- Duration: 31 min
- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01JAX0KBSB6C7F4F60TJCG3ZAF (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JAX0KBSB6C7F4F60TJCG3ZAF)
Transcript
[Ben Ornstein]: How are you? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Pretty good. [Ben Ornstein]: How are you? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. Solid. [Michael Houck]: Um, big filming day. I have like five different scripts that I’m going to film. So we’ll have a lot more, a lot more to go on basically taking the ideas we’ve put out so far and, um, doing some of those as well. Some news related stuff. Um, okay, let’s dive in since I know we only have, uh, 15. Um, so I’d say, Discussion topic today real quick is are we shooting ourselves in the foot by doing short only? Reason I bring this up is because I discovered that YouTube does not count the watch time from shorts To help you monetize your channel So if we wanted this to turn into a revenue generating thing at some point not the biggest priority in the world but if we wanted to You know, we’re only getting the watch time from our podcast isn’t going to generate in the short term enough for us to monetize the channel. So yeah, I guess initial thoughts on should we be doing long form? Should we be doing like fewer shorts and a long form video every week? [Max Palmer]: I thought you could monetize with solely shorts. You’re just not going to make as much. [Michael Houck]: So you can monetize with either. The way it works is that you need a thousand subscribers and one of two other conditions. Those conditions are either 4,000 watch hours from long form videos or 10 million views from shorts. [Max Palmer]: Okay. Yeah. I mean, long form videos. So we’re already doing the podcast. Are you, we would just do eight to 10 minute videos explaining? [Michael Houck]: I don’t know what the, I don’t know what the topics would be, but that would be, yeah, one of those per week. Um, and then like a couple shorts, we’d probably still have budget to do a couple of shorts. Um, the, the downside of this is that it, um, it’s like diluting our focus, right? So we’re not going to master it. Short form as quickly if we’re also doing long form. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: So that’s the trade-off. [Michael Houck]: And I would say additional helpful context is so far we’ve gotten, let me go to YouTube just to confirm these numbers. So far in terms of the subscribers that we’ve added, okay, my mouse is freaking out. God, sometimes I really hate ARC, but other things I really love about it. Okay, for subscribers, so far we have added, where is it? Okay, we’ve added 40 from our long form videos and 26 from shorts. That doesn’t seem accurate because we’ve added over 100 overall, but those are the numbers that it’s showing me right now. [Ben Ornstein]: I feel like it’s too early to Dilute the focus on the short form videos until we’ve exhausted even more Different formats and ideas and worse if we’re still not seeing anything I think it’s still too early to make that decision because the other thing I’m thinking is if we go I feel like longer form videos unless we can find something that’s easy to create either content wise or I think those are gonna take longer and Because of that just our output going to be less, and I think likely lower quality because it’s going to be less. You don’t think we’d be able to do one per week? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: We could. [Michael Houck]: I just, I don’t know. [Ben Ornstein]: It depends what the content would be. Like, I don’t, I’m not even sure what we, like, did you have any initial ideas into what those could look like, [Michael Houck]: No, I mean, I don’t think that’s a prerequisite for for deciding either. Like there’s proven formats that we can look at other channels on long form that work and adapt them to our niche and our channel. And we have a lot of material obviously to go on. So I’m not super concerned about that. I think the big question is just like does it makes God it’s like a fucking Blue Angels show out there today. Does it make sense to entirely master shorts over the course of like, you know, another month, two months before we decide to go this other way. And then, you know, the other side of this is that we’re already able to do 10,000 plus views with, you know, multiple times a week if we’re putting out these these types of shorts. So obviously, we have We haven’t mastered anything. We haven’t gotten a breakout video to hundreds of thousands or a million plus views. But we’re doing some things right, at least. [Max Palmer]: Yeah, let’s master shorts first. Let’s just focus on one thing at a time. This is a new medium for us. And I agree, I don’t think we would have a hard time content ideas for eight or 10 minute videos. But it would take a lot of research and script writing and back and forth with clip wing to do a 10 minute video. That was the only thing I was thinking of Yeah, it would take a lot of work. And yeah, we haven’t mastered shorts yet. Let’s master shorts. If we prove we can master shorts in the next two months, then great, we’re gonna have that on lock, and then we can move on to longer form stuff. [Michael Houck]: That’s where I’m leaning to, is like, let’s spend the rest of this quarter entirely focused on shorts. Yeah, it doesn’t help us towards the monetization goal. But I think from like a strategy perspective, it does make more sense. [Max Palmer]: Yeah, and it’s not like we’d start making a lot of money either way from YouTube Like now if we’re gonna end up making good money from YouTube, it’s gonna be a longer term play totally Okay, cool. [Michael Houck]: We’re on the same page then. So let’s do that Stay focused on shorts. Okay. I will have a couple minutes. So Did you guys have any outliers you wanted to share today? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay, I have one. I have one as well. [Michael Houck]: Okay, let’s do this. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: I’ll share this tab. [Michael Houck]: Ground Zero, I had zero followers, 28 days. I started this account brand new, Ground Zero, I had zero followers 28 days ago, and I now have almost 25,000 followers. That’s almost 1,000 followers a day since starting brand new. If you’re new here, my name is Ellie, and I’ve been sharing all of my tips and tricks from growing a TikTok account from zero to over 5,000, which was my goal in the beginning, to get over 5,000 so I could get into TikTok shop affiliate. That in five days. Genuinely just sharing what has been successful for me so that I can help inspire other mothers, other people out there that they can do this too. Because if I can do it, you can do it. I was engaging, which is something I wasn’t doing very well on my last account. But when I started this one, I was like, I gotta do it better. I started engaging with every single account that I saw. I liked it. I commented like a real authentic comment, not just emoji. Like I commented something about that video and then I shared it. What I did is I just hit the share button and then tap copy link. I don’t actually share it or send it to anyone. I just hit the share button in the copy link. One thing that I’ve been using has been creator search insights. I know this isn’t available in all regions, but if you have it available in yours, I’m in the US, it has been really helpful. My next step is make sure that you always have text on screen. There’s a lot of people that are scrolling through TikTok and they can’t listen. And so if your video has captions on it, they’re more than likely going to watch your videos. Also at the beginning of every single one of my videos, I add a caption slash hook right here at the beginning that everyone You can see mine at the beginning of this video was talking about my follower count. And other than that, I think consistency too for the last 28 days, I have shown up multiple times a day and that has definitely played a big factor engaging. [Ben Ornstein]: I try to respond to comments and all that fun stuff. So a few things I noticed about this video, really long, excessively too long, but it still was an outlier for her. It was 300,000 views. A lot of her videos get between like I don’t know, one in 10K. She’s had three outlier videos and all three of those videos, two of them being over a million, two of them, all three of them were tactics for follower growth, which is really interesting that she does all these different types of videos, but the ones that hit have been the ones where it’s talking about follower growth, growing TikTok accounts. I just thought that was really interesting and just the I’ve said it multiple times, but like, if you show people like how they can actually do these things, I think it’s, I think it means something. I think it’s something that’s engaging because they’re like, wait, I can do this too. And yeah, I just think the format is so easy and basic and we’ve seen it before. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: It’s not new. [Michael Houck]: It’s like a Ponzi scheme. Like I’ll show you how I grew it all together. Followers by posting a video about how I show you how to grow all these followers. [Ben Ornstein]: Yeah. Yeah. That’s a good point. That’s a good way of looking at it. And you can see like, look at all these different things she’s doing. What does shadow banning mean? Amazon reviews, like all of these different things, bath toys, like what? Um, but it’s interesting that the ones that have really hit for her are these ones that show the numbers and the growth that she’s done. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. Yeah. [Ben Ornstein]: And I think this is like an interesting case study for us in like, look at how many different things she’s tried. [Michael Houck]: This is interesting too. [Ben Ornstein]: 500K for phone suction. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. Like how does that hit? [Michael Houck]: And play it. It’s really quiet. Yeah, it’s fine. This is so fucking boring. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: I know. [Michael Houck]: I know. I don’t get it, man. A weird one. [Ben Ornstein]: Hoping you make money from a home with legit side hustles. I actually do. So like that’s her thing. [Max Palmer]: The side hustle making money niche is so big. [Ben Ornstein]: It’s massive. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. All right. [Michael Houck]: Interesting. Let me grab the one max that you This guy built a $1.2 million business out of his van selling eggshells. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Check this out. [Michael Houck]: Okay, it's 2020 and the van life trend is popping off. This guy quits his job, moves into a $1,500 junker and starts calling himself the van man. He has dreams of starting his own business, but no idea what to do. So he just starts posting on Twitter about what it’s like to live in a van. People love this content and he starts to build a small following. But everything changes one day when he comes across this video of Arnold Schwarzenegger breaking an egg into his protein shake. So he goes down the rabbit hole, reading article after article and discovers eggshells are actually known to prevent cavities. This gives him an insane idea. Eggshell toothpaste. He searches for it online and it doesn’t exist. So he cooks up a recipe in his van and calls it Van Man’s Miracle Tooth Powder. He sets up a Shopify store, posts the link on Twitter, and sells $5,000 in the first day. Years later the van man makes over $100,000 per month from his signature toothpaste. Proof that it all starts by sharing your story with the world. [Ben Ornstein]: I saw this one the other day. [Max Palmer]: I mean it’s a huge outlier for him. The hook is incredible. 1.2 million for selling eggshells. You’re like what the fuck is this? And then he does a good job of telling the story. Every two to three seconds there’s a there’s a change. And yeah, it’s good. It’s a good reel. Also, you like learn something like who would have thought eggshells are good for your teeth? [Michael Houck]: No one knows that. I didn’t know that for sure. Yeah, that makes you curious. And the guy himself is very interesting. Like why is he living in a van? We don’t know. [Ben Ornstein]: Yeah, I’ll proclaim the name of the van man too. [Michael Houck]: This is this is definitely a great story. And packaged it really, really well. [Max Palmer]: I’m curious if we could do this same thing and tell the Airbnb story. The thing is, everyone knows, not everyone knows, but the Airbnb story has been told to death. No, but it’s been told to death to us because we live in the startup world. And so we think that. I know. [Michael Houck]: I know what you’re saying and it’s true like there are people out there who would be like Airbnb started at the cereal that’s crazy but like the reason that this one got a hundred K likes is because literally no one knew this story like no one knows this guy so like well and the sort of like outsider people it just kept getting bigger bigger yeah I wasn’t even talking about the the cereal store is more so talking about [Max Palmer]: hey let’s blow up an air mattress in our living and rent it for this conference. [Ben Ornstein]: I mean, this goes back to the whole how I built this idea that I was talking about the other day. We could turn those ones in that format into our own videos too. [Michael Houck]: I think the key is finding the right stories that are, if they’re about companies that people know, that’s great. If they’re about companies that people don’t know, like this VanMan thing, that’s also great. It’s just how unique is the story? And have people heard it before or not. I think those are the two big factors. So I like doing this. I think we just need to find the right stories. I got to jump. Yeah, yeah, I know you do. Ben and I will keep going, but yeah. [Ben Ornstein]: I’ll hop back on if he doesn’t join. Okay, see you. I could easily try to find most interesting, like I could listen to how I built this in not full episodes. Like I think that’s an easy first place just because they’re already curated really good stories. Excuse me. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I know. It’s just, let’s, let’s think about what type of story, right? Cause it’s not just as simple as like, Oh, some story about the business. I think we need to like think about, okay, what, what makes this story so good? What makes this story so good? What makes these outlier stories for him so good? And let’s find like what that is and more of those. I don’t know where those are going to be like what the right sources are. Taking podcast transcripts, running them through chat GPT, extracting the insights and then building a script off that. That makes sense. That’s what I was thinking. Yeah, that’s that’s smart. I’m just trying to think what is the most it’s a really efficient way to find those stories. Like, Pat has a huge, like, database of case studies on these companies that he can pull from So we just have to think what’s the best way to do that? And also, do we want to do this explicitly for venture backed companies, like the stories behind venture backed companies? Do we want to do this for just any online business, any business in You know? [Ben Ornstein]: I think, like, obviously our niche is the venture-backed companies. I don’t think there’s a downside to doing any interesting online business, maybe. Yeah, I think that’s probably right. [Michael Houck]: I think, especially early on, we should just find the most interesting ones. But like, okay. Where do we do that? Because like this band guy, for example, that story is not going to be on a podcast. He’s never been invited on a podcast, probably, you know? So yeah, I guess like, how would we find? [Ben Ornstein]: One thing I could think of is like Read.AI. Read.AI has everything. I could go to like Read.AI threads and find like, there’s gotta be a subreddit of like interesting business founding stories. I could imagine something there somewhere. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I mean, maybe just even in like the bigger ones, like the entrepreneur or the startup or whatever. I don’t know, I’m not a Read.AI user, so I don’t know what they have on there, but whatever the more popular ones are, just like we can go in there, sort by top posts all time or something like that and grab those. That could be one way to do it. In those, I know they do. [Ben Ornstein]: That’s how Greg Eisenberg finds a lot of his business ideas. He has an AI that kind of scrapes subreddits for like things people are actively talking about in certain niches. Yeah. Maybe long-term we can do something like that, but obviously not now. Yeah, I’ll search for the big subreddits. I think that’s an interesting idea. [Michael Houck]: Okay, so subreddits is one, podcast transcripts is another one because, you know, well known company stories that are really unique. I think the key will be, if we can hook somebody with like a, did you know that, you know, Apple was founded because Steve Jobs got hit in the head by an apple or something like that. Something that no one knows about the origin story of a big company or the journey that company went on. That’s good. That’s actually better because we hook people more with the brand, right? But it has to be stuff that I don’t know already. Like, I hear Max’s point that like, you know, the startup people have heard the Airbnb story, but the people outside it haven’t. But the problem is, this reel would be served initially to the startup people, right? And so in order to break out, it needs to be first attractive to the core. I think I agree with you. [Ben Ornstein]: And in that point, I see where he’s saying where I see where he’s going with that. And I don’t disagree. But Yeah, it’s a story that our audience that this is gonna be served to has heard. [Michael Houck]: Right, because what the YouTube algorithm or TikTok algorithm or whatever else is doing is they’re saying, who is most likely to be interested in this story? And those are the people who first determine if it gets pushed to more people or not. So we need a story that’s interesting to the core that they don’t know already, but also then is like just genuinely crazy like this band story. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: Okay, so let’s start there. Let’s grab some from Read.AI and from podcasts. Spend some time finding those, maybe keep the best ones in a Google Sheet and send them to me. Oh, no show? Yep. We were just talking about how to find some of these stories. I think what Ben’s gonna do is look through Read.AI and also look through old podcast episodes from like, you know, how I built, Ben, you mentioned how I built this. There’s probably other podcasts too, like Acquired, that probably has some good nuggets like that. Grab the transcripts from them, throw them through chat GPT and see what spits out. Maybe Hacker News too. Oh yeah, Hacker News would be a good one. Might be tougher to sort through there though, that’s the thing. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: Cause their form, the UI hasn’t been updated in like 25 years. [Max Palmer]: Do we want to tell these type of stories of these niche businesses that aren’t really startups? [Ben Ornstein]: No, see, I wasn’t thinking ones like this. I was thinking ones like one of the ones that I remember from how I built this is Stacy’s Pita Chips. I remember the reason it got started. Everyone, like a lot of people know that brand. And I just said like only online businesses, but like that’s I think Stacy’s pita chips could be an interesting one. I know for a fact she was standing in line and her chip got, like she was standing in line so long that the chip got like old. And then that, I don’t remember the exact story, but that was part of it. And like, it was an interesting origin story. So maybe it could be any relatively well-known brand. And that’s obviously subjective, but [Michael Houck]: You know? Yeah, I think it’s like we need to think about this max in terms of like the different parts of our audience, right? So we’re saying that like, yeah, there’s our core audience. Those are the people who are in the startup world who YouTube is going to say, they’re going to serve that to them first, right? And it needs to be interesting to those people. And if it’s interesting to those people, then it gets pushed to sort of the outer people who it can go really big if it’s a genuinely just fascinating story like this van thing. Or it just dies and just stays in the core, right? But it has to be interesting to the core first. And I think that’s why I push back on the Airbnb thing, because the Airbnb thing would be interesting to the people outside the core, but it would never get there. [Max Palmer]: Yeah, if that’s how the algorithm works. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: I mean, that’s how that’s how Twitter threads work. That’s how I assume that maybe I’m wrong, but that’s how I assume that work too. It serves it first to the people who it thinks are most likely to give it clarity on whether it’s a good post for that niche or not. Yeah. Um, but okay. Yeah. Let’s do some, let’s pull some good stories out. I don’t think it’s a bad thing if we do these about not specifically venture backed companies, at least to start. Um, if they are about venture backed companies, I think it’s a plus, obviously, but I don’t think it has to be. And let’s just experiment and see what happens. Okay. So today I’m going to, what am I recording? I’m recording the character AI thing is a crazy story. So we’re going to do that one. Something about how Claude lets you like, let the, like take over your computer now. I’m gonna do a script for one of these AI generated ones of like Mr. Beast talking to Elon about something. And then I’m also either gonna do like a here’s a startup idea, like an opportunity from the newsletter, or I’m gonna do a reaction to a clip. But I think we need to find out what that clip would be. So I might not be able to do that one today. But yeah, I’m gonna record this today and we’ll get them to the clip wing team. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Cool. [Michael Houck]: Awesome. And then other ones I wrote down for next week are like a compilation of what like luminaries thought leaders think about a topic. So the hook would be like me saying, you know, here’s what, uh, five billionaires think, uh, how you should build your business or something like that. And then we would cut two different clips from like the startup archive of people talking about that topic. Um, So we’ll see how that goes. [Ben Ornstein]: But that one’s interesting. Harry Stebbings does that for 20 VC. He says like, we’re going to talk about why something about AI. And then he pulls clips from previous episodes that he just did and creates an episode out of that. It’s interesting. Oh, that’s cool. [Michael Houck]: Can you send me one of those? Cool. Okay. Well, um, yeah, sounds good. Let’s, uh, Let’s move forward with this. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Sounds good. [Michael Houck]: Cool. See you guys.