- Duration: 18 min
- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01JCNYW6Z21DK1EY5QY4RZVDBE (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JCNYW6Z21DK1EY5QY4RZVDBE)
Transcript
[Antoni Gmitruk]: Hey, Antoni. How are you, man? Good. [Michael Houck]: Good to meet you as well. [Antoni Gmitruk]: Where are you? Where are you based? [Michael Houck]: I’m currently in San Francisco. Oh, nice. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Exciting. [Antoni Gmitruk]: How about you? I’m in New York. I used to live in SF though. [Michael Houck]: I was there for for three years, I think. Yeah, a little over three years. Nice. Well, cool, man. I’m excited. I’m excited to kind of learn more about what you’re thinking on the content side and sort of how we might be able to help and just any context on you and kind of what you’re doing that you think might [Antoni Gmitruk]: be useful too that I can share some more about what we do. Yep, absolutely. So I guess the main thing that this is relevant to is I ran a fellowship in where I’m originally from for young builders. We basically support them when they’re still in high school, when they want to build crazy stuff, like I used to with my co-founder when we were in high school. So it’s our kind of giving back thing. But we are funded by private capital. We are an NGO technically, but we’re funded by private people. We have basically 12, you could call them business angels, that invested in the program. And so not to get into many details, but basically, there are two things why I think this is interesting for us. A, we really hate marketing, me and my co-founder. And we are very compact in terms of the team. It’s just me and him. We don’t want to really expand that much, because we don’t want to add additional operational capacity, because it’s not our main thing even right now. But we hate marketing, which is really uh, you can really see it to our instagram page but We what really worked well for us in terms of um, reach and conversion is linkedin Because although many young people don’t have linkedin we are like very well converting on the older audience So it’s basically targeting, you know Parents or targeting people who know people in their workplace that have kids in high school who do crazy stuff Or targeting those people who are like a little bit ahead in high school already who have LinkedIn, but have a lot of friends that don’t have LinkedIn that are surrounded by people that would also build crazy stuff, or maybe they build together. So LinkedIn has been a surprising source of very good leads. And we tried, the way it would work so far is our founding partners, people who support us would post on LinkedIn because they have, you know, hundreds or thousands of followers, more like multiple thousands. So that worked well, but we have to have a sustainable way of building that ourselves. So we tried posting for a bit, but it’s not our thing. It’s hard for us to write something that we feel good with. And it’s us with most things. So social media, it’s a game of consequence, right? You have to be consequent, and you have to be consistent. So that’s the situation. So if we can have someone who can write for us a good copy and write something that we like, and we are not afraid to post it ourselves, then that would be ideal. Because then we can get a lot of the things that are kind of buggers for us out of our heads and just focus on other things that are more important. Yeah. I mean, that makes sense. [Michael Houck]: Social media is really close to a full-time job. If not a full-time job and especially if you guys have a bunch of other stuff going on, it’s just it’s easy for it to sort of fall off the priority list. It’s a daily thing you got to do. Okay, cool. That’s helpful. We see the same thing. We see LinkedIn being a really good lead source for a lot of clients right now and that’s why people are coming to us too. So we actually just had someone who had signed up with us four months ago and they’re the founder of the company. And they’ve been driving so many leads that they actually just got the rest of their executive team. That writer on our team is pretty swamped right now. But no, yeah. So I can tell you a little bit about sort of how we work. [Antoni Gmitruk]: So, I mean, we work with founders. [Michael Houck]: That’s what we do. So we tailor the whole process specifically to how founders work and the founders are super busy. They don’t want to get on a bunch of calls and things like that. So if you want to do like content interviews with the writer, we can do that. But most people say, Hey, let’s just do Slack voice notes kind of back and forth and handle it. That’s our standard thing. Super lightweight. We’ll set up a shared Slack channel. We’ll initially do one meeting, which is just like a one hour kickoff where you’ll meet your writer and this will be like your thought partner, right? Their job is to sort of download your brain. And when you send us stuff or when we have ideas for you, it’s not coming from some pool. It’s a one-on-one relationship with that person. And yeah, so we’ll do a kickoff call. We’ll go deep into like, who’s the audience you want? What do they care about? Where are they spending their time on LinkedIn? Who are they following, right? What type of content do we want to create to capture them? All that kind of stuff. We’ll build sort of like an internal profile for what we want the voice to be and then we’ll start creating the content So there’s an initial sort of two-week period where we’re doing research or putting an idea backlog. We’re getting writing samples from you And we’re setting up ops and then we’ll start delivering content after that And we can we can do the full ops for you if you’d like like we can get into your account We can schedule it. We can even engage with replies and engage with other people your niche at the same time on their content so you get some free impressions that way. We can do all that you like, Most clients want us to do that, but some don’t. So I always just like to mention that it’s an optional thing. And that’s pretty much it. Then we’ll deliver and schedule the content each week and keep you updated on performance and things like that. The other thing I’ll mention is that we have a large creator network. So we have a creator network hundred creators in various niches. And, uh, it’s, you know, we offer that as a SAS platform to people actually, they can like purchase the ability to work with those creators, but we include that for free. Uh, you’d need to still pay the creators for partnerships, engagements, and things like that, but you can amplify your content to their audience, uh, if you’d like, So that’s another thing that we offer that, uh, really no other agency has anywhere near the degree that we do. [Antoni Gmitruk]: Nice. [Antoni Gmitruk]: But how does the pricing work? How are you working on? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, so we price based on how much content you’re looking for us to create each week. Well, let me ask you one clarifying question first. Would you be looking more for longer form content, or is it more so we want to post shorter stuff every day? [Antoni Gmitruk]: I think somewhere in the middle, because we want the content to be based what’s happening internally in the fellowship. So what we’ve tried so far is kind of getting whatever most interesting thing happened last week and kind of writing about that, trying to focus on that. So we would probably want the content to be led by the interesting things that we have going on inside. And just to make it interesting, I would probably see two posts a week that would and interestingness and not dilute it too much. Yeah, that would probably be around that. So it would be a bit longer than three sentences, but I’m not a fan of essays on LinkedIn. I don’t think anybody will read that. And I don’t like putting trash on other people’s pages. So yeah. Cool. [Michael Houck]: That’s fair. And I feel the same way. To not be too terse with my own content, but at the same time, you open something up and it’s a book, who’s gonna read that one? [Antoni Gmitruk]: I’m not gonna read. Yeah, I’m not gonna read it. [Michael Houck]: Okay, cool. So yeah, so if we’re doing two good size posts per week, that would be on our light tier, which is 19.95 per month, so basically 2K a month. And if you wanted to increase that to say maybe we want two of the longer posts, but we also want to intersperse some like shorter, like thought leadership style, like witty posts. We can do that too. Um, and that would be, uh, three K. So 2995 per month. Uh, and that includes all the ops and everything like that too. [Antoni Gmitruk]: Right. Okay. Yep. Sounds, sounds reasonable. Cool. [Michael Houck]: Um, once we would get started, I’d also do just like a profile audit for you basically where I’m, uh, just like, you know, going through, a Loom video, what can we update? We make this like high converting for you guys, if that’s a goal, how can we make this convert to followers or convert to people who are joining and things like that too. [Antoni Gmitruk]: So we’d go through all that. [Michael Houck]: Cool. Cool. Thanks. Cool. Um, what are the questions, uh, what are the questions you have? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Antoni Gmitruk]: Um, yeah, like one thing I’ve been wondering is like we, you know, we’re two co-founders, how do we approach both of us posting and still keeping it interesting and not overlapping ourselves? We kind of have the same insights or the same stories or the same experiences from the fellowship. And that’s been one thing that we’ve struggled with as well, is not only writing our own posts and writing as they are, but also trying to keep our posts separate. And in both domains interesting. That’s one thing probably a writer could somehow structure it in a way that’s ending that part. Yeah. I mean, there’s two thoughts that I have to that. [Michael Houck]: The first one is that there might be a world where you guys just sit down and have a hard conversation about, hey, I want to be the one who’s focused on building my personal brand and sharing these insights. [Antoni Gmitruk]: Yeah, that’s also like one thing we’re talking about. So like, yeah, so basically, I don’t know, like how you say it from, so yeah, I’ll let you. [Michael Houck]: I mean, it’s all good. The the other way would be basically, if we’re taking, you know, similar stories from everything, but we’re structuring them and formatting them and packaging them differently, right? So maybe Maybe you’re the guy who’s sharing text-based posts or things like that, and he’s the guy sharing screenshot essays and images and carousels and stuff like that. So that’s another way to do it. Right, okay, yeah, that makes sense. [Antoni Gmitruk]: So that’s what I would say. [Michael Houck]: So I guess the first question would be, you guys chat, let me know if you think this would be good for both of you, One of you, do you want to split that up? But yeah, we’d be excited to work with you guys. And I mean, you know, have some writers who I think are pretty solid, have worked with me for a long time for context. The way we’re structured is that I handle most things with clients. So I’ll be the one who’s like interacting with you. We also have Blake Imahl, who, you know, he has more followers than I do. He’s built a hundred K follower base on Twitter and a decent sized audience on LinkedIn too. He’s in the weeds with the writers every single day. No content gets sent to you for approval without at least him reviewing it. In most cases, I’ll take a look too, especially early on when we’re getting you guys onboarded. And the writers are all folks that one of us have directly worked with for a decent capacity of time at this point. [Antoni Gmitruk]: It’s not like we’re outsourcing this or anything like that. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Right. Cool. Cool. Okay. [Michael Houck]: So I’ll shoot over an email just, you know, going over basically what we talked about and I’ll keep an eye out to hear back from you guys. [Antoni Gmitruk]: Awesome. Thank you. Cool. Good to meet you, man. Talk more soon. Thank you.