- Duration: 12 min
- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01J9S7K2SYF8M975X068PBP21A (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01J9S7K2SYF8M975X068PBP21A)
Transcript
[Allison Mahmood]: I don’t know how much you know about the defense space, but the Q3, Q4 period of like September to December is the craziest with everything. So every week I’ve got about three weeks worth of work, so it’s always fun. [Michael Houck]: Well, won’t take up too much of your time. Yeah, me a heads up. Glad you grabbed some time, but give me a heads up on sort of how you think Megafone can kind of fit into things. [Allison Mahmood]: Yeah, so basically I’ve of a note in the kind of vibe, but I can give a little of extra context around it. Essentially, right now I work at a startup where I run the commercial side of it. But as always, I’m on the side, I’m working on something else that’s actually focused on as a solution for people that are running defense tech startup and defense companies. And because that’s a clientele that’s quite public and facing, in the past, I was like, OK, well, good way to get more people involved early for testing and stuff would be just build more of a reputation in the space. Because, you know, people, you know, in the UK and the defense space, people might know me, but the main market for this, you know, defense tech startups are heavily in the US or within the EU. And defense tech is very segregated. So having more of a public reputation for stuff would be very useful with what I’m building out for the tooling buys. So I came across Megaphone because I’m a your mailing list for some reason. I don’t remember what it’s from, but it must be from something you did back when, that I found interesting. And so I was like, oh, this looks interesting. Let me check it out. And basically what I got stuck on when I was like, okay, hold on, let me actually set up a call instead of just trying this out right away, was the categorization. Because obviously defense and national security is a very specific space. And what I want to see is like, hey, do you think that’s kind of suitable given the people you have involved right now? And also maybe from the perspective of how does it work from the people that would engage? Would it generally, you know, is it in large part kind of, oh, they decide if they feel like that’s relevant to them, in which case that’s fine, because if it’s not relevant that they won’t, or is it more frequently a lot of people try to engage with just stuff generally, like to figure out kind of get those two answered? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, sure. So we match the posts that we get with specific specific creators. It’s not like put into a pool and they bid on it or grab it or whatever. We match it with them and send it to them directly via WhatsApp and Telegram. They receive it and they get some context on it and then they go click the link and and can engage. They do have discretion of whether they want to engage with a post or not. If they choose not to within an hour, we’ll automatically pick somebody else and send it to them as well to make sure the engagement is timely and we’re not sitting around all day waiting for someone. A comment or repost something. So so yeah, so it’s all it’s all very intentional. We do consider sort of the niche alignment between your account and their account as a primary factor. I don’t think we have any specific defense creators on the platform right now. So just full transparency on that. But you know, there’s a decent overlap with like the startup world and the people who are building in startups and and that space at least right now. So we have a ton of coverage in that niche. But yeah, that’s what I would say. [Allison Mahmood]: Fair enough, makes sense. And so based on what do you then determine the alignment? Because I’m assuming that’s an algorithm, you’re not doing it by hand. That would be very inefficient. So what are kind of those factors outside the general categories of like, oh, it’s startups, oh, it’s politics or whatever? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, we have a lot of data at this point on performance of when certain creators engage with different types of content, how that content performs, as well as their response times. And obviously, whether they’re online right now or not, they give us their hours of availability and things like that. And then there’s a couple other factors as well. So we’d look for some level of niche alignment. And then we’d also look at past performance similar posts and things like that. [Allison Mahmood]: Fair, fair. Similar posts that’s evaluated probably by some kind of sentence stuff plus categorization or whatever. Yeah. Makes sense. Makes sense. And then one thing, because without fully being signed up, I feel like it wasn’t fully clear as far as how does the kind of charging structure work. So there’s the monthly thing. That’s just to have access to it. And then because I know it mentions, oh, you preload some money into it. But then I wasn’t clear of how that’s allocated out or how that ends up working. Is it like in each post? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, so you got it right. You pay to get access to the network and then you can deposit funds into your like wallet or your account on the platform. You can set up a monthly recurring deposit for that and we’ll give you an extra 10% every month that you have that active or you just do it on kind of an ad hoc basis. And when you go to share a post, you can say, all right, I want to spend $10 on this post or want to spend $100 on this post. You can also, um, look at, uh, you know, like what countries do I want the creators to be from What audience sizes do I want to target some other, uh, filters that you have available to you as well. Right now, uh, you set that up for each individual post, uh, but we’re building out a sort of, uh, the ability to have that happen automatically. You don’t need to fill it out each day. Time. [Allison Mahmood]: Make sense. Make sense. Okay. Yeah. That covered all my main questions. Uh, so now I just think I have more and then I’ll probably end up trying it out. [Michael Houck]: Cool. Cool. Sounds good. Um, well, if you have any questions that come up, shoot me an email, happy to hop back on and chat more. Uh, but yeah, excited to support your growth, man. [Allison Mahmood]: Perfect. Thanks. See ya. [Michael Houck]: Bye.