- Duration: 36 min
- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01JE41DWD136A5R0THHPVNXA0T (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JE41DWD136A5R0THHPVNXA0T)
Transcript
[UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: I’m up. How was your weekend? It was good. [Max Palmer]: I went to New Jersey for Thanksgiving at my and uncle’s and then got back to the city on Saturday. Oh, you’re up there for a couple of days. Nice. Yeah, I was there Wednesday What were you doing? [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: Saw some friends for like a little birthday gathering, and then went down to see my parents. We’d done Thanksgiving with Jenny’s parents the weekend before, so we had Thanksgiving number two. And then just took it easy. It was nice to have some time to not do anything. What about you, Ben? How was your Thanksgiving? Looks like you’re back at home after your travel. [Ben Ornstein]: Yeah, I was in Pittsburgh from Tuesday through Saturday. So it was nice time to spend time with my grandma and aunt who live over there. It’s my mom’s side of the family. You don’t see them as much just because they’re farther away. So it was nice, but yeah. Work some during the small break-ish, so it was nice. But yeah, no, it was good. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: It was good to see everyone. Okay, so one of the things I was thinking about over the weekend and want us to try for December is just being more, I think, process-driven, especially with content stuff, as we start to focus on our strengths more as we go into 2025, I want us to just be more, less all over the place, more process driven specifically with this stuff. And so I wanted to set up and I’m still setting it up. It’ll be done tonight, but I want to set up linear and start using that to track our progress on like the bigger content pieces. And I also want to do this meeting, each week. Basically, the goal of this meeting normally will be to go over what is our Saturday deep dive of the week. And what research do we need to do for that? What is our long form YouTube video that we’re going to do that week? And what research do we need to do for that? Maybe those are the same thing. I think eventually, they’ll probably be the same thing consistently, but initially, probably not And then just keep doing what we were doing before. We’re ideating ideas for shorts, but also extending that to ideas for like bigger, like LinkedIn posts, right? Where I’m writing these like mini essays on LinkedIn to, you know, hopefully get a lot of impressions and things like that. So that’s sort of what I framed this meeting as. Obviously for this first one, We’ll talk more about the process. We’ll do a walkthrough of Linear and more stuff like that. But that’s what this would normally be about. So does that make sense? Does that sound good? Anything we should add to that? Yeah, sounds good. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yep. OK. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: So I think first, let’s just do a quick walkthrough of Linear. Ben, you’ve seen it a little bit more from the Megaphone stuff. I’ll just do a quick walkthrough of what I set up for this. Okay, so I added a couple things for Megaphone Studios in here. Yeah, in here. And we’ll probably add more to this too, but just keep an eye out on this workspace as well. You guys will be tagged and please add task also that you are working on. Same goes for the content side, but this is, you know, issue title, description, priority, assign it to yourself. Don’t worry about project for now. And then the way to think about this is that extra small is less than a day. Small is one day. Medium is like half a week ish. Large is a full week and extra large is more than a week. Closer to two weeks or more. And then labels, I need to remove the engineering default ones, like bug feature, right? But you can add labels if a task is like, should be tagged by something that’s not in here. My ask would just be that we try not to duplicate labels. So try to keep them, as much as possible and then use them. Use at least a couple on each task if needed. As for the founding journey stuff, so what I did is I added the four, I think it’s four, yeah, four videos that we identified that we wanted to do and I created tasks for them. I’m gonna set this up as a template where we can just use it each week. Basically there’s this parent task And then there’s these child tasks. And Ben, some of the real ones are going to be auto assigned to you. I’ll be doing the scripting and recording. And yeah, just other stuff in there, too. So I added those. One thing we should do today is pick the first one that we want to do. And then there’s some other smaller tasks in here, too. Again, I haven’t added all of the things we want to, but I’ll be doing that today. Um, when you go to update a task, so for example, this is in progress. So I’m going to go here. I’ll Mark. This is in progress. And then in Slack, you guys can see if you go into the, um, what channel is it in? I think it’s in the social media channel. No patient should pop up in a second. Yep. There it is. That says that that task is in progress. This will just be good to keep us on the same page about what’s going on. And if you see somebody move something like to complete or in progress or whatever, or even leave a comment on it like here, I’ll leave a comment like this is a test comment. So if I leave that as a comment, it’ll pop up with a notification also in Slack and then you can choose to either comment on the linear task as well or just open up a thread in Slack. It’s probably easier to just open up a thread in Slack at that point. So it’d be faster to find resolution that way if there’s something you want to comment on about what’s going on on a task. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Does that all make sense? [Ben Ornstein]: Yeah, linear is great. I love it. As a tool. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: Yeah. It’s really good for, for like project management and stuff. Um, eventually we might add projects and all once we know what videos we’re going to do, which week, which pieces we’re into, which week we’ll add like due dates to them just so we make sure we’re staying on, on [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: task. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: Um, but yeah, the goal is to sort of have our ops run through this as much as possible. Um, without it being some like overbearing process. Any thoughts on your end, Max? [Max Palmer]: No, I haven’t ever really used linear before, but I can get the hang of it. Yeah, you can change the view if you want up here to be like a board view too. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: You can mess with how it shows up on your screen. You can also save views. So if you like filter by, you know, my tasks, then you can save that view over here as well. Just so you can go back to any time and you can favorite stuff and put it in like your favorites up here. Like I have a view for what’s Rafael working on, what’s each of the engineers working on, what are our current bugs, right? So it’s pretty, it’s pretty cool. It’s pretty easy to use. As I said, we’re not using projects yet, but that’ll be another layer when we do edit. [Ben Ornstein]: Max, you’ll pick it up pretty quickly. It’s like, it’s highly intuitive. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Cool. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: It was built by a guy from Airbnb. So like the product design is like very clean. The UX is very thoughtful. I might add cycles to this too. So here, I’ll show you what I mean. I mean, so cycle is sprints, basically. We do this on the engineering team where we do two week sprints. I think on the content side, it probably makes sense to do one week sprints instead. And then we use this meeting each week to just plan for the weekly sprint. But I don’t know if that’s going to be necessary yet, or it might be overkill. So we’ll see how it goes this week and go from there. But yeah, I guess as you guys get things set if you have any questions, just let me know. Okay, so the first, I guess, like topic for this meeting that we probably won’t ever need to talk about again. Right now, the content we’re creating for YouTube and obviously across all channels, you know, the newsletter kind of nonwithstanding, just talking about social media channels. Is there a world where we create content other than startup-centric, founder-focused content? Is there a reason that we would switch up and create, I don’t know, the best example would probably be like growth content, ghostwriting, content that’s gonna attract clients for the ghostwriting agency. Obviously, we have less historical credibility but we do have a business in that space right now that’s doing well. So is there a world where it makes more sense for us to do that than the startup stuff? [Max Palmer]: Curious your guys’ thoughts. I think we need to decide what the end goal of our YouTube efforts are. Is it to get subscribers for the newsletter? Is it to just grow a YouTube account and monetize that? Yeah, I think we need to decide that before we decide, like, which way we’re going with the content. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: And, yeah. [Max Palmer]: What else was I going to say? [Ben Ornstein]: I forget. Kind of how I think research on work week, Adam Ryan’s work week, and then, um, kind of how you’ve built the newsletter and then built products and other product lines and things like that from that core product. I kind of see it as continuing to focus until we have both the monetization on the YouTube side, plus you worship and fun and Some amount of followers that we’re comfortable with or subscribers um that we’re comfortable with to then expand elsewhere and that’s how we can build things that are more It could be different Playlists, it could be completely different channels once we have that process down and perfected um, then we can build specific Content related to different niches that we’re also involved in outside of like the core stuff. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: But I do agree with Max. [Ben Ornstein]: First, we should probably figure out where we want to go with this, because that’s going to drive all the decisions. [Max Palmer]: I would probably say we stick with startup content. That’s our bread and butter. That’s what we already know a lot about. That’s where all of your expertise lies and where you have credibility There’s a ton of content that we can make about startups and founders. And it’s a good top of funnel for several of our businesses. Yeah, I agree. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: I think that the end goal at this point is probably just to create a large YouTube channel. Channel. And I think our easiest path to do that is the content that we’re already creating around the newsletter, the content that we’re already knowledgeable about. It’s the lowest friction way to, to create good content. Cause like we can do a little research and come up with a good YouTube video within a week. Whereas if we’re creating for something else, it would take us a while to get up to speed enough to create like the expert level content, would want to create. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah, I agree with that. OK. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: Also, it makes the newsletter a lot easier, sort of what I was hinting at before, where if we get in a good groove with the video, we can literally just make the Saturday Deep Dives about the video that we already are creating each week and knock out two birds with one stone. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Ben Ornstein]: Yeah, Max has talked about the repurposing of content, and that’s still, I completely agree. While I do two different things that we can repurpose it. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: Yep. Okay, cool. That’s an easy, easy call then. What else? For now, I would say like that, that should be the focus. Yeah, I agree. Okay, so as far as the idea of using the long form YouTube video for our Saturday deep dive newsletters too. I don’t think that should be the goal for this week. If we get there, great. But I think it’ll be our first week sort of trying this out with the long form YouTube. So yeah, I think let’s hold off on that. But yeah, excuse me, I don’t know if we’re gonna get it out. Won’t get it out because we need to research and record the video this week and then they’ll edit it and stuff next week. So goal should be, I guess next week we, we tried that out for the start of deep dive. Um, Oh, one other thing I forgot to show on linear, they have recurring tasks that you can set up. So like if you guys are doing something each week, um, or I guess even each day, but whatever, um, you can set it up so that it just reappears in your to dues, um, on that interval. So let me know if you want to set that up and it’s a little different than setting up the normal tasks. What else does I have? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Um, okay. I think that was it. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: I think the next thing is then let’s just pick what topic we want to do the first video on. So let me open up Linear again. Okay, so we have the entire history of Silicon Valley. We have startup fundraising explained. Max, that’s that video that you had found a while ago. We have the Twitter thread on the US versus the EU, and then we have the Twitter thread on how Elon Musk runs so many companies. Any thoughts? I like those first three. [Max Palmer]: The fourth one about Elon, I’m sure three dozen YouTube channels have already created a video like that. So I like sticking with one of the first three. And the startup fundraising explain might be the easiest for us. Just because you are an expert on that. And, uh, it’ll probably require a little less research. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah, that’s true. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: It will require less research. The entire history of Silicon Valley one is interesting too, because, um, so I found out that John Coogan actually created this video, like, but it’s two years ago. So it’s, you know, it’s not like we’d be creating the same video right after him. Yeah. I’m sorry. But yeah, I would say we should watch this. It got really good engagement from folks had like 600,000 views. I don’t know how early it was for him on his channel. Like I don’t know how long he’s been doing this for. But 600,000 views is in the like top I don’t know, 10th of his maybe top 25% of his videos, and it was from two years ago. So I think because it was a while ago, I don’t think we’re stepping on toes by doing it. We just need to make it markedly different with our own research and all that. So Ben, what do you think between these, if we say these three, first. [Ben Ornstein]: Yeah, I agree. Starting with the one that is the least, probably least amount of research and easiest lift, just to and then also just to get our process in place. That seems to make sense. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: I was going to say one of the first two. So cool. Okay. I guess we could do the the fundraising one first. So yeah, I guess let’s watch that video. And like, I guess, take some notes on structure as we go through it. I’ll do the same Ben, you and I should both both do that. And then we should sync up and sort of identify any additional things we want to research for it after that. And then we can write the script for it once we have all that in one place. [Ben Ornstein]: So let’s say maybe we sync up on that on Wednesday. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: And by then, we’ll both have watched the video, we’ll both have gone through it. And you can do some initial researches based on what you think would be relevant and then we can sync up and do sort of next next steps on research. I’m trying to see if there’s anything we can do tomorrow. My schedule is a little crazy today and tomorrow but I guess we could chat at like 2.30 tomorrow. Are you free then? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah that should work for me. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: Okay let’s actually do that then instead of Wednesday just so we’re moving Okay. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Um, I’ll send an invite now. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: Max, do you want to, since you flagged this one too, do you want to be in that too? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Um, sure. [Max Palmer]: If you need me. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: Yeah, I think maybe for this first one, let’s just all get our, um, get all opinions in there. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: At 2.30 in the morning? [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: Yeah, right after I run on one. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: OK. Yeah. Cool. OK. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: Should I bring ideas to that? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: What’s? Yeah, yeah, yeah. [Max Palmer]: Bring ideas. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: I mean, I assume you’ve watched the video, but I guess maybe watch it again and just take some notes and thoughts and what we could do differently and what we should do the same. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: OK. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: And then we’ll refine this process over. Over time, but okay, so I’m moving this one to high priority, in progress, and then, yeah, okay, cool. So the next week’s deep dive will also be on this, just like a playbook of fundraising, basically. I feel like we’ve done a deep dive on that before, but yeah, but you know, we’ve done, we talk about fundraising a lot, but it’s, it’s the, it’s the framing, right? Like everything you need to know about fundraising. I don’t think we’ve done that before. Yeah. Yeah. Um, and we could actually, we could pitch the, uh, the valuation course in that deep dive too. Yeah. Just bring that back up. Okay. Let’s see what else. Okay, for a deep dive this week, thoughts on topic for that? Because we should, we want to be more research driven for that too. So thoughts on that? [Ben Ornstein]: That one that I sent you while I was driving that one sounded really interesting. It was like sales The future of what was it? Hold on Death of a sales force. I thought that was really interesting. It was an a16z podcast Um, we could talk about how like ai is affecting um how AI changes sales and how founders can take advantage of it. That could be an interesting one to dive deeper into. What’s the angle for how founders can take advantage of it based on what you read? It was a podcast and it was, honestly, I don’t even fully remember. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: I have to re-listen to it. Okay, yeah, because I think if it’s like how, if it’s informative of how founders should do early stage founder-led sales, then I think, yeah, that’s interesting. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 2]: If it’s like more for, you know, like later stage folks, then it’s probably not as widely applicable to the audience. [Ben Ornstein]: I think it was, since it’s A16Z, probably a little bit later stage than like, so yeah, maybe not then. [Max Palmer]: How do you remember a while ago when you asked me to find some new topics? [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: So it’s funny. I have, I have that, um, that message that you sent those various ideas to me. I have that bookmarked in Slack and each week I update the reminder to the next week so that if I need inspo on Friday morning, it’s there for me. Okay. [Max Palmer]: Cause I was just searching in Slack for it. So you have it. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: Yeah, I have it. Let me, let me find it real quick. Hold on. Um, I think I just updated it, so I gotta go forward in my reminders. I use the Slack reminders way too much. Okay, I guess I’ll just share my screen so you guys can see the full list here. Yeah, so this is what you’d sent over. [Max Palmer]: Yeah, I mean there’s multiple there that we’ve never talked about Yeah, I mean throw one out there that we can do this week like great interview exit interview I Decide if you should shut down your startup or keep going You kind of dealt with that. Yeah, kind of kind of not really but yeah Yeah, I mean pricing wise like how to price your product. I don’t think we’ve ever. [Ben Ornstein]: And you said that’s one of your expertises, right, Hauk? [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: Yeah, I mean, I built pricing models at Uber, so I know. [Ben Ornstein]: Right. Pricing is impossible. I have no, I don’t think anyone, like, I don’t know how to price something. And that’s a hugely important topic. That one’s really interesting. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: I think we would need to get a little more specific, I think, because, like, you price different products very, very differently. Like, psychology of a SaaS product is very different than something else. So we need to find an angle there that isn’t overly specific where it’s irrelevant to most of the audience. So we can think through what that should be. But I do like tackling that topic in general. We could also frame that one like one of these big surveys survey pieces where we just reach out to a bunch of founders and we ask them a couple of questions about how they price their products in like a qualitative way and then turn that into quantitative data. That could be one that probably I don’t know if we’d be able to get that done in one week or less than a week, I guess, but that could be a good one. [Ben Ornstein]: Absolutely. When to pivot is relatively broad too, but I love that topic. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: Yeah, when to pivot, I think you can actually do as a one-off, even though it’s broad because, you know, there’s, it’s not like it’s like a data driven topic, really. It’s like a, I mean, it’s to a degree it is, but there are generalizable things across industries that you can feel and look for about when to pivot. So that, that could be a good one to do. Um, one thing we’re going to be doing this week is conducting user interviews to inform product decisions around how to position the founding journey offer and what to include in it. So maybe that’s a good timing for us to be doing this topic. [Max Palmer]: Or do we want to do it after we’ve done these interviews? [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: Yeah, that’s a good point. Might want to do it afterwards. Maybe in two or three weeks. That’s a good idea. What about how to pick who should be the CEO? [Max Palmer]: Yeah, you dealt with that. You told me. Yeah, you told me about your story. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: For me personally, yes, yes, I did say that personally. [Ben Ornstein]: Yeah. That is great. Especially for the ones that you have personal experience with, you can talk very specifically about this. Like you have first person experience. Yeah. And that’s great. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 2]: It’s also a topic where there’s probably a lot of research out there that we can do to see what other people think about it. And we can reference that against my viewpoint on it. [Ben Ornstein]: So that might actually be a good place to start Yeah, I’ve heard so many different podcasts where like that’s been talked about some for some it was so easy like some people are like I remember Dara talking about his uh, it was so easy for him because He was the one that was trying to like ship the whole product, uh, or or He had the vision, but he was always looking forward and going too fast for his co-workers co-founder was more product focused and was like trying to hold him back and be more specific about certain things. So it’s very clear that Dara was going to be the CEO where his co-founder was, was the CTO. It was, it was just that split was so obvious. Yeah. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 2]: I mean, in some cases it is one person just wants to write code and build a product and the other person is more interested in, you know, the fundraising and the sales, but it’s not always. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Oh yeah, definitely not. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 2]: So, but I guess my point is that I think there’s a lot of good content out there that we can reference and still come up with a unique perspective about it based on my own experience. [Max Palmer]: So maybe let’s do that one this week. Sounds good. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: Pick a CEO. Yeah. All right. What do you think? [Max Palmer]: Yeah, I think there’s, we can do several of these. So I think we’ll keep coming back to that list. Okay. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 2]: Let’s do this one. Start Ben let’s I guess I’m on like back-to-backs all day today so and you can just get started on like looking into blogs and podcasts and even Twitter posts where people talk about it LinkedIn posts people talk about it there’s probably actually the most insight is probably on Twitter posts so I would just say let’s compile sources let’s compile insights from those sources in like an ocean doc. And then we can chat about this tomorrow as well. And what I’ll probably do then is I’ll probably enter you to some folks who can share perspective on this. We’ll just email some folks and say, hey, do you want to answer a couple of questions about this this week? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Feature in the newsletter. Perfect. [Ben Ornstein]: Yeah, I got to check out my to-do list There’s a whole bunch of shit here. Yeah. Yeah. You add, add them to linear, get it, get them in linear. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: Yeah. Okay, cool. So we’ll do that this week. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Um, do we did long form? [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 2]: We did deep dive. Uh, okay. And then I’m going to do the shorts and LinkedIn stuff this week, so we don’t need to talk about that. And we’ll start integrating that into this meeting normally next week. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: But I think that’s it. You guys have anything else? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: No? Okay, cool. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: Well, we’ll sync up tomorrow and talk YouTube. And we can also touch base on the deep dive then too. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 2]: But I think this new process will lead to good content, which I’m excited about. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Cool. That’s good. Cool. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: All right. See you guys.