- Duration: 28 min
- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01JADFPS0MTXFPJQTPQKZ4YJD9 (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JADFPS0MTXFPJQTPQKZ4YJD9)
Transcript
[Michael Houck]: So Ben, Max and I were just talking about the clip. We think we could do one, Max’s idea, we think we could do one for like, which startup founder would you wanna work for as well? [Ben Ornstein]: Oh, that’s a good one. I think that’s a little bit better than, yeah. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, it’s more on niche. [Max Palmer]: Yeah, that’s good, I like that. Another one, which startup would you want to invest in? UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Stripe? [Ben Ornstein]: I mean, there’s a bunch you could do at that point. We could do a lot at similar stages. Early stage ones, we could do like, this company’s working on this. Here’s this other company in the same niche at the same stage doing this. Which one would you invest in and why? I don’t know. But I see what you’re saying. That’s That’s a good idea. I like that. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, let’s test out a couple and see how they do. Um, it could be my hypothesis that I, I said to Max was that, um, the format is better suited, I think for like teens, right. Who are just like, Oh, let me just throw this little engagement on this thing. I don’t think it will be as successful for us. Um, not only because our niche is different, but also, because who our target watcher is, but that doesn’t mean it couldn’t do, you know, tens of thousands of impressions or views or whatever. So worth a shot. [Ben Ornstein]: Um, uh, separately, I reached out to Spotify for podcast transistor and told me to reach out to Spotify. Um, they’re just saying that because the file is large, it may take time to upload, but I tried it and I left it for so and it’s stuck on zero. I don’t think that had anything to do with it. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I don’t buy that explanation. [Ben Ornstein]: And that’s what I just told her. [Michael Houck]: Just keep pushing back on them and see what you get. Okay. So let’s see. [Michael Houck]: Performance. So yesterday, the Elon one, it actually had our best, like first few hours views. But excuse me, I think that’s mostly because it’s similar to the last one, which got a lot of views and so it just was pushed more as our account is like warmed up more. It was more more divisive, more divisive. I don’t know how to pronounce that with like, Only 72% of people who engaged with it liked it as opposed to like for the other one. But the one big difference I think is going to stop this from being as big as the last one is that in. The Nvidia one we had. The average percentage viewed was 79%. And with this one actually doesn’t say it yet on desktop, but on mobile it does. I think it was like like 50%. The hook is getting people at a higher rate because more people are viewing it after being served. It’s like a 80% or even people 90% are viewing it after being served it, but the content wasn’t as interesting and those people are leaving faster. So that’s kind of takeaway there. The Nvidia content was more engaging. People liked it more. [Michael Houck]: Do we think there’s a reason for that? Like, is there a way that the Elon one could have been improved? Yeah, in terms of the content, the body content. [Max Palmer]: I don’t even know if I’ve seen the Elon one. [Ben Ornstein]: It was a little longer, not like it was six seconds longer. I wonder if that played any factor. Like people are looking for those dopamine hits or just the knowledge immediately. [Michael Houck]: I mean, the promise of the Elon one was, was I think pretty interesting, which was, um, Like the hook was like it grabs your attention with the actually Max, let me just show it to you. So you you’ve seen it too. Hold on, share my screen. Go ahead. Here we go. [Michael Houck]: Oh fuck, it’s new. I hate how it always it arc is not good at this. How can I change this to? This tab? Here we go. How the does Elon Musk get so much done? Here’s his five-step algorithm for getting things done. First, question every assumption. In school, we get good grades when we do what we’re told, but in the real world, everyone’s wrong sometimes. Even the textbooks. Second, delete every step that you can. Don’t leave things in just in case. Make every process essential. If you’re not adding things back in, then you’re not deleting enough. Third, optimize and simplify. A common mistake is to optimize something that shouldn’t even exist in the first place. Why this only happens after the first two steps. Fourth, accelerate cycle time. You’re probably moving too slowly. And if you’ve already done the first three steps, you’ve solved the problem. Now focus on delivering the solution more quickly. Lastly, automate. Automating is an investment. You’re saying that you’ve already found the solution and optimized it, so it’s okay to delegate it. If you’re not feeling comfortable doing that, you’re not actually at this step yet. But even if you nail all that, you still might wonder, how the Does Elon? Yeah. [Max Palmer]: It’s good. I like it. [Max Palmer]: I don’t know why. [Ben Ornstein]: The same format like it and the other one worked. [Michael Houck]: I think that the copywriting wasn’t as crisp. Like, as I think about it. I think that the Nvidia one was really tight. I think every bench in the meeting the other day, every word mattered. I think in this one, there were some cases where I was a little vague and like I didn’t deliver as much value in terms of like, what is this algorithm? And so I think also there wasn’t any Elon in the video. I don’t think now that I’m thinking about it, like no shots of Elon, so. That’s true. [Ben Ornstein]: That’s possible. One other small thing I noticed this time that I didn’t last time, just cause I was doing research on other videos, in the title, Maybe you could have capitalized the letters in so, just make it like, I would get so much done to like emphasize it. I just saw that in another video, which I’ll share soon. So maybe that could have had a small impact. I don’t know. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, that’s true. That’s true. Those little things can make a difference. [Michael Houck]: Okay. [Michael Houck]: Cool. I think those are probably the takeaways from that. Just maybe you could do more with the title. Copywriting wasn’t as crisp, didn’t deliver the value, and no Elon. [Michael Houck]: One other difference that we had in this one was that I fluctuated between being on the top and the bottom, as opposed to the Nvidia one where it’s just on the bottom. I don’t think that makes a huge difference, but something to note. Okay. Wait, didn’t we do that on the first one? No. We did, but then the link in the Trello board wasn’t, the clip wing hadn’t updated the link. And so I posted the other one, which was the, just on the bottom half. [Ben Ornstein]: Interesting. The one that we didn’t want them to, that’s funny. Hmm. Good thing to know. Maybe. I don’t know. [Michael Houck]: Okay. Um, let’s move on to outliers. Um, what do you guys have today? [Max Palmer]: Um, I’ve got, um, Sorry. So this girl has a huge account. [Michael Houck]: Oh, it’s Cleo. Yeah. She does the, um, like the, the explainer videos. [Max Palmer]: Yeah. Tech explainer videos. And she’s really good. Subs. This particular video got 5 million views, which is a lot more. Well, yeah, I guess some of hers, which is more than, than most of hers. Um, but what I noticed, so I guess you can watch it first. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, let’s watch it first and then we’ll do takeaways. [Speaker 0]: SpaceX just caught a rocket booster. It’s the first time anyone’s ever done that. Here’s why this was so hard and why it’s such a big deal. People have been trying to reuse expensive rocket components for a long time, particularly the booster, the piece that boosts the part where the people or the cargo out of our atmosphere. Has their rocket boosters detach and fall into the ocean, which means a specialized dive team has to go get it and then disassemble it and refurbish it and reload it with propellant. SpaceX found ways to get their boosters to turn back around and propel themselves to specialized landing areas, which was already a big deal. And there were a lot of hurdles along the way. Oh my god, this clip. [Max Palmer]: That’s what makes this so cool. Not only is it part of the biggest rocket ever, Starship, but it returned back to the exact spot that it launched from and lowered itself precisely into giant metal arms on its first attempt. Subscribe for more optimistic science and tech stories. SpaceX just called. So one of my main takeaways, and this reminded me of a video I saw a while back that was analyzing Mr. Beast’s videos and why Mr. Beast does so good. And basically every two to three seconds, there’s a change. With this video, every two to three seconds, the background video of all these rockets changed. It was a different cut of some rocket, and it kept you engaged every two to three seconds. And I remember watching this video analyzing Mr. Beast, and it was basically like, you have to keep the viewer engaged every two or three seconds, or else they’ll scroll. So you have to constantly change something. [Michael Houck]: Right. It’s like basically every two to three seconds is a new hook, right? We hooked them up three seconds and we got to hook them again and hook them again. Yeah. Yeah. That’s good. Um, I think obviously this video also benefits from like timely timeliness. Also it’s rockets. There’s explosions like it’s space X. [Max Palmer]: Yeah. So there’s a lot. Um, yeah, I mean she probably got this video out within 24 hours of you know, and that’s, that’s a quick turnaround time. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. I mean, that should be, but at the same time, she, she might’ve even gotten out faster than that because you think about it. Yeah. She prepared for it. Right. Right. You know, space X is going to do this. Right. Right. You know, it could work. So you prepare the rest of the clip and then you just like use the actual footage immediately after it probably takes like another hour or two. [Max Palmer]: Yeah. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Okay. [Michael Houck]: preparing beforehand for news events. I think that’s an interesting thing that we can do to try and get out, be the first video, Max, to your point from yesterday. [Max Palmer]: Yeah, and her copy was really good too. There weren’t a ton of wasted words at all. Like, you know, it was, she’s good. [Ben Ornstein]: She also broke down a complex concept into very simple verbiage, which I think she did that extremely well. [Michael Houck]: That’s a good point. Yeah, I noticed that too. I made a mental note when she was talking about NASA doing it. First of all, I didn’t even know that NASA does retrieve their stuff that falls in the ocean. And then second of all, I didn’t know that they do it so that they can reuse it. I literally thought it was one-time use. So she broke it down very, very simply. Right. [Ben Ornstein]: Yeah, no, that was a great video. [Michael Houck]: Cool. That’s a good one. Definitely some learnings we can take from that. Ben, do you have one today? UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: Cool. Let’s put it in the chat. Okay, cool. Let me. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Okay. [Michael Houck]: Let me do this thing where I changed the URL again. Sometimes arc is great and sometimes it’s not great. Yeah. Okay. Here we go. Let’s do it. I want to show you guys just how much more money YouTube is paying over Tik Tok or Instagram. I took the same video and it went viral on all three platforms on Tik Tok. Million views. Instagram got about half a million views. YouTube got about five million views. I want to show you how much money I made from all of these. So on TikTok, I made $0 because my account got banned and I'm not in the creator fund anymore, but my old account would have made about $20 with that many views. So $20 on TikTok. Instagram didn't pay me a thing because Instagram sucks. I got like 200 followers for it. Instagram reels are worthless. YouTube is what we need to talk about though. On YouTube, I have made over $250. This isn’t even updated yet. This is only accounting for like 3 million of my views, but I’m getting about seven cents per thousand views, which is two to four times as much as TikTok pays. But what I really want to show you is this YouTube premium. You’re not only getting money for each of the ad rolls in between each of your shorts, you’re also getting YouTube premium revenue from your YouTube shorts. This is insane. YouTube is paying so much money for this. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Interesting. [Ben Ornstein]: You had the same reaction I did. You laughed. So that was one thing. It was, it was not only educational, but it was also just funny. Two, it was transparent, not only with the numbers that he showed, but he recorded this in his car. Like there’s no, I think sometimes there’s a value to it not being so productized and yeah, yeah. So there was that. And then the other thing, just the comparison to other platforms. I think like not only is he talking about one platform, he’s actually comparing to others. And then the last thing I noticed was the thing I said before, the fact that in his title, he said so much money. So like, so those are all the things I noticed. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I mean, I thought that the, the thing that was most engaging was the fact that he was like, I’m going to show you how much money I made. And then it’s like, I made $0. It’s just like slapstick funny. Yeah. Because you’re waiting to see where he did make money then too. [Max Palmer]: Yeah. People are always so curious how much money other people make. Yeah. It’s a great one. Like it’s, it’s, you always, you’re just curious, like what, what do these creators make? What do, what, what is someone’s salary? We’re like, that’s just such a, everyone’s just always curious about that. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. It’s, it’s definitely a, and there’s a lot of like, I think deep seated, societal motivations that play into that for people that are universal. Like everyone’s stuff. I think this is, this goes back to what we were talking about the other day with the Patty Galloway and Noah Kagan thing. Noah Kagan was making these videos for like, you know, how to use different tech tools. Great for people who are trying to learn how to use these tech tools, but not that interesting. And then they start making videos of, well, why don’t you go talk to all these like successful people that are in your second degree network and ask them how they made their billions of dollars. Obviously much more, Sam Parr is doing the same thing now with his new podcast, Money Wise. Love that, yeah. So it’s an evergreen topic and something we can probably play into as well. I mean, Ben’s already interviewing all of these founders who we could ask them their permission to make reels about how they’ve raised all this money, you know? [Ben Ornstein]: That was 100% one of my ideas from this. I was like, there’s a separate, there’s even an opportunity for like a separate show where we have founders who transparently talk about, you know, their personal income from their startup journeys. Then we can also dive into like the actual valuations on the startups, if they’re comfortable sharing, stuff like that. There’s a huge opportunity for the MoneyWise for startup founders. I totally see that. [Max Palmer]: I mean, MoneyWise does interview startup founders. [Michael Houck]: That’s true too. They do. [Max Palmer]: I don’t know if it’s starting a different podcast, but it could be something as simple as adding a question in the rapid fire part of the podcast or just in the podcast itself. Asking, if you’re open, how much did you pay yourself as the founder? [Ben Ornstein]: That’s probably easier. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: That’s a good rapid fire one. [Max Palmer]: It’s a good, yeah. And you can tell the guy, before you answer the question, you can say, just want to be fully transparent. We can totally edit this out if you don’t want. And then ask the question. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, we can reaffirm that. I make it clear to them we do that before we turn on the recorder for the conversation, but that might be a good moment to sort of say it again. [Ben Ornstein]: That’s actually really interesting, that method for also other questions that we can ask. You know how I was talking about like Jay Klaus does the whole, his producer tells him what questions to ask, if possible. And Jay sometimes actually does it. That is absolutely a method for different questions we wanna ask that can be directly turned into Reels. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, we can reverse engineer the Reels or those TikToks or the shorts or whatever. Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, Ben, feel free to take that on. I know we have, I think two or three more episodes we’re gonna record this month. So feel free to throw some options And we’ll go from there, yeah. [Ben Ornstein]: Yeah, I’ll check those out. Definitely opportunities with that. [Michael Houck]: Cool. Yeah, I think this has been good. I like these, these outliers. I was going to get an outlier today, but I unfortunately was not able to. So I’ll bring one tomorrow. So we’re back on track there. Any other ideas that we have that we want to try out that we haven’t kind of talked about already? [Ben Ornstein]: Well, so based this video, my idea was why don’t we, you talked about it on the podcast that I interviewed you on. I asked you like how newsletter founders can start building a newsletter from the ground up. You could transparently talk about inflection points in your journey of newsletter growth and maybe to whatever extent you’re comfortable with or even is valuable, talk about those inflection for the newsletter growth. [Michael Houck]: About the newsletter specifically? [Ben Ornstein]: Specifically for that because you have numbers you can actually show people. [Michael Houck]: Is that a lot? I mean, I guess it would be, I guess it’s similar. Like people who are writing the newsletters are probably, well, some of them have startups. I’m just trying to think about like how aligned is that to our like core demo. [Ben Ornstein]: I mean, instead of newsletter, we could do megaphone growth and like the revenue associated with it potentially. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. I mean, I’m not a big build in public guy, honestly. [Ben Ornstein]: Yeah, no, totally get it. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: We can talk about, I mean, I could talk about launch house and like what we did there. I, yeah, I still have all the information just for things I’m actively working on. I’m not like, Hey, here’s what I’m doing. [Ben Ornstein]: I get it. Get it. I was just thinking the transparency was interesting on the last video. But no, totally get it if that’s, you know, minor thing. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I mean, there’s something to it, though. [Max Palmer]: Yeah, I mean, that stuff would work well, if you show the dashboard of megaphones MRR in a short form video. I mean, that stuff would do well. But yeah, I don’t know. [Ben Ornstein]: I mean, you see that stuff Twitter all the time. Just launched this project. Look at my seven grand day in my first day. I mean, people do it. I saw that yesterday. [Michael Houck]: People do it. The best example of this is Mark Lou, the ship pass guy. Yeah, and levels. Yeah, and levels too. I would say that levels is more just like stream of consciousness style. Whereas Mark is like very structured tweets about that stuff. I’ve thought about it. Maybe in the future I would want to do more of it. I think for now. I don’t know, I’m just not. I’m not super keen on it. But there’s probably something to do that with like other people like case studies like how this person did this. And put the numbers behind it, we’ll have some of them. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Definitely. [Michael Houck]: Okay. Cool, okay, I think this is good. I’m gonna try to write a few scripts and record a couple tonight so that we have basically a batch for next week. We’ll see if I get to it tonight, might be over the weekend. But yeah, we have three clips for the interview with Sam and then we’ll probably have like, I don’t know, four or five other ones to use as well. So it’d be a good week to get some data. We’ll try out a couple of different styles to see what works. [Michael Houck]: And then I need to finish the sort of like our system for posting stuff. I’ve been trying to decide whether to start with one of these like scheduler tools or start with Airtable and feed it into a scheduler tool. So I have to make a decision on that today and just play around with it more. But okay, cool. Anything else? Max, do you have any other ideas? I know I wrote down here the two from the very beginning about like which private star what do you want to invest in and things like that. But did you have any others? [Max Palmer]: I don’t right now. But I’ll keep an eye out now that I know we’re going to be like meeting every day and I’ll be better trained to actually keep an eye out for this stuff. [Michael Houck]: Cool. Yeah. I mean, I would say that basically before we hop on this call and I need to be better about this, too, because I haven’t done the outliers. We should have one outlier. We should have watched and have thoughts on our own video that was posted the day before, and we should come with ideas, and I’ll do the same. Cool. All right, guys. See you.