- Duration: 26 min
- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01JEP5M9RE3PVRDSDX6A67WJDK (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JEP5M9RE3PVRDSDX6A67WJDK)
Transcript
[Michael Houck]: Well, for the ghost writing, I want to actually meet the people that we’re going to be working with. So it’s important. Yeah. Fair point. [Stephan Schmidbauer]: I mean, I can give you a super quick overview. We only have 15 minutes, but we are not going to need more. So I’m a founder myself, but I’m bootstrapping the business. So I’m working in some of my free time, if you want to say so, as a fractionist. And I’m doing that job for an executive coach in the DACH regions of Germany, Austria, Switzerland. That’s at least his core region. His name is Julius. Actually, you had somehow a shared touchpoint together in the past because one of his clients is the founder of some creator software. That you are using. I forgot the name, but I can find it out and send it to you afterwards if you want. And so I’m kind of optimizing the funnel for Julius. He used to work with an agency in the past who did a lot of his LinkedIn and cheat sheets and stuff. But we figured we now understand what what is needed and also how to create these cheat sheets for a lot less of the money. But what is still there is the strategic part. How do you get some diversity into the LinkedIn posting? How do you, yeah, just keep that up. But then at the same time, he has the newsletter. How do you bridge the gap kind of between LinkedIn and newsletter subscribers? So I saw that you were kind of doing both. I just wanted to understand what is it that you’re doing? What is it that you’re offering? Primarily we have a goal and the goal is he has currently like 2000 subscribers on the newsletter. We want to get it to 10K by the end of 2025. That’s the clear goal. And yeah, I wanted to know how much does LinkedIn actually play a role in that? Because for me, you have one of the best newsletters in the founder space. [Michael Houck]: Oh, thank you. [Stephan Schmidbauer]: I appreciate that. His clients are primarily the founders, Sirius A stage and later. So, yeah, I’m just curious. First question. What percentage of your subscriber growth comes through? What types of measures? And then also, what’s the concrete offer that you kind of do for newsletter and for LinkedIn posting so that we can kind of decide which of the two a combination of what you’re offering, none at all. Yeah. Okay. [Michael Houck]: That all makes sense. Appreciate the context. And I would be keen to know what his, what, what, what the startup is that, that we use it. Maybe it’s passion fruit. [Stephan Schmidbauer]: I don’t know. Yes. That’s them. Passion fruit. Passion fruit is great. [Michael Houck]: I love, I love that platform. I think that my interview that I did with them is actually their number one YouTube video. [Stephan Schmidbauer]: Okay. Okay. [Michael Houck]: So one clarifying question for you first, which is, it sounds like the primary goal is newsletter subscribers. Is that, is that accurate? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Stephan Schmidbauer]: Well, the thing is this, what we figured out is LinkedIn is super important for him for the brand because he is at a price point where he cannot do aggressive sales anymore. Yeah. So he’s charging so much that he just says, I cannot send emails. I cannot build email funnels and be super pushy for him. It’s all about that. The people that worked with him constantly see him and then refer him new people. So LinkedIn, on the one hand, is important to keep it up because he constantly hears from his ex clients that they saw again what he put there, that it was super useful. And then this gets shared and this builds the reputation when he has like half a million impressions and a few hundred or thousand shares in a quarter. But I see that not so much happens from LinkedIn to newsletter subscribers. And our core goal is to get more relevant newsletter subscribers so that the entire funnel activity that I am kind of creating makes sense. So, yeah, that’s the challenge. That makes sense. [Michael Houck]: And then one follow up is on on LinkedIn, you guys are already creating that content. You sort of you have the process down. That’s not something that you would necessarily need help with. [Stephan Schmidbauer]: No. So idea generation all on the team. We use lots of AI tools ourselves. We now even have like a very good design freelancer who could just continue to replicate the design that before the agency that we worked with did but that still leaves two very big jobs. The one is writing a post that should somehow convert and that takes a lot of time. And the other thing is obviously then the commenting in the first hour. So we are open to build a process there ourselves But if someone else is giving us a good price, we are willing to pay for that. But that is really just sustain what already works to not sacrifice the current numbers. But at the same time, the question is, how do you grow? And that only works through the middle funnel, which is the newsletter, which builds the trust over time so that at some point people then, when they are sales ready, just come to Julia. As an inbound lead, so to say. That all makes sense. [Michael Houck]: So I would need to look at his LinkedIn profile and some of his recent content to really be sure if there’s best practices that we can add to get the funnel working better from LinkedIn to the newsletter. Without reviewing it, I’m not totally sure. I’m happy to take a look at that after the call if you want to send it over and I can share some thoughts and best practices. You guys are probably doing a lot of it already, but who knows? Worth taking a look at. Outside of that, yeah, happy to chat about newsletters and about the content writing on LinkedIn. There’s probably two ways that we could help. So for context, on my side, early on when I was growing my newsletter from zero to, say, 15,000 subscribers or so, content marketing played a really big part of that. There were really content marketing and then referral networks for other newsletters. Those were the big channels that I was using at the time. Once we hit 15K, we started doing, we started sending some posts viral with the help of big creators and that expanded even more. And then we started investing in paid ads after that. The interesting thing though, is that what we do now is we actually do less referral networks. We do no referral networks. We do fewer paid ads than we were doing before. We’ve built a interesting email process where we, you know, we basically collected a really, really big database of emails and they’re tagged by interests. It’s not just like job title, like Apollo or something like that. It’s basically the type of targeting that you would get from social media ads. Right. But directly in people’s inboxes. And so we started doing that for my newsletter a few months ago. I’m seeing really good results. Better metrics than with paid ads. And recently we’ve started offering it to a few people as a service too, and we’re kind of testing the waters there in a beta right now to see if it makes sense to scale it, but the results have been [Stephan Schmidbauer]: good. So if- Like interest means something like our, what is it called? Our B2B where you see kind of who came to your website or what does interest mean? [Michael Houck]: Oh no, like, let’s say that I want, you know, my newsletter for founders, right? So let’s say that I want to add subscribers to my newsletter, who, you know, who follow Y Combinator on Twitter, or who are interested in, you know, Andreessen Horowitz, or something like that, right? We have tagged data of who’s interested in what at the email level. And so what we can do is send them through an email campaign, cold email campaign, basically validate that they are an active inbox and that they’re actually interested and things like that. And then we have a process for them to join the newsletter. And the combination of those two things, the tag data and the process to get in the newsletter, we can do that at pretty big scale for cheaper costs than you can do through other channels. So depending on the scale and the niche, it would be between 50 cents and $1.50 per subscriber. [Stephan Schmidbauer]: So a subscriber, that's good. [Michael Houck]: So we started offering that to people. So the main goal is to grow the newsletter with like targeted, relevant folks who could become customers. That's one route that we could go down. Um, and then if the investment is in LinkedIn, because again, at the size you guys are out with the newsletter, there are definitely ways to sort of funnel people from social media into that newsletter. Um, we could do that as well. You know, I work with Blake email who has an even bigger audience than I do. Um, and we both lead this like content team of writers who we've worked with for a long time. And yeah, I mean, at this point, our agency is, you know, it's grown, it's grown pretty, pretty well. And we're looking to grow a big next year. So we definitely have bandwidth, high quality writers, no content will get sent to you without personally being reviewed by either myself or Blake. And it's all async, unless you want meetings, like we're happy to do meetings. But most clients, because they're founders, just want to do Slack channels where they send us rambly voice notes in response to the questions that we send them. So our process is pretty lightweight, but I can send you some examples, obviously anonymized, of clients who've joined recently just to see performance, but it's good stuff. [Stephan Schmidbauer]: Cool. What is, since I know from Rb2b that quite often things are a lot easier in the US when when it comes to lead generation workflows, is there any limitations to Europe as a region? No. So we've done our research on this. [Michael Houck]: There are no limitations. We're GDPR compliant, everything else. Basically, we have a process with our business. And then what you're paying us for is essentially a lead list. The process obviously a lot more smooth than just like dropping off a list or something like that. But in terms of like how to it. It's basically it's basically that you're taking a curated lead list of people who are interested in the newsletter, and they're subscribing. So happy to jam more on that. [Stephan Schmidbauer]: But no, there's there's no concern. We've looked into it at length. Okay, cool. How long is it gonna take to get to 10,000 subscribers with what you just pitched me? [Michael Houck]: Well, on the on the I'm fine. [Stephan Schmidbauer]: You can keep the notes. Okay. [Michael Houck]: Um, with the, uh, with the LinkedIn, it depends. I need to get in there, see the account. We need to talk about voice and things like that. Um, with the email growth, uh, like service that we're now offering that depends on, on budget. Basically we can get there as quick as you want us to. We have the emails, we know what they're interested in. We can put them through a sequence that would take, you know, the sequence usually takes about two weeks to add to the newsletter. And then we do weekly batches from there. And the size of those batches will only be limited by the size of the newsletter. So we don't like to do like, we're not gonna add like 100,000 subscribers to a new newsletter. But what we would do is grow it by roughly 20% per month on autopilot. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. [Stephan Schmidbauer]: That's the number I need. Okay. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: You mentioned pricing as well for the content writing for LinkedIn. Depends on exactly what you would want, but we do handle replying. We actually also identify thought leaders in your niche and sort of will be replying to their posts as well. Yeah. So we're full service and starts at $19.95. So 2K a month. [Stephan Schmidbauer]: But if you want us to do everything, then it’s 3K a month. Yeah. Honest feedback. So I checked your LinkedIn profile and the one from your co-founder. So I would 1000% trust you with the newsletter. I’m not 1000% convinced based on your profile and the one of your co-founder, the traction, the posts that you guys have to get. For LinkedIn, I just reviewed that now. So because personal feedback as someone who’s been following you, but who’s also following big creators in the space like Ben Meir, Jade Bonacolta, these people that essentially also at some point said, hey, I’m just offering this as a service. The difference is that they very actively use LinkedIn and that is something where you would need to convince me more. But my suggestion would be, let me send you Trulio’s profile and let me send you where we feel confident what we can do ourselves and where we would just want to outsource it. And then you can tell me what the package price for that it would be, but honestly speaking, the most interesting part is the one that I didn’t see yet on the website, which is the newsletter or the paper subscriber kind of thing. Yeah. Yeah. It makes sense. [Michael Houck]: I mean, I haven’t been actively using LinkedIn myself on my account for a while, except for basically posting our podcast. So my audience. Yeah. Yeah. But, you know, we get results for clients. Nonetheless, we had a client start with us three weeks ago and had a post go to 2,600 likes within the first three weeks of being with us and multiple others in the hundreds. [Stephan Schmidbauer]: But maybe in general, last question since we’re already over time, or I don’t know how much time you actually have. I have five more minutes if you also have them. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, let me let my team know I’m going to be late to something. Hold on. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. [Stephan Schmidbauer]: So how important is LinkedIn for subscribers or is it for you also just something that you do to do it because you already have the content and you just kind of resample it and it fits with the channel? Yeah. What’s your personal take on that? Yeah. [Michael Houck]: I mean, it sort of echoes my own sort of journey, right? So early on when you don’t have a ton of subscribers on the newsletter, very, very important to get the people who are already interested in your content into that pool, right? You want the people who are following you on LinkedIn to be in your newsletter. And there’s a few ways you can do that. [Stephan Schmidbauer]: Once you get to the- Yeah, Julius just uploaded all his people via email when he started and that worked quite well, so. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, and when you’re at the point of, like 70,000 subscribers like we’re at now, no matter how much I post on LinkedIn, it’s not going to be a large percentage of our subscribers, subscriber growth, right? Like every large newsletter, the majority comes from paid channels, whether it’s affiliate networks, whether it’s paid ads, or whether it’s what we do now. You know, 90 plus percent of all subscribers come through those channels. But when you’re early on, especially if you have a network that is supportive and engaged with your content, you can find more people who are, you know, very close to what you want, because they’re just in the networks of the people who already follow you. So that is a viable path as well. [Stephan Schmidbauer]: Okay. And then very last question, because you mentioned that earlier for the early stage partnerships with other newsletters. What is it like, who would you approach people that have like the same size of subscribers or same topics or both? Or do you offer to collaborate on an article? Like what do the people want that you can collaborate with? What convinces them to do it? [Michael Houck]: All of the above. In some cases, new newsletters are just looking to collaborate with other newsletters around the same size and share subscribers back and forth. And that’s a good viable strategy. In other cases, you know, you do a guest post or you let them do a guest post or something like that. And that works too. We did a few of those early on as well, and they worked well. Um, but I would say, yeah, just setting up, whether it’s a, you know, I don’t know if you’re on beehive or, or kit, but yeah, this beehive has a free recommendations and they have the paid ones. You know, you can value them as you, as you see fit, but, um, both of those channels have worked well for us in the past. What I would say is. You know, if someone joins your newsletter that way, they are signing up for another newsletter and just adding yours on as a secondary thought. So those subscribers tend to be less engaged than paid ads or the email process. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Agreed. Yeah, exactly. [Stephan Schmidbauer]: Okay. Awesome. Hey, don’t want to take more of your time. Thanks so much. That was helpful. Let me send you the information that you need and then let’s take it from there. [Michael Houck]: Sounds good, man. Looking forward to it. [Stephan Schmidbauer]: Good to meet you. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Ciao. [Stephan Schmidbauer]: Bye bye. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: you