- Duration: 38 min
- Platform: zoom
- Source: Read.ai 01JDMR60C8FQ7D582K9X80VSAE (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JDMR60C8FQ7D582K9X80VSAE)
Transcript
[Michael Houck]: Yo, what’s up, man? Nothing much. [Ben Ornstein]: How’s it going? It’s going. [Michael Houck]: It’s going pretty good, I would say. And we’re we’re beholden to two of these three big sponsor deals closing. We had one close. I saw the big one, which was awesome. [Ben Ornstein]: That’s not that’s not the big one. [Michael Houck]: That’s the actually the medium sized one. Wow. [Ben Ornstein]: There’s a bigger one. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, there’s a 20K deal that They’ve verbally committed multiple times and they’ve asked for a contract and they’ve approved the contract. And we’re just waiting on them to sign the slowest moving company I’ve ever seen in my life. Who’s the company? Bamboo HR. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Oh yeah. [Michael Houck]: I’ve definitely heard of them. I hadn’t heard of them before, but they want to do a deep dive where I interview be their founder and everything. So yeah, it’s a it’ll be our biggest deal ever. Slightly over the Athena deal we did in the spring. And That one and then there’s another $9500 deal that. They're being a little weird. They've like committed, but they're being weird now so. If those two both close, very comfortable going into the holidays. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: But that's really the only only thing right now. Other than that. Yeah, everything's everything's doing pretty good, honestly. So how are you? [Ben Ornstein]: Yeah, no, that sounds really exciting. Yeah, no, I'm going through Raina's list right now. Some of them are some pretty solid ones. That I hadn't even found. So those are looking good. [Michael Houck]: Don't hesitate to like assign her like data research data entry type tasks like that whenever they come up for you. Like she's, you know, she's totally fine doing them. That's what she does. And she's proficient at it. [Ben Ornstein]: So don't hesitate. Cool. Yeah, no, she's she is good at that. I agree. I I'm getting ready to have to pick up my sister from her boyfriends in Delaware in Delaware. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, you're driving. Why do you drive so much is crazy. [Ben Ornstein]: The problem is my my family is kind of everywhere, so I have my mom's side of the families in Pittsburgh, so that's where we go for Thanksgiving every year. So I'm picking her up and I have to drive to Pittsburgh and I'm leaving at like 145. So I'll be like inactive from like 2 to 7 30 or something like that. But when I get there and after I eat dinner and stuff, I'm going to do the research for, um, is it Poojoon? Poojoon? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Poojoon. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. One thing I've noticed about him is that, um, recently he started posting on LinkedIn a lot more. So there's not a ton of info about him like online, but I would imagine that we can get some good questions just from his own LinkedIn content. There's not that much else. [Ben Ornstein]: Yeah. And luckily I already started the research on him, but, and I, or I, I kind of did like one. Yeah. It wasn't, it wasn't great because I was really like, I was grasping. So I luckily I'm not starting from zero on his, but there's, I definitely have to improve what I had. So that one is partially done. So yeah, I'm going to try to get his done and then Adam Nathan by end of this week. Is Adam Nathan on Friday will technically be a week before his episode and I it's kind of like, [Michael Houck]: We're kind of in like a rough position here because I told you that I'm going to get you the new format that makes sense for this stuff. With the Adam Ryan one, but then Adam postponed so we were not recording tomorrow. [Ben Ornstein]: Oh he did. I didn't realize that. [Michael Houck]: So I deprioritize then doing the updates on all his stuff and doing more research and stuff like that so. I didn't do that, so I'm sort of waiting to do the next one so that I can show you, but you're obviously doing more in the meantime, so it's like we're in a bit of a weird position there. [Ben Ornstein]: Yeah, I so I was going to note that I that was one thing I was going to bring up, but OK, that makes a lot of sense. Yeah, it's it's a tough time. We can turn these things around. Around quick and luckily clip clip wing is usually pretty fast, so you know when we get that new outro for the Adam Alpert episode. [Michael Houck]: That's yeah, that's so that's still pending. [Ben Ornstein]: Yeah, I'm going to get that to him today. [Michael Houck]: I've had a lot going on, so I haven't done it. [Ben Ornstein]: Yeah, of course, no worries. Yeah, actually on the Adam Alpert stuff. That's. Other than that, we just need that outro and then I can, cause everything else is created or at least we're ready. [Michael Houck]: We're, we're ready on the Adam one. [Ben Ornstein]: We just need the outro. That's it. Yup. Yup. And then, um, yeah, so everything's done with that one. Um, for the combined episode for Friday, um, I have a drafted title, uh, Oh, the thumbnail for that one. Yeah. It's on my list. [Michael Houck]: It's on my list. I gotta, I gotta get this stuff. Today. Yep. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yep. [Ben Ornstein]: No worries. [Michael Houck]: I basically, I postponed everything related to podcasts for the last like couple of days. So I'm getting back to it this afternoon. Okay, cool. No worries. I don't know. [Ben Ornstein]: We'll see. Yeah, no worries. Just wanted to like have that check in and make sure we're on the same page there. Yeah. Okay. So on the podcast stuff, that's good. Um, the yeah, I'm checking out rain arena's list. I'll let you know when I've done a review on that. I added like a couple sections where it was like a yes, no or maybe and then for the most of the maybes I have like a another comment on the right of like white maybe so. When I finish with that, there's going to be. Oh, so one of the things you talked about was the megaphone FAQ's like a like a review of those. Do you want to schedule a time sometime in December to to go over that? [Michael Houck]: I think it will make sense to do that. It'll make sense. It's it's it kind of sucks. We kind of do it multiple times, but because it's like we're releasing groups. Probably in one to two weeks, it said next week, but I just don't trust his estimates anymore. So let's say two weeks, but then we also are going to have campaigns and campaigns is a pretty easy feature for them to build. So that'll probably be able to go live by like, I don't know, first half of January at some point. So I don't know if it makes sense for us to go through and do a full update in the interim. But what do you, what do you think? [Ben Ornstein]: Yeah, I agree with that. And then, yeah, I mean, there's not much new other than like pricing maybe and because we changed the changed it well I don't even know if we have that listed anywhere of like it used to be 39 for an extra now it's 89 I don't even know if we even had that listed in the first place so yeah I don't know I agree with you though I think it might make just make sense after both in terms of [Michael Houck]: like prioritization and good use of our time might not make sense to do it until until January. So we'll see if we launch groups and it yields like a ton of new user growth instantly. I don't know if it will until we start like promoting it more. But if it's if it's if it's big instant growth, then we probably should prioritize it. So we can just observe and see if that happens. [Ben Ornstein]: And when is what are we changing the pricing model to have no subscriptions? [Michael Houck]: So we have a couple pricing model changes we need to do. One is that we need to allow for account level pricing. That's the first thing that's gonna happen. That'll happen probably this upcoming month in December. And then the sort of, well, I wouldn't say no subscription. We're still gonna require a subscription, but it'll just be deposited instead of like us just take a hundred percent of it. So rather than have somebody pay us $49 a month plus an additional $50 a month, and we take a hundred percent of the 49, but we take, you know, 20% of the 50, we're going to simplify it and just do one subscription. It goes into your account and we take probably like a 30, maybe even 40% commission on that. [Ben Ornstein]: I see. [Michael Houck]: But that comes as a, as a subscription each Yeah, and people can make one-off ones as well, but in order to use the paid products, we're going to require you to have at least one subscription of a certain level, probably minimum $50 a month. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Okay. [Michael Houck]: That makes sense. Got it. And that change, the biggest impact of that change is, I mean, one, I think users will like it. I think it’ll inspire user growth. But two, is that it dramatically changes the economics in the short term of the business. Actually do that until we can reduce our engineering hours, which probably can’t happen until. I want to say February or March at the one of those two at the earliest, so. Will probably deprioritize that until either building it in February or March. [Ben Ornstein]: Yep, OK, that makes sense, alright? Um? Also, I have here so yeah, for the rest of the week my my like are finishing the research for both Pujun and Adam Nathan. Those two are like, I will get those done for sure. And then writing Adam Alpert’s Thursday email. Those are, those are my two goals by end of week. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I know we’re paused on the case study stuff, at least no new ones coming in because of the domain issue. I’m hoping to have that back operating Either end of next week or the beginning of the following one. So there will be a lull for that. So yeah, I would just keep an eye out for that and expect there to be below. It’s actually good timing, because there’s all these podcast episodes to do research for right now that we’ve come to. [Ben Ornstein]: So it’s yeah, it’s been crazy, but and there have still been a couple case studies like I did one yesterday. Oh good. And I had one a few days ago that was rescheduled so like, Yeah, there and those are both. Those both have been sent out to the founders and there’s still. There are there are three right now that have been sent to founders that I have not heard back from Well, two of them got sent like yesterday and the day before that. [Michael Houck]: So the ones the ones that you did for today. Or did I put in the newsletter this morning? Those are really interesting. The companies are interesting. The amount of money they raise is really significant for two of them. Yeah, those were those were good. Nice work. Thank you. [Ben Ornstein]: Endless West. That was the one that raised like almost 100 million. I asked that guy if he would be interested in being a podcast guest because the sheer amount of money and was really interesting. And he said that he would definitely be interested, but he wants to have an acquisition first or he wants to have an exit first so he can tell the story, which, um, yeah, I was like, sure. So he doesn’t want to be a podcast guest is fine. [Michael Houck]: No, no, he, he did say he wanted to be interested. [Ben Ornstein]: And I asked him like, okay, well, you know, is there going to be an, is there going to be, you know, off the record, some sort of exit in the next, you know, little bit. And he said likely between 12 and 24 months. So I was like, all right, we’ll stay in touch, buddy. He doesn’t, he doesn’t help us. [Michael Houck]: He doesn’t want to be a podcast guest. That doesn’t, that doesn’t help much, but you know, that’s like, that’s like me saying that we’ll go to $10 million in revenue in two years. You're like, I hope so. Sounds great. I would love a giant liquidity event if I was a startup founder, you know, but yeah, I don't know. [Ben Ornstein]: That guy's a previous founder as well. He, I think he exited a business, so he would, you know, he was a really cool founder, but yeah, I don't, that seems unlikely. [Michael Houck]: Oh, my video, there we go. Yeah, I mean, when you have interesting folks like that, again, I think this is maybe one of the insights, one of the places we can use that insight. If we find people who you're like, wow, their story is really interesting and they're well spoken, good on camera and all that, then maybe we just, even if they've raised a lot of money, maybe we just do one with [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: them, you know? [Ben Ornstein]: Yeah, no, absolutely. One of the guys that I just interviewed, his story is he raised money from Alexis Ohanian, 776, from 35 Ventures, which is Kevin Durant's fund, and another one. And they had some crazy pivots. They started in AR, VR. They got huge during COVID for the kind of metaverse stuff. But then they also went to then they got inbounded by who's that same company that the other one did they got inbounded by a big like gaming company which helped them realize that you know they shouldn't just be in metaverse company then they got inbounded by a education company and so that was their latest pivot to go into just education. That's where they're firmly in right now. That guy, he's an engineer and he talks a lot, but the story is pretty interesting. He's a former VC. He's got a crazy background. [Michael Houck]: I think the thing we need with these lesser known founders is like an angle, right? We need the headlines. We need the subject line. We need the 30 second to a minute long intro for the YouTube video. Those are the things that are gonna make the episode successful if those are good. Obviously we can have a good conversation if the story is interesting. So I think when you're having these conversations with people, and you can even go back through the ones you've done if you want, just like think about like what would the angle be? What would the story be? And then we take the top 10, 20% We reach out to the mess if they want to do the podcast and then we package it up and see if people like it. [Ben Ornstein]: Yeah, yeah, definitely there. There might be a few that. That we could do that with potentially. But I'll go through those for sure. And let me think, is there anything else? Yeah, outside of the just the ghostwriting, continued ghostwriting stuff and intercom Yeah, I want to get those podcasts done. Finalize the case study stuff. But yeah, I think we're in a pretty good spot. Like the intercom stuff has slowed down significantly. There were, you know, the weird pricing stuff this morning, which was. It still drives me nuts, man. [Michael Houck]: It's just, it's been so long, the same issues, the same things happening. And maybe, maybe the bugs on the back end are different, but the users are having the same experience. I think if we had like an automatic poll, like not, we didn't have to ask people, but if we just registered like what percentage of people who joined have an issue during their onboarding and initial payment experience, I think that it would, over the past few months, be like 50% or more. That kills us. That absolutely kills us. So I'm not happy about it. [Ben Ornstein]: Yeah, I can't imagine how many potential users were losing during the onboarding process too. Like before they even pay, they're just like the experience isn't good. And yeah. [Michael Houck]: Don't, uh, I don't want to think about that. Yeah. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Ben Ornstein]: Sorry. I shouldn't have brought that up. No, I mean, it's fine. [Michael Houck]: It's real, you know, it's, um, we're gonna, we're gonna improve all that stuff. Cause it's just, it's just unacceptable. Um, but, We'll see, I'll work with them on it. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah, for sure. [Ben Ornstein]: I was gonna bring up something related to that. Oh yeah, what are we, are we doing any forms of marketing with Megafone or is it solely just word of mouth referral kind of thing? [Michael Houck]: Right now it's literally entirely word of mouth plus the little widgets in founding journey and in viral examples. Those two newsletters. That's it. Uh, we're having those SEO blog posts created, but we haven't migrated our blog over to the new blog yet. Uh, we should be doing that as part of the sprint on the engineering side. So SEO should start being a channel. The thing is it's really tough to market a service like my phone because, um, people don't really like to advertise that they're using it to others, you know? So the only, channels that work really well are intent based channels like SEO or SEM, but we don't want to spend on SEM if SEO isn't working. Also. Potentially, we could do paid ads, but my guess is that SEO will be better and affiliate networks could also do really well. So. Been waiting for so long for this referral thing to be done, and now that this is going to be done, I'll be able to pitch affiliate networks on using it. And we'll get that sort of going to cold email, maybe as well. But we haven't experimented a lot with it. Interesting. It's not one of those things we can do like content marketing for, you know, and post about it all on, on Twitter or LinkedIn, because we'll be like, Oh, you know, what is this? [Ben Ornstein]: Right, exactly. [Michael Houck]: I wonder if podcast Um, it could be again, it's tough to it's tough to get attribution, though, you know, that's true. [Ben Ornstein]: They're expensive. [Michael Houck]: And they aren't cheap. [Ben Ornstein]: If you go to the ones that are like actually worth kind of advertising with. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. And from what I've from my experience with newsletter ads, you really need like, The potential is high, but the the fit has to be super narrow, has to be super on point in order for that to happen. And so it's something we can experiment with at some point, but I think other channels are a better investment in the short term. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: 100%. [Ben Ornstein]: Yeah, I mean, I think that's all from me. That's all I wrote down. Yeah, once this goes right, Once we hire someone for that, I'll be feeling pretty good. But in the meantime, it's, again, as we said the other day, I have no problem handling it for now. And yeah, no, I mean, I think things are going pretty well. Cool. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: One thing we're gonna do to market Megaphone, I forgot to mention, Max and I were talking about this. We're gonna start running like newsletter style paid ads for viral examples. Because the welcome sequence in each email mentions Megaphone in so many different places and the ghostwriting service and we've seen people convert to both from there so I think it's likely that if we're acquiring a subscriber for the newsletter for like $2.50 or $2 let's say maybe even $1.50 if we have a lead magnet we put together if that’s the case then for it to make sense for Megaphone we probably only need one out of every, I don’t know, 200 or so people to use Megaphone. And we also need, we only need like one out of every, I don’t know, 3000 or so people to become a ghostwriting client. So I think the economics work in our favor there. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Absolutely. [Ben Ornstein]: For the ghostwriting, what marketing are we doing there? Same type of things for Megafone as Megafone? [Michael Houck]: It’s again, it’s tough because we’re blocked by not having a website. It’s really hard to just go advertise it without a website. And like, I’ve wanted to just be like, put up a card page or put up a notion page. And so I have a notion page now that I send to people, but you can’t really send them somewhere on like a big scale that way. So the designers are currently redesigning the Megafone website. A part of that will be related to ghost writing. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Oh cool. [Michael Houck]: Package it up as like an all-inclusive platform for content growth. And from that we’ll have a page specifically devoted to ghost writing like megaphone.network.com slash ghost writing that we can send people to and start advertising and I’ll probably start doing content marketing about it on LinkedIn. And we’ll probably start running you know some level of other marketing channels for probably cold email more than anything else. [Ben Ornstein]: Cool. Yeah, that sounds awesome. The last thing I would say is next week, I’ll start that the look back at intercom and kind of create like a Google sheet of just looking at the tickets that you brought up on the call yesterday. Yeah, because I really just want to use that like, I think I know what the answers are going to be. [Michael Houck]: But I want to use it to emphasize to the engineers like this is where you guys are missing dropping the ball a little bit. So I think just having that visual will be like, it’s not something I’m going to ask you to maintain. I think just having it one time will be helpful. Because they’re like, oh, if I have to spend two hours on each of these bugs, then if 50% of the bugs are coming from onboarding, and I see how much of my time is getting lost. And they know that the more their time is spent solving bugs, the higher percentage than the less pleasant I am to deal with. And so I hate to phrase it like that, but it’s just at the point where it has to be like that with them. So yeah, I think they’ll get the message. [Ben Ornstein]: 100%, definitely. [Michael Houck]: Honestly, like, you know, if you ever are going to start your own thing, something to keep in mind is like, this is a data point to use engineers who have skin in the game with the company rather than like outsourced contract based engineers. It’s really easy to onboard them and get started with them and kind of even vet them for quality relative to other others. And the risk is way lower, but if they’re spending 50, 60, even 70% of their time solving bugs a week, it’s still the same thing to them. Whereas somebody who is an equity-based person and or is actually employed by the company, they have more of a, I’d say, ownership over the product. That was the word I was going to use. [Ben Ornstein]: The ownership is so key. Not actual equity in the company. Like that feeling of partial ownership is, I can see that being a huge motivator. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: Cause I mean, it’s, it’s just like, you know, where, where are you getting paid? Right. It’s like, they’re getting paid technically through this agency, micro one, right. I’ll use company. Yep. Um, I’m paying them, they’re taking their cut and then they gave me to the engineer. So if the engineers at the end of the day, if it doesn’t like, they want it work out. They put a lot of work into it, but at the end of the day, if it doesn’t micro one, I’ll just send them to somewhere else. You don’t have to go find a new job. Um, so those, those, uh, those subtle motivators are very strong in some cases. [Ben Ornstein]: Yeah. Every one of the engineers, um, not everyone, all of them are from micro on. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: I mean, the process is super good with them. Ali gave me a really fair quote on everything. Um, so yeah, I was just like, why not? Um, I originally was talking to a friend about co-founding Megaphone together. Um, but he wanted to go get a, do a master’s program at MIT, go back into academia. And so, um, I think it worked out because we didn’t end up raising venture for it and it’s just sort of a nice cashflow type of business. So I think he probably would have left at some point anyway, and better to have somebody like Raphael, who sort of knows the whole code base has been working on it the whole time. [Ben Ornstein]: But it comes with trade-offs, you know, it comes with trade-offs. Of course. Yeah, makes sense. Yeah, anything else I can help out with? Anything on your mind? Nothing? [Michael Houck]: No, I don’t think so. I’m still, I’m still working on 2025 planning, which is going to dictate, I think my view on what we can do for January and beyond. So I’m not at a point where I have anything to share there yet. Um, but I’m hoping to by next week at the very latest, we can do it during this call the following week, but I’m hoping to have something by next week. [Ben Ornstein]: Cool. Sounds good to me. Um, but yeah, I’ll, I’m going to get, I’m going to crush that podcast research and I’ll get it to you as soon as possible. Cool. Yeah. No, no, no rush. [Michael Houck]: I think, um, we there’s, you know, I think these are for next week, so I’ll just have the weekend to review them and everything. Um, and I’ll try to do the Adam Ryan one too. I’ll just do like a batch day of just going through all of them. [Ben Ornstein]: Yeah. Oh, actually quickly, what’s the difference in the structure? Cause you talked about the structure of the Adam Ryan one. You wanted to change it up a bit. Was there just so for what I know for the rest of them. Um, cause you said you, you wanted to, instead of me like actually phrasing the, like writing them out as questions, you wanted like a, like a reason for why I should, I think it should be included. But you said even after that there that you quickly looked at it and that maybe wanted to change it up a little bit. [Michael Houck]: So I took a look at it and like, here, I’ll just open it up. Let me share my screen really quick. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Yeah. Okay. [Michael Houck]: Make this a full page. Why is this blocking this? Okay, there we go. Yeah, okay. So right now you have it as like research and structure. Yeah, I actually think that there’s no need to have two sections. I think it actually complicates it to have two The ideal structure in my mind would be like, I don’t know if it needs to be a table, but I’m just gonna illustrate it this way to make it simple for myself right now. So one would be, one column would be like, I don’t know, like topic, right? And so topic could be like a founder origin story, right? Or like fundraising. Right something like that and then there could be like data point right and it could be like you know had a lemonade stand or you know backed by YC after punching Michael Houck in the face right like something like that and then it could be like I’m doing this really quickly, so this is really bad, but it could be like a proposed question, right? And you have like what you think we should ask based on this data point. And then what else did you do? Oh yeah, and then source, and then like source, like just link to like where you found that. That way, if I wanna go deeper, it’s just linked directly to that. And again, I don’t know if it needs to be a table like this. It might be fine to have it be like bullet points right where it’s like you know like a bullet point for like the data point and then like topic is this or maybe maybe the other way around maybe topic is on top and like propose questions I don’t know and then like some data points like q1 and q2 whatever and then source right or maybe even source up here and is linked here. I don’t know. I don’t know what structure is exactly the best. But when I saw this. Just not ideal. I think the biggest thing about it was that it still read really long. So like if I wanted to pull something in from here and like match it with something like up here. There’s like there’s like moving work that I need to do for that versus this section, which I actually think is organized really well, where like, I can just quickly read through these bullet points and it’s like all on the screen at the same time. I can sort of digest it really, digest it really quickly. Okay. So I thought like having something like this, or I don’t, again, I don’t know the exact format, but just making it super kind of concise on the page where I can just be like, Oh, this, this, that tells the full story of this person. Because what I what I what I do right now for each episode is I start by reading your research. And then I write down here like my own list of bullet points of like interesting things from this. And sometimes those are covered in the questions and sometimes they’re not right. [Ben Ornstein]: Yeah, yeah, that’s because some OK, I could see that. [Michael Houck]: So what I end up having to do then is I’ll write down like Q1, Q2, whatever, right? But then I need to go match, okay, does that exist in here? And then if it doesn’t, how do I move these all around on the page to be a new section with these new questions in there in a way that still reads coherently? Maybe I change the section names. So it’s just like, there’s a lot of like extra mental. [Ben Ornstein]: That’s too much extra work. Yeah, yeah. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. So I don’t know what the right format is. Maybe it’s literally just research with like source in parentheses or something. And like, maybe like, I don’t even know. I literally don’t know, but I would just say, play around with the structure a little bit and, uh, and let me know what, what you think. Okay. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: That’s interesting. [Ben Ornstein]: I’ll, I’ll play around with something very different for, um, for pushions and we’ll, we’ll, I’ll come up with something different now that I’d see how your process is. Figure that out yeah sorry my process is all over the place no I again the handover is we we I feel like we we obviously have the same goal and we understand what we’re going for but I think our processes are different in in like the way it’s actually done um and just the handover in general for this kind of thing I feel like the process has to be exactly the same for both of us for it to be very smooth But OK, now I see how you’re thinking about it. I think I can structure it in a way where it. Obviously, like there’s less work limit. Yeah, I’ll I’ll play around with it. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I mean it’s trial and error. Well, we’ll figure it out, but cool. Alright, I gotta go chat with with Max, but Sounds good, man. [Ben Ornstein]: Have a good a good drive.