- Duration: 32 min
- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01JDMSXFP9W4FPXX61R26XGT65 (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JDMSXFP9W4FPXX61R26XGT65)
Transcript
[Max Palmer]: these deals, we end up having one fall through. I hate to say it. [Michael Houck]: I hope it’s Freck and not Bamboo. I really want Bamboo to close. We’ve invested a lot of time into it too. I know. You in particular. I’ve been nurturing them for like seven months or eight months or something. [Max Palmer]: Yeah. So we’ll see. I don’t know. I don’t think there’s a whole lot else we can do at this point. Yeah. Just like I’m going to continue kind of diligently follow up without going too hard. And if it doesn’t close this month and hopefully close next month, I don’t know. Yeah. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: Not a huge deal. If it doesn’t close this month on, on my end, obviously I want it to close ASAP. Um, but yeah, as long as it does close, then it’s fine at the end of the day. Um, but yeah, we’ll see, I guess, but good that Athena did at least. [Max Palmer]: Yeah. Yeah, other than that, I’m trying to organize these. Wouter had wanted to do like three spots in a row, it seemed like, Yeah. Are you on the ad availability doc, whatever it’s called? [Michael Houck]: Yeah. What is it called now? [Max Palmer]: like little counting journey, add calendar, add calendar. [Michael Houck]: There it is. Okay. Yeah. Three in a row is crazy. That’s nuts. Yeah. So I’m just not sure. [Max Palmer]: Like if bounty will want to go here or here. Um, But I mean, I’ll see what they say. [Michael Houck]: What about what about Athena? Where are we slotting them in? [Max Palmer]: They. Because, like, well, they’re mainly doing Q1. Yeah, I think originally they said December into Q1, but we can we can structure it mostly as Q1. [Michael Houck]: That’s fine. Or all is Q1, I guess. [Max Palmer]: Well, yeah, let’s actually give them one of these. December spots. The 28th or the 31st. Let’s do the 28th, I think, because they’re a long-term partner. [Michael Houck]: I don’t want to give them, like, I know that historically it hasn’t really mattered, but just in terms of, like, their relationship and perception. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Max Palmer]: Let’s do the 28th. Okay. And then, yeah, they booked seven placements. And I think we said Yeah, we said two per month. With either one in December or one in. [Michael Houck]: Cute April, I guess, yeah. Cool, that’s fine then. I guess you can even see if they want the 28th or if they’d rather have the extra spot being. [Max Palmer]: In April, OK? Uhm? Yeah. And then like, you know, awesomic didn’t get a single lead come in. [Michael Houck]: So that sucks. Yeah. [Max Palmer]: Um, and I like was thinking about giving them like a free link spot just because, but then it’s like, okay, but like, they’re so like Athena said, they didn’t want the competitors and they’re kind of a competitor. Are they competitive? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: What do they do? [Max Palmer]: I mean, they outsource hiring. [Michael Houck]: Damn, it really is a gold rush with these companies. It’s crazy. Because they’re what? We have a team overseas. We have Arc. We have Osomic. We have Micro One. We have Athena, obviously. That’s like five right there who’ve advertised from in the last month. Technically, because the October 26th. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah, that’s crazy. And yeah, team oversees. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: Not a great performance. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: We got to grow the base. That’s the key. [Michael Houck]: We got to grow it. I know. Okay. [Max Palmer]: So I think order of operations to sort of, cause right now the newsletter makes money, right? [Michael Houck]: Like founding journey makes us money actually makes us pretty decent money because of sponsorship. But in order to keep those going through 2025 like they were through 2024, we need to sell more of our, we need to do one of two things. Either we need to sell more of our products to each new subscriber than we currently are. And there’s, you know, our exercise where talking to folks, then we’re going to reposition. That’s going to address that. Then the other side is we try to make money back on ads and play the game again, like we were before, where, um, you know, we’re spending say one 50 to $2 per ad subscriber. And we're making X back on that through, um, through little things. So through referrals, through affiliates and the welcome sequence, right. At those two channels, if we can break somewhat close to even on that, then that becomes much more scalable too. [Max Palmer]: And we're not doing that right now. So have you talked to anybody about those lead magnets in the welcome sequence? No, I haven't. I'm not sure who to talk to. Part of me just thinks we should just And now that Athena is closed, we should just add that on to, um, we should just see if they want to do that because there, there, there is, um, they have the [Michael Houck]: highest payout with the affiliate link. Yeah, they do. They do. But it's, it's less predictable though. Right? Like that's the, that's the thing. Um, I guess there's no real like incremental cost since we're just sending these emails to everybody who signs up. Um, but in terms of how to plan how much budget to spend on Facebook ads, Instagram ads, et cetera, it's hard to do that when it comes in chunks rather than like, you know, is more easily spread out across the whole subscription. Yeah. So maybe by like when we chat next week, if you want to come up with some or just reach out to some folks that you think could be good fits for this. And again, it doesn't need to be like an existing affiliate deal. That one of these companies has, we can just approach them and be like, hey, we'll add you to our welcome sequence. Do you have a landing page we can send to and if so will you pay us per lead that we send you basically yeah so I mean we're just sending them emails basically right we're delivering leads and they have a level of trust that we are providing good quality leads because of who our ICP is and all that Okay, maybe artisan or attention. Yeah, there is another one that Oh, Sarah would be good. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Actually. [Max Palmer]: I'm talking to Akio. [Michael Houck]: I'm doing like a video for their like founder series on Monday. So I can actually bring that up with them then. [Michael Houck]: I'll draft up an email. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Cool. Okay. [Michael Houck]: Um, cause yeah, if we can get that, if we do two of those during the welcome sequence and we do, excuse me. Um, and then we reintroduce like spark loop or beehive boosts and we're you know, I don't know. I don't even know what payouts are like these days compared to a year ago when we were doing this, but let's say 50 cents to a dollar per subscriber that way. Plus if we get another 50 cents to a dollar from these, like these onboarding folks and then we sell a small percentage of our own product, as well after repositioning them. I think that gets us to net positive to the point where we could start scaling up ads again. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. OK. So I think that there has to be a goal for the news. [Michael Houck]: It has to be actually maybe the main goal even for the newsletter for 2025. And you know, ideally the first part of 2025 is just get it to a place where it can sort of grow at a regular rate at, you know, break even or better. Um, and then sponsorship money is just like the gravy on top because right now it's not like sponsorship money keeps it afloat. Um, And that's risky. That's not a position I like to be in. [Max Palmer]: So. So they would have to opt in if we had if they're if this sponsor is in our welcome email. The the subscriber then has to click on them. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, basically, it'd be like either a dedicated email or an ad within an existing email that we send. And they would need to click into that and drop their email on the landing page. [Max Palmer]: Wouldn't it be in the welcome email? [Michael Houck]: Well, we have a, right now we have like a five or six email sequence that people get when they sign up. And so we would either replace one or two of those emails or we would put a part of it in the middle of one of the other emails. [Max Palmer]: Gotcha. [Michael Houck]: Cause right now we have like, I think two different emails that are specifically about the membership. And we can probably at least take one of those and repurpose it for one of these. Yeah. [Max Palmer]: Some of these I like, like artisan and attention. I like can pitch them this, but then if they go with this, they'll never advertise with us again. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Right. [Max Palmer]: I don't think they would. [Michael Houck]: Do an ad in an issue? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. Yeah, I guess that's true. [Michael Houck]: Maybe we could price it based on impressions. Advertising to this demographic, you're going to get seen by, I don't know, a couple thousand people a month and just price it like you would a normal ad. [Max Palmer]: Then how are we like proving the, we're not, we're not proving like, It's not, yeah, it's not, it's not performance based at that point. [Michael Houck]: It's just you are our Q1 onboarding flow partner and we charge X for that. And you get a dedicated email with a specific, you know, you want to set up a specific landing page and all that. Yeah. [Max Palmer]: So a thousand bucks a month for the court or a thousand bucks for the quarter or something like that. Maybe. [Michael Houck]: I mean, we would need to map out like how many people we expect. To go through. But yeah, I mean, that would actually probably be best from our perspective for budgeting. Because if we say we're going to get two people to do this up front, that's $2,000 that we have to spend directly on ads. And then we can assume that we’re getting $0.50 to $1 back. Let’s say $1, just to make the math easy. $1 back per subscriber through Spark loop. So that means that we can spend more. And then if we assume that we’re selling our products at X amount, X rate, right? The math is a lot easier to do there and we have the upfront capital to do it. So it’s not all sort of coming in as we go. [Max Palmer]: Yeah, I’m just, I’m thinking people prefer the pearly, but I think if this is priced right, um, we might be able to get a few interested. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. And it wouldn’t need to be, I think we could price it in like an attractive way. Um, because again, if we do, even if we just do one of these at say a thousand dollars or $1,500, then you know, that right there is what that's like somewhere between 500 and a thousand subscribers. Um, so it's not a huge amount, but if we do two of those and we have spark loop and we're have better positioning on our products that very quickly could turn into, you know, a five to $10,000 ad budget to grow that way and just get back on the growth growth wheel. What do you think? Poke some holes in it. [Max Palmer]: I’m not sure who we’re going to reach out to. I think Micro One would be interested, especially on a paper. I think a lot of these companies would be interested on a paper per lead model. Even some of these, we can charge a higher amount per lead. We could, you know, maybe charge four to five dollars per email or maybe even more. I don’t know. [Michael Houck]: Maybe even more. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: So there’s there’s the pay per lead model and there’s the sort of like quarterly model, quarterly partner model. Yeah. And then there’s sort of two different types of these that we can offer. One is a dedicated and the other is a placement in one of the welcome emails. Maybe even the primary welcome email, I don’t know. I guess maybe do some research on what real estate. Yeah, exactly. Wait, what? I think I heard feedback for myself and I thought it was from you. I was like, you’re echoing exactly exactly what I say. I guess we’re on the same page. Yeah. I was just saying, um, maybe do some research on like what realistic pricing for these things are. Um, cause there’s probably other newsletters that do it, so we can probably even touch base with them. So if you see other newsletters that are doing it, I can probably reach out or you can reach out to the people who run it. [Max Palmer]: Okay. [Max Palmer]: Yeah. And then like the only other worry would be like, it’s going to stop a few of these from advertising to us in the traditional manner, which they wouldn’t even know if they were going to again, because like attention and, uh, what was the other one? Like, you know, AISDR might be a good fit micro one artisan. Like these are all ones that have had poor performance. So who who knows if they’re even interested in running again. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. Um, I don’t think it necessarily precludes it because maybe they have like a specific campaign that they want to run at a certain time or something like that. Um, and also this is fewer impressions than they will get through a traditional placement, right? Like traditional placement, they’re getting 40,000 impressions or more, right? Maybe 35 K minimum. Something like this, it would take a while for them to get that many. So I do think there’s reason for them to do the bigger one. Um, but that’s why we priced this one sort of, you know, attractively. Yeah. Okay. So let’s touch base on that next week. Um, and see where we’re at. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Wow. Okay. [Max Palmer]: So funny timing. So I, I cold emailed this, this company, superpower.com. And he responded within 15 minutes. [Michael Houck]: Why do I know that? Yeah. Oh, this is my old co-founder. No way. Yeah. Who did you, uh, who do you email? Uh, someday they’re marketing partnerships person. [Max Palmer]: Oh, okay. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: I, the, um, Jacob, the CEO is my old co-founder and then Kevin, the CTO, was a launch house member, former YC guy, um, who I also know very well. [Max Palmer]: Okay. Yeah. So, I mean, he, he’s like, we’d love to learn more. [Michael Houck]: Uh, there’ve been multiple times over the past year where Jacob has tried to get me to give him a free deep dive over text. So, um, you know, I’m glad you’re going through the partnerships manager. But if we need to loop in the founder, we can. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Max Palmer]: Well, I mean, he said like, you know, $50 per sign up that we drive. So it's, you know, that's a true affiliate. [Michael Houck]: Oh, they want affiliate. [Max Palmer]: Okay. [Michael Houck]: I mean, yeah. [Max Palmer]: So I could, I could, I could go back and say, we don't do that. But if you're interested in getting, you know, paying $5 or $10 per lead, because they're a high ticket item. $10 per lead, we can do this. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, $50 per sign up is actually crazy low, because their product is like over $500 a month. [Max Palmer]: Yeah, it was $500 in the newsletter I saw it in. Yeah, I guess see where that one goes. [Michael Houck]: If you run into a blocker, but you think it's a promising one, let me in, and I can get Jacob and Kevin involved. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. Okay. So let's just touch base on this stuff next week. I mean, it's probably worth just putting some budget towards these ads regardless, but the thing is like, I don't want it to just be like throwing money into a vacuum. I want us to be able to recoup a decent amount of it. So I'll do some research on the spark loop side, see what payouts are like these days, see if it's worth us doing that. And then you do some research on these onboarding flow lead magnet type emails. And again, it's better if they're lead magnets, right? Having to go sign up for a full product. We want people to be like, they set up a lead magnet, they're collecting a big email list. [Max Palmer]: They can then do whatever they want with that. [Michael Houck]: And then the third piece would be the product repositioning. So I finally have some time to do that. So I will be doing that over the next few days. And so by next week when we talk, I'll have a perspective there and we can start Okay. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Um, cool. [Michael Houck]: Anything else? Top of mind? Um, just these, uh, these graphic designers. [Max Palmer]: Yeah. Yeah. Um, we have the one right now and you're talking more. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. I mean, she, she's ready to go. [Max Palmer]: She just said like $30 for that screenshot. I say template and then she said she can make these other graphics that I sent her, which was just the ones that I sent in, um, in this sock. [Michael Houck]: Okay. I would say that my takeaway is that, um, the ones in Slack are like, okay, I’m not like blown away by them. Not like let’s hire that person. Yeah. So there might be, might be other more relevant folks out there. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: I’m not sure. [Max Palmer]: Yeah, I can keep looking. [Michael Houck]: Cool. Let’s do that. [Max Palmer]: Okay. Um, okay. [Michael Houck]: I guess, um, if I don’t talk to you, have a good Thanksgiving. [Max Palmer]: You too. Cool. See you man. [Michael Houck]: Later.