- Duration: 27 min
- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01JAAXEDX3FBCHNGN6V4FBP84S (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JAAXEDX3FBCHNGN6V4FBP84S)
Transcript
[Michael Houck]: How are you? Good. How are you? Good. Okay. So let’s jump in. I weirdly had a power outage last night for a wifi outage last night for a bit. So I didn’t get to set up our dashboard yet, which I wanted to do before today. So we’re behind on that. [Michael Houck]: But other than that, I guess we can just jump right in. So, I mean, we talked about performance in the channel, but we’re ending up, it’s actually picking up a bit again this morning, which is crazy for that one video. It kind of stopped overnight because I guess it’s targeting people in the US. But yeah, I guess any other sort of insights that we have and talked about about why we think that video is performing so well. [Max Palmer]: I don’t think I have any others. High quality, like it’s… [Michael Houck]: Oh, shit. [Ben Ornstein]: What’s up? My Wi-Fi just cut out. No, you’re fine. Oh, that was so weird. You guys look like you completely froze. Yeah, I would say high quality, like that is a differentiator at this point. All cameras, even like on the newest iPhones are pretty good, but especially for your camera, like it’s, it’s extremely high quality. And I think it sets itself apart a little bit. That could be a small factor. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. I mean, it’s better than recording it on, you know, like some old, some old phone. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Right. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. I guess we’ll see what this Elon one, how it does. Um, Oh, he finally sent over the fixed version. [Ben Ornstein]: Let me just pause this. Yeah, I was wondering if he fixed it. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I’m just going to post it on YouTube real quick and see how it goes. [Michael Houck]: OK. [Michael Houck]: Why is this taking so long? There we go. Any other videos? [Ben Ornstein]: ours that we want to Talk about before we move on to like other outliers Okay, so should I have them do the same with the other ones beeps instead of like the glitch sound Yeah, yeah. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, the idea was was beeps It’s a peeps. [Ben Ornstein]: I guess he took it as glitches. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I don’t I didn’t even hear the glitch sound. I don’t really know Jesus Christ I didn’t even know what he was talking about As in like it’s kind of just So I guess I’ll have them edit the other ones Sorry, I’m just writing a quick caption here, and then I’m going to post this. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: OK. [Michael Houck]: No related video. Oh, it needs a copyright check every 10 minutes. OK. Well, I guess I’ll wait 10 minutes, then. OK. [Michael Houck]: So yeah, let’s add in any outliers. Do you guys find any outlier videos you wanna talk about today? [Max Palmer]: I was just looking for some, but didn’t really find a good one. [Ben Ornstein]: So I found this one. This is just one that showed up on my YouTube because I don’t have, I barely have ever watched shorts. So the content is a little strange. It’s like a girl like dancing, The premise of what she did was genius and there so her She gets about 1 3 views per video But because she said like pretend like it’s 2078 this video got 1.2 million views so The fact that she just like she had people engage in the comments genius how the content is obviously just like her dancing like a a lot of the TikTok girls, but I thought it was really smart. I mean, it is so far removed from every one of her other videos. I was like, this is impressive. [Michael Houck]: So the idea here is like, she literally just tells people like post in the comments, like what it would be like in 2078. Yeah. [Ben Ornstein]: And it’s kind of funny. Like people are responding like, oh my God, this is so 2024 or, and they’re just, you know, they’re coming up with just funny, creative things and people love to show their creativity. I thought it was smart. I don’t know how important this was, but I thought it was clever. [Max Palmer]: Max, you sound like you were going to say something. It’s interesting. I’ve never seen that approach to get engagement. [Michael Houck]: So this is similar to on Twitter when you make a short post and the post is just asking a question. Um, some people just do this all the time. They just post questions and then the questions are actually interesting questions. So people answer, I think the sort of like tick tock YouTube shorts, equivalent of asking an interesting question to get responses on Twitter is like asking maybe a more generic way to get engagement. Um, but it’s the same kind of principle. Yeah. I think the other thing is that. Like she’s not actually that good at like dancing, like her moves are very like robotic, I would say. Um, and so it sort of gives off a vibe of like, like the, the top comment is, or at least top comment for me. Um, or yeah, top comment for me is stop. This is so nostalgic. It’s giving 2024 LOL. Right. And I think that like, the fact that she’s using a trending sound and the fact that she is like, kind of like almost imitating what a TikTok dance would be like, this is so basic. It almost sort of taps into something, which is like, it’s not actually so that she’s good at it. It says she’s sort of imitating it. And so therefore people feel maybe more comfortable commenting about it. I don’t know. [Ben Ornstein]: Yeah, I was just impressed with how many, just if you look at all of her shorts, it’s so far, it’s by far her best video by a mile. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I’m scrolling through her shorts right now. They’re like hundreds of views or a couple thousand views, like one with 58K. Yep. Let’s see what that was. [Michael Houck]: Okay, I don’t even know what that’s supposed to be. She’s just like walking away from the camera with her hands up and got 58,000 views. I don’t understand what’s going on here. [Michael Houck]: Okay, so I mean, basically we can just treat this as an example of like another format that explicitly asks for engagement. [Ben Ornstein]: Right. I got one more as well. This one’s a little more applicable to us I think this is like a similar video to what we would post or something that we We lost him Yeah, you’re back. I think My computer free. This is like a relatively new computer. I don’t have that many tabs open like this should not be happening. Maybe it’s Wi-Fi Could be I don’t know. It’s every time sometimes when I’m in these calls and then I open up a new tab. Things go crazy. But this was just talking about the WeWork founder and why he’s still rich. I think the title was interesting. The video was quite good too. [Michael Houck]: Let me open this up and I’ll let the audio play. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: you. [Michael Houck]: Hmm, interesting. Why did you like it, Ben? [Ben Ornstein]: Um, high quality, no fluff. [Ben Ornstein]: A lot of research into it. Clearly, it wasn’t like something that stayed on the surface level, they were pretty went pretty deep. And I did just a good production overall. And it for whatever reason it did. Get people to comment. It’s still getting people to comment. [Max Palmer]: Max, what do you think? Yeah, it was educational, like you learn something. And I agree, it’s, it’s well researched. And there are a million startups where we could do stories like that. Yeah. There’s the obvious, you know, stories, or I guess stories that are a bit different than that. I mean, I know the Airbnb serial story has been told a million times, but I’m sure it would do well. The Travis Kalanick benchmark story at the hotel would do well. So yeah, well-researched stories about well-known startups. I think it would be well for sure. [Ben Ornstein]: If you like pivots as well, we could do like the Slack pivot from game to Slack. We can do a bunch of those too. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. I think, so I actually found it a bit dense. I think it was, it had a lot of good things for it, but I actually think they could have gotten a lot more like views and stuff on this if they made it a little less dense and brought it up a bit. Some of the wording I thought was a little, it was a little like corporatey, which was weird. I guess it makes sense because Slidebean is like- Yeah, I think that’s just Slidebean’s vibe, yeah. Yeah, they’re like an older brand at this point. I mean, I think the main reason is because, yeah, it was well-researched and this is just people get mad, I think, when they think about somebody. [Michael Houck]: Some people would say he defrauded people. There’s that controversial angle to it. And people get mad when they hear the details of that story. The top comment that I see is, I’ll never understand how these people get away with this. That’s the sentiment that’s driving, I think a lot of the sharing probably and definitely the comments. Like how are these, how do these investors get access to this much money when they’re this stupid to work with a guy like this, you know? [Ben Ornstein]: That’s what makes people mad. And then we work obviously, like a lot of people, if they’re generally familiar with tech and startups and I mean, we work even outside of the niche was just a very well-known company. It was huge. And their downfall is pretty widely reported on as well. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. I bet that if we did this video, but we waited, I don’t know, three to six months or something, and then posted it, I bet that it could do even better than this one did. Because again, I think we would have same high quality type of editing, but our script would be a little easier for people to understand who aren’t experts in this stuff or aren’t deep into this world. So this is an interesting idea. Like specifically, this video is an interesting idea for us to keep in the backlog, because I think we could do a better job. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Definitely. [Ben Ornstein]: Oh, and one more comment on this. He usually gets around 10,000 views. This one got like 82,000, better for him. [Michael Houck]: So you had like an 8x outlier. Let me write that down. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Dimension. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. Okay. And I guess the first one was like, what, like a, like a thousand X outlier. [Ben Ornstein]: I mean, yeah, kind of [Michael Houck]: Okay. Um, cool. Okay. Sounds good. Um, we have those for today. I think when we are, uh, when you, when you guys are bringing these, I’m going to start bringing some outliers, uh, to this conversation tomorrow too. But when we bring these, uh, we should have like very, very strong opinions on what specifically about the video works so well, like we should touch on like, Hey, this is a format that could work for us, but I want us to go one level deeper and be like, oh, you know, this one did well because of like, the little details that can make a big difference in some ways. So I think just let’s make sure that we’re going that deep on the examples. [Michael Houck]: OK. Next up is, why did I add this three times? This is a notion. That’s weird. I guess let’s just jam on some ideas. So outside of those two formats, which I think are interesting and we should try to probably test them. Any thoughts on new specific ideas that we could use? [Max Palmer]: What are your thoughts on breaking news clips? Like on getting the story out as soon as possible from your account and maybe not it as edited as you’d like but being the first to post about it. I’m not gonna post that at all. Because like that the the Praxis news like if right when we saw that tweet for the Praxis announcement or that I got their email and you you know shot and an iPhone clip, it would just I’m just like, I think it could potentially do all because I do know that on Twitter, being the first one to post about, you know, the open AI debacle, like the FTX stuff, like all the big breaking news, obviously praxis isn’t as big as that stuff. But still, just being being the first one to post about it, I think matters on platforms and that’s another kind of different type of content that we could try. [Michael Houck]: What I like about that is that I feel like again, a lot of the people who comment on startup tech world news on these video platforms are like, they’re not, they don’t actually like know that much about business and about startups and about how things work. And so the interesting angle here is But yes, it’s sort of an off-the-cuff, low-budget type video. But my hot take would probably be more interesting than a lot of these people’s hot takes. And so they need to wait until they write a script and highly produce it. And they have a process to do that probably within 24 hours. But if we get something up that’s more interesting right away, that could be better. [Ben Ornstein]: Yeah. And when you first post those things on Twitter, a lot of people, just repost with their own comments rather than, and so we get engagement from that as well, so. [Michael Houck]: I think the big thing is I need to figure out then how to like do the little editing of the videos in the, I guess it’d be in the TikTok app or in CapCut or something. Cause even those, even those types of like off the cuff videos people do, they’re in front of a green screen, or even if they’re not in front of a green screen, they’re like stopping and starting the edit at a certain point. So I would just need to figure out how to do that. [Ben Ornstein]: I could do that piece in Adobe. Like if it’s simple, just cutting that, I could handle that for sure. [Michael Houck]: Cool. Okay. Then yeah, maybe I’ll do that. Maybe I’ll just ramble and I can send you the file or something. [Ben Ornstein]: But I think it’s definitely worth it past. [Michael Houck]: I like that. So all the more reason then to surface interesting news that we see on Twitter in the TikTok channel. So that if we see one that’s interesting, I can just hop on it real quick. [Ben Ornstein]: I saw this post or this tweet, and I thought it could be an interesting idea for us to talk. It’s very controversial and I think there’s a different angle we can take I don’t think we should take the political angle, but I think a VC job is Simply to bring returns to LPS and nothing else and nothing should stop that I think there’s an interesting approach we can take there with this one. I don’t know. What do you guys think? Like talking about it in the context of truth social specifically We could we could I just think staying away, we could go political, but I just don’t think it’s smart to take a side in general. Because then we’re then associated as one way versus the other, regardless of, you know, what side it is. Does that make sense? [Michael Houck]: No, but I mean, like, we can talk about the company without making it political. Right, right. Yeah, no, no, I agree with that. Okay, so yeah, so my question was like, do you mean talking about this in the context of Truth Social specifically, or just like, you know, did we find like other examples or like, what were your thoughts on the fact [Ben Ornstein]: that- I was thinking Truth Social specifically, because it’s a controversial company, but, and it’s, you know, we talked about like turning threads into, or tweets into videos. And just because of the controversial nature. But yeah, sorry, I didn’t make that clear. Specifically about true social is what I was thinking. [Michael Houck]: I feel like this tweet could be a good candidate for like a reaction video. Like we put the tweet in the background. We have me either on top of it as a green screen or below it in like a half split screen scenario. And we just talk about that concept. That could be interesting. Because again, truth social would catch people’s attention. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Max Palmer]: Yeah, I agree. Black Rifle Coffee is another company. Have you guys heard of them? They do millions in revenue. And they’re, you know, basically a right wing. I think they’re just like a right wing coffee company. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, they are. [Max Palmer]: So that’s one you could bring up. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I don’t mind leaning into this right now. I think it’s very, very of the moment. So yeah, that could be interesting. Okay, I have that one down to do some sort of green screen or split screen video for it. Reaction style. So I’ll play around with these. Today. And then we have some from yesterday I want to play around with too. So yeah, these are good. [Max Palmer]: We do have to kind of walk a fine line, though. You know that if you mentioned Trump, no matter what it’s regarding, you know for a fact that the far left is going to be in the comments, regardless of whatever, you know, you’re talking about a startup or not, like, you know, 100% Yeah, which is going to be good for engagement, because then more people are commenting. But it’s also will it get you flagged? Will it? You know, I don’t know. [Michael Houck]: Right. These platforms are not as friendly, ironically, as Twitter in terms of like flagging you and things like that. So we do have to we do have to tread that line. I was watching an interview with the Tucker Carlson did this morning. And the guy who was interviewing was saying that he thinks that after the election, it’s going to be like the biggest like mental health crisis in the history of the country. And like on like a sustained basis. And so I think like that’s the context that we should keep in mind if we’re going, if we were like treading into that world at all. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Max Palmer]: I would almost veer away from it, but yeah, I agree. I’m not sure if it’s totally worth it. There’s a ton else in the startup world that’s not, but you know. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I think with like one exception, I’ve always stayed away from including that stuff in like explicitly in my content. It just doesn’t make sense to. Yeah. Okay, cool. So this is good. I’m going to, get our database and database set up today as well as, Ben, I’ll get back to you on the dashboard stuff and we’ll get that set up. [Ben Ornstein]: And then I think that’s it. While I have you on the Thursday email, should I just, should I use the one that was sent last week as a template kind of [Michael Houck]: Yes, what we actually should do is in Beehive, if you go to the post section and you go to the top right where it says start writing, if you click the arrow next to that and then click use template, you see that there’s one in there called like founding journey Thursday email. If you click on that and then edit the template rather than use it, it’s blank right now. You can just drop in everything from last week. And then maybe make it, like cut it up so that there’s only one example rather than two, because we did the two episodes last week. And we can just use that and save that as a template and we could use it as a template each week. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Cool. [Michael Houck]: Okay, that works. Cool. Okay, cool guys. Good chat. I’m on my horse today trying to get some of these done. So yeah, I’ll talk to you on Slack. Cool. [Max Palmer]: See you.