- Duration: 26 min
- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01J9VTYMNCDDV9ARPYC5EQ8KYT (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01J9VTYMNCDDV9ARPYC5EQ8KYT)
Transcript
[Arthur Menard de Calenge]: Easy, man. It’s is always like a big period and we’re juggling a few exciting projects. But yeah, so it’s an easy time. How about yourself? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, same here, man. Lots going on. We just launched a podcast today, actually. We’re all over the place right now. Um, I have not been sleeping very much the last week or so. [Arthur Menard de Calenge]: Uh, the military proposal yesterday, uh, that we’ve been working on for like three weeks and I slept till 10 AM today. That was incredible. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. When you’re finally like, all right, I can get a full night’s sleep in. It’s like, okay, things are good again. Yeah. Well, yeah, I mean, Look, thanks for grabbing some time. Let me, I guess I’ll toss it to you first. Like, let me know how you see content go straight and kind of fitting into what you guys are doing right now. And yeah, just give me some, give me some context that we can go from there. [Arthur Menard de Calenge]: Yeah. It’s a pretty, it’s actually a pretty open ended call on my side. I’ve been thinking more and more about the concept of like founder led business. With regards to our audience recently. And this is definitely something that we don’t do well enough, I think, from a content coming directly from me. And we’re in the process of recruiting someone on the content side to help with this. But I’ve been toying with the idea of launching a newsletter for a while. I actually did launch one. For a limited amount of time and then work caught up and You know, I missed a couple months and then I posted again twice and then that was it So needless to say the experiment has not already paid off so far and Yeah, and then I saw that that you were offering a ghostwriting services for newsletters. And I’m like, well, I know someone who definitely built a very successful newsletter. So if anyone knows how to do that, that’s definitely you. So I figured, you know, hop on a call, understand how you work, what you do and see if it’s potentially a good fit for us. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, cool. Sounds good. I mean, what we do, it’s pretty simple. We work with founders basically exclusively. So our process is like tailored to founders. It’s super lightweight. Um, but at the same time, you know, we’re trying to put something out that like only you, uh, could be like uniquely, right. That that’s our goal. And so, um, basically the way it works is we would set up a shared Slack channel and in there we would send you a topic and some questions about that topic each week. Um, and it’d be Slack connect. So it’ll show up natively in your, your Slack as well. You would have to like join our, or something like that. But we send you some questions each week. All we would ask from you is some rambly voice notes. We want the emotion, the intonation. We don’t want you to type something out that’s super stiff. Just give it to us. If it’s five minutes, if it’s 10 whatever, all the detail you can share. And then if we get that from you by Wednesday, then we’ll get you a draft by Friday at the end of the week. And you can request edits and stuff, we can revise it, that’s fine. In the first couple weeks of working together, we would do a one hour kickoff call where basically we ask you a lot of questions about niching down on the audience, what they care about, who they are, who they follow right now, what they read right now, all that kind of stuff. Also about your voice, like how you want us to speak to them, any like stylistic things, examples of content that you like, can want to emulate with the newsletter. And then some other questions as well. And so we get a lot of information about that. And that’s how we sort of built the initial voice of the newsletter and the structure and things like that. Would you want to use existing name branding positioning from something you have already? Or is that something you’d want to work through with us? [Arthur Menard de Calenge]: This is actually something I wanted to discuss. [Arthur Menard de Calenge]: But I was kind of curious. Obviously, my business is like we’re creating, we’re blocking EMF from reaching your body, right? And so I’ve been playing with the idea of this first newsletter we started was like more of a inside lens, you know, like, what’s, what’s currently going on? What am I trying out for health products that I’m finding that are exciting, like not necessarily talking about the EMF themselves. And the reason behind this was like, well, I’m not spending my life like thinking about EMF, you know, like I’m spending my life running a business and like I care about health and wellness and generally that was the first like initial positioning that we did trying to be a little more human. Now, we could make it more tied to EMF, which is one of the biggest expertise that I have today. But there is also potentially more, if I’m thinking about what I’m good at and what I care about today, it’s like, well, running a business, being a founder, obviously, thinking about and building company, like that’s essentially my life. Probably more so than EMF, right? And then this is kind of unrelated, but another big passion is like personal finance. But I’m not entirely sure how this all ties up together. [Michael Houck]: That’s kind of where I’m at. [Arthur Menard de Calenge]: That’s what I was saying, very exploratory poem. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I mean, I think what would probably make sense is for us to, like, I don’t know, we don’t have to be super specific on one of those three, we can sort of take little bits and pieces from the different angles, if they work together, like a cohesive set. So we need to think about that and kind of plan that out a little bit. But what I would say is that the decision really comes down to like what your goal with the newsletter is, right? If the newsletters goal is like, let build myself up as a thought leader and influential voice in the space, that’s going to be a drastically different newsletter than drive business. Right. So I think that would be the question I would throw back at you. [Arthur Menard de Calenge]: Probably the former. Yeah. I mean, I think ultimately the former leads to the later, you know. Yeah, I agree. We. Like, I’m not B2B, so I’m not trying to, you know, like, it’s more powerful, I think, for us to be, to build myself up as a thought leader that people seek out for certain reflections on certain things. More so than trying to recruit people to read my newsletter about EMF so that we can convince them to buy our clothing, then they can just sign up to our companies that are, you know. [Michael Houck]: OK. I mean, I like that because it gives us more flexibility and more like experimental kind of bandwidth, especially in the early days to test out different messaging, different positioning, things like that. So, you know, with my newsletter, we knew it was going to be about startups from day one, but we didn’t know sort of what the structure of the different sections would be. I iterated so many times on that early on and just try to get feedback from readers. So we could take a similar approach here. Like, do we include sections about these different topics? Do we even touch on them in some way? Do we curate links? What’s the right approach there? That’s just something we would iterate on with early readers before we start to try to scale it up to some massive size. [Arthur Menard de Calenge]: That sounds really good, actually. On the scale side, I’m curious how you guys approach that. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. So we can’t help with that. What I would say is that early on, we’d focus on content and the goal for you to just share with through social media, share with friends, share with people, you know, and get direct feedback from them that way. We could survey people on the newsletter, too, of course. And we we would. But the focus would be on content initially. But once we get to a point where like, all right, this content is really good. We like it. The structure makes sense. Now we’re just on like a weekly sort of content machine. Right. And I don’t think that should take too, too long. It usually doesn’t. Once we got there, Then I say, all right, let’s talk about scaling. And there’s really two ways to scale newsletters. Most people know about paid social media ads, right? So you can do ads through Facebook, Instagram, X, sometimes TikTok, but it’s not quite as good and efficient as the meta platform and even the X platform for ad spend. So that’s way one. And we can totally do that. We do that for me. We do that for other people. We could totally help you out with that depending on how much budget you want to allocate to it. The other thing we do that not a lot of people do is cold email. So cold email as a channel to grow newsletters is actually really solid. It’s cheaper than ads. The subscribers tend to be at least the same, if not a little bit more engaged than the ones who come in from ads because you’re already in their inbox. Right. Right. And so, I mean, I don’t know how much of like a cold email guy you are, how much you know about like the intricacies of setting up all these inboxes and warming them up and writing campaigns and things like that. But we could do all that for you. We’d buy some domains. We’d buy some inboxes on those domains. We’d copyright some email sequences. We’d work with you to create a lead magnet that drives responses to those emails. And then anybody who engages with the emails that we send above a certain rate or type of response, they would get added to the newsletter lists basically right away automatically from there. So yeah, that would be a little bit cheaper than ads, especially early on. You get the ad cost down, but it takes some time. Email, it’s pretty solid cost right away. And that’s something that we do for actually a fair amount of clients at this point, too. So we could layer that on as well. [Arthur Menard de Calenge]: OK. What does a typical newsletter growth look like for you guys when you take on a client from day one? [Michael Houck]: Yeah. The first one to two months are spent exclusively on content. So we’re just focusing on working with you, getting the right voice, getting the content, you know, sections of the newsletter kind of set up. And so the growth at that point is entirely dependent on basically where you’re sharing the newsletter, right? From there, what we can do is Especially if we focus on email, the growth is literally just up to how many emails you want us to send. We can get targeted lead lists that are highly, highly specific with, you know, our own scraping bots that we’ve set up, um, just using publicly available information, not doing anything shady or anything like that. But, um, yeah. So if you want us to be hyper specific, if you want us to try out a couple of niches and different, like, you know, ways of approaching them and kind of different copywriting, we can do that. Um, really comes down to on volume side, really comes down to what you want. So we have we have a guy who, for example, he wanted to get started with growth stuff right away. So we started slow and we did 1000 subscribers a month coming in from cold email. And then we have another guy who sort of did what we’re talking about here, which is let’s wait the first one to two. I think he waited three months and then now we’re doing five subscribers a month for him. So it’s really it’s really up to you. [Arthur Menard de Calenge]: Super interesting from Yeah, I think the What I like about this approach is I did the idea of experimenting with like how we’re repositioning this newsletter. I think this is probably the biggest challenge for me is like I’m like those three worlds of like health and wellness business. And personal finance, which are kind of like the three top things that occupy my life today. And yeah, I think it’d be very interesting to see like through experimentation what we can get out of it. [Arthur Menard de Calenge]: When thinking about the cost, what does that typically look like, And I’m curious about the how you guys think about return on investment as well. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. So depends on how frequent you’d want us to be sending the newsletter. Right. So we have two packages for newsletters. We can either do a biweekly send or we can do a weekly send for the biweekly send. It’s nineteen ninety five a month. So two K a month. And for the weekly send, it’s thirty four. Ninety five. So three point five K a month. And with that, basically what we’re doing is we’re handling all the newsletter operations. We’re setting everything up. You know, in the first month we’re writing the welcome email sequence. We’re writing like what happens when people go to become stale or different like automation sequences around that. We can help out with the branding, too. We do have a designer on the team who can help out with that. Generally, we find that people like to create the branding or use something related to their startup or something, but we can totally help with that if you’d like, On the content side, you’re matched with one writer on an ongoing basis. This isn’t some situation where every week we’re throwing something into a pool of writers and somebody’s coming back and writing it. You have your dedicated partner who’s imprinting your brain onto theirs and they’re learning your voice over time. And things like that. They write the content. And then we have Blake email, who you might know from Twitter, or didn’t. He’s my partner in the agency, he gets in the weeds and manages the writers on a day to day basis, make sure the content is up to a certain level of quality, then I review everything before we send it to clients. So it’s like multi tier kind of internal review process. And then yeah, then you get the content. And once you approve it, we schedule it, we hang all the, you know, reporting weekly reporting in behind for doing a weekly send. And, and all that. And so ROI is really, you know, we can set this thing up to serve whatever goal you want. If your goal is, let’s just build up my authority in the space, then a little harder to measure the ROI. But it’s how many subscribers we want to get in there at that point is sort of how I would think about it. If the ROI was more specific of like, all right, I want to drive leads for the business, I want to drive growth, then obviously easy to measure. And we would set up funnels within the within the different email sequences then too. [Arthur Menard de Calenge]: Awesome. [Arthur Menard de Calenge]: Sorry, I’m just finishing up my note. Cool. [Arthur Menard de Calenge]: Yeah, I think that’s Most of my questions today. How many clients do you have and what’s been your retention rate? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I mean, we have 12 or 13 clients right now. I don’t know the number off the top of my head. We’ve had three clients leave since April and one of them, their company got acquired. Second one, the board acquired the CEO. And then the third one was just an early client who wasn’t a good fit. Both on both sides. [Arthur Menard de Calenge]: Okay. Okay. That’s thanks for the transparency. That’s always helpful to understand like whether, you know, like, and why was it not a good fit? [Michael Houck]: Um, they had sort of, I’d say unrealistic expectations around the, um, around what they wanted from our writer. Um, they were asking for like, you know, multiple, multiple rounds of revisions each time. Even though the content, in my opinion, was pretty solid. And they ended up hiring someone internally and they just went that route instead, which made more sense for them. So, you know, sometimes you fire clients, sometimes clients fire you. This one was kind of mutual. [Arthur Menard de Calenge]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: OK. [Arthur Menard de Calenge]: OK. I think the biggest thing that I got to wrap my head around is like, what do I want to be writing about? But it sounds like actually you guys would be really helpful on that front, right? Yeah. Because I think this is probably the biggest hurdle for me getting started is like I’m like the fuck am I gonna write about I know I’ve got knowledge to share Being out of the weeds and like zooming out This [Michael Houck]: is probably the hardest part for me today and understanding what’s gonna resonate The biggest thing that people like psych themselves out about is is this they like I need to know what to write about Before I like put it out there and start doing it I haven’t found that to be the case with newsletters because you’re only as good as your last email, right? You can, you have unlimited shots on goal with these people. It’s not like you need to sell them each time. Um, obviously they can unsubscribe, but usually that’s like a very small percentage of the newsletter. So you can keep iterating with them. Um, I think the key for us will be how we set up ways to get feedback from readers. So we can include like a poll within the newsletter. Obviously you see me do that with mine as well. Um, We can more directly ask for feedback. We can even set up automation. If somebody takes X action, then trigger an email asking them what they thought about what that did for them. So there’s a lot we can do to help us iterate quickly. [Arthur Menard de Calenge]: Okay. Cool. Let me digest that. [Arthur Menard de Calenge]: probably game to give it a go. I just want to digest and also get through this next couple of weeks. It’s going to be pretty intense for us. We’re about to launch a crowdfunding campaign. We’re about to rebrand and launch a crowdfunding campaign around it. So this is in a pretty intense period. Period to get it ready and write about the next chapter of the company and where we’re headed and all this. But it’s really exciting. We’re on to something pretty good, I think, right now. But yeah, so until we’re rebranded, I think in three weeks, I’m going to head down on this. But I think After this, hopefully, we’ll lighten up a little bit. I understand that you guys are busy founders, et cetera. Yeah, let me do some thinking on it. But I think I really like the structure. I’ll give you honest feedback on this call. But yeah, I think it’s probably good for me. [Michael Houck]: I appreciate it, man. Yeah, look, I’ll send I’ll send you an email either probably tonight, I’ll send you an email with just like summarizing all the key points. You can come back to it later. And then I’ll probably follow up a few times over the next few weeks. So don’t be mad if I’m reaching back. But yeah, whenever you’re ready, we’re here and we’d love to work with you for sure. [Arthur Menard de Calenge]: Cool. Thanks, man. Thanks for taking the time. I wish you the best for the podcast. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, thanks, man. It’s fun to finally have it out there. We’ve been working on it for like a few months and we’ve got some great guests. So I’m pumped to get it out there. [Arthur Menard de Calenge]: Is it mostly interview style or do you, same topic, like you interview founders and start up well or? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, the idea is like just like the founder journey, right? Like something like it’s tactical, but it’s also like you as a founder, like what’s your story, what’s your path, you know, the authentic kind of behind the scenes look like Steven from Cameo. We interviewed him pretty early on. He gave us a pretty cool story about how they raised their Series A that I don’t think he’s ever shared before. So that’s the goal. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: That’s awesome. [Arthur Menard de Calenge]: Cool. Well, I’ll try and give it a listen when I’m on a drive. [Michael Houck]: Well, look, good luck with the rebrand. I’m sure we’ll talk. But yeah, good to catch up and excited for this. [Arthur Menard de Calenge]: Sounds good, man. Talk to you soon. Bye, Hooks. Bye.