- Duration: 13 min
- Platform: zoom
- Source: Read.ai 01JDA9G327GS8HBRB8MMZHDEKT (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JDA9G327GS8HBRB8MMZHDEKT)
Transcript
[Michael Houck]: There we go. Good. Good. How are you? I’m good, man. Um, thanks for, uh, thanks for being up to chat. Um, where are you? [Stefan Avram]: Where are you based? [Michael Houck]: Uh, I’m in Miami. Oh, wait, I can see in the, in the corner up there. [Stefan Avram]: Yeah, there we go. That’s cool. [Michael Houck]: I went to college in Miami. [Stefan Avram]: Uh, yeah. Very cool. Are you still here or no? No, I’m in New York now. Oh, okay. New York’s nice. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: Well, cool. We probably won’t need the full 30. We normally do these in like 15. So probably we’ll be able to get you some time back. But yeah, I guess I can share some details about sort of what we do, how we help people with content. But I think first we’d love to get more about where you’re at and sort of how you think we could potentially help. [Stefan Avram]: Yeah. So we’re like a VC backed startup. We raised 3 million about, or 3.5 about three years or two years ago. And then since then we’ve grown to profitability. And right now we have a couple of term sheets on the table for series A, but we might not take it. We might just keep growing the way we are, but we’ll see. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. It’s funny. [Stefan Avram]: Like most startups we talked to, they’re like, Oh, I need money. And we’re like, we’re kind of good. We don’t need that. But where we are on the content side is that most of our audience, developers or like, um, he’s of engineering on the platform team. So very technical focused and like we don’t do any outbound sales. All of our marketing comes from writing technical blog posts as well as kind of like, you know, like brand marketing from the founders. We do a lot of founder led content and a lot of founder led sales. We don’t have a sales team. It’s just me and my co-founder and content we post on LinkedIn. Weird. It’s like doesn’t get the crazy amount of impressions, but it gets the right amount of impressions from the right people and then they reach out to us. And that’s kind of where we’re at with the audience thing. And we kind of want to double down on that and figure out a way to maybe make it bigger on Twitter and make it bigger on LinkedIn, but also keep the same authenticity and the voice that we have that resonates with the current people we have. My co-founder talks more about like specifics in GraphQL, which is like where we’re at in our market. And then I talk more about API management and startups, but overall they both work. And that’s kind of where we’re at. And funny enough, I tried out Megaphone, a while ago. It was pretty cool for Twitter, but I didn’t have any more time to kind of get used to it. But that’s kind of like where we’re at. [Michael Houck]: Cool. Okay. Well, that’s all really helpful context. So it gives me a lot of what I need. I guess I can give some background on me and sort of what we’re doing. We can go from there. So I’m Michael. My last startup was backed by Andreessen. We raised Series A from them, then raised a venture fund, started investing in a bunch of other startups. Did that for about two and a half years. Now I basically built up a little personal holding company, bootstrapped, have some media assets, have a couple agencies, have a SaaS product, Megaphone. And this is sort of a new arm off of Megaphone in the last few months where we’ve started in like April. So I guess it’s more than a few months at this point, but what we’re doing, ghost writing for folks. And so you’d actually get a free subscription to Megaphone as part of this. But yeah, so our process is, you know, we work with founders, because that’s my audience, that’s who I work with. So we do X, we do LinkedIn, and we can do newsletters too, if you want. And, excuse me, I got some phlegm this morning. Basically, process is super lightweight. We don’t want to put a ton of meetings on your calendar. And our main focus is sort of just getting that voice that is like unique to you. We want to create content that’s specifically things that you could write. And so the way we do that is we have like a pretty robust onboarding process. So I’d say like the first week that you would sign up, there would be like some homework, basically. But then after that, it’s very lightweight. As I said, no meetings required. You can always do content interviews if you want. But for most people, we find that it’s sufficient if we send them questions in Slack and they respond back with like a very rambly voice note and then we can kind of parse down into what their voice is, what their style is based on the onboarding information that they’ve given us. And so we do, there’s, we take over the full account. And so we’ll post content, we’ll reply to people who comment on our content, and then we’ll also find sort of thought leaders in the niche and we’ll go leave comments on their posts that are going viral. So you get some free impressions from them coming to visit your profile as well. We handle the scheduling and all that too. And as I mentioned, you’ll get the free subscription to Megaphone as well to kind of get access to the Creator Network. So it’s me, it’s Blakey Mall is my partner in the agency. He has like more followers than I do. He’s got like 100K on Twitter and I don’t know, I think about 30K on LinkedIn. So a little fewer than me on LinkedIn, but he leads our content team. And then we have a small team of writers that we’ve worked with. One of us has worked with individually for quite a while at this point. Before even the agency got started. And so they’re all highly trusted folks. They’re all very good. And we’re in the weeds with them, as I said, on the content to make sure that nothing gets to you, that either Blake or I, often both of us, but either Blake or I haven’t reviewed first. [Stefan Avram]: Yeah. No, I mean, it kind of sounds exactly what we’re looking for. And like, I think the microphone would help. Like I tried it out and it was pretty useful for X, but yeah, it’s kind of like what we’re looking for is maybe somebody just talk to, tell them the content ideas and then they go and they go ghost write it behind. And then it’s still us, but it’s just automating some of that work for us. Yeah, exactly. [Michael Houck]: And if you like, well, if you want us to make edits to the content after we send it to you, we’re fine to do that. But we’ll have a ton of that voice information from you as well. So I’d imagine that over time, the need for edits will go down substantially. It makes sense. [Stefan Avram]: I mean, right now we have like a VA that does our social media posting. And she used this chat GPT. In the beginning, it was a little bit rough, but now she’s just crushing it. [Michael Houck]: Cool. Well, yeah, we’re happy to take that on and everything else. As far as pricing goes, we’re $29.95 a month. If you want the full suite that I mentioned, that includes daily posts. If you want just a couple posts per week and fewer content ops, so no replying to people in the niche, just we'll schedule content and hands off. That's $19.95 a month. So we offer both of those. [Stefan Avram]: You say not $19, right? No, it’d be nice if we could offer for that price. [Michael Houck]: But no, I mean, I mean, you know, 2K. I was about to say, I was like, there’s no way. [Stefan Avram]: What was the first one? What was the first one? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, so it would be 3K basically. [Stefan Avram]: I mean, I think it sounds Yeah, it’s more than reasonable and you guys kind of do all that work behind the scenes Yeah, we take care of everything. All you need to do is send us voice notes and approve the content. That’s it Yeah, um On and then do you have a package deal if you do it for two people? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, we can give a discount Usually we do like up to 10% discounts. We could probably do that So yeah, we could do we could do 10% Okay. [Stefan Avram]: So, um, let me be transparent with you. So my CEO is on vacation this week and then I’m on vacation next week. Perfect timing, right? Yeah, no, terrible timing, but also good because we can kind of ramp up before the New Year’s. So if we want, can we set up a followup for December like fourth or fifth? I want to bring him on the call because I think this is something definitely like, like what do you recommend as like a just to kind of try it out and see how it goes, like one or two months, [Michael Houck]: and then do like a yearly commitment? Yeah, I mean, if we’re going to do yearly, we could probably actually give an additional small discount to probably add another 5% on top of that. But yeah, we can do like maybe a, I don’t know, a two or three month, I’d probably recommend a quarter, but two or three month trial, depending what you guys want to do. That’ll give us time to get everything ramped up, we get the process going, and you start to see results for a while. Before that would end and for that to make a decision. So that’s what I’d recommend. So we can get a call on for the fourth or fifth. Let’s see. On the fourth, I’m free after 2pm. Eastern Time. And on the fifth, I’m free before four. [Stefan Avram]: Let’s do two 2pm. Eastern Time on the fourth. Okay. And you can invite me and then I’ll just add my co founder. And then you’ll just meet you and then most cause we’ll just start with like a one or two months. It’s just monthly paid, right? [Michael Houck]: Yeah. Yeah. It’s, it’s monthly. Um, and all we ask for is that if you guys are going to cancel, just give us 30 days. [Stefan Avram]: Okay. Perfect. Yeah. Okay. Let’s do that then. Uh, like I already think it’s a good idea. Like I’ve seen your co-founder and I’ve seen your, your content and it’s exactly what we’re looking for and especially around the price range. [Michael Houck]: So it should be totally fine. Cool. Okay. Well we’ll touch base after Thanksgiving. Um, but, If you have any other questions that come up before then, just shoot me an email. I’ll send you that invite now. And yeah, looking forward to it, man. [Stefan Avram]: Awesome. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Likewise.