- Duration: 23 min
- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01JBHK02QZ9YZ7B4DGPYV4HSGS (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JBHK02QZ9YZ7B4DGPYV4HSGS)
Transcript
[Michael Houck]: So I guess where should we start we start with bamboo? [Max Palmer]: Yeah, they haven’t responded so yesterday I said Yeah, I sent you what they sent us and then I Said yeah, please add them to thread. We’re happy to jump on a call as well We’re a little confused with Greenleaf consulting is also Hawks name is no longer part of the newsletter We’ve rebranded to founding journey and beehive is just software we use to deliver [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: the newsletter. [Max Palmer]: I’ve already explained that to them and it’s just getting lost in the jumble of bureaucracy that is big companies. Yeah, for sure. [Michael Houck]: Um, okay. Well look, if it doesn’t close today, obviously, uh, you know, not great, but it’s okay because it’ll, you know, close. The next few days. So no worries. [Max Palmer]: Yeah, it’s a bummer though. I really wanted that to close. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. No, me too. Okay. What else do we have in the pipeline right now? Awesome. [Max Palmer]: I sent a package of deals to I’m waiting on a response. She said is talked with her last week. She said it’s gonna take a week. I followed up with I’m on Tuesday or Wednesday. Um, and haven’t heard back yet. So that’s another one that seemed promising. Um, and then there was one other that I’m forgetting who it was, but it’s, it’s somewhere in my email. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. [Michael Houck]: So, I mean, it sounds like with those, like we count bamboo, I guess for November and hopefully Osama closes. That puts us in a good place for the month right there. [Max Palmer]: Obviously we’re kind of behind because of this month, but yeah. Yeah. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: Hopefully we can make it up in November. Yeah. If we can, you know, considering the 20 K from bamboo, if we can have like a, you know, somewhere close to a 40 K a month, that would be insane. Actually it’d be huge. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: It’d be great. Um, as far as solving the growth problem goes, or the, I guess, engagement problem more than anything else. I was thinking we try doing the cold email again with these lists from either Apollo or from, what’s it called, List Kit, and just using that and tripping people in. Basically. Um, yeah, I mean, if you look at, um, if you look in beehive at the segment of folks who joined from, what did I have the segment list of as, uh, I forget what I named it. Oh, I named it Ember cause this was from Matt’s thing. Um, if you look at the segment, They don’t have great conversion to premium, at least historically. Um, but their click rate, even, you know, we haven’t added anyone to this segment in five, six months, even that their click rate is, uh, close to 3%, which is much higher than, um, other cohorts. So an open rate is still 47%. Again, adding no one new to this, uh, since may. So. I don’t know. Seems like an engaged group of folks. [Max Palmer]: Yeah. I’m trying to find it. I’m in segments. Oh, there’s a lot of segments here. Okay. Oh, okay. So there’s 5,000. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, we added 5,000 folks from them. [Max Palmer]: That’s more than I thought. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: Unsubscribe rate is high, as you would expect, right, from this channel. But the engagement is actually pretty good. [Max Palmer]: Yeah, 46% open rate, 54% unsubscribe rate. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: So I think there’s a path to doing that pretty easily for our newsletter. And we sort of avoided ever asking other people because of the whole like, I don’t know, back and forth with Matt at the time. We’re asking other people if they wanted us to do this for them to if we get it working for us and do it basically case study on our own newsletter. Yeah, especially with where our metrics are right now for like, Oh, we increased our metrics by this amount. Right. Could be a Like a high ticket sale to some folks. [Max Palmer]: So we would do that with. What’s it called and [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I mean, we might as well start start with grabbing the people from Apollo because we’re already paying for that, right? Yeah. [Max Palmer]: Yeah, I use Apollo to help me find contacts. For outreach and so does Dreams. [Michael Houck]: How many do you guys pull per month, like roughly? [Max Palmer]: Not a lot, like a few dozens. [Michael Houck]: Well, I mean, let’s say we want to increase the size of our list by 20%, right? That’s like 12,000. If we want to add 12,000 subscribers, then we would need to get somewhere between 300 and 400 per day. And that falls well within the limit that we have on Apollo, I think. So yeah, maybe I’ll ask Reena to just set that up. [Max Palmer]: What’s the limit on Apollo? [Michael Houck]: I think for our tier, it’s 24,000. A year. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. [Max Palmer]: So it’s not judged by month. It’s a year. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. You pay by month, but your limits by year. [Max Palmer]: Got it. Yeah. I mean, these Facebook ads aren’t working yet. I know we just started, but yeah, we gotta, we gotta give it some time. [Michael Houck]: I saw the CPA came down a bit yesterday. Um, Not much. [Max Palmer]: Yeah, it’s terrible. Like what? [Michael Houck]: I think it’s the election, honestly. I was worried is these creatives I was creating. [Max Palmer]: No, I mean, the creatives are solid. [Michael Houck]: There’s nothing wrong with their OK. Yeah. Yeah. Like I think it’s a combination of new ad set and just all advertising costs being inflated right now. Like this is like the worst week of the entire year. To be testing this. So, I mean, what do you think? Should we can it for now and start again in like a week or two? [Max Palmer]: I mean, there’s gonna be no real difference, right? In immediate growth, but it will give this more time to learn. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: It’s just like, if we don’t hit 50 conversions within a seven period, it never escapes the learning phase and just keeps trying new people instead of targeting like one specific type of person. [Max Palmer]: I mean, we’re almost at 40. [Michael Houck]: Um, so if I look from the 25th till today, we’re at 33, which we’d need to hit 17 more by the end of the day today, or else it just is going to push it forward by, by a day. [Michael Houck]: So yeah, I think we’re, I think we might be screwed for now. Um, and we just picked the wrong time to do this. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. [Max Palmer]: So basically not next week, but the week after we’ll pick it up. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: Let’s pause it for two weeks and I’ll, I’ll have Rena do some of the, um, the Apollo or email stuff in the, in the short term. [Max Palmer]: Okay. So I’m going to hit pause at the ad set level. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. Or the campaign level, whatever, it doesn’t matter. [Max Palmer]: Okay, I just paused the ad set level. I’ve got this guy making those two ads that I sent you with the script. And then this girl is also working on two others. And we still have two on top of that, that we already paid for with her. So we’ll have a good amount of creatives to test once we’re ready to fully go. I haven’t started creating creatives for viral examples, Let’s definitely wait for that, obviously. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. Yeah. [Max Palmer]: Fire examples. Yeah. I’m wondering what creatives should look like for that, but I’ll figure it out. Probably just similar. Yeah, probably similar. [Michael Houck]: Blake just sent over the first two issues of like the other weekly issue we want to do for it. So we’ll start publishing those probably next week. And maybe we can do the email thing for this too. We just got to think about who the right persona is for the newsletter. [Max Palmer]: Marketers, right? [Michael Houck]: I guess it’s marketers, like social media marketers specifically. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: Do you think we should start including, um, videos in the curated set every week? [Max Palmer]: I have included a few you, you, you mentioned earlier this week or last week, right? About photos. I meant, I meant like, um, sorry, I should have been more specific. [Michael Houck]: I meant like, um, the ones we’ve, we’ve included in the ones I comment on was like, a video or photo element on Twitter or LinkedIn. I’m talking about should we have like a section in the newsletter for like TikTok, Instagram reels, things like that. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Interesting. [Michael Houck]: We could keep it to three, so it’s not like extra work or something, but we could have like one TikTok, one LinkedIn, one Twitter or something like that. [Max Palmer]: I kind of think no. Just because if the end goal of this newsletter is to funnel into Megaphone, then that’s not helpful. Because Megaphone is only on Twitter and LinkedIn right now. [Michael Houck]: Well, for now, but we’re going to be like the literal next thing that Rizwan will be working on after this two week period that we’re in right now is expanding to either Instagram, either threads, TikTok or Instagram. [Max Palmer]: Yeah. Uh, I don’t know. How long is that going to take for us to launch TikTok and Instagram reels on megaphone? [Michael Houck]: Honestly, pretty quick. We have to scrape. We have to create like a, a process to scrape the engagements. [Max Palmer]: Um, but we already have defined creators. Well, no, we have talk finder. [Michael Houck]: We have all sorts of like these databases of creators that we can just reach out to with the offer of, hey, let us pay you to leave some comments on stuff, you know? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: So, realistically, I would say, my goal is to get one new platform launched by the end of the year, and then another one or two launched in Yeah. [Max Palmer]: Part of me is like, I want to get this to really like work well for Twitter and LinkedIn first, but I don’t know if that’s the right strategy. You mean like the newsletter or the product, the product? [Michael Houck]: Oh, I mean the product does work well. It’s just, um, we, I thought it had a lot of churn. We have had a lot of churn, but that’s mostly also been because we haven’t been growing, because we haven’t invested in growth, because we haven’t dealt with so much shit with the engineers. But we’re done with that now, and we’re back to building new features. And once we launch our Groups feature, which is our sole focus for this month, this month being November, once we launch our Groups feature, it makes sense to start investing in growth because the offer is a no-brainer because we’re saying hey there’s a free tier to do this with your friends rather than you have to pay so yeah that’s the uh the bottleneck has been that we’ve been blocked on the engineering side to really have it make sense to invest in a lot of growth stuff that’s changing. So if you want to keep the newsletter focused on LinkedIn and Twitter for now, that’s fine. I don’t feel strongly about it. It’s just an idea. [Max Palmer]: Yeah, let’s keep it for now. But once we have that launched, I agree. We can almost start an entirely different one just focusing on short form video. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah, we could. [Michael Houck]: Okay, maybe let’s cross that bridge when we get there then, I guess. Yeah, I agree. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Cool. Let’s see. [Michael Houck]: What else is on your mind? [Max Palmer]: So I’m going to go, I started this investor list. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: There’s a lot in there. [Max Palmer]: It’s gonna take a while. It already took me a minute just to get through 20 of them. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, there’s there’s just so many. Don’t be afraid to like write off once quickly if they have like one disqualifying factor. You know? Yeah. If you can tell if it’s just like, yeah. [Max Palmer]: No, I know. That’s what I’ve done. So I’m making a list and then I’ll share it. But yeah, there’s 117 in there. Oh, wow. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, there’s even more. So yeah, I’m gonna work on this today. [Max Palmer]: Okay. [Michael Houck]: I would imagine that there’s probably a few good ones in there. Probably a lot of bad ones. Yeah, that’s what it is for sure. [Max Palmer]: Okay, other than that. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay, cool. [Max Palmer]: I just got a response from this company vellum for an ad. Yeah, who has three webinar series, that is three sessions, November 7th, 13th, and 20th. What are some available placements before any of these dates? Great. Ship AI systems you can trust. Cool, that’s another hot prospect. Sweet. [Michael Houck]: Um, cool. Sounds good. I will. Um, I don’t think I have anything else right now, but let’s see about this email stuff, um, for the newsletter. Let’s just, uh, the growth problem or the engagement problem has become so much that we just need to sort of blast it and see what happens. [Max Palmer]: Yeah, I agree. It’s killing all our renewals and whatnot. So yeah, we’ve got to tackle it. [Michael Houck]: Cool. That’ll be a focus. I’ll let you know if there’s anything operationally we need for that. But I think I could just delegate it to Rina and have her manage it. So I’ll let you know. All right. [Max Palmer]: Sounds good. See you. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: See you. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: you