- Duration: 25 min
- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01JE4DDN7V1WWR41XX14YJ8NBK (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JE4DDN7V1WWR41XX14YJ8NBK)
Transcript
[JP Taxman]: That’s uh, that’s I mean, that’s quite a thanksgiving I would say so I wasn’t even expecting to go that day like so but I ended up there Okay, that’s that’s wild. [Michael Houck]: Um, I hope it was fun. I guess It was fun, man. [JP Taxman]: Like, uh, I got a lot of research done for my newsletter, which is great. So That was spectacular and made it. Uh made some money and got a free trip. So I was you know, all in all pretty good time check check right Exactly. [Michael Houck]: Exactly. I do. Well, look, glad to end the chat. Thanks for grabbing some time. I didn’t want to call it the goat dude. [JP Taxman]: No, come on, man. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Um, it’s good though. [Michael Houck]: Um, we’re, I know we don’t have a lot of information about this stuff up online, what we’re doing with the newsletters yet, but soon we will, um, launched it a couple of weeks ago and it’s, uh, you know, we’re, we’re up to, I think 12 K MRR now on this. So it’s moving pretty well. We’re still keeping it beta. We’re not like blasting out to everybody yet. But yeah, excited to chat on it and see how we can help. I guess, give me some context on the newsletter. We can use that as sort of jumping off point. [JP Taxman]: Sure, so I’m running a little bit of a different one. I’m trying a different angle. I run a science fiction newsletter. It’s called the Time Traveling Salesman. And it’s about, a time traveling salesman that goes and he works for a company called the Source Industries. And basically what they sell in the future is like the experienced memories of the greatest people in it throughout history coming up with their great ideas, which they essentially sell to them in the past to record them. They really sell them to their family members. So he goes back and does the sale and then goes and gets the recordings to then give to the source industries to sell in the future. I do seasons, so there’s three to seven episodes, which is each week of email going out. Then I have other smaller segments, and then I have a subscription to exclusive content. There’s just a lot I can do here. And it’s just, I’m having a blast with it. [Michael Houck]: This is one of the coolest newsletters that I’ve heard of I’m not gonna lie, like, ah, thank you! I like science fiction first of all, so I’m a little biased, but Yeah, it’s okay, me too. I think you’re the first person that I’ve met who’s sort of using their newsletter as like a writing, like a narrative, week-to-week narrative situation, rather than like, you know, here are my five best tips on email marketing this week, week, right? Very cool idea. I’d never even thought of using Beehive. You’re on Beehive, I imagine. Yeah, I’m a Beehive guy. [JP Taxman]: Yeah, for sure. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yep. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. That’s awesome. I feel like my mind is expanding on what we can do with newsletters now. [JP Taxman]: Exactly. There’s so much, dude. I’m really excited for this. I’m super excited just to figure it out. Because that opens up a whole other avenue for a ton of other fiction writers. There’s so much cool stuff to be done here, I think. [Michael Houck]: I mean, you go back to like, even like the 1800s, right? Like all of Dickens’ novels were published week by week, like chapter by chapter. Oh, really? I think it was month by month, maybe not week by week. But yeah, the same kind of constant serialized. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah, yeah. [Michael Houck]: Very cool. Wow, okay. I’m just enjoying that for a moment because it’s very cool. [JP Taxman]: I’m glad to get your excitement from it because it makes me happy. And like, I like it when other people get it, you know? [Michael Houck]: Let me, let me subscribe right now. What’s the URL? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Sure. I’ll post it right here. Okay, cool. [JP Taxman]: I’m going to, I’m going to subscribe. What the fuck? Where’s my chat? Oh, it was over here. Oops. There we go. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Sweet. [Michael Houck]: Um, okay. Let me sign up right now. I’ll use my, my personal email address. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Um, sweet. Awesome, man. [Michael Houck]: Um, very cool. Excited to get the next, the next issue. I’ll try to read up on some of the past ones. So I’m not, uh, not out of the loop. Yeah. [JP Taxman]: I mean, there’s, there’s really no being out of the loop. Um, kind of how it is. Like there’s some on there, obviously, like I I’ve only sent out one completed season. The other ones I have are dreams of a time traveler and dreams of an AI, which originally I just wrote as like content to like drive traffic. But then I was like, these are actually really good. And I like needed some time to build up some more to write some other seasons. So I have two other seasons that are done now, which is about nine weeks that I’m actually going to schedule today or tomorrow and have that are going to start releasing. But like, I’m trying to also make it where like, if someone comes in in the middle of a season, I link them so that it’s like, hey, if you just started here in the middle. Here’s the first one. Go read that. And then you can get back here. That’s smart. [Michael Houck]: Okay, cool. So I’ll just wait for the, I’ll wait for the next one and I’ll, I’ll read, I’ll circle back. [JP Taxman]: Yeah. Or even like the welcome email is going to come out. And if you like, even just feedback on that is great. Um, or thoughts or, you know, just, that’s kind of a fun thing I do there too, a little bit, but yeah, I’ll, um, I’ll dive into the whole thing. [Michael Houck]: I see you got some other pages up here too and everything. So I’ll, I’ll, I’ll take a look through everything. I’ll send you, I’ll send you some thoughts. Um, right. But cool. Okay. So should I, I can give some more context sort of on what we do or what we’re, what we’re doing now, I guess. Um, so basically we, well, okay, let me back up. My co-founder of this project is a friend of mine. He’s a Teal fellow, YC backed his last startup. He’s like super legit. And he’s also the best like cold emailing expert that I’ve ever met in my life. He’s like, genius with subject lines, with copy, with how to send out things without getting spam and stuff like that. He’s really good at it. And so we decided to partner up on something around newsletters where we were first just testing with my newsletter. Basically, he would set up these cold email campaigns, highly, highly targeted people. And the ones who would opt in or be interested or express some positive sentiment, we add them to the newsletter. And the engagement and open rates that we’re getting from this are basically on your, what’s that? [JP Taxman]: I said, I just assumed they’d be huge. Cause it’s just more like a more personal touch, essentially. Yeah, exactly. [Michael Houck]: And it’s, it’s better than you can get with like paid social media ads. And it’s also cheaper on an infrastructure level for us to set this up for somebody through paid ads. So the other thing I should say is that the people who we’ve been targeting are, he again is like an amazing data scraper as well. And so he’s built this like interest based graph on top of email addresses. So basically you can do the type of targeting you would do through social media ads, but instead of just showing up in someone’s newsfeed, you get directly in their inbox. And so we’ve been doing this for a little bit on my newsletter. We did a pilot with it back in the summer and then or late, late spring, early summer. And then those people still today have higher open rates and engagement rates than the cohort of people we added through ads at the same time, which is great. More recently, we’re like, okay, maybe there’s an actual business here. And so we started working with a few folks on beta and it’s going really well. Super legit people, they’re loving it. They’re not gonna drop names because we don’t talk about who we work with, but Yeah, it’s super, super legit working really well. And so yeah, we’re just offering it to some more some more folks. [JP Taxman]: Cool. Yeah, that sounds dope, man. That sounds really great. I guess I don’t know what I guess main questions are. So basically, like, you guys are just going to kind of do all that for me. [Michael Houck]: And yeah, we would source people who are into science fiction. You can do more specific if you want. And we’ll say, okay, here are the people we have who are the best for this. We’re going to set up and run these cold email campaigns. What we might ask for from you is just some demographic information. And like, if you have a lead magnet that you want us to include or to incentivize people with, send that to us. [JP Taxman]: Yep. [Michael Houck]: I got a couple of those. Cool. Great. And then, and then that’s it. And then we’ll set up a process to deliver them into your Beehive account each week, probably starting with the third week. It takes some time to warm up the email servers. But yeah, that’s it. And depending on the niche, I’ll have to talk to my co-founder, see what we can do for this niche in particular. But the rates that we can offer are basically between $0.50 and $1.50 per subscriber. And that depends on both niche and scale, how many you want to do. [JP Taxman]: Yeah. Where I want to be. And that sounds good. And so you just get them into my behalf, you’re just going to like, I mean, you’re just going to send them to the whatever landing page, and they just subscribe, subscribe normally. [Michael Houck]: So so we use we look at the signals in the email to like, how many times do they open it? How quickly do they open it? How many emails in the sequence that we send them? Do they open? And then they can click through and sign up via the lead man if they want. We can also take to highly engaged active folks since we know they’re already interested in the content because of the niche targeting that we do. And we can just import them directly into the Beehive account. [JP Taxman]: So we have somebody on our team who would add them directly. [Michael Houck]: And then we’d set up with you a custom welcome sequence variant for this cohort specifically. So you can show them like the greatest hits. That’s what I do for mine. Like I send them my four best like deep dives on startup related things. And then if they make it through that without unsubscribing, then they get credited as like a lead that we would give you. So there’s like two layers of quality check before you would actually need to pay for them. [JP Taxman]: Okay, gotcha, gotcha, gotcha. Okay. That, oh, so I’m paying per, like, I’m just paying you per subscriber? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, basically you pay upfront, per month, you say like, I want X number of subscribers per month, and then we’ll hit that. [JP Taxman]: Or if we don’t hit it, we’ll make it up the next month, basically. Okay, that’s fine. Okay. All right. Uh, that sounds good. I think. So right now, the strategy I’m running is like the spark loop strategy, which I’m sure you’re generally familiar with. So like, that’s kind of where I’m like, all right, can I make that work? Because right now the goal is to advertise, get them through in the my subscribe form so I can get that extra, get that revenue to pay for the marketing and zero out my marketing. Right. So that I can keep running. Um, I guess, well, I guess, uh, I mean, I’m open to also thoughts and like how to make it other, other strategies. Maybe you’ve seen to make it work. Cause like, that’s the main thing is just like, I need to make sure I’m making at least my ad spend back to cover the to keep growing, to keep at least the baseline marketing spend alive. Do you monetize with any paid products or anything like that too? Yeah. I’m still early. I’m at 780 right now. I’m still figuring out what that’s going to look like, like in terms of like actual signups and things. Cause like a lot of mine too is like, at least the way it’s going to be structured, like people need to get through it and really understand what the exclusive content is. So there’s a lot of education that needs to be done. So it’s not like an instant signup for me. [Michael Houck]: It’s kind of, that’s more of a longterm play. [JP Taxman]: So, and then again, same thing on terms of like, I can, I know like once I’m at scale too, like selling advertising is going to be super easy, but I still need the numbers to sell the advertising, you know [Michael Houck]: what I mean? Right, 100%. That makes sense. I’m trying to think, this would be, because most people who we’ve worked with so far for this beta have been busy making it up on the products that they’re selling through the newsletter. Let me talk to my co-founder and see if he has any thoughts on what we could do for something like this, because I don’t think that there’s an easy way for us to have the Spark Loop or Beehive Boost widgets But maybe there’s something we can do in the emails. I’m not sure. Let me put some thought into it. [JP Taxman]: If it works, cool. If not, I’m always down to swing back around once I’ve gotten, I’m back into a more steady place. I’m not trying to ask too much of you by any means, but if you just help me get my Facebook ads optimized, if I can get that scaled up. Not burning through, then I’m, then I’m growing and scaling. And then I can like really figure a lot of this out and then come back and layer on, on top you guys as my next kind of like base. Yeah. And then I have like a base level paid. I can like keep scaling, making money through boat of a lot. I think you kind of get what I’m getting at there. [Michael Houck]: I totally get it. I was in that same spot at one point. You got your, you’re playing, you’re playing the leverage game, putting one thing off the, off the, exactly, exactly. [JP Taxman]: And so like, like my apps are kind And now I’m just like, I just haven’t been getting signups for some reason. And I’m trying to figure out what that lever is as to why people aren’t signing up. Because it doesn’t seem to make a total sense. I should be getting a couple. So I’m like, what is that? Is it because I’m using leads and just driving traffic and not doing the leads? So I’m trying the leads once a day. I just launched that one to see if that changes it. [Michael Houck]: I don’t know. It might be how the conversion event or the pixel is set up too. [JP Taxman]: That can sometimes be it. Was not set up correctly. So I think that might be it. And I got that set up yesterday or the day before. [Michael Houck]: So I wish they had a more clear guide when you first sign up for like the meta ad platform about like how to do that. We did the same thing. I probably spent like, I don’t know, probably 500, a thousand bucks on like without tracking any of the conversions. And I was like, Oh God. [JP Taxman]: I’ve like done it before, but they are, they make it like so convoluted and then you got to like plug it into Google’s tag manager, which is also like its own amount of overwhelm. But like I can get on and do all this stuff, but then certain things like this isn’t working. You’re like, why not? I did everything. And then you just have to go back two steps and then come back. And it’s like, Oh, now it’s working. Fuck you. Okay. All right. [Michael Houck]: Let me, let me talk to my co-founder. If you do think there’s a, there’s a path of what I can also do is have my, my chief of staff. There’s also like my ad guy. He can, he can kind of jump in and see if we can help out with that too. So let get back to you by tomorrow or Wednesday at the latest. And we can just sort of go from there. [JP Taxman]: Cool. Yeah, that’d be great. Yeah, anything else I anything else I can do to help you? Also, like, I can definitely I don’t know, this is like, this is good, because there’s like a lot here that I can also, as you grow, and that I can plug into, because part of also what I’ve been doing is helping people. I’ve been trying to utilize the Sparkloop thing, but also just getting people on Beehive with their partnership referral program. So I’ve been helping people for free, set their shit up in there and then offer free strategy to do that. So I’m just working with people on that and then I can funnel them in as this is another thing to quickly grow. [Michael Houck]: What are you seeing right now? Because we stopped using the referral network Like, oh man, it’s been a lot longer than I thought, almost a year ago. And I haven’t used them since. Which one are you seeing be more valuable today? [JP Taxman]: Is it Boost or is it Spark Loop? Oh, I’m sorry. What I was talking, I’ll come back to that, but what I was talking about was, I’m just saying like referral network in terms of like, you know, the Beehive partnership program. [Michael Houck]: Oh, the referrals to join Beehive, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. I’m trying to get the beach vacation. [JP Taxman]: I’m trying to get paid. Cause like if I can get like, you know, 200 people ish or like two, apparently at two people with like a hundred thousand subscribers gives me like 12 K a month revenue. Holy crap. That’s great. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So I’m like, okay, like let’s do this. And then also like sparks apparently is pretty ridiculous as well. So I’m just trying to like pair those in some way and like get a bunch of that kind of consistent referral money. That’s smart. Yeah. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [JP Taxman]: So I’m trying to figure that out too, a little bit, but like, again, as I’m doing that, I’m just building up my network of like people within the newsletter space that I can like parse out to in terms of [Michael Houck]: like helping others succeed with theirs and like knowing who those people are. Well, one, one thing that could be interesting then is, um, if you know anybody in that like network who is, um, looking for ghostwriting, we have a ghostwriting agency too, that specifically we do social media. [JP Taxman]: That’s what people ask for. Yeah. We do newsletters too. [Michael Houck]: So, um, be happy to toss, you know, pretty sizable referral, like your way, uh, for anybody that uses this, who converts like, you know, basically we, our base is, uh, three K a month, but then we also can do down to two K a month or up to four K a month, depending on like, you know, how much they’re looking to do. Um, so we can give a referral that’s like, you know, depending on the tier, like one K 1500, something like that. [JP Taxman]: That’d be sick. That’d be amazing. So yeah, I’ll definitely, and that’s one of those ones that like, I definitely am looking for people to refer out for, for that stuff because like that, I’m not trying to run their newsletter. I’m just trying to help a strategy and help them kind of make sure it’s successful. I don’t want to be writing. I’m writing for one other newsletter. I’m doing kind of a similar thing for my, my buddy’s coworking space where we’re like bringing his coworking space to life and I’m writing stories about like how the conference rooms talk after work. [Michael Houck]: It’s so creative, man. I love it. It’s going to be cool. [JP Taxman]: And I wrote the first three and they’re like, it’s just kind of like a roll call. Um, but, but that’s actually one where like, I might refer this strategy to him as a possible, um, way to grow, grow that one. Cause that one, we can easily, we’re all we’re trying to do is get as much virtual, virtual mailboxes, Well, we’re trying to get to 50 and then we’re trying to just sell as much conference room space as we can. So that’s a good one where we can make it back really easily on that one. So I’ll definitely bring that up to him as an option. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: Anybody on the writing side or on the growth side who you think could be a fit, just intro them to me over email so I credit the referral mentally and then when they convert, I’ll send it over to you. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Sick. [JP Taxman]: Cool. Cool. Dude. [Michael Houck]: Well, um, I’ll send you over an email anyway today. Um, or I guess tomorrow probably, um, the, uh, the thinking on how we can make it work on, on time traveling salesman. But, um, for the other ones too, I’ll send over some info on that as well. [JP Taxman]: Perfect. Sounds great, man. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Dude. [Michael Houck]: Good to meet. [JP Taxman]: Good to meet you too. [Michael Houck]: Cool. Talk soon. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Later.