- Duration: 243 min
- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01JCRACT2S54ZVK8KNG2E7Q1VS (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JCRACT2S54ZVK8KNG2E7Q1VS)
Transcript
[Conference Room (keep_outline) - Speaker 1]: email not responding, I’d be worried, but it’s showing that he’s not opening it. And Kim is opening it. So I followed up and asked directly, Kim, if if Mitch was out of office or something, I’m just trying to get a response. [Conference Room (keep_outline) - Speaker 2]: Cool. So that’s, that’s a big one. [Conference Room (keep_outline) - Speaker 1]: I know. It’s like starting to worry me. Yeah, I mean, they’ve been slowly said the whole time. [Conference Room (keep_outline) - Speaker 2]: So like, there’s that in my head. But I also at this point, it’s it’s a little worrying to have a contract out for that long. And then I know, not sign Yeah, and then I think Athena should happen. [Conference Room (keep_outline) - Speaker 1]: I’m like starting to think that Alana that doesn’t work there anymore or something, like, I don’t know. Well, Alana never worked there. [Conference Room (keep_outline) - Speaker 2]: She was just an outside advisor or whatever. Yeah. But yeah, so I know from dealing with them on the ghostwriting billing stuff that once they say it’s been sent to their their procurement team or their finance team, whatever, accounting team, whatever they said, it’s effectively paid at that point. Basically, they have a lot of VAs running every process within the company, and so they have so many layers of checks to make sure things are correct that it’s a similar level of bureaucracy of getting a bill paid from the federal government or something like that. [Conference Room (keep_outline) - Speaker 1]: It sounds like that’s what Bamboo is too. [Conference Room (keep_outline) - Speaker 2]: Yeah, sounds like it. But yeah, so I think it’s safe for us to say that Athena one is confirmed and paid because they sent it to their their payment team. [Conference Room (keep_outline) - Speaker 1]: Okay. Yeah, I did a bunch more outreach this week to some companies that looked actually really promising. So who knows if and a lot of them have read my first email. I saw so you know, hopefully those turn into something. But yeah, I mean, I’m just continuing to do more outreach and follow up on everything. [Conference Room (keep_outline) - Speaker 2]: Do we have any more promising leads for the end of the year? Let’s say that Bamboo does close. Let’s say that Athena obviously does close. That’s great for this month and would be great even for the end of the year. I want to get a sense of beyond these two whale deals. What’s our baseline right now? [Conference Room (keep_outline) - Speaker 1]: Corey from Substrata responded to me two days ago and said, yeah, send over pricing and spot options. So I sent him three different options between $4,500 and $7,000. I’ve been in touch with them since October of 2023. And they’re occasionally responsive. And yeah, it’s been so many follow-ups. So, you know, and he had told me last time, you know, in September, he said, let’s chat around November as I’ll be looking to fill up my 2025 Q1 and Q2 media calendar. So who knows with these companies that are so difficult to close, but that’s one. There’s this Freck company, frec.com. She was busy traveling and she said, in the meantime, can you confirm the cost if we do a newsletter ad placement and tool of the week, newsletter meaning deep dive. I’m thinking I’d want to optimize around around less than 10K spend, but the deep dive newsletter will be critical. And so she last responded October 29th, followed up four times, sent her a $9,000 package with a deep dive future placement and tool of the week. [Conference Room (keep_outline) - Speaker 2]: So that's another potential. Yeah. Okay. That's promising. We'll see. I guess like what, I'm starting to think about 2025, too, and where we should be allocating budget, where we should be investing on the growth side, too. Where do you see our baseline for sponsorship revenue being? Obviously, you can't predict too far in the future, but just your best guess for, let's say, Q1, from now through Q1 of next year. [Conference Room (keep_outline) - Speaker 1]: Yeah, I think 15k per month until we get renewals back. Going because nobody's really renewing anymore. Right, right. So if if by the end of q1, we've grown by 15 20,000 subscribers, and our ads are performing better, then I think q2 will be good for renewals. And we could start making a consistent 2025 k a month. [Conference Room (keep_outline) - Speaker 2]: Okay, you think you think 15 is is like baseline now? [Conference Room (keep_outline) - Speaker 1]: Well, I don't know because it's just like one deal can take up all that. So it's just like, it's so hard. I need to be consistently getting the three or 4k deals to have a good confidence that we can get 20k a month. [Conference Room (keep_outline) - Speaker 2]: I mean, 15k a month is, from my perspective, Obviously it's not great, but that at least makes, like I'm looking at the business in terms of like different business lines, right? We have Founding Journey, we have Megaphone, we have Megaphone Studios. And I mean, in some ways those are the same, but I break them out in the P&L. So 15K a month sponsorship revenue, plus the 3K a month I'm doing in advising, plus the roughly 4 to 6K a month we're getting from membership revenue. Right now, minimum 3k a month from that. That puts us in a position where founding journey is like very comfortably profitable and good. And we can continue to invest in growth and in everything else. So that's fine with me. My concern is that if I look at the last few months, right, we had September was huge, 34k. August was 20K or 21K. July was 13. And then coming back, October was eight. And that's, oh, sorry, that's total. If I just look at sponsorship, July was 7.5. August was 14. September was 24. And then October was two, right? Three of those, obviously one is like basically 15, but three of those four are under 15. I just want to make sure like, should we, should we count on 15 or do we feel better at like a 10 or even a five? Uh, yeah, I guess a 10 or a 12, um, just to be conservative. Yeah. I'm looking for the bear case, right? [Conference Room (keep_outline) - Speaker 1]: I'm looking for the, then yeah, then, then yeah, let's say 10. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. [Conference Room (keep_outline) - Speaker 2]: Cool. So average of 10 K a month is our bear case. That's fine. That still puts us in a place where with the, the other revenue coming off the newsletter too, that it's comfortably profitable. We can continue investing in content and growth and all that stuff. So there's no, no concern there. If we get down to like 5k a month, then we're basically breaking even. Uh, and so it's, uh, it's harder to invest in, in more cause we have to cover everything else. Um, But if we're 10K, we're good. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay, cool. [Conference Room (keep_outline) - Speaker 2]: That was my big thought on that. Okay, the other thing, we haven't talked about this, but the, or actually, I guess since we're on the topic of founding journey, let's do that first. So the repositioning stuff that we talked about in October, but then got sidetracked on, Let's kick that off. I have bandwidth on my end to do that, and I'm assuming you do too. So I think the initial things we need to do, I need to go back through my notes from when we talked about this before, but it's mostly updating the sales page to be better positioned and probably some of our emails and stuff too. The discussion is, do we want to reframe how we're selling it? Price point, right? Do we want to bring it up to be a premium priced offer and maybe sell it through webinars instead of just having it be funneling people there and hoping they pay the lower price point when they sign up for [Conference Room (keep_outline) - Speaker 1]: the newsletter, which hasn't been working. And what's the current $400 or it’s 200 bucks, 195. And that’s not working. Yeah. [Conference Room (keep_outline) - Speaker 2]: I mean, I don’t I don’t know if it’s because the content isn’t compelling, or I don’t know if it’s because the positioning is wrong. We changed the way we’re wording it, making it more transformation-based rather than just buying some case studies. Maybe it becomes more successful. [Conference Room (keep_outline) - Speaker 1]: So there’s two variables here. [Conference Room (keep_outline) - Speaker 1]: that are paying subscribers and just see what they want. Like, like ask them, what would you pay $1,500 for straight up? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: It's a good idea. [Conference Room (keep_outline) - Speaker 2]: Like our pay ask our, um, community subscription to community people. Yeah. Okay. [Conference Room (keep_outline) - Speaker 1]: Like what, what, what would you pay $1,500 for flat fee, one time fee? [Conference Room (keep_outline) - Speaker 2]: Yeah, might as well ask, right? [Conference Room (keep_outline) - Speaker 1]: And then we just need to deliver it. Yeah, because I think we’re kind of guessing what these founders want. And we know they’re all very early stage. I don’t think there’s a ton of series A, series B founders in there. So we know that. And we know a lot of them want help with fundraising. [Conference Room (keep_outline) - Speaker 2]: But what exactly do you want with fundraising? Yeah, I think we’re overly relying on my firsthand and knowledge to our audience rather than just getting it directly from our audience. [Conference Room (keep_outline) - Speaker 1]: It’s a good call out. Yeah. And yeah, I guess I, you know, giving them homework of 50 case studies to three didn’t end up working, which I, you know, in hindsight makes sense, but we didn’t think of that. [Conference Room (keep_outline) - Speaker 2]: We were like, we were like, there’s all this interesting knowledge and stories in here. And they’re like, you want me to read like six Yeah, how did we not think of that? [Conference Room (keep_outline) - Speaker 1]: I think we were just, I think we were naive, honestly. [Conference Room (keep_outline) - Speaker 2]: Yeah. Probably me being naive more than anything else. But it’s all right. I think you’re right. Let’s talk to people. So maybe that’s what we do over the next week. We talk to people and then by the end of next week, we have a plan for exactly sort of what to do. [Conference Room (keep_outline) - Speaker 1]: Yeah. [Conference Room (keep_outline) - Speaker 2]: And how can we incentivize them to actually respond to us? I mean, I probably just need to DM them. [Conference Room (keep_outline) - Speaker 1]: You could literally DM 50 people. Yep. [Conference Room (keep_outline) - Speaker 2]: I think that’s the move. And just, you know, spend a few hours having those conversations. Yeah. Yeah. [Conference Room (keep_outline) - Speaker 1]: And literally just asking, you know, questioning them, like, what do you want? What’s worth $1,500? Because if we can sell something at that price point where we’re selling five to 15 of them a month, that’s just going to be such great revenue. Yeah. [Conference Room (keep_outline) - Speaker 2]: If we can sell five of those a month, then we’re in real good shape. And the best part of it is that we then become a much more self-sustaining business rather than relying on this spiky sponsorship revenue. It becomes gravy at that point, right? Yeah. Okay. Cool. Okay. That sounds good. I’ll do that next week. Um, the other thing is these email, email lead magnet things. Um, do you want to test that? What’s your, what’s your thought on that? [Conference Room (keep_outline) - Speaker 1]: Well, so explain it more. Cause I asked in Slack about it more. So audit wants to basically just get more subscribers through cold email, which is what we’re doing. Right now to get more subscribers for us, and he wants to do the same for him. [Conference Room (keep_outline) - Speaker 2]: Yeah. Basically, I’m going to share my screen here. So this week, I’ve reached out to a bunch of these people, some of whom are creators on Megaphone who have newsletters. Others are people who we do ghostwriting for. Others are just connections that I have. All of them that I’ve talked to so far, except for, well, not all of them, but the majority of them so far have at least verbally confirmed that they will pay a specific price, and some of them have already paid, for us to do for them what we are starting to do for County Journey. Finding these right leads, some people want them to get sent a cold email campaign first, others are like, just put them in my welcome sequence and they’ll get churned out. And they want that, and they trust that the level of data fidelity and targeting that we can provide is good enough for them to pay for that at different price points. We’ve tested out a few price points, as you can see. But yeah, I mean, if these folks convert, we’re already at a pretty good run rate here. [Conference Room (keep_outline) - Speaker 1]: Yeah, okay, so some of them literally on us to send them a spreadsheet of emails and they’re just gonna throw those emails into there? [Conference Room (keep_outline) - Speaker 2]: No, they want us to import them so they don’t have to do any work at all. Totally done for you. They’ll add Rena to their Beehive newsletter team or whatever and she’ll just import them and have them get sent to the welcome sequence. [Conference Room (keep_outline) - Speaker 1]: Wow, and not even email them asking if they want to respond? [Conference Room (keep_outline) - Speaker 2]: No, because someone like AI Tool Report, they have like hundreds of thousands of subscribers So if we’re adding 8,000 per month, that’s not going to have a meaningful impact on their deliverability, even if half of them turn out super [Conference Room (keep_outline) - Speaker 1]: quick. Interesting. And they’re not worried about getting, yeah, I mean, they’re not worried about deliverability if a bunch of them mark as spam, because it’s kind of technically illegal. [Conference Room (keep_outline) - Speaker 2]: So it’s not. We did a reading of the spam, the act that people always site in this case is case. And as long as you have an address and an unsubscribe link in the email, you can send them emails and they, they can just choose to unsubscribe, but you need the address so they can physically mail you like a complaint if they want. Um, but, um, yeah, so they, they’re just fine with them being up uploaded directly. What we would do is we would go in and set up like very aggressive auto unsubscribe rules if they don’t open or engage with the first email or two emails that they receive. So it would be pretty aggressive in that way. But it’s pure profit, because Matt already has all of this data, and it’s already tagged by interests. If we wanted to spin up, I was thinking about your soccer newsletter, actually. If we wanted to spin up your soccer newsletter to a million subscribers, we could do that. It would take a while, because we’d have to, with a smaller audience, we’d need be more gradual with how many people were importing per week. Right. You flagged. But we can build like, you know, obviously there’s like 10 million different things that need to actually go our way and actually be true before this would happen. But we can build a big media company this way and incubate and sell newsletters or just get paid pure profit to send subscribers to other people. [Conference Room (keep_outline) - Speaker 1]: We’re back on this. Same pill that we were on and then we got off and now we’re back on it. [Conference Room (keep_outline) - Speaker 2]: The reason we got off of it was because I didn’t keep Matt focused and he got sort of thinking too big about things and wanting to do it for, he got away from the newsletter problem. He was like, we have these emails, we can do anything. Let’s do this creator thing. And the creator thing is good, but the newsletter thing is a very clear business where we have an initial people who will pay for it. And so I I don’t know if it’s gonna be a big company, but I don’t know if it’ll ever even be a big part of our focus, but at the very least, we know a lot of people with these newsletters who would pay us for these subscribers, and so that’s the sole thing that I’m expecting out of this, and if more comes, great. And they’re paying us per lead? Yeah, so there are other people who scrape social media for emails and then do this, but they don’t have based graph like Matt does so those people charge like somewhere between 40 and 60 cents but it’s like worst quality targeting and data yeah so again my hypothesis is that this won’t become something big but if we can make 20k a month extra and I haven’t even reached out to that many Um, yeah, that’s a lot. It’s just, it’s just dumb not to do it. So, um, my, my job in this is keeping Matt focused and keeping him, uh, on task. Uh, but, um, you know, it’s been, it’s been successful so far this week, so we’re going to keep, keep pushing it. Okay. [Conference Room (keep_outline) - Speaker 1]: So where do I fit in and what do I need to do? [Conference Room (keep_outline) - Speaker 2]: Yes. So, So in the short term, some people, as you can see over here, some people want us to create like campaigns, like drip campaigns for them, just like we’re doing for Jake Uber, right, with Venture Simulator. So we need to replicate that for Audit first, and then we can get into it for some of the other people too. I need to get clarity from Audit. I added him to Slack channel, but he hasn’t joined yet. From him if he wants the emails to be from him, or just like totally random emails. We’re basically just testing, does this inbox open emails or not? So we gotta get that info from him, but once we have that, then we’ll just craft some simple sequence and start sending it. Okay, so that’s what you had asked me to do. Yeah, but he didn’t join the Slack channel, so we’ll just wait. And we’ll just wait until he gives us that clarity. [Conference Room (keep_outline) - Speaker 1]: Okay, so I’ll hold off on doing anything. [Conference Room (keep_outline) - Speaker 2]: Yeah, you can hold off today. [Conference Room (keep_outline) - Speaker 1]: Hopefully by Monday, he’s in there. Okay, so it kind of just required me to just build out a piece of copy for sequences for some of these, is what it sounds like, [Conference Room (keep_outline) - Speaker 2]: Yeah, and then in the long run, you know, assuming that these people like what we provide and that it actually does add value for them at whatever rate they’re paying, then we’ll probably start expanding it, offering it to SaaS companies who have email lists, but no newsletters. And that way we get ghostwriting revenue and extra revenue from this too. Yeah. Um, and so if that happens, then your role in that would basically be to just be leading the sales for that and just going out and talking to these founders, telling them about why it’s a good could fit for their business and getting them on board. [Conference Room (keep_outline) - Speaker 1]: Yeah. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. So we’ll see where it goes. [Conference Room (keep_outline) - Speaker 2]: It could literally just be that we have Jake, we have Nicole and we have audit and that’s it. Right. Oh, actually what these guys, these guys, uh, reconfirmed this morning. So they’re into, so it could just be that this is all we ever get from it and that’s fine. And we split the revenue with Matt and call it a day, but it’s just so little work for, a decent amount of money that’s just, you know, why not? [Conference Room (keep_outline) - Speaker 1]: Yeah. And of the hundreds or a few thousands of subs that we’ve brought into Founding Journey through this process, what’s their engagement like, [Conference Room (keep_outline) - Speaker 2]: Yeah. So there’s a couple different cohorts that we have. So if I go back and look at the original Ember cohort from, let me move this little arc window, from whenever this is. Right, so these people were uploaded at the latest, May 20th, I think it was like April and May. We uploaded 5,000 people. Their open rate was like over 70% initially, and even with it being six months later, the open rate is still like acceptable. This is better than you’d get from, well, this is worse than you’d get from SparkLoop, but this is better than you’d get from SparkLoop, right? And some of them have upgraded to premium, obviously a very low amount, unfortunately. Some of them have referred people, and the ones who don’t want it just unsubscribe, and it hasn’t hurt our deliverability. More recently, now these people went through a cold email campaign in SmartLead, I remember. Um, more recently we uploaded these folks who are the 2,600 that Rena has uploaded now in the last two weeks or whatever. Their open rates are a bit lower. There’s no cold email campaign that we’re doing for them. It’s just straight upload to be high of 200 a day. Um, unsubscribe rates are, I think about what you’d expect and you know, this will obviously rise over time. Um, but the click rate is just in line also with what we saw from the cohort, too. So no one’s bought anything yet, unfortunately. That’s the one thing that’s, I think, going to make or break this business, is can these people take action in these emails for people? [Conference Room (keep_outline) - Speaker 1]: But that just might be our bad positioning. I don’t know. Yeah. Yeah, I might want to do this for my soccer newsletter. [Conference Room (keep_outline) - Speaker 2]: Yeah, we totally do it for your site, we blow it up, start selling ads through it. Um, and, uh, give you guys the ability to build some products around it too. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Conference Room (keep_outline) - Speaker 1]: But we’ll see. [Conference Room (keep_outline) - Speaker 2]: So we’re just testing it right now, but we’re using this as like a case study. When I go to talk to these people and be like, yeah, we have this old cohort, we have this new cohort metrics are pretty good. We can set up unsubscribed rules. Now, no, I haven’t set up any unsubscribed rules for this at all. Just going through our normal. Process. But we’ll figure out what those should be as we test it with folks. But I’ve been encouraged. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah, cool. Okay. [Conference Room (keep_outline) - Speaker 2]: So yeah, so that’s that. I’ll loop you into this stuff with audit. I think that’s all I had for today. Did you have anything else? [Conference Room (keep_outline) - Speaker 1]: No, so I’ve got this guy making these viral examples ads. So we’re still planning on running ads for viral examples? [Conference Room (keep_outline) - Speaker 2]: I think so. I think so. I’ll feel better about it once Bamboo converts. Wait, once what converts? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Bamboo. [Conference Room (keep_outline) - Speaker 1]: Bamboo, yeah, yeah. [Conference Room (keep_outline) - Speaker 2]: But yeah, I mean, look, we can probably do this same email thing viral examples, too. But I don’t like relying on just one growth channel. So maybe we try to do the lead magnet thing for viral examples, too. I don’t know. Yeah, we just target marketers. [Conference Room (keep_outline) - Speaker 1]: Yeah, target people who want to get in front of founders and marketers. [Conference Room (keep_outline) - Speaker 2]: And we have a welcome sequence that includes, you know, at least one or two of these things. And we make some money back on when people subscribe. And then we’ll have the budget to start start sending even, I think a higher percent of people through ads. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Conference Room (keep_outline) - Speaker 1]: Okay. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: So I should still. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yep. [Conference Room (keep_outline) - Speaker 2]: And then we’ll take those live. Maybe not next week, maybe the, maybe the following week. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Cool. Okay. Yeah. [Conference Room (keep_outline) - Speaker 1]: I don’t think there’s anything else. Look at the calendar we’ve got. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Conference Room (keep_outline) - Speaker 1]: I mean, we’ve got to, I’ve got to fill all December. So got a lot to fill honestly. Yeah. [Conference Room (keep_outline) - Speaker 2]: I mean, we have, we have offers that we can use now, so it’s not the end of the world, but yeah, obviously we want to fill it if we can. [Conference Room (keep_outline) - Speaker 1]: Yeah. Wow, yeah, we really have nothing in December. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: That’s crazy. [Conference Room (keep_outline) - Speaker 2]: Well, I guess Athena will take two of those at least, right? [Conference Room (keep_outline) - Speaker 1]: Yeah, and then hopefully Bamboo will take one. And then, yeah, I mean, Micro One performed terribly. I don’t think the guide was close to booking a big package. And then they’re like, actually, We only wanna test one and then they tested one and it didn’t work. We gave them a free tool spot that didn’t work. So now they’re not gonna renew. A team overseas has done bad. So this is their makeup spot right here. Yeah, hopefully, or yeah, I gotta look at all some X numbers actually or send them back to them or no. [Conference Room (keep_outline) - Speaker 2]: No, that’s Tuesday. [Conference Room (keep_outline) - Speaker 1]: So hopefully they do well. Yeah. [Conference Room (keep_outline) - Speaker 2]: I mean, hopefully we get some more of these. My guess is that filling December at this point will be pretty hard. [Conference Room (keep_outline) - Speaker 1]: It will be, yeah. [Conference Room (keep_outline) - Speaker 2]: Because Q4 budget’s already tied up. [Conference Room (keep_outline) - Speaker 1]: Right. OK. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: All right. [Conference Room (keep_outline) - Speaker 2]: Well, I guess we’ll see what we do. Just keep me in the loop. If you feel like you’re ever at risk of that 10k baseline, like looking ahead to the next month or just in general, just let me know because that would mean that I need to change some things budget wise, which is fine. I just, you know, heads up about it. Okay. Sounds good. Cool. All right, man. Have a good weekend. You too. [Conference Room (keep_outline) - Speaker 1]: Later. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Bye.