- Duration: 26 min
- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01JA8AZP44QTCKEXYP91ANRV98 (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JA8AZP44QTCKEXYP91ANRV98)
Transcript
[Michael Houck]: Well, it’s good to actually meet. [Jeff Walsh]: Yeah, likewise. Yeah, it’s funny. I get, as I’m sure all of your subscribers do, half a dozen to a dozen emails every day and newsletters. Oh, yeah. And yours tend to be the ones that I read more often than the others. So yeah, good stuff, man. Good stuff. Good to finally meet you. Um, so yeah, so I clicked the link for what megaphone. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I think this was, you scheduled the time to talk about ghostwriting. We have with megaphone, we have like the distribution creator network and then the ghostwriting content side of things. [Jeff Walsh]: Ah, okay. So I only have 20 minutes and I know your, your time is probably short as well. Um, what, yeah, it would be interesting to actually hear both of those. Services. Okay. Sure. Um, yeah, just because we, um, so I’m in, we’re an ed tech startup. Okay. And, um, we have, we have a great platform, great product. And, um, truly like it’s, it’s, it’s great. Our, our biggest problem is we’ve been so focused on like building the features, you know, using a lot of pilot schools and, um, you know, kind of focusing on getting the product right before we’re going for scale and growth, right? Like, you know, so just from a marketing perspective, we fucking suck. And I mean, our public landing page is embarrassing. Like, you know, just because we didn’t want to build a beautiful landing page that kind of bragged about everything about the product until we actually built the product, right? And it had all this exciting stuff to brag about. So the landing page is coming like a much more upgraded landing page is coming. We now have paying users. Um, yeah. And, and we have like, uh, we’re on track for our budget and all of that. However, now we realize that we need to do a lot more on, uh, well, there’s two pieces. The marketing side is kind of one. And that would be like, I guess, ghostwriting and just kind of marketing stuff. And then on the content side, and I don’t know if this is something that might be relevant to you, but on the content side, specifically around using our platform productively. Like if you go to some other ed tech tools, edtech platforms, some are really good at like, they have a YouTube channel, and they have like professional development content. And it’s like, how to get the most out of our platform, right? Like, oh, you want to do this with your students? Oh, here’s a great lesson plan. And here’s a great like, tutorial, it’s not so much a tutorial, like, oh, how do I use this citation generator, or show me around the platform, but it’s more like very use case specific to give them ideas to hold their hand. So it’s literally turnkey. You know what I mean? So it’s like, Hey, if you want to build digital literacy for your seventh graders, so they understand reliable content, here’s a great lesson plan. And then we walk them through something. So a teacher can literally just be like, ah, that’s perfect for my class. Boom. I’ll watch the video and I’ll download some content, hand it out to the students and we’re off, right? They don’t need to kind of come up with, you know, so it’s, it’s just basically facilitating ideas to use the tool. So content that’s relevant really for people using the tool. It’s not about capturing new users or, you know, fun, you know, the creating the funnel or cat, you know, marketing and awareness. It’s more like, Hey, you’re on the tool. Now you just want some ideas on how to, how to maximize it. Right. So that’s the other category. So there’s the marketing piece. Right. And like, Hey, wouldn’t it be cool if we were on Tik TOK and, you know, bragging about and drawing awareness and, and all that from a funnel perspective and conversion. Sure. And then the other piece is, Hey, I’m on the platform. Give me some fricking ideas, how to use this thing and like how to, how to use all tools because it’s not a one hit wonder. It’s there’s a lot of different tools on it. So if I’m going to use the misinformation toolkit, what’s a good lesson plan for you know what I mean? So that’s like bucket number two. [Michael Houck]: Sorry, go ahead. [Jeff Walsh]: Yeah, that so that’s it. I’d be really interested if if what comes to your mind because a button by the way, I should preface all of this with our team just as terrible at marketing like we just are don’t have it in our DNA. We’re not, you know, we’re not clever. We’re not connected to what works, what doesn’t, all the platforms, channels, et cetera. So, you know, the sum of like, if you have, you know, as I told you, those two buckets of, of kind of content, if any, you know, whatever comes to mind, I’m all ears. Sure. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: I mean, those two different buckets make total sense. I think it’s smart to break it up that That way, you want to get people in the door, obviously, now that you guys are at a point where you’re ready to do that. But also, you want them to succeed once they get there. So it makes total sense to me. When I saw that you guys were in ed tech, I actually got excited because we have a writer on our team who is actually, like, he works in the school system. He is an educator, knows it really well. He’s worked with other education clients with us. They’ve done really well also. So yeah, perfect fit there. As far as like how we work. So on the content creation side, we have Megaphone Studios, which is our ghostwriting offer. Basically, you can tailor that to sort of whatever medium you would need it to be for. And we can talk strategically about what makes the most sense there. That could be on, you know, ghostwriting for social media like LinkedIn or X. We’ve seen well for the education before. [Jeff Walsh]: And what is what is ghostwriting entail? Like, sure. Yeah, what is that all about? [Michael Houck]: Sure. Yeah. So ghostwriting is basically when you imprint your brain on to one of our writers. They are dedicated partner to you. They’re not some pool that you throw an idea into and someone grabs it and writes it back. It’s your partner on the account Um, and basically every week they send you some topic ideas and specific questions about those topics. And then you respond with like voice notes where you’re sort of, you know, very rambly and emotion and the intonation in there that makes it very nuanced content. That’s only something you yourself could write. It’s not like cookie cutter, SEO type stuff. Like this is your voice. Um, so if we get those voice notes back from you, in like a Slack channel or something by Wednesday, then by Friday, we can get you a draft of content for the week. And this can be, you know, sort of the medium can be either X, LinkedIn, a newsletter, a blog on the site, whatever you think is the right fit for your users and your audience to pull them in. Personally, I think based on where it sounds like you guys are at, I would recommend social media as our first stop, just because it’ll help us build awareness And then we could also do a newsletter if you’d want as well to sort of pull them in, capture their email. That’s on the marketing side, right? Yeah, that’s where ghostwriting would fit in. If we wanted to then also do like content for retention and engagement with the product and things like that, we could do that too. And that would be the same person. With like probably another partner on our team helping out as well. And they would, their responsibility there would basically be to work with you and say, okay, this week we want to build a quiz or this week we want to build a help center, right? And you’d walk through what’s required. They’d get the requirements from you. They’d give it back to you. You’d come back to us with edits and changes and things like that. We’d deliver the final product. So in both cases, be the same sort of cohesive person and experience for you. And yeah, that’s how it works. Just in a Slack channel, if you wanted to hop on calls, we can do that. But you know, we work with founders and we find that most founders, they prefer the voice notes and the async Slack stuff. But that’s up to you. We can do a kind of content. Yeah. [Jeff Walsh]: Okay, that’s cool. Okay, so on the on the social media, the first thing you talked about on the marketing side, like the ghostwriting, is that a pardon my freaking ignorance, but why couldn’t, can’t you just create content that, and then just post it across all the channels, all the platforms? Like LinkedIn, Twitter, Insta, Facebook. [Michael Houck]: You can, I would say that each platform has kind of their nuances. [Jeff Walsh]: They do. I hear that a lot. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, for, excuse me, I got a little phlegm this morning. For example, when you make a post on Twitter, you’re going to want to write probably a thread. We have a hook tweet and then a couple of supporting body tweets with different pieces of evidence or parts of a list or something like that. On LinkedIn, you can’t do that. You can’t string different posts together like that. On LinkedIn, the best strategy is usually some screenshot carousel or long-form text as one single unit. Nuances to that. Instagram and TikTok, obviously video is going to work the best there. Video also works on X and LinkedIn, but what I would say is it requires a little bit more of an investment from the, the end, uh, the recipient, the person who sees it in their feed, they got to decide, I want to watch this video. So text them to get your points across a little, a little quicker. But yeah, but you can’t do text obviously on, on TikTok or Instagram. [Jeff Walsh]: Yeah. Okay. Okay. So there’s subtle differences. It’s like, yeah. Yeah. Okay. Um, and, and then in the newsletter, you said that’s part of the ghostwriting, you know, piece. Is that like, what do you, what would be the recommendation is the newsletter, like a weekly biweekly monthly, because right now we don’t have a segment where we haven’t segmented our users from educators. And students. So like, and now we’re recognizing like, is this kind of, when I send, we typically have sent just monthly newsletter updates with basically it’s all about the product. It’s all about like, here’s our new features. [Michael Houck]: Got it. It’s like an update email. [Jeff Walsh]: It’s an update email. That’s really what it is. We try to make it pithy. It’s, you know, it’s concise, it’s effective. It’s written in my, you know, the human voice. No, we do get compliments that people really like it because it’s succinct, but on point. And that’s just how my brain works in terms of the content. It’s just an update. And it’s not like a thought piece, thought provoking. It’s not a newsletter in your style newsletter. Is what you you have in mind when you say newsletter more like your style newsletter where it’s a variety of links to outside content and ideas. Yeah. Okay. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: So the actual format, like we’d work together with you on that on probably a kickoff call and be like, all right, here’s some sections we want to try out. We’d probably experiment with that over the first few issues to see what resonates with people. You know, that’s what I did when I was starting out my newsletter and it let me sort of get to this format that now works really well for us. It’s different for every audience, so we’d want to get feedback from the readers and see what resonates with them. But yeah, we would try out a few different things. In terms of frequency, it would sort of depend. We could do it weekly. We could do it biweekly. We could keep doing it monthly and just maybe add in a thought piece, as well as the updates, as well as some curated links from the space that are going to be of interest to these people and keep them coming back and opening the newsletter. So I can’t speak to what specific sections we would include yet. But what I would say is we’d work with you to make sure that it’s delivering value for whatever makes sense. And we would also, we’d also set up a Beehive account for you. We’d set up automations, like a welcome sequence, a re-engagement sequence, a few other things as well. And we sort of maintain that on a week to week basis. [Jeff Walsh]: Okay. [Jeff Walsh]: Okay. Then on the, the content creation side, so the one when we already have them as users and we want to create content for them, that to me, that’s the biggest, that’s the most, I mean, both of these buckets are important, but I actually have another conversation with an ed tech focused marketing company on Friday. So, you know, I’m just trying to figure out like how do by Optimize here, and if you have, the guy on your team who is an educator, is he personable? Is he like someone that likes to be on camera? Or is he just the mind behind it? [Michael Houck]: No one has asked us to put him on camera, so I can’t speak to that, but he’s a very personable guy, he’s a very friendly guy, speaks well, So if that’s something you guys would want, we could explore that. Sorry, my phone alarm is going off. I can’t hear it. I don’t know why that went off right now. But we could certainly try that. [Jeff Walsh]: I would be interested. This to me is probably the most important piece simply because we need to retain. We need to have our users like loving the product. Right. And I want teachers to be like, oh, my God, you got to use this product. Because it’s so turnkey, right? And that’s where this content creation piece comes in. We can always build the marketing slowly, later, whatever, you know, but just from the content creation, to me, it feels like that’s the most pressing right now because there’s fuck all and we need to do a much better job. And when we launch our new public landing page with all the bells and whistles, we want to have this resources page, right? [Michael Houck]: And so, yeah, one thing I could say is that we do have somebody else on staff. Again, we normally sort of keep people set on their, their function. So we do have somebody on staff who is, you know, he’s our video guy, right? He’s like ready to talk about different topics. And he’s very, very good on camera, very personable. And so if you wanted to go this route of having us sort of record some of that video content for the this, my suggestion would be we have the educator sort of write the scripts and content, get your feedback on those, and then we turn it over to this guy to actually record it, probably come out with the best product that way. [Jeff Walsh]: Yeah, okay, okay. What would that cost and look like, And just a high level, obviously, I’d want to have a second follow up call with those two people just to make sure we’re all, because this We wouldn’t want to put anything out there that doesn’t hit the mark. I think it’s pretty straightforward, right? We’re not reinventing the wheel here. It’s actually pretty straightforward, but it would just have to gel. What does that look like, If we wanted to basically build a library, that’s what we’re kind of talking about. And I guess it might be like, Hey, initially let’s put together, like, I guess there would be a little bit of a kind of mad dash to put together like the core pieces of the library that we launch with. And then maybe a weekly or not even weekly, bi-weekly or monthly update with new content, like a new lesson, a new this, like media literacy week is coming up in next week. And so like, you know, we’d want to, I know we don’t have time for it. We’re going to miss it this year, but the idea would be like, Hey, looking at the calendar, media literacy week is coming up. We should do a lesson for media literacy week. So team let’s do it. Right. Let’s hang it up. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. Um, okay. So that makes sense. I think the way we normally work is we set up a monthly agreement and each week there are deliverables. Um, so we’d say depending on how many deliverables you’d want to arrange any where from 2K a month up to on the high end, very high end would be like 6K a month, right? And so somewhere within that sort of spectrum, we don’t do any sort of long-term commitments. It’s totally month to month. We only ask for 30 notice before we cancel, if you ever cancel. And yeah, I can send over an email with like some breakdowns of like, hey, if we do the $2,000 month tier versus the $5,000 a month tier, hear what that looks like in terms of the amount of content we’d be able to give you. And I give you options in that between like video content versus written content. Cause I, I would imagine that part of the library you guys want to build and correct me if I’m wrong, but I’d imagine that part of it includes, um, you know, sort of like written blog content or, uh, guides and things like that as well. [Jeff Walsh]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: Okay. [Jeff Walsh]: Yeah. Um, yeah. And, and it wouldn’t, and I understand like if we’re giving the teacher downloadable materials that they can hand out to their students. Like I do have someone that can actually create the rough form of it. You know what I mean? So it’s like, you know, in a rough form. And then I don’t know if you guys do polishing. So that way your guys don’t have to come up with like, oh, Is this a curriculum standard? Or is this part of the common core? [Michael Houck]: I have someone that- Our guy would actually know that. He would be able to sort of have some intuition around that as well. But obviously the more sort of subject matter expertise we get from you guys, the more we’re gonna be able to get back to you, yeah. [Jeff Walsh]: Yeah, okay. So two things. Could you send me a link to a video that this guy has done, your video guy, And obviously like I have another person on my team who has done all our tutorials. He does demos up the wazoo. So he is super comfortable. He’s been, you know, but it’s not his wheelhouse. You know what I mean? Like he will love them during demos, but he’s not that engaging character, you know, that like you would want to watch on YouTube necessarily. Or if a teacher is like, all they need a lesson plan, boom, and they come to our resources page. You might not wanna see Luke. You might wanna see someone who’s a little bit more lively, right? And so that’s what I’m thinking when you said you have a guy who’s okay to be, is happy to be on camera. Like that’s an actor. I mean, I’m thinking of an actor, right? Like just someone who can be enthusiastic, read through the script, make it feel like they’re the real deal when he’s not. [Michael Houck]: He’s basically the equivalent of like a YouTube and TikTok actor, right? He helps out businesses like us with clients who need video content. So it’s like, it’s his specialty. That’s what he does. He’s very great. [Jeff Walsh]: I would love to see some footage of him. Sure. And then have a conversation with him and your educator, who’s an educator. I think the three of us, plus you, I guess, just to do a mind meld for a few minutes to see if this is something that they all connect with, because I don’t want to shoehorn this. I’m sure you’re speaking honestly, like, yeah, we can do this, but there’s some chemistry that just needs to fall into place organically. [Michael Houck]: Okay, we typically don’t do calls with the team with the client before we get started. It’s usually just me. I can ask them if they’re if they’re up for it. But you know, I generally pay them based on their time. So I yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I’ll share with them though and see if they’d be up for it. [Jeff Walsh]: Yeah. Okay. And do you want me to send you a like our two minute highlight demo video is a way you can share it with those guys and be like, Hey, this is the product. That we’re talking to. [Jeff Walsh]: And then you send me the link to some example of this guy performing. And then a breakdown of that cost, like what would the two grand per month look like, What’s that package? Is that one thing a week or whatever? Yeah. Okay. Let’s do that. [Michael Houck]: I’ll talk to them. I’ll send you an email probably by sometime tomorrow after I hear back from them and we’ll kind of go from there. But I know we’re over time, so sorry for taking up more of your time. [Jeff Walsh]: Yeah, I know. I have an investor call in seven minutes. Oh. Yeah, so someone I’ve never met before, so. Oh, wow. I gotta be on my game. Good luck, man. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: I’m rooting for you. [Jeff Walsh]: Nice. All right, and I’ll send you a link to the demo video. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, the more you send over literally any any materials that you want us to take a look at and then we’ll digest it. [Jeff Walsh]: And your email, can I just use the one the how.news? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Howcanhow.news? [Michael Houck]: Howcanhow.news, please. Yeah. Okay. I made the mistake of putting my newsletter on my personal email. But it works out. [Jeff Walsh]: But yeah. All right. Awesome. Thanks, Michael. Great. Great meeting you. Good to meet you. Talk more soon. All right.