- Duration: 33 min
- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01JE486T6Z5EFGE72J99TA47KR (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JE486T6Z5EFGE72J99TA47KR)
Transcript
[Lee Schmidt]: I kind of found you guys, well actually I think I got subscribed to your newsletter a long time ago and so I just kind of discovered your brand randomly and I saw there was like an email where you mentioned some ghost writing services and then some time passed, I remember there was like a link in the email and I tried like save it for later and I lost it. And anyways, long story short, then like, I, you know, I think like a few months later, which was like just recently here, um, it popped into my head again. And I sent a message through, um, your intercom widget on megaphone. Oh, sure. Yep. So I was on there sending the message and I’m like, Hey, do you guys do, um, like ghostwriting for newsletters and Twitter, um, and channels like that? And, and so they sent me a link and then I booked a call and, And so anyways, that’s how I came across you here. I mean, it’s, it makes sense. [Michael Houck]: We got to update our site for megaphone to emphasize that we do do the ghost writing books right now. It’s totally focused on the, the creator network and platform that we, that we offer to partner with creators. But we’re in the process of updating that. So sorry if it was confusing. [Lee Schmidt]: Oh no, no, not at all. Um, but yeah, that’s cool. So it’ll give you a quick rundown of, of, um, myself and refresh so I I’ve always been like a Kind of like a sass Entrepreneur, I guess Several years ago. I’d started up a side project at the time where I was like working full-time as an engineer side project turned in my full-time thing Which was like this product that was it’s like a credit repair software platform kind of like a self-serve alternative to the traditional credit repair industry, which has always been kind of like scammy and predatory. So then fast forward to about a year ago, I started a second product, which is called Refresh, and that’s the brand or the company that I’m looking for, ghost writing for. And that is more of like a general personal finance platform, like helps people create budgets, track all your spending and income and investments and net worth and everything like all in one spot. Not too dissimilar from popular budgeting apps like Mint, which shut down now, they’ve been shut down for like a year, but then like Rocket Money, YNAB, Copilot, Monarch, there’s like a handful of them out there. And so that’s what Refresh is, just like a personal financial management platform. And for the We launched early this year, for the first year. We haven’t really had to do any traditional marketing because the reason I mentioned that first, that other SaaS product that I had, they kind of are strategically linked together. Customers for my first SaaS, they need to get their credit report from somewhere. But due to compliance related reasons, you can’t let people directly access their credit report in something, in a product that does actual credit repair. They’ve got to be like totally separated. So one of the first feature that we built in Refresh was just letting people access their credit. So I can send people over to my other product and say, Hey, here’s how to get access to your credit report. Then you can like import it in. Um, so anyways, for the last year, that’s, um, that’s where we’ve been getting our customers from It’s just from this other SaaS that I own, which is great, but that, you know, giving people, selling credit reports is not a scalable business model, but it’s a way that we, you know, we could get customers flowing, get revenue flowing, everything like that. So anyways, now we’re gearing up for like our bigger launch where we can actually like launch our features core to our actual product, which is all like the budgeting and personal finance features, which are not live yet. So we’re kind of in the middle of planning out just a bunch of marketing initiatives to kind of be timed with our, now that we’re kind of like moving into like a new phase, there’s a bunch of things that we want to get live at the same time. One would be a newsletter. Another would be establishing a presence on X slash formerly Twitter. Um, I still call it Twitter all the time. So, so yeah, we want to establish a presence there probably from, um, both like a, you know, a brand, um, account and my, for, for myself, you know, probably like more also like a founder, um, you know, kind of like a personal brand angle on it, but still geared towards like the company. And then just to kind of complete the the marketing picture here even though these next two things are not really relevant to like megaphone, but But we’re also also like reaching out to companies who do social posting And and then of course and then we’re working on like Creating organic content too Which will probably live on Beehive as well. That’s where we plan to do our newsletter anyway, so we’re probably I’m planning to do like organic content, newsletter, social, like Instagram and stuff like that. And then Twitter, it’s kind of like a different kind of social. And everything that we’re doing, we’re trying to, you know, there’s a bunch of ways to just kind of churn out really like low quality content, right? In whatever form, whether it’s organic or social posting or whatever. We’re trying to, we want everything to be super high quality. So, you know, when it comes to having a newsletter done, that’s the main thing that we’re after. It’s kind of like, I don’t know if in the last couple of years or something, it seems like newsletters have become repopularized. And the bar has been set really high for just the quality of content that I think people expect and are comfortable with to land in their inbox. So anyways, that’s kind of what we’re going for. How does everything work with you guys as far as types? I guess the first question would be in the personal finance niche, is that a topic you guys can work with, you know, and just how does it work from like pricing and just the whole process, I guess. Yeah. I mean, so that’s really helpful context. [Michael Houck]: And I agree strategically that you do want to hit it sort of from the newsletter angle where you stay top of mind for folks and then the social angle for like establishing credibility, thought leadership and sort of driving them into that funnel in the first place. So I think you’re strategically it makes We’d be able to help with the newsletter and then also the Twitter accounts. We don’t do Instagram right now. Maybe that’ll change in the future, but we could help with Twitter and the newsletter. And so our process is honestly really simple because we work with founders, right? Like I built it based on the process that I would need. So we don’t have any required meetings. We’re not going to take up your time. If you want to do content interviews with us, we can do those weekly. We do those monthly, that’s fine, but it’s not a requirement. Our process works without needing that. Basically what we do is we’d set up a shared Slack channel. We do one kickoff call with you where we sort of go deep on the audience, the content pillars, the formats, the cadence and structure of the newsletter and things like that. And then from there, everything would happen in Slack. So each week we would send you ideas and specific questions about those ideas. And we encourage you to send us ideas too. Course, but we would be prompting you for that in Slack. All we’d need from you is, ideally, some sort of rambly voice note where we can capture the nuance, the voice, the intonation, all that kind of stuff. And then we turn that into content for you on a weekly basis. And that would be delivered via Notion. We’d post about it in the Slack. You’d go into the Notion, check it out. And we can work with Beehive very easily. We also handle all content So, for example, scheduling, replying to people on Twitter for you, everything like that. Both people who engage with your content will reply to them and also will reply to like thought leaders in the personal finance niche who are having posts go viral and want to get some free impressions and traffic on your page and some followers from that would do that too. So that’s the process, super simple. And I have a writer in mind on the team who’s very knowledgeable about the personal finance niche, who would be a good fit for this. I’ve worked with them for, honestly, at this point, over a year and a half. [Lee Schmidt]: I know very well. [Michael Houck]: And yeah, we’d definitely be a good fit for this. They could handle both the newsletter and the Twitter content as well, be the same partner. They’d be totally dedicated to you. It’s not like you put your content in a pool and some writer picks it up that week or whatever. They’re your partner on this. And my partner on the agency is Blake Imahl, who actually has more, a bit larger audience even than I do. We both are in the weeds with the writers. I’d be your primary point of contact. You’d also see him in Slack and he’d be working very, very closely with the writer. And that’s pretty much it. As far as pricing goes, it depends how much content you’d want, right? So we can do a weekly newsletter, we can do a daily newsletter, a bi-weekly newsletter. And on the social side, if you want daily posting, if you just want maybe one or two threads a week, and no other stuff around that, there’s different options. I can send you over something that breaks down the pricing in full detail. But a good way to think about it is that both of them would start at $19.95 per month, so $2K a month. And at the high end, the newsletter would be $4K. The social content would be 3K. [Lee Schmidt]: That’s on the high end. Okay. Okay. Gotcha. Cool. Um, okay. That sounds, yeah, that sounds good. That’s like, you know, then in our price range and, and everything, um, there, um, going back to something you said earlier in Slack, we’re like after, so after the initial call, um, and then when it’s kind of like on a, just like an ongoing basis, um, did you say that, so let’s just say it was a weekly newsletter, um, Um, would, would the writer, I forgot if you said that, would they put something in Slack and then like on a weekly basis or like once we get going, would they just kind of, um, or yeah, I guess what is, what is that process that you said? What does it look like once you’re like kind of past getting everything like started and situated? Yeah. [Michael Houck]: So we’ll be doing our own research on different topics each week. Uh, in this case we’ll propose those ideas to be like, hey, for the newsletter this week, how does this sound, right? Maybe it’s some angle, like five personal finance hacks to increase your 401k faster or something like that. I don’t know, right? Or yeah, whatever. They’re the expert on that. And so they would, they do the research and they’d send those ideas to you. We’ll also take in any ideas from you. If you have an idea on a Thursday night, you’re like, hey, I think we should do this next week. Just send it to us. And we don’t necessarily require any input from you. If you’re like, hey, I’m super busy this week, I can’t get to it. That’s fine. What I would say is that the more of like just a rambly voice note, as I said, that you can give to us, the more unique the content will be, the more unique the voice will be, which, you know, will over time be compounding and work better for you. So. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Lee Schmidt]: Okay. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: That makes sense. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Lee Schmidt]: Cause he said, since it’s like the same person, they’ll, hopefully start to get a sense of like if we’re consistent with like leaving notes and thoughts and feedback. Yeah, hopefully it should get kind of seamless after a while. Cool. Well, yeah, that sounds pretty good. So what would be if we decided, you know, we wanted to move forward, what would the next step look like, kind of like how long does, like, do you guys have, you know, basically how quickly could we get started if we wanted to move forward? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I’m 90% sure that the writer I have in mind does have bandwidth immediately. I’ll check with them today. And then I’ll shoot you an email later today to confirm that. But, you know, as far as that, it’s just any other questions that you have, I’m happy to answer and then we’d be ready to ready get going. Once we sign and once we’re operational, there’d be like a two-week period where we’re doing context gathering, we’re setting up the newsletter for you in Beehive, we’re handling all the settings and all the ops and the automation sequences and things like that. But other than that, we’d be rolling and content will be out within a few weeks. [Lee Schmidt]: Cool. Okay. Cool, cool. The only other question I think I have then would be, as far as the email format and templates and everything themselves, I think I saw on the landing page that you guys do, do you do anything related to the actual design, the visuals of it? Yeah. [Michael Houck]: Some clients want to take it on themselves because they have a brand in mind and they’re like, I just want to do that, but we can set up the design of the newsletter. You give us some guidance on colors and fonts and things With that, we can take care of the rest. [Lee Schmidt]: Okay, all right, cool. There’s another question I had that was on the top of my brain and it just slipped away. Yeah, it kind of slipped away. Okay, but yeah, cool. So if you want to send, I think you said there was something you could send over with, I don’t know, just any additional information and the pricing, even though I think the pricing was on your landing page when I looked last. But yeah, anything you can send over just to have something I can look at later today. And then I would say, we’re trying to get everything rolling pretty darn quick because we’re hoping to do our actual feature launch next month in January. Great. And yeah, so that way. [Michael Houck]: Two quick points to call out. One is that you would to get a free subscription to Megaphone as part of this too, the Creator Network platform. So you’d still need to pay the creators on the platform to amplify your social posts, but you wouldn’t have to pay us to get on the platform. And then the second thing is, excuse me, the second thing would be for the newsletter, can you give me a sense of how big the initial email list will be? [Lee Schmidt]: So it depends. We have about, See, I can give you a number right now of how many accounts we have created right now. So we’ve got 9,300 people right now who have just an account. They’re not all paying customers right now, but those are the people who are actually signed up for Refresh. So if we took all those people, and I’m assuming in our terms of service and everything, technically they’ve opted in to of communications from us. So I would feel comfortable, at least I would feel personally comfortable putting them just like kind of auto subscribing them to a newsletter. Um, so if there’s a way to do that in beehive, um, that is, you know, what we would probably have like out of the gates and then in like the last 30 days, um, let’s see. So yeah, then probably about like in the last 30 days, for example, we had like 800 accounts created. So that should be, you know, pretty reasonable growth rate. And then what we’re hoping is, you know, once we get a Twitter presence established that, you know, hopefully we can kind of send people back and forth, you know, people who end up on the newsletter, say, just because, you know, people who are like coming in from our other SaaS product and signing up that way, you know, they get on the newsletter. Maybe they’ll discover Twitter that way and vice versa. People from Twitter discover the newsletter and hopefully they kind of work synergistically. Yeah, that’s, that’s a pretty standard sort of back and forth funnel for these, these types of newsletters. [Michael Houck]: I do it with mine. Um, and, and you know, we’re, we’re very familiar with how to get that set up in a maximizing the topic back and forth. Um, one other thing I would mention is that we, we recently spun this up. It’s in beta, so it’s, it’s a new thing that we’re offering, but we’ve seen some, good results with it. It’s gone from zero to 10K MRR in two weeks, so people seem to like it. Basically what we’re doing is, once we get sort of the structure of the newsletter set up and we’re like, okay, we feel good about this, this is our format, the audience is liking what we’re putting out. Once we have that kind of validation from the target demographic, what we can start doing is running cold email campaigns to very, very highly targeted folks that’s like, we use a proprietary process to make sure these are folks who are interested in certain things, not just with like X job title or something like that. Like you get on like Apollo, we have our own process of doing an interest-based targeting at the email level. And so what we do is we’d run these campaigns against the lead magnet and we’d say, Oh, are you interested in this lead magnet? If they are interested, then we would basically add them to the newsletter as well. Cause it’d be some note that’s like, you’d also get our newsletter. Right. And so they joined the newsletter as well. And we’ve seen that actually compare favorably on both cost and engagement relative to paid ads on social. So early stages for us, something to keep in mind, but definitely something we could layer on as the newsletter, you know, matures. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Lee Schmidt]: Awesome. Cool. Because one thing that we’re planning to do, like once we get the newsletter spun up is so right now we’re doing some paid ads on Google, which to be honest, right now it’s not super effective, mainly because since we’re only able to advertise the features that we have today, which is access to your credit report, and we built an AI assistant that you can talk to about your credit. So we did some cool little things that make it a little bit more unique. But anyways, so we have some paid ads running Um, but one thing we’re going to experiment with is just like running some paid ads in with the conversion goal of just getting people signed up for a newsletter rather than a conversion goal of like getting them to pay for a subscription, just to kind of play around and see what, see what that looks like, Like how low can we get a CPA for getting people onto the newsletter? Um, and then, you know, kind of trying to figure out some. Metrics on like, okay, how, what percentage of people who like sign up for a newsletter end up signing up for a subscription at some point. Um, and stuff like that, since it might be, you know, maybe you can get someone on your newsletter today and they won’t actually sign up for like three months or something. Right. And that’s like, you know, so sometimes I think those things are like lost because, you know, with like Google ads, Facebook ads and stuff like that, like, you know, I think it’s like after 90 days, like you can’t track a conversion, But I think that there can definitely be conversions that happen in time spans longer than 90 days. Oh, yeah. [Michael Houck]: We just had someone literally last week, right before Thanksgiving, sign up for our membership through my newsletter. And I looked through their Beehive history with us. We’ve been sending emails for almost a year and a half. So no platform is going to recognize that unless you just you know, have the data yourself and you’re looking at it. [Lee Schmidt]: Right. And then, yeah, actually, yeah, I guess I’m even a good example of that, too, because like I mentioned, it was like months ago when I first got your email. Now, finally, all of a sudden, I’m like, hey, let me book a call. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. So what we can do is when you’re ready to do that, I would recommend, you know, a mix of sort of meta. So Facebook, Instagram and cold email rather than Google. For the newsletter, you’ll get better CPAs on both those channels than Google by far. We’re happy to help with both, with setup, with management, with creative development, whatever you want. We’ve got folks on staff who do it all for us and for some of our clients as well. [Lee Schmidt]: Cool. OK. Yeah, that all sounds great. So I think I’ve run out of questions for now, but I would say it sounds like there’s a strong chance that we’ll want to Get started, because this all sounds pretty good. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Cool. [Michael Houck]: I’ll send over that email later today, just rehashing the pricing and any other details and things like that. If any questions come up, just grab some more time. Happy to hop back on and chat more. But yeah, we’d love to work with you guys. The niche is something we know really well, so I think it can be a good fit. Cool, cool, cool. [Lee Schmidt]: Oh, and just one other random thing. We’re going to be doing, I forgot to mention this, we’re also in the process of, we’re going to be doing a rebrand. So we’re going to be changing our name and we’re, yeah, so we’re also, what’s that? [Michael Houck]: You’re going to be refreshing it. Yes. Yeah. [Lee Schmidt]: We’re, we’re, we’re way out of the refresh name. Yeah, I guess. Um, so, so yeah, just as an FYI too, yeah, we’re going to be, we will be changing our name, um, and everything. So yeah. So in the, in the not too distant future, probably like in January, uh, we’ll have a That’s fine with us. [Michael Houck]: We can work on how to brand that around the newsletter. That’s fine. Cool. So I’ll email you today. Is this something you guys would be looking to move on this week or later in December? [Lee Schmidt]: So how are you thinking about that? I would say, I would say probably by the end of this week. Yeah. We could probably move on it. Yeah. Yeah. Because we’re, you know, it’s like December is always kind of just like time it slips away at the end of the month and everything like that, and then all of a sudden it’s January. So yeah, we’re trying to get this all situated and figured out as soon as possible. Cool. [Michael Houck]: We can move as fast as you guys want us to. Our team is super lean and we’re ready to go. Okay. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Awesome. [Lee Schmidt]: Well, thanks, Michael. I’ll look out for you. If you have anything you can send over to me, I’ll take a look at that. And then if I have any questions, I’ll send it over to you. Otherwise, yeah, by the end of the week, I’ll just loop back with you. Or if you have like a, I don’t know, an agreement or something that you could send over, I guess it kind of depends on, like you said, if the newsletter is like weekly and what. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I think you guys chat internally about what you want to do in terms of cadence and frequency. And I’ll sort of outline the different options in the email. And then we can send over an agreement and the strike link and everything like that from there. [Lee Schmidt]: Awesome. Okay. Sounds good. Cool. Oh, sorry. [Michael Houck]: One, one last thing I forgot to mention. We are month to month 30 day cancellation, but if you want to do like a six or 12 month commitment, we can knock something off the price for, for that too. So just, okay. [Lee Schmidt]: Okay, cool. Awesome. Good to know. Cool. All right. Thanks Michael. I will talk to you soon. Talk soon. See you.