- Duration: 38 min
- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01JAQS7K9GYAPY975WCRD1E1HT (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JAQS7K9GYAPY975WCRD1E1HT)
Transcript
[Michael Houck]: Yeah, it was good. Are you back to training? [Max Palmer]: Yeah, I did 15 miles yesterday and my knee is - I’m icing it as we speak but it’s bad. It does not - it’s not where it’s supposed to be two weeks prior to a marathon. [Michael Houck]: You’re going to be in trouble with 10 more to go - 11 more to go beyond that. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: I guess it’s like deal with the pain after right? Yeah, exactly Yeah, what’s up Ben? Hey, how you doing? Good. How are you? Good. We’re talking about how max is icing his knee because he’s running a marathon. [Ben Ornstein]: Oh Man, you’ve been training for her for a but for a while. Yeah four months man, I did cross country in high school and that was a 5k and I I don’t miss those days. I actually miss when I was a good runner, but I miss, yeah, that’s crazy. When’s the marathon? Two weeks. [Max Palmer]: Oh man, are you ready? Not quite, I’m dealing with some knee stuff, but yeah, I’m excited for it to be over. [Michael Houck]: Nice man, that’s awesome. Okay, so I added some discussions at the top for today. I wanted to just touch on them. First thing, I added this doc. I watched a few videos over the weekend about like, I don’t know, this kid who like, he does the like AI shorts, like the faceless shorts, right? So it’s not exactly apples to apples with what we do, but he shared a lot of like good practical advice, nothing that I think contradicts what we already sort of are doing, but just puts it into sort of more clear words. Like for example, hook should be two to five seconds, right? Um, short should be 50 seconds or slightly less. Um, he just has a lot of data on this with multiple accounts and, um, I thought it was a good video. So if you want to take a look through there, I don’t think there’s anything to, you know, go too deep on because again, it’s not contradictory to what we already are seeing and our intuition. But just good to digest. One thing I do want to discuss though is the podcast clips. So we don’t have too many data points yet, right? I think we’ve like nine or 10 videos that we’ve posted, but the two that we’ve posted that are not podcast clips have both, excuse me, now gone. Over 5K views. One is like at 19K, the other is at 5K, but still going up this morning. And all the podcast clips are like a couple hundred to, you know, at the most like 1.5K. And so the question is, are the podcast clips the best use of our resources? Obviously, they don’t take much time, right? But they do take up like slots that the clip wing team could for other things. Um, some other like data points I’ll throw you before we talk about this. I looked into, um, other people who have successful podcasts and see what they do. Um, like Lenny and Greg and some other people, all of their podcast clips with the, like with a very low hit rate about liars, all of them otherwise get like a few hundred to at most like a couple thousand Views and as I said the hit rate out the outlier hit rate is very low Noah Kagan and in some cases What’s-her-name Cody Sanchez? They there seem to do the best So we can look at them and see like are they doing something differently? But I worry that overall like the the results of feeding like you know these these like, oh, you know, six out of every 10 shorts that we post are these clips and they’re getting such low view count. I worry that’s hurting our chances of going viral with the other ones. [Max Palmer]: So what are your guys’ thoughts on that? How many slots do we get from Clipware? [Michael Houck]: We get, right now our thing is two or three clips from the podcast episode. And then five other shorts per week. [Max Palmer]: So we could turn that into seven or eight shorts per week? Correct. Yeah, I mean, I’m not that surprised that the podcast clips aren’t doing that well, just because they’re not engineered to be shorts, but yeah. [Max Palmer]: And are we using the full five for the shorts? [Michael Houck]: Uh, we haven’t, but we plan to this week. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Max Palmer]: Um, yeah, then I think it might make sense to just do them all as shorts instead of podcast clips, at least for the time being. And if that changes, then we can just change it whenever we want. Right. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: We can change it whenever we want. Um, Yeah. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: What do you think, Ben? [Ben Ornstein]: I mean, given how the other top podcast clips are performing, I don’t, if that’s what, like what we’re aspiring to get to, like a channel with a bunch of views and, um, and that’s what they’re doing, then maybe it’s not even worth our resources at this point, considering how these clips, some of them are doing quite I think those are probably worth focusing on. The clips, again, they don’t take up that much time, but it’s more of like time for focus on other things. [Michael Houck]: Sorry, you mean not the clips, you mean the normal like short videos, right? [Ben Ornstein]: When I say clips, I mean podcast clips. [Michael Houck]: So you think we should focus on those? [Ben Ornstein]: No, no, I’m saying because they, I’m saying they don’t take that much time. But if it’s not resulting in anything meaningful, and seeing what the best or some of the top podcasts are doing, there’s aren’t even doing that. Well, yeah, I agree that I don’t think it’s worth our focus. [Michael Houck]: Got it. Yeah. I mean, I worry that it’s a net negative, actually, because again, like, every time we post a video, the let’s let’s use TikTok example, the TikTok algorithm is what are the quality of videos that this guy puts out, right? And if we have a lot of data points that our videos don’t get a lot of views and they don’t have watch time and all that stuff, it might actually hurt the ones. Um, okay. I think we already have a lot of podcasts close for the upcoming ones, like done though. Cause we have like a backlog, so probably makes sense to just use them. But maybe we use them on like LinkedIn instead of, I don’t know, we’ll see. [Ben Ornstein]: The other thing I was thinking with those is like we could use those in the future. Like if there’s a week where we just get hammered with a million things, like say when V3 of Megaphone comes out, for example, you’re going to be very busy and we could have clips ready to go. Some of these podcast clips are Relatively evergreen where we could just post it to get something out there on a week where we’re crazy busy Yes No, it’s a good thought having them in the backlog is not a bad [Michael Houck]: idea I think the only other idea that I had for this was Like when we’re doing the podcast itself having a higher volume of Sure, like quick hitter repeatable standardized questions, you know, we asked the same question at the end of the episode, but maybe expanding that and doing more of that, that way we could create like compilations of different people and be like, this is what 10 people, 10 startup founders think about, you know, whatever, right? Oh yeah, that’s good. Like that’s, that’s something. It’s worse for the podcast though, I think, but it’s better for the clips. [Ben Ornstein]: Those are things we could edit out of the actual episode though. [Michael Houck]: That’s true. Yeah, that’s true, actually. I actually really like that idea. [Ben Ornstein]: That way we can accomplish both. We can accomplish a great podcast episode with the addition of like a guest potentially saying like, that was a weird question for them to ask there. You know, that’s like the only downside. [Michael Houck]: But I think we can always edit that out of the actual episode and still make it. Yeah. OK. OK. Maybe we do that. Maybe if we want to brainstorm some more questions to include, we can go back and forth on that async. Cool. And then, Ben, can you look into more about what the people like Noah and Cody do in their clips that are maybe different than what Greg and Lenny does? Yeah. I’ll look at that. Sahil’s clips also tend Some of his also do do poorly I’ll add him in there too. [Ben Ornstein]: Just to check it out. [Michael Houck]: Cool And then the other thing not I guess there’s not too much to like discuss on this one, but just a flag I Spent like a little bit of time this weekend going through all of the tick-tock accounts of like the big Really credible startup people that I know from Twitter or whatever who are also on TikTok and like almost all of them get poor results with their videos, like consistently a couple hundred views, like in some cases even a lower average than we’re getting so far, right? And this is even people like Matt Gray, who is not like super credible as a founder, but who has styles that are like absolutely crushed on TikTok. He’s had millions of views on some videos, but his are getting like a couple hundred views now. So I think what we need to see is like, who are the TikTok natives or the Instagram natives, or I guess the YouTube shorts natives who are really, really crushing it on those platforms in the startup niche? And what are they doing, right? I found one guy, but there’s probably more. I think if you guys can spend some time also looking through and finding some more people who, regardless of their background, credential, credibility, whatever, they’re talking about startups, they’re talking about venture capital, they’re talking about whatever, and they’re crushing [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: it. What are they doing? And we’ll talk about that tomorrow. Cool. [Michael Houck]: Um. So Rena’s adding the data to our new dashboard. Right now. I’ll get this fixed up with her by tomorrow so we can start doing some analysis, but Basically, this will be helpful for us. Going forward to like review our own videos. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Um, okay. Let’s do outliers. [Michael Houck]: Um, who added the, Oh, did I add this? The KSI in Hawke to a girl explain how to use differentiation. I might’ve added this. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Was this me? [Max Palmer]: What are you looking at? [Michael Houck]: the Notion doc for today. Oh, can you see, where is that? I’ll send it in the chat. Okay, let me open up this video here and we’ll… I just requested access to it, to the page. [Ben Ornstein]: Wait, you don’t have access to it? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Really? [Michael Houck]: Okay, hold on. Sorry, this like thing is in my way. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Sorry about that. [Michael Houck]: Okay, Ben, you should have access now. There’s like a whole like I have these notes from every day we’ve been doing this call so far. Okay, let’s. [Michael Houck]: Share screen. This is the first one. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Differentiation even useful. [Michael Houck]: Well, me and JJ even used it when we was playing Minecraft last night. We only had 20 fences left to build an enclosure, but it was annoying because however we built it, the area was always different. So how do you think we made the biggest area we could? [Speaker 3]: First, I bet you said that two of these lengths plus this width would need to to equal your 20 fences. But wouldn’t we care more about the area of that rectangle? [Speaker 5]: Yeah, the area of the rectangle is what we want to maximize. [Michael Houck]: And obviously, that’s length times width, LW. [Speaker 5]: So at this point, me and JJ rearranged this top equation to get W, and then subbed it into the area equation to get rid of it. So why’d you get rid of W? [Max Palmer]: Because now we have A as a function of just L. [Speaker 3]: And this is way more useful now, because area versus length has this lovely little graph. [Speaker 5]: So to maximize the area, we want to find this point up here where area is as big as can be. [Speaker 3]: Haley, we both know that’s called a maximum. And it’s basically where the derivative of our area function is equal to zero. [Speaker 4]: Oh, so we need the derivative. [Speaker 5]: Yeah, so you know what to do. Say it. Get out the power rule and differentiate that thing. No! [Speaker 3]: Somebody turn that off. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: No! [Michael Houck]: I enjoyed the song. Thank you. [Speaker 3]: Okay, now to find the value of L at this highest point, where the derivative is zero, we can set the derivative to zero and solve for L. [Speaker 5]: Zero equals 20 minus 4L, so 4L equals 20L equals 5. [Speaker 4]: So you get the biggest area when L is 5. [Michael Houck]: 5 fences. And remember we had exactly 20 fences, so this width is gonna be 10 of them. [Max Palmer]: Okay, so the biggest space we can build is 5 fences by 10, and it’s 50 fences squared in area. Area maxing complete! I’m so confused. [Michael Houck]: So, I mean, they use one of those like AI… [Max Palmer]: Yeah, it’s all AI generated. [Michael Houck]: I don’t know. What do you think? I think that like huge views, like insane views. [Ben Ornstein]: I mean, it definitely captures your attention when you’re like, wait, the Hawk Tua girl does not talk about math. You’re like, what am I even watching? You just keep watching. Cause you’re like, is there an out where, where are we getting here? And then you eventually realize they’re going to solve the math equation, but you’re like, why is she, you’re kind of just thinking the whole time. Why? And what, why are they talking about Matt? That’s what I’m thinking the entire time. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. It’s like learning by accident. [Ben Ornstein]: Yeah, exactly. That’s interesting. [Max Palmer]: I’m not sure how we would apply this to us. Like, would we have Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and Paul Graham doing AI voices of them? [Michael Houck]: I think there’s two to go about it there’s the what you said there’s like the startup luminary way and then there’s also like the people who have nothing to do with startups way like the Paley Welsh and the Mr. Beast and all that or some mixture of them like Mr. Beast talking to Elon you know so I don’t know I think it’s interesting I think people would stop this role for that for sure but it’s probably a gimmick it’s probably just like a short short-term thing. [Max Palmer]: Yeah, this is more under the engagement hacking category than anything. Agreed. Another one I had is this format. [Michael Houck]: Five ways I make passive income at 27 years old. You guys are loving these videos, so I’m gonna keep them coming, starting with covered calls. Now, people get intimidated by this for some reason, but I think it’s much simpler y’all think. I even hosted a live stream about it. Let me know if you want the replay link, but I did this two to three monthly. [Max Palmer]: I mean, you get the idea on this one, right? [Michael Houck]: He’s just, yeah, there’s a bunch of ads that do this. Yeah. Um, these just work. Uh, but the problem is our, our kind of handicap here is that my handwriting is absolutely terrible. [Max Palmer]: So I don’t know how realistic this one is for us. Well, we, We could just have Clip wing make it we could send them a Google Doc of what we want the page to say It also doesn’t have to be handwriting. [Michael Houck]: We could print out a Google Doc with you know typed words and do this Maybe yeah, maybe I feel like the handwriting is like part of it, but I don’t know We could test it But yeah, those were two I had that I found over the weekend. What do you guys have, any outliers? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah, I’ve got one. Sent it. Okay. So his name’s Amit Agarwal. [Max Palmer]: He lives in India and he is a one-man company that makes something between 15 and 30 million dollars selling simple plugins for Google Docs and Google Drive, the G suite of apps. [Michael Houck]: But making $20 million a year in income is probably the same as being worth like $500 million. [Max Palmer]: That is a huge unheard of song. So his name’s Amit Agarwal. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: He lives. [Max Palmer]: I think the hook’s good. It’s like, so his name’s Amit Agarwal. And they show a picture of this, you know, random Indian dude. And you’re like, who is this guy? You know, you’re immediately curious, like why are Sean and Sam talking about this, this random Indian dude, you know? Yeah. I think that the last thing you said there is the key though. [Michael Houck]: Like this it’s because it’s Sean and Sam, right? Like they, they’ve done a lot of this type of content and they’re talking about this guy. Yeah. This guy doesn’t look like the normal people that they talk about. That’s weird. That’s interesting. Let me keep watching. [Max Palmer]: Yeah, this one got. So his name is Amit Agrawal. It was an outlier. Oh, where’d it go? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Wow. [Michael Houck]: They’ve had some really big ones. [Max Palmer]: 22 million views. That’s insane. Yeah. But they also have like a lot that are just five to 10,000 views. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: Okay. I’m going to post one right now. So here we go. Um, okay. So, uh, besides the sort of like unexpected, What else do you like about it? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: It’s very short. [Max Palmer]: I don’t know how long it is, but you almost want it to keep going. So I think that’s another interesting part about it. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, that’s true. It just feels like there’s more to the story. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Ben Ornstein]: That makes me want to listen to the podcast episode. Like it actually does engage me. Like that’s interesting. How did he start doing that? I don’t know. It just gets me interested. Yeah. [Max Palmer]: And I mean, that’s a podcast clip too. [Ben Ornstein]: That’s a great podcast clip because it’s just enough to give you enough context, but it’s also not enough where it’s like, I’ve gotten all I need, I don’t actually need to listen to the episode. It’s the perfect combination of those. [Max Palmer]: Yeah. Here’s another one of theirs that was an outlier got like two or 3 million views. These guys are really good at storytelling. Sean. Oh, they’re so good. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Ben Ornstein]: The most popular websites are all websites. [Michael Houck]: There’s three college students in Canada, they realize that there’s a a lot of traffic to these websites. They meet at a competitive foosball tournament. The guy who’s the best foosball player, he happens to be the best programmer of the bunch. He creates a live streaming video website to stream their foosball competitions. There’s not much of an audience for the foosball competitions, but he realizes as he’s building all this video tech, we can do the same thing for porn. In the same office, they created PornHub, the website that was gonna host all this stuff, and they created Brazzers, which is a producer of content. It takes off like a rocket. Guy Keezer was an SEO savant. He came out later and he goes, we were the number one rank for **** and **** on Google. Do you know how hard, how competitive that is? They finally decided, let’s cash out. There’s not a lot of buyers for this thing, right? Because institutional investors can’t really buy this type of asset. And now it’s big. It’s worth over $100 million. So they sell it to that guy, Fabian Tillman. $140 million is what they sold it to him for. And then he just grows it like crazy. In like three to six months, he doubled the profits of the business. The most popular websites are all **** websites. There’s three college students in Canada, they realize Max was it black for you the whole time? [Ben Ornstein]: Yeah. Okay. Wait, what? [Michael Houck]: No, I watched the video. We heard the video, or at least I did. [Ben Ornstein]: And then but the screen was black. It only turned up. You can only see the screen now. Okay, that’s weird. [Michael Houck]: Ark is doing some weird things on my about that. [Max Palmer]: But yeah, this is another outlier. And I think we can adopt the style of videos with which is just telling short, interesting startup stories. So is this actually a clip from the episode? [Michael Houck]: Or is this them summarizing what they talked about in the episode after the fact? I think this one’s from the episode. [Ben Ornstein]: I remember listening to this one, because it was a really good one. I believe they are taking pieces of the actual episode. Got it. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. [Ben Ornstein]: I think I’m not a hundred percent sure on that, but I think so. [Michael Houck]: I mean, the interesting thing here is that their podcast is sort of set up for this, right? Because yes, they bring on guests to the podcast, talk about things sometimes, but their podcast is generally two guys talking back and forth about ideas. So it’s more like they’re telling each other something. Like with what we’re doing on the podcast right now, it’s basically I’m asking questions, I’m interviewing somebody, I’m asking them questions about their journey. They’re like trying to tell the other person like a story that has nothing to do with either one of them, you know? So I’m wondering how we can adapt that. [Ben Ornstein]: Well, instead of podcast clips, it would just be finding like unique startup stories that aren’t widely reported on, that are interesting. [Max Palmer]: I think that’s what Max is saying. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we can tell the, you know, the story of how the Bumble Girl left Tinder and how, you know, or… [Ben Ornstein]: founders started Hinge. That was a good one. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: We need to make sure that there’s stories that are interesting that like, not that people haven’t heard, but that they haven’t heard in this format. Right. Like, I mean, I could go back. [Ben Ornstein]: I could go all the way back to some of the startups on the How I Built This podcast and like from the ones from the early days that they did. Even finding those that have already been talked about, but not for a very long time and haven’t been circulated in a while, that could be one way. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: That’s true. That’s true. [Ben Ornstein]: Get the transcript of an episode and just have Chachapiti say, what are the most interesting things from this story? Yeah, that’s smart. [Michael Houck]: That’s actually really smart. We should do that with, um, with videos and I guess all podcast episodes for folks too. I’m trying to, I can’t articulate what it is, but something about this format feels less viral, but obviously the evidence is, is showing me, uh, otherwise. Um, so I guess let’s do a couple of them and see how they do, but we need to pick the right, the right stories. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: Um, okay. Let me add that, um, those two links. Into the doc. And then, Ben, were there any you wanted to throw in there? [Ben Ornstein]: Yeah, this guy’s account isn’t big, but it’s an interesting video that I think we can learn from So, here we go. Let’s go to the chat. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: I make people go viral for a living. [Speaker 4]: You see all of this? This is what I do every single day. Here are three tips that are gonna help your next video go viral. Number one, be more entertaining in your videos. You don’t just always have to stand there. Show some depth of field. Move back and forth. Show them the pages that you’re talking about when you’re referencing them. Tip number two, say what matters to them first. Instead of saying, here are three workouts that will help you build more muscle, You want to say, if you want to build more muscle, here are three workouts you should do. [Ben Ornstein]: And the last thing, you have to be super competitive. A few really interesting things that I’ve never seen before. When he was giving the list of the videos or the list of tips, did you see in the top left corner about how it was showing how much was left in that tip? It was like, he’s making sure it, first of all, it’s a short video in general. But now you don’t see it this time. Oh, there it is. Yeah. So in the top left corner, it showed how much was left. So he’s like, you don’t have to stay here for that long. It’s going to be here. It’s good. I’m going to finish it very quickly. Yeah. The hook was great, obviously. I make viral videos for a living, so he instantly shows credibility in his engaging hook. I think he accomplished the interesting like dual, in those words, he accomplished credibility and an interesting hook. I think that was, I thought that was kind of interesting. Yeah. Yeah. I thought the hook was good and I like the little timer. [Michael Houck]: That’s, that’s cool. That’s unique. Um, I didn’t really feel like he delivered on the promise of the hook though. I agree with that. [Ben Ornstein]: I don’t think he did either. [Michael Houck]: And that’s probably why the video didn’t crazy viral because the actual tips are not, like two things. One, the actual tips are not as unique. Like he says, I make people go viral for a living. Number one tip is be more interesting or whatever. Like that’s like very, very entertaining, right? And then the other thing is like, he teases us with this like board and I’m like, okay, cool. Like what’s on the board? Like what are the secrets that this guy is doing? What’s his process? And then he totally ignores that for the rest of the video. So I think those are like misses for him, but I agree the hook is good. And sort of this thing is interesting too. And he somehow got a hundred people to save this. [Ben Ornstein]: I don’t know who is saving a video like this. Like it’s not even good really, but, and the other one thing I noticed and he does all of his videos. You can see not even on the right. He stands very close to the screen. Like, he makes sure you are listening to him and not getting distracted by anything else in the background. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. [Michael Houck]: I’m going to add the thing about the thing in the top left corner, because I think that’s interesting. We could try that. Yeah. Okay, cool. We’re at time. So I think these kind of give us some ideas, but are there any specific ideas you guys had you want to throw out there? [Max Palmer]: Mine was just the same, telling the quick startup stories. Okay. Okay. Let’s try to do one of those today. [Michael Houck]: Mine was your, I remember you talked about that LinkedIn post that you have about like the top books for recommended books for founders. [Ben Ornstein]: You could do a series of videos. People do this on TikTok all the time like part one, part two. And you just talk, you do like a sentence about why each book is so valuable, like one sentence. And you do like four or five videos. I don’t remember how many books are in that list, but that’s easily a short series you can do. [Michael Houck]: Recommended top books for entrepreneurs. Oh, so, okay. So I do like multiple videos, each video with multiple books. Yeah. Got it. Yeah, that’s interesting. We can do the same thing with like, uh, like SAS tools. Yeah, absolutely. Definitely. Maybe the books is probably actually better because it’s more widely applicable or widely interesting. Um, okay, cool. Sounds good. Um, let me know what you guys find on the more people who are like these Tik Tok native startup people, um, who are crushing it right now. Unlike the people we know. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. Will do. [Michael Houck]: See you guys.