- Duration: 19 min
- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01JCNVC7939R28KVDDHAEAFF24 (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JCNVC7939R28KVDDHAEAFF24)
Transcript
[Liam Lawson]: Hey, Michael, how’s it going? Hey, Liam, how you doing, man? [Michael Houck]: Good to meet you. Good. It’s a pleasure. [Liam Lawson]: It’s a pleasure. Where are you calling in from [Michael Houck]: I’m in New York. [Liam Lawson]: How about you? Awesome. I mean, I’m in Phoenix at the moment, but I’m headed down to Paraguay and Argentina soon, so. Oh, that’s fun. What are you doing now? I am living, mate. Doing the whole digital nomad thing, so. Getting in an area of focus. Let’s put it that way. [Michael Houck]: Where in Argentina are you going? [Liam Lawson]: So the plan is to do a month and kind of each different place for a period of six months. So month in Buenos Aires, Cordova, Bariloche, El Calafate, Patagonia, and then decide where I want to do for the sixth. But I just want to explore the country. So just kind of set up a base in each place. [Michael Houck]: That’s sweet, man. Good time to go down there, too. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Everything’s changing. [Liam Lawson]: Yeah, and in Malay it’s certainly an interesting time. I’m interested to speak to Argentinians and see what they think about all the and actually see it in real life as well, because you obviously see lots of news on Twitter and stuff like that, so it’ll be interesting to [Michael Houck]: see in the flesh what’s going on. Yeah, yeah, super cool. It will be good to actually get some real opinions rather than just the most liked tweet of the day. [Liam Lawson]: Exactly, exactly right. Anyways, I’ll dive into it if that’s okay with you. So from what I understand, You’re getting these subscribers based on interest. Are you kind of scraping social media sites and then buying those emails from a data provider? Is that how that works? [Michael Houck]: No, we have some proprietary stuff that we do with AI to link publicly available email addresses. You know, nothing kind of below board, everything totally above board with then sort of what their interests are on various social media sites and also they’ve sort of expressed in other ways on the internet, too. So it’s kind of a secret sauce thing, can’t go too, too deep into it. But just know, it’s, it’s a process we’ve built from scratch. And we sort of have now this interest based graph on top of email. As opposed to like, you know, normally, if you want to target based on interest, you have to go through social media ads, right? We’re trying to take that off of social media and take it into email. Okay. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Cool. [Liam Lawson]: So with that, in terms of you script your email and then you’re going to be adding them, import them directly to our email list. I assume you mentioned in there that you’re kind of like cold email experts. So could you talk to me about what that warmup sequence is from them just being interested in a general thing to then actually staying a subscriber to the item or not on something? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Sure. [Michael Houck]: So there’s, there’s three ways we can go about it. One is that we just import them directly into the list that you guys already have, they get your welcome sequence. And we set some very aggressive sort of auto unsubscribe rules if they’re not engaging, so it doesn’t have any impact on your deliverability. That’s like the simplest way we can go about it. If we want to then if we want to instead kind of vet the emails ahead of time and send cold email sequences, there’s two ways we can do that. One is to with you guys sort of set up a sequence that makes sense, probably around the lead magnet that they can reply to and get some interest in. And we would send them a drip campaign based on that. And you’d have full kind of overview of what the copy would be and could tell us what you want to include versus not. That’s the second way. The third way is if we just want to basically test if the email is active and engaging with people emailing them in the first place, we can send them something totally unrelated to your guys’ brand based on inboxes that we already have set up. So there’s no sort of initial waiting period to week waiting period, like it would be with new domains. I don’t know how much you know about cold email. Maybe I should take a pause and just, are you like a, like, do you know that kind of like cold, uh, cold email? I know enough. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, you get the domains, you set up two inboxes, send up to 30 cents per day per inbox. Um, that’s what it would be for the second method I just described, which is we’d set up domains that are kind of like your guys’s domain and we’d send the email is if they’re coming from you. The third way is we totally ignore that. And we’re just kind of testing the email address itself. And so there’s no impact to your brand. They don’t sort of see the brand at all. Some people prefer that. So that’s just saying, Hey, are they opening? Are they engaging with the unrelated emails that we’re sending? Then we take those people and put them on the list. [Liam Lawson]: How long have you been running this offer with these three different methodologies? [Michael Houck]: We’ve tested it with my newsletter. So for context, I have a 60,000 founder newsletter. We’ve been testing with that since the spring. And we’ve seen pretty consistently that the open rates are around I 40s to low 50s click rates are about two to three x what we see from paid ads and unsubscribed rates. If we set like the aggressive rules I talked about, they’re fine. There’s no impact to deliverability. You don’t get a ton of spam reports or anything like that. Yeah, I’ve been testing out my newsletter and sort of now we’re starting to offer it to more people as a service. [Liam Lawson]: So that’s why I reached out to Martin. Got you. Could you talk to me about the kind of benefits and the drawbacks to each option? And I guess if you have a kind of recommended option as well. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: So the benefit of sort of the first option where we just import them right to the list is that the first touch point that they’re going to get is the emails that you guys want them welcome sequence, right? I assume that you guys have products or services or something that you’re offering and those you want to kind of get them to convert. We put them through that right away. That’s the first email they get. And then they’re also obviously getting the newsletter sooner and you guys are going to the subscriber count sooner. The drawback of course, is that we need to have pretty aggressive unsubscribe rules in order to make sure there’s no impact at all to your deliverability or anything like that. [Liam Lawson]: So I would say- Could you get granular with that and terms of what the unsubscribe rules are. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: I mean, it’s, it’s sort of up to your discretion. The people we’ve been talking to have had like different desires for how aggressive they want us to be, but it can be something as much as like, Hey, if they don’t open the first email within a day or two, then we auto unsubscribe them from the list. [Liam Lawson]: That’s it. Other people are like, sorry, would we pay per subscriber added to the list or per subscriber that stays on that list? [Michael Houck]: Right. So we’re open to either model. Again, we’re sort of figuring out what people want from this as we go. So yeah, we’re not going to charge you for people who we upload to the list and then they’re not interested or not engaged. But we do also do a lot of vetting. And again, we have literally targeting that nobody else has on the front end. So we have high confidence in the emails that we’re putting in. [Liam Lawson]: OK. OK. That seems to make sense. We’d set our own kind of rules as to what we unsubscribe for. Talk to me about that. So say, for example, we’re only paying for subscribers that stay on that list. What are the metrics on that with scale in terms of pricing? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, so metrics are the pricing is basically what I outlined in the email. So depending on what you guys are looking for in terms of who the people are, how competitive that niche is with other people in the space, we’d probably price that at somewhere between $0.75 per lead to $1.50 per lead. And if you guys were to go at, say, a 1,000 or a 2,000 person a month amount of leads, that would be closer to the $1.50. If we're going more so $10,000 a month plus, we’d go down towards the $0.75. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. Um, cool. [Liam Lawson]: Let me speak with Martin to give you context. Like, because we are growing at a scale, we’ve got someone that does a similar thing to yourself. Um, I’m with the scale we’re at, they’re doing them for around 40 to 50 cents a subscriber. And the rates on them are really good as well. Like when I pull up our kind of subscriber They get a good 45% open rate, good click-through rate, good unsub rate, and they’re very good performers. So I asked Martin, the 75 cent number makes sense to us. We’d potentially test out for a month and see the quality of that traffic because it never hurts to have a bit of diversity in terms of requisition sources. But I don’t think the one for the 75 cent number makes sense to us. Number would make much sense for us and the 75% the 75 cents a bit more scale does make more sense. So I speak with Martin as likely that we’d give it a try for a month just like measure the quality of the source and then go from there. [Michael Houck]: Yeah I would let me just ask the the other folks you’re working with are they just basically scraping leads off of social media and then uploading them? [Liam Lawson]: Yeah I’m not sure about the complexity of it, to be honest. [Michael Houck]: We do know of some other people in the space who are doing that. I just want to be super clear, that is not what we do. We have a very intense extra level of targeting that you guys get that people like that are not able to replicate. [Liam Lawson]: Yeah. Okay. Cool. I mean, if that’s the case and these are more targeted and they are more interested, then we’ve got our analytics set up some kind of stuff on the backend that we’ll be able to measure who upgrades. So for example, beyond just the open rate, click-through rate, and so on. Another kind of measurement for success for us is, do they upgrade to our pro community on school? Do they upgrade to our thing? It’s like, what are their engagement rates? What is their actual click rate on the newsletters themselves? So that’s likely why we’ll take that test budget and be like, OK, let’s test it. And even if it is more expensive, we can still see, are they upgrading to the pro community? Are they actually interested in clicking on the newsletters themselves? If it’s as targeted as you say then that kind of showed the metrics for us as well So I think testing a budget makes sense to kind of see what it looks like after a month. [Michael Houck]: Cool Yeah, I mean we’ve seen with mine for example When we initially upload cohort people it can be as high as like a 70% open rate in some cases with some some cohorts Yeah, we’ll also say is that as I mentioned we’re super new at setting this up It’s you know, we haven’t even incorporated a business yet. This is just running through my existing my existing holding company. So I can talk to my co-founder on the project, Matt, and see what we can do on the pricing side for you guys, because we see you guys as a great initial partner and a long-term partner too. So obviously have a lot of respect for what you guys and Martin have built. Let me see what we can do on pricing. I might be able to bring it down a little bit to sort of match what you guys are seeing in the market. [Liam Lawson]: Yeah, sweet. That would be awesome. It gives more confidence. Again, we’re just open to testing it. Test it for a month or two. And then if we see confidence in it, then we can continue to scale that like a big focus for us and the new year is going to be growth and we’ll set up a few deals with Some kind of big players in the space and our welcome automation sequence where they include lead magnets and we get paid out in a CPL number So it’s making growth Profitable for us. So if we can do More scale and more scale and more scale and that continues to be profitable then we can just double triple quadruple people are spending with you guys. [Michael Houck]: What would that initial test look like, What size, what amount of subscribers do you think that would be? [Liam Lawson]: I’ll speak to Martin, but I can imagine maybe 2,000 a week, so 8,000 for the month seems reasonable for an initial test. I think that gives us enough of a number to be like, okay, does this make sense or not? I think any less than that is hard. But if you get back to me on your best number for a first month of 8,000, that’d be great. [Michael Houck]: Okay, we’ll operate that way and I’ll get back to you tonight or at the latest tomorrow. [Liam Lawson]: I did have one question in terms of the process of this. What is your standard operating procedure? Do you need details from us in terms of who we’re looking for, in terms of psychographics, demographics, because obviously everything’s proprietary and IP related for you guys. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I mean, the more detail that you can share with us, the more specific we’re going to be able to be. But our normal process with folks has been that we set up a shared Slack channel, and then we just kind of go back and forth in there. If you want us to sort of take over the opposite of it too, and be the ones who are uploading the leads, if we go with the direct route or the route one, we can do that. If you want to sort of have a VA on your side, take that on too, that’s fine. And we can just send them the list each week. [Liam Lawson]: And most likely be the first option we’d kind of upload you into the team and then be like handle it manually Yeah, sounds good we’re building an api connection so it’ll be all automated pretty soon too All right. [Michael Houck]: Dope. [Liam Lawson]: Um, yeah, let me speak to martin and he’s back online today So I’ll have a call with him and I’ll let you know whether we’re kind of good to go If you can get back to me with a number as soon as possible that kind of helps me in that conversation Um and get moving on that pretty quickly quickly. And then if that does go ahead and we are on a Slack channel, if you could get back to me on a specific set of questions that will help us get basically highest quality readership as well, that would be amazing. Cool. [Michael Houck]: We can do that. I’ll keep an eye out to hear back from you once I send you the confirmation. I’ll shoot you an email again, probably later today at the latest tomorrow. [Liam Lawson]: Okay. I really appreciate your time, Michael. I’ve also what you’re doing, and I’ve followed you for a while on social, so great job on everything you’ve built. I appreciate it, man. [Michael Houck]: You guys are building something crazy, too. I love it. It’s been a while to watch. [Liam Lawson]: Awesome, man. I appreciate your time, and I’ll catch up with you via email. Cool. Talk soon. See you.