- Duration: 28 min
- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01JC6EWT7VPRH4HXBV54EWQ74P (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JC6EWT7VPRH4HXBV54EWQ74P)
Transcript
[Maggie Goldstone]: Hey, Maggie. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: How are you? I’m good. [Michael Houck]: Oh, wow. There’s some crazy echo going on. I can. Oh, no. Now it’s gone. I could hear myself very loudly. [Maggie Goldstone]: For a sec. Happy Friday. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: Happy Friday. Are you in? Where are you based? I know Nathan’s in in Boise, right? [Maggie Goldstone]: Yeah, I am in New York. Are you and Nathan pals? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, yeah. When when he came to New York a bit ago, we met up for coffee where we’re friends. [Maggie Goldstone]: Nice. Yeah, Nathan’s Boise. We are actually a remote company. But yeah, I’m based in New York. So in Brooklyn, how about you? Where are you specifically? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Williamsburg. [Michael Houck]: Okay, nice. [Maggie Goldstone]: I’m in Fort Greene. [Michael Houck]: Oh, nice. Yeah, no, I like it here. I was in SF for a while, I was in LA for a while, but yeah, back to the East Coast where I was originally from [Maggie Goldstone]: Nice, nice. I know, I haven’t left the East Coast, so this is where I’ve been. But yeah, well, so nice to meet. I’m a big fan of the newsletter. Oh, thank you. I’m sure you and Nathan have talked newsletters, your newsletter historically. You run on Beehive, right? I do run on Beehive. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I do. I have the bad choice between picking between the products from two friends. Okay, cool. How has that been for you? [Maggie Goldstone]: Because you’re growing at a decent rate, right? [Michael Houck]: Well, we’ve prioritized our SaaS product the past few months, we actually turned some of our growth off, but we’re back to it now, adding hundred subscribers a day right now. So yeah, it’s good. B has been solid, especially as they’ve added sort of more, more features. [Maggie Goldstone]: Originally, the product was a little, a little bare. Yeah. Okay, cool. Um, well, you know, whenever you’re thinking about something else, we’re, we’re here. Um, but yeah, so I, I think I follow you on LinkedIn or maybe I read it. No, you know what? It was probably in your newsletter. Um, But I saw that you’re starting a ghostwriting company and it’s interesting because a lot of newsletter operators I’m now seeing are doing similar things. And I’m kind of in the space at the moment where I’m looking for a short list of viable partners to kind of put forth in front of some of our celebrity prospects and potential partners who are coming on board to Kit and then even you know, like the bigger influencer, digital content creator who has a team, they want to invest in, you know, a ghost writer, ghost writing services in order to run a new newsletter, just because time is not, you know, something that that creator or celeb has slash they might have the funds to kind of outsource. So with that being said, we’d love to just learn a bit more about what you’ve built, like how long it’s been around, maybe cost, how things work, just kind of high level. Yeah, makes total sense. And I love that you guys are doing that also. [Michael Houck]: I think that’s a demographic that we want to get them off social media, want to get them into newsletters. And so obviously, you know, maybe they don’t have time to write the newsletter themselves, makes a lot of sense. So we’ve been around for a little over six months now. Started it in the beginning of April. The agency is two people to me and Blake Emall, who has like even more followers than I do on social media. And we manage a team of writers who we’ve worked with for a long time in various capacities. They’re their top folks. They’ve worked for some other agencies in the past. They’ve written for, you know, very, very high profile people, both as our clients and for on their own before this. Can’t say exact names, of course, but yeah, very, very high quality team. Our process is very lightweight. So basically, we work with founders and executives and well-known people a lot. And so they don’t have a lot of time to get in the weeds and hop on a bunch of calls and things like that. So our process can, if the client wants it, and we actually for it this way can happen entirely through Slack. We never require any calls whatsoever. We use voice notes where we sort of get the emotion and intonation. And we do X, we do LinkedIn, we do newsletters. We can package those all up together as well if folks are interested in that. We’ve grown newsletters as well. So we don’t just do the writing. If people also want, they can layer on a growth package. Most people try to grow newsletters obviously through content marketing or through paid ads like social media, like Facebook and Instagram ads, we actually have built up email as a channel. So we’ve created basically one of the first large scale interest based social graphs built on top of email addresses. And so what that lets us do is do interest based targeting. So just like you would be able to say with a Facebook ad, you know, I want to target people who like Elon Musk or Y Combinator or something like that, or F1, right? We can go in and do the same thing with email addresses. So it’s not just like you scrape a bunch of people’s job titles. It’s like you actually know what they like, So we have that kind of package to add on to just the content creation, which obviously helps people grow. And we qualify all those emails. Everything’s above board. We’ll send them cold email campaigns with lead magnets to make sure they opt in before they get added to the newsletter or anything like that. But that’s another thing we offer. And then the third piece of what we offer is a creator network. So we have a creative network called Megaphone. If the creator or whoever is creating the newsletter wants to amplify their content on social media, we can also provide hundreds of creators in various niches with tens of millions of followers who can go engage with their content in a timely manner within an hour of posting it to get more amplification on it. Or drive more subscribers to their landing page or something like that. [Maggie Goldstone]: OK. I’m just taking notes. Cool. That’s a lot. So a couple questions. First two, tell me a little bit more about the interest data you’re able to gather from email addresses. I’m just curious how that works. And then secondly, the creator network. Is there a website that reflects this network? Okay, I’m just curious what that actually is. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, Sierra, let me just send you a couple of links really quickly. [Maggie Goldstone]: So we don’t- And if you open deck too, Michael, just after this that I can circulate on everything that you mentioned, that would also just be helpful. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, so we don’t have a website ghostwriting agency yet. What we do have is this notion page. And then we have this site for the creator network, we’re working on combining all these things into one like site, I can create some sort of notion doc that has everything in there for you. Actually, most of it’s in the notion doc that I sent over already. But if there’s anything that’s not, I’ll make sure to add it. But yeah, so the the email graph works basically, because is we have very, very advanced like AI powered data scraping people on our team. And they use various data sources online. And there’s some secret sauce about how we sort of mix it all together and make sure that we’re tagging people correctly. But we can have someone’s email and basically know exactly what sort of their interests are. And so that just lets us say, if you want to start Like, I don’t know, an F1, we’ll use the F1 example. If you want to start an F1 newsletter from scratch, or if you have one already and you want to grow it faster, we can provide subscribers who we know are interested in F1 and have then been sort of vetted to be active email addresses and are engaging with our cold emails that we’re sending them initially before we import them. [Maggie Goldstone]: So there’s no impact to like deliverability on your main domain. Interesting. So you’re testing, you’re just going out into the world and finding email addresses that are relevant to a given niche. It doesn’t have to do with like an influencer importing their own audience and then looking into their own audience. [Michael Houck]: No, I mean, we can do that if the influencers like, hey, I want to know what all of my subscribers, like if all of my subscribers are interested in a newsletter about this topic, we can do we can answer that question for them and then we can import the ones that are after sort of putting them through this vetting process so that we’re not impacting the newsletter’s deliverability or anything like that. [Maggie Goldstone]: Got it. Interesting. And then you can do the other route that you were saying. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yes. [Michael Houck]: And then on the creator network side, basically how it works is that the user shares the URL of a social media post on X or LinkedIn. And we’re actually expanding this to other platforms in the next two months or so. But for X and LinkedIn, you share a post and then we’ve already tagged your account based on what niches we think your account is in and what you tell us that’s in, and then you set a budget for how much you wanna spend to amplify it. And then we’ll actually push that out to a bunch of relevant creators who are online right now to go amplify it. [Maggie Goldstone]: Okay, got it. And the group of relevant creators, like, are they opting into like a tech platform? Yeah, these people have opted in. [Michael Houck]: It started out just with creators that I know. And then they’ve referred a bunch of creators since then. So we don’t just have like, you know, random people on there. These are like real vetted creators with reputations. And, and they’ve opted in and we’re sending them messages and they’re like, Oh, this is interesting content in my niche. You know, I’m gonna I would engage with it anyway, but I might as well because I’m being sent I’m being sent it by the platform. [Maggie Goldstone]: Got it. And are they getting paid? Like what’s the incentive? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, yeah. So they set rates and we compensate them and things like that. [Maggie Goldstone]: Okay, got it. Okay, cool. Um, okay, very cool. Well, and then I think you might’ve mentioned this in the beginning, but how big is your writer team and what do they, it sounds like the majority of your clients for ghostwriting are like entrepreneurs, like business people. [Michael Houck]: I mean, that’s mostly just because my audience, like my newsletter is written for founders, right? That’s where we started our customers, but we’ve got some folks in the finance space. We’ve got creators who are trying to grow their brand. We’ve got execs in various niches. Even have someone who’s who’s in like the cannabis space. So wide variety of folks. Our team. So yeah, so as I mentioned, it’s it’s myself and Blake email, both, you know, know how to build our own audiences on social media, and also our own newsletters. I manage sort of the sales growth and operations, the business and like account management with our clients, Blake heads down in the weeds with the writers every single day, no content is going to get sent to send to a client with out being reviewed by Blake and probably by me, too. So there’s at least one, if not two layers of editing that gets done before we send the drafts to the clients. Our team underneath us, we have a team of seven active writers, and then we also have a pool of about 10 to 15. I don’t know the exact number of writers who’ve opted into working with us, and we know they have bandwidth and who have various, various expertise. And we also have access to a community of writers beyond that who we can and have pulled people from in the past. [Maggie Goldstone]: Okay, interesting. And are they like the team? So the seven? Are they full time? Or are they just kind of freelance, but essentially? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I mean, we don’t have any w two employees, if that’s what you mean. But you know, they’re, they’re busy, let’s say. [Maggie Goldstone]: Okay, very cool. And I imagine, I mean, maybe not. But if we were to bring you how How comfortable, in truth, full transparency, would you feel with someone in fashion? Do you have writers who are familiar with that vertical? I’m curious what verticals your writer base is suited to because what I’m trying to do, again, is we have a couple other folks similar to you who are newsletter operators, they’ve built these smaller teams who do this, but I’m very much looking for folks that I can say, okay, if you’re in this vertical, like this is the team for you. Um, and I’d love to know, like, where do you strike highest? Like, where are you best? Because then we can optimize and obviously like the first one that we send your way, um, should this become something that folks are looking for? Like, obviously we want that to be a hit. [Michael Houck]: So yeah, I would say so Blake in my experience, let me talk about my experience. So my experience is obviously in startups and as a creator, right? I’ve built venture backed businesses, I built million dollar bootstrap businesses, I built my own audience up. That’s our bread and butter. If you send us a founder, we’re ready to go. If you send us a big creator who wants to expand to newsletter, we’re ready to go. Those are those are bread and butter for sure. Any sort of exec like business type person, CEO, COO, director, of marketing, whatever, we can handle that too. That’s pretty easy. And then as far as like specific niches beyond that, it’s easier to sort of answer, you know, what we wouldn’t be able to handle because of this expanded writer pool that we have access to. We have significant ability to scale sort of beyond where we’re at right now. And that’s what we’re looking to do over the next, you know, six, 12 months. [Maggie Goldstone]: So your goal as a team and company is to just kind of be vertical agnostic. You’re not looking to like, oh, specific verticals? [Michael Houck]: I mean I would love to own the sort of like entrepreneur, founder, and big creator verticals. Those two I think are again most aligned to my own experience and therefore sort of what I help our writers to do and Blake too. As far as our writers experience, as I said we have a variety of clients today. So we have folks who can focus on finance, we have folks who focus on marketing, folks who can focus on a variety of things. I can send over like maybe a full list, if that would be helpful. Yeah, that’d be great. [Maggie Goldstone]: Yeah, that would be great. And then, you know, what I would love to do is just have an idea of like, who, yeah, what kind of niche makes sense to throw your way, which I think I have a sense. But yeah, based off and if you have any case studies, or just like lists of folks that you have done this for, that’d be really helpful. But, um, and in addition to it, like pricing. Oh yeah. [Michael Houck]: So I can’t share specific clients. You know, we have anonymity with, with all of our clients. That’s something that we promise. Um, I can share that, uh, you know, we’ve taken a newsletter client from literally they had zero subscribers. They had no idea what they were doing. And we built a newsletter for them in 12 weeks that got to 19,000 subscribers and had over five percent open rate and a nine percent click rate. [Maggie Goldstone]: So we know what we’re doing. Yeah, that’s great. Yeah. Anything along those lines just would be fabulous. And yeah. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Maggie Goldstone]: So I just want to answer your other question about pricing. [Michael Houck]: So we’re pretty competitively priced, I believe, especially given the expertise on the team. So we have basically a light package and a full package. So if you wanted to do like a weekly newsletter, that would be $34.95 per month with no growth attached to it. If you want to layer on growth, it would depend on how many subscribers you're looking to add and also how hard that niche is for us to manage. So it would vary a little bit, but it's more affordable than paid ads. So it'd be like probably between $0.75 and $1.50 per subscriber to add on to that, depending on scale and niche, as I said. Um, if you wanted to do like a, a, a bi-weekly newsletter, we also can support that. Some people like that, that would be, um, that would be 1995 a month. And then, um, if you're looking to do something more frequently than weekly, we can, uh, it would depend on the length of the newsletter itself at that point, you know, some like news newsletters are pretty short, um, as I'm sure, you know, so it depends on the length of what the exact pricing would be. [Maggie Goldstone]: Okay. Great. Um, and so for, weekly, it's $34.95. Yeah, that’s that’s what we charge. [Michael Houck]: I mean, we could talk about actually throw a question to you. Like, what are you seeing from these folks that you’re talking with? Is that competitive? Is that in line? [Maggie Goldstone]: Is that way out of the water? Like, how does that strike you? Yeah. Um, I mean, it’s interesting, because a lot of the packages that we started out looking for were more of like, kickstart packages where you’re building kind of like the content strategy, the brand guidelines, all of that. And then, like the first four newsletters. And all of that was lower than your monthly for a weekly newsletter. [Michael Houck]: To be fair, we all We also handle strategy and setting up automations and segments and all that type of stuff too. [Maggie Goldstone]: It’s a total done for you package. Oh, so you go in and you actually manage the send and everything. We do everything. Yep. Wow. Okay. Okay. That is a whole other thing. Okay. So ESP sending automation. Okay. So you’re literally like, even for the weekly newsletter package, you are sending, account, you’re doing everything. [Michael Houck]: Even for daily, all they need to do is set up, pick their subscription plan, and we’re good to go from there. [Maggie Goldstone]: Wow. Okay. And so are, do you have, in terms of like how this works on your team, I’m actually just curious, do you have your writers, like your freelance writers as the same, like the same person is sending? No. So we have, uh, we have ops folks. [Michael Houck]: We have one, uh, one U S based ops person who sort of manages a team of VAs who are based in in the Philippines. And so the US person is basically making sure the processes are done right, and the VAs are sort of executing that. [Maggie Goldstone]: Interesting. Well, that’s huge. Great. Well, I think that changes things a lot. So I’d say it’s pretty much in line. And honestly, we’re looking to get updated pricing anyway, just because the initial asks were kind of like kickstarting package versus Evergreen. But this is really helpful. And I imagine that various teams, because essentially, Michael, we’re in touch with a ton of different agencies, like folks who represent talent. And those are really the folks that are like, hey, who are the ghostwriters that I can put forth this manager or you know like business manager of X talent so I could see various folks like negotiating with you but I want to give them kind of the basics on like here’s megaphone they charge around this these are their capabilities we can get you in touch with kind of thing or feel free to reach out. Like that’s kind of how this will look. And by the way, just to let you know as well, only a couple agencies have asked for this and like, they’re just starting to think about email, but I think it’s still good just to know the landscape. So that’s why I’m happy to have the call. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, it makes total sense. I think on our side, you know, we obviously see this as a potential opportunity for us. I love also what you guys are doing, what Nathan and you guys have built. So I think there’s definitely an opportunity for us to, you know, assuming that this isn’t just like, you send us one client, and then that’s it. If this is, oh, okay, we’re going to build a system here, we’re going to build a partnership in some way, we can figure out a way to sort of maybe even give a like a kit discount to these clients who are coming in from you guys, maybe down to, I don’t know, $29.95 for the full instead of the $34.95. But I don’t know, we need to see sort of how that would that would evolve. But that’s definitely something I could see happening. [Maggie Goldstone]: Okay, that’s great. Um, yeah, because I think what would happen is, depending on the agent, and if they’re interested in you, then you’re in touch with an agent that represents a ton of talent. 100%. And our goal is to onboard that talent. And if the agent is keen to just like, pay for the services and not have the talent bother with it, then there’s something there. This is all so nascent, and I think a lot of this will evolve, and I’m sure you’re getting more asks for this just as the space is getting bigger. But again, very good to know. And just make the connection. So I appreciate it. And any additional materials would be great. And yeah, I think truly the next step if there is a next step is really, I just have a couple conversations with agents down the line and I’ll be able to kind of give them my short list and ideally something kind of comes your way. Yeah. We’d love that. [Michael Houck]: We’ll keep an eye out for it. Um, I’ll also, I’ll give you a heads up when we, right now, as I said, our website is just focused on the creator network, but we’re expanding the website to include the ghostwriting agency and everything else. When that’s live, also ping you. [Maggie Goldstone]: Yeah, that’d be great. [Michael Houck]: For now, the Notion doc should have everything. [Maggie Goldstone]: Amazing. Okay, fabulous. Well, thank you for that. And also, while I have you, just totally different note, just given that you are in New York, we are starting to think about just various events for newsletter operators, like that kind of thing. And I’m sure you attend a couple here and there, but curious if there are event styles or meaning like, you know, the mastermind approach or the intimate dinner or networking dinner. I’m kind of pulling a couple of folks like in our network and outside of it, just around like, and knowing their subscriber count and their niche and who they are, like what’s of greatest value to them in terms of that connectivity. Yeah, curious if you have any thoughts on that front. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I mean, I love events. I would definitely love to join some with people also building and just share ideas and things like that. I think for me, the two biggest types would be just sort of the intimate dinners, sort of as you mentioned. I run some of those for founders, and sort of doing more newsletter-focused ones would be fun. They’re always a good time. And then also I think like, you know, just being part of the scene, broader networking events, you can just go meet folks and say, hey, and things like that. Those are fun too. [Maggie Goldstone]: Masterminds, I probably don’t have bandwidth for masterminds. So the other two would be my picks. Cool. Great. Great to know. And last question for you, actually, are you just knowing your affiliation with Beehive? Is this something that you have been doing with other ESPs? Is the ghostwriting piece something that you’ve kind of hooked up with Beehive on? I’m curious how that’s been running for you thus far, or is it truly just individuals and how you’re thinking about that? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, so far, I’d say 90% plus has come just from my founder network and things like that. We are talking about doing this too, but we haven’t like gotten any clients from them or anything like that. So it’s brand new. It’s sort of nascent on both fronts. [Maggie Goldstone]: Okay, cool. Well, super helpful. And awesome that you built this. I mean, this is really robust. So I’m excited to dig in a bit more. And as you build, if you have case studies, like new anything you can share, like, stay on my radar, send me emails like it won’t hurt. I’ll tell you that. But Thank you so much for the time and great to meet you. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, Maggie. Thanks for your message. Very serendipitous. [Maggie Goldstone]: I felt like cool. [Michael Houck]: All right. We’ll chat more soon. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Amazing. [Maggie Goldstone]: Have a great weekend. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: You too. [Michael Houck]: Talk to you. [Maggie Goldstone]: Bye.