- Duration: 20 min
- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01J9YFTQ585F5YYNF42GCQ93NP (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01J9YFTQ585F5YYNF42GCQ93NP)
Transcript
[Max Palmer]: Hey David. [David Yue]: Hey, how’s it going? Good. How are you? Doing well, doing well. [Max Palmer]: Good to meet you. You too. Where are you at? Are you in San Francisco or? [David Yue]: San Francisco. Yeah. Salesforce tower, if you know it. Salesforce park. How about you? [Max Palmer]: I’m in New York. [David Yue]: New York. Okay, cool. What area of New York? [Max Palmer]: I live in the East village. [David Yue]: Nice. Okay. Great spot. [Max Palmer]: Yeah. Awesome. So I’m Max. I’m Hauk’s chief of staff, so I usually handle most of these megaphone calls for him, but would love to start just hear how you guys heard about us and why you’re interested in megaphone. [David Yue]: Yeah, totally. So how I heard about you guys, I think I’m maybe drive to one or so of his newsletters, maybe, or something, or pass through. Maybe I saw an ad, maybe I saw something in the newsletter, I clicked on it, and discovered Megaphone through that. And so I think for the context, why it was timely is, so to give you some background, so I’m one of the founders at a, you know, also AI startup based here in San Francisco, Series A stage, so fairly early stage, but the thing is, like, we not publicly launched as a company yet, and I think that’s one thing that’s of mind for us is how do we publicly launch and make the right splash with it. So that’s kind of the context and why I decided to book a time. Cool. Awesome. [Max Palmer]: Yeah, I was checking out Accordance. It looks cool. Companies have used us to help with product launches and for fundraising announcements and other stuff like that. So I definitely think you can use it for that. And then are you looking to do this on Twitter or LinkedIn or both? [David Yue]: We haven’t thought too much about it. We haven’t made a strategic decision on it, so we’d be open to whatever. I think the end goal is, of course, we just want to have a very splashy launch and reach a lot of end people. We also weren’t sure, I think from the website, I wasn’t sure if Megaphone is a little bit more for creators and you’re trying to push content or if it’s more for launches. I think that was kind of the question, just to see if it’s a good fit. Whether it’s for LinkedIn or it’s for Twitter, I think maybe both is great if that makes sense, but also open to if you guys have a preference saying, hey, we only do it for LinkedIn or something that can make sense too. [Max Palmer]: Yeah, so it’s on both LinkedIn and Twitter. How it works is we have over 150 different creators in a variety of different niches, everything from AI tech startups to health and wellness to marketing and whatever. A bunch of different niches that these creators are in. And these creators have tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of followers. The minimum requirement is 20,000 followers, real followers. And then we have users who are people like yourself, people who are looking to grow the audience of a company account to acquire leads, to get sales, whatnot, or to grow their own personal brand. And then those creators will engage with your content And that will help amplify that content within the algorithm either on Twitter or LinkedIn. Those are the only two platforms we’re on. So that’s how it works in a nutshell. You’ll post something on Twitter or LinkedIn. A creator in the AI space will engage with your content. And by engage, it’s typically going to mean a comment. They’ll comment on your post something relevant. And then because they commented, your post will get they get boosted in the algorithm, they get shown to more people, more engagement, more followers, more whatnot. So that’s kind of how it works in a nutshell. We definitely have a ton of creators in the AI niche. So in terms of niche alignment, there’s fit there. We would only send your posts to creators that are in your niche, right? We don’t want to send accounting, AI accounting software to a health and wellness influencer, because that doesn’t make any sense. So we definitely have your niche. There’s no worry there. Yeah, and then I can, if you have any questions there, let me know and then I can explain the pricing. [David Yue]: Okay, and so how does this work? So do we know who would basically engage before or is it like once it gets sent out, then you guys send that out to a network and people opt in or something like that? [Max Palmer]: Yeah, so you won’t know. So for kind of obvious reasons, the creators don’t want it to be known that they’re using the platform. So you won’t have the opportunity to pick which creators you want. You will pick which niches you’re in when you’re onboarding onto the app. But after that, when you’re submitting a post, we’ll allocate that post to different creators based on three criteria. First and foremost, creators that are in your niche. Second, creators that are online at the time you’re posting, so they can engage right away. And then third, we’re going to maximize the budget. So for each post, you’re going to set a budget. On average, it’s about $30 per post. But for your big launch, you could do $200. We’ve had people do well over $100 a big launch or a fundraising announcement, whatever it is. And then the creators, they set their price. So we have a creator with 350,000 followers, or 370. [Max Palmer]: followers, they charge $35 for an engagement, whereas we have creators with 50,000 followers and they charge $5 or $10. So it varies a lot. They typically raise their prices by $10 for every 100,000 followers they have. And then after they engage with their posts, you'll kind of know, right? If some big account engages with you out of the blue, you'll kind of know, OK, they must be a megaphone creator. But other than that, you'll have no access to these creators. [David Yue]: Got it. That makes sense. And what kind of engagement can we expect out of them? I know it's a comment. Is it a thoughtful comment? Is it an emoji? What can we expect out of that? [Max Palmer]: Yeah, it's a thoughtful comment. So when you're submitting a post on Megafone, there's going to be a box where you can add context for what you want them to comment on. So that way, they'll get the message. Message with your context, and then they'll know exactly what you want them to comment on. They'll read your post, and then they'll comment. So yeah, it's good comments. [David Yue]: Got it. Okay. And how much engagement can we expect? So let's say it's a launch. Let's say we only do it once. So let's say we can put up a big budget for it. Let's say it's like $1,000 or something. How much engagement can we expect out of that? Or does it scale linearly? Does it hit a plateau? At some point, like what does that mean? [Max Palmer]: Yeah, I imagine it does hit a plateau at some point. Just cause like, you know, your niche, like you’d probably pick AI tech startup niche in accounting. I don’t know how many accounting creators we have to be honest. I don’t know if there are a ton of accounting creators out there in the world. [David Yue]: Or finance, or finance. [Max Palmer]: We definitely have finance creators. Yep, I know that. So yeah, we have your niche covered. If you’re trying to do it, you know, allocating a couple hundred bucks towards a big launch could absolutely, um, you know, get, you know, several creators to engage with you. Um, and, and yeah, and, and, you know, launching at the right time, like launching at maybe 10 AM. Um, so that, you know, uh, cause majority of our creators are us based. Um, so, so that’s another important thing. Um, yeah. Okay, cool. [David Yue]: Is there a scenario where we could basically draft what our post would look like first and then figure out who bites before we even post it or before we do that, or is it only after? [Max Palmer]: Yeah, it’s only after. [David Yue]: Okay, got it. Cool. Yeah, and how does pricing look? [Max Palmer]: Yeah, so I explained the two parts of the pricing. I explained the price per post, right? So you allocate a budget towards each post. And then the subscription’s the other part. So it’s a monthly subscription, no long-term commitment, either 49 a month or 89 a month. So the only difference between those two tiers is with the $89 a month tier, your posts will get sent to the creators as soon as you send them to us. Whereas with the $49 month tier, we’re going to delay your post an hour until we send it to the creators. So if you’re doing this solely for a launch, I highly recommend doing the $89 month tier. If this is more like a longer term growth strategy to grow your accounts and create great content and do that, then the 49 might be fine. But yeah, instant engagement is important on these platforms. Right, absolutely. [David Yue]: Okay, that's really helpful. Yeah, I mean, I'm just trying to think. So I mentioned the launch is kind of top of mind for us, but of course, I could see us and being long-term users of this platform? I mean, if it's built around engagement. And so actually maybe to clarify, do you see more customers that are individuals? So would it be more so that like, what's a better fit for your customer type? Is it like me, who's a founder of the company and I'm tweeting and I'm doing sort of content, or is it more like the company itself as being a customer of the content and they're tweeting? What would go further? [Max Palmer]: Yeah, we have a lot. So a lot people use this to like grow their accounts and get leads for their business. Um, what we found, like basically you're asking, I think between personal accounts and company accounts, like what does better. So typically on, on Twitter, personal accounts will do better. Um, and typically on LinkedIn company accounts will do better, which isn't all that surprising. Um, but, but on LinkedIn, personal accounts also do great. Uh, So yeah, that's kind of the difference. [David Yue]: That makes sense. That makes sense. Cool. Okay. [David Yue]: Great. Yeah. Okay. So, I mean, this all sounds good. I think this is kind of what I was anticipating. In my head right now, I'm just trying to think about, does it make sense for us to use Megaphone for the launch first? Or if maybe like, you know, I should go for a test spin first and try it like personally and like use it for a month or two, see what that looks like, and then do it for a launch before we ramp up like, you know, $500 on a budget for like a launch post or something. So I don’t know, just trying to think about what makes sense there, if you have thoughts, but otherwise that sounds good. Like, so how should we get started? [Max Palmer]: Yeah, just right on the website. So you can just, you know, sign up and onboard right on, on the Megafon website. I mean, growing, building your account up definitely helps. I don’t know, I don’t know where your, your guys’ accounts are currently. At, but posting consistently on these platforms, like these platforms reward consistency. So if you consistently post for a month and then you launch, it’s, it’s, you’re more likely to have good juju with the algorithm. All of a sudden you’re posting out of nowhere. And, uh, you know, so, so yeah, that’s my advice there. [David Yue]: Got it. That makes sense. Posting consistently. Okay. [Max Palmer]: Yeah. You don’t even have to be amplifying those the month You don’t even have to be amplifying with Megaphone, but just like posting consistently is important with these platforms. Got it. [David Yue]: Got it. That makes ton of sense. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Cool. [David Yue]: Yeah. And I remember, I don’t know if this is you guys. I remember someone doing like ghostwriting or like content. That’s not you guys, right? Or is that you guys? [Max Palmer]: It is us. Yeah. So we have started our own ghostwriting service to help tell Megaphone users out with their content. Okay. Um, so if you’re interested in that, I can send info over, um, it starts at $2,000 month, uh, and then goes up from there. Um, but yeah, would you like me to, to send more info on that? [David Yue]: Yeah, if you could, whatever info you have or, you know, I know it seems like it sounds like maybe it’s early, but whatever you guys have done before and whatever’s, um, uh, yeah, if, if you have more content, that’d be great. Like just so that we have an idea of what that looks like, Um, but [David Yue]: Yeah, and maybe we’ll try it out and see if it’s working, then that’s great, right? So yeah, that sounds good. [Max Palmer]: Cool. I’ll include Hao, because Hao handles all our ghostwriting stuff. So if you are interested, you can hop on a call with him to chat about that stuff. Sure, awesome. [David Yue]: Sounds great. It sounds like you guys are doing some good stuff. This is pretty interesting. [Max Palmer]: Yeah, it’s been fun. Awesome. Cool, man. All right, well, best of luck. That’s perfect thanks