- Duration: 60 min
- Platform: zoom
- Source: Read.ai 01JCRPCHT4W53XMX0H8V5NNC1N (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JCRPCHT4W53XMX0H8V5NNC1N)
Transcript
[Blake Emal]: Here we go. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: What’s up? [Michael Houck]: What’s up, man? [Blake Emal]: How you doing? I’m good. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: I’m good. [Michael Houck]: How are you, man? Good. Yeah, good. Thinking about getting out of New York for the winter, trying to figure out where to go. Yeah. Where are you at with that? I don’t know, man. Life decisions are still hanging over me, so I’m not totally sure yet, but we’ll figure it out. [Blake Emal]: Has any divorce stuff finalized or are you still just working through that for a while? [Michael Houck]: We, we put a pause on it, but I don’t know. I’m like, I’m back to thinking it’s the right call. So, um, it’s tough, man. It’s hard to know, you know, like I don’t want, we don’t want to spend this whole meeting on that, but just like the big thing is having kids. That’s really the main, the main decision point. Everything else is fine. It’s just, it’s just that. So, um, We’re talking through it. Yeah. So, um, how are you? What’s going on? Nothing much. [Blake Emal]: I, uh, in true fashion, I did write way too many notes for this topic. We don’t need to go through all this. I can send it to you after, but, uh, yeah, I’m, I’m good. Just want to get things running a little bit smoother. I think there’s some like onboarding stuff that we can show up and get your on some ideas I have. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: I mean, let’s talk through, I mean, the big topics are that, which is like, you know, the churn problem, which is downstream of other issues with client selection and onboarding expectations and process and things like that. So that’s one. Second, the second topic is what are we going to do about Sarah, right? With Ramesh. And was there a third, I feel like I remember there being a third thing we want to talk about, but I can’t put my finger on it right now. [Blake Emal]: I think when we were talking, it was really just the client churn thing that we were going to talk through. And then we can tackle Sarah as well and make a decision there. [Michael Houck]: Cool. Okay. Go for it. Why don’t I do this? [Blake Emal]: Why don’t I just high level read every thought that I had and then you can just stop me when you want to dive deeper into it. Cause not all of these are things that we can do right now or want to do right now, but everything on paper first, and then we can narrow down. I have a hunch on, a couple of things that I do think would be probably good to do regardless. So fundamental problem, just to reiterate, is we get who we think is the right client coming in a lot of the time. They seem cool. They get into Slack. Then we start getting fewer inputs from them. Writer isn’t on tone. Something happens, whatever. And then they just don’t publish the posts and they churn. There’s a common theme in there. So core problem client is churning without having like a humongous reason why it just seems like maybe they were actually either a wrong fit right away or something like usually I don’t think big things are really happening so it leads me to believe that misaligned expectations on their end or something happened and then looking for an excuse basically and so anything that goes wrong yeah like crazy if I I’m going through I wrote down the churn reasons for [Michael Houck]: everyone who’s churned historically. So if I just quickly go through these, so Fuel Finance, they were our first client before you joined. They churned after one month. Grace was their writer. They hired someone in-house, but there were complaints about the voice. They weren’t happy with the, the results were fine, and they were happy with the numbers of the posts we’re doing. They just didn’t think Grace was able to get the sort of FinTech voice that they wanted. The second was subject. David was the writer. They churned because they were just unhappy with performance. The founder had a LinkedIn presence with some amount of followers. We were creating new content and also porting some of his old content over to Twitter. And it just wasn’t, wasn’t doing anything. He was getting very few likes, wasn’t happy with it. Third was Pathways, but they’re now back. They churned because the CEO got fired, but now they’re back. Jen Kamara wasn’t happy with Jacob or Ketsuya, had hired somebody else kind of already at that point though. Turbulence there early on because Nick, original Nick, quit writing after like a week, right? And then earn-in, bad multi-layer process, made it hard to get actual client feedback for Austin. And then momentum, where wasn’t happy with the writing quality of Remesh, sort of similar to what we’ve seen with Sarah, technical topic, Remesh unable to go into the technicals. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yes, okay. [Blake Emal]: That’s helpful. Okay, so most common is tone slash writing quality. Yeah. Good to know. I think I’ll align there. So some of the fundamental problems overall with ghostwriting and with things that we’re seeing that I put down is lack of results, slow to see, quick wins, misalignment on tone, not enough depth of knowledge in the content. And then on our side, seeing no client inputs. So we get broader content. Clients not having their own ops. So publishing becomes a whole issue for comms on our end also. So those are like, that’s just problems. That’s not solutions in terms of solutions. I kind of thought through three core buckets that we’ll touch on this number one, being onboarding number two, being in process. And then number three, post-mortem that’s more of a half topic. Cause the only thing for post-mortem that I would say is we should have one. I don’t know. What that looks like currently, but we don’t have to require them to give us huge documentation to quit or anything. I like making it flexible, but we should hop on a call with them and get their candid feedback on this stuff. I’m sure you’re already doing that, even if it’s just in Slack or whatever, but having a template that we follow, almost like an exit interview, so that we can create these patterns, like seeing this listed out here is super helpful. So just doing that for every client that leaves as well. But that’s more of a half one. So like most of it is on onboarding or pre-engagement, you could say, and then in process. And I kept coming back to this thought of there are long-term things that we can do, short-term things that we can do. I think it all starts with philosophy in our marketing. So like what Clifton does and what other ghostwriters kind of do, agencies do when they do it well, is all of their content is basically just sharing their content philosophies so that if some lead comes from that content, they instantly align with how you think. And so it’s just way easier to get them to click with your process and want to stick with you because they like, like Clifton social media content you’re talking about. Right. Yeah. So everything that’s pre like early funnel pre-engagement emails, whether it’s social content, those kinds of two core buckets, or even in sales calls to some extent, but hopefully before then, we’re creating organic stuff that is all about how to build an audience the right way and how we think about it, which would require us to, which is the next step is something that we can do now is to have an actual written down philosophy doc that kind of goes through. This is how we think about content, period. Cool. Like all of our rules, we can list that out. And then that, that helps us create content. That’s really focused on just that stuff. Give it to clients because then they’re like, all right, this is what I believe, too, because if they’re coming to us, they’re looking for an expert and they would like to align with our thinking. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. And we also that’s also going to maybe we even put that directly on the website, like a manifesto type scenario or our guidelines or guiding principles or whatever. But it would also inform as we start to think about because I have the designers working on a site right now. So it would it would influence even of how we structure that site. [Blake Emal]: Totally, yeah. Like a note from you, kind of like who does this? Intercom does this on their website. They have a note from the founder. Basecamp, like anything that they do, the 37 Signals guys, they always have a note from the founders. It’s a story, it’s a note. So that could be our manifesto of philosophy, how we think about content is how I would frame that. And then we put that multiple places. The website alone is gonna be huge for experts Cause then we can just have a brochure to go through how we think about things. But, and then we can list out our process there and everything too. So I think that part of it, the longterm is creating content based on the philosophy all the time. Short term immediate is create that doc or the manifesto. And then we just place it in different places. We make a PDF of it. We give it to the client when they’re in the sales calls and just make sure that like, Hey, does this sound good? We believe. We don’t really hear from this. [Michael Houck]: Do you want that? [Blake Emal]: Uh, that, that could help too. Uh, cause I know that we’ve talked about this before and you’ve assured me in the Slack that we’re not talking about going viral and we’re not talking about the, like they should in theory be aligned on expectations. Yeah. Somewhere along the way, they’re just still not, it’s a really weird phenomenon to me. [Michael Houck]: And I don’t fully understand it. I think the answer is just sort of being more clear in our materials and things like that. But yeah, it’s not clear because I had a, I had a sales call with somebody just yesterday. And so I like checked myself at the end, like, what did we talk about? There was no talk of like, oh yeah, we’re going to get you 10,000 followers in a month or something. Like there’s nothing like that. And so it’s weird that we’ve had people come in with that expectation. Maybe it’s because they know me and they see my threads go viral, you know, I don’t know. Yeah, it is different. [Blake Emal]: Cause like the kind of content we’re doing for them is not actually how you built your account a lot of the time, because threads just used to actually work. And now they don’t, you know, that’s not what works. It’s more about, can you show up all the time and you can build a loyal audience? [Michael Houck]: It’s just, you know what, you know what it might be. So the way to grow and the way to build an audience has changed, right? Because algorithms have gotten better. It is more about that loyal, that loyalty. Owns a consistency, exactly what you’re saying. And so maybe the fact that we’re packaging our pricing and our offer for Twitter, at least around like two threads a week or three threads a week or shorter form equivalents, maybe they’re expecting, they’re thinking, oh, threads, threads go viral. I’m expecting to go viral. [Blake Emal]: Yeah, I thought that too. I actually was thinking about, should we just kill the threads idea? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Blake Emal]: That’s not really the format anymore. We should play around with more stuff, because any time that I’ve had something do really well lately, it’s been a screenshot essay, or it’s been an asset that I created that’s just fully visual with a good hook, and it’s not actually fully written out a lot of the time. But that stuff still works, and we can accomplish client goals with that stuff. So I don’t want us to become a design shop or anything, but can we become a little bit dangerous at creating more more screenshot essays, more assets, even if it’s just basically a screenshot of an Excel sheet or whatever, like I’ve done that stuff and it’s gone viral, so. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. [Blake Emal]: I mean, like being flexible there and getting really clear on it could help a ton too. [Michael Houck]: It would be really easy for us to bring on, because all those screenshots, it’s just like Canva templates that are like slightly tweaked, right? Yeah. And so it would be really easy for us to hire a super cheap, like Upwork designer who specifically does Canva, and just have them on staff. And then if one of the writers is like, oh, you know, I wanna do a screenshot essay this week about, you know, some topic, then they write it out, they write out the copy, they send it to them, they get it back, right, during the week. Yeah, I like that idea. [Blake Emal]: I will express one concern that I’ve seen from that. Go for it. They tried to do that at StoryArb, and the writers just don’t feel like putting in a request for it. Because it already takes so long to get feedback from the clients and stuff. So if you add more stuff into that process, they feel like it’s just never going to get done. We would have to be, I don’t, we’d have to find a way to like get the designer more proactive about stuff. Like the designer that we would work with shouldn’t wait for writers to just request stuff. They should go into every post and see like, could I make a visual from this? And if so, what would that look like if they were more proactive, I think it’d be awesome. Cause we get visuals on everything, but if we’re asking the writers to come up with the idea and write it, and then also come up with an image and put in a brief to the writer or to the designer, whatever, you know, more from these writers, like the more you ask from them, the less quality you’re going to get. [Michael Houck]: That, that makes sense as like a principle. What if we templatized it? Right. So what if we onboard a new client, right. And we, you know, we match them with one of the writers and we tell the designer, Hey, we have a new client. Can you create a new screenshot essay template for that client? And then anytime we want to create one, the writer would be able to say, Oh, this is the medium for this idea. Let me template that already exists rather than having to send a request back and forth. [Blake Emal]: Yeah. I love that. So like if, if for each account, the designer instantly created three different options. So like a light mode, a dark mode, and then a brand color mode for screenshot essays. And then you patch it in and then do the same thing for like, all right, if we wanted to do an infographic, this is the background. And then if you wanted something deeper, then they could request it. My hunch is that the writers still would probably avoid trying to do posts that required reaching out to the designer just because it’s extra work. [Michael Houck]: Wait, they wouldn’t need to reach out to the designer though, in that scenario. [Blake Emal]: No, I’m saying if they were trying to do a full infographic, then they couldn’t use a template because it would have to be something that’s like created. But if it’s a screenshot essay, you’re totally right. They can just patch in the content and it’s the same every time. And then they’d have three different color ways they can choose from so that it’s not, the client would feel there’s some optionality on that. But that part would suffice. If we’re talking like unique data, then of course that’s going to have to be custom made. Yeah. I mean, I’d be more like if the client requested that, then we would get the designer on it instead of expecting like the writer to proactively come up with infographic ideas. It’s a little bit different, I guess, skillset to ideate that compared to content. But yeah, that’s what I saw with like story art. They tried to do that and nobody used it. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. I, what I’m hearing is that there’s two separate things here. We need the templates for the screenshot essays that the writers can feel comfortable just popping their words into. And we also need a proactive designer who’s going to look through the posts and every week, you know, create an infographic for maybe one or two or X number of our clients. And that way there’ll be like little surprises because the client’s not really paying for that. They’re paying for the X number of things from the ghost writer. But if they also get these little surprise in the lights, it can actually be a good thing. Totally. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Blake Emal]: I think the surprise in the lights delight part of it is huge. If a designer can be proactive and is like trained to look for one per week, that would make a good infographic. They should do that and just add it in. And then if the client doesn’t want to use it, they don’t have to, but most of the time they probably will. So yeah, I think that part’s pretty sweet, actually. [Michael Houck]: We should definitely do that. Okay. I can find a designer to do that and then we will incorporate the sort of screenshot essay template options design just as a part of onboarding when new clients join, the designer will by default go in and create those so that the writer has them at their beck and call by the time they start creating the content in the third week. [Blake Emal]: Cool. I’m just putting a note in that you’re doing that. And then I’m going to work on the philosophy thing. And then we can collab on that once I have some bullet points in there. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Sounds good. Okay. [Blake Emal]: Other ideas? I’m just going to try to blitz through stuff on the input gathering side of things some of my thoughts I’m trying to figure out if this is the right kind of zag most like 99% of the time process for ghostwriting is kick off immediately then week of context gathering kind of like you know what we’re doing basically and then you start writing as quick as you can I’m wondering if we flip that on its head a tiny bit and actually don’t do a kickoff call in the traditional sense but we do context week. So like the whole first week is the context gathering that to me kind of seems like it gets swept under the rug a little bit right now because the kickoff is treated as more important. And so then after the kickoff, it’s just like, Hey, when you get a chance, send over any docs or whatever. That’s problematic because a lot of the time they’re going to be some clients that definitely do have all of their docs and they can share stuff. But a lot of time they have have no clue what you’re talking about. They don’t know messaging docs or positioning. They haven’t thought through whatever. So I think we should create context docs for each of those core things that are important to us. Specifically around the question you like asking is which accounts do you like that you want to be like, right? We do have documentation kind of around that, but how do we make a template of it and require them to fill that out? Day one, day two. All right. You may not have a messaging doc, but this is the template and you’re going to fill it out. And so then we put them through the ringer a little bit in week one. Not ideal because there’s some friction there, but long run makes it way easier. And then at the end of that week, we have the kickoff call. And then the kickoff call doesn’t become like watching Jacob input notes. It becomes more like, all right, I have some context here. Let’s flesh out some initial ideas and figure out what you’re going to like, [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I’ve noticed Jacob and Austin both doing this pretty well already on the kickoffs, which is, yes, they’re following the script and they’re asking the questions, but they’re also going one level deeper. They’re asking follow-ups, they’re following rabbit holes, and they’re sort of getting that additional context. And I think it makes the writer trust them, the client trust them more. So from that perspective, I like it. I think my concern would be like, okay, a question I guess would be, what happens if we’re at the end of the first week, the client has filled none of it out, right? Do we just postpone the kickoff call? Like, hey, we can’t do this until you give us this context and sort of make it a forcing function. Or, you know, do we relent and we’re like, oh, well, they’re just going to churn. And maybe it’s fine if they churn because they don’t seem very interested anyway. I don’t know. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Blake Emal]: I almost was wondering if like, it’s not ideal to have that be like a free trial. A week, that may not be the right way to look through it. But what if before they, but like kickoff is the day that we initiate everything. So payment goes through or I don’t know, we can figure that out. But like kickoff initiates the actual work and the context comes before it. And this is a forcing function to get to that point. So if you want words, you have to do this. [Michael Houck]: I get that there’s friction there though. Like it’s not. I think that I don’t think we can postpone collecting payment. I think that’s, that puts it at risk. I think I do the sales call with them. I close them over email, make the purchase. When they make the purchase, we set up the Slack channel in the welcome message in the Slack channel. We say, Hey, here are the four things you need to do. We’ll tentatively schedule a kickoff for this date. Please complete them before then. And we’ll remind them throughout that week to get them to us. I think that’s probably a best case scenario. It’s not a perfect solution, but I think it’s probably going to lead to the least amount of wasted time for us. [Blake Emal]: I like that. Cause you know, people show up to our kickoff calls without any idea what they’re really doing anyway. And then after if, if they backload the not giving us context, which happens all the time, then it’s almost worse than if they front load it. Cause then if, if they go a whole week and don’t give us anything, we can still hop on the call and say, hey, just so you know, this can’t be a kickoff call because we haven’t had these things, but maybe we can work through some of it together. So then there’s an opportunity to move things along even then, and we probably need more context. So I would think like action item there is create a template for those things like your messaging, what you like, what you don’t like, Maybe we should flesh that out a little bit more over Slack before I actually build those out. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Blake Emal]: Or five docs that were like, Hey, once per day until the kickoff do this. And this is going to give us a lot more. Cause I think this helps solve the tone thing a little bit. If they can actually articulate and be forced to go through our template and figure out everything that we want, like we can figure out everything that they want. Um, I think that one thing I’m also going to create is a sales doc along with this. [Michael Houck]: I don’t necessarily need to walk through it with them on the call. I mean, maybe I can. In some cases, I can test that out, but I want them to know what they’re getting into. Just another way to set expectations, be like, Hey, this first week, you’re going to have to do stuff, right? You’re going to have to do this stuff before we sit a writer down with you and have them, have them get started. So I can create a notion doc. That’s like a, like a sales, a sales doc, basically that I send them. I either send them before a call to it on the call with them. [Blake Emal]: Yeah. Okay. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Cool. [Michael Houck]: Sweet. All right. [Blake Emal]: So I’ll brainstorm templates and we can keep that going. And then like next week I can build those out and then you create the sales doc and then we should have multiple touch points of these are expectations where we should be more aligned there. Do you have, I know we’re kind of like at time. [Michael Houck]: I got time. I got time. Okay. [Blake Emal]: Next thing was on writer selection. So one thing I’ve noticed with how we currently do things is new client comes in, and then you let me know kind of your initial thoughts and where you’re leaning. And then I’m just like, yeah, that sounds good. Or I would go this way. I’m wondering if there’s a more strategic way to do this, where we almost create a database of our writers’ samples anonymously, so that they don’t know who our writers are beforehand. But they each have a gallery and notion of their samples. So we would ask each of them, take your five favorite short forms that you’ve done for yourself or for someone else and your five favorite long form. And we’re going to put it into your own card in Notion and anonymize all of it. The client gets to see that and peruse through all of them. And they don’t necessarily get final say on everything. Like it’s anonymized. So ultimately we can make the final call still on who we think is going to be best. [Michael Houck]: But it’ll make them feel better, make them feel good. Yeah. [Blake Emal]: So it accomplishes a few things. They get to pick the writer so they’re more on the hook if the writer fails. So they’re less likely to want to churn or have another writer. But they just get a better sense of like, oh, this for some reason, this one’s tone or the way they format things. I think this is kind of the style that I want to do. Yeah, it makes it way easier to narrow down. And then we would ask them to basically pick a top three. So then we have choices and we can pick amongst those. And they don’t have to know that who we picked was exactly they picked. Work, but it helps give us more data as well. So I just thought like, that’s a pretty easy, quick win to make everybody feel better. [Michael Houck]: The most interesting part of this actually is something that you didn’t say, which is that if they do choose to switch writers, I think in this scenario, they will be significantly less likely to churn and they’ll be more likely to accept another writer. And the reason for that is twofold. One, they pick this top three at the beginning and two, they don’t don’t lose trust in us because they made the choice. So I think we’ll see more second chances given in these scenarios with this system. I love it. [Blake Emal]: I think it’s great. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Cool. [Michael Houck]: I’m going to set that up next week. Writer, samples, database. Okay, cool. [Blake Emal]: I’ll share this Notion doc with you after too. Yeah, please do. I’m not even sharing my screen, I just realized. [Michael Houck]: I’m taking notes in our Slack combo right now. This is my last idea for onboarding. [Blake Emal]: This will be pretty quick. For the first batch of content, I think it all has to be templatized. That gives us a quick win to instantly get this stuff written really, really quickly. So by templatized, I mean, post number one is an intro post every time. It is not a random thought leadership thing of any kind. It is an intro post to the client where we dive into their story. So it’s like, these are the interesting things in my background that have led to what I’m talking about right now. And this is what you can expect from me. Those posts always do well. So we get them initial quick win. Post number two is more of like a mission post. So it’s like, now that you know my story, this is kind of what I’m building now and why I’m building it and why you should care about it. And then post number three would be, all right, now let’s start getting into some fun stuff. Here are some hot takes or POVs that I have. And then it’s like a listicle post of 15 hot takes or POVs that they have. And the reason why I wanna include that one is because then it’s so easy. If we can get them to agree with all of those hot takes or we get those directly from the client, we learn a ton about how they think and the different contrarian angles that we can take that we’ve already approved. But then also every single one of those within that list can just become its own long form post. So we’re basically bringing like 15 to 20 posts right off off the bat, just based on hot takes. So if we do those three templated posts, that’s usually, that’s the maximum batch that anyone can really have anyway. I don’t think we have any clients that are doing five, right? [Michael Houck]: So. Well, it depends how long the posts are, right? If these are shorter posts, then yeah, we have people. [Blake Emal]: Yeah, I’m thinking longer posts. I mean, for each client, it can depend. We can mix it up a little bit. If we just create basically templates to follow, or just give a lot of examples for what each of these looks like, and then expect that the first batch is these three types of posts every time. Then the writer almost buys time, because they’re already on the second batch before they have to start thinking about all of the deeper knowledge stuff, like while they’re still gathering context. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I like that a lot for that reason. It removes the stress from the writer’s side and lets them just get up to speed. Also, we’ll see how the audience reacts to those things and what they comment on and stuff like that. One other thing that thought there is like, well, that’s good for social media. It doesn’t really do anything for newsletters, but each newsletter is going to be its own sort of specific case anyway. So I don’t know if we need something there for newsletters. Yeah. I don’t. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Blake Emal]: Template for newsletter. They’re probably already writing something or have within the past few months or whatever. So I don’t think we need like an intro post or a template like that. So definitely more social. But another thing that this does ties into is this idea I keep coming back to across the board of maybe they’re just not seeing enough quick wins, and that’s a big reason why they lose momentum right away. Because so many clients are not publishing, which we’ll dive into in a second, because maybe they’re not seeing anything go quote unquote viral or even do better than their average stuff. They don’t see a quick win, so they don’t see any wins, and they just get discouraged. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, and really quickly, they’re like, why am I paying two or three K a month for this? I mean, we saw what we saw with Brindis, her first post, it didn’t even go crazy viral. It was like 200 likes or something like that, 300 likes, maybe, which is good. Right. But the fact that that was her first post, she now trusts us. Right. Jacob has her trust and You know, it’s we’re in a really good place there. That’s huge. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Blake Emal]: And I just I pick these templates for a reason, because especially the intro post, it always does well like every time even if it’s not that good if you’re just saying hey I’m back this is what I’m talking about here’s my interesting story just works so we we kind of build in a quick win there um and then along those lines as we go into like the in-process stuff one thing I was going to ask is about the megaphone integration here yeah because I know I’m I’m sure that you’re like pushing perks that way I’m just wondering how we can stretch the limits to how much free stuff we give them to where it still makes sense. Because if we’re just like chucking megaphone people at them and instantly getting them wins, that could be huge. But again, I don’t want them to rely on that. Oh, I see what you’re saying. [Michael Houck]: You’re saying, can we throw some big creators at their first post basically? Right. Yeah. [Blake Emal]: Like from the, from the people that are actually going to make an impact and help their first post do really, really well. But then ideally you would just want that for every single post so that they keep But you also, I don’t want them to rely on that to do well. I want their content to independently do well. But again, coming back to quick wins, if we give them some free engagement on their first batch or whatever, that could help. [Michael Houck]: Ramesh actually mentioned this and I’ve talked to other agency owners and they’ve sort of echoed what he said, which is basically that, you know, more so with Twitter than with LinkedIn. I don’t think anybody else really has the network that we do on LinkedIn. But on Twitter in particular, they’re all doing this. When they post a thread, they just send it to the seek mastery, like, you know, growth mindset and on pages. And they get them like, you know, the few thousand free impressions and then they see how it does from there basically. But creating that baseline for people could be good. I mean, it’s an investment, right? Because when we think about expenses per account, right now. We have the writer, which is roughly half in most cases, 50% margin from there, usually a little bit up, a little bit down, depending. We have the content ops hours. So Ben’s been doing this next week. We’re working on finally outsourcing it, not outsourcing it, but delegating it to Rina. So it’d become a lot cheaper at that point. But then yeah, there’s that, which probably brings our margin down a little bit. And then there’s like, okay, well, if we’re going to send them these free creators, through Megaphone, that could be, I don’t know, depending on how many posts we do it for, maybe we give them a hundred bucks free credits and we split that out over the first three posts or something like that. That wouldn’t be too bad, honestly, really wouldn’t be. Might be worth it. [Blake Emal]: I mean, if a hundred bucks and then they decide that week that they like us, that’s probably worth a hundred bucks. I mean, definitely it’s worth, it’s probably worth 10,000 bucks if they decide that they like us within the first week. [Michael Houck]: It might, it might also get them to use megaphone more and actually spend more money with us too. [Blake Emal]: Yeah. The only, the only question there would be how much do we let them know about it? Like, do we want them to know that we’re using the phone? Do we, do we want to, I don’t know, like, could you go both ways with that? Let them know. And then maybe they use megaphone more or don’t let them know and just let them enjoy the quick win and not think about where it’s coming from, you know? Um, but anyway, I thought we can just noodle on that more. Because we could do that at any time. I just thought that could sweeten the pot for that first week. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Cool. [Blake Emal]: Next thing was scheduling. This is more just a problem because people don’t schedule their stuff out a lot of the time, and then they’re not publishing. So I think the solution is basically require that we publish for people. I don’t know. It’s not the most perfect. I think that’s kind of gone that direction anyway, right? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, honestly, people want it, like nobody wants the hassle of doing it themselves. And it’s not that big a lift. Some of the writers like Jacob and Austin are already scheduling stuff in their typefully account for them or whatever. So yeah, I mean, and if not, we can just buy a typefully account again, another hit to the margin, but not that bad. It’s like, what, like 40 bucks a month or something like that. So you can just buy one for them and set it up that way. [Blake Emal]: It might be worth it. And then just have Ben or Rena run the rodeo there. They’re in charge of patching stuff in and scheduling it out. And that way, basically what I was thinking was like, in the feedback process, we just make the date, when they approve it, the client, they should look at that date and know that that’s when it’s going live. And if they want that to change and not go live, they need to communicate with us. We’ll accommodate it. But otherwise we are going to, once you say it’s approved, we believe you and we’re going to schedule it on the day that we said without any questions. I think that’s probably better process just across the board and eliminate for the most part, any custom scheduling that people want to do on their own and just say, we’re taking it over. And that way we can get publishing right away. It’s probably the smart thing to do. I think it’s smart. [Michael Houck]: I agree. Okay, cool. [Blake Emal]: Oh gosh, the last two, I don’t think we really wanna dive into too much. I think they’re bigger topics, like feedback and comms, basically. We already talked about comms, so I don’t think we have to tackle that too much, but just dedicated daily movement of some kind, whoever’s doing it. If the channels feel dead during the week, then the client’s dying too, probably. And so that’s just never a good sign. We need to be sharing tips, updates, whatever, asking questions, asking for ideas, giving ideas like every day, every weekday, at least that should be normal. And if not, then we should flag it as a concern. Cause like for the most part, if we haven’t heard from anybody in the channel since Monday, that’s probably more a bad sign than a good sign. So that’s the only thought there, but I think we’ve kind of talked through that a little bit. A little bit. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. I think we need to put some more thought into like what that looks like, I think, you know, what we really need to avoid is adding, by adding process, also adding like operational complexity, right? So what we need to be creating is just like self-sustaining loops. Like, okay, you know, Jacob writes the content in typefully, then every week Rima schedules it for the next week. And then she sends a message in Slack saying these posts scheduled for these days. Like we need that to happen automatically without you or I needing a single thing. [Blake Emal]: Yeah, totally. Yeah, I agree. There’s there’s a ton of this we could automate, for sure. I think we also can automate like messages going to the writers every Monday saying, Hey, it’s idea day. Did you send your ideas yet? I think I’ve had that in place before. But I don’t know if it’s firing now. [Michael Houck]: Okay. I mean, I can set up automations like that, too. So just Let me know what you need from me there, what ideas you have that we could do. [Blake Emal]: Yeah. I can probably just do it, but I think we’re good on that. The last thing was just the post-mortem. So just have a template where we ask them to meet with us when the client turns. But that’s everything. So I think that based on the action items for you, it was talking about or finding potentially a designer for screenshot templates, and then potentially proactively looking for one infographic per week. And then you’re going to create a sales doc around expectations and process. And then on my end, I’m going to work through the philosophy stuff and templates for the pre-engagement context that we want from clients. And then also the writer sample database. So those are the things. [Michael Houck]: And I’ll change our pricing to not be focused around threads. Like when I’m talking about pricing, we’ll just talk about More generally, we’re taking over your account. You know, there’s an argument to be made to not have the cheaper tier and just have the $29.95 a month tier and just say, hey, you want social media from us? We take over the account. [Blake Emal]: It's $3K a month. That’s it. Yeah. I kind of like that idea. Yeah, me too. The more that we have different plans, different channels, like different everything, it definitely adds complexity where it doesn’t help. [Michael Houck]: I think now that we’re moving away from threads, it doesn’t make as much sense either. We can just have one price for social, one price for newsletters, and that’s it. Yeah, I like it. [Blake Emal]: I mean, eventually we could even do like a, it wouldn’t change the pricing of things, but we can almost do like a quiz where you pick your format. Do you like screenshot essays? Do you like long form posts? Do you like whatever, just on social side, obviously. And then they could mix and match. It wouldn’t change the price necessarily, but we could just get, oh, they want two screenshots essays and one long form post, or they want 10 short form posts, then we just have an idea of clearly what they actually want. Because for Sarah, I kind of get where Romesh is coming from in some of her feedback, because she didn’t give feedback on what she actually really wanted a ton. And then all of a sudden, she’s like, I don’t actually like this format, or I don’t like this. And her feedback is also valid on the it’s not deep enough side of things. It’s not technical enough. I totally get that. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Blake Emal]: Feedback on formats and whatever. It’s like, yeah, we probably, you probably could have told us this a while ago that you didn’t want. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, but we didn’t, we didn’t ask probably. [Blake Emal]: Right. [Michael Houck]: So yeah, I like the idea of some sort of quiz or some sort of, um, I had something else written down about this too, but just as when we build the website, when we launched the website, which I would expect will be launched, um, either late December or early January. When that’s done, then yeah, we’ll want some way to like engagingly capture emails, like to get more emails from people. So a quiz could be a good way to do that. Oh, the other one was a free email course. So we could run even paid social ads against a free email course. I think that could be really good. We have this sort of perspective to be able to do that. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Totally. [Blake Emal]: I think that’s solid. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. So about Sarah and Ramesh then, I don’t know, where are you at with it? [Blake Emal]: Let me, let’s, let me just make sure I’m not changing what I’ve said before, because I thought, you know, like, where’s the last thing you said here? Okay. So Kestia, to me, is off the table. I just don’t think that she can write well. I don’t know. [Michael Houck]: That’s a key component of the job that we’re hiring her to do. [Blake Emal]: I don’t feel crazy confident about that. Andrew, I’d be comfortable with, but I don’t know if that’s necessarily a good enough reason to do it. Andrew’s good. [Michael Houck]: He’s like the boss. [Blake Emal]: Kind of stuff. But now it’s turned out that that’s just how Dan likes to write. So I feel more confident in Andrew again. [Michael Houck]: Well, yeah, I feel like Andrew is like the fallback here, right? Like we know we can we know Andrew will take feedback. We know that he will work hard for an account. Like he’s working for the multiple count. He’s like, I don’t think you’ve been in the DMs, but he’s he’s potentially saved that account. He’s like working with Keevin to try to save the account. We’ll see if it works. But like, I’ve been really impressed with with his dedication and effort there. Yeah, same. [Blake Emal]: He’s been awesome. He’s been messaging me about it too, and he’s got the right attitude about it. So I feel comfortable with him for sure. With Sarah, if he took on the account, I’d still say I would feel a little bit nervous that she’s still going to churn. But I don’t have a silver bullet in my pocket where I feel like if we put this writer on that account, we’re gold. Because the more technical When I look at the account, I don’t feel super clear on what topic she wants to really hammer home. I think a lot of it’s just been, what does your business do? And then we’re just going to write kind of adjacent to that. But I don’t, I would love to talk more with her about that, I guess, and get deeper feedback on what do you really want to write though? Cause we can keep coming up with ideas, but it might just be guesswork and we don’t want to do that. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: I don’t know. [Blake Emal]: Maybe, maybe it’s, Andrew, like if Grace struggles with more technical stuff, it’s just a shame with Romesh because I thought that he was more technical. Well, your stuff he was doing. [Michael Houck]: Grace, Grace doesn’t necessarily struggle with more technical stuff in general. That client was particularly challenging to work with. I would say like Grace almost quit the agency after working with that client. So. I wouldn’t put that all on her, but yeah, the other thing She can’t do the 2K a month tiers. Her rates just don’t make it make sense. [Blake Emal]: We’d make like 500 bucks a month on the account, it just wouldn’t make sense. Yeah, yeah, for sure. Okay, so Ketsey is out, Andrew’s maybe, Grace is probably out, and then the other writer, Jason, that you sent to me, I still haven’t gotten a sample back from him, but he’s willing to do it. How much do you wanna say we’d give him for a sample? [Michael Houck]: I mean, we need it by Monday for sure, I think. [Blake Emal]: Are we willing to give it like what, 50 bucks, a hundred bucks? [Michael Houck]: What’s- Oh, cost-wise, yeah, let’s give him a hundred bucks. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: That’s fine. [Blake Emal]: Okay. How should I set that up? Should I just like get him looped in with you or Rina or- For payment? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: Oh yeah, I’ll handle that with him. All right, cool. [Blake Emal]: I’m going to message him right after this and try to get that by Monday. I can’t make an assessment yet, but he has good sensibilities. I think I said that. I can see that he’s thinking about how to format things and how to create a structure and a hook and everything. I wasn’t blown away by any of it, but I wasn’t discouraged. All of it was short form, basically. So I need to see what she thinks. [Michael Houck]: I felt the same. Nick definitely oversold him to me, unfortunately, but it seemed like he has good instincts. He’s just green. He hasn’t done a lot of it yet and therefore needs to be kind of honed. And so the question is, will that happen quickly enough or will it be a ton of work on you? And if so, it’s probably not worth it to have to of coach him up or not. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. Yeah. [Blake Emal]: I mean, the other argument is if we’re feeling like we want to save the client, it depends on like how far past the 50 yard line we are with her. If we’re feeling like we can save this, if we do it right. I think we can save it. [Michael Houck]: I think we can save it. Yeah. [Blake Emal]: And Andrew might be better. I was going to say, if, if we’re feeling like, you know what, I feel like she’s just going to look for a way out either way. Then maybe it makes sense to get experimental in the door. Cause then we just give him reps. And it was going to go that way, you know, but if that’s not the case, Andrew might be the play here, but I’d still like to see what he’s got. Cause this is the kind of person that if he’s at least got decent instincts and understand structure and stuff, we can coach him up a little bit. He could be a diamond in the rough that we can really count on and price tag. [Michael Houck]: I think we’re on the same page there. I mean, look, I think, I think we’re on the edge of it not being recoverable for a third month. She’s already renewed for a second. So we’re good, but we’re two weeks away, or two and a half weeks away, I guess, from her renewing again. So I’m okay sort of giving it to the new guy and giving him reps. I feel like we’re teetering on the edge of being able to save it versus not, so it could go either way. [Blake Emal]: Yeah. I almost wonder, I don’t know, the timing then. Ramesh is still on board right now. And he was better this week, but he’s obviously not the solution. But now I’m like, do we just let him finish out the month and see if she renews and then transition or, but then that’s almost worse. I don’t know. It’s impossible to time this out where everybody’s cool with it. Cause changing writer, she’s not gonna be happy about it. [Michael Houck]: I mean, it could be. So, okay. The other angle here is that If we propose changing the writer proactively, she could take that as an excuse to churn, right? Yeah. Whereas if she comes to us and she says, hey, I’m thinking about churning or I want to churn or whatever, we could counter that by saying, hey, we have this other writer. We just signed him. We think he could be a good fit. Let’s try him for one month before calling it quits. And maybe she says yes to that. Yeah. Yeah. [Blake Emal]: I, I’m more, I think I’m more on board with the second one there. Oh, but I do see the risk. Like she could just take it as, Oh, cool. They don’t have confidence in this guy either. I don’t think they’re going to do good work for me. Yeah, that’s true. Um, but like, I, I, I kind of feel like for an account like this, my gut feeling that I’m leaning into is Sarah seems like she’s looking for excuses at this point. And I’ve had clients like that. And usually if you get them results, they still don’t care. They’re just looking for the next bad thing that’s going to happen. Um, that’s just my gut though. That could be wrong. So for a client like that, I’m more inclined to just take a flyer and see if we can swing for the fences on it. Cause Andrew’s not going to be, uh, probably not going to be a home run. It’s probably going to be like a BB plus for her. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I agree. Higher floor, lower ceiling. [Blake Emal]: I’m for it if you are, but again, I’m willing to help coach and stuff. We obviously have through the weekend here, if I can get Jason’s example or sample, and then I can see if he for sure would actually be able to deliver on that. But I think in the meantime, again, I think we need to figure out more topics that she wants to write about or just get more ideas on the table. Because we’ve pretty much gone through all the ideas, and Ramesh has not supplied new stuff. He’s also pretty confused about what’s going on in the account. I don’t know if he’s been messaging you at all about it. But he’s confused by Tara’s feedback. He’s like, should I create ideas for her? And I’m like, yes. Yes, create ideas. Even if you’re not totally sure, we need to be creating ideas for her to send. But yeah, I don’t know. That account’s kind of a mess now. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. I think he’s been a little, I don’t know. I gave him some pretty harsh feedback the one night. I was very direct with him. And so it sounds like he’s gotten better since then, which is good. But he hasn’t been sharing the confusion, because I think he’s worried he’s going to get fired if he seems too confused with me. [Blake Emal]: Yeah, for sure. I’ve been pretty straight with him, too. I’ve been like, man, what are you doing? You didn’t deliver again. Like, Hey, I saw that you shared two new posts with the client. I’m like, yeah, man, because you didn’t do what you said you were going to do. And we’re going to lose this client. Like, well, of course I shared, I had to write stuff for her. Like, yeah, he was, he’s been confused about that. We’ve, we’ve worked through things. He’s been more chipper this week. And he, he actually delivered, he did a bunch of short tweets and then he is delivering some longer ones too. So he kind of did extra this week, which I appreciated, but I don’t think it’s still going to be exactly what she wants. I think now she’s decided. Current writer isn’t it. [Michael Houck]: You know it’s funny because Nick would be like not the Nick that we currently sort of have in the loop but the engineer Nick would be the perfect fit for this client. Anyway okay so you in your mind she’s like Ramesh is not the guy. And that’s like a certainty for her. [Blake Emal]: Yeah, I think that she’s probably lost confidence that he can nail the tone. Even if he perfectly nailed it, I think that she would be looking for flaws at this point. [Michael Houck]: Okay, so let’s see what Jason comes back with. And if it’s good, maybe we decide on Monday to take the fire. If it’s not good, or if it is good, but maybe we decide anyway, we can say, hey, let’s do this December 1st instead of before Thanksgiving, when you might be out for a couple of days, you know? [Blake Emal]: Fair. Cool. I’m going to message him now. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Sweet. All right. [Michael Houck]: Send me that Notion doc from the stuff you had, and I can get started on my actions from it. [Blake Emal]: Cool. Sounds good.