- Duration: 63 min
- Platform: zoom
- Source: Read.ai 01JD33GZHZPH2KCQ26MN89Q1M6 (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JD33GZHZPH2KCQ26MN89Q1M6)
Transcript
[UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. Yo, what’s up, man? [Michael Houck]: Looks like you’re outside. [Austin Schlessinger]: Looks nice. Outside because. My wife has been out for 48 hours. Jumping from Wi-Fi coffee shots, the coffee shop. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Oh, shit. [Michael Houck]: Power outage or weather related or what’s going on? [Austin Schlessinger]: I guess an outage. I don’t know. I’ve been in contact with the internet company nonstop because I’m like, dude, I work on the internet. And I didn’t realize how stressful it would be to not have internet until I haven’t had internet for two days. So yeah. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: I was actually thinking about this a lot recently in the lead up to the election, because I was worried that if one side won the popular vote and the other side won the Electoral College, that one of those would be aggressive and it could cause some internet outages. And so I was like, what would I do if I didn’t have internet? And it’s not fun. I don’t envy it. [Austin Schlessinger]: Now I was like, I should just get a hotspot or something. I was trying to work off the hotspot on my phone, but that wasn’t, that’s not that great. So I need some sort of risk mitigation. [Michael Houck]: You got to get Starlink or something, I guess. Yeah. There’s the solution. Um, cool. We’ll wait for them to pop in. Um, I, I have to clarify the billing thing. I don’t know if you have context on this. I think Nicole was the enemy about it. Basically, uh, when Tom went to pay, he paid for two subscriptions at once. And so since it’s such a large amount, I can’t like easily refund them that because Stripe like blocks it or something. So we’re just gonna apply it to the second month. So basically they paid up front for two months already, but he has a question about like the accounting side. [Austin Schlessinger]: So I wanna get that out of the way with him at the beginning before we sort of dive into everything. [Michael Houck]: But yeah, how’s everything going otherwise? You guys all settled in down there now? [Austin Schlessinger]: Yeah, pretty much everything’s settled in. Still waiting on some furniture, but it’s really nice. The weather’s been really great and just getting back into a routine of things has been nice. Living on a hamster wheel for a while, but yeah, things are good. [Michael Houck]: What, what part of the state are you guys in again? [Austin Schlessinger]: We’re right outside of Sarasota and Tampa in a town called Bradenton. [Michael Houck]: Well, yeah, I, I know like South Southern, a little further South Florida, um, very well, but, um, that area is really nice. Actually. Nice pick. The weather is beautiful. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Austin Schlessinger]: No more Jersey, right? No more cold. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Austin Schlessinger]: I just got to find my people, you know, in Jersey, New York, it’s, uh, it’s happening. There’s lots of people doing things. [Michael Houck]: So, yeah, that’s the truth. That’s the truth. Um, well, I’m sure you will. I’m sure there’s people down there. Yeah. Um, okay. Let me shoot Nicole a note. Cause we’re about five minutes over and I want to make sure we get to everything. [Austin Schlessinger]: Um, where’s our channel with them. So what is Nicole’s relationship with Antela? I think she’s also involved. [Michael Houck]: How does that work? She didn’t invest her money in it. I think I think she’s just like the CEO operator and Tom is like the The chairman slash investor. I don’t know the exact relationship, but Nicole is is the operator as far as I know. She said that they became friends because they like worked in the same coworking space a long time ago and they’ve and looking to do a project together and this is it. Okay, so they’re on a call wrapping it up. So they’ll be here in a minute. [Austin Schlessinger]: Yeah, things are good, man. [Michael Houck]: It’s actually really good. Last week, I spun up a new sort of arm of the holding company where we’re helping out newsletters with email growth. My friend, Matt is like a, you know, he’s like a Teal fellow, YC guy. And he’s built this crazy email process and system. And I was like, we should just build a business around this to help people scale up to the newsletters really quickly. So we did like a pilot with my newsletter. It’s working really well. So now in the last like week, we’ve gotten from zero to 10 K and are selling it to other people. And a lot of those people are going to want us to write the newsletter too. So it’s going to be really good for for the Ghost Writing Agency, too. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Oh, that’s cool. [Austin Schlessinger]: So we’ll see how it goes, but off to a very good start. And how’s Megaphone? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, it’s good. Growing as normal. Chipping new features and stuff, all good. Looks like Tom is here. There we go. Hey guys. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Good to meet you. [thomasmeister]: Yeah. Good to meet you guys too. How you doing? [Michael Houck]: I’m good. I’m good. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Thanks. [thomasmeister]: And you? Yeah. Good. [Michael Houck]: Are you in NSF? Oakland. [thomasmeister]: Actually, Nicole and I often work out of the same office. I’m just working from home today. But how about you guys? New York for me. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Oh, nice. [Austin Schlessinger]: Now I’m in Sarasota, Florida. [thomasmeister]: Nice, very cool. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I lived in SF for like a little over three years when I was at Uber and then Airbnb. Very, very fun place. Nowhere like it. The density of smart people is just, it’s unbeatable. [thomasmeister]: Yeah, I’m biased because I’m from Northern California, but I like it, obviously. It’s a little bit different post-COVID, But you know, home is home. [Michael Houck]: So yeah, I feel yeah, I left actually during COVID. Yeah, we were in SF and we moved. [thomasmeister]: We moved out here to the Oakland Hills like right when COVID was happening. We were in which part of SF for you and we were there versus in the mission then actually went down to Bernal Heights. [Michael Houck]: Get a little like more neighborhood quiet vibe. It was nice. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Oh yeah. [thomasmeister]: Both those are great. Like we were in we were in Nopa, if you know, we’re like if you ever went to Nopalito restaurant, we were in like the kind of running a condo in the building above it. But it was like right across from the DMV. And like people kind of overstate the San Francisco, how bad it was and is. I mean, it was pretty bad for a while, but we were like a start of it. It was like it was like as movie because they had the homeless tents like at the DMV across the street. And it was just like, you know, you see, we’d go walk the dogs in Golden Gate Park and there’d be people like like this guy had like a punching bag like hung up like it was just like this dystopian kind of experience. [Michael Houck]: But yeah, when I was at Airbnb, I was still living in the mission. And my walk was I was at like Dubose in Valencia and my walk was under the overpass. Down to Brandon Street. That every day being the walk to work was very dystopian. Everything you can imagine and more. Yeah. But I wanted to quickly note the billing things. [thomasmeister]: We just get that kind of out of the way. [Michael Houck]: So it looks like when you went to sign up, I don’t know if you like click the button twice or if it’s just process twice, whatever. I’ve canceled the second one. So that obviously won’t be charged. Again, and I can add a promo code to the first, like actual subscription so that we just basically are applying the other payment to month two. Nicole mentioned there was some like accounting thing your account was like, I didn’t question. [thomasmeister]: So let me know what doesn’t whatever, whatever. Either either skip what I told them yesterday. My big thing like quick background me I know Nicole I was texting her I know she will be joining like I I run a family offset here. My background’s in financial technology and kind of structured credit, but most of my career has been in FinTech. I mentioned that not to blow hot air, but more so to say like probably like 60% of my day is like finger wagging at people that are asking for financing and telling and being like your books and records like show this, but like you’re saying that. And so I try to be not perfect, certainly, but I try to be pretty disciplined with my bookkeeper about that. So literally yesterday, I only saw it because yesterday I was reconciling the corporate credit card statement with them and they were asking me these questions. And so I told them to book, I didn’t know if we’d do a refund or a discount, but I was just like, whatever this one is, just book it. It either is going to be applied next month or it’ll be refunded. Either of those is good for me, I just need to let them know what to, let me just pull up because what they did. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I would have caught it when I went through our books at the end of the month, but glad you did now. And yeah, I think I went to go refund it just because that would have been, I think, the simplest, cleanest way to do it, but Stripe literally didn’t let me do it because the amount was so high. I think that the easiest logistical way is for you guys on your side to just sort of apply that to month two. And we’ll add the promo code to not charge next month on our side. Okay. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [thomasmeister]: This part won’t be in the movie, but I literally have an email from her this morning saying she looked into it. She’s going to book it as a receivable. So I think that works great. Cool. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. [Michael Houck]: Good. Good, good, good. [thomasmeister]: And this is the kind of fun stuff we’re going to help, you know, cannabis and hemp entrepreneurs. It looks like we got Nicole in the house. Hi, sorry I was late. [Nicole Jarbo]: It’s it’s one of those weeks and it’s Tuesday. But did you guys get to Tom, did you get to introduce yourself? Because I know these two. So, yeah, yeah, we were just just catching up. [thomasmeister]: And you missed the super exciting billing, billing and accounting discussion, which but which you’ll get to read on meeting notes, maybe. But yeah, it’s scintillating. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I guess, I mean, Tom, just I can give you some background on Austin can do the same. So yeah, so I’m Michael, did the big tech thing for a while, as I mentioned, I was part of the early team at Breitz and then became product manager for Airbnb Plus. Plus got laid off, the whole team got laid off during COVID. And so I founded a company called Launch House. We raised We ended up raising a Series A from Andreessen Horwitz. And we also then raised a venture fund to invest in a lot of our customers, AKA members who are founders. Raised about a $10 million fund, ran that for about two and a half years. And then more recently been building up a personal holding company, a couple of media assets, a couple of agencies, a SaaS business. And that’s been a lot of fun, totally bootstrapped. And met Nicole at this point, like a long time ago, but it’s like a year and a half ago. And we’ve just been sort of collaborating on various things ever since. And it’s been it’s been great to work with her. [Nicole Jarbo]: So excited to help you guys out with this. Awesome, good to meet you. Yeah, I just like collect random people. Tom is like one of those dudes, too, in my life. Internet friends. Yeah. Did you did you do your intro, Tom? [thomasmeister]: Just super quickly, but Austin, I know you’re in Sarasota. So to Florida, but yeah, if you don’t want sharing a little bit about yourself, not to do the performative thing, but just to get to know you a little better. [Austin Schlessinger]: Yeah. So my name is Austin Schlessinger. I work full-time as a sales engineer at a cybersecurity company, but I also am a ghostwriter. I’ve been ghostwriting for the past four years for 15 clients across various industries. I haven’t written for cannabis. This company yet, but excited to learn about the space. I also have around 16,000 followers on X and periodically write a newsletter. So I create in my free time as well. But curious to learn a little bit more about what we are looking to do here. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Awesome. [Austin Schlessinger]: Sorry, was I cutting out the whole time? [Michael Houck]: No, I heard. Okay. Um, cool. Yeah. I mean, uh, Tom, if there’s anything else, I know we kind of like did like a sort of spontaneous pseudo intro. If you want to do anything else, feel free, but if not, we can, we can just jump right into it. [thomasmeister]: No, I’m not happy to jump in. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. Cool. Um, okay. [Michael Houck]: Well, I’m going to turn it over to Austin. This is kind of his meeting. Um, and he’s going to run through just some questions that we have to sort of, you know, help us get to know the audience a bit better and what you guys are looking for. Obviously, Nicole, I know you filled out that type We went through that, but these are just some questions to go a little deeper and hear from both of you guys. And then at the end, we’ll circle back around on next steps and getting started and timeline and all that. Any questions that you guys have, feel free to jump in and ask us as we go. Awesome. Let me make sure you can share your screen because I know that the permissions on my account are sometimes wonky. Okay, you should be good now. [Austin Schlessinger]: Can y’all see my screen? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yep. Yep. [Austin Schlessinger]: Should be looking at Notion. All right. So you’ve already met me. First, I wanted to start with some outcomes for the meeting. So I want to define primary and secondary goals of the newsletter. Again, talk about exactly what audience you’re looking to write for, Nicole shared. Profiles and I loaded them into here but just have a few more questions about that then we’ll talk about content pillars so what specifically are you looking to to cover and kind of what content formats you’re looking to you’re looking to focus on then we’ll talk about a posting schedule when you want to post how frequently overview of the process and then just kind of answer any questions you have about that and then we’ll discuss next. Is there anything else you want to cover in this or is that good? So start with the first one here. What is the number one reason you want to build a newsletter? What’s kind of the primary goal, for example, is it to drive revenue, leads, just to kind of establish credibility and become an expert in the space? What’s the number one reason for having a newsletter? [Nicole Jarbo]: I can take these, Tom, and if you feel like you need to add, just jump in, because I know we’re a little late here. Yeah, so I think for us, the number one reason, well, first, we’ll start with the fact that we’re trying to stand up this sort of professional sort as marketplace for folks. So if you want a corollary or like a comparison, Fundera is a really good one, just kind of this SMB support. So just that background, I think is helpful as you guys do more research. But we want to hopefully connect people to meaningful financing products for them, meaningful professional services, whether that’s like marketing stuff, agency stuff. And then probably in the future, more on the production side of things, hopefully. And with that, the point of the newsletter is to build a media property that can actually drive leads for those prospective partner like companies and organizations. The goal would be that we drive really meaningful revenue via like affiliates slash referrals. So this is really sort of like a lead collector for us. Tom, would you say anything about that in particular? Like this is the thing that we actually wanna like nail if we get anything? [thomasmeister]: Yeah, I think within, Nicole, you mean specific to like how to sort of the referral, like monetization strategy? [Nicole Jarbo]: No, unless you think it’s important, but really like to me, our goal is like to cultivate one, drive leads, and two, secondarily, which obviously has more utility, like build a community of these like, you know, cannabis operators, leaders, et cetera. Yeah, that’s yeah. [thomasmeister]: The only thing I was as I look at your screen share, I don’t know if now or when we get to the the audience part, like the the thing that I think is really interesting about this space is a bit of a detour to to Nicole’s tee up is it’s it’s incredible. Fragmented kind of like by. Like it’s incredibly fragmented by by like legal structure, because in two in two respects, from the top down, there’s like hemp and cannabis. Right. And so like Austin and Florida, like where you are, there was like this amendment three that did not pass in the last cycle. Like Trump was on the side of the pro cannabis, like the pro like cannabis being like the plant itself has like a certain percentage, dry weight percentage of THC, like intoxicating cannabinoid, like, you know, chemical properties and hemp, like not. So there’s like that kind of divide just between like hemp versus cannabis. One is like federally legal. One is not hemp, which is federally legal, might not be state legal. And then, so there’s just this like really complicated, like fracturing of the market. And then because, effing complicated in that respect, the provision of services is really challenging, right? Like maybe you can do this in one state, but not another. Maybe the person that like does your transport can do it in this state, but not another. And so I think that’s like a really big opportunity. And what’s like a really growing, like a fast growing customer segment because people, younger people are consuming these products more than alcohol. Um, so viewed through that lens of just like extremely confusing kind of like fragmented markets with extremely confusing fragmented provisioning of services. I think the hypothesis here is that we can, as Nicole said, present this marketplace of B2B service providers, maybe with a little bit of emphasis on financial services to start because financing and access to payments is often very high within the SMB hierarchy of needs, but it’s not to say that there aren’t others. But again, the thing I’d emphasize is just the extreme fragmentation and then also the kind of tribalism around it where there’s like, Hemp versus cannabis is like, you know, is there’s this kind of conflict within the space. Nicole, I don’t know if I’m at least making contact with the ball here, but [Nicole Jarbo]: You’re you’re in the same ballpark. No, I’m just kidding. That was great. I wrote I dropped in maybe like a helpful note. So, you know, Tom’s describing the like actual opportunity here, which is like, it’s a super fragmented space. People want to get in. Regulations are up and down all over the place. And so if we can center any media properties or a brand in the future around being like a trusted source for people, like it doesn’t matter if you’re, you know, in California and all of this stuff is widely available, or you’re in Idaho where there’s like no chance of it happening. We do want to build like the trusted community for people who are enthusiasts or already operating the space. And so even if it’s not happening in your state, you can feel confident, like following us and knowing that like, we’re going to have the information as like the rest of the world catches up or like doesn’t. Right. So I kind of tried to sum it up a little bit in the chat, but I think that was right on, Tom. [Nicole Jarbo]: And I think the way that maybe that shows up in content is like, I think there’s like a, here’s an update. Like there’s a new rescheduling thing. Um, that’s really like useful. Right. But if it doesn’t impact your state, then the angle and the question is really around like, what does, what’s like the takeaway for like the broader industry versus like, if you’re, you know, if you’re in whatever, Ohio, you can do X, Y, Z now. Right. Like that is like a type of content. I think what the space is kind of missing overall is like, what’s the insight from regulation and from regulation changes that shift the way people like think about the opportunity in the space versus just like giving you like a ticker update about like how regulation is changing. [thomasmeister]: One thing, too, and I realize this may be like like Austin, please. Like reign me in if this is like overemphasizing the audience part of this, but, you know, we all know about sort of getting down to sort of reach those high intent, you know, kind of decision makers at these companies. I think when we think about like, I’ll talk about it as like a guy that’s used this type of strategy and financial services businesses, FinTech businesses before, right? The challenge in some of what Nicole, like, If you started to kind of do some initial research on the space, I think Nicole identified, this is really helpful kind of framework, I guess, that I borrowed from some of what you’ve called out, Nicole, that the space is either like, these are the hottest stock picks of Canadian tickers or whatever, or it’s like lawyers ripping bong hits on podcasts before they get into some really complicated explanation of FDA rescheduling. Neither of those I think is like super, super actionable or it doesn’t quite hit right. But if you think about like from a financial services perspective, I’ll just focus on that as like a B2B category B2B service providers within the space, you’re trying to reach an executive with some decision-making authority at like a company that actually has some value to you, right? And so I think some of the threads or topics that reverberate in the space, rescheduling, that’s super important. I think even just figuring out like, hey, how do I collect on this? How do I save money on my payment processing? What are my different options there? What’s a way for me to… I’d almost say thinking about the content itself in a way that almost presupposes that you have either a viable business that actually has a problem that a B2B service provider could utilize versus you’re somebody that just trying to learn. I think obviously all leads are good leads in some respect, but these would obviously be higher value. Or what are the indicia of somebody that’s starting a business that, again, can express some monetizable intent? You want legal services. You’re looking to lease office space. Things again, I think like the content itself being, I don’t know, keyed into somebody that’s … There’s almost sort of like some initial filtering of the content itself that you’re at least like, I don’t want to say a serious business person, but you’re, you’re thinking about issues that suggest that you have some high intent to [Austin Schlessinger]: pay for services, as opposed to just kind of kicking the tires on the space. It’s almost applying a frame to a news or driving some sort of insight that’s targeting somebody who is building something that has the the disposable income in order to pay for the services. We’re not just kind of broad stroke targeting any consumer of cannabis across the industry. It’s kind of, these are the specific people. [thomasmeister]: Yeah, I think like what Nicole has here, kind of founders and execs in cannabis and hemp, like you’re probably like what, Nicole, a CFO, probably C-suite or VP level. [Nicole Jarbo]: Yeah, like the hawks of the cannabis space. That’s like, you know, I think that we’re getting to like a good part on the like psychographic profile. So I think that, you know, if this works, this is sort of like the gateway, I guess, almost for people to, to, to find relevant, sort of like business products for them, right. So this is, this is like the place that we want folks to find their their cannabis forward design agency, right? Cause like there are some of these places like Design Bake and other places, you know, the financing piece comes from like Tom’s own background. And also there’s like a major structural and regulatory challenges like around that. Like not every bank right now is gonna fund this stuff. I mean, most don’t, or if they do, the terms are terrible for entrepreneurs. And so we wanna be like an entrepreneur, founder, cannabis or first publication. And I think the big thing is just trust, right? So when you’re looking to expand your operation, where are you going first? So I don’t know if that makes a little bit more sense or clarifies what you’re saying, Tom, but that’s kind of the way that I think about some of this. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. I think from both of you guys, it’s very clear now who we’re going after, which is great. And the type of kind of approach we want to take to build that trust with them. And, you know, it sounds like it’s not going to be too hard to differentiate ourselves in this market if there is that, like, you know, bifurcation of content today, and neither one is really appealing to this particular, or at least the reason that someone like this would go and read a newsletter on a recurring basis or something like that. So that’s all super clear. One thing I think maybe we can put a pin in it for now, maybe circle back at the end if we have time, or chat about it later. I know that we’re gonna be setting up, you guys have like leads that you wanna get in front of and we can set up some email campaigns to sort of loop them into the newsletter in a very organic way. When we have that marketplace and everything ready to go and sort of in a place where you guys wanna drive a lot of traffic to it, we should revisit this because we’ve recently set up basically a process where we can get interest-based targeting at the email level. So you can do like the type of targeting you would normally get on people’s social media news feeds, but you can get directly in their inbox rather than them having to click through something. And no other email provider, it’s not like job titles on Apollo. This is interest-based, it’s one level deeper, sort of rebuilt the interest-based social graph, but with emails. And so that’s something that we’ve just started rolling out to some folks who work We’ve used it on my newsletter with a lot of success over the past few months as like a pilot. So when the time comes, we really want to start driving traffic. That’s something that we should definitely revisit here because this demo in particular, I think, you know, would resonate with the content once we get things set up. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Great. Right. [Austin Schlessinger]: So I feel like we have a good grasp of the audience and I’ll summarize it. All these things and send them back to you guys just to confirm. But all this was really great. One other thing on the goals piece, and I feel like we’ve talked about it a little bit, but what needs to happen for this to be considered a success? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Good questions. [Nicole Jarbo]: I think in the short term, we want to be able to put out and grow the newsletter to like, I don’t know, a monetizable like list, which I think is for what we’re doing and how you’re really the expert, you guys are the experts here. So like, I’m thinking that’s probably somewhere between like 700 and like 1200 high quality like subs. And so to me in the short term, and I would say this is like over several months is probably, like how I think about that part of the question. I think in the medium term, right, we’ll just say like is whatever, like a year to two years. I think we wanna be at a place where it makes sense for us financially because like real leads are being driven to like our partners. And so I think we wanna be at a place where we can meaningfully reinvest in the newsletter to like accelerate like growth, right? And so if, I mean, again, I’m just throwing random stuff out there, but I think this looks like, you know, the 5,000, 7,000 to 20,000 mark really just depending on what we see. I think because our space is so new in terms of like better branded offerings on the B2B side, there’s just going to be like a question mark. But I think initially it’s like consistency, decent content and high quality like subs and getting the letter to a place where we could monetize it even on its own. Own. Instead of just, you know, our model is our model, and that’s where we want to invest over time. But if we can sell ads, because we’ve got 1200 folks, that’s a win too. And then I, you know, I think long term, we step on the gas. And this really is a meaningful driver of revenue across a variety of different, you know, opportunities. So our referrals, ads, you know, anything else down the pipeline that like makes sense, like our own branded products in these areas too. But I think those are probably like the top three important things. [thomasmeister]: Tom, do you have anything else on that? Cool. Yeah, I think all I’ll say for my part is my intent is to take some evidence of subscribers existing and that number growing to be able to approach these partners. So yeah, I mean, that for me is how I kind of intend to, and the part that’s extraneous to the newsletter use this, but yeah, I mean, I think that’s great, Nicole. [Austin Schlessinger]: Awesome. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: All right, so we have goals. [Austin Schlessinger]: We talked about audience. Is this the same audience getting a newsletter. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I think we can include this because some people they want their their business and their newsletter to sort of be slightly different. But in this case, it sounds like it’s it’s literally just funnel people straight through. So that makes sense. Yeah. [thomasmeister]: Well, I think just before you scroll all the way down, I would I don’t know, Nicole, I did look at this when he sent it, but I would just make a short plug to make sure that there’s a couple of hemp folks in there too. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. Tom loves hemp. [thomasmeister]: Hemp has got to be in there as well. [Michael Houck]: We will make sure that hemp is duly respected in the content. [thomasmeister]: Yeah. [Nicole Jarbo]: And then, I mean, even on like that short-term goal site, and I talked to Tom about this, like my dream is to have this be a really interesting five-minute daily for the industry. Right now it’s MJBizDaily, which is fine. They’re very much like a straight media company, and I think that’s cool. But I think if you looked at some of the links that I sent, the space is grimy or it’s boring, and there’s just an opportunity for a good brand in the space, a B2B brand. Of consumer brands, but there are no B2B brands that I feel like people actually want to be a part of in this space. And so I think that’s the opportunity for an enduring company for us, if we make a brand that’s appealing and not scary. [Austin Schlessinger]: Awesome. I like that. All right. So for content pillars, what are the three to five topics that matter most or that you’d like to cover? I know that we kind of spoke about news, but are there any other high level topics that you want to cover in this publication. [Nicole Jarbo]: Tom, you consume a lot more of this than I do, but I can go ahead and start. So yeah, go ahead. I think like, obviously, news is really important, just so people feel like generally informed in terms of pace. So I’d say like news, I’d say kind of business stories, business sort of how to sort of like tips, advice, case studies, those kinds of things from the cannabis industry. And then those feel like the biggest things to me, I think there’s probably branches underneath, but anything that positions us as like insightful and like a trustworthy brand, I think is actually really important. Tom, I don’t know if you wanna like add anything else, like even with like underneath those, there’s like a million things we could add. [thomasmeister]: Yeah, I think, sorry, I’m just trying to formulate the thought. I guess to me, I guess two things are kind of coming to mind. One is, I would say kind of like actionable intelligence is something that actionable intelligence in the sense that like you can actually use some of this stuff for for your business, right? There’s some new there’s some new offering or there’s some new chain. Like one of the things that that really permeates the industry, especially when it comes to business considerations, is like the Honestly, I went to I went to my first cannabis conference last month and it was like, you know, I started my career as a lawyer. It was like going back to law school and everybody’s like incredibly literate about all of these myriad like legal issues. But one of the ones that like overhangs the whole industry is tax treatment. You know, most businesses you can write off your expenses and in cannabis, like you can only write off your cost of goods sold. And so all these other expenses associated with your business, you got to pay, you got to pay tax on things. And then there’s state taxes too, not to escape past that. I feel like even, this is really niche, but more so than any industry, and I had spent time in a lot of weird industries, people are more literate about taxes than CPAs who live on my block. So knowing tax hacks, things like that, I think is really helpful. And then I think within the realm of corporate news, understanding new entrants into the like either new big businesses that are starting to offer products and services to cannabis or new categories of products and services that are coming to market, I think is really, is really important. Like here’s like a whisper, for instance, from the conference, like Aon, one of the largest, you know, insurance carriers in the space is now starting to look at, at providing insurance to the cannabis industry. Like those types of change and people don’t even necessarily a Bondera analogy and a Colmade, most business owners don’t know the difference between property and casualty versus general liability. That stuff’s its own maze to go through, but just even understanding how those potential developments can have an impact on your business and things to start keeping an eye out for, hey, maybe you could actually insure against your employees not being able to count money at the cash register while I think those two things, actionable intelligence and kind of making meaningful kind of like new corporate entrance or product entrance to this space, I feel like that’d be really [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: differentiating. [Nicole Jarbo]: Yeah, and like, how, I mean, you know, for your newsletter, it seems like folks are like a variety of stages like what they’re building, but I’ll probably like identify as founders. I think what some of the things Tom’s talking about probably show up for your people too. It’s just like, like these, these tips, these hacks, this like advice, like I think to Tom’s point, for some areas there is like real niche specificity for our folks. And so anyways, I just bring up like your newsletter because I do actually think some of the ways of thinking about business are probably similar for people, the actual content or need-to-know thing is very niche for us. And so I just wanted to add that because we want to attract operators and not forget the operation part of operating, right? So there’s a knowledge part that makes you an expert in the space, but then there’s your actual ability to operate. And I think that we can, we can like run across, vacillate on that spectrum because yeah, at the end of the day, we want operators in here. Yeah, go ahead. [Michael Houck]: The one difference I would say between how we think about this for my newsletter versus how I think we are going to think about it for this based on what I’ve heard from you guys so far in this conversation is that like we’re playing a volume game, right? We’re getting as many founders, early stage folks, it can be VC back, they can be bootstrapped, they can even be like, you know, they can even be like aspiring founders, right, people who like are planning to start something by having it. In this case, it sounds like we’re more focused initially on just having a very high quality bar for who the people are who we’re advertising this to getting this in front of, and who we want to read it and we want to get value from it. So I think that’ll change the lens Austin through which we approach like, how to write about these topics. And the altitude that the content is at. [thomasmeister]: One thing, I was actually, you’re prompting something, Michael, with what you’re saying, which is, I assume you all are all much more adept at how to do this, certainly, than I am. I assume it’s better for us to start with that kind of, know, narrow focus and we can always widen the aperture versus okay. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I would highly recommend the strategy that that we are moving forward with. I think we can blow you guys up in a volume game with sort of those I mentioned the email stuff. Anytime. What makes sense first is carving out a personality carving out a reputation. And also sort of just like seeing what content resonates with the people who are the best example of this niche, because that’s going to trickle down to what everyone else in the niche eventually will react best to too. So we start small, but with the right people, we hone our approach and then timing it with when you guys are ready to start driving a bunch of traffic through here, then we do that. [thomasmeister]: No, it makes, thank you. That makes a ton of sense. Nicole, one thing we’ve talked about at turns, but I guess we haven’t really sounded each other out on in a while is, I don’t know if it would be good, or I guess broader for the whole group, like to have, I don’t know, like I guess human interest is the best way I could put it. Stories like, you know, I think there’s like the fast company way that everybody kind of like glamor, you know, just kind of glamorizes entrepreneurship. But I think having somebody providing the opportunity for like an entrepreneur or executive in the space to kind of like talk about issues and kind of position themselves as a thought leader, I feel like that, I don’t, you guys will know better, Nicole, we’ve talked to different points about whether showcasing entrepreneurs or companies could be beneficial. I don’t know. I’d be curious if what you guys think. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, we’ve we see a high appetite for that type of like, it’s not quite a case study, but it’s like sort of in that direction, how I would classify it. We see a high appetite for that from the sort of earlier younger folks within at least the founder niche, there’s the startup niche that we for my newsletter, and we see the same thing kind of happen across a few different other client newsletters as well. I would assume that holds true here. I don’t know if that content is gonna be as valuable necessarily for the sort of initial cohort that we’re going after, but if we do position it more of like a, more of like, you know, less of a case study of like how they did this and more of a, like the impact that they’re having on the space, That could be more interesting, I think, to even the initial folks. [Nicole Jarbo]: Yes. Plus one, and I guess I would also say, not just the impact, but thinking about the reader, I think there’s this piece around how do our readers get some type of edge in their work? I think that’s very insight-driven, takeaway-driven, and to your point, how like really engaging with like the impact of people who are doing it better than you, versus like, this person went from this to this, here’s how, you know, I think that that’s like fine. But I do think, you know, we should think that like framing should really about be about like, how do you get like an advantage in your work? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, totally agree. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Totally agree. I feel like we have some good pillars. [Austin Schlessinger]: So general news, business stories, actionable insights, content in the industry, kind of like tips, how to’s, hacks, advice, lessons. And if we were to do that, like success story kind of route, tie it into some sort of industry insight that would lead to some sort of takeaway that your readers can then use. Is there anything else you want to add here? The only other thing I would say, Nicole, you shared a few links. Tom, are there any other kind of places that you turn to for industry content? [thomasmeister]: One, let me just see if I could pull it up here and drop it in the chat quick. Highly objective, let me, the author, there’s a sub stack from a guy who doesn’t publish, how do I find I think this guy’s substack is really good. I wish he published more often. Dive Trunk. [Michael Houck]: Sorry, did you drop the link somewhere, Tom? [thomasmeister]: It should be. Oh, it should be in the chat here, or maybe it’s in the oh, it’s in it’s to my bad meeting group chat. It’s to the it’s to the AI. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: I’m trying to think there’s probably a couple others. [thomasmeister]: I’ll I’ll gather I won’t Jamie goes here. I’ll gather a couple others. [Michael Houck]: But yeah, we can we can have this be part of the action items next steps. Makes sense. And I think that Nicole to one of your messages right before that when you’re talking about like, you guys can direct us and share the research and info and stuff. That’s gonna be super helpful. I think that’ll be part of the weekly cadence that we do with you guys through Slack. We’ll get to that at the end. But basically, we’ll have like a weekly process through Slack where we’re talking about, oh, what topic and identifying the questions to answer within it and things like that. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Great. [Austin Schlessinger]: So I’ll follow up after this with that action item. In terms of newsletter formats, we talked about the hustle, kind of Morning Brew style, just sort of like, here are the three topics we’re talking about this week. Here’s a brief kind of summary. Of each. Is that kind of what you are looking for? Is that off the mark? What are your thoughts there? [Nicole Jarbo]: I suggested it, so I like it. But Tom, this is your chance to fight back. [thomasmeister]: No, I mean, I don’t. I’m trying to think because I probably can. Of myself as a long form content reader. And then, you know, like a lot of people, I have these like magazines I subscribe to, and just take them out to the recycling, you know, once a week. Um, I, I will say for this space, one of the things that I, I do think, um, like, less, less, I don’t know if this is the right way to put like items of content, um, with some kind of like, curation or focus would be good. I feel like what I, one of the things I like about Highly Objective as an example is like Dai puts out really good stuff. He doesn’t put out again as often as I’d like, Some of these others, it’s either too much. There’s one called, I’m answering this indirectly, I guess, but like there’s one by Tom Angel, I think is how you say his last name, A-N-G-E-L-L, called Marijuana And it’s mostly about like the legalization kind of updates that are happening in the space, but it’s like too much, it’s like too busy. And so I find kind of another kind of barbell dynamic where it’s like, you either have like really great focused content that you want to read, but it only comes out infrequently, certainly not at the kind of cadence that we’re talking about. Or you just have like a glut of information, most of which is being aggregated and pushed out by other folks. So I do think, I don’t know, like narrowing, deepening, and kind of like curating of it, I think is definitely, I don’t have like a great example of that to point to in another industry, but I think that’d be [Michael Houck]: good. One thing I can add here is that this is not, a lot of people feel like it is, but this is not something that we need to nail issue one, right? That we shouldn’t let this sort of hold us up from putting content out there, experimenting with different formats. And by this, I mean, like, you know, do we do this sort of, little bit longer content, we do shorter, more news bitey type content, how do we how do those two things play off of each other? You know, when I started my newsletter, I didn’t nail the formats that we use now for six months. And obviously, we have a lot more experience spinning up newsletters now and kind of can move a lot faster than that for you guys. But I, all I would say is that I would expect that we will iterate a bit on format in the early days, as we see what these readers want. [Nicole Jarbo]: I mean, I think that highly objective just curates a bunch of stuff. That’s how I would read them. I wouldn’t consider, I think there’s some things that are a little bit longer, but like, I feel like most of it’s just like linking to like stories on the internet. So I think, you know, I think that’s what we’re talking about here, right? Like a little summary of stuff like compelling in the space. So I do think that, I do think we’re on track. And I think it goes back to the thing like, you know, this idea of building trust with people, like how do you build trust? Like you don’t make them read shit they don’t need to read. Sorry, excuse my language, right? Like you’re not forcing people into a relevant content. You’re, you know, you’re positioning yourself as someone who’s like, we know what you need to know, whether that’s true or not. And I think that’s probably the better place to start in recognizing that we’re probably on the lower tier of what Megaphone does, respectfully. Thank you. I think that some of these things make sense as we deepen our investment in the newsletter. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, totally. And I would say that it sounds like there’s a lot of opportunity in this niche to actually do that, which is nice. I mean, we’ll see how the readers respond, but, you know, always excited to tackle a new niche. And I think this conversation has made it clear to me that there’s sort of room to play, which is good. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Cool. Posting schedule. [Austin Schlessinger]: What are your thoughts on how frequently you would like to put out posts? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I think, Nicole, we talked about originally twice a week, right? Is that still Is that still true to Sandy checking? Okay. Do you guys have a preference on days of the week? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: I don’t. [Nicole Jarbo]: I think that you guys, do you guys have like data around what hits for people? Honestly, people overblow this like a lot. [Michael Houck]: People say that Saturday is the worst day to send newsletters. I send my weekly deep dives on, I’ve sent my weekly deep dives on Saturdays for two years, maybe a 65% open rate. So, you know, it’s all relative. It’s all, you know, train people on when you’re going to send your emails and just be consistent about it. [Nicole Jarbo]: It doesn’t matter that much. Tom, when do you read stuff? [thomasmeister]: I read stuff through. I’ve been told by marketing folks in the past, you know, Tuesday and Wednesday or whatever, but to Michael’s point, like I don’t, I don’t know that that’s actually had any magic effect on anything. So I don’t know. I’m pretty indifferent. I’m pretty indifferent on. [Nicole Jarbo]: All right, I’m just throwing out like Thursday and Sunday. If people don’t care, Thursday and Sunday, or I think maybe like Tuesday and Friday, either one, I think we should just move past this part. [Michael Houck]: I like Tuesday and Friday because I don’t think that much new stuff happens between when we publish on Thursday and Sunday. I think we have more material between Tuesday and Friday. And we can set that up in Beehive as part of the ops stuff. We can schedule it and all that. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: So that’ll be taken care of for you guys. [Austin Schlessinger]: All right, so here’s a look at our process or steps moving forward. So from now until next Tuesday, it’s all going to be context gathering. I’ve already started some of this. Thanks, Nicole, for sending over that information. Just kind of start gathering my thoughts. Like I said before, I’m going to summarize all of this stuff. Good thing we have this recorded to just kind of boil it down to a quick here’s our target audience. Here’s our content pillars, just so we’re all on same page. How is going to do a I guess we don’t have any audit. Is that right? We’re not going to do anything. Or what are we going to do for that? [Michael Houck]: Normally here we will go through and we’ll do an audit like we’re taking over a newsletter or something since we’re basically spinning this up. What I’ve replaced this with is basically Nicole once you give me access to the beehive account for for this one. I’ll go through and just make some recommendations. About what we should be doing. And then I’ll leave it up to you guys to determine what you want to do versus what you want us to kind of jump in and do on the upside. [Austin Schlessinger]: Happy to, you know, happy to tag team it. We’ll do that. And then after that context gathering phase, I’m going to start writing the first issue. Send that to you guys for you’ll have a few days to provide any edits or revisions. And then we’ll get our first issue scheduled two weeks from now. Sweet. [Michael Houck]: On like, on like a weekly basis, you know, you guys will work, I guess, you know, depending on how you want to split it up, Nicole and Tom, between the two of you, you guys will work with Austin over Slack. Austin will basically surface some topic ideas. In the early days, it really helps if you guys also surface topic ideas, but eventually as we sort of, you know, get into the groove of things, I imagine that most of those will come from the company side. But regardless, those will be in Slack. We’ll have a couple questions, and if you guys can record voice notes, we just sort of ramble, and give us your expertise. That’s really where we’re going to be able to get content that only you guys could be creating, is if you were writing the newsletter. Obviously it’s just going to be from the brand, But the more of that we get, the more unique the content is going to be. [Austin Schlessinger]: I can summarize all this in a follow up as well. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, you can you can get rid of some of those writing bullet points that are new to it to X a week on this one. But yeah, we’ll get into a loop with the feedback process and all that. We’ll also set up a NotionDoc where you guys will get reports on how each issue performed. Obviously, you can just go into Behive and take a look at that and play around yourself if you want. But we also can put together a NotionDoc thoughts as well. [Austin Schlessinger]: I think that’s everything I have. Cool. Yes. And Nicole, please do ramble in the voice notes. Tom, you too. We want rambling. [Michael Houck]: We want emotion. We want intonation. That helps us with the content. So as next steps, I will just work through those, those action exhaustors just talking about, we’ll start to get things rolling and then we’ll kick it off. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: That’s really it. [thomasmeister]: One thing, one thing I’ll, I’ll throw out here at the last minute. Nicole, I know we’ve talked about the fact that we had this herb subscription that’s going to run up at the end of this month or, or I think, sorry, at the end of December. If there’s any value in having Herb promote the newsletter. I don’t know if this is stuff you guys have covered or not, but just, yeah. [Nicole Jarbo]: No, I’m talking to Nathan tomorrow. So maybe we just talk, maybe we just do this on Slack. But Nathan and I are meeting tomorrow afternoon. So I think I can just ask him straight up. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I mean, my hypothesis would be that until the list is either And I think that’s a really good point. I think that’s a really good point. [Nicole Jarbo]: email outreach by content. So Herb’s its own media company, but they’re mostly focused on consumers. So, you know, this idea, like they might have some overlap, but that’s what I’ve been talking to the team about. Like, do you really have overlap between like operators and like consumers? And obviously some operators are also consumers. So let me, I’m talking to their team tomorrow. So I’ll just fill in the whole team once I, once I get more info. [Michael Houck]: Okay. Yeah. I mean, it sounds like we would overlap because we, we aren’t into operators. As I said, we have like an interest based graph that literally no one else has. We built this from, from scratch. So, um, yeah, I would say if we want to get people who are interested in a certain brand or people who, um, you know, uh, some other interests or the watch certain content subscribers, certain content, anything you guys want to do, we can a hundred percent do there with a level of targeting that no one else can. [Nicole Jarbo]: Yeah, I’ll fill you guys in. But basically their model is they do all of this content. They just do their own spawn con and push to partners versus other types of advertising. They’re just owning the actual channel. And so what it would look like for us is they write something about business and then they link to our newsletter, but I’m, I’m clarifying that stuff with them. And they also have this like herb mail thing that is similar to what you guys discussed, but let me just talk to them. I don’t want to waste any time on this. [Michael Houck]: Cool. Let me know how that goes. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Happy to chat more. [Nicole Jarbo]: Yeah. Thank you guys. I’m so excited about this. Um, I think it’s going to be really great. And, um, yeah, you guys are pros. Thank you for being willing to do this. [Michael Houck]: No, we’re pumped. Thank you guys for the opportunity. And, um, yeah, we’re really excited. [thomasmeister]: It’s going to be great. All right. Thanks guys. Likewise. See you guys.