- Duration: 59 min
- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01JA8EFDV4WAVT91E35TN9WBET (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JA8EFDV4WAVT91E35TN9WBET)
Transcript
[Michael Houck]: Hey. Yo, what’s up? [Ben Ornstein]: How you doing? [Michael Houck]: Good. Pretty good. Good. Okay. Let me open up our notion here. So Max, I messaged you about this, but the reason that we’re, we started to set these up is because, um, we realized that basically we need to, as we’re these like video content platforms to the mix, it just makes sense to sort of, I don’t know, we don’t know a lot about video, right? We’re not experts. And so the best way that every time I try to have a meeting in here, there’s like five airplanes, the helicopters go by. I don’t know a lot about it. So the best way to get good at it is for us to sort of have these brainstorming type sessions and share examples and obsess over sort of the details of them. So that’s what this is for. We’ll do a daily to start at some point, we’ll move it to weekly, but let me just, I’ll share my screen. I wrote up this notion doc. [Michael Houck]: Where is this? There it is. Okay, so, okay, so basically, wanna split this into two parts. Part one is sort of analyzing these outlier videos that we find and understand what worked about them. And also take time to analyze our performance of our own videos. And then the second part is new idea generation jamming on things that’s worked for us. Things that worked for other people in our niche, and then sort of like new ideas that we can create based on templates or examples from other niches that we think we could apply to ours. Does that make sense? Any sort of things that you think we’re missing from that structure? No, it sounds good. Okay, cool. Okay, so I have this notion thing set up. I’ll probably add more to this over time, but right now it’s just this daily doc. And so, yeah, I guess the first thing is our videos. So let me open up Airtable. Actually, I don’t think I added everything in there yet. So let me open up YouTube. Yeah, let’s go to YouTube instead. Also, I recognize that I’m sharing the tab, not the browser, so you can’t see this yet. Let me try to change that. [Michael Houck]: There we go. Um, okay. So we are, how are we doing? We posted two videos and we’ve posted, I think four shorts now, five shorts now. Um, for some reason these don’t update in real time, but the one today is doing decently as well for the first like hour or two. Um, so we’ve had two, that have sort of done okay. Notably, the best one, and I think this intuitively makes sense, is the one that we actually recorded of me talking about a topic and writing a script, rather than just the guest clips. [Michael Houck]: But we did have one clip do decently as well. I don’t know what happened with this one. It just never got shown to anyone. But yeah, I guess any thoughts from you on what has worked and what hasn’t worked about these? [Max Palmer]: I really like the split screen. I’ve seen that with a couple other big creators. There’s this soccer like content site that does incredible videos and they do the same thing. The guy on the bottom talking through it and then the video up top. So I think we should keep doing that. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I agree. I saw it from this guy called Callaway who basically does these, he does like, I’d say like tech news more broadly. Like, oh, you know, chat GPT released this new feature or whatever. And some of them are interesting. Some of them are kind of lame, but he doesn’t, he has no like real credibility in the space. Like he’s not a startup. Person. So I thought that there’s sort of this interesting way for us to, as soon as we get good at the scripts and stuff, to do that well. So I agree, this format is something we should come back to. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, any other thoughts? Ben, anything on your side? [Ben Ornstein]: Yeah, in terms of the video itself, one thing that just engages me personally is when I see when you’re like five things that the five-step framework, a list, or, you know, you’re telling people that they’re going to get different value through different points within a video. So like that will cause people to stay a little bit longer if there’s like a, if there’s a structure to it, where you’re like, there are going to be five things or, I don’t know, it, you, and then the other thing is like, you said, what the video was gonna be about right in the beginning, so they didn’t have to guess. They knew what, and it was a strong hook. Like, I think the overall structure of the entire video was really good, for the NBA one specifically. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I mean, I think what really works about it is that, like, I agree with you that the multiple item and step is something we should come back to with others, but I think the two things that really make this one And I think why it’s being pushed even more today than it was yesterday is because two things. One, the hook was super concise. Like with a Twitter thread, you basically get two or three lines to hook somebody and get them interested in the topic. I’m realizing that with these videos, you have like two or four words to get them interested. You have to hit them that fast. And then the second thing that I think I did well with this one was, um, we had the script, which was like the three, the three things, the three points we wanted to make about Nvidia’s culture, but we didn’t have anything that was tying that back to like why an MBA might not like working in that culture. And so the hook was sort of disconnected from the rest of the video. So I actually went back. Right before I was recording it, and I added in like, like little sentences about why an MBA might not like this aspect. So it’s like, oh, Jensen Wang has all these direct reports, but he doesn’t do one on ones. And then I add a little like caveat at the beginning of like, why that’s something that the MBAs might not like in sort of like a controversial way. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, the first three seconds are everything. Yeah. One other thing I’ve noticed is that the two metrics that seem to matter more than others, although obviously there are exceptions, this metric is interesting, how many chose to view. So this is like of the impressions, what percentage of people watch it for enough to be counted as a view. Which I think is a couple seconds or something. We’ve seen this video do pretty poorly, like only 50%, but it still got pushed a bit. Whereas this one did significantly better and is now being pushed sort of more aggressively than that one ever was. But there’s also counter examples like this one where It was sort of in the middle, but it just had an initial push and then it’s never been pushed again after that. So unclear why that’s the case. My guess is they’re just testing it with different audiences. [Michael Houck]: And then there was a second metric that I’m forgetting right now, but that’s one that I have my eye on. [Ben Ornstein]: In terms of the title, it says like, why raising 33 million? Like numbers definitely grab people. That could be a factor. [Michael Houck]: Totally. Totally. Yeah. Numbers do. Um, the sort of like how or why making a tactical does a strong words like must hate, you know, um, typical copywriting stuff we can apply here. It’s just like so much more condensed than it was on, on Twitter or, Anything else that we’ve noticed, maybe from this video in particular, that we think worked well, or didn’t work well, or that can be improved? [Ben Ornstein]: I was thinking that, like, there’s no fluff. Every word, when I looked at that script before the video was created, there was not an unnecessary word in there. And I think that’s so key. We just continue to do that and don’t just add words to add words. That’s gonna be like, this was so clean, this script. I think that’s gonna be very important as well. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I agree. I agree. It’s crazy that 21 hours people have watched this little clip. [Ben Ornstein]: That’s insane. [Michael Houck]: Anything we can take for the podcast clips? [Max Palmer]: Yeah, those are me tougher. That’s one of the reasons like I’ve had. It’s like struggle to find good clips with these podcasts is because. I was trying to think about it in terms of like the first three seconds matter and so many of the first three seconds of these podcast clips like they’ll stumble or they’ll be slow to get to like a good story. Or a good, like, which is hard, because you’re not going to engineer a podcast solely for clips. But yeah, I don’t know if there’s anything else we can do there, to be honest, besides just editing it to the best we can. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I mean, the tough thing is we can do everything we can to engineer a podcast for clips. We can ask leading questions. We can ask controversial questions, try to get from the people, but at the end of the day, the guest is a guest and they probably aren’t thinking about clip quality, you know? [Ben Ornstein]: So one really interesting thing from the Jay Klaus course was when Jay’s editor or producer and him, so when they come to a video, and this is more long form, obviously, but this is important for clips. In terms of the big idea that they had, before they come up with a big idea of what they want the goal to be for the video before it’s even recorded, obviously, which would be really helpful if we adopt that strategy. But when they do that, the producer even tells Jay, he goes, if you can get this person to say this, do it. And they were joking at first saying like, yeah, they don’t actually do that. Was like, no, I literally say, can you say that again? Or can you rephrase that? So like how in terms of like, things that you could do while recording to engineer clips, that is one way to do it. But that’s when we become more intentional about what we want the goal of the video to be rather than adding another guest to the list. Because it’s only gonna what they said is, it’s only gonna get us getting big names is only gonna get short term views unless the audience is directly related to ours. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, no, but going back to the clip point, I think I’m torn because if I like asked them to say something again, obviously they know that I’m trying to get like a clip, right? And so like, I worry that that could like, you know, Joe Rogan wouldn’t do that, right? He wouldn’t try to get clips. And it might make the conversation feel less authentic to the guests, which then might make them be less forthcoming. So I don’t know, I’m hypothesizing that might be totally wrong. But that’s where my head goes. [Ben Ornstein]: It might be something that’s just in the moment. It’s not like maybe we don’t come in saying we want this specific clip, but more it’s like, Oh, that was interesting. But you’re not zoning in on like the exact words that the guest uses. But you’re like, That was an interesting thing. Maybe if they rephrase it, I can’t think about it. I can only think about it in theory right now. When I was a host, I never did that either for sure. I never purposely, can you say that again? No, I didn’t do any of that, but I thought it was really interesting that they actually do that. [Michael Houck]: I think maybe what would be good is if when you’re prepping the, for the episodes, if you include a little section of like ideal, like ideas for clips. And then I can sort of use my judgment in the moment about whether to go back to something or not and just keep that in my head. [Ben Ornstein]: I think that’s probably the best approach to keep it authentic. Cause that’s the most important thing. We need these things to be, especially the conversations themselves need to be authentic. [Michael Houck]: Okay. Okay. On other platforms, let me see. We won’t spend too much more time on this, because I want to get on to the next piece. But on other platforms, we have done sort of OK. I don’t know what happened with this first one. We’ve gotten like seven followers or something from this, so not huge. And same thing on Instagram, although this one got like 2,000 views or something on Instagram. The thing is, like, if you look at this, we have a good amount of people who are liking the video relative to how many views it has, but no one is sharing it. No one is commenting on it. And so I don’t know what that means, but obviously sharing and watch time or where we’re going to get. Those are the best signals rather than just likes. [Max Palmer]: Yeah, and we can start. Adding At the end you could say, you know comment on if you blah blah to get more comments like comment if you agree with this Stance on this topic or whatever it is just prompting to do something Yeah, I [Michael Houck]: mean Ben we we looked at that. Let me try to pull this up max that you’re gonna This one is nuts. [Ben Ornstein]: I don’t even understand Which backpack would you choose to take to school? Dirty Backpack? Ignore. Minecraft Backpack? Leave a like, Camo Backpack? Subscribe. Nike Backpack? Comment a heart emoji. Futuristic Backpack? Do everything and share this video with a friend. [Max Palmer]: They already have 800,000 subs though, so. [Ben Ornstein]: I don’t think all the videos are like that. [Michael Houck]: No, no, so Max, the background here is that this channel was started in the last two weeks, and they’ve just put out videos just like this the whole time. [Max Palmer]: That’s all they do. Wait, go to the channel. I want to see this. It’s nuts. [Michael Houck]: They have 18 videos. They’re all shorts. And the oldest one. [Speaker 4]: If aliens took over the world, who would you save? Your father. [Max Palmer]: like this video, your mother, subscribe, your siblings and pet, comment a heart emoji. It’s just AI garbage. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, it’s AI garbage, but the format of like, it’s the same crap that we would do on Twitter when it would be like at the end of the thread, like share this, repost this thread if you liked it or comment below or whatever. It’s the same exact crap, just basically supercharged. [Ben Ornstein]: It’s insane. [Max Palmer]: these guys are making, because YouTube actually pays well. [Michael Houck]: YouTube pays very well, yeah. We don’t get monetized until we have 1,000 subscribers and I think it’s like 400, 4,000 watch hours or something, some number. Anyway, I don’t know if it’s too cringe, but maybe there’s a way to make a format like this. We should just be getting more of these and trying them out. [Ben Ornstein]: I have an idea for this format later that we can talk about. [Michael Houck]: We’ll get into the ideas, but yeah, I guess like, Max, you haven’t seen this, so I wanna get your quick reaction to it. [Max Palmer]: I mean, it’s just, it’s brain rot. This is why TikTok needs to be banned, man. I mean, besides the fact that China has all our information, this crap is just poisoning our youth. No, I mean, I don’t think we want to do that type of content. Like we don’t want this. I get it’s going to go viral, but I mean, I don’t know. I mean, I think, yeah. [Michael Houck]: I mean saying, you know, people said the same crap when I started writing Twitter threads though. Like the first people who I was like learning to write Twitter threads from were like, Oh, you know, don’t, don’t be too cringe about it or whatever. But you have to lean into it to some degree. And I would argue that maybe this is beyond the pale. [Max Palmer]: And that’s what I’m saying. Yeah, saying comment, if you agree on this topic is very different from saying from from these videos, you know, like we can ask for engagement, but going this far and like, well, these just videos just don’t have any value. Like you’re not learning anything like we’re like, yeah, it’s crazy. [Michael Houck]: there’s no value at all. It’s just to get engagement. That’s it. [Max Palmer]: I mean, whoever did this was genius though. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: Same time. So this kind of brings up an interesting point that I want to get into before we get to ideas, which is, um, like I watched this video from Jay Klaus and Patty Galloway. Patty’s like a Mr. Beast strategist guy. And he’s, he’s really smart about long form YouTube. He’s not, not really a shorts guy so much. Um, but he was saying, that a really common mistake that people who have expertise in a certain field and then go to make videos make is that they make videos for the core demographic, which is like the other people who are super interested, not the sort of tourist commoner people and not like new people who are getting exposed to it. Or they go the other way and they just make content for absolute beginners that’s not interesting to sort of the hobbyists or the sort of devotees. He calls it, what’s it called, Ben? Core Common New or Core Casual New? That might be it. I think that’s it. I think it’s Core Casual New. And so I think one of the big things, and we’re not gonna solve this today and we shouldn’t try to, but one of the big things I wanna throw out there for you guys to keep in mind as we come up with ideas on an ongoing basis is that the best content is gonna be one that’s appealing to all three of those in at some level, right? So it’s, it’s interesting to the experts. It’s new to people who can, it’s still accessible to people who it’s new for, and it has broad appeal. He used the example of Noah Kagan, and Noah Kagan was writing like, making videos about like, you know, oh, what’s the difference between slack and discord or whatever, but, you know, no one cares about that people won’t accept if they’re actually making that decision. And so what he did is he started working with Noah, and he was like, how do we take this like expert level business audience and give them something that’s still interesting, but also appealing to more broad people. And so they started interviewing billionaires instead. And that was what blew up the channel. So just sharing that, as we think about formats for shorts, as we think about formats for I mean, it’s not long form, not doing long form right now, but as we think about formats for videos. [Michael Houck]: OK. I didn’t take notes, but that’s OK. [Michael Houck]: Do you guys have any outlier videos that we want to jot down? [Max Palmer]: I have one video that popped up on my feed. Send in the chat. Okay. It got like 11,000 likes. So it’s like good, but nothing crazy. But we it’s like something we could do. Like he’s just talking about books that like change your life. And it reminded me of that thread you wrote how of like, every book of entrepreneurs should read and that went viral. [Michael Houck]: Okay, let’s let’s watch this real quick. [Speaker 1]: First one is the Lords of easy money. Let’s talk about three books. First one is The Lords of Easy Money. Understanding how the money supply works. By the end of it, you’re gonna be so pissed, you’re gonna wanna start making money. The second one is The Millionaire Master Plan. It’s understanding what is your wealth profile. Different people make money in different ways. Cristiano Ronaldo made his money completely differently than Elon Musk. Each of them have a wealth profile. They’ve attributed and been able to build wealth in their own avenue. So what you need to do is identify what is your wealth profile. People are looking at stock traders or at investors. I wish I could do that, but it’s complicated. Well, maybe it’s not your wealth profile. Maybe you’re trying to get rich at the wrong thing. [Michael Houck]: Let’s talk about. Wow. Okay. So that’s really good. I’m surprised that only did 11,000 actually. [Max Palmer]: Yeah. So the music helps for sure. Yes. We could, we could think about that. Cause that, that just gets you watching it for a longer period of time. Um, and then it’s a simple subject, like, you know, You would start, here’s three books every entrepreneur should read. And then boom, get into it. And that quick line will get people hooked in three seconds. [Max Palmer]: And yeah, so that’s a simple one we could do. [Michael Houck]: One thing that I think does really well with this video is that it’s, he’s clearly like, I don’t know if he actually is on a podcast or not, but it’s meant to appear that he’s on a podcast. But at the same time, he’s very well spoken for being on a podcast, which gives you the impression that he has actually internalized and mastered these concepts, and he’s giving it back to you very simply. [Max Palmer]: So it’s interesting because I follow this consumer founder on Twitter, and she’s growing solely through video ads and organic video, basically just this, exactly, and she rented out a podcast studio for the sole purpose of shooting short form videos like she was on a podcast, even though she wasn’t on a podcast. So you have a, you have a mic, you can do that too. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. That doesn’t surprise me at all. Um, and I don’t want to spend, I wouldn’t, I don’t think I want to spend money on a podcast studio for it, but we could totally make it look like that. Um, what else stood out to you guys about this video? [Ben Ornstein]: They said they said it right at the beginning like what what was going to be in the video they didn’t he didn’t wait till the end to say what was going to happen or like what he was gonna cover and Again to hook the the viewer or listener. [Michael Houck]: I feel like that needs to be said right up front I Agree I agree And max you said 11k views as 11k likes this thing probably has like no I said 11k likes Oh, okay. I must’ve misheard. But yeah, that’s okay. That’s more in line with what I would expect for this. Yeah. But look, only 29 comments with 11K likes. That’s insane. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Ben Ornstein]: I mean, yeah. He didn’t really prompt anyone to say which one they liked best or are there other ones you’d recommend? Like those are opportunities for this guy. [Michael Houck]: Well, the CTA wasn’t to get engagement though. Was, I guess he wanted to like sell this. Yeah. Okay. That’s what a CTA was. Yeah. Yeah. But the clips that he used of like, um, Ronaldo and Elon, like the, there’s some weird like filter on the videos. And I think this was true of like when he’s on too, but like in all the cases, it just looks, it has a very interesting, like, look to it. [Max Palmer]: Yeah, it’s on filter. I don’t know if that has a huge. [Ben Ornstein]: It’s like a little darker and the light looks it’s well, yeah, not in that one. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I’m not saying we should copy the style. I’m just saying like it has a style, you know, eye catching in some way. Has a visual style. [Ben Ornstein]: And we should come up with our own unique style that is consistent throughout all the videos in some way, shape, or form. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I agree. We should experiment right now, though. [Ben Ornstein]: No, yeah, eventually. [Michael Houck]: The caption is also really good. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, like that’s just a very concise and good caption. [Michael Houck]: Cool. I think that’s it. Ben, did you have any on your side? [Ben Ornstein]: I have a TikTok that came through. [Michael Houck]: Okay, let me pull this up. [Speaker 3]: Companies that are big, this spreadsheet has a list of almost 90 companies that are big now, but when they were small, started off by doing completely unscalable things. Like, for example, did you know So I started in our niche. [Ben Ornstein]: didn’t think the video was incredible, but it did, it was outlier in terms of views for him. He was getting like around 100K per video. This one had like near a million views. The CTA of like a list of things, I mean, that’s why we did the case studies, right? I think it’s similar, similar kind of value given from those. But I just think like he told a few stories stories always hook people And and I remember Max was saying like when he was looking for the podcast I’m looking for like a story but those if we can quickly get a story in a short I think those always hit Yeah, the stories are really good. [Michael Houck]: I think the other things that work really well on here are that there’s clearly more information in the spreadsheet than just what he’s talking about, but it’s not shown, which makes you feel like, oh, if the stories are this good, then the other information is probably also interesting. So I want to actually go and check it out. [Michael Houck]: It looks formatted and like I actually would like this spreadsheet, right? The other thing is that the He has the words, like the subtitles, in a place that makes them kind of hard to read, which I think actually might work in his favor here. [Michael Houck]: And he’s also, he’s not making eye contact, which is a little weird. Do you guys think that plays into it at all? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: I don’t know. [Ben Ornstein]: I don’t know how I feel about that. [Ben Ornstein]: There are videos where I would think it doesn’t matter, but then it plays a big factor in successful videos. So I don’t really have like a strong opinion either way on that. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: And I would imagine that the actual spreadsheet, Ben, did you check out the spreadsheet at the link? [Max Palmer]: I didn’t look at the spreadsheet. I’ve looked at it It’s a good spreadsheet here. I have it actually I think okay. [Ben Ornstein]: Yeah drop it Interesting he used these hashtags The other thing that caught my attention is there were a lot of comments on this Which like it doesn’t seem like something that would generate many comments. I think I saw 80 almost 90 comments maybe Is that a lot? Just for the type of I thought so. [Michael Houck]: Can you create a geoticket to get the team to look at this? [Max Palmer]: I just dropped it in the chat. [Michael Houck]: Oh, cool. Let me pull it up. This is the actual spreadsheet? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Max Palmer]: I saw it on Twitter the other day and ended up tweeting that story about DoorDash and Trader Joe’s. [Michael Houck]: Wow. There’s actually a lot in here. [Ben Ornstein]: Oh, this is crazy, actually. It’s wild that he’s giving this away for free. [Max Palmer]: Yeah, I mean, this could be a lead magnet for us. Yeah, it could. [Michael Houck]: I mean, it is one for him, basically. Yeah, I guess so. He just mentions to try them out. It’s not really well formatted, but he does have that element there. So the interesting thing is that there’s not actually any more value in here. It’s just one sentence and then the sort of more detailed quote version of it. And an epicness level, which is interesting. I’m gonna make a copy of this. [Ben Ornstein]: I was just impressed that I didn’t think the video was all that great in general, but it did so well, especially compared to the other ones. Like there’s nothing the video did extremely well that was, that caught my attention. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I think it’s just that the content was actually pretty interesting. [Ben Ornstein]: And the FOMO play of like, hey, you can’t see all of these. Do you want to see all of them? Maybe. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I think that plays into it. He’s also talking fast, which I think helps get to the point quickly. Do they do cuts? Yeah, they’re doing cuts, right? Or is he just literally doing No, they’re doing cuts. Okay. Okay. I think this one’s good. A lot of shares on this one. A lot of bookmarks on this one too. [Max Palmer]: Yeah. So this relates to what my idea for what we should do, like more with these videos is going to be. And I’ve already, I’ve already said this before, but it’s just repurposing the Tuesday set. So putting the opportunity of the week at the bottom of the screen or the top, and then you’re on the other side, and saying your first line, the first three seconds is, here’s a startup idea you could start today. Boom. Getting into it, the tweet is, again, that bottom half or the top half. And then you’re explaining why that startup idea is a good or bad idea, how you’d build an MVP, get your first customer, whatever. That’s what will get a lot of bookmarks and shares because people will share it. It’s like, want to start this idea to their buddy, people will bookmark it thinking they’re going to come back later and actually start it. That type of startup porn is what will do well. [Ben Ornstein]: I love it, especially because one, we’re already making the content anyway. So there’s that. [Michael Houck]: I’ve been saying this for a while. Max has been trying to get me to do this for forever. So it makes sense. It’s a good idea. It is. [Ben Ornstein]: It is a really good idea. One, you’re already creating the content. Two, I mean, Greg Eisenberg started the Startup Ideas podcast because of the success of podcasts like My First Million that talked about startup ideas on the podcast, like a section of it. That was a reason for why he did it. [Michael Houck]: He started the Startup Ideas podcast because and Sahil Bloom started to dislike each other and no longer wanted to work on where it happens together. [Ben Ornstein]: That’s something I didn’t know. That’s something I did not know. [Michael Houck]: That’s an inside baseball right there. [Michael Houck]: Why don’t they like each other? I’m curious. They just didn’t like working together. They’re very different styles. Greg is like kind of chill, lackadaisical. Sahil’s very like deadline and get things done driven. It just was a oil and water. [Ben Ornstein]: Yeah. But no, everyone loves the, like, they get the startup ideas. It’s like, Ooh, wait, I could build that. Or, and you’re right. So shareable, so saveable commenting will naturally. [Max Palmer]: Like it’s people love learning about startup ideas and like, like thinking that they’re going to start, start them. And, and the other thing is we can do the trend as well. Here’s a startup. You need to be watching, boom. That’s a hook that’s gonna get you in the first three seconds. And the quote, I think we can do as well. [Max Palmer]: How would we do the quote? Well, the quote, I don’t know what the hook would be, but the, yeah, I don’t know what the hook would be, but if it’s like a good quote from, I mean, we’ve done quotes from Paul Graham, Sam Altman, a bunch of big people. And if you just, I don’t know, if you said, here’s what Sam Altman said about this. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, that’s exactly what I was thinking. I’m literally writing that down as you’re saying it. [Max Palmer]: Here’s what Paul Graham said about this subject. [Michael Houck]: Okay. And then the other one or the tool, we could do the tool also, not the free tool, but the paid tool. [Max Palmer]: Like, yeah, I don’t know how well it’ll do, but yeah. [Ben Ornstein]: That was actually one of my ideas where I said, powerful tech you need to know as a startup founder. And then that’s the hook or, you know. Okay. [Michael Houck]: It’ll work. I don’t know how effective it would be. We did some like that when we were building the Launch House TikTok back in the day. Those were our best performing videos actually. Like here’s a specific tool, like, like not even a screen share, but just like recording your camera with recording your computer with the phone. Um, so, okay. Maybe we explore that too. Um, and then I think the framework probably less interesting. Um, yeah, it’s more like abstract, um, Less shareable, I guess. [Ben Ornstein]: Yeah. Oh, sorry. [Max Palmer]: Keep going, Max. No, go ahead. I don’t think the framework’s as good either. [Ben Ornstein]: So this was based on this thing you said at the end of the case study, which I think is a valuable resource we can tap of when I started asking the question of what’s something that you agree with that, you know, what’s your hot take in starting? Startups or fundraising. You said bootstrapping in a business better prepares you to be a founder. Here’s why. And then you can say that one. [Max Palmer]: Hmm. Okay. [Ben Ornstein]: I think VC backed founders are going to be like, wait, what was, what is he saying? What does he mean? [Michael Houck]: I agree. I think that would resonate with VC backed founders. One thing to keep in mind though, is like how big is the market of VC backed founders? Right. Like I’m trying to, I’m trying to the sort of Patti Galloway framework as we’re going through this. And like, we don’t want content that’s gonna just be interesting to people who’ve raised money. Yeah, that’s fair. But if maybe we could frame this as like, you know, if we frame the hook differently, the concept could be interesting to people who are new, who are looking to become founders or thinking about becoming founders. So I think there’s something here. We can work on to work on the hook for it. [Ben Ornstein]: And then my last idea that had to do with that stupid YouTube channel was, who has the better AI tool? OpenAI’s ChatGBT or Anthropics? Like for OpenAI or comment for Claude or subscribe for both. I don’t know, something dumb like that. I have no idea if it would work, but [Michael Houck]: Okay. To trying one of those and seeing how it does. [Ben Ornstein]: We can play around with it and see if it’s too cringe. It could be too cringe, I’m not sure. It likely will be, but I was just so impressed with how well that channel’s done, so. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. Yeah, I mean, we need to get off the ground. Okay. You can always remove it later. Okay, so I think these are good. This is enough for today for sure. We probably have a couple of days worth of stuff here. Um, Max, can you go through some past issues of the newsletter today and pick out a couple opportunities, trends and quotes that you think would be good for us to do videos for? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. Okay. [Michael Houck]: Cool. Um, and then I’ll log these also in our air tables. I set that up this afternoon. Um, as well as the formats and the outlier videos we talked about, But okay, I mean, this is more than I think we expected to do in one day even. So I think it’s a good start. I’ll record one of these, my goal is to record one of these today. And so we’ll start getting like a quick kind of iteration cycle. The other thing I would say is that let’s make sure that we’re all spending a little bit of time on Twitter to catch what the topic of the day is. Because if we can get more of this, use Callaway style explainers, but with more authority because it comes from me as opposed to some random like tech gadget guy, um, then we should do that. So keep an eye out for those and just surface them in the channel. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. [Michael Houck]: We’ll do. Okay, cool. Um, Max, you want to stay on? Cause we have our one on one. Yeah. Cool. Um, Cool. I think we got some good stuff. Yeah, I agree. We’re finally going to do the the repurposing of the Tuesday send. How happy are you? [Michael Houck]: What else is going on? [Max Palmer]: Alright, so super humans back. I literally can’t live without it. [Michael Houck]: That was that was nuts. [Max Palmer]: It was being really weird. I emailed them four different times. In the last two emails, I added Rahul, their founder. I added his email to the thread just to like sound an emergency. And that was four emails in 24 hours. And then like kind of like 20 minutes after I added him, like it looked like it got fixed. I don’t know if that was because of that at all. I really don’t know what the issue is. [Max Palmer]: But yeah, I still have another 40 emails to go through today. They’re pretty much all reminders. And I just got a good reply saying, can you send me over your marketing kit with pricing? And I already sent him that. But yeah, so that’s where I’m at. We had one close via pay. Or not basically close see it is blaze blaze yeah I don’t even know I asked them to send me their website I think it’s this blaze The marketing AI tool for teams. [Max Palmer]: Such a weird website. [Michael Houck]: Was Remo first or Remo first? I don’t know how to pronounce it. Were they bothered at all that I just included the link to the website? [Max Palmer]: Let me pull up. [Max Palmer]: She hasn’t responded today. But yeah, I mean, I, I fucked that up because I didn’t have, I didn’t see this email in time. [Michael Houck]: So yeah, she ended up Oh, but because of the email issue, you didn’t get it. [Max Palmer]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: Oh shit. That sucks. Um, yeah. So nothing we can do. [Max Palmer]: I don’t know what to tell her. [Michael Houck]: Like, do we, I don’t know what to tell her. I mean, if they’re like mad, we can give them a free link spot. [Max Palmer]: I’m not opposed to that, but, um, The thing is, she sent it in time, like, I mean, she sent it yesterday afternoon, but it was still like at whatever, two o’clock. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I mean, so if they want like a free link spot, we can do that. Or if you want to offer it, we can do that. It’s just like an act of God, you know, an act of the tech, the tech God. [Max Palmer]: It’s just so annoying. Yeah, it’s crazy how It sounds superhuman, it’s actually insane. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I bet it’s like the whole thing for all these conversations you have in flight. [Max Palmer]: Yeah. Okay, I’ll respond to them and see what they say. I think it’ll be relatively fine. I don’t know how many clicks we’re sending them, but [Michael Houck]: I didn’t do too many in the link section because I didn’t have that many. Mine is entirely covered in politics right now. [Max Palmer]: Yeah, I kind of have been off Twitter a little bit less. Or often more so. Yeah, I haven’t found as many good ones, but [Michael Houck]: Yeah, it doesn’t look like they got that many clicks. No, I mean, no one’s getting. It’s crazy how much is down, man. It’s not. [Max Palmer]: I mean, micro choir has nine unique clicks right now. [Michael Houck]: Jesus Christ. They have one more with us or this is the last one for now. [Max Palmer]: Uh, I think they have one more. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. They have one more in two weeks. We’ve got to, uh, we’ve got to start, we’ve got to do this repositioning thing. The megaphone thing just knocked me out for like two weeks. I pulled like three all nighters. Rafael and I were like debugging stuff at 4m who It was nuts. But that’s all wrapping up. So we’ll be back to just letting them build new features and stuff by next week, I would say. [Michael Houck]: So yeah, so we’ve got to do the repositioning thing so that we can start justifying money to the paid ads. So we’re going to start on that. [Max Palmer]: Okay, oh, I got a response from, this is another thing I needed, from someone, I gotta go find the company in my email, but saying they wanted to advertise before, I think it was October, or advertise in October. And I’m just not sure who I can move around to make happened let me pull up the calendar here all right I think they said before November like dealmakers this a free spot but that’s after November 6 yeah I don’t know if I can move What about charge flow? He had said they wanted, um, like late October, early November. Maybe I can, I can ask him if he’ll move to November 12th and then I can move deal maker here. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. That might be the, that might be the play. [Max Palmer]: Okay. I’ll, I’ll see what they say first if they’re ready to commit. [Michael Houck]: Also, is this arc? This isn’t Arc the Browser, right? This is the other thing, ArcDev or whatever? Yes, it’s the other one. Yeah. Okay. And you said you have someone who might be interested in a deep dive, too? [Max Palmer]: Yes. I’m forgetting who that was. It’s going to pop up as a reminder probably today. Oh, cool. Okay. Yeah. I just rely on SuperHuman to just remind me single day. I don’t even know. There’s so many emails I have going. So yeah, they had responded like, we most likely be interested in a deep dive or like a founder interview with our founder. I was like, Oh, perfect. That’s actually what our deep dive is. That’s great. So I’m gonna see. Yeah, I responded with a bunch of info on the deep dive. [Michael Houck]: I’ll let you know. Okay. Sounds good. Um, sounds good. Um, so, uh, Salesforce is back up and running again. Um, I’m sending out emails from you, uh, for megaphone, um, with the, uh, not with the link in them, but if people reply, we can send them the link to grab your Calendly. Um, so that’ll start popping up soon. And then we have the ghostwriting stuff running again, which is great. And so we should be adding more folks there too. Took so long to warm up those domains, but yeah, they’re back up. [Max Palmer]: Okay. [Michael Houck]: Was there anything else on our… List for today. [Max Palmer]: Well, you had slacked me about. [Max Palmer]: So I sent you two different Upwork people. It was the same people that I was going to have create ads for us. [Michael Houck]: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. We should get started on the copy for Jake today. We don’t need to get it to him today, but We should get it to him by the end of the week, just like a draft of what we go live with. I’m going to buy the domains today. OK. Oh, wait. Sorry. That’s a totally different thing. So yes. So the video guys are for this potential new client who wants us to do this. Rather than social media content for them, he wants our writer to do educational content within their product and their platform. Um, and part of that is they want videos attached to it. So we just need some, you know, good but cheap, uh, Upwork guy to help out with that. Okay. And then the other thing is, uh, venture scaler. Um, did I give you context on that? That’s with the Jake guy. Um, we write his newsletter. Um, basically he has a, he’s an Uber guy who now has like a hiring business for scaling companies. Um, and we write his newsletter and he wants to start growing that newsletter with cold email. And so we’re going to set up, um, some stuff for him to, to do that with. [Max Palmer]: Okay, so should I create the copy in what’s the email platform, not Salesforce? [Michael Houck]: The smart, smart lead. Yeah, I guess so. Cause we can share smart lead, like selective access with him. I think I got to figure out how to do that, but I know we can. [Max Palmer]: Okay. [Michael Houck]: So I just need to create like a three email cadence and then we’re going to find Yeah, I think we already have, we can use one of the lists that Drake gave us a while ago. They’re just so big that there are enough emails in there to make it worth it for him for at least the first month. And then if it goes well, we can use Drake to kind of get more lists from there. Yeah. Okay. [Michael Houck]: Great. Okay. [Michael Houck]: Did the Buy Optimizers people get back to you about the ad? Did they like it? [Max Palmer]: I haven’t sent it to him yet, so I’m going to send it to him today. [Michael Houck]: Cool. And then I think for that, like, I don’t know if you want to track it in the same Google Sheet that we do the newsletter or like a different tab of it or something. Yeah. Just coordinate with Ben on which one to include in which episode, because he’s he’s interfacing the video editor more than I am. So he’ll know where to put that. [Max Palmer]: Yeah, he created a Notion calendar for the podcast, but we might add it to the Google Sheet. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, probably simpler to keep it in the Google Sheet. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: So yeah, do whatever works best for you. [Max Palmer]: OK. And then you had said, did we decide to set up a separate outreach inbox for you on a specific domain? [Michael Houck]: Right. Yes. I was just, I went to do it yesterday and I was like, wait, did we say this would be on a specific domain? And it sounds like no. So I’m just going to set one up, uh, today unless you have a preference. [Max Palmer]: So, so it’s going to be something like max at get founding journey.com. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, it’ll be something like that. And then what we’ll do for this one specifically is that we’ll go into the DNS and we’ll have GetFoundingJourney redirect to foundingjourney.com. Okay. So like, you know, if people get the email, they want to check it out, it’ll actually go to the real website. [Max Palmer]: Okay. Yeah. Right. And then, yeah. And then my main email is going to be max at founding journey. [Michael Houck]: I mean, you, if you want to keep using the house, that news one, cause you have so many contacts in there and like do whatever you want to do. Um, I would say just if you start getting questions, people, well, what’s how.news journey. Yeah. Yeah. Do whatever works for you. That’s fine. [Max Palmer]: Okay. That’s what I’m worried about. Um, We’ll see. OK. Cool. [Michael Houck]: I’m trying to think of anything else, but I don’t think there’s anything coming to mind right now. Let me check my own to-dos here. [Max Palmer]: I’m going to be out of office for this half day on Friday. I’m going up to Boston. So I’ll be out probably most of the afternoon. [Michael Houck]: Nice. What’s in Boston? Unfortunately, a funeral. Oh, that’s unfortunate. I’m sorry. Yeah. [Max Palmer]: I’ve lost two grandparents in the last month. [Michael Houck]: Oh, shit. Dang, dude. And you’ve been sick. [Max Palmer]: That’s brutal. Yeah. It’s been a bummer. My dad’s dad and my mom’s mom. [Michael Houck]: Oh, dang. Well, that’s awful. I’ll keep the family in my thoughts, man, that sucks. Yeah, thanks. [Max Palmer]: But yeah, other than that, just my whole mind is on this marathon right now. [Max Palmer]: Did you get the session in on Monday, yesterday? Dude, no. I was feeling better on Sunday and So I did a run and my knee was killing me, like my left knee now. And then I tried running yesterday. I could barely get half mile and like my knee was hurting so bad. So yeah, it’s just a war of attrition. Like it’s training for a marathon. It’s so hard not to get injured. I’ve had both knees have been giving me issues. So my whole training schedule I was supposed to do a long run and you’re really like not supposed to miss the long runs. It’s really important not to miss them. And I missed the 20 miler on Saturday because I had the flu and now I don’t even, yeah. So I don’t know. I don’t know if I’m going to end up running it that fast or as fast as I’d hoped, but yeah. [Michael Houck]: What’s your, what’s your goal for the time? [Max Palmer]: So I really, I wanted to do under, I wanted to do like 325. [Michael Houck]: Okay, I don’t know anything about marathons. So I don’t know if that’s yeah. [Max Palmer]: Yeah, it’s pretty fast for a first like for your first marathon, but I thought it’s doable but now like given the Given my issues. I don’t know if it’s gonna be doable. I think I’ll get it around 345 see dang Well, good luck. [Michael Houck]: When is this in like two or three weeks? [Max Palmer]: Yeah, November 3rd. So my parents are flying in on that Friday. I’m going to work that Friday, but then the Monday after marathon, I’m going to plan on taking the day off and hanging out with my parents. [Michael Houck]: It’s the New York marathon? Yeah. Oh, shit. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. [Michael Houck]: That’s cool. You’ll be running, I think, right outside my apartment at one point. Right down Bedford. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There you go. That’s funny. Well, cool, man. All right, keep me updated. I want to hear how you end up. Okay. Well, I’m going to get started on some of these video things. I think we can get pretty good at this pretty quickly. I don’t think it’s rocket science. I think we have good instincts for it. I agree. [Max Palmer]: Let’s just test a bunch of stuff and see what works. [Michael Houck]: Exactly. All right, cool. We’ll do the next. So later.