- Duration: 23 min
- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01JAR76W62VJ4XKGWC7RVQ5F94 (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JAR76W62VJ4XKGWC7RVQ5F94)
Transcript
[Michael Houck]: Yeah, man. Thanks for putting it together. You’ve put out some good stuff. So I figured I’d check it out. Seems good. I should look through some of the resources seems useful. I guess context is we’re getting started creating more short form video content through my own personal brand. Up until now, we focused basically entirely on written content. But we’re launching, we just launched a podcast. And so at the same time, I figured might as well do short form And so yeah, so we just started, we’ve only done a couple videos and just trying to get better, really meet the right people and just get better at it. Nice, okay. [Joseph Choi]: What’s your niche now? Is it similar to the newsletter or is it more like, is the pod and the short form gonna be a different type of content? [Michael Houck]: No, same niche, figured it’s easiest to start out, same niche, so startups, venture capital, online businesses, that kind of stuff. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay, cool. [Joseph Choi]: Nice. Yeah, there’s definitely a lot of people doing really good founder-led content in the community. And yeah, definitely there’s the focus around consumer apps and going to market with consumer apps through short-form videos. Is that something you’re also trying to plan on? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I mean, we don’t have any consumer apps that we’ve launched yet, but some of our engineering work on one of our existing products is stable at this point. So it’s more of a, all our efforts onto that are going to be going towards growth throughout the product for the next six months or so for the most part. So have some engineering time freed up. So probably will make sense to create something, but don’t know what it’ll be yet. [Joseph Choi]: Interesting. So what’s the challenge with founder-led content now? Are you trying to figure out how to? Because, I mean, there’s a lot of stuff you could do, right? Like, if you figured out the strategy right now, today, then you could just, all your content could funnel people towards a wait list, for example. Or it could sort of nurture the audience to be interested in a certain product. Or are you kind of just more of the mind, like, let’s just do the content and build the following and then see what happens. [Michael Houck]: Well, I mean, we have a following on other platforms. It’s just, you know, it’s really just let’s get good at it, right? Like if I wanna apply this to a specific product that we incubate, then I wanna ahead of time know exactly, hey, this is what I need to do off the bat to make an account for that grow better in that niche, right? So like, I don’t know the first thing about a short form video. I’ve done some research. I made a couple of videos. We performed okay. I think we got one with like 20,000 views, which is good for a first one. Second one got like seven K or something like that. So they’re okay. But I don’t know how to get, you know, a hundred K, 200 K, 500 K, a million. And if I do that with my own personal brand where I know the subject matter really, really well, I feel like, and then go apply that to whatever niche we want to build a product in, you know, over the winter. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Joseph Choi]: It makes sense. Yeah, just taking notes. Content. Yeah, that makes sense. You already have the angles and everything figured out. So just figure it out. Part of the controllable is limit the variables. [Michael Houck]: It’s like, I don’t know the medium, the form factor, but I know this content. So let me see how this plays into this format, learn what I don’t know, and then have the playbook to apply to something else. [Joseph Choi]: Yeah, definitely. Yeah, I mean, there’s a lot of founder content. The thing is, like, the niche is going to be important, I think, because, like, certain, like, general beginner business content, how do you make money, you know, does super well, you know, like, Hormozy and Becker and all these big business influencers. And then more specific, like, how do you do, how do you raise money for You know tech company that’s like Different, um, you know the follow-up like the content gets not as many views. Um, so is that something you’re trying to Trying to do like are you trying to go broader niche? Yeah, tons and tons of views or is it more like stay in the startups because even like VC backed startups, for example, that’s part of your story, like that, yeah, that also targets and like sort of limits your market. Not in a good or bad way. But you know, it’s like, it makes you like the each audience member is more valuable, but it’s going to be smaller, right? Yeah, of course. [Michael Houck]: I was watching some interviews with Patty Galloway, and he was talking about Noah Kagan was doing a lot of these very specific videos for the tech-fluent audience, startup-fluent audience, and they weren’t doing particularly well. They started working together, talked more about these interviews with billionaires or whatever, and obviously that has much broader appeal, while still being interesting to his core niche. So I think, yeah, that’s kind of what I’m looking to do here with with the personal brand is like, all right, we have the credibility in the space. What is sort of the right altitude for this type of content to go big? Cause I know what I need to do on like a Twitter thread. I know the altitude to make a Twitter thread get popular and go big in this niche and even expand beyond the niche. [Joseph Choi]: What does that look like for short form video? Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. I mean, Do you think that’ll all come from the podcast then? Like if you’re doing podcasts and then you do clips, is that where you plan for most of the content to come from Or do you actually want to do like talking head, like talk like beyond? [Michael Houck]: The podcast clips, I don’t think will. We’ve ran a couple of them and they’ve gotten like, you know, anywhere from 500 views to 1500 views. And I think that that makes sense, right? More niche, not as like polished. They’re not as like scripted. MBAs probably hate working at NVIDIA, and here’s why. First, there’s no opportunity for backroom politics. Jensen Y. Wong, the CEO, doesn’t do any one-on-ones despite having 40 direct reports. Instead, all big decisions get made in group meetings, share transparently. Second, you have to have unique ideas to stand out. He ignores traditional status reports and instead encourages everyone to send him the top five things they think the company should be working on. He reads a hundred of these emails every single morning. Third, you have to be extremely adaptable. Jensen says he’d rather the company be able to quickly adapt to changes in the market than plan for the long term, which is actually crazy because the hardware they started building over 30 years ago for gaming only became insanely valuable in the last few years with the rise of AI. Talk about skating to where the puck is going. [Joseph Choi]: His belief in a radical company structure is clearly working though, with the stock up over 2,000% in the last 5 years, even though NBA’s probably hating it. [Michael Houck]: I’m pretty sure I met one of them. Yeah, like, Mike’s Simi. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah, I know. Sim. [Joseph Choi]: Yeah, because they do they do content like kind of like this. I was like, hey, this guy, you know, this high profile CEO does this thing. Here’s the insight into general like business. And that’s like, very Yeah, it’s a good way to get a lot of views because you leverage the nickname. I know someone who, there’s someone in the community that actually, what was it? He helped them do the short form pivot or some sort of thing where he led the strategy for the Our Future video. So I can make a quick intro in the Discord for that. Today. That’d be helpful. Yeah, that’d be helpful. [Michael Houck]: That sounds good. I have to get back into the discord. Honestly, discord is like, I don’t use it enough. [Joseph Choi]: And so yeah, yeah, that’s one thing I’m trying to figure out. Like, I think a lot of people are, like, they’re just trying to, they want to, they don’t want to miss out on insights. But they also don’t want to, like, comb through every single discord message. So I’m trying to figure out ways to organize the information so that people see the right things. Maybe I can show you a quick walkthrough of the server just to point out a couple of things. So this is the announcements. Here’s where I talk about the actual community itself. Here’s introductions. If you introduce yourself here and then hype yourself up, people will probably recognize your name. Of some metrics too. And then it helps with networking with the right people. So especially if you like hug yourself up, say what you’re good at, and then kind of like give an ask, like, hey, does anyone know how to do this thing? It’s pretty effective. All the resources, this is like the, if you want to really like learn how to do the TikTok marketing for apps, this is like the map. So you’ve seen all this stuff. Yeah, cool. And then, yeah, the memory structure is also really helpful. I wonder if people do FounderLed. Yeah, it’d be hard to search for that, but you could also do. It’s kind of hard to figure out. But yeah, I mean, some people are doing FounderLed content. If you find them in the intros, you can definitely reach out. People are pretty responsive to DMs, too. Yeah, it’s a good way to network. Yeah, here’s where we talk about marketing chat, product chat. I do the weekly digest, summarizing everything. This is a newer thing. So if people like, what I found is that teams, like a lot of people are, a lot of the founders are first time founders, and they’re just, I think they’re the best at, What they do like it’s really hard to find an organic tiktok agency that really knows how to do everything end to end and the best people are just doing their own company and um, so the best way to learn I think is just like trading trading advice with people so um Like the main way people have used this channel is just talking about themselves, you know flexing almost the same thing as the intro and then kind of like being explicit about here’s what I can help with and here’s what I need help with. A lot of DMs get exchanged here. [Michael Houck]: And then I can also do the intro. [Joseph Choi]: Have you thought about sending out the digest doc that you put together as a community newsletter, like an email? I have thought about it. It would be, I just need a VA to manage the membership because I want the people to receive this, to be the ones who are like the members of the community. Because people who are in the community don’t probably don’t want it to go out to like random people. So I just want to make sure. [Michael Houck]: You can do like a private newsletter on Beehive or something with like, you have to prove people when they try to sign up for it or whatever. Right, right, right. [Joseph Choi]: And then if people like turn from the community, I’ll have to like remove them. So just like doing that, maybe every two weeks or so, just like I just wish there was an all-in-one. Maybe this is a startup idea. I need community management. I need to basically productize Lenny’s thing, just community, content, newsletter, everything all-in-one. Currently, I use Flop, and it’s decent. It’s good for member management, but they don’t do newsletters. Actually, I think they do have a newsletter app. I’ll just have to look into that. But that is good feedback. People have definitely said that. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I think the number one thing would just be like, I can look through the directory more and I can reach out to people and I’ll probably do that. But anyone who you think would be worth chatting with, yeah, would love to just be connected and get started making connections with people that way. I think we have editing, we know how to do that. The main thing is like, just like, what is the altitude of ideas to go broad? Like I can analyze videos to death and I could be like, all right, you know, here are like the little differences and how they edit it or how they cut it or, you know, what the hook or something like that. But yeah, it’s more so just like getting my feet wet, getting familiar with like, how do people respond to different altitudes of content? That’s really the thing. [Joseph Choi]: Yeah. Yeah. That’s an interesting one. Watch much YouTube? Honestly, no. [Michael Houck]: I started to watch more since we started doing the podcast, but I don’t watch a lot of content, honestly. [Joseph Choi]: I’ve been watching a couple of interesting business content. Oops, okay, there we go. I have this playlist saved of all the people that I like watching. There we go. Yeah, I mean, some of this is long form, but the vibes are very interesting on different peoples. Like, some people do very specific stuff, actually, and they actually do, they get a lot of views, and they just generate, like, leads from their channels. Like, this guy- Figure stock portfolio. Subs. But just talks specifically about SEO a lot of time. And then he sells the SEO SaaS business. And then this whole raw reality thing is a big trend, raw reality of building a business. It’s kind of like build in public kind of thing. But it’s a big trend that he’s doing pretty well. Raw reality. Yeah, you’re just such raw reality on YouTube. And you’re going to see so many videos with a title of running a clothing brand, being a millionaire in Dubai, owning an $8 million business in Montreal. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Interesting. [Joseph Choi]: And the style of it. [Joseph Choi]: It's kind of this slow, casual, fun time. It's a little bit more lifestyle-y. It's like entertainment. And then there's even more lo-fi. I call this playlist loom, reality loom, because if I want to make content, I want to make it as natural feeling as possible for me. I do pretty well in one-on-one meetings, but I feel like when I get on camera and try to script it out, sometimes it just comes out forced. But some of my best moments are actually just recording looms, and then I get super excited, and I start showing the passion in the loom. And that video format works. For example, So here's how I built a multi six figure software. Like this video got 23k views. That's how I made this SAS business. And it's just a loom video. And he just walks through his Figma designs or his mirror board. [Michael Houck]: So I guess you just need to make the mirror board and then basically do no editing after that, because it's just raw. Yeah, yeah. It works pretty well. That's pretty cool. I like that. [Joseph Choi]: I really like this guy's channel two, um, YouTube scripting. I think it was this one. Yeah, this is really good. Um, that's more scripted, but I like the stuff. I don't want to spend that much time on like scripting. So I like the, I like the loom videos. Like I think these are great. And it's something that's slightly higher fidelity than that is, um, uh, Clay Automation, like the outbounding tool. They hired a creator to make how-to style videos, like the only B2B marketing strategy you will ever need. In order to do any sort of B2B marketing. It's just this guy speaking as if he's an agency owner that uses Clay, which spoiler alert, he actually is. So he's the head of content at Clay, like employed as a full-time employee, but then he also, they allow him to like run an agency on the side. So he's speaking as if he's just, you know, agency, but it like, it does well, like the content, you know, gets like generates leads for Clay, cause it's like more targeted. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: That's a good deal for him. He gets a full-time job. The leads, that's pretty good. [Joseph Choi]: I know, it's great. Like he has the best setup ever. And it's slightly more edited, you know, like he has transitions and stuff, but at the base of it, like you could just hire an editor. He's just doing a loom video. So it's pretty low effort for him, I think, unless he's editing as well. [Michael Houck]: Interesting. I mean, yeah, it gives me some good stuff for, for long form. We're gonna dip our toe into that, probably once we nail the short form, or at least are consistently getting like, I don't know, consistently in the 10k plus per video, probably start thinking about long form. Just our podcast. That's all we have on there. Yeah, I think you could do Hormozy. [Joseph Choi]: Like, I don't think Hormozy content is good anymore. Like he kind of is way too broad appeal now and a little bit corporate. But if you scroll all the way back to short form, or even his long form from 2020 or pre-2020, he was making really raw videos. Just, here's no BS, how I run these businesses, how I have grown them. His tagline was I have nothing to sell you and it was it was so effective. It was so good and he's still he's still like The promise I mean he sells a $1 PDFs, but yeah, you know, it’s a Yeah, you like the old hermosi. [Michael Houck]: I think it’s pretty good for fun as well interesting If you have any specific creators who you think either for long form or for short form you think are Doing interesting stuff and I should check out doesn’t even need to be in the niche just like Formats that I could apply to the niche obviously would appreciate that but know you’re you got a whole community to manage so no no pressure But I’ll dive in I’ll introduce myself to everybody. [Joseph Choi]: I’ll try to connect with some folks go from there Yeah, do you know James Dow by any chance? He’s from He owns the agency and he is also a founder creator. Okay, I’ll introduce you to him, too He has like 70k on IG reels, but he makes only like founder content. He talks about owning a marketing agency for brands so Yeah Good menu. Let’s keep in touch message anytime if you want Intros or help on anything. Well, I’m excited to be in the community. [Michael Houck]: Thanks for putting it together. Seems like a good group and yeah, I’ll engage. So I’ll see you in there. Awesome. Cool. See you. Have a good one. See you.