- Duration: 25 min
- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01J9S1PSA278EG7J8C08GAXNCR (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01J9S1PSA278EG7J8C08GAXNCR)
Transcript
[Michael Houck]: Thank you. [Michael Houck]: It’s. [Noel Moldvai]: How’s it going, man? [Michael Houck]: Good. Good to meet you. [Noel Moldvai]: You as well. You as well. I enjoyed the newsletter. Good stuff. [Michael Houck]: Thanks. Glad to enjoy it. I saw the top 20 lists that you posted. Yeah, that was pretty aligned, I think, least at the top with what I would have expected. So I’m not surprised to see it. [Noel Moldvai]: Yeah, we have them coming out here probably tomorrow for Q3. Not much has changed. It’s probably what you’d expect. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, but still cool. I love the product. I love that you guys are able to offer that to people. By the time it gets to the public markets, you’re already behind the real money. So yeah, good Yeah, exactly. Thank you, man. Um, well, cool. Uh, want to learn more sort of about what you guys are looking to do on the content side. Obviously you’re already pushing stuff on LinkedIn, but just give me some context about maybe how you see us fitting in, how we could help. [Noel Moldvai]: Yeah. Um, so we, uh, just a little bit of history. So we, we launched dogmat, um, March of 2022. We didn’t actually go live. Fully like publicly until September of 23 because we had to go through a bunch of broker dealer. Sure. And FINRA stuff. And so we finally got licensed then and could make money and do advertising and the whole shebang. But we initially launched as like an institutional marketplace. And so people can post, you know, bids and asks. And then negotiate directly with each other. Everything was transparent and we had like a messaging platform, a negotiation system. So we’re still doing that. But what we’ve done is what we noticed was that people were not, it’s very difficult to make deals happen without someone in the middle, especially when you’re talking about like one to two million dollar average trade size. Sure. I mean, a little is 200k. All the way up to we had the biggest order we saw was for a billion. But holy crap. [Michael Houck]: One company Jesus Christ. [Noel Moldvai]: SpaceX. Wow. Really want that. But yeah, so we so we went from this institutional marketplace and we wanted to solve essentially the supply side. So we now do is we’ll buy up shares in the company using our balance sheet or using a credit facility that we have and then we’ll just resell them. And like the equation is like you want a big credit facility and you want to be able to do that distribution very quickly. Right. And so the big difference here is that now we’re targeting a kind of different sector of audience because the minimum is like 10 grand in most offerings. Sometimes it’s 25, sometimes it’s 50. And so we have this like bimodal distribution of investors. Like one is average size, like maybe 25, And 50 then you have the other side, which is like 2 million. Um, and so now we’re, we launched this six months ago, so now we’re targeting like this bottom end of the market. And, um, so we’re, I mean, I’m kind of out of my element. Uh, I come from an engineering background. My co-founders was doing like institutional sales and trading. Um, and so what we want to do is I guess like a few things. One working on like SEO and putting out content on the site. And then also a big avenue that people want, a big avenue of investors in this market is on LinkedIn. And so we’re just trying to expand our LinkedIn following. So that’s, that’s like kind of the context. And I think, I don’t know, there’s a bunch of different ways I think we could do it. But, I mean, something super simple is like just putting out a weekly, uh, you know, summary of the market with, with narrative, but I’m also open to whatever, uh, we’re kind of in the beginning stages of thinking about how to think about this. [Michael Houck]: Cool. Okay. That’s helpful. Um, yeah, I mean, we can, we can brainstorm some different content formats and things like that. Um, as well, I think at a high level, those two sort channels make sense, we would be able to help out with both of them. If you wanted. Obviously, we advertise the sort of social media ghostwriting is our primary thing. And also newsletters, if that’s of interest, we do a lot of newsletters for startups as well. But we do have someone on staff who’s, you know, very well trained in SEO. So if that’s something of interest, we can talk about that too. But yeah, I think LinkedIn makes sense. The approach that I would probably recommend just knowing a a little bit about the market and also kind of seeing and hearing from you here is probably just like founder led content that sort of establishes either you or your co-founder as sort of a thought leader in the space. And we we focus on like what’s going on sort of behind the scenes in these markets. Right. That stuff that literally no one else is going to have unless they’re also in these transactions. So highly first party information. And we put that out in carousels. We put that out in long form posts. We put that out in lists and screenshot essays and things like that, just the sort of high engaging type of content. So, yeah, I would say probably start out with like a less is more fewer posts, higher information density. And then as we build up the following, we’d start to we’d start to trickle in probably some shorter posts as well to to sort of round it out like who the person is behind this information that’s been putting this quality stuff out for a while now. [Noel Moldvai]: Got it. Um, yeah, it makes a lot of sense in terms of like the, we try to do this with our marketing agency like a year ago. Um, and I, I think the problem was that they just, I mean they were, they weren’t, uh, well-versed in this market and things. And so it was like very heavy lift from our side to like, you know, idea generation all the way to like editing the voice. The voice was just like, not right. And so we, we kind of took that off, off their plate and put it on pause. But what do you think about like how much input or how much time or effort would it take from our end versus, versus yours? [Michael Houck]: Yeah. I mean, this is, this is the primary thing that a lot of the people that we talk to bring up because, you know, my audience is startup founders. So we ended up talking to startup founders. We basically built our whole process around how busy founders are. So it’s super lightweight, but we still managed to get that level of like, this is content that you uniquely could write. It has a perspective, it has an opinion, it has your voice. So we managed to sort of thread that line. The way we do the process is pretty simple. Basically, once we get started, we do one hour long kind of onboarding call where we’d go through a questionnaire We’d take notes about like, hey, what’s the exact audience you want? Who has that audience today? What do they care about? And also, we’d ideate on those kind of content formats, also pillars, like topics that we’d want to talk about a lot, consistently coming back to them, and then some more information as well. And we’d get all that down. And that’s the only call we would ever need to do. If you wanted, we could do content interviews on either a weekly, biweekly, or monthly basis. Fine. But again, most of our clients, what we tend to do instead is on Monday of each week, we’d send you a list of questions in a shared Slack connect channel. And we want your expertise on those. And so you would just need to reply with like very rambly, like voice notes, where we get the intonation, the emotion, all that nuance that we’re not going to get if you just write us an answer back in a Slack message. And so we take those if we get those by Wednesday, we’ll get you a draft of the content by Friday. And so that’s sort of how it works. It’s very simple, lightweight process. [Noel Moldvai]: That’s awesome. Um, yeah, that’s, that’s super interesting. Um, what do you think like a next step is? Cause I think you, where did I hear about this? I, I read about it somewhere and you had like a form, uh, you guys just started doing this or you’re exploring doing it or no, the info on the form might be, updated, I should that’s a good reminder to [Michael Houck]: me to update that we started doing this in the beginning of April of this year, basically, we built up megaphone, which is our like, creator engagement network distribution platform for social media content. And a lot of the users of that were like, Well, I want to use this, but I don’t know how to create the great content in the first place. Can you do it for me? And so we just started naturally setting up this what’s become an agency. And Yeah, at this point, we have a good amount of clients. We have a small team of writers. I have brought in Blakey Mall, who has 100,000 followers on Twitter, is also decently well-known on LinkedIn. He manages the editing process day to day. I still review everything before it gets sent to clients, but he’s in the weeds with the writers. And these are writers that he and I have worked with in various capacities for some time now. And then, yeah, then it gets sent send to you. So we’ve been doing it for, I guess about five months now. [Noel Moldvai]: Okay, sweet. In terms of like frequency and cost, is that kind of like how you think about it? Or how do you think about that? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, so basically we have two tiers. And this is if you would not want to layer in like a newsletter or credits for Megaphone to get distribution on the content or anything else. Just for the content. And then we’d go in and sort of post it and engage with some replies and some basic stuff like that. That would be 1995. So basically 2k a month. And for that, we would give you two long form posts, either screenshot essays, or whatever the case may be per week. Or we could break it up with like one long form and a few short form, right? We could test out different, different frequencies, or different splits. And then the other tier is 29.95 or 3K a month for three per week. So it really just depends on the frequency that you want. [Noel Moldvai]: Okay. Yeah, that makes sense. Two, two, two, three, three. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I mean, all that sounds good. Like if we were to go forward, what’s like kind of the next step or like, what do you, any questions for us? [Michael Houck]: I mean, most of the questions I would have for you, we’ll talk about on the the kickoff call, that’ll be you, me and a writer, I’ll be on there too. So I’ll make sure that we’re getting everything we need. But next steps are pretty simple. I can shoot you an email in the next, you know, few minutes or so, with just a breakdown of all all pricing. And you let me know what you want to go with. And we’ll send over a stripe link. Once you take care of that, we’ll set up time for for the onboarding call. And, and the Slack channel. And we’ll also set up a little notion database for like where we keep the content easy to find. And, you know, we pin it in the Slack channel and all that stuff. So, um, yeah, we get started on all that, uh, right away. And then after the kickoff call, there’s a two week like research period where our writer goes super deep on the niche, super deep on you. We want you to share writing samples, uh, you know, industry reports, anything that’s sort of going to help shape the type of content and also your voice. Um, And then at the end of that two-week period, we’ll have the first draft of content ready for you to go, and we’ll be able to get started posting at the beginning of the third week. [Noel Moldvai]: OK. Yeah, that sounds good. And just for a little bit of context, Brian, I’ve been evaluating products for a couple of weeks, just like these ghostwriters. I like your writing a lot. I read the newsletter. Thank you. I’m blanking on what it’s called, but I’m like a premium subscriber or whatever. Oh, yes. So I do enjoy it, but yeah, sounds good. If you could send that over, we’ll probably figure something out in the next week and go from there. [Michael Houck]: Cool. Before I hop off, are there any questions that I didn’t answer, anything that other agencies have mentioned that maybe we didn’t talk about that are important to you, anything like that? [Noel Moldvai]: I think right now we’re just figuring out the cost and quality balance. I mean, it seems like this is, this is like right on the money for us. Yeah. Um, but one thing I would say is like, we, um, maybe we need to separate out. Actually, you said you had SEO staff as well. Yeah. That’s something that we’re interested in as well. Um, because we do want, we do want SEO on the site. We like want to create longer form content on the like VR blog, but maybe those play together or something like, I don’t, um, but if we were to do something like that, like, what would that look like, [Michael Houck]: Yeah. That makes sense. Yeah, that totally makes sense. It depends exactly what you’d want. Like with SEO, you know, you can do programmatic SEO. You can do like how much AI do you want in the content versus how much you want to be human written. Um, my recommendation would be that we, I mean, we can talk about it now. If you have more time, happy to do that. [Noel Moldvai]: I have five minutes here. [Michael Houck]: Okay, yeah, I guess just give me some context on what you guys are thinking around around SEO. [Noel Moldvai]: Yeah, I mean, we’re just we’re just trying to get more people on the site. Organically, we like do paid advertising on across a bunch of channels. It’s not that great. But the organic Google searches are actually pretty awesome. And so I think we just want to increase, you know, that The one wrinkle that we have on the AI front is that there probably will be about a 24-hour period between content finalization to post because we’re a regulated entity. All content that’s visible by more than 25 retail people has to go through a compliance department. It’s pretty standard stuff, but sometimes they’ll tell us, you can’t say this or like you have to put a fat disclaimer like when you say something. So I think, I mean, maybe that would affect some things on the blog and how we can do it. But yeah, I think the content I think would, I mean, our blog right now is pretty like, pretty bad and pretty empty. It’s essentially like product announcements and like, you know, there’s some stuff about there about why we started the company. Um, but I think, I don’t know. I think the, the point of the blog I think would be just to get more organic visitors. I don’t really know if I care about the content because we also have like this other thing that we’re working on, which is more like an education center. Like how do secondaries work? Um, uh, if I’m a startup employee, how can I sell my shares, like maybe that could be part of the blog. Hmm. If I want to buy shares in these private companies, how does that work? What are the risks? What are the what’s the like landscape of things? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Sure. [Noel Moldvai]: We want to be a leader there as well. That’s kind of why I started the company. But yeah. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I mean, it makes sense, right? Especially now that you mentioned that these like the transaction sizes, it’s not just like somebody going buying a couple shares of some public stock. It’s like, you know, they’re spending at least a few thousand dollars, in some cases, a few million dollars. It makes sense. That’d be more like intent based purchases rather than just you show up in like an Instagram ad and then drop a couple million. Right. That makes sense. So SEO as a channel makes sense to me. Would you would you want to do like site hierarchy things as well? I know you guys already have some stuff on on the site like this. I took a look. But would you want to optimize that as well? Specifically the blog, I guess. [Noel Moldvai]: When you say site hierarchy, do you mean like categorization, organization of those things or? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, just like you have a page for, I went back on the site right now, you have a page for the marketplace, you have a page for the collective, you have the Power20, and then you have the blog, right? So within the marketplace product, we’d want to create like different pages for different use cases, like why this type of person will want to go to this and things like that. [Noel Moldvai]: Um, yeah, I think, you know, whatever, whatever gets more traffic, I guess. [Michael Houck]: I mean, my intuitive, like my intuition is that the number one type of page for this is going to be something that’s like about the specific companies, right? Like we want to show up in the search results for companies. So I more about that is probably the the highest leverage SEO thing we Okay. [Noel Moldvai]: Yeah. We’re actually working on that now where you can actually, well, we’ll have a search because right now the app is kind of cordoned off from things, again, a regulatory thing, but we are building like a pages for every company. And so you’ll be able to be like, this is the price of SpaceX currently. And then here’s this FAQ. So that’s kind of already in flight right now, which will probably be out next week. [Michael Houck]: Cool. Yeah. I mean, I would imagine like someone Googles, like, how do I buy shares of SpaceX? Right. But yeah, that’s gonna be your customer. Yeah, I mean, look, I can put something together in the email that I send over with like what this would include on top of the social media, the LinkedIn ghostwriting. We’re generally pretty affordable. Our writers have worked with us for a long time. There’s like high levels of trust there. So they kind of cut us good deals on working with them. And we passed it on to you guys. Let me put something together. I’ll get it to you maybe a little bit later this afternoon. But on the ghost writing for LinkedIn side, I think bread and butter. And we don’t use any AI in the social media content, by the way. Just want to put that out there. We do for SEO, but not for social media. And two other things I quickly mentioned. One, you’ll be matched with one writer. For the whole duration of the engagement. It’s not like you give us a request, we put it into a pool. That’s not what we do. So you really learn your voice in that way. And then the last thing is, um, megaphone. So that’s our distribution network with creators. Uh, normally it costs a monthly subscription to get access to the network as well as what you spend on it. If you are doing ghostwriting with us, we won’t charge you for a subscription, get access to the creator network completely for free. [Noel Moldvai]: Okay, sweet. [Michael Houck]: Oh, sounds good, man. Yeah. Well, look, I’ll send over an email later this afternoon, and we’ll go from there. If any other questions pop up, though, please email me. Let me know. I want to make sure you guys have all the information to make the decision. [Noel Moldvai]: Perfect. Thank you, man. Appreciate it a ton. [Michael Houck]: Good to talk. See you.