- Duration: 28 min
- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01JAG5N2WHZFDR22SPST7G42JA (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JAG5N2WHZFDR22SPST7G42JA)
Transcript
[Scott Nixon]: Are we doing burrito bowl? [Michael Houck]: No, I went burrito, chicken burrito with the hot sauce, lettuce, and I think some cheese in there too. And then the black beans and white rice. [Scott Nixon]: You know, it’s Friday, so just go for it. You know what I mean? It’s the day to do it all. Oh my gosh, that’s a good one. I know I always feel guilty getting in burrito form. I always like, certain age. I’m trying to pick up the pennies where I can, you know? [Michael Houck]: I feel you, man. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: It’s Friday, so why not, man? Let’s get the tortilla, you know? [Scott Nixon]: Yeah. Hey, so I think I subscribed to your newsletter for a long time. [Michael Houck]: Thank you. [Scott Nixon]: Appreciate that. Yeah. Yeah. And if I no longer receive it, it’s because I have peeled back significantly. I used to head up product and growth over at The Hustle and was there for Yeah, you want to grab it? No worries. We’re good. You can keep going. Yeah, yeah. So we, uh, that was the edge. I, you know, I worked with Sam, um, and, uh, was in, it was very, very deep in that space for a long time, um, through, through the HubSpot acquisition and stuck around for a couple of years. And then I, I had to just, I had to take a step back from the newsletter space. I was pretty burned So, but yeah, all the guys I hired, Matt McGarry, Ryan Carr, all these guys have gone on to do some pretty cool stuff. I’ve sent them a ton of business too, but yeah, still in that space. It looks like you kind of got your hand in a lot of stuff. I’ll obviously tell you more about long angle, but yeah, that’s kind of me in a nutshell. My background is performance marketing. Marketing. I’ve managed about $100 million to date. And then I kind of moved into startups, I don't know, six years ago, I joined TechCrunch for a year, I launched their subscription, and then I left and then went to The Hustle, was there for four years. And then I joined a venture backed startup, where we went on a raise, I took them from when I was an advisor, but joined as their COO, but it was state which is like the least exciting thing you could possibly be writing about. I was just over it. And I realized that the minute I signed the dotted line full time and I was like, this was a big mistake. But they're good guys. They went on to raise another 15 million. We'd already raised a 15 million plus in a pre-seed. And so yeah, they're doing great. It's all M&A though now. So they're going around buying state government news outlets in different states. And it's just a roll-up strategy. That's all they're doing So just it wasn't as exciting to me as like building from the ground up if that makes sense But but yeah, so do you it sounds like you've kind of got your hand in a little bit of everything You still run the newsletter and then there you go. You've got a megaphone going as well. [Michael Houck]: Yeah First of all super quiet. I know you hired Matt and Ryan Matt's a friend and Ryan we've known each other for a while as well. Yeah That's super cool. It's funny. I actually, this is like going back, I don't know, a year and a half now. I was talking with Matt about starting a company to specifically do like local city level news, right? And this is back before 6am city. So it became a lot bigger. I think there are some other people doing it now too, but, um, Yeah, I've been thinking about doing that. But just ultimately, I didn't think the margins would be attractive enough to to make it worth the to go after. But anyway, yeah, so right now we've got megaphone that's going well, small team of engineers working on that. And we got the newsletter, we sort of have this like case study library that we've built up around that that we're selling as an info product. Product. Cool. And then we now have a podcast, too, that's on YouTube. So that's the main stuff. There's some other stuff we're kind of exploring. And then the ghostwriting agency is sort of part of Megaphone. That's how we look at it. Like Megaphone is content. And so, yeah, the content side is, you know, we help a lot of people with with X, with LinkedIn and also with their newsletters, too. But obviously the social media plays in really well with Megaphone. So, yeah. [Scott Nixon]: Yeah, that's awesome. Yeah, I've been, I've kind of taken a step back. And I've just been taking on consulting work. And then I joined Long Angle full time last January. So I came in and it was just consulting for them. It's an awesome community. And I think it'd be really great. So for what it's worth, one of the things I took away from working directly with Sam was I love to help people get ideas off the ground. So I love to help be the beta client, provide, and kind of be a backdoor for feedback as well. And that's something I really enjoyed doing. The one thing, you know, so for Long Angle, it's pretty cool. When I joined, I revamped their entire website. Yeah, had to do some foundational work around brand. And then we had about 1,000 members then, just over. And then since then, I've been, I've been working on building out our referral channel, our organic content. So we have a blog. I've hired a writer. She's doing a great job. And we have essentially like about 6X our daily traffic organically, which is not bad. That's all in the last probably six months. And then we have been, we're also scaling up our paid right now. So I'm kind of spearheading paid. Got somebody else who's running point on referrals. And then I've got the writer who's managing our member only newsletter, we're going to do a public one, we'll do a free newsletter eventually to kind of build an audience there. One thing at a time, right. But the magic about this community is that it's it is very genuine. It's free to join, it's 2.2 million or greater in net worth. So you have to prove out assets, excluding your primary And once you're a member, it's free to participate in our chats. Um, we have a full online community that's, that's home. It's homegrown. So we had a former head of, um, of engineering from meta and snap, uh, who came on, he was a member and joined full time to build this out. So he got some, that's really cool, man. It's, it's like, honestly, the best way I could put it is you have a group of highly credentialed people who could be anywhere. And we're all choosing this. To help grow and scale this. Interesting part for me personally that I've been learning a ton around is I'm trying to figure out where I want to be in the next 5, 10, 20 years, especially financially. I get a firsthand look at how folks who are $5 million, $10 $20 million net worth, up to $100 million, are diversifying their portfolios and what they're doing. And we do actually execute. We've done about $250 million in committed capital into private markets. On behalf of a member. That’s cool. So that’s a really interesting aspect too. Most of the deals are around 10 to 15 million. Minimum commitment from a member is like 50 to a hundred K usually. Biggest commitment I’ve seen is like 1.5 million. And that was for an energy deal we did, which I’ve never been exposed to an energy deal before really. I mean, it’s kind of what you would expect. They’re drilling in the ground, but it’s, it’s down to a science now. I mean, they, they can project what your return is going to be in three, five, and with some form of payback. It’s pretty neat. So anyways, that’s what we’re doing. I’m just back where I love to be, which is like in the early stages and kind of building out this team. I’m sure I’ll get bored in three years and be like, what am I gonna do next? That’s kind of my MO at this point, but yeah, we’re doing some cool stuff. So we’ve got three managing directors. Um, Two of them are pretty active. One of them’s very active on podcasts. He does a really great job. The other one wants to be, and really wants to offer up his LinkedIn profile, for example, to kind of help build out and kind of be the face in that channel. So we’re kind of figuring out what, you know, what the roles look like, but they each kind of head up a specific area. So that’s, what’s kind of neat about it. Um, we’re in a good position right now are posted. It’s pretty dry. Like it’s all LinkedIn. I’ve got a writer doing it. She’s not a social manager by trade. So I’ve been pushing her to kind of get more creative around graphics and grabbing, you know, snippets from podcast interviews and whatever. He’s just kind of struggling and I don’t want to force it. So we actually just had a conversation. We were doing our fourth quarter planning and we just had a conversation where they were like, well, if you could find us like a resource, it’s like 2000 bucks a month, we should test like a ghostwriter. And I’m not kidding you, I literally opened up your megaphone newsletter and I was like, well, this seems like perfect timing. So yeah, it sounds like a really good fit. I would just be curious, yeah, what does that like, what would the kind of setup sound like, What does it include for two grand? Is that like just one executive page? Is it a, you know, are you thinking holistically around like the overall strategy or are you just kind of like, tell me where we plug in? Yeah, again, I’m just, I’m happy to help you kind of prove out concept in areas or, you know, however you want to shake it out. I’m really curious. [Michael Houck]: Cool. Yeah. That’s a super helpful context. It sounds like both of them are putting out, like it sounds like the one guy’s more podcasts and the other guy is more interested in LinkedIn, but also maybe podcasts. Is that, is that a fair characterization? Yeah. [Scott Nixon]: It’s, it’s the one guy who does most of the pods right now and he’s really good ones. And it’s he’s just not as active on social, he would be or he would offer up his profile for writing if we wanted it to be. He’s kind of the face of it. He’s more of like the how to raise your children in wealth, how to manage your portfolio, how to do everything. He’s more broad stroke. The other guy is as well. The third co founder, kind of late stage co founder that we have, he heads up our deal flow. So he’s 100% like just wants to know it out and have his profile be about alternative investments. But it’s like, what I’ve realized is, I did work with a, an SEO agency. Again, they were just getting started. We just couldn’t meet halfway. They weren’t able to get the quality to where we needed it to be. And it’s, I think for them, I don’t know if they were, I mean, it was pretty clear. They were, they had just, they got going and they were using somebody to actually write it. And then they were just flipping on AI and I called loud on it a few times. And, and then eventually they did bring somebody on, but it still just wasn’t where we needed it to be. They were, I think they had just grown too fast. They took on too many clients. Um, so they kind of lost us. Uh, so I, I politely told them that I was just like, Hey guys, the quality is not where we need it to be. We’re going to bring a writer in house. And honestly, our blog has like gotten significantly better. Um, one of the, um, co-founders has kind of been playing around with the, with the, is it the Google notebook LM or whatever. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, notebook LM. [Scott Nixon]: Yeah, yeah, he loves it. I mean, that’s he’s the one that’s kind of like the he doesn’t do as many podcasts. But he loves to nerd out. He heads up our engineering side. And honestly, it’s fine. Like I told him go for it. If you want to spend 45 minutes using a blog post to do one of those things and then post it and he’s done a couple and the last one ended up bringing in some inbound leads through his inbox. So so I do think there’s there’s definitely opportunity for us to find more interesting ways to engage people. At some point, we have to launch a podcast because our members want it, people want it. I just, we were not there yet. We’re still in build mode, and they don’t have the time to like commit to doing a podcast every week. So yeah, I mean, how does that resonate with you? I mean, like, what, what sounds interesting? Like, how do you how would you see something like this kind of shaking out? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, so I can tell you what we normally do and then I can tell you what I think would make sense here. So we specialize in content, right? In social media content and newsletters. We have done like blogs and things like that. Also like internal materials for users slash members, depending on what the use case is. We’ve done that before too. [Michael Houck]: Our process is super lightweight where we work with founders. Everyone’s super busy. We know that. We basically do one kickoff call with you, me, and like a dedicated writer who’s going to be the partner for you guys on an ongoing basis. This isn’t some case where, you know, you send us a thing to do, I put it into some pool, and whoever’s free claims it, and they’ve used some AI tool. No, this is a dedicated writer who gets matched with you guys, who you interact with on a regular basis through a shared Slack channel. And who’s basically their job is to sort of like imprint your brain onto theirs. And so whether that’s used for blogs, whether that’s used for social media, whether it’s used for a newsletter, they can handle all of the above. These are writers who I’ve worked with in various capacities for a long time. And we also have Blake Imahl on the team. I’m sure you’ve seen him on Twitter and LinkedIn. He’s sort of my partner in the agency. He gets in the weeds with the writers on a day-to-day basis, making sure the content is up to level. That we would expect. And then before anything gets shared with you, we’re still small enough where I’m gonna actually be reviewing the content as well. So you get sort of a double filter there. And the way it works is pretty simple. Basically, at the beginning of every week, we will send you some ideas in Slack. You can accept or reject those ideas, send us your own, whatever the case may be. And there’ll be specific questions about each idea. Our sort of request is that you guys send us any materials that you have on the topic or also rambly voice notes where we get the sort of emotion and intonation so that we can come back with content that’s something that only you uniquely could write. And so if we get those voice notes back by Wednesday, we’ll get you the content by Friday. That’s sort of how it works. And different price points depending on sort of how much content you’d want on a weekly basis. We start at 2K. We also have a 3K package. That’s standard for our social media options. So like if you wanted, say, two long form posts per week, that would be 2k. If you wanted three long form posts per week, that would be 3k. If you wanted some combination of long form and short form, we could do that at those price points as well. And if you wanted us to do more than three things a week, if it’s like blog, newsletter, two people social media, we’d obviously be able to give a a discount on the package. So that’s just where we would start at. [Scott Nixon]: Yeah, that’s cool. So we do a pretty good, I mean, our blog posts are solid at this point. We’re pulling actual insights from community discussions and anonymizing it. And we’re seeing our click rate in organic impressions has gone up basically 10x since we’ve moved away from the agency. The quality is just amazing. And it just gives us more power to like, we’re actually targeting, you know, phrases and keywords that people are actually looking up, right, like passive income for high net worth individuals, estate planning for high net worth individuals, these types of things. So we’ve got the blog posts, we’re doing about a blog post per week, I’m pushing, I’m trying to push to get that to like two per week. So the idea would be, you know, one of the thoughts would be like, hey, we can we can share those with you. And if you want to create a write up, based on those blog blog posts or do something that’s, you know, that’s a little off, you know, it’s a little different, but we could totally do something like that where we feed you the content that we’re publishing. And then you could write a long form post that would then go on, you know, the individual’s profile, um, to sound more like from him as opposed to, cause I mean, we, I mean, I know the game, like we went through this at the hustle. Um, Sam was so against doing any social. And then once we finally started doing it, he, he became addicted to So it’s like it’s so funny, dude It’s funny to see you doing this now. [Michael Houck]: He’s got he’s doing a Hampton and money wise I feel like it’s like you guys have gone on these like, you know parallel paths Yeah, and and we are like he’s kind of got you know I was in one [Scott Nixon]: of the beta groups for Hampton as well And then I ended up I don’t know. I just kind of spun off I was ready to kind of branch off and do my own thing thing and work with a new founding group. Sam’s just he’s tough to work with, man. He’s just like, yeah, I’ve heard he’s just really difficult to work with. And I really like him as a person. I always got along with them. It was just time for me to kind of separate and kind of figure out my own path. They are very similar in nature. They’re also very, very different. His is his is going directly toe to toe with like the EO, YPO, Vistage type of group, you know, and he wants to steal you know, he wants to steal folks from like even chief, um, or more in like the tiger 21 area where like it’s $30,000 year, but it's become very like, there's a lot of solicitation happening to members. So that's where we kind of found our edge is we accept people who are high net worth, but we still have members who are ultra high as well, like 30 million plus. Um, so these are people that have already done it. The difference between us and Hampton is, candidly is that they're focusing on small intimate events, but you have to pay 10 grand a year to get in. It's way easier for us to drive new members and build our audience because it's $0 join. And then you have tons of ways that we can monetize our members through our alternative investments, our peer groups. So we do have peer groups as well, which is scaling very quickly. And then we have some we basically launched a premier membership, which gives you a discount on our annual retreat, a discount on our peer groups. So we’re starting to kind of, we’re just now starting to activate our audience into more meaningful revenue. [Michael Houck]: Honestly, I think that’s smart. You know, we obviously played in this space a little bit with Launch House. We were sort of more focused on the early stage startup founders. We were charging them a membership fee, but the longterm plan, once we raised enough money, was always to, let’s just run this as a fund. And rather than try to get money up front from these people, let’s invest in their upside. Right. Monetize in a different way. And so when I hear that you guys are, you know, obviously different cohort of members, but same sort of thinking of, you know, hey, there’s a bigger opportunity here than just getting them on some high ticket item recurring subscription. Yeah. I hear a little bit of like kinship of thought there, which I, which I like, [Scott Nixon]: Yeah. They’re very cautious. I mean, like these guys, it’s almost, It’s literally the antithesis of working with Sam. He’d be like, just fire it off. And if it doesn’t work, give him a refund. It’s like, you know, now I’ve actually got folks who are like, Hey, we want to build this out within our platform. You know, can we build out a feature and component to help promote this? Um, you know, what, what can we do? So it’s, it’s definitely, I mean, I’m basically went from working with like super scrappy entrepreneurial type folks who, you know, we’re hiring people at, you know, $45,000 year to working with people who all their own fields. And so now you just have like the smartest people in the room coming together and figuring out how to take this to the next level. Which is cool, it’s great. It’s also like, for me at points, I get a little flustered because I’m like, this is so clear, just bring it live and just see what happens. And they’re always like, wait, hold on, let’s talk about this a little bit more. And I’m like, we’ve talked about this for six months now. This has gotta go live. I feel like I’m back at HubSpot. Like, come on, let’s get to it. Live and launch it. [Michael Houck]: Sam rubbed off on you more than you’d like to admit. [Scott Nixon]: I know it and there’s a lot of good things that he did rub off on me and one of them as well is, again, I love working with other founders to help build out what they’re doing and making it successful and being a case study for them. It’s a two-way street and that’s really how I look at it. Sounds good, man. I think we’re, we’re definitely interested. I think given your background and what you guys are doing, and you’ve already have other clients, I think that sets us up, you know, for a good opportunity as well. But I’m doing everything I can on my side to kind of get the pieces rolling to have content to have ideas. And that way, we’re able to kind of start rolling with that and be able to create the long form posts from that. Cool. Just to confirm, so so when you talk about producing the long form content that then would we get public to an individual, you know, an individual’s account, or what? So that’s the idea, right? Is building a personal? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, it’s always stronger. People follow people first, you know, right. So, you know, we can post the content. And we can also handle for us worth, I don’t think I mentioned this, we can also handle like, so the content ops around it, we’re like, where’s the one scheduling, we’re the one replying to the comments in the first hour, you know, we’re commenting on thought leaders in the niche for you, so that these accounts get some free impressions from their posts, like all that stuff, we can handle that as part of this. But yeah, I mean, the idea is, you know, whether that’s you saying, all right, we want to build up one of our co founders, their personal brand, we can create all the content for them. If it’s also a case where you’re like, hey, we have these members sharing these insights, we want you to create posts for their accounts. And we’ll kind of work with them to get it scheduled on their side. We can do that too. We have a client that we do that for we have a process set up for it. So pretty straightforward. But yeah, that’s the thought is personal brands first and foremost. And then as the personal brands grow, you do this sort of Andrew Gazdecky strategy, and then you start talking about the brand account. [Scott Nixon]: Cool. Yeah, that’s I think the approach we want to do. And I think we’ll have to figure out on our side, like who’s going to start. I think we want to put all of our ammo behind one account, most likely, as opposed to like, I mean, we could do two. But it feels like if we’re going to be more, I mean, the reality is I get the game. Like we should be posting minimum five days a week and we should be commenting on other you know influencer posts like that’s what gets you you know thousands of likes as a you know an engagement as opposed to like [Michael Houck]: you know 50 to 100 especially right away like you know you gotta have those notifications on and when they’re when they’re posting something you one of the first comments that’s either insightful or funny and then you get the get [Scott Nixon]: the free impressions from it yeah totally yeah I’m on board um cool yeah I’m super interested. I think we probably just start maybe at the 2k package. What does it look like kind of flipping on, you know, like an upgraded tier? Just let’s talk about it. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, everything’s super lightweight, we’ll kind of operate however you guys need us to. It’s month to month. Also, there’s no long term commitment. Just give us 30 days if you’re if you’re going to cancel at some point. But other than that, super, super lightweight. So what I can do is I’ll send over an email to you. I wrote another call in a bit, but later this afternoon, I’ll send over an email that has like full pricing. You said the 2k package to start. So I’ll send you a link to sign up for that. And then once we’re good there, we can get a kickoff call on the books for whatever works for you guys. We’ll need an hour for that. And that’s the only meeting we’ll ever kind of force you guys to do. [Michael Houck]: if you want, we’re totally fine with it, but no requirement on our end. So yeah, so that’d be next steps. [Scott Nixon]: Cool. Yeah, that sounds great. Let’s do it. Let’s start there. And then, yeah, my goal is like, hopefully, you know, I want to prove out concept to these guys on my side, and then we can start to scale up if that makes sense. And I have a feeling based on your experiences, like that’ll happen pretty quickly, and they’ll start to see results. So yeah, let’s do it, brother. I’m excited. [Michael Houck]: All right, man. I’ll send over an email, excited partner up here. Also, you’ll meet Blake. He’s not going to be on the kickoff call, but he’ll be in the channel so you guys can chat there. And then I’ll talk to the team. I have one writer in mind who I think would be a good fit based on his experience, other clients he’s written for us. I’ll make sure that he has the bandwidth I think he does. And we’ll go from there. [Scott Nixon]: Perfect. Sounds good, brother. All right. We’ll talk to you soon. Cool. Talk soon, Scott. See you. Yeah.