- Duration: 19 min
- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01JATM70SE4DSSZ76N509HD15Z (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JATM70SE4DSSZ76N509HD15Z)
Transcript
[Michael Houck]: transcripts, but for some reason I still like having them. [Jeff Berkowitz]: It’s weird. I don’t know. Yeah. I mean, we’re, we’re looking at a trend transcripts when, uh, for demo, like demos and sales. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Oh yeah. [Michael Houck]: That makes sense. That makes sense. [Jeff Berkowitz]: Um, but usually like ours does a summary that it emails to. So we usually, and it’ll actually, and it puts an email in my draft folder of like a recap or Maybe I should look at your guys’ then. [Michael Houck]: Maybe it’ll force me to actually use, because the one I use, I don’t go back to it. Why am I paying for this? But maybe with yours, I actually would if it’s kind of prompting me that way. So that’s, that’s really sweet. Well, hey, look, I don’t want to take up too much of your time, but thanks for grabbing some time. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Sure. [Michael Houck]: I enjoyed the newsletter, so. Oh, I’m glad, man. Yeah, that’s awesome. It’s a, it’s a passion project. It for sure. So good to good to hear. But yeah, I guess just like, you know, give me as much context as you as you can as you want to, about sort of your your goals here and how you think that we could help out. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Jeff Berkowitz]: So we’ve been thinking a lot more about sort of founder led sales. And, you know, I have a I have a pretty large following on on LinkedIn, you know, a lot of folks connected, mostly just because I’ve been on the platform for a long time. And, you know, when I have time to produce posts and everything, it’s good, we get good engagement, but I just it’s hard to stay consistent, you know, we get busy, you know, you take a day like today, we literally have four demos for our platform that we’re rolling out and an investor call and this and it’s like, I’m on zoom all day. Yeah, and it’s become more important as we’ve You know, we’ve had a consulting firm for a decade in the political risk space. And in the last year, we’ve, earlier this year, we spun out an AI platform from using some of our methodologies into its own SaaS company. So one of the reasons why I ended up subscribing to your newsletter, you know, starting to get more into that, you know, VC funded world and figuring all that out. You know, but as we and we, we pulled pull, it came out of stealth mode in August, you know, late July, early August, and really would like to make sure that we’re, we’re more consistent with content, you know, just to stay in front of the audience. And I think for what we’re doing, LinkedIn is probably better than Twitter and some of the other platforms just because It’s just a little bit more thoughtful and I think it just works better for our brand who are trying [Michael Houck]: to reach. Yeah, I think also just based on having the following there already, like start where you get the most organic reach naturally. [Jeff Berkowitz]: Yeah. So I’m just, we’re looking at different options of folks to help with sort of getting that content generated more consistently. Um, and one of your, your colleagues had reached out about megaphone, which has definitely been sort of something I’ve been like, well, when we actually get to the point where we’re doing enough content reliably and kind of have that, that system built, then yeah, then, then this would probably make sense to invest in, but we’re not there yet. And I said that to her instead of saying, okay, well, good luck with social thing. [Michael Houck]: Actually we do that too. [Jeff Berkowitz]: Um, so. She has to connect to learn a little bit more about what that looks like, [Michael Houck]: That was Rena, right? She’s yeah. Yeah, she’s she’s great. She’s my personal assistant, like pseudo chief of staff. She does like everything. She’s awesome. But OK, so that’s helpful. I guess I can tell you sort of what our offer is, what we do, how our process works and also how Megaphone sort of works into it as well. So, yeah, it’s pretty simple. You know, we work with founders. We work with execs like that’s our target audience for our clients. And so we tailor the whole process basically to exactly what would work for me, which would also work for, for, for them. So, um, as, as a founder, so, um, basically it’s super lightweight. Uh, we would do one kickoff call at the beginning, probably be 45 minutes, maybe up to an hour. And then that’s it. We’re not going to require kind of any more of your time after that. If you want to do content interviews, like in person with, the writer that you get matched with, we can do that, but it’s not required. What we do for most clients is that we set up a shared Slack channel. And every Monday, we’ll send a couple topics and a couple questions about those topics. And we want your expertise and your knowledge on those questions. And so, you know, in tandem with research that we’re doing on the side about the topics for sure, we want you to send back like voice notes, just ramble, give us the emotion, the intonation, make it so that the content we produce is something that you uniquely only could write, right? It’s not just gonna be something coming from AI or from someone else, it’s you, it’s your voice. And we get those by Wednesday, then we’ll get back the content to you by Friday. But you know, over the first few weeks, we’ll have a big idea backlog, and we’ll start to build up a backlog of content. So it’s not a stressful process from week to week, you’re not like, oh, I need to get this done by Wednesday, or else I won’t have content to post next week. Like that’s, you know, it’s not, that’s not how we work. There’ll be a notion workspace where you can see all the ideas, you can comment on them, you can request revisions on pieces we’ve written, it’s totally fine. We also handle content operations. So we’ll have someone who can go in, log into your account, schedule posts, reply to people who comment on your posts, drive that engagement, drive that community and trust. And another thing we like to do is identify a list of people in your niche who have the audience that you want already, and then that same person they’re commenting on the replies to your content, they’ll also be commenting on like the most recent fresh posts from these thought leaders with like either something a little insightful, maybe a little funny, just to get more impression on your profile, more followers. So that’s, that’s pretty much the process super lightweight. [Jeff Berkowitz]: So what’s when they’re writing those comments, like how do they do they like run those by me first? [Michael Houck]: Or how does that how does that process usually, if you want them to, they they can, um, if you’re making me cough, I’m a little sick at the moment. I got some phlegm. Um, but, um, most people haven’t asked us to do that. They’ve just wanted us to take it off their hands basically. But if you want to review the thing, anything we post from your account before we do, like we can do that through Slack pretty quickly. Um, but, uh, we also have a, uh, an AI reply generator that would be trained on your specific voice that we could use if you wanted. Our default is to have our ops person write the comments by hand, but we do have that option as well if you’d want. That’s why we built it in-house. But I should note that none of the content will be written by AI. What we have is a team of writers who I’ve worked with in various capacity for a long time. And they write the content, you’re paired up with them. It’s not like, you know, you put your request into some pool and some person picks it, right? This is your partner, they download your brain. And then before the content gets to you, it’s actually reviewed by Blake Imahl, who’s my partner in the agency. He has like, you know, he’s the first CMO at Copy AI, he has like 100,000 followers on X and I think like 30 or something thousand on LinkedIn, more than I do in total between the two platforms. And so the two of us have partnered up on this. He reviews it. He’s in the trenches with the writers. And then I also do a review. We’re still small enough where I can do that before it gets sent to sent to clients. [Jeff Berkowitz]: So you get sort of that double review process before it even gets to you in the first place. Yeah. Yeah. No, I was just curious because we’re we’re pretty niche and some of the things can be a little complex or, you know, fraught, you know, with sort of political implications. So. It’s always this balance between sort of like pointing out what’s correct and real versus like, people having different views on things, regardless of reality. Yes, I am. [Michael Houck]: I’m very well versed in people having views on things that are not reality. Don’t worry. Yeah, I mean, look, if that’s a concern, we can work with that. As I said, share the things in Slack before we would post them. And then maybe over time, we sort of build up trust where we learn what’s kosher and what’s not kosher, basically. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah, exactly. Cool. [Michael Houck]: So yeah, so that’s it. It’s pretty straightforward. What I would do is the next step is basically to chat with our writers, see who’s excited about the project and see who I think would have the best expertise for it. And then we’d be ready to go basically ASAP. On the pricing side, since I imagine that’s of interest, just as well. We have two basic tiers. So one is $19.95 a month, so $2k a month. And that’s, you get two long form posts per week, or some mixture of long and short form that’s like equivalent to two long form per week, plus the content operations and everything else. Then at $29.95 or $3k a month, you get three per week, or again, some mixture of long and short form. So it can be up to like, you know, let’s say one to two long form and close to 10 short form in that tier. So you’ll be posting multiple times a day at that tier if you want, or just have a couple long form posts that really, really go big. And you also get a free megaphone subscription for the account as part of this as well. So you don’t need to pay the 89 or 49 a month. And for any new new people signing up also throw in some megaphone credits on the accounts, you can get some free application as well. [Jeff Berkowitz]: Got What was I going to ask? I had a question and now I have to remember what it was. I don’t remember what the question was. I’m sure it was a good one. Too long for comments. It may come to me. [Michael Houck]: Um, I’ll send over an email also after this with like the whole pricing, uh, written out, uh, and anything else. [Jeff Berkowitz]: So maybe it’ll come to you then. Okay. Yeah. I don’t remember. It was not, it was a thought and then it went, went away. [Michael Houck]: Um, this is why I have to record me. Yeah, there you go. Excuse me. Um, that makes sense. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: All right. [Jeff Berkowitz]: Well, that’s pretty, pretty, straightforward. Oh, I know what it was. So is that when you do that initial like onboarding calls that where you kind of like build out sort of the figure out the content pillars? Or how does that sort of that strategy piece plan? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, so the the onboarding call will be me the writer and you and we’ll go through everything in detail. We have like a doc that will fill out live on the call. There’s also an onboarding form that will send you where you can be like, Oh, from one to 10. How much do I want my content to be this or that? But on the call, we’ll go really deep. We’ll say, you know, who’s the audience that we want? What’s the voice you want to speak to that audience in? What are the topics? [Jeff Berkowitz]: All that kind of stuff we cover on the call. Okay, cool. Yeah. Yeah, because it’s definitely important to me, like, it be authentic. Like I see some people, they, they’ve obviously started using somebody to write content for them. And all of a sudden, they’re like, a leadership guru. I’m like, I don’t write or all these things. Like, why are you posting posting about this, you’re a social media person. We take the first two weeks basically to just learn your voice. [Michael Houck]: So we’ll ask for a ton of writing samples, some voice notes if you can, and also content that you like either for the style or for like the followers of the account. And yeah, we’ll factor all that into sort of this initial research period before we start churning out the content. [Jeff Berkowitz]: Yeah. Yeah. Of op-eds. I write a, although I haven’t got, I haven’t had time to write one in a bit, but I write a Forbes business column and we publish, you know, every two to four weeks, at least we’ve got an analysis we’re publishing on our, you know, the consultancy website and have been, we started publishing that in 2015, late 2015. So there’s a lot of, there’s a lot of back content, um, that, I’d like to talk. Okay. [Michael Houck]: I mean that those, those clients come on, those are the easiest clients to work with because it gives us sort of that starter material and then we can tweak it to fit social media in again, that we want. So yeah. [Jeff Berkowitz]: Okay, cool. All right. Well, that’s easy enough. Uh, appreciate you taking some time to, to walk through that and I’ll chat with our, um, our, our, uh, go to market person. Um, you were talking to a couple, different folks. See, see which model makes the most sense. Cool. [Michael Houck]: Jeff, was there any question that either we didn’t get to or also? Oh, sorry, my, my Google just went off. Any question we didn’t get? Or maybe something that another, you know, potential partner that you’ve been talking to mentioned that we didn’t cover? [Jeff Berkowitz]: Um, I don’t think so. It’s pretty straightforward. [Michael Houck]: No, I don’t think so. Okay, sounds good. We’d be really pumped to work with you. [Jeff Berkowitz]: So I guess just let me know. [Michael Houck]: We’ll follow up probably by the end of the week if I don’t hear from you. But yeah, excited and would love to kind of help grow the account. So let us know. [Jeff Berkowitz]: All right, sounds good. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Thanks. [Michael Houck]: Cool. Thanks, Jeff.