of, well, I won’t take up too much of your time. Um, although funny, um, I forgot you were in Dallas. I’m, uh, thinking about moving there actually from New York. Are you really thinking about it? Not my dad’s from Dallas. So like, you know, there’s some family ties, but yeah, we’re, my wife and I are talking about it. [prestontroutt]: I think you’ve got everything here. I think you’re in the center place. You can easily get to Florida, New York. California. I really like it. You know, I think it’ll be a base for, I mean, I know it’ll be a base for me forever. I’m actually dating a girl in Nashville that has some potential and that would be a move. [Michael Houck]: Nashville’s the other city we’re thinking about. [prestontroutt]: So it’s literally one of two. Yeah. Yeah. Dude, it’s awesome. I literally, I love it. I think those are both awesome places. Those are the two places I could live. I’m generally good wherever I’m at, but when I’m thinking if I had a choice, I think those are probably the two states. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. I mean, I’ve never been to Nashville. I’ve only been to Dallas when I was a kid. So yeah, might hit you up maybe when you’re back to get some tips and some advice because my wife’s never been there at all. So we’re trying to figure out where do we want to live? Of like all that kind of stuff, you know? [prestontroutt]: Yeah, definitely. [Michael Houck]: But I guess more immediately. Yeah, so just tell me where you guys are at. Because obviously we paused when you know initially James sort of got behind on things we brought in raw mesh to catch up and then we ended up with this backlog of stuff. And then seeing some of the stuff you’ve been posting. Obviously that wasn’t all written by us, and so when I understand where you’re at, The styles that things are going out with are literally styles that we use literal templates and formats that we use for other clients, too. So that’s stuff that we could do as well. We know our prices are competitive. Ramesh actually freelances for some other places, too. And he he’s very familiar with those styles. So, OK, that’s the type of stuff that we could do. Now that seems like you sort of know what formats are working for the account. But the one thing I would say that kind of caught my eye when I was looking at it was some of those accounts that are doing those retweets, you know, those are accounts that retweet 10, 20, 30 posts a day in some cases. And their followers are all, you know, people in the Philippines or Pakistan or places like that. And I don’t know if that’s the audience that you really want to build based on our early conversation. So, yeah. Yeah. I just want to see where you’re kind of at with things with that kind and then see if we can find a way to make something work here. [prestontroutt]: Yeah, definitely. Yeah, so there was actually another group I had talked to that’s helping me out currently. And then, you know, so I had been working with them. And then on the retweet side, yeah, I agree. I mean, I think I had used this group and like, you know, It’s, yeah, I think I’m at a place now where I think I just shut all that down. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I’ve heard this story many times. Believe me, a lot of people come to us and they’re like, wow, Megaphone versus those groups. It’s like, it’s quite different. [prestontroutt]: Yeah, I think so. I know. So I very much agree with that. And so I mean, because there’s, there’s kind of a number of things. [prestontroutt]: I like this group. I’m not 100% like either way. I think I may continue with them for another maybe month or so because they really just fired up another month or two. I think it’s to be determined there. But I think I do want to start to ramp up the megaphone side again, because I hadn’t been doing the tweet like wanted to get your thoughts on how I should go about about that in your opinion. Yeah, we think of like, Because I’ve got a number of posts coming up that have like big creators that have already agreed to like interact with it. [Michael Houck]: That’s great. [prestontroutt]: Yeah, and so and they’re about them. So it’s like a deep dive on them, which I think is cool. Yeah, so like I’m trying to get like four or five of those lined up. I’ve got about three of them. And so. I think there’s that, but then on the megaphone side, when we think of like, well, how do I get, you know, true finance people really looking at this? And just like some of the, like, so yeah. So like, I guess that’s one on the megaphone side. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: I mean, we have folks in that niche on the platform. We actually just rolled out a brand new dashboard and database. So the app is much faster now. It’s like it’s like built on a real database now. [prestontroutt]: Oh, cool. [Michael Houck]: And then we’re we’re launching some stuff in the next like month or so, which is going to have crazy organic growth for creators because it’s like basically group chats around engagements for creators. So we’re launching that in about a month. We expect to see a ton more creators come onto the platform at that point. But we have people in the niche already. There for sure. So, um, yeah, look, I mean, if you’re just looking to use megaphone for amplification, what I would say is, you know, you’d have to sign up with a subscription. You’d have to, uh, set your budgets for the broadcasts that you want to send out and basically use it at the, um, at the time when you go to share the post to social media, grab the URL, log into megaphone, um, and share it with us. Um, although one thing I would say is that if we were we’re going to do some of the writing together. We do have some stuff that we’ve started offering to our ghostwriting clients as well that we could offer to you also. One is that rather than you have to actually share the post, obviously you get the megaphone subscription for free if we’re doing the content for you. But aside from that, rather than you having to go in, share the post, you just tell us in advance if you want the post to be amplified by megaphone or not. And then we actually have a bot now that will scrape your account when it goes live. And can automatically put it in at like a budget level that we talk about beforehand. So if you say I want to spend. On megaphone, then we can allocate that across X number of posts for you during the month automatically, so it’s totally done for you. Another thing we’re doing is for people who join. The this is for like new clients for ghostwriting, but I’d extend it to you too. We’re actually offering like a credits basically for megaphone right now. So you get like free spend on the platform as part of it as well. Um, depending on what tier you would choose, that could be up to like 500 bucks a month. Um, so it’s pretty substantial. Um, and then, um, yeah, those are really three things, free subscription credits, and also kind of the automated done for you type experience. Those are what we include with the ghost right now. [prestontroutt]: That’s really interesting. And okay, cool. And you say, depending on the tier, is the top tier still like the LinkedIn, Twitter? [Michael Houck]: Yeah. So basically it’s the same as before pricing wise. It’s 3k a month for basically full amount of content, three threads a week or one to two threads a week with shorter form posts interspersed as well. We also have a lighter tier which is two threads a week, that’s 2k. If you wanted to, you know, we obviously have newsletters as well, you can layer on top of it. But for social, those are the two the two packages. [prestontroutt]: And then do you repurpose on the LinkedIn side? Or I guess you just, yeah, we can do that for you. [Michael Houck]: And we can also handle like replying to people who engage with the thread. So like, you don’t have to be logged into your account when it’s like, getting some attention will be there to reply to them. And also to leave comments and some thought leaders in your niche around the same time, too. [prestontroutt]: Interesting. And is that additional or how does that generally look? [Michael Houck]: No, we can we can include it. Just a member of our ops team who is trained on how to do this and has done it for at this point six or seven other clients. So very familiar with how to do it. [prestontroutt]: OK. And then your thoughts on like, What you would want to do with my content. I know we obviously had, we worked together for two months. Um, but just thoughts on like, cause I think what I’m, what I’m seeing is like, I need to really start to put in like some of my like thought leadership stuff that’s in my brain. Yep. Cause I’m like, I think these greater highlights are cool, but I think they’re cool once a week. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. That’s what I was going to suggest. Like you can do those viral threads for days and you can, especially if you have the actual creator engaged with the thread, like that’s the maximum value you can do for something like that. You’re going to get the best return on it if you want their followers, like if they’re a creator who’s relevant to what you want. But I remember when we were talking early on, the audience you wanted to build wasn’t just people who are interested in creators. It was, I’d say even more so maybe people in these sort of like investment finance and even like tangential to startup space too. So I think that now that you have you know, a decent amount of followers. It’s not like a brand new person on the platform anymore. Like probably some people have seen some of your threads at one point or another. We can start layering in some of those more personal takes. We could do content interviews if you want, or we could do an async with the voice note system in Slack. Either way, I would say a mixture is probably best because what you do is the creator highlight threads, they build your top of funnel of awareness. And then you sort of build trust with the sort of Hey, who am I? Here’s what I got going on. Here’s what I know. [prestontroutt]: Yeah, it’s super interesting. That makes a lot of sense. And then I think, OK, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And then I think one of the other things, you know, it and I think this is more on my side, but I think I felt a little bit like I was still having to do a decent amount of work. You know, and so I think we’re working towards that, I guess, with the notion and then like using something, I forgot what it was, typefully or something where we kind of plug them in there. Was it typefully or what? What were we? [Michael Houck]: I forget if it was typefully or tweet hunter, but one of the two. [prestontroutt]: So I guess that was another one of my concerns in the past, seemed like, I didn’t really say much on that, just like I didn’t, it felt like there was still a decent, like I was still plugging it into the threads and taking the script. Now that was probably partially a decent amount, if not a lot of it on my side, because I wasn’t as quick to respond to, hey, this is comments or let’s change this. So I think I own a lot of that. [Michael Houck]: No, that’s fair. But yeah, no, we do offer that to folks now. Like if you want us, like when we go through on, with new people at this point, we’re asking them, like, do you want us to schedule? Do you want us to handle replies? Like, we’ve been able to add an ops person onto the team who would be able to log into your account directly, schedule directly, and you wouldn’t have to touch any of that. And the other thing I would say is that you were one of our very, very first clients. You were like our maybe third or fourth client. I forget exactly, I think third. The writer that we originally matched you with is unfortunately no longer with the team, had some performance issues. And I feel very confident in the team we have now. And also we brought in Blakey Mall, who you’ve probably seen on Twitter and maybe LinkedIn too. He’s like 100,000 followers on Twitter. He was the first CMO of Copy AI. He’s leading our content team now. Basically our delineation work is that he’s leading the content team. I’m still reviewing stuff, but he’s like day-to-day with the writers. And then I’m handling most of our sales and growth and account management and stuff like that. So I’d be your primary point of contact, but he’s riding the shoulders of the writers to make sure that the content is what we want it to be. [prestontroutt]: Cool. Okay. That’s really interesting. Okay. That makes sense. I guess the one guy is no longer. It’s unfortunate, I guess, part of it. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. Whenever you start something new, there’s a, you know, yeah. [prestontroutt]: Hey, I trust me. We’re right. We’re there right now. [prestontroutt]: Okay. And then, um, so, okay. So top tier three K three threads a week below that two K two threads a week, I guess one K one thread a week. [Michael Houck]: Um, well we, we don’t do the one K just because, It’s not worth the writer’s time in terms of the research that they do. The hours they put in is still, yeah, still too much. [prestontroutt]: Yeah, yeah. So 2K, two threads is bottom. And then you add kind of reply with people who engage, replying, commenting on certain people. Is that in addition to that, or is that kind of, that’s a… [Michael Houck]: No, we’ll include it. Sometimes we charge people for it, but we can include it in this case. And then the other thing is the megaphone credits as well that you’d get. If you do the 2K tier, you’d get $250 a month in megaphone credits. If you do the 3K tier, you get $500 month in megaphone credits. OK. [prestontroutt]: OK. Cool. Well, I think I’m going to for sure start ramping up the megaphone posting right now. I don’t think we’re just, I guess we’re like kind middle of the month with this group. So I wonder if I touch back here in the next few weeks and figure out from there. I hate to keep, I hate to push it, but I guess that’s it. Yeah. All the information again. I, you know, okay. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. So maybe, I mean, you’re going, you’re going away for a bit anyway, so let’s touch base around the time you get back. And, um, or I don’t know how long you’re going to be there for, if it’s like a month or something, but yeah, it’s a, it’s a couple of weeks and I have a little trip. [prestontroutt]: So I’m, I’m thinking it’s like potentially end of the month, like before next month starts is when we can. So like, I’m out of town number of times. So maybe it’s like into this month, like the 30th or 31st, maybe. [Michael Houck]: Cool. Um, check my calendar. Yeah, I could, I’m actually pretty flexible on those days. Do you want to set a time for the 30th? Just need an invite. [prestontroutt]: Yeah. Yeah. Let’s do that. Let’s. [prestontroutt]: The similar. Similar like afternoon work like 430 again, or I guess what time is that? Yeah. 530 for you. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, we can do the same time. That’s fine. [prestontroutt]: Cool. [Michael Houck]: I’ll see after this. [prestontroutt]: Awesome. Well, cool. Awesome, man. Well, I really appreciate it. And then all I’ve got, I took notes on everything. And so we’ll just kind of carry this on and then we’ll look to get some of the megaphone, you know, push out over the next couple of weeks. And then we’ll look into the month for the other stuff. [Michael Houck]: You’re sure. Sounds good to me. Sounds like a plan. We’ll chat at the end of the month. Do you want me to restart your megaphone account? Cause I can just process the, I could turn it active basically right now if you want. [prestontroutt]: Yeah, yeah, let’s. Let’s do that. Wait, do I have any? Because I know I had the X and LinkedIn one for awhile. Is it all through the same? Is it? Same subscription? [Michael Houck]: It would be basically you have to pay for two accounts if you want both XM and LinkedIn. So it’d be 89 plus 39. [prestontroutt]: Okay. [Michael Houck]: Um, actually it looks like the, it looks like you have an active. [prestontroutt]: Yeah. I thought I’d, yeah. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. Yeah. You do. You do for one account. [prestontroutt]: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. And then the other one, um, let me log, I’m looking in here. Okay. So I have, Oh, I don’t have both of them active. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, it looks like you just have one active right now. [prestontroutt]: Oh, interesting, which one is it? [Michael Houck]: I’m looking in Stripe, so it doesn’t tell me. OK. But it should show on your dashboard if you if you click the new broadcast button, it’ll show up in the little dropdown for your accounts, which one is active and which one isn’t. [prestontroutt]: It looks like, [prestontroutt]: Looks like both, maybe not. Alright, we can. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I’ll check in with her. Maybe there’s a we just launched the new dashboard, so it’s possible there’s a bug. [prestontroutt]: Yeah, I like it. I remember looking. I really like this. This is smooth. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, a big step up for sure for us. [prestontroutt]: Yeah, I like it awesome. Alright, cool man. Well, I’ll yeah, I’ll take a look at this and then. Yeah, and then we’ll we’ll keep rolling. Cool chat more later this Enjoy the trip. Awesome. Thanks so much. All right, man.