- Duration: 25 min
- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01JC69JNGPKFH9D5E18PPGM908 (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JC69JNGPKFH9D5E18PPGM908)
Transcript
[Robert Daniel]: Hey, Robert, how you doing? Pretty good. [Michael Houck]: How’s it going, Michael? Good. [Robert Daniel]: Good to chat, man. [Michael Houck]: Thanks for having some time. Yeah, thanks for sorry. [Robert Daniel]: I’m running a little tardy. I was just trying to get off another call. [Michael Houck]: So no, you’re all good, man. [Robert Daniel]: I know how it goes. No worries. Somebody just lost their job. So I was trying to figure out how to make those sinew connections there for their next opportunity. [Michael Houck]: Dang, that sucks. Sorry to hear that for them. [Robert Daniel]: It could be a blessing rather than a curse. You never know. [Michael Houck]: It was for me. I got laid off from Airbnb and ended up starting my first venture-backed company. So things happen. [Robert Daniel]: The universe puts things in front of us for a reason. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, no doubt. Well, cool, man. Excited to hear more about where you guys are at and how we can potentially help with content, talk more about what we do, process. But yeah, first I just want to learn more about how you think we can help. [Robert Daniel]: Yeah, I’ll tell you. So let me tell you kind of the two worlds I live in. So my day job, I have a day job and a side hustle, obviously, which seems to be the way to go. My day job, I’m a coach, mentor and advisor in an incubator here in Atlanta. So constantly working with founders, trying to help them launch, grow and scale. Focus particularly on fintech. So that keeps me super busy and then I come home and I work on stand-ups and startups. Stand-ups and startups I launched about a year ago. We produce comedy events for the startup community. So they’re like two hour long events, 30 to 40 minutes of networking and then four to five comedians and then an improv kicker at the end called Pitches Get Stitches where I pretty much bring bring people up on stage and then they pitch random business ideas. [Michael Houck]: Oh, I thought, I thought it might be you up there doing the, doing the standup. [Robert Daniel]: Oh no, I bring in other comedians. That’s the other thing. I don’t have time to do, to write the, I’ve done comedy. I used to do some comedy up in New York and that’s where this came about. Cause it brings, I’m more of improv funny and I love being up there and doing stuff. But at the same time, it’s how do I help other standup comedy or comedians who are kind of startups in their own right rise up. And so there’s lots of elements to do that. And being a host is enough for me right now. And eventually I’ll outsource the hosting because it’s taking me enough as a solopreneur to kind of run the business as a side hustle. And that’s kind of why I’m reaching out now because I’m getting to the point where I’m like, I’ve got an intern doing my social media. But I need to get more strategic with that because she sees one thing she’s in college and I need somebody with more experience. I’ve been trying to start a newsletter for the past couple months, but that’s just, I’m just limping along because I’m trying to go out and find other areas as I’m expanding outside of Atlanta. So we’re doing four shows in Atlanta, expanded into Charlotte, Birmingham and Nashville, trying to expand into some other cities and get a cadence where we’re doing four shows a year there. So that means just establishing more relationships and that’s the part the business I’m focusing on. I’ve got an executive assistant that I’m trying to leverage as well. I probably need a different one because I need someone who’s more attentive to details and I thought about them kind of helping from a writing standpoint. But quite frankly, I’m trying to run so I love your newsletters and you seem to have this down to a pattern. I know you’ve used Beehive and I’m like, how do we take and run quickly with something like that where I could plug in and play and then be like, let’s get the newsletter going. Let’s get a marketing because to me, I need a newsletter that feeds into other markets that they start signing up, which builds an email list where I can be like, we’re in your town and we’re throwing an event here. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Got it. [Robert Daniel]: So that’s, that’s where I am. And then the whole point too, is we’re building up this educational programming, how we use improv and comedy to help you be a better public speaker, to be able to pitch better, that’s coming next. So that’s part of the newsletter. The problem with that is I don’t want to cannibalize my newsletter so people are getting that with the education, the events because right now I’m spitting out stuff from HubSpot like if you’re in Atlanta, you get the Atlanta details. If you’re in Charlotte, you get the Charlotte details. So I’ve got a list of 4,000 names right now across different areas which is a good start but how why start producing content that people want to see from the newsletter and don’t unsubscribe and cause me not to be able to service them at the at the show level? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, sure. If you’re if you’re sending reminders about shows in Atlanta to people in Nashville, they’re going to be like, unsubscribe. Excuse me, got some phlegm. So that’s really helpful context. I can tell you a little bit sort of about what we do. Basically we do three things. One is obviously we can create newsletter content for you. The second is we can grow a newsletter, build your email list up. We’ve built some pretty advanced, basically we built one of the first social graphs built on top of email addresses. And so we can do interest-based targeting for emails rather than like, you know, normally you’d have to go to Facebook and do like Facebook ads, do interest-based targeting. We can actually do that. And then the third thing is if we want to sort of put the megaphone out there, blow it up on social, we can create social media content for you as well. It sounds like the newsletter is top priority. Am I hearing that right? Correct. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. [Michael Houck]: And I think that’s smart because that’s going to be where you build trust, where you actually can mobilize people the most, I think, to go out and come to the events and sort of go deeper into the ecosystem. So I think that’s smart. As far as the content itself, what frequency do you envision the newsletter being? Is it a weekly thing? Is it a bi-weekly thing? Is it just a monthly newsletter? What’s your perfect world? [Robert Daniel]: So at first I was thinking just monthly, like a monthly newsletter to scale in. I wouldn’t mind getting to the point where I’m doing every other week. I have the idea of wanting to do do a podcast as well, and that would be integrated into this. But again, podcast is secondary to newsletter, then the podcast would be every other week, speaking with founders. So I don’t mind starting monthly and then moving to every other week, bi-weekly. Okay. [Michael Houck]: And then would you also want our help in sort of growing the list, doing outreach to these people who, again, we can target based on interests and things like that? Or is it more so that you just be looking for us to come in initially, maybe and help with the content, and then layer on the growth stuff later? [Robert Daniel]: Some people like it one way or the other? That’s a good question. I’ve been trying to grow smartly. Because I don’t want to get to the point where I’m like, hey, we’re doing this awesome thing. And other people like that is cool. Let me recreate that because there’s a very low bar to it. I’m trying to expand into other cities. However, I do need to build up, that’s one of the key things is building up lists of people in other areas and then leveraging those lists of where do I move next? Okay, I’ve gotten a thousand subscribers in Palo Alto. Okay, maybe I need to hit the Valley, you know, all that stuff. [Michael Houck]: Right. Okay. I mean, that makes sense. I think that’s a smart approach. You wanna be able to expand, but not sort of at your own detriment. [Robert Daniel]: Okay, that makes sense. [Michael Houck]: So last question, then I can share some more context. For the content itself, do you have a vision for that? Or do you sort of want us to get in there, come up with some ideas? Because it sounds like the action when people take is like engaging in this community coming to these events. And, you know, there’s a couple different ways we could create content that’s not specifically just reminding them about the events, but like is more editorial or more news based or funny. That sort of keeps them engaged. But I’m curious if you have a vision for the for the content side. [Robert Daniel]: Yeah, I have a few things. And the tough thing is, is I’m trying to figure out what that is. Because somebody is like, well, why would people want to read your newsletter? And I’m thinking it’s the same group of There’s a couple different customer profiles and that’s the challenge too. Like one of them is the founder aspect. And I’m definitely trying to help the founder aspect with the education. So let me give you tips, tools, techniques around comedy and improv that would help. Number two is funny bits. Like I have to have something that’s kind of funny in there, whether it’s like a joke with each thing, it could be a knock knock joke, a dad jokes, like groany jokes or really funny jokes. One of the things that I’m doing with my social I think would be great for the newsletter is what I call a Saturday spotlight. So I ask three questions from my comedians and I just put that in there and like a carousel of their pictures. And then here’s the three questions like, where did you first perform? Like what kind of comedy do you have? And then what got you into comedy? So having a highlight on those I think would be good, whether that’s tied back to Instagram or just stand alone, that would be fun. And eventually, I would love to kind of highlight back to my social. I’m trying to punch up, I’m trying to create clips of comedy clips of these are the Friday funniest, these are the funniest things. So having some sort of funny component, tying back to comedians, but also tying back to folks to tell them these are tips, tools, and techniques, and I would like to get the point where I’m putting that in a blog format on my website. And so it integrates into going back to a full website. So maybe like, here’s the quick tips, tools and techniques that you see in a newsletter, go look at the blog on our website to get deeper into this. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, that makes sense. There’s a fair amount of people who do something like that. And actually, it drives up deliverability of the newsletter too, because you’re driving up the clicks, right. And so that means that, you know, inbox providers think that, Oh, this is content that people want to click on. So I’ll make sure that it gets the primary inbox rather than their promotions folder or spam or something like that. So it can actually help with that a bit. Um, cool. Okay. So the way we work is pretty simple. Basically, uh, we don’t require any calls because we work with founders, you know, busy people are right. Uh, if you want to do sort of content interviews, uh, for each issue, we can do that, uh, but we don’t require it. Some other folks might. Instead what we do is we set up a shared Slack channel and then for each issue we will propose a few topics, ask specific questions about those topics that we’ll want your guidance and your expertise on. And then our only ask of you is basically that you reply and give us some rambly voice notes where we can capture the emotion and the intonation behind what you’re saying. Rather than just writing out a reply. And then we’ll get you a draft. After that, you review it. We make edits, and then we can schedule it and go live. And we’d also set up automations as part of this, too, for new subscribers and re-engaging stale subscribers and a few other things, too. And any other operational tasks around the newsletter, we’d also help kind of set that up just with our best practices. So it’s pretty lightweight. Happens through Slack that way. And then, yeah, if you had any, if you want to get on calls, as I said, we could, but it’s a pretty lightweight process just because of who our clientele is. Oh, Robert, did you freeze? [Robert Daniel]: Oh, I’m here. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. Oh, OK. Sorry. So I think you might have frozen. I don’t know. [Robert Daniel]: No, no, no. Can you see me now? [Michael Houck]: Okay, yeah, you’re back now, you’re back now. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. [Robert Daniel]: Yeah, I heard everything she said, so. Okay, cool. [Michael Houck]: So yeah, so that’s basically how our process works. It’s super straightforward. And you’d be paired up with a specific writer who would sort of learn your voice. That’s their primary goal. It’s not like, you know, you’d be put into a pool and some writer who’s free this week would take you. In kind of learning the audience, learning the voice, and building the content. So they set up a content library in the first few weeks, like an idea backlog, basically. And we do some research on the niche and also, as I said, set up the automation and other ops tasks. And then we get started publishing after that. So that’s pretty much how it works. [Robert Daniel]: So would you, because I know you use would I have to set up a Beehive account that you can just kind of fill that out and complete? Or is this something seamless on your end? [Michael Houck]: How does that usually work? We can use whatever platform you want. If you want to use Kit, if you want to use Substack, if you want to use MailChimp, anything and everything is fine. I’d highly recommend Beehive just because it has the easiest usability and also the best feature set. So a great combination. And you can kind of customize the design of the newsletters to make them look more appealing. To readers. So in my opinion, it’s far and above the other options, but we would set that up for you. You would need to actually create the account and then we’d go in and set everything else up from there. [Robert Daniel]: Okay. Yeah, that sounds good. I tried to go through the free trial, but I ran out of time and I was like, this is fantastic. I use HubSpot for my CRM, but I just send out emails. I send out emails from there I’m already in my shows, but that’s about it. So I’m on more or less the free version of HubSpot. [Michael Houck]: Cool, and how big is the list today? [Robert Daniel]: It’s about 4,000. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay, great. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I mean, well, okay, another question. How many are you adding per week right now? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Not that many. [Robert Daniel]: I’m not getting a lot of, so most of it has been folks I’ve met, and then I just add them into the list. And I’m not getting a lot of new subscribers. I kind of need to redo my website a little bit just to tweak it, but I want to use the newsletter to kind of start pushing things out to hopefully get new subscribers from that. [Michael Houck]: Cool. Okay. I think that’s fine. We can help with that too. Yeah. So basically what we do is we just port the list from HubSpot into Beehive and then From there, we’d set up, you could embed a widget on your site where people, it’s an email capture widget. When they sign up through there, it directly goes into Beehive. So you don’t need to be transferring people every day or every week or anything like that. So we could set that widget up and you just need to install it on your site. But yeah, it sounds pretty straightforward to me. So typically when we work with folks, we do either a weekly newsletter or a daily newsletter. Or a bi-weekly newsletter. Monthly is, I think, on the low end of what we would be able to service just because it’s writer time, right? Our writers can only take on so many clients. So I think if you’re looking to do weekly, we can accommodate that. It’d probably be, I would say, more expensive per issue than a bi-weekly newsletter would be. So I can send over some pricing options via email later today, and you can let me know what works best for you. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: That’ll work. [Robert Daniel]: Yeah, I mean from a weekly standpoint, I’m thinking bi-weekly. Well, I mean if somebody else is writing it and helping me take care of that, that might help from that aspect from a weekly standpoint. I might not worry about, I might rather start with a bi-weekly just to get a feel for it and then and set something up like that because as I said, We’re hosting four events a year in Atlanta, and then eventually we’re focusing on more. But as we get into the next two years, that could get up to like 100 events a year. So leveraging this newsletter is an important way to kind of feed people into signing up for those events that are in and around the country that maybe they might not see. [Michael Houck]: You know, it’s funny because I’ve been thinking through this conversation, if I can think of an example, and I can’t, I don’t know I actually don’t know any, but I especially don’t know a good newsletter that goes after this niche. So I actually think that there’s pretty good potential to own this niche and build this up over time. So I was trying to think about that throughout this conversation. Do I know any? I don’t. [Robert Daniel]: So I think it’s sort of a Greenfield thing. Yeah, I’m really excited about that. And eventually I feel like I won’t be working at Accelerator during the day, but that’s like the next two years. Years. I want this nationwide. I want this helping entrepreneurs from two aspects, like the laughing and mental health and wellness, but also helping them finding their voice with comedy and improv. And then that essentially creates more trust in themselves. So it’s got an aspect of passion and goodness to it. It’s not just about the monetary intake from it. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I can feel that and I can, I can see it on your face actually. Uh, it’s a, it’s clearly something that I think, you know, you care a lot about and I think that’s the best, those are the best things to do. That’s what I love to do also. So, um, we’re happy to help with it. We’d love to, I can, I’ll send over some context, um, pricing wise and you let me know just what works best for you. Um, and we’ll, we’ll be ready to get started. Uh, ASAP, uh, I have a writer on the team who I think could be a good fit for this. [Robert Daniel]: Sounds great. I appreciate the time today and look forward to seeing more on the pricing and then going from there. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. Sounds good, Robert. Chat more soon, man. Sounds great. [Robert Daniel]: Great to meet you too. Good to meet you. Bye. Bye.