- Duration: 18 min
- Platform: meet
- Attendees: Ken Krell (The Kenergizer), Michael Houck
- Source: Read.ai 01J9Y1FTZ1N1Z6RHX0PBT7HE0R (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01J9Y1FTZ1N1Z6RHX0PBT7HE0R)
Transcript
[Ken Krell (The Kenergizer)]: Let’s see if this works any better. Hey, Michael, can you hear me okay? Yeah, I can hear you just fine, Ken. How you doing? You look, hang on a minute. Oh, shit, I did something wrong. I’m in a rainstorm in front of a rehab facility where my mother is because she just broke four ribs. Yeah, it’s a little drama. Here we go. But it’s all good. You look really familiar for some reason. I don’t know why. I’m I don’t think we’ve met. It’s a small world, it’s all good, hang on a minute. But happy to do this from the car before I get out and get drenched. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, sure, as long as it’s a good time for you, it works for me too. [Ken Krell (The Kenergizer)]: It’s fine, it’s fine. Well, these days is never a good time. So it’s like, let’s get it on the calendar and let’s go do this. So it’s all good. So I know you have an agenda, let’s stay with your agenda because I’m fried and this will be much easier for both of us. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, sure. You mentioned on the invite that you were interested in growing the newsletter and then also potentially Megaphone with relation to some Newsletter Academy type clients? [Ken Krell (The Kenergizer)]: Yeah, so I run a five-day newsletter challenge which then converts people into a 12-week Newsletter Growth Academy. Oh, cool. Yeah, so we need to expand that because it works really, really well. We’ve run it twice small numbers, I mean, like 15 people in the Academy, but they pay three grand. So it’s a nice little payday, a little more expensive than Matt McGarry. And I’m much more engaging and much cuter. And I love Matt. I love Matt. So that’s the back end in terms of my being able to refer some business to you guys in terms of what we are. Mostly newbies, Michael, mostly newbies, but they don’t know how to run a newsletter. They don’t know how to get subscribers in place, they have ambition, and they’re willing to pay. So, you know, I haven’t given them a done-for-you solution yet. I’m not sure that some of them are ready for it. But, you know, we have that place to go with. The newsletter that I’m trying to build, I shouldn’t say trying, that I am building, there’s two of them. But the first, the most important one to me is the Pride Nomad Letter, which is designed for LGBTQ digital nomads and those who want to be. The giant market, we’re at about 2,000 subscribers right now. We need to get them more engaged, but obviously the digital nomad market is people that have money and want to grow online businesses. Ergo, running newsletters to me is the easiest way to play, to get started. The second newsletter is called the Business Impact Letter, which is my old Infusionsoft list that I’m still working with. I want to monetize it a bit and then sell it. Argued enough for me, speakers, authors, coaches, wannabes. So potential clients, you know, that need that need that want more business. But my focus really is on is on the LGBTQ market, because I see so much growth there. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. Okay, cool. That’s helpful context on both sides of what you’re doing. And also on the the academy side of things. [Ken Krell (The Kenergizer)]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: So okay, so it looks like you book this through I’m just confirming this before I say something crazy. You’d book this through the link for our ghostwriting business. So I just want to make sure that it doesn’t matter. [Ken Krell (The Kenergizer)]: I mean, it’s funny because I’m about to launch something on Facebook to offer 15 viral content hooks. I’m going through AI. So we’re going to, we want to do some ghostwriting too, wanted to see whether there was any kind of commonality I don’t really care. Whatever options are there for us to play with are awesome, because I’ll resell whatever, which makes all sorts of sense to me. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I mean, on the ghostwriting side, we have a team of seven writers now, and they work with a variety of clients on both LinkedIn, X, and also, obviously, newsletters. So we do play for a bunch of founders, their personal brands, their startup brands, however they want to fit us into that. So that’s a service that we offer to folks. So if there’s any way to, you know, if your newsletter academy folks, or I guess you are interested in that, that’s what these chats are about. [Ken Krell (The Kenergizer)]: I want to hear more about it. I frankly forgot what we were going to be talking about. That’s why I threw it off to you to be perfectly candid. I’ve been fighting with GPT for the past 12 hours. [Michael Houck]: All good, all good, I know how that can be. Well, no, I mean, it’s like, we could talk about that, but also then in the, sort of in what you have framed to me and also what was in the calendar invite, it seemed more focused on Megaphone, which is our software platform. [Ken Krell (The Kenergizer)]: Yeah, and I’d heard briefly things about it, but not really sure what y’all are doing. And the fun thing is that the Megaphone context for me has been a competitor. We run a business that helps set up nonprofits for for-profit businesses so we can get the Google a grant for those nonprofits and get $10,000 free Google advertising for folks. So one of our competitors, not for the setup piece, but in terms of strategy, but in terms of providing the ad grant services is a company called Megaphone, nonprofit Megaphone. So there's that. So anyway, yeah, tell me a little bit about what you guys are doing and let's take a look at how we can help each other. [Michael Houck]: Okay, so we do two things. We do content and we do growth, right? On the growth side, we have Megaphone, which is our SaaS platform where basically someone can create an account and they can link their social media profiles, either X or LinkedIn. We're gonna be expanding to TikTok, Instagram and things like that later this year. They link those profiles and then they can share posts that they make on their accounts. So like, let's say you have a LinkedIn account and you have a post that you wanna get a lot of attention on. Maybe it's a launch, maybe it's just to a thought leadership carousel post. You show the URL to that post with Megaphone and you allocate, okay, I want creators in the US with a ton of followers and more to engage with that. And then you say, okay, I want to spend this amount of budget for this organic engagement from these creators. And we will match it with the best creators in our network and we'll send it to them via WhatsApp or Telegram. So they get the link, with it, it gets amplified to the audience, their audience gets exposed to that content. [Ken Krell (The Kenergizer)]: Okay, got it. Cool. That would be helpful. Certainly will be helpful with some of the plans we have. Now, how did how did those guys get paid? [Michael Houck]: Yes. So when you share posts, you say, Alright, I want to put a $30 budget behind this post, right. And so then that gets put into the network, the creators have set their own rates for engaging with posts. So we know what those are, and we allocate that. [Ken Krell (The Kenergizer)]: Okay, cool. So that’s interesting. I’m assuming, again, running into the game market, you’ve got folks that are in that space as well? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, for sure. For sure. [Ken Krell (The Kenergizer)]: Okay. That’s interesting. I’ll give you two reasons why that’s real interesting. We just have to figure out how we’re going to monetize it to pay for it. We haven’t mastered that, and that’s very frustrating. No, it’s very, very frustrating. So number one, we have the newsletter, which is for the digital nomads, but we’re also launching a discount LGBTQ travel site. There’s like no travel zoo for the gays. [Ken Krell (The Kenergizer)]: So we’re gonna be it. We’re working with the International Lesbian and Gay Travel Association. Apparently they’ve got about 1,400 their members that are tour operators. So we should be able to have a whole bunch of stuff that we can sell at discount. Gays have money, they love to travel. So there’s that. And that should go pretty viral. We’re also launching, that’s what I’ve been fighting my chat GPT about today, a big ass summit, a virtual summit that’s going to be calling it the Pride Nomad World Playground Summit. Basic idea of how do you become a digital nomad if you are? How do you travel better, safer, more economically, blah, blah, blah, blah. So we want, frankly, all of those influencers as speakers. And our approach is to get them, we’ll turn them into an Amazon bestseller so that the payment for them is not, we’re gonna give them cash, we’re gonna give them notoriety. I’m gonna do kind of like TED Talk stuff. So that’s gonna be important to us as well. So that’s kind of the master plan. How we put it together, not quite sure, but that’s what we’re doing. I shouldn’t say not quite sure. With you guys, you know, how that’ll play. But we’re compiling a humongous list of LGBTQ influencers and having them be the speakers, you know, how they run their lives and what’s the business background of it, all that. We’re gonna do it basically in terms of like 20-minute TED Talks. So that way it’s- because right now we have about 85 different topics. It’s ridiculous. Wow. Yeah, I know. Well, you know, they’re there. So we may as well do that. And of course, the of that becomes one giant freaking book. So we have all that to go with. So that’s the bigger picture. And back end of course will be a mastermind, but then again, we have more stuff that we can sell and people will need to join Megaphone to be able to promote their businesses. So it’s kind of one giant circle that we could play with. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I mean, however you see us fitting into that makes sense on my end. You can, either whether that’s, we can offer some discounts to members or something like that. So we can figure that out what that would be kind of and how that fits in. But yeah, sounds good to me. And then the other thing we do for growth is, I’m sure you know for newsletters, obviously a lot of people grow through like paid social media ads, right? That’s pretty common. That’s what Matt McGarry does, right? That’s his thing. What we’ve started doing, and we’ve actually found this works really well for my newsletter and for some of our clients as well, well is using cold email to grow the newsletter. And so the way we do this is we set up a bunch of campaigns with different domains that are related to the primary domain. We warm up the inboxes. And if people either engage with the emails that we send or open them at a certain rate, they get opted into a newsletter. And the actual open rates and engagement rates from this cohort are better than paid ads. And you can get them for cheaper because you’re just basically going through lead because as long as the copyrighting is good, you get a certain percentage of that lead list off. [Ken Krell (The Kenergizer)]: Music to my ears, I’ve been doing it, but I’m out of data. So we’ve been using Instantly and my conversion on it has been anywhere between 1.8 and 5%. So to a yes, because we’ve not been giving them a link, we’ve been saying respond and I’ll hook you up. Yep. The free newsletter. But if we can find more data and if you guys can help us with that, I’m not proud, I want the result. And I’ve got a bunch of different, I’ve got Lifetime on Instantly and we’ve got, there’s a few others that are playing the Instantly game, none as good as Instantly, but we’ve done all the warmups and so on. But we haven’t been able to scale it because we’re out of data. We scraped a LinkedIn group for LGBTQ business people, but right now we need to scrape the Instagram followers of which there’s gazillions. If we can do that, we’d love to do the app out. And if we can scale it, Michael, you know what? I’m happy to hand it off. I don’t need to do it myself. It’s all about the results. So yeah, I’m a complete believer we’ve been doing it. We’re stopped at the moment. [Michael Houck]: Okay, yeah. What we can do is we can go through other social medias and grab and link them to the data that we have about emails. Excuse me, got a lot of phlegm this morning for some reason. Yeah, we can take a look at that as well. But yeah, all sounds good. All sounds good to me. And then if anyone’s on the content side interested in the ghost trading as well, I can send over some details on that. [Ken Krell (The Kenergizer)]: Do that, do that so I have it. I mean, I see a lot of different ways we can play with this. And I mean, I guess at the end of the day, to make this one giant circular profit center us. If we can, if we can, and this is kind of a different direction, if we can fill the newsletter challenge with a ton of people, we’ll sell them all the other services that tie into that to grow it. Because from my standpoint, because this could be really interesting, from my standpoint, ads on Twitter, even though Matt McGarry loves it, has done nothing for us. The guys that we had that are big on the game market in Twitter, Zero results, been horrible. Facebook ads have been okay. We ran out of money on those, so we’ve got to get the monetization up, but we’ve been converting it anywhere between 95 cents and about 250. But our monetization on the subscriber hasn’t hit yet. Spark loops on a little bit, but I’m not real happy with them right now, and Louis has pissed me off. Louis has pissed me off because he won’t respond to me at all, at all. Seem to get hold of them. And right now, I’m just, I’m totally offended. But I guess I offend easily. But anyway, don’t ask for my, don’t ask my help and don’t ask me to be a co-host and then ghost me, you know, not, doesn’t work. So it’s created an enemy or disappointed, disappointed client. But we need to fix that. We fix that, we’re golden, right? You know, that then, you know, we can scale all the way down the line. And if we can make that work, you know, we’re a great case study for everybody. But the point is, if we can continue to do that piece, then we’re getting Beehive happy, because we’re setting everybody up on Beehive, getting more clients for you. And I’m a great front-end guy. Just a quick background. I’ve been a professional speaker for 40-plus years. So on stage, I sell high ticket beautifully. [Ken Krell (The Kenergizer)]: during COVID, I took all that stuff and created an online program which sold very well, it was 20K, called Pride, Produce Ridiculously Irresistible Digital Events. It wasn’t with the game market, but I played with it. So that’s kind of who you’re talking to right now. So if there’s a way to play with it, we’re there. So that’s the long term approach where we’re headed. So yeah, so think about what makes sense Certainly, I absolutely agree with you. Direct email is amazing, you know. And of course, once we have the data, so we haven’t gone back to those same people to offer them the travel site yet. And with the travel site, if you go to discountgaytravel.com, the opt-in is a waiting list, but they get the newsletter for free. So, right? Yeah. So, we’re going to go back and double dip half rent at a time. I’m going to go back to the same list that we offered the newsletter to, and all the people that didn’t respond to them 98% will now get, would you like to travel for less, as a gay person, whatever, you know, here’s the link. Oh, by the way, you’re going to get this newsletter free. So I’m going to try another bite of the apple and see how that goes. So anyway, that’s the long and the short of it. Let’s see what percolates and how we can work together. You know, founder to founder, I’d love to help you build. You’re certainly a lot bigger than we are at this point, but we have big aspirations. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I’ll shoot over an email later this afternoon with some thoughts and we can go from there. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Awesome. [Ken Krell (The Kenergizer)]: Where are you based, by the way? [Michael Houck]: New York, Williamsburg. [Ken Krell (The Kenergizer)]: Oh, okay, cool. I’m a New Yorker from way back. I’m currently in Miami with my mother, but I left the States in 2009. So I was living in Bangkok for years, living in Sydney until a few And now I live out of a suitcase, for real. So head to Japan on Tuesday to meet with the International Les Benigay Travel Associations having their convention in Osaka, so I’m going there. And then who knows? So we’ll figure out time zones. But yeah, would love to work with you. [Michael Houck]: Cool. Very excited, Ken. Enjoy Japan. [Ken Krell (The Kenergizer)]: Never been, but- Neither have I. And I never cared to go, but now all of a sudden, everyone, everyone is like, Like, oh my God, it’s great. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: So. [Michael Houck]: Well, it’s the currency, right? It’s a- I don’t know. [Ken Krell (The Kenergizer)]: Well, I’m happy. Well, I lived in Thailand for like 10 years. It was awesome. You can live like a king for nothing. So yeah, all good. All right, listen, I’ll let you run. Thank you. I’m around. I’m around. I fly on Tuesday, so we got time to figure things out. [Michael Houck]: Cool. Sounds good, man. Good to meet and looking forward. [Ken Krell (The Kenergizer)]: Likewise. Likewise. You made my day. Thanks, Michael. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: See you. [Ken Krell (The Kenergizer)]: Bye.