- Duration: 42 min
- Platform: zoom
- Source: Read.ai 01JE9J8F59RMWCZ9YRSC3TV6RV (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JE9J8F59RMWCZ9YRSC3TV6RV)
Transcript
[Michael Houck]: Yo, yo. What’s up, man? [Blake Emal]: Nothing much. [Michael Houck]: How you doing? Good. You look, um, you’ve got a color theme going on today. [Blake Emal]: I dig it. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Yeah. [Blake Emal]: I dressed up today. [Michael Houck]: I gotta get that on my hat game, I guess. Um, but yeah, look, I guess there’s a lot going on. Um, yeah. So, I actually forget why we originally scheduled this, was there a specific topic? [Blake Emal]: Yeah, yeah, it was to talk through new landing page and website stuff. [Michael Houck]: Right, okay, we can do that. I don’t have our V1 copy done yet, because the design team has been a bit slow, but we can go over that too. Sure. But I guess first, just, I know I said the voice notes, but quickly on the two sort of at risk clients. So I got to get back to Jade today about what we’re going to do. The tough thing is that we’ve created all this extra content for her that she’s paid for. And Jacob has apparently reconfirmed with her that she wants us to keep producing it, even though we’re not posting But she doesn’t want to use any of it. She wants to basically have new content produced in this new tone, which is basically just my newsletter. That’s what she said she wants. So like the honest best way to handle this is literally just to say like, look, we confirmed with you, you want to keep producing this backlog of content. If you don’t want to use it, tough shit, you know? Like we’re going to keep charging you this new lower rate going forward, but you know, tough shit. But I’m wondering if there’s like a more creative thing we can do to not make it feel so cold, I guess, to her without obviously taking a hit on her side. [Blake Emal]: So any, any thoughts on that? Yeah. Can you, um, for some reason I’m just not, it’s not like fully clicking with me. Yeah. Can you just like reiterate what the current solution that you’re talking through would be, and then I could probably understand a little better, we can brainstorm. [Michael Houck]: So, okay, so she’s been a client for five months. She’s about to have her renewal again on the 10th of this month. And she let me know that she’s not happy with the content style that Jacob has been doing. She also let me know she hasn’t shared that direct feedback with him, but I talked about it with him yesterday. Anyway, she’s been paying the 3K a month plan since the beginning, and we’ve been producing three posts per week for her. We’ve been- Right. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: What’s that, sorry? [Blake Emal]: She hasn’t used any of it. No, she’s used it. [Michael Houck]: She’s used two per week. And Jacob had like asked her like, hey, you know, we’re gonna keep producing three, is that fine? We’ll just build up this backlog. And what Jacob has told me, she’s never pushed back. I’m not in those calls, so I don’t know for sure, but I wouldn’t imagine he would lie about that. So yeah, so she’s basically said, fine, create this backlog of content. Problem is now she doesn’t really want to use any of that content. And I imagine that we could edit those posts, but a lot of them have already been approved, or at least some of them have already been approved. So in my mind, our options are we can have Jacob keep editing those posts, but I don’t think Jade’s gonna, I think she just wants like fresh content with this new voice, which is just the voice that I use in my newsletter. That’s what she said she wants. [Blake Emal]: But in terms of format, she’s not wanting to do longer stuff or anything like drastically different. It’s just It’s just tone. [Michael Houck]: She didn’t say, well, here, let me actually pull my full notes to her just so I’m a hundred percent right. She wants the punchiness of my newsletter. Otherwise it needs too much editing and too much time editing on her side. She said sometimes there are too many topics in a single post and the ending note is different than the opening note, not catchy enough in the hook, more edgy and controversial. Ironically then, Jacob said she previously asked It has to be less edgy and controversial. And yeah, that’s basically it. [Blake Emal]: And she wants to downgrade to a lower retainer, but stay at three posts for, or she wants to go to just two and she’s fine. [Michael Houck]: No, she wants to make the transition to paying for, her big thing is that she feels like she’s been paying for three, but getting two, because she’s only been posting two, even though that was her decision. Now to be paying for two. And we need to decide is, well, do we keep producing new content or do we sort of have this bank of content that she’s already paid for and just needs to adjust? Got it. [Blake Emal]: When was that? When’s the renewal date that we would just make the shift? [Michael Houck]: It’s next week, the 10th. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Okay. [Blake Emal]: I mean, so let’s just say that we did, just for the sake of argument, we did nothing and it just switched to two and then that was it. What would be the problems that you think she’d have and what would be the problems that you’d have? [Michael Houck]: I mean, there’s no problem on our side. That’s like the easiest, simplest, in my opinion, most correct solution because we can keep paying Jacob. It’d be less because it’d be less content per week, but keep paying Jacob. She keeps paying us no disruption at all. Problem is I think that she will be we didn’t use any of that content. I don’t want to use any of that content. [Blake Emal]: So why should I have paid for it? So you think she’s going to ask for either money back or a better rate, more favorable rate because she thinks we haven’t delivered on. [Michael Houck]: I, I think she feels like she’s been paying for something that she hasn’t received. And that is based on what I have been able to figure out, that’s entirely her decision. But from what she said on the call, I’m pretty sure that’s how she feels. [Blake Emal]: What if there is some middle ground where we, she may not go for us just re-editing all this, all this stuff from the past, but for the things that she hasn’t used, maybe for the first couple of months, we do throw her a bone on a couple extra of those that are re-edited, like one per week or something for a month or two as part of the agreement. And then, so then we don’t have to redo all of that or edit all of it, but she can handpick the ones that she thought had potential, but that need reworking. And Jacob can at least use those kernels of ideas. I mean, that wouldn’t add to, Jacob would probably be okay taking the hit on his payment and still delivering something like that, where it’s just editing. [Michael Houck]: It doesn’t feel great though, right? Like it doesn’t feel great for him. [Blake Emal]: Yeah, it doesn’t feel great, but [Michael Houck]: Cause he’d be going, if we did that, if we said we’re going to two per week and one of them is just something you’ve already been paid for, then he’d be going from 1500 a month for the client to like 500 a month for the client, which doesn’t feel, doesn’t feel great. [Blake Emal]: So if he did, if he was doing two net new, would he be at 1K? [Michael Houck]: Is it just 500 per? [Blake Emal]: Yeah, 500 per. Okay. Well, I mean, I’m just thinking like, If so, do you feel like she will has she expressed actually that she would push back on just two posts and doing new stuff going forward? [Michael Houck]: No, no, she hasn’t pushed back on that because how we left it was I was like, well, you know, I’m going to look into this and I don’t want to speculate and I’ll get back to you basically by tomorrow. With something. So we don’t know that she’s going to push back. So maybe the right next step is just to propose this, see how she reacts. But she’s pretty volatile, especially over email and just like erratic. So it’s not the end of the world if we lose her as a client, just because I think everyone sort of doesn’t like dealing with her, honestly. Jacob, I know, doesn’t. She goes to me for this call four times, four times. Um, so it’s just kind of, well, I think it wouldn’t hurt. [Blake Emal]: So that I would say that’s the initial message is just status quo, but won’t hurt to have like two or three options in the back pocket to immediately fire on. So if she pushes back on that and she wants kind of a cherry on top, one of the options can be, uh, we’ll do the two Newton, two net new posts, and then we’re just gonna, we’ll, we’ll throw one in and whether it’s me, that’s gotta do it or whatever. We can find a way to do that. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. I can do something to like to edit them or something. I think. Yeah. Maybe that’s it where we just, we say status quo. And then if she pushes back, we say, well, we can edit some of these posts and give you three per week as well. Um, in the meantime, the problem is of course, that she vocally thinks that three posts per week is objectively too many on LinkedIn. Um, and I pushed back. That multiple times. She’s, she’s set. Yeah. [Blake Emal]: Well, I mean, like another sweet in the pot thing, which is something we’ve talked about before that I guess could, could be helpful. It’s just offering megaphone credits or something. Yeah, we could do that. We could do that. [Michael Houck]: Although that’s going for the next week. [Blake Emal]: Well, you can check out megaphone that’s potential upsell too. If she wants to start, if she sees good results and starts using it, but a lot of money though. [Michael Houck]: Like it’s, it’s a lot. Cause we, we basically, I basically have like 30 extra posts for her. Like it’s a big backlog. The other thing, the other complicating factor, this is like such a dumb situation. The other complicating factor is that she has some big deal that’s closing and she’s been telling both Jacob and I that she doesn’t want to be posting until that happens because she won’t have the credibility until that happens. Obviously it’s a terrible strategy. We’ve talked to her about that. She’s still trying to talk about pausing. So my guess is what’s going to happen is I’m going to go to her with this and she’s going to say, well, I’m just going to pause then. And we’ll revisit this in the future. And at that point, I feel like we just sort of have to wash our hands of it. Yeah. [Blake Emal]: And at that point, when she wants to come back, you’d tell her that the price has gone up. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, we have the DBAA. Remember that from Breaking Bad, DBAA? [Blake Emal]: I should remember it, but I don’t, but I love that show. [Michael Houck]: It’s when Jessie goes to rent the apartment from Jane and she’s like, oh yeah, we have the extra DBAA fee. And he’s like, oh yeah, DBAA. And she’s like, you don’t, that’s not real. It means don’t be an asshole. [Blake Emal]: Well, I guess just having that in your back pocket the right thing, but don’t don’t show the card at once. Yeah, let’s see how that goes. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I’ll miss her today. I just want to see if you had any other other ideas. And then on Sarah’s front, we’ll see. I’m collecting writer samples today. I’m going to get those to her tonight. And then she’ll pick somebody and basically by the end of this week or early next week, we’ll we’ll have someone just sort of dive it in. [Blake Emal]: Cool. Yeah, that sounds good. I’m cool with just adhering to whatever she says at that point. I don’t have to vet it. So Romesh is gone. He’s not creating this week. What are your thoughts on what it would take for him to get another client? [Michael Houck]: It’s tough, man, because it’s not just the fact that she didn’t like the content. He also was really bad reliability wise for her. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Yeah. [Blake Emal]: It’s, it’s very odd. Cause I didn’t experience that with him earlier on where like, there was some flakiness, but this was like every single week without fail. You should see our Slack messages together. It was, it’s been bad. [Michael Houck]: It’s like, it’s like James level. It really was worse. [Blake Emal]: Yeah. Worse. Oh man. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Okay. [Michael Houck]: I had to remind him like every, every Monday I was like, Hey, are we going to be on track? [Blake Emal]: I want you to deliver. On Wednesday and he’s like, okay, I’ve got it. I remind him on Tuesday and then it’d be Wednesday. And he’d be like, he would never, never replied to me on Wednesday ever. Here’s an idea, like an idea. So I think anything is going to be a net positive on that. It’s just weird. Cause he, he clearly has some kind of niche where he can slot in and be pretty good. I don’t know how, maybe we treat him as a mercenary. If we need a one-off post, pay him one off or something, he might be reliable for that. But he could be, he could be good for the content queue idea. [Michael Houck]: We’re going to build that into Megaphone either end of this month or early, early January. So he could be, he could be good for that. [Blake Emal]: I think, yeah, he, he might just not be a good recurring guy, like with the client relations stuff, probably just not great at it, but he did tell me that he wants to experiment with doing a newsletter for somebody. [Michael Houck]: So maybe be more motivated to do a newsletter client. I could see him being pretty decent at that. [Blake Emal]: I think his strong suit is research and compilation. So if he could, I think he’d be fine, but I just don’t know if we could put him in a Slack channel again with a client. Yeah. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: I, there were multiple times with Sarah where I had to delete a message she sent and then message him to fix something about us before she saw it. So yeah, all right. We can just keep them in the wings. I think between Austin, Jacob, Grace, Andrew, and Tanmay, we’re in good shape for now. Yeah, with Tanmay, I guess we can talk him real quick. [Blake Emal]: Oh yeah, go for it. [Michael Houck]: What are you saying? [Blake Emal]: I love the initiative. It went a little bit rogue, but I like the initiative. I would rather have somebody going rogue in a good way. I feel good about it. I haven’t actually seen the content yet. I think that’s still a week out. We’ll see. If the content’s good, I’m excited to have somebody that’s kind of young and ready to go. Yeah, he’s got ideas. I put it into the strategy notes in there, because I think there was some audience stuff that was interesting to just keep in mind. But for the most part, I was like, we’re not really going to use all of this. So we don’t have to. It is a good client relations thing though. [Michael Houck]: Cause basically we went through the, like, you know, Waleed gave us all that info in the type form and with the, in Slack and everything. And then we had the kickoff call. And then the next thing that they get is just some content. Right. And so I think having this sort of like document could actually be good because it could actually show them, Hey, we were listening, we do get it. [Blake Emal]: Yeah, I like it. And I think like the strategy doc can largely just be what was funneled through the kickoff. And it doesn’t have to be this huge project. Even, you know, if we do a good enough job of taking notes in those, I can compile those into like a pitch deck or whatever that they can just have. Like the writer doesn’t have, I don’t want to put too much more onus on them to create things that aren’t content. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Yes. [Blake Emal]: But so if the kickoff call notes are pretty good and we’re asking all the questions, questions we need, we can basically just translate that into a more formatted thing of here’s what we’re planning on doing. So then we have deniability too, if we’re sticking to it. [Michael Houck]: You told us this is what you wanted. Yeah. Um, I think that could be solid. [Blake Emal]: Okay. [Michael Houck]: I’m going to, I’m going to add that into the things that I’m setting up, um, this week and we’ll just integrate that into the onboarding for American note about that right now. [Blake Emal]: Um, Is there anything that you want me to do? [Michael Houck]: No, I honestly think you’ve, you know, you always go sort of above and beyond. So this is just me sort of synthesizing everything. And I’ve sort of, I feel like I’ve neglected this for a little while, like, like fixing up some of our operational bottlenecks and confusions. And like Ben was making a mistake where he was, he was posting three times a week for Brindis when she was only paying for two. And so we like went through Jacob’s backlog really quickly. Like I just need to like glue everything together a little bit right now. Cause it ends up causing me more headaches. So I don’t, no need to, no need for me to send anything your way. What I will say is that I’ll keep you in the loop. And if you have ideas for what we should be doing better, like definitely let me know. But I, my hypothesis is that by the end of, let’s say next week, between this week focusing on operational stuff and next week, week focusing on growth processes. I think we’re going to be a much smoother ship kind of going forward. Sweet. [Blake Emal]: One request that I have in the client docs is just, I don’t know all the stuff you’re planning on doing operationally, but like the max amount of that stuff that you can make visible between the client and the Ghostwriter on the Notion board will be better. Because I think one common question that comes up is just like, is is it still the same amount of posts or like how many posts per week is the number one question at the beginning for the writer. They’re like, how many posts per week? There’s a spot on that, but sometimes the writers don’t fill it out. So I think we probably just need to do that. And then any other logistics questions or even preferences for the client, we should probably just at the top there of the client page where it’s got all the, the fields, you know, I’m talking about like status. Yes. Yes. All that. And like, I think Tone’s on there, but yeah, if there’s other stuff we want to add in there that would just make it super obvious what they need every single week, that would be helpful. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: I’m going to, um, I’m going to have some of this stuff sort of quote unquote automated for you, me, and the writer, and just have sort of the ops folks take care of this on the backend, like on an ongoing basis. So Ben will probably be leading this. Rena will probably be executing a lot of it. Maybe we loop in Margan who’s like our other VA, cause Reina’s plate is pretty full right now. So yeah, we’ll have that all set up and it’ll be very visible and easy to find. And like, yeah, just a streamlined, I think. The deck slash doc template is a good idea. I can think about what the right format is for that, but yeah, I’m excited. I think it’ll reduce the sort of operational headaches. I feel like I run around with a chicken with my head cut off and I can’t even spend time on the growth stuff sometimes. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: So. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, for sure. That’s number one. Funnel isn’t a good place right now though. We have like four or five folks who maybe two, three of them convert. [Blake Emal]: So I feel pretty good about that. [Michael Houck]: Sweet. Sweet. Okay. Do we have anything else or should we go to the famous stuff? [Blake Emal]: Yeah, let’s go into Let me share my screen here. [Michael Houck]: Okay, so they’re still working on this. This is the vibe. Oh, sorry, this is megaphone. What am I talking about? Well, yeah, but I guess this is the vibe that we’ll be going for. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Ignore the text. [Michael Houck]: And I’m trying to decide whether the homepage should be focused on the, like the platform, or if the whole homepage should actually be focused on, you know, making the ghost writing like the number one thing and having it be like, like rather than being a platform with an agency attached, make it be like the primary offer is the ghost writing and we have this other platform that people can go to by clicking on like our products page just sending them there directly with stuff. So there’s a little bit of positioning, like, I don’t know, confusion in my head that I need to work through. [Blake Emal]: Yeah. I can only speak to my experience, but I think, so like PageTear, for example, there’s like literally nothing else on that. It’s just that offering. Yeah. And that’s cool because it filters out a lot of people front end so traffic and then like click-through rate is my conversion rate’s pretty decent but the initial click-through rate on like seeing pricing and stuff is just low because of the low traffic but it’s hard to push an agency thing just because it’s so big so soon and then but if you flip it and you have something to put before that that eases them through where they have options that usually leads to something like that that’s one thing I’ve thought about doing more is how can I soften the blow a little bit so that it’s not just land on here, pay me $3,000, but it’s a little bit softer. So if I were going between the options, I, I think I’d prefer the platform first and then the ghostwriting, especially if you’re planning on driving independent traffic from cold sources or ads or wherever else you can get people to the ghostwriting landing page. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, that’s true. If I’m, so when I look at like our funnel options, let me, I have this written down somewhere. Let me pull this up. Where did I write it? Oh, it’s in Notion, right? I’ve moved it in there because I’m updating that. Okay, so if I go to ghost writing. I think it’s only in Figma right now. Oh, sorry, sorry, sorry. Let me change that. New share. I’ll just do my desktop. Why not? Okay. So if I’m in here, I have to organize this. I’m just jotting some notes down here, but growth strategies, referral, me being more vocal on LinkedIn, which I need to do, LinkedIn DMs, which we’re going to set up with Max, setting up an email course or quiz and driving a ton of ad traffic to that, capture the email, all that stuff. Our existing megaphone users, although, you know, they come in where they come in. Paid ads for viral examples, we’re launching that on Monday. We have some good creative already set up for that. And then I had this idea about founder memberships, like communities, conferences, year-long memberships. Clifton did this, he joined Hampton, and there’s a lot of founder communities that would honestly highlight me if I joined as a member, because I ran a venture-backed founder community. So I might invest some budget and some time in Q1 into just being more visible in these sort of communities, and positioning the ghostwriting as the number one thing that I’m offering. And then the other thing is this email thing. Did I tell you about this, the email growth, newsletter growth thing that I’m doing with my friend Matt? [Blake Emal]: No, I don’t think so. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Okay. [Michael Houck]: So my friend Matt is like a cold email expert. He’s a Teal Fellow, last startup was backed by YC. And he’s the guy who taught me how to do cold email. And he’s also like a world-class data scraper. And so what he’s been able to do over the last, basically this year, is build an interest-based graph of emails. So people can get targeting with cold email at the level of fidelity and preciseness that they would only normally be able to get through social media platforms and their newsfeeds, but it’s right in their inbox. Super powerful. There’s obviously a lot outside of newsletters even that we could do with that if we wanted to, but we think there’s an interesting business to be built growing newsletters that way. And so that’s what we’re experimenting with. We’ve been doing it with my newsletter. We’ve signed some clients to do it. And the clients we’ve signed so far have just been existing newsletter operators, but starting maybe next week or at the latest, probably the following week, we will also be selling to venture backed startups. Cause again, he has everybody’s email. We can get in touch with anybody. And so, you know, we’re going to say, Hey, you wanna stay top of mind for your customers and potential customers as well and convert them, build trust with them, let us create a newsletter for you and also we’ll grow it for you too. And so we’d split that, Matt would handle the growth, we would handle the content creation. And it’s great for us, cause I mean, on my end, I get to sort of double dip, but it also could be, we could very quickly from, you know, I think we’re at like 28k, 30k right now, we could easily go from that to doubling or tripling if this works. So it could be very quickly that we need to have more writers and our problems change, we don’t even need to worry about the other growth channels. But for now, I’m just considering it as one of them. [Blake Emal]: Yeah, so what’s like the launch or experiment time for Yeah. [Michael Houck]: I mean, there’s, there’s no, like, we’re not doing a launch because I think it makes more sense to be sort of, um, you know, just one-on-one relationship driven with this, but, uh, like we don’t have a name for it UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: or anything. [Michael Houck]: Um, but, um, yeah, the idea would be that probably the next two weeks we would start emailing founders and then. Assuming that we can sign a couple every week or every month, um, from there on, you know, by the end of December into January, could very quickly be looking at a lot more newsletter clients. [Blake Emal]: Sweet. Which feeds kind of into where I think we would like to be anyway. [Michael Houck]: Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Founder brands are fine, but newsletter clients are stickier from what we’ve seen so far. [Blake Emal]: I think it’s a little more differentiated too. [Michael Houck]: It’s not as crowded. Yeah. And also just less stress because unless you’re Athena, you are less sort of attentive to every little wording than you would be on your personal social media accounts. [Blake Emal]: Right, because they have a thousand people there looking at stuff. [Michael Houck]: Right, right. Dean is the one exception. But yeah, so those are the growth channels I’m thinking of So I don’t know, is anything missing from that that you can think of [Blake Emal]: No, if anything, it’s probably too much, but I don’t think it’s missing. No, I’m interested to see how the cold email stuff converts. And then, you know, with referrals, that’s more of like a, when it happens, it happens. I guess you can kind of set yourself up and create your own luck with referrals just by doing good work and some other stuff. But all of it makes sense. I guess things like LinkedIn DMs, content marketing, things like that are a little more manual. So I’m curious what the time is going to be like spent toward that versus like cold email, for example, where you can do an initial batch of time to get it set up, but then it kind of runs. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I think for the LinkedIn DMs, we’re gonna try to just, you know, automate it basically where Rena can execute it from my account with some templates. So I don’t need to worry about it. For the content marketing, if the email thing goes well, then I think what I’m probably gonna do is just like personally pay Jacob to do my LinkedIn for me and see if he has bandwidth to do that without, you know, taking up too much of his time. But if not, I mean, you know, I can do it. I can set aside an hour in the morning every day and just engage with stuff. I can, that’s, that’s fine. Yeah. [Blake Emal]: One thing on LinkedIn DMs that I’ve seen work, it’s more manual. So you have to decide, want to do it or not, but, um, use sales nav, just like usual, find your list, build it out, get all the people that you want targeted in there. But then, um, just send connect like 30 connection requests blank every day. And then the next day you go back and just look at. Ideally as quick as possible, but realistically just go back the next day and everybody that accepted you get on your, the mobile LinkedIn and record a voice note instead of a text note. Oh, that’s like the one thing that LinkedIn has that other platforms don’t. And it’s very obviously not automated. Right. It stands out like crazy. So what I’ll do for a page tear is like, okay, 30 requests per day to my ICP. I don’t say anything in the, in the, in the note, I just send the connection request. Right. As soon as I see them come through or the next day, I have kind of a templated script ish kind of thing that I’ll say, but mostly it’s just it’s muscle memory now where I’m just like thanks for connecting noticed this specific thing so like a call out a specific thing um that that clearly isn’t automated and then just basically offer free help like hey if you ever if you ever want to chat like content I’m all about content happy to help for free get my sense and then half the time that they respond to you it’s like well what do you actually do what are you offering and then the other half of the time. It’s, it’s almost never, they actually request free help. So is there any, any tips for like targeting? [Michael Houck]: Cause I think if you offer free help, obviously it’s be careful with who you’re offering that to. Cause there are people who will just. Yeah, for sure. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Yeah. [Blake Emal]: You, you, especially with ghostwriting, it’s like you want to have in your back pocket something free that, so for me, like I’m kind of willing to do a tiny, tiny request for a big company for free. If I feel like it’s, almost like a free trial type thing. So I can offer that and it’s okay. Most people won’t take me up on it. And the ones who do are fairly likely to want to keep doing stuff together. But in terms of targeting, it gets tricky because sales nav in theory has okay targeting, but then in practice you get in there, you’re like, okay, well I want to target by SaaS companies. It’s kind of impossible to just, I wish that there was a thing that said SaaS e-commerce agency and broke it out like that, but it’s not like And so it’s more based by job title. And for you, that gets even trickier because anybody can put founder on anything and show up in search as founder, even if they’re just me, where I’m like, yeah, I’m a founder, but I’m building multiple freelance businesses, basically. And it’s not like I have a company. So it’s hard to find out. [Michael Houck]: I guess we can just vet it. Like if I’m sending, when they accept the request, I can just, just take a look at their profile and be like, is this worth sending a voice note or just letting it be. [Blake Emal]: Totally. And you, I mean, you can also with sales nav, you can also say 10 to 50 people or 50 to a hundred people at the company plus CEO. So you can’t get that granular, but sometimes even then it’ll send you people that it’s not really that great. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Yeah. [Blake Emal]: There’s a little bit of a manual thing there. If you’re just trying to get the max amount of people, then you can automate all of it. It probably won’t be as impactful, but I like this. [Michael Houck]: I think, I mean, again, this is something that I can just, you know, when I wake up, just start my day and then do a little bit of this while I’m engaging with content on social media. [Blake Emal]: Yeah. One important toggle in SalesNav that you’ll want to make sure is toggled is, I think there’s one that says has posted in past 90 days. That’s like going to be table stakes for obviously for what you’re doing. Cause you, you want that evidence that they are actually on the platform. Most of those people, they posted like a repost of their company event or something. So it’s not, it’s not like they’re already creating content for themselves, but they aren’t dead or on, not on the platform. Like you have evidence of that. So that’s, that’s an important one. Other than that, it’s kind of trial and error. [Michael Houck]: Cool. Okay. Yeah. We’ll, we’ll set that up again, probably next week. I think the email course, free email course will be good. Dickie Bush and whatever his name is, Nicholas Cole, have set up some interesting stuff around that that I keep getting Instagram ads for. So I’ll probably just take some inspo from that. And we’ll probably do an email course for LinkedIn, an email course for X, an email course for newsletters, and then probably a fourth one about just like generally building a founder brand or growing your startup or something like that. Um, those will all be in progress and I spent some time writing them. Yeah. I mean, you can expand that out too. [Blake Emal]: If you want to get more, more money from it, you can build templates that you charge for and run ads towards those. And then it’s not even like there, there’s so much that you could run ads toward. Like there’s, there’s going to be founders out there that technically fit your ICP, but they’re so stubborn that they want to do it themselves. They want to convince themselves. And so they’ll buy a notion template that has like all the daily actions they should take. And then they’ll realize doing that, that it’s horrible and they don’t want to do that and run a company. And then they’ll hire you. Eventually you can have your ghost, the ghostwriting offer inside the template, but there’s other ways you can have a middleman in that funnel. [Michael Houck]: I like that. Cause it’s like, it’s the traditional like front end offer, low ticket offer to the higher ticket offer. Um, yeah, look, I think a lot we can do with that. A lot we can do. With LinkedIn and content marketing and also the DMs. A lot we can do with viral examples and building that out and putting some ad spend behind that too. [Blake Emal]: And- One thing really quick, sorry to interrupt. [Michael Houck]: Go for it. [Blake Emal]: Based on timeline of how we wanna grow it though, the things that are most exciting is probably still content or I’m sorry, cold email and then the email growth thing that you’re building. Yeah. And you’re trying to allocate your time across all this stuff, it makes more sense to double down in areas where you can turn levers, whether it’s money or automation or whatever. Whereas on the content marketing side, there’s certainly stuff you can automate, but you and I both know that it could be six months before that really hits and that ecosystem’s firing, right? So then all of a sudden you spend all the time and then we sell it or whatever. There are things like the email course, stuff can work, but you have to spend that full time building out all that stuff and making sure it’s good. [Michael Houck]: Then setting up the ad. The email growth thing is like, if that hits, we don’t really need to do anything else. [Blake Emal]: Yeah. Just be extremely willing to kill all else. If you find something that works, like those are the cold email could work really well just because of the high volume. And then, yeah. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. So the primary goal for this month is after getting our operational stuff set up this week, is starting to sell to these startup clients and seeing if they convert to go certain clients as well. If that happens at a good rate or at least in a volume, then great. We can scale that thing. We can build this up and we can easily flip it whenever we want at that point because we have a clear growth channel that’s working. And then we’ll have the money to sort of invest in more of this as well and sort of build out a more comprehensive funnel as well. Sweet. Okay. Look, I guess maybe what we do is I get my ducks in a row with this website stuff this week, and then we touch base on like specific copy and positioning next week. Yeah, totally. Okay. [Blake Emal]: Oh, she’s going at it right now. [Michael Houck]: Okay, well, anything else we should go over today. [Blake Emal]: Uh, no, no, I’m, I think I’m good on all that stuff. Just keep me posted. If really, if there’s anything I can take off your plate, please let me know. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Okay. I will. [Michael Houck]: I appreciate it. Um, maybe with some of the growth stuff next week, but with operational stuff, I’m, I just gotta go into monk mode tonight and take care of it. [Blake Emal]: Good luck. [Michael Houck]: Thanks man. I’ll see.