- Duration: 21 min
- Platform: zoom
- Source: Read.ai 01JDJ2AA3CM5S819322K6XJ77J (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JDJ2AA3CM5S819322K6XJ77J)
Transcript
[Ben Ornstein]: Hey. Hey, give me one second. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: Let’s Let’s do this. So are we at a point where you feel good about making this transition to Reena? And if not, then I guess the discussion becomes how do we find someone specifically for this who is not Reena, right? [Ben Ornstein]: Yeah. So I don’t think this is a process Reena should own personally. Now I don’t know what her bandwidth is, I know she’s always doing something. I know she’s pretty busy. But regardless of her bandwidth, I think this is a process that someone needs to have more. And I’m not saying Rena’s not smart or aware or any of that. But I believe someone with a content operations background Could crush this and the bigger the bigger thing is what I said on or over the message was like as this scales this will and again I can handle this. I can do it. It just wipes out part of my morning every day. How much time does it take you per day? Well, so I’m replying to comments. It seems like it would be something that’s really quick, right? It’s like I’m just I’m keeping a tab. And kind of monitoring. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: I’ve done this myself, my own content, so I know that it can drag on. [Ben Ornstein]: Yeah, I mean, especially if we have. Like I’m looking at the schedule right now, there’s like a Most of them are three per day. Thursdays are insane right now because we have two at the same time and one of them is Noel and augment, which they’re very cautious about like, [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: Yeah, they’re highly regulated. Yeah, right. [Ben Ornstein]: So so. There was a ton of back and forth on the first time that I went with Noel. I was like, is this how you want to phrase it? And then he kind of changed it. So getting the voice correct, but also making sure everything that’s said isn’t strict regulation and all that kind of stuff. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: Yeah. What are the don’t say’s, basically. [Ben Ornstein]: Yeah, right. So that’ll take a lot of time. And for that specifically, I don’t think Raina should be doing that and handling the back and forth with the client, that kind of stuff. Yeah, I think that’s fair. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: I’m not saying she couldn’t do it, but you know what I mean? [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 2]: Yeah, of course. There’s just a level of like, Like Rena is extremely good when you tell her here’s what needs to be done and go do it. She doesn’t have any business training really whatsoever, and so that level of like kind of like the voice in the of your head or my head, which is like, I should ask a question about this. Or is there something about this that I’m not thinking of It’s not there for her. It’s just not. So I guess, yeah, especially given there’s two sides, right? There’s the obviously for highly regulated clients, that’s a whole different story. But also for every client, just like the way you’re phrasing the replies to take in the context a topic that you might not even know about. And coming up with something coherent that doesn’t make the client look bad. There’s a lot of like nuance that goes into that, right? [Ben Ornstein]: So like coming up with a reply sometimes, especially for like, I don’t know anything about plant based meat or, or autism. I mean, luckily, I want to say luckily, because things aren’t going well there. But like, I don’t know anything about this. So It’s not like I’m doing research for each reply, but you understand the level of complexity it takes for this job to be done well. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 2]: There’s there’s. I think the main thing here is that when you are new to an account doing this for them, there’s a ramp period. There’s an onboarding period just like getting familiar with the language and the players and the space and all that stuff. [Ben Ornstein]: 100% so it definitely takes some time and I think someone who has. Of content operations. I mean, if we can get someone from like StoryArb, like I, there were a couple of people I actually linked in that message to you. Oh yeah, I see. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 2]: That had like perfect backgrounds. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Ben Ornstein]: And like, those would, obviously the people who have ghostwriting agency experience, there’s no better person. If they’re writers, that’d be great, because then they can really understand the replies. And this doesn’t have to be a full-time person, obviously. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 2]: No, no. Look, I mean, it totally makes sense. And thank you for finding these highly relevant people. I think that they could be good fits. And the key is like, does it make sense economically, right? Obviously it wouldn’t be full-time. So it’s just like replacing one, you know, the same amount of work as being done just by a different person. Okay. How much or less does that cost for that person? That’s like my calculus, right? But I would imagine that we can find folks in a reasonable range for this job. Because I would say this is something that, yeah, I would say we could definitely find folks who are sort of in that range. [Ben Ornstein]: And these might be people that have full-time jobs, like I know some of the writers do. Or at least one of them does, I don’t know. But that has a full-time job that is looking for side income that they could be writers. They could be in operations. Like I don’t have a, like I have some media background in terms of like podcasts and some newsletters, but someone like me that is motivated to do something like this and is like really excited about it. You’re like, you’re like, I just don’t like doing this. It’s not that I don’t like it. Cause I actually do meeting, I do, meeting new people and like you know I love the strategy and complexity of it but if I’m gonna do the the stuff I am I think uniquely good at to do well I would agree that’s why because I know I’m not gonna be the best we can find on this I could do it I can continue to do it and I’m sure I’ll manage but I feel like if we’re optimizing to do things the best we possibly can which You know, I think that’s pretty ideal. Then this I think this is the route that makes the most sense. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 2]: Cool, look, that makes that makes sense to me. I think I would. I would worry a little bit about hiring someone as a full time job in the US because they might have meetings during these morning hours when they need. But if they’re international or if they’re like part contractor type folks in the US too that can work. So. Yeah, look, these six people you identified. They look pretty good. Some of them look really good actually so. I’ll reach out to them. You know, we’ll see also Blake helped. Alex set up story are initially. Interesting, OK left because they we had differences. And Jacob was a writer, and so was Austin. I was a writer at StoryArb who- I think I saw that, yeah. Sort of felt similarly to Blake and sort of followed him over here. So between the three of them, maybe one of them knows who out of these people is maybe feeling similarly to they are and might be willing to jump over. [Ben Ornstein]: That’s a great route. I was going to say, that’s what I was going to say. I would be like Jacob probably, we could even ask Jacob. I’m sure he has someone he knows. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 2]: Yeah. I’m going to DM them all today and see first if they know any of these people, if so, who would be the best. And second, if there’s somebody else who isn’t on this list, who, who would be, who’d be really good at it. Yeah. Okay. So, okay. I agree with you. That’s the way we should go. That’s going to take a little bit more time, obviously, because we can’t just set up an Ocean Dock Farina and hand it off to our her with like some training from you or something. So I’ll get to work on that today. My guess is that it’ll be since it’s Thanksgiving this week. Probably won’t have resolution on this until. I don’t even know, maybe the end of next week, so I expect it to take the end of the year. [Ben Ornstein]: Kind of is kind of how I I look. I again I can continue doing it. It’s just my my mornings from 9 to. Sometimes noon, depending on the day, is pretty consumed with this stuff. So not the whole morning, but you know what I mean. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 2]: And I want you to be able to, you know, do the best work on the things that you are best suited to do and also most interested in doing, which I agree, probably it seems like this is something you could do, but it’s not like an area that you’re super excited about. And we could probably find somebody else to take it on. So for you, to do the other stuff that is more exciting. So, okay, let me work on that and I’ll just keep you in the loop with what I hear from them. [Ben Ornstein]: Sounds good. But again, I can do it as long as we need to. Cause I don’t want this, cause I, I understand how easy this revenue is. And it seems like it’s, it’s scaling too. Like things are, I see a new client that’s getting onboarded like every day. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 2]: Yeah. Let me pull up my little Google sheet here. Right now we have 10 active clients. So yeah, it’s in a good place right now. I think, you know, our outreach is capped right now due to the domain stuff. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: So I’m waiting for the new domains to get warmed up so we can start sending those emails again. But we have a couple other people in the funnel who I think might convert over the next month or so. Um, and we’re also going to start running ads for the viral examples newsletter cause that’s proven to be a decent funnel for this too. Um, and you know, if we, what is that, what’s that CPA, if we get somebody who’s like every thousand subscribers, we get one client, that’s a win, you know, even every 2000, when you get one client, that’s a win. So we’re gonna invest some money into that. And then the other thing is that this other project that I’ve gotten started with my friend Matt, which I haven’t looked into yet, cause there’s not really much to throw at you, but maybe that will be the case. Basically we’re helping newsletters grow through cold email. He’s like this cold email wizard and we’ve tested it for mine. And it works basically equivalent to social media ads, but for much cheaper. So we’ve started selling it to folks over the past like week and a half. And we’ve got like 15K MRR coming in from it now. So there’s probably gonna be some work that is gonna go, Max is doing some stuff, but there’ll probably be some stuff for you too there. Yeah, we’ll see. No one’s renewed yet, so I don’t know if it’s real, right? But if it’s real, then it could be a really exciting new part of the business. Very cool. Anyway, the reason I bring that up is because right now we’re just helping newsletters grow, but phase two, which will probably start as soon as late, mid-December, is approaching startups and being like, hey, you have an email list. Let’s build a newsletter around it. And if so, this thing with Matt sends them to subscribers, our ghost writers write the newsletter. So we get to double dip. So that could dramatically accelerate the ghost writing agency if it works. [Ben Ornstein]: Yeah, that’s really interesting. Cool. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: I’ll keep you in the loop on that. But yeah, in the meantime, I’ll try to find somebody for this content Operations job and I will let you know. And I guess let’s just keep rolling with it until then. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yep, sounds good. Cool. Alright. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: Sounds good. Alright, I’ll see you on the next one soon. [Ben Ornstein]: I think. Oh, we’ve got a while. I didn’t realize now. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: Oh yeah, yeah, this was I thought this was going to be like let’s walk through the whole process. But your conclusion of finding someone specifically to do this is right. So we will have a longer meeting for this when we find somebody because we’ll need to set up like an onboarding doc for them and here’s how you’re gonna train them and stuff like that. So we’ll cross that bridge when we get there. [Ben Ornstein]: Yep, definitely makes sense.