- Duration: 26 min
- Platform: zoom
- Source: Read.ai 01JE6QBAN5F74285F4PAZQJY25 (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JE6QBAN5F74285F4PAZQJY25)
Transcript
[Sarah Allali]: Hello, Michael, can you hear me? [Michael Houck]: Hey, Sarah, yeah, I can hear you. [Sarah Allali]: Can you hear me? Yeah, very well, thank you. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Cool. I have an echo. [Sarah Allali]: Yeah, it will be fine. No worries about that. Thanks for taking the time to chat. [Michael Houck]: No, thanks for grabbing some time. I’ve been wanting to catch up for a couple weeks. Of course. I’m gonna find some time. [Sarah Allali]: Of course, of course. Happy to share more if you want about like, I don’t know how you wanted us to do this, but I’m happy to share more about like what we have in mind if you want, or. Yeah, sure. [Michael Houck]: I guess maybe you can start. I have some thoughts based on what I’ve seen just so far, both in terms of getting things out there and in terms of what we’ve gotten from the team. [Sarah Allali]: So I have some thoughts on my end, but curious maybe to start with where you’re at. Yeah, sure. So basically, the goal for us was to have a first kind of strategy regarding social media, like mostly for the branding for my side, integrating a little bit of flood about news about flood here and there. But yeah, mostly projecting or itself is kind of an authority in space in what we want to do. I feel when we started working together that what I wanted to do was not clear enough for me to explain correctly or to guide your teams as effectively as possible so we can work as fast as possible. I felt that I spent more time explaining what needs to be done because it wasn’t necessarily that clear on my end than having your team working I guess, like, at the pace they are used to work, usually. So, yeah, for me, I feel like, yeah, it’s kind of an issue on our end here. Regarding the content that has been produced, for me, it was okay. I find it, like, way too generic sometimes. But also it’s because, as we weren’t that clear also on what we wanted to do, it’s hard for people to work with not precise instructions. Or even regarding the tone and things like that, because it didn’t have a specific tone, obviously when people are generating something, you can be like, yeah, this is okay, this is not okay, but as I don’t have samples you can work from, it’s really hard for them to guess at one point. Yeah, it’s definitely really hard hard for them to guess. And the last one regarding kind of the engagement, engagement, social media, I know how it works, like, sometimes it’s working, sometimes it’s not working. I just feel that it looks pretty kind of off regarding like the previous post that I that I had, even if I didn’t have, you know, 10,000 likes on the post, we had kind of an accumulation of one, one or two likes and things like that. So something we needed to change. We need to change something, obviously. But yeah, I know it’s something that takes time. So we had a discussion with Nicolas and what we had in mind was that I would spend some time posting by myself, really trying to find the right tone, what I really wanted to do. And then potentially hiring directly someone in our team for this, because we are kind of closing around right now. So I feel like, yeah, it will be as long as the money is not in the bank, we never know. But yeah, thank you. Yeah, so we have really someone in the team who can like handle this part, but also like the rest of the marketing side, we need to work on. So yeah, this was kind of our take on this. I’m happy to hear also what you had in mind. But I guess that, yeah, you agree on the fact that if I’m not clear, people can work as fast as possible. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I mean, a lot to respond to their various points that I’d hit. I guess the first thing I would say is that if you were going to hire someone in-house, you mentioned they do this and the rest of the marketing. What is the rest of the marketing, just so I can get a sense of like, you know, just as an objective sort of outsider, like would it? Totally. Yeah. [Sarah Allali]: Like give me a sense of what else they’d be doing. Yeah. So things we need to work on a newsletter side, like all the email marketing side that are not like transactional and also a little bit of blogging that we need to do, but this would be kind of secondhand. Not everything right now. Yeah. So essentially, once we hire someone dedicated to this, we would be able to externalize a little bit kind of the production for the social media side. So we can have like kind of two people working on this and not just one. Yeah, this was something we had in mind. [Michael Houck]: Okay, so two people working on social media, one internal, one external? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah, exactly. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. Okay. I mean, the first standard flag is that newsletters are pretty core to what we do as well. And so we’d love to chat about that. I think we’ve seen really good results with our newsletter clients. And also we actually have a, you know, we can maybe dig more into this later in the call, but we have a proprietary way to grow newsletters that is cheaper and more effective than paid social media ads that we’ve been rolling out to clients over the last couple of weeks. And we’ve actually gone from zero to 13K MRR in like two weeks. This. Yeah, so people are people are digging it. So happy to chat about that too. Happy. [Sarah Allali]: Yeah, we’d love to. We’d love to know more. [Michael Houck]: But just first, just on the social media side, I want to I want to hit on that. So I think my perspective has basically been we haven’t done a lot of testing of different like content formats yet. Yeah, I would argue that that’s as big of a reason that we’re not hitting the tone as anything anything else from your side. We started with the assumption that we’d primarily focus on threads. And so we’ve created some threads, we’ve posted a couple of them, and they haven’t hit, right? I think that the two reasons for that might be A, your audience might not be looking for threads from you. They might be looking for more authentic, shorter form commentary and posts and things like that, and updates on the founder journey. So that’s part one. Part two is probably just that maybe for whatever reason Romesh is not hitting the target on this subject matter. He’s worked well with technical clients in the past, but I think in this case, I can see it from my perspective too. I would agree that maybe he’s not hitting the mark of what you’re looking for from what I’m gathering from the voice notes you’ve sent, the feedback you’ve given. Maybe there’s some disconnect there. So one other option that we could pursue is we have other folks on the team who I think also could be a good fit for this and might understand your perspective, your voice, So, would be happy to try someone out there. I have a couple people in mind who I think could do it. We could throw a couple writing samples your way. You could let me know the best fit. So, that’s one thing. The other thing is on the content ops side, the replying side, I noticed the same issue that you did with what Ben wrote. Just for clarity, we don’t use AI for that. He was writing it. But I’ve gone really deep with him over the last two weeks since then and basically trained him a lot more on how to do that better. So I would expect that to be better going forward. Just flagging that as well. We’ve also hired a designer in the last couple weeks who can create infographics and screenshot essays and things like that to sort of, again, try out new formats and All that to say, if we did want to continue with the social media, I do think that we would hit better results as long as we’re sort of experimenting with new formats and maybe we try a different person behind the scenes to get up to speed. And if we are continuing with that, we’d obviously make sure it makes sense on both sides. Yeah. Yeah, okay. [Sarah Allali]: Yeah, that’s the first thing I would say. Okay, now you wanted to add something No, no, no, go ahead. [Michael Houck]: We can start there. [Sarah Allali]: We can start there. Yeah, no, sure. Okay, so what do we can do? In any case, the month that I have right now, December is like paid, or I guess it will be paid like in the next few days, or it has already been paid. Yes, we’re paid for December, yeah. Okay, so what do we can do? We can try to see like with someone else kind of the different type of post that we can try. On my end, I will also write things. So I can- I’m not here to stop you. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, yeah, no, no. [Sarah Allali]: No, but I guess it would be helpful like for both of us, like for me to really have an idea of what I want to write and how we want to write it. Because usually the last post that I wrote, like it’s kind of really casual, random thing. And it’s not like perfect, but it’s okay. I feel this represent pretty much what I wanna do. So writing more than this. So also you can have like an idea for you, for your team. [Michael Houck]: I would love to get to the point where you have a thought for a random sort of update post or just insight or something. And your first thought is let me open up Slack and record a voice note on my phone to tell the megaphone team what to write about. [Sarah Allali]: Yes, okay. Okay, so I will definitely do this. Good thing for the designer side, I feel it’s really important, especially right now, as we will start, kind of wanted to build more on the branding side of the company, having something that is more coherent. Yeah, images that are a little bit more modern and that fit people we are targeting. This is really good to know. And yeah, we can do this for this month to see how it goes. And yeah. Sweet. It’s okay for you. Okay. [Michael Houck]: My action item there then will be, I’ll grab a couple writing examples from folks on the team and I’ll send anonymized versions of them to you. Okay. And you just let me know who you think might get the voice the best and we’ll try them out for the month. [Sarah Allali]: Okay, perfect. Let’s do that. And we can make like a point at the end of the mouth to see like the value. Because yeah, at the end, I guess you know the speech, but we are at the early stage. So money we are spending needs to be spent to get something, you know? We don’t want to put you guys in a bad spot. [Michael Houck]: I know. I know, I know. Just so I’m operating under the correct sort of mind frame. Should we assume that if this goes well, then, you know, we’ll continue or should we be operating under the idea that January 1st, we’re ending it and we’re just sort of running this month under that sort of guideline? [Sarah Allali]: Yeah, so for us, if this goes very well, three options, basically, if this goes very, very, very well, like unexpectedly very well, we definitely continue and we won’t hire any one right now in January. If this is kind of an okay, we will potentially continue us hiring someone in January and potentially having you work with us for this or the newsletter. We definitely need to chat to chat about it. If I really see that I don’t get like any customer out of this, or at least in the interest, you know, for us, it wouldn’t make sense. Like to continue engineering and I will directly hire someone. Yeah, who would handle this. That all makes sense. [Michael Houck]: So then, generally we operate with 30 days cancellation. So basically what we’ll do is we’ll say from the 1st of December that we’re sort of under that umbrella and we’re trying to keep it going this month, but the default will be January 1st, no go. And unless you tell me otherwise that’ll be sort of how we operate. [Sarah Allali]: Okay, yeah, we can do this. Yeah, if you have a 30 days kind of pre-warning, yeah. [Michael Houck]: If you’d rather do it the other way where we say our default is yes, we’re expecting that the performance will improve and in January we’ll continue, then we’d say, all right, let’s just touch base at the end of December and we’d have that 30 days from that point onward. So you tell me what you’d rather do. [Sarah Allali]: I think I would do the first, I would do the first one because we would need to have way, way more engagement. Not that I don’t trust your team, but this is still 2K per month, so. That makes total sense. Okay, so that’s how we’ll operate. [Michael Houck]: We’ll get things running in the meantime, and then we’ll touch base when it gets closer, and you let me know if the performance is at the level where you want to continue with social media. On the newsletter side, I can tell you what we have. Okay, so obviously we have my newsletter, but we also now write newsletters for I think eight, maybe nine clients in various spaces, in various formats. Some are daily, some are weekly, some are bi-weekly, whatever the client wants. And same sort of structure where you’d have a writer on the team who’s sort of your partner on this newsletter. They would get you draft issues. The difference is our newsletter service is sort of done for you, like totally. So we would handle beehive setup, automations around the welcome sequence, re-engagement, things like that. Making sure that the list is healthy at all times, so deliverability stays high. And obviously then the writing. So that’s all included in sort of the base package that we do for newsletters. And, you know, we see that obviously being a great way to kind of stay top of mind for both active customers and users and also potential folks to get them to convert. [Sarah Allali]: Yeah. Okay. Okay. Let me know this. Yeah. Sorry. No, no, no. [Michael Houck]: The other thing we do, which I mentioned around growing the newsletter. So one of my friends is, you know, he’s a Teal fellow. His last startup was backed by YC, super legit guy. He’s also like the best best code emailer and data scraper that I’ve ever met in my life. And what he’s done over the last year is basically create this interest based graph. But, um, so, you know, with email, normally you’re targeting people based on job title or something like that. Um, we can do social media newsfeed style targeting, but directly in people’s inboxes. And so what we’ve done is sort of, we’re testing this out as an offer first for newsletters. Maybe eventually we expand it to lead gen for startups and things like that, but we’re testing out for news first. And yeah, so what we can do is we can say, all right, what is the demographics and psychographics of your ideal reader? We’ll pull a giant list of them. We’ll email them to make sure the inboxes are like active and bounce and things like that. And then We’ll import them into Beehive after getting that confirmation that they’re active inboxes. And we’ll sort of do a second validation within Beehive to make sure that you’re only getting folks who are gonna engage with the newsletter. And then once they go through those two processes, they’re live active subscribers for the newsletter. And we can do this, depending on scale and niche, we can do this for 50 cents to $1.50 per subscriber, which is better than, you know, you’re probably gonna get with ads. [Sarah Allali]: Ah, super interesting. Okay, I never thought about like, so you’re kind of scrapping people’s data based on the- Based on interest. On the persona, based on interest, and then you’re using this to kind of target the newsletter. Okay. Yeah. Okay, really smart. Really smart way of doing things. [Michael Houck]: We’ve been doing it with my newsletter for a couple months, and we see that the open rates and engagement is actually better than what we’ve gotten with paid ads during the same period. So we’re gonna base right now with like six clients who are doing various sizes. The largest is at 8K a month, and then there are others at like 1K a month. But we’re at, I think it’s 13K total now. I gotta check, it’s growing every day. Yeah, so it’s super new, but it’s working super well initially for these folks too. We’ve kind of expanded it from me to them. So yeah, we’ll definitely be able to offer that. Well on top of the newsletter. [Sarah Allali]: Okay. Super interesting. Um, for the newsletter, um, do you, do you kind of in any, uh, why I don’t find the word, um, uh, my brain melting, um, not affiliate, but you know, when people are kind of paying to be on the newsletter sponsoring sponsoring, yeah. Do you, do you integrate kind of any sponsoring system here or? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, so we have my chief of staff is like our sponsorship guy for my newsletter. And for clients who are of a certain size, we can offer that to them. It doesn’t make sense to do it for smaller newsletters. But yeah, no, obviously, once we get it to a certain size, then yeah, he would absolutely be also looking for sponsors and making a revenue generator for you guys outside of just converting people to the product. [Sarah Allali]: Okay. Yeah. Okay. Thank you. Thank you for sharing this. Yeah, this is something I have to think about. So long term, but if this would be a potential, you know, revenue channel, and if we target kind of the whole marketing strategy in this way, or not, um, yeah, because we are thinking about, we are talking with like different AI agent companies building at the product in the productivity space, if we can kind of redefine how we are doing productivity at the agent era and all building kind of content about how we could be like more productive using these tools instead of, you know, to set up like huge productivity systems and things like that. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, exactly. [Sarah Allali]: Exactly. Spending more time to try to be productive than really being productive. So yeah, this, this is something we, we are talking about with several companies in, in this the newsletter would be kind of a big component for the marketing strategy. So this is pretty good to know. Question for you, pricing. How much is it? [Michael Houck]: Yes, so it depends on, for the growth side, it’s like I mentioned, 50 cents to 150 per subscriber, depending on niche and scale, amount of subscribers per month. On the newsletter itself, depends on frequency. So if we wanted to do a weekly newsletter, then it would be 4,495, so 3,500 a month. If we’re doing bi-weekly, then it would be 2K a month. And if we wanted to do something that was like multiple times a week or even daily, that would be custom based on how intensive, research intensive the content is. So we’d need to look into that and give you a quote. [Sarah Allali]: Yeah. Okay. Okay. Okay. Really good to know. Okay. I will ping you about that. When we decide to launch this, I should definitely. Cool. Yeah, talk about the folks internally. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: And with the other companies, too, I guess you’re exploring this stuff with. And then, We’ll touch base. [Sarah Allali]: Oh yeah, no, it would be, or like my newsletters. Oh, it would just be you guys. Yeah, yeah, it would just be us, but kind of sharing content. Yeah, having kind of a suite of newsletter talking about like productivity. Oh, that’d be good. If they’re going to give inspo, that would be cool. [Michael Houck]: We’d get like a lot of unique perspectives in there. [Sarah Allali]: Yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely. But yeah, I will ping you about that. In the meantime, let’s focus on the social media side. Just a question about that. Can we have access to Megaphone? Yeah, you already should. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I think you already do. Let me make sure that you have access to that. I’ll check on that today. Okay. And I’ll shoot you a note in Slack or over email with like this. And I’ll also send over writing samples from a few folks on the team. And we can get somebody picked and operational this week. They’ll be writing their first batch for you by next week at the latest. [Sarah Allali]: Okay, perfect. Let’s do that. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Cool. [Sarah Allali]: Thank you very much. Thanks for taking the time to chat. [Michael Houck]: No, no, no problem at all. Thank you for taking the time to chat. [Sarah Allali]: You’re the one raising the round. [Michael Houck]: I appreciate it. No worries. Okay, we’ll also touch base at the end of December with next steps. [Sarah Allali]: Yeah, let’s do that. [Michael Houck]: Perfect. Thank you.