- Duration: 25 min
- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01JDWJQC8BDM4HMVWQB2WFPFPX (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JDWJQC8BDM4HMVWQB2WFPFPX)
Transcript
[Michael Houck]: I have some work going on in the apartment this morning, so if you hear any weird scraping or jackhammering noise, that’s what that is. [Andrew Roth]: Okay. That sounds good. Cool, man. Yeah, well, excited to have you on board. I’m happy that we could finally serve you. [Michael Houck]: Jared treated you well? Yeah, it’s been great, man. He’s been fantastic and very responsive. Yeah, excited to get started. Know, I’ve kind of been looking at you guys for quite a long time. I recently onboarded a new bookkeeper. And so we’re transitioning from me doing a very convoluted Google Sheet to them sort of running the books. They have a platform, but their platform doesn’t let me split my business out in different entities, which is essential for us. And so I was like, you know, you guys just make sense. So sweet. [Andrew Roth]: And are you keeping that bookkeeper? Are you? I don’t know. [Michael Houck]: At least at the end of the year I will be. We’ll evaluate again for Q1 and into next year. I really just want to see like, can we get this to a point where it’s fully automated and I just need them for like tax season? Because that would save me a couple hundred bucks every month. Yeah, sweet. That sounds good. [Andrew Roth]: So maybe a quick agenda for the call is I want to make sure you feel set up in the platform, make sure your account’s set up, and then we’d love to chat about your newsletter and see if we could potentially work together if that makes sense. [Michael Houck]: Oh, cool. [Andrew Roth]: It’d be great, yeah, let’s do it. I’m the head of growth, so I lead partnerships, marketing, and sales, and right now, onboarding, so. Cool. Yeah, I would love to chat about that as well and see if you have any interest in that as well. [Michael Houck]: Love to see a head of growth doing onboarding. You’re in the weeds, I love it. [Andrew Roth]: Yeah, fully in the weeds. Hopefully, since launch, we’ve done very well So hopefully we’ll be able to bring on a couple team members to alleviate it. But for now, yeah, no, it’s good. So yeah, do you want to share your screen? And then let’s dive in. I don’t know if you use meats, but half the people don’t. So it’s the rectangle with the arrow next to the happy face. Cool. Any open questions before we dive in? [Michael Houck]: Oh, yeah. Okay. One like really thing. Um, these like savings things, it’s just recommending like my, I don’t know if I should even have my personal expenses in here, but since this is an LLC, I just included that as a separate entity. Um, but what it’s doing is like every single month for the same items, it’s recommending that I move it to a business transaction. And if I like, you know, skip it or whatever, it doesn’t, it doesn’t smartly like do that for the next month. [Andrew Roth]: So we’re about to ship a fix to that. That was like a V one for launch. Um, the way to think about this is like, so right now your personal was actually a different LLC. [Michael Houck]: No, it’s not an LLC at all. [Andrew Roth]: So the way to think about this is that we essentially are trying to optimize and find you net new write offs. Um, we’ll, we’ll be coming out in the next couple of weeks is if you actually click skip, it’ll never do that again. Right now it’s probably super annoying. Um, yeah. Okay, cool. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: The other thing was what I was flagging over email, which trying to find out where that was. Um, the balance sheet. Yeah. So, um, this type form is asking me which entities is related to. So I don’t know, like if I need to do that individually, Jared seemed like sort of looking into that and you shared the type form. [Andrew Roth]: Let’s go through that really quick. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, so it just takes me here and I’m like, yes, I can only see kicks like the submit opening balances. [Andrew Roth]: Sharing that like it’s a pop up. [Michael Houck]: So let me present something else and do full screen will be easier. OK. You see the full screen now you’re still in the kick tab still only on the kick tab. [Andrew Roth]: Unfortunately, sorry about that. [Michael Houck]: Stopping sharing and then, oh wait, that won’t let me share anything. What the hell? All right, I’m gonna reload. [Andrew Roth]: Here, let me just look at it from my side. [Michael Houck]: Okay, I think we’re back. Oh, it won’t let me share my own screen. [Andrew Roth]: It says an error has occurred while screen sharing. Okay, well. Great. Balance sheet onboarding. Do you probably should submit one for each of the businesses that need balance sheets? Yeah, I think the issue is that it’s gonna be a pain in the ass to be honest. [Michael Houck]: Well, I mean, it’s not even that necessarily like I’m fine doing the grunt work. It’s just that some of these businesses don’t have like separate bank accounts yet, right? Like they’re all part of the same parent LLC. And so there’s really only one, like, quote unquote, opening balance for the business. So I don’t want to put in something that’s incorrect. [Andrew Roth]: Everything is right now, mixed into one, everything. [Michael Houck]: Our newsletter, our SaaS product, our two agencies, my advisory business, it’s all in one LLC. And in Q1, we’re going to be breaking it out into individual ones. [Andrew Roth]: So why don’t we just do it under the one LLC right now, like the parent LLC. And then next year, we break it into all of them. [Michael Houck]: Okay, so I have the balance sheet. I think the issue is that my expenses, my revenue will be tracked in kick at the entity level rather than all business. Yeah. [Andrew Roth]: Um, so probably like, maybe for this year, what makes sense is to have it roll all up into one. And then once you break it out into because right now it’s one LLC, right? Everything’s just in one. So I think probably it makes sense to do it all in one right now. And to be honest, there’s a really easy hack on the P&L side of things, where you can see this all year, and then right at the end, you can just move everything into one, and then export the P&L. For the balance sheet, I would just do the balance sheet under, is Rye Valley the core one? So I would do the balance sheet just for Rye Valley. And then, here, I’ll show you really quick. If you go to accounts on the left side. So you’ve already started moving transactions over from one business? Have you already started to untangle everything? [Michael Houck]: We have it all untangled in the Google Sheet. My assistant’s going to go in and do it all on Monday or Tuesday or something. [Andrew Roth]: Okay. So the balance sheet we can do fine. The thing is, for this tax compliance job, I wonder if this year you should have it all under Rye Valley. And then I’m just trying to think. Because if you move it all over, then the P&L for a tax compliance perspective is going to not include those transactions that you moved over. [Michael Houck]: Right? Yeah. I think the issue is I need to run my business at that level, right? Because I need to be like, oh, Megaphone, we’re investing $20K extra this month, right? I need to be able to visualize that. That’s been the appeal of jumping into Kik. [Andrew Roth]: Super interesting. So maybe what I’m going to do is I’m actually going to talk to our internal team. I think it’s like there’s a cool feature that we can build off of this. Yeah, I’m just trying to think about it while you don’t have the broken up bank accounts, because if you move things over, right. You know what, I think we can figure this out. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: I’d move things over. [Andrew Roth]: I mean, I feel like, Yeah. These are like, again, like we’re early. So I’m just trying to think about the best way to do it. Because what’s important to you is to have the insights across all your businesses, right? But you still want it to roll up to the one. Because right now, if you move things over, you’ll have separate P&Ls. But I wonder if in the Accounting tab, we can roll it up. I’m actually going to take a second. I’m recording this. I’m going to talk to my accounting engineer to see if there’s a way to do this pretty easily. I’d say like go for over like the next day or two, if it’s right, like the next couple of days, maybe just like hold off. And because ideally, if you go to the accounting tab on the left side, accounting, and you go to profit and loss, and then you click on your different LLCs, like right now, it’s all in one, this is this works, right. But now like what I’m trying to figure out is like how to have a parent. [Michael Houck]: Oh, yeah, I see what you mean. If I do move them over, then they’ll all be individual, which honestly is fine. Like I would love to see them at the individual level too. [Andrew Roth]: But I also for my bookkeeper and for tax So like on the transact, on the cashflow tab, that works perfect. Like we have like that parent view of cashflow on the, and you click Rivalry LLC on the right side. Um, just go, yeah, perfect. Like we have like the ability for you to actually like roll everything up into one. Yep. Um, but we don’t have that on the accounting side. So I just actually need to call my accounting engineer and be like, Oh, right. Cause I, I could like, I could do this and it would show like a role from like an insights business performance perspective. You want the P&L also from the business point of view. You want to be able to have, yeah. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, ideal case. Ideal case we can see it for everything. [Andrew Roth]: Yeah, so what I’m going to do is I’m actually going to bring this to the team. I think it’ll be okay. I don’t think it’ll be that big of a deal. Cool. I appreciate it. It’s amazing. My technology is going to be like, you’re an asshole for saying this. He’s going to be watching this recording. But I’ll talk. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I mean, for next year, we will have them all or at least the ones we keep because we’re we’ve deprecated this one already, but for the rest of them, we’ll have them all as individual season. So it’ll probably work a little easier. [Andrew Roth]: But for twenty twenty four, it just we won’t be able to do that in time. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. And you’ll need everything retroactively as well. Yeah. Yeah. So leave that with me. And I will follow up. Cool. [Michael Houck]: But yeah, that was my only real like platform level question, like how to get around, how to categorize stuff, sort of how to set up rules, even like it’s all pretty intuitive. So that was really the one thing that I was like, all right, let me make sure that I can use this. [Andrew Roth]: Yeah. Yeah, no, it makes sense. I’m happy you’re liking it. And then for partnering, I haven’t given you one second to think about it, but I would love to hear about what you’re doing and how you generally partner with different brands. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, so we do most of the newsletter. We basically have a couple different placements that we can do, different types of placements. We can do a deep dive. Basically, I’d interview Kik’s founder, and from that, I’d extract some narrative and insights that are valuable We write a piece about it. So I imagine it would be related to, you know, why, why the accurate record keeping and all this stuff is important or the future of bookkeeping and financials for startups with AI. I don’t know what it would be. Something like that. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: Make you guys look really good. Um, and we could do that. Uh, we also have like a standard featured placement primary partner for an issue or issues of the newsletter. Um, and then we also have like a little tool of the week. Where we could feature like, hey, you guys are the most interesting tool that we found this week. The list is 67K right now. We’re growing by about 200 to 300 per day. Yeah, thanks. Depending on when it runs, you know, I don’t know what that would be, but yeah, it could be a bit more than that. And yeah, those are the main ways. My chief of staff handles all of the sponsorship stuff. So in terms of like getting in the weeds and figuring out what makes sense for you guys, he’d be the person to talk to for that. But I’m trying to think if there’s anything else, but those are the main ways that we at least initially partner with folks. [Andrew Roth]: Sweet. And then you also said that you do like, do you guys also do some like ghost writing on like the founder news side of things? [Michael Houck]: Yes. So we have, actually let me just show you, easier to show you. [Andrew Roth]: Like I have been pushing Conrad to really like get into that, but dude, it is a grind. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. [Michael Houck]: Content is like, job and people don’t, people don’t realize that it is, but I know so many founders who, who start and then they end up coming back to us. They’re like, I just didn’t have time to do it. I’m like, yeah, I know. [Andrew Roth]: That’s what I told you in the first place. It’s so, it’s like such a grind. So we do a couple of things. [Michael Houck]: We can do social media content for founder brands or other people at the company. We can do social media content for corporate accounts. We can do newsletters as well. If you guys have an email list, we just started a newsletter this week. [Andrew Roth]: That’s what I’m talking about with Conrad. You want to see it quick? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, please. [Andrew Roth]: This is what we’re working on. We’re trying to like, essentially, like, it’s sort of going to be a common, we’re trying to figure out essentially, we’re making like a combination of like five tweet Tuesday from from Sean Puri, who’s like one of our one of our investors, but like this, this is like, it’s we’re calling it the upside. And it’s essentially like, three, like, this is what’s coming three Black Friday hacks to make you more money this weekend. It’s like about like the shit that we’re doing. So it’s like our head of content leads out this week. So I want to share three hacks. Like one is like we sent like insights on like our Black Friday deal, 50% off, um, how to get paid on like on invoices faster. It’s like very much like the, and then this is like the fuck up email, which is like what I did. [Michael Houck]: Um, I saw that. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Andrew Roth]: It’s like, but then like I said, we set the follow up and it did five X better. So just very much. There you go. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: It comes up very organic when you do that. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Andrew Roth]: So like trying to like bring that off that side, but like honestly the Conrad’s founder brand on LinkedIn, I think is like, would be super interesting to even just like chat about with you. It’s something that I personally want and people will be like interested in, but Conrad’s like, I don’t, I like want to focus on product. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: As he should, you know, he’s, you know, if, if, if you guys are at the product’s main focus, he should be spending his time on product. Yeah. Same time you want to be growing too. So it’s like, yeah, yeah. So yeah, so as far as the social media goes, writing goes, we have a team of writers who worked with me and my partner on the agency, you know, Blakey mall. Yeah, yeah. He was the first CMO a copy AI is like 100k on Twitter. Yeah, he’s super legit. He’s my partner in the agency. So he basically is in in the weeds with the writers, nothing will get sent to you guys without being reviewed by him and probably also by me realistically, cause we’re still pretty small. But at least him, you’d have a dedicated writing partner. It’s not like you went to some pool and whoever’s free picks up, like someone’s learning the voice for Conrad that you guys want to be putting out there. And the process is super lightweight for him and for you. Cause we work with founders. So it’s like no recurring meetings. If you want to do content, we can do them, but if you want to just record rambly voice notes into slack about different topics and ideas that works for us too. Uh, so super lightweight. We just set up a notion board. We’d take over all ops and scheduling. We’d even reply to like thought leaders in the niche, uh, from his account to like get some free impressions that way. Yeah. And yeah, that’s how it works. And how much is it a month? It’s 2995 a month. Um, for the full sort of like account takeover. [Andrew Roth]: Cool. Yeah. We talked to Conrad about it. Um, like I’m, I’m interested in it, like definitely in it. Um, and so like, we look at people like, like, um, what’s his name? I forget, like the CEO of pylon or do you know him? Like, like, yeah. I’ve seen his stuff. Yeah. Yeah. Or like Austin Hughes, who’s sort of like blowing up on, on LinkedIn, um, with unify. Yeah. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Andrew Roth]: I’m just, I spend way too much of my time on social media. [Michael Houck]: I really love something like that with Conrad. [Andrew Roth]: Um, so let me, let me talk to him and yeah, I think that could be interesting to partner about to partner on, especially if you’re a user and like we can figure out how to work with the newsletter. [Michael Houck]: Um, it could be super interesting. Yeah. I mean, it sounds great. Um, one other thing I’ll say on your guys newsletter side, we also have a growth offer growth service. That we do for newsletters. Without getting too in the weeds, the details are that we have basically the most targeted data set of corporate and personal emails that you can possibly get. We scrape social media. We have basically an interest-based graph of emails rather than interest-based paid ads on social. And so what we do is we do cold email campaigns to these people who are tagged in certain niches, have certain interests, follow certain people. And if those inboxes are engaged, then we can add them to newsletters and grow the newsletters super, super quickly that way. So we started to do that with mine. We started with a few clients and it’s working really well. So that can be of interest too. [Andrew Roth]: Okay, sweet. Yeah. Let me talk to Conrad. Cool. Really interesting. [Michael Houck]: I’ll send over details and all of it too, so you know the details. [Andrew Roth]: Yeah. And if there’s any flexibility on price that you can give to us, I’d really appreciate that too, just because, um, so yeah, let me know if, if you can do anything on that side of things. Yeah. And then, yeah, let me talk to him. [Michael Houck]: Cool. Yeah, I mean, we’re total month to month. All we ask for is 30 days for the ghostwriting. For sponsors, we can definitely give you guys a good deal. Ghostwriting, we can maybe shave a little bit off that, but it’s tough because the writers, they cost what they cost on my end. [Andrew Roth]: Totally. Yeah. Whatever you can do, and then we’ll figure out something. But yeah, super interesting. Really excited to have you on board. And I owe you reporting roll-ups. [Michael Houck]: Yes. You a lot of information on various things. [Andrew Roth]: I’m sure you weren’t expecting this to be a sales call, but it’s something I like though. It’s like you’re a customer, like we’d rather work with you. Yeah. Yeah. And I think the product is great. [Michael Houck]: I’ve, uh, I’ve tried a bunch of these, um, just on my own. I ended up going back to a Google sheet, but I think your guys is like, I think kick is the first one where I’m like, I could actually see myself using this and not like going back to get some extra fidelity in a Google sheet that I can’t get from the platform. [Andrew Roth]: Yeah, totally. I’m excited. Me too. Okay, I’ll be in touch. Thanks so much. Really appreciate it. Chat soon, man. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: See you.