- Duration: 34 min
- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01JAG259AR2D05YV2NH4D8ZCEM (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JAG259AR2D05YV2NH4D8ZCEM)
Transcript
[Michael Houck]: I wonder where Max is, let’s see. Let me message him again. [Ben Ornstein]: He’s active on Slack. [Michael Houck]: Oh, there he is, what’s up man? Hey, sorry. Oh, good. [Michael Houck]: Okay, so let’s dive in. [Michael Houck]: Show my screen, there we go. Okay, so nothing went live yesterday, I just posted long-form video and so question for you guys do you think we should keep doing that or do you think that when we post the podcast it should have no impact and we should try to post a shorter video anyway I think we should try to post as much as possible yeah I don’t think there’s any downside to that yeah yeah I’m scarred from from Twitter and like where if you post too many times in a day, you don’t get the same reach. Or this is definitely LinkedIn. Twitter, it’s debatable if that happens or not. [Max Palmer]: Yeah. And with Twitter, if you have a post that’s picking up steam, you don’t want to post again. [Michael Houck]: Right. [Max Palmer]: That’s what I’ve learned trying to do this soccer Twitter account. I’ll get a good tweet, and then I’ll tweet again, and it’ll suppress it. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: So I’m scarred from that. I think in this case, that’s probably not the case. We probably just want to post as much as possible. So, okay. Um, so, uh, Max, I was saying before you hopped on, uh, I’m going to do, we have the team editing one more this morning, the, um, the meta food credit thing. Um, so I’m gonna post that today and then, um, well, what else? And then, um, I might post one of the, Sam clips today And then tomorrow I’ll post the brain rot Like you PT one We’ll see how that goes but then I’m gonna record for like four more over the weekend because I think we have a lot of ideas right now and We’ll post those throughout the week and then I’ll save one spot for like a trending news thing that we can catch next week that we really Like because the clip wing team does up to five every week for us basically. Um, okay. So outliers. Um, I had one, um, let me, I’ll open this up here. Um, Oh, it’s going to do the new dammit. I gotta get a better system for this. Okay, here we go. Do management consultants do I’m here with Matt. Matt, what do you do? So I’m currently working at Google and their strategy department. Prior to that, I was a consultant at BCG New York. I also spent a fair amount of time in investment banking before that. Why did you go from investment banking to consulting and then to tech? When I was in college, I wanted to go into finance. I was really interested with the numbers, loved analyzing different businesses. So that sort of led me to investment banking. Spent a little bit over a year in investment banking in New York, which was super fun, but at the same time had an itch to learn a little bit more about the strategic side of things. And so I pivoted over to consulting and had an awesome two years at BCG. But after that was really looking to work on something a little bit more impactful and have a little bit more ownership over the work as opposed to just being an advisor. And so that sort of led me over to Google. And on the side, I also run a YouTube channel. Now we got about 14,000 subscribers making a lot of career related content. And I’m also now getting started with a career prep business. Super excited about that. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. [Michael Houck]: I’m curious. What are your guys’ reactions to that? That got 30x more views than Andrew’s normal interview videos. That much more? Really? Yeah, this is 30,000 versus normally like 1k. [Max Palmer]: That was kind of a boring interview. [Ben Ornstein]: Like, I don’t know why that did well. I was pretty bored too, to be honest. [Michael Houck]: Okay, so I have the same reaction. And I understand it now. It’s because it was so boring. It’s because this guy comes off as like, so inauthentic, just like, you know, he’s it’s like he’s like talking to a recruiter. Right? He’s like, you see him like side eyeing the camera, like very conscious that he’s on camera and how he’s coming off. And I looked in the comments, and the comments basically affirm this, the comments are like never answer the question. There’s no way this is a real person. This is the most conventional career path you could do. What does he do a Google PowerPoint slides? Not a job interview, just tell us the truth instead of BS. [Max Palmer]: You know, like, That’s why it went viral because people made fun of him in the comments. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, yeah, basically people people like it. And I think yeah, he just I think he just comes off very inauthentic. And that’s why it it grift is a surface. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, so I think that’s why I don’t really know what we do with that information, but I do think that that’s the insight here. [Ben Ornstein]: Very interesting. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. So I don’t know. Any other thoughts? [Max Palmer]: I don’t know. You’re not going to start doing interviews in the streets, right? [Michael Houck]: No. I have no interest in doing that, really. Yeah. [Ben Ornstein]: A lot of videos do go viral with that format. So it’s like a format that does blow up. I mean, the talk to a girl, that’s how that started, right? [Michael Houck]: I mean- Yeah, I mean, Ben, do you know Jason Levin? [Ben Ornstein]: Max, I know you- Oh my God, he’s hilarious, yes. [Michael Houck]: So Jason used to work for me at Launch House. Oh, cool, I didn’t know that. And he started doing the guy, like the subway book guy, where he’s reading like these insane books, right? He’s reading like books on like, you know, I don’t know, like ridiculous topics, like how to get rid of your yeast infection or something like that. He started that kind of trend. Yeah, that’s that’s him, like New York subway book stuff. And then he does it in the park now too. But yeah, I mean, that those formats, it takes a lot of time to get out there. And it’s like, it’s not my not my cup of tea, but it is a good format. Absolutely is. If there’s ever a scenario where it’s easy for us to do it, maybe we do it, but [Max Palmer]: He was doing that as a service to companies. Right, right, right, right. I remember talking to talk with him. He’s like, yeah, man on the street as a service. This company’s paying me 3000 bucks a month to just go on the street and ask people questions. I was like, dude, apparently. So you saw he launched his SAS. [Michael Houck]: Uh, yeah, I did. [Max Palmer]: Yeah, apparently, it’s like, pretty good. I was talking to my friend yesterday, who’s also friends with Jason, and he’s like, use it. And apparently, it’s a good sass for for creating memes. [Michael Houck]: But he’s charging like $6.90 for it, though, right? Nothing. Yeah, it's nothing. [Ben Ornstein]: He needs to triple his prices. [Michael Houck]: He will over time. I mean, he's like quintuple his prices. You know, he's got no margin on that to do anything with. But I guess he's doing doing it for the lulls at the end of the day. Okay, any other outliers that you guys found that we should throw in here? [Ben Ornstein]: So I found one, to be honest, I didn't even look if it was an outlier. The format is what caught my attention as something we could do. And here's the video. [Michael Houck]: Okay, let me open this up. This led directly A lot of people think to make a million dollars you got to sell 10,000 people something for a hundred bucks, right? And that would be 1 million dollars. But it's way easier to just sell a hundred people something that costs $10,000. [Ben Ornstein]: The real problem that you’re solving is what do I have that’s worth $10,000? Well, the thing is, is they also don't have to pay you now. This can be split over four years, which is now $200 per month. And for you to acquire the hundred customers, you’re talking about two people per week, which is not that hard. And if you’re reaching out to a hundred people per day, then you getting two out of 700 people to be willing to spend month $200 with you, all of a sudden this million dollar goal becomes a lot more real. A lot of people So breaking down a number that is at face value difficult to achieve is just one thing. But the more important thing that I think here was the whiteboard strategy. What it displays is like inherent mastery and knowledge. If you’re writing on a whiteboard, you’ve already achieved something, you’ve already done it. You are now sharing your expertise inherently which I like the format. And then, you know, you see this all the time, and it doesn’t have to be an actual whiteboard. I’ve seen, like, stick figures and drawings, like, virtually, that maybe can be created. I don’t know if that’s too complex an animation to create, but this is an interesting format that I think would do well. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I agree. Um, I like it. I think easy to repeat this to like use this format for a lot of different things. I’m trying to think like I’m looking around my apartment, like right now, like where would I do this? Um, I don’t know. There’s, there’s a, there’s a space concern, but maybe I can solve that by just like throwing something up somewhere. Maybe the camera around. Yeah, I think that’s a problem for me to solve, but I like the format. [Ben Ornstein]: And then for the content itself, it’s like how to become a millionaire. It’s like, Oh my God, how, how am I going to do this? And he breaks it down. So breaking down something into something actionable, achievable, um, and it makes you stay. It just makes you step in the video. It’s like, Oh, how, how could I do this? [Michael Houck]: It makes it, it makes it seem very, very achievable. Something that is daunting to a lot of people. [Ben Ornstein]: Yeah. And then I’ll talk about my idea for this afterwards. [Michael Houck]: Let me go in and wait. I somehow lost my tab with the notion thing. [Michael Houck]: OK. So let me throw this in the thing here. [Max Palmer]: Is this an outlier? Do we know? Honestly, I doubt it if it’s a big account. [Ben Ornstein]: I didn’t even check to be honest with you. I just, I wanted to talk about the format. [Michael Houck]: When did he post this? [Michael Houck]: Is it like a recent post? [Max Palmer]: I mean, you can just look at his views on his other posts to see if it’s an outlier. It’s pretty average, it looks like, Oh, here it is. [Michael Houck]: Oh, it is. That is an outlier. [Max Palmer]: And look, he’s got other ones in front of the whiteboard that aren’t an outlier, interesting enough. [Ben Ornstein]: That is interesting to note. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I mean this one, at least he starts out like more, he’s smaller. This one he’s like more in the frame. Let’s see what this one looks like, [Speaker 5]: The best businesses to start are ones that compound. And there’s only two ways to build a compounding business. Number one is you build stuff that people never stop buying, all the way through They buy again, they buy again, they buy again. The other way is to add on people who never stop selling for you. And so that means that even if they sell people only once, they themselves consistently sell month after month after month. And so if you have, for example, a real estate brokerage, the realtors you have really are the customers of the business, because each of them represents a certain amount of revenue that they will collect for you. They’re going to sell two houses a month every single month, and you can count on that, versus something like Coca-Cola, where you’d have somebody who buys this month, buys the next month, and buys the next month. But in both situations, these realtors get more realtors, and then the next month, they sell more houses, and that’s how this compounds, and then for this one, you continue to get more customers, and then they never stop buying. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I can see why that one was not as good. I agree. He should have led with the example. At the beginning, the Coke and the real estate example right away. That would have been more engaging, I think. [Ben Ornstein]: Yeah, so it’s interesting. It was an outlier. I didn’t even check if it was. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I mean, it’s a good video. I’m not surprised that it did well. But OK, so good format and an outlier. So this is whiteboard format. [Michael Houck]: Making something daunting. I feel achievable and obviously credibility like he has a ton of credibility in space. People know him OK. Cool Max, what do you got? [Max Palmer]: Got this one. [Speaker 2]: One of the best financial decisions I ever made in my life. I sold my house. I’d made a mistake and bought a house, had a bunch of equity in it, took the equity, bought an apartment building. Seven years after I bought the apartment building, it had gone up in value. And the lender called me and said, Hey, would you like to refinance From a tax perspective, this is correct. [Speaker 6]: And the real surprise that people get from a tax perspective is that when they sell, remember, you got all of those loan proceeds from the property tax-free. So what do you have to do? You have to pay back the loan when you sell, and you’re not going to get a tax deduction at that point, and for actual tax law from a tax attorney subscribed. [Max Palmer]: Interesting. Yeah. So this one is an outlier. Got 1.5 million views, and her other ones were getting Does she use this format elsewhere? She’s used it a couple of times now. Go to her page. [Ben Ornstein]: That format is so interesting. [Max Palmer]: Yeah, it is. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Here we go. [Ben Ornstein]: I don’t even know if I like it. [Ben Ornstein]: Her just staring at the screen there. [Michael Houck]: Oh yeah, so some of them have the little other videos that she’s commenting on. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: Talking about stuff, interesting. [Max Palmer]: So I think one of the reasons it works is because you can see like, she’s just waiting and waiting and waiting for that little video to end and the viewer is waiting for that video and because the viewer knows she’s going to comment on that video. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yes. [Max Palmer]: So the viewer, the viewer, you know, watch time is going to be long because they’re waiting for her to comment because they know she’s coming in with a, you know, a comment opinion about this. So this is something and this is going to be my of what we should try is like we could clip other random podcasts with big entrepreneurs and then have you give your opinion on that clip and basically do the same format. [Ben Ornstein]: So easy too. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I think the key is like the video that we clip has to be obviously it should be an outlier in and of itself, right? It should be an interesting video. Yeah. Because that’s what needs to keep people’s attention. Like they need to want to see somebody comment on that video. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Ben Ornstein]: Or it’s gotta be a video that requires further explanation. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, that’s true. That’s a good point. Yeah, cause like, I didn’t understand that. I’m not like a real estate guy. So I’m like, to me it was like, not necessarily over my head, but like over my level of caring about it. You know what I mean? Yeah. In the space, they probably like, oh, you know, Grant Cardone talking about this, let’s see what this actual tech, because a lot of people also criticize Grant Cardone for being like a hack or like, you know, like, like, just like a social media guy. And hearing a tax person actually saying that he’s right about something is probably interesting. [Ben Ornstein]: Very qualified to JD CPA EA bank. [Michael Houck]: Got to pay off those student loans somehow. [Ben Ornstein]: Yeah, exactly. Um, cool format. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a format like that, actually. It’s interesting. [Michael Houck]: It’s very cool. Um, Max, do you, do you want to find, and Ben, if you want to, to, uh, find a couple of videos that we could do this for, and I’ll, I’ll do this as one of the tests, um, for next week. [Ben Ornstein]: Yep. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: Okay. Cool. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: I think this is good. I think this format could be good. [Ben Ornstein]: I love that Max and I have found different formats every day. We’re continuing to find new ones. There’s probably a million more. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, there’s so many. I mean, that’s why this, that’s why this is, you know, we don’t need to go out and find 20 formats right off the bat. We can just do one, one every day and it’s fine. Okay. [Max Palmer]: We, I remember a while ago when I was clipping those vids, those videos, and we were posting on Twitter. [Michael Houck]: Yes, like the Reed Hastings Netflix is not a family, it’s a team one. [Max Palmer]: Yep, there were a few others. I’m wondering if one of those we can just plug into here. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, that’s a good idea. We have those and we have also we can just use the Startup Archive, like all the Sam Altman, Keith Raboy, Marc Andreessen, and the scripts that they use for those. [Ben Ornstein]: That’s exactly what I was thinking of, the Startup Archive. That’s the exact thing I was thinking of [Max Palmer]: I was like, how can I find videos without doing so much work? [Michael Houck]: Rather than you guys go off and do that, let’s just use videos that we know perform well already from there. So I can pick out one or two and do a test run with them this weekend. Yeah. Does take time to find videos and watch them. You got to watch through these long videos to find like the one minute clip. Yeah, yeah. Okay. How long is that clip? Just do it. Let’s I don’t know. Up here. One of the best financial decisions I ever made in my life. Let me Where’s my phone with my timer? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. [Ben Ornstein]: Can you drag the thing at the bottom? Maybe a number pops up? I don’t know. [Michael Houck]: Oh, yeah, it does. You’re right. Nice. Okay. So the video itself is like just under 40 seconds before she starts talking. And then I get, it is long. Yeah. Yeah. It does seem long and it gives her, she talks for like 20 seconds on top of that. Um, so yeah, we’ll try to get one that’s really, really good. Um, and probably shorter. Okay. Uh, Let me go back to Notion here. [Michael Houck]: So for ideas. Oh, actually, yeah, let’s watch this. This is another kind of format that I found. It’s not like an outlier format like I didn’t go find a specific video that’s an outlier, but I think this is another format we can use. Oh no, that’s not I want to click. Copy link address. [Michael Houck]: It’s 50 million views per month on TikTok with this simple strategy. Basically, they just do these slideshow posts. 385 slideshows in 105 days. So, these are the slideshows, right, when they post them. They’re like video slides, basically. So, they got 12 with over 1 million views and then 36 with over 350k views. A median is 37k views. They have nine accounts performing as well. So, Astro app is a basic astrology app, which isn’t even ranking among the top players. So, CoStar, The Pattern, Moonly. So, but they have an insane top of funnel strategy. Strategy generating 50 million views a month. They found a slideshow strategy with text heavy slides that work incredibly well for engagement. This stuff gets shared a lot. And there’s… Yeah, so I checked out the account. I think I might have linked to it in the Notion doc too. Yeah, here it is. There we go. Here it is. So the red is kind of annoying, I think. [Max Palmer]: But they just post… Yeah, that’s true. [Michael Houck]: But they just post four to five of these every day. It’s the same sort of thought process as, like, the LinkedIn carousels or, like, the Ben Lang screenshot essays on Twitter. Like, here, I’ll just watch one. [Ben Ornstein]: Yeah, I’ve seen like a trillion of these. Did we lose him? [Ben Ornstein]: Oh, how gross. [Ben Ornstein]: I’ve seen these form and they That’s fishy. [Ben Ornstein]: I didn’t check out that content that I’ve talked about. [Max Palmer]: You’re back. Am I back? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, you’re back. Yeah. Sorry, my computer has this like insanely annoying quirk where if the battery falls below 6% it just starts freezing. I don’t know why it’s like a brand new computer. Um, but yeah, anytime it goes under 6% it just like glitches out. So maybe I have some spyware from my trip to China. Um, anyway, uh, yeah. So that format super easy to do. We could do these also like we could put out a ton of these if we wanted to. I was thinking, This could be a format we try on the main account, but also we could do this for startups. We could create like a startup account for this, like the start of the equivalent on TikTok of the startup archive, but without the clips, just like these little things. [Michael Houck]: So I don’t know, what do you guys think of the format? [Max Palmer]: Yeah, I mean, I think it’s worth a try. [Max Palmer]: Basically, we would have to create those Ben Lang type screenshot essays, but a little more condensed. And yeah, it’d be the same thing, basically. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. Yeah. So we’d just find the ones of these that do the best and basically apply the same concepts. Yeah. OK. [Ben Ornstein]: Let’s start the test. I don’t think we should. There’s probably no downside at this point to just trying a bunch of different formats and seeing what sticks and then. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, it’s just time commitment, right? It’s like, that’s the only, the only consideration we wanna make sure we’re, you know, we have more to do than just create TikTok videos, but at the same time, they seem pretty much to do. Okay, Ben, what was your, the idea that you had? [Ben Ornstein]: So based off the whiteboard idea, I was thinking apply that strategy to startup equity. I think startup equity is one of those things that’s like really confusing. Even the founder that I just interviewed the other day or yesterday, she was saying like she had no idea how much equity to give team members, early team members. I think startup equity is so interesting. Cause like how much do you apply to you and your co-founder? How much do you give advisors? How much do you give early team members, late team members? And there could be an entire series literally just that strategy, putting some numbers around what makes sense to give certain, you know, all the different counterparties. Like different role types? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. That’s interesting. I think that hits our core demographic. [Ben Ornstein]: Well, too hard. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I think it might be be too hard because like maybe we could frame it in a way where like, you know, it’s, it’s useful for people who are applying to jobs at startups too. [Michael Houck]: But that’s kind of, it’s also kind of outside our, like, that’s like outside the demo. So I don’t know, that, that feels more like something we’d go deeper on in the newsletter rather than something we’d use for top of funnel. [Ben Ornstein]: Yeah, no, that makes sense. [Michael Houck]: That doesn’t make sense, but we can use the whiteboard for a bunch of other things too that maybe are wider applicable. So I think that’s a good one. [Michael Houck]: And then Max, you said this style, but with startup stuff too, right? Okay, cool. Well, this weekend I’m gonna, maybe today actually, we’ll see. But yeah, by Monday when the team clip wing team gets back, we’ll have a few of these different formats to test out next week. So we’ll start getting some learnings real quick. Cool. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Awesome. [Michael Houck]: All right, guys. I’ll see you later.