- Duration: 31 min
- Platform: zoom
- Source: Read.ai 01JEVHAS9T2G7E0T1AV2N5RYTZ (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JEVHAS9T2G7E0T1AV2N5RYTZ)
Transcript
[Ben Ornstein]: Yo, what’s up man? Nothing much. Anything we should talk about? [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: Like stuff going on. Touch base on. I don’t know any questions or should we just dive into talking about longer term stuff? A couple things really quickly. [Ben Ornstein]: So there is this one guy who just reschedule who wanted to re onboard And he had the Get the plan, whereas the it was the pro plan with an additional account at $39 per month for the additional. So he just wanted to re onboard, but he had to change his payment method on file. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: OK. So. How would you have approached that in the first place? [Ben Ornstein]: I probably should have asked before I. How would you approach given that situation? [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: Could he log into his account or was he locked out? [Ben Ornstein]: I asked him if he I gave him the options so I said I could either try to charge the one on file to. He could give me like the new payment. Why actually didn't I didn't say that the option I went with was sending an invoice to his email. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: Saying invoice. [Ben Ornstein]: for the amount of, you know, what, what to be charged. Right. But it's a subscription though. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Right. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: It's, it would, it was, it was an invoice for the subscription. [Ben Ornstein]: Oh, I didn't even know that you could do that. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: I thought invoice was like a one-time payment and subscription. Yeah. [Ben Ornstein]: I don't, if, if that isn't set up properly, then that may have caught, I say, I don't really know. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: Cause he has It says new subscription. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Hold on. It says he has an active subscription. [Ben Ornstein]: That was after I suppose if you scroll down and you see the invoice. It shows it as a draft, which is weird because I sent it. It says it'll be automatically billed soon. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: Uh, by tomorrow it says due December 12th. I don't really know what you did. Um, I've never seen this before. I think what I would have done is probably, well, I mean, look, we need the engineers to fix this stuff. I just let people fucking log into their accounts and add new subscriptions. But in this case, I probably would have. [Ben Ornstein]: Because the other option was, hey, can you send me your new credit card info and I can update it? No, I would have had him sign up for. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: Well, OK, I probably would have gone into. Oh, right, because the payment method, right? That's that's what was difficult about this. [Ben Ornstein]: That's why I went with. I should have just messaged you first. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: That was dumb of me, but I probably would have had him sign up for a new account and then had one of the engineers the two in the database. [Ben Ornstein]: So I guess monitor this for the next day and see if it pays the 128. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: If it doesn't, then, you know, we'll need to figure it out. Because he's using the service without paying for it right now, basically. Right. Well, the metadata hasn't even been added yet. So no, there's no metadata that I think needs to be added because it's already on his account because he's an existing user. [Ben Ornstein]: Got it. Okay. Yes. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: If you go into his straight profile and you go on the left, right hand side, scroll down underneath like taxable stats. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 2]: Got it. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: So any subscription on his account is automatically linked to megaphone. Um, I think since there's something weird going on here and this is like an abnormal process, just talk with one of the engineers and just make sure that everything's set up right, because we don't want to tell them it's [Ben Ornstein]: And then it's not work or something. Yep, sounds good. I'll check in with Rafael later about that. Yeah, one other quick one is there was a guy from last week who his subscription ended and he had $23 left in his account. You about this. I think I followed up once you may have. Gone in the, um, just maybe you just missed it, but so he can’t access his wallet anymore. Um, he has $23 left in after he canceled. Do I give him a free month to use the other 23? Do I refund him the 23? Do I do neither? Is he asking for it? Yeah. Well, yeah, he did. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: He did want it. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Yeah. [Ben Ornstein]: Yeah. Give him a free month. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: I mean, you can use it. That’s fine. [Ben Ornstein]: Sounds good, okay, I’ll do that. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: Better than a refund. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Okay, cool. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: So first I’ll throw to you any kind of thoughts on your end about January going on, like where are you at with things? [Ben Ornstein]: Yeah, so did a ton of thinking, talked with the fiance, with the family, about everyone’s different perspectives. I wanted to hear stuff outside of my own, you know? And everyone had like different opinion. So that didn’t help me, which is not surprising. But what I came, what it came down to is the whole agency starting my own company idea, not agency, the whole like research, really interesting idea. I don’t think it’s the right time to do that. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: Risk right now? [Ben Ornstein]: I think too much risk. Yeah. Just given where and It sounds really exciting and obviously very much up my alley, which you correctly identified. But yeah, just with trying to get out of my Beyonce sister’s basement. I understand. Yeah, just timing. So that’s why for now, you know, just for now until money becomes not a factor or less of a factor, I feel like it’ll always be. Um, then the, the whole full-time job seems somewhere seems to be, you know, what I want to opt optimize for, or, or as close to full-time job, whatever, whatever that looks like, Okay, cool. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: That’s helpful to know. Um, so, okay. So I, I, I think that the, the, the headline is, I think we can make it work. Okay. I don’t think we can make it work in January. But I don’t think we should be too long after January before we can make it work. And so let me let me explain. So as I was going through and we can walk through a doc that I wrote about sort of 2025 planning and stuff like that. I want to focus on our strengths. That’s like the number one thing I want to focus on and our strengths are. Content and specifically newsletters. And things like that so. What that means is I think that we want to focus more on the newsletter and the long form YouTube videos than the podcast. Also, the podcast is very expensive to run and it’s not bringing in any revenue and there’s no clear way yet. As I said, I’m having those kind of conversations with members and there’s some stuff that’s coming out of that that I’m, you know, I’m bullish on, but we’ll see. To say. But yeah, I want to focus more on long-form YouTube, because I think that has more viable potential, and the newsletter, because that’s our moneymaker. The more we can get people opening those emails, the better off we’re going to be. The other thing is, and this is where I think the opportunity is going to be, so I mentioned that newsletter growth project with my friend Matt. I don’t think I’ve told you that much about it, but basically- This is Matt McGarry? [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 2]: No, different Matt, different Matt. [Ben Ornstein]: Oh, got it. Okay. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: This is a guy, Matt, who’s like, you know, he’s a Teal Fellow and he’s last startup went through YC and he’s a founder friend of mine. He’s the guy who taught me how to do cold email and everything like that. He’s a wizard at that stuff. Anyway, back in the spring, we were talking about fruition at the time, but more recently we’ve been starting to grow my newsletter through basically just like cold, cold email, right? Highly targeted people. He has like scraping capabilities. Basically you can make like an interest based graph on emails. So you can do social media level targeting, but directly in people’s inboxes. And that’s like a very compelling sales pitch to newsletter operators, to startups who want them as leads to become users. Right? And so we think the highest leverage place to do this is by helping people grow in newsletters, either newsletter operators or venture backed startups who want to start newsletters. And so we’re going to be doing is we already have people paying us for this, but we’re going to be expanding is offering this as a service and it’s no marginal cost. It’s like we have the lists, we just need to target them to the right people. And then ops time to like manage the business. Um, What we’re going to be doing is selling this as a service and tacking on the ghost writing to it as well. And the offer converts really, really well. I contacted like 10 people, maybe like 15 people about it a couple of weeks ago, and only two of them said they weren’t interested. And like over half of them have already paid. That’s phenomenal. Yes. We want to expand it and he has an engineering team working on some of the backend stuff. But what we’re going to be doing is the front end stuff, the content, the business operations, all that stuff and the sales. And so I think that that is a business, especially with what we’ve seen so far, that can grow really, really quickly to the demographic that we already have trust with, which is founders. So my estimation is that if we go and just start selling that more over the next couple weeks, that within weeks, not like half a year, we will be at a point where that business is doing 20, 30, 40, 50K a month, and we’re hiring for it, we’re building a team for it, and it’s like a real company. Especially if we’re selling to startups who are also paying us for the ghost rate. Like we’re already making, I think it’s 13 K a month from it. [Ben Ornstein]: And there’s. When did you start this? Like a month ago. That’s crazy. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Yeah. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: So it’s just, it’s just been Matt, myself, Rena, and Matt’s like one or two engineers who are helping out on the technical side. Um, so there’s no corporate structure, there’s no LLC, there’s no anything like that. It’ll be under Rye Valley, like our portion of it will be underneath Rye Valley. But it’s growing quickly and we haven’t even really started selling it. We just contacted a few people I know. So the TLDR is, that’s not gonna be ready to say like, yes, W2 or yes, go, you know, whatever in January. But I would say at the very latest by March, we’ll be able to sort of make that jump. So I know that’s like an unfair thing to put on you and you’ve been very, very patient with this and with me already. So I totally understand if that doesn’t work for your timeline or if you’re just not interested or don’t believe in it. And I can obviously share more and answer questions and stuff. But this to me feels like a real inflection point for one of our offers that even if we devoted more time to the podcast or to Founding Journey or even to Megaphone right now, we’re not gonna be able to move at that rate of speed. And so as a bloodhound who seeks out fast-moving, fast-growing things, my spidey senses are tingling. No, I mean, you have to go towards the thing that’s moving quickest. Yeah, so that’s where I’m at and that’s sort of where I’m coming to you at right now. So I know that it’s not an ideal outcome, with timeline-wise, but in terms of long-term work potential, I think there’s a lot that you could be doing there and also helping across the rest of the business as my attention gets pulled into that. So the sort of role that I would envision is basically similar to what you’ve been doing, operations across the whole business, research and operations, I guess is what I would say. And it would be at the rate that we talked about that would make sense for you. And it would be full-time. Whether that’s W2 or whether that’s what we’re doing now at the higher rate, that’s fine. But I want you to know that I see what you’ve done is incredibly valuable to me and to our business. And I think that with what we’re doing here, it could be a much longer return thing. So that’s where I can post to you. And again, I understand if it’s not on the timeline that you need and you know, I, I just have to accept that if that’s the case. [Ben Ornstein]: Yeah, no, I mean, it sounds really interesting. And I, you know, I really enjoy doing everything I’m doing here. It’s fun working on all these different things and projects and it makes work like getting kind of enjoyable, which is good. And would there be an opportunity for in the meantime to increase the hourly rate? Like, I’m not saying crazy numbers, but like more than what it is now in the meantime to, yeah. Yeah, a hundred percent. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 2]: Cause we talked about that when you first joined, we were like, this is just temporary thing initially. So yes, we can, you know, you let me know what your ideal case is in the meantime. And we can, you know, I don’t see why we can’t make that happen. It just won’t be able to be exactly where it will be once, you know, once we’re, once this business is formalized. So right now, you know, we made 13K off of it in the last month, but no one has renewed. There’s no necessary reason to believe that that’s, that there’s that business there, but I have high confidence that it will be there. Of it yet. So I can’t, like, you know, I don’t want to do something that I can’t back up, basically. [Ben Ornstein]: Right. And I think what would be good about just like the increased hourly is, you know, your risk is still only when I’m working. You’re not paying me W-2 full time. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, and of course, I can still work across the entire business. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 2]: Yeah, I mean, for what is worth, we will be converting, right now the company is an LLC, we will be converting it to an S-corp. I’m hoping by the end of the year. And so that’ll give us some more flexibility on like structure and when we go to formalize, it’ll be easier to do that, all that kind of stuff. [Ben Ornstein]: Got it. Okay. So then the next step on that would be just figuring out what number, I guess, per hour to increase to. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 2]: Yeah. Like what sense for you from January 1st through March, and then we reevaluate again in March. And if the business is super successful, I’m like, hey, I need you to commit longer term, sooner than that, then we’d have that conversation sooner. [Ben Ornstein]: Okay. Yeah, I think, I think that can work for now. Because again, I, I really enjoy the work and there’s like a, The deadline for actually getting out of this place is August. So there’s not like I’m being kicked out, but it’s more of the fiance’s like we got to get the hell out of here. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. So that’s kind of where, like I said, December, the deadline was for like getting like some consistent revenue stream through. Yeah. But yeah, August is when I have to actually move out. So, okay. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 2]: I mean, we’ll have this figured out way before then. Um, again, this thing is either going to hit or it’s not. And early indications are that it’s going to hit and we’re going to need to put more manpower behind it. Um, I just sort of, you know, right now I’m sort of getting my personal shit figured out and then, um, then we’ll be going hard at this. Um, and it’ll be our, our, probably our main priority, honestly. Um, at least in Q1 and hopefully beyond that too. So I can look. Yeah, sorry, what were you gonna say? No, no, no, go ahead, go ahead. [Ben Ornstein]: I was gonna say, so when you say this, obviously the podcast is very capital intensive and the ROI is not great right now, does that mean shutting it down? Yeah, what does that mean for that kind of stuff? [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 2]: Yeah, I think we keep doing it with the guests that we have, because I think right now we’re scheduled to record I don’t know. Basically, we’re scheduled to have episodes edited one per week through at least the end of January, maybe into February a little bit if Saw Hill and Dryden convert as well. So my guess is that we’ll keep doing it and paying for it through February, because we’ll probably find two more people to round out February 2, right? If cash got tight, we could shut it down, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. So it makes sense to just keep rolling and then keep doing the long form YouTube kind of alongside that. So there will be a lot of like research, content research work. And also I want you to keep doing what you did last week for the newsletter too, because that was really great. I think it was one of our best issues in a while. So podcast, not immediate shutdown, but plan is basically to evaluate it as we go into February. Because my hypothesis is that our time will be sucked into this new thing. And just in terms of ROI, it’ll make sense to prioritize our content budget towards long-form YouTube rather than the podcast. That’s my hypothesis, but a lot can change in two and a half, three months or whatever. [Ben Ornstein]: Yes, it can. In terms of, so the case studies, are you talking about the entire foundation? Journey brand or just the [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 2]: No, no, I’m just talking about the podcast. We want to keep doing everything else with founding journey because it’s such a, it’s such like a, like an entry point into our ecosystem for founders. Um, so nothing changes on the newsletter, nothing changed on the podcast in the short term. Um, at least in the immediate short term, um, we’ll keep doing the case studies actually are our new email domains for that are fresh by tomorrow, I think. So we’ll finally doing outreach again um so block off your calendar in like the holidays if you have time you want to take off because people just book it yeah I’ll I’ll do that after we hop off to just make sure um but yeah that’ll be back on and then I would say shifting like sometime towards newsletter research as well long form youtube research um and then I’m going to loop you into all of this, you know, growth stuff as well. I think there’s a future where the ghost writing agency and this email growth thing merge and become one entity. But for now, I don’t think it really makes sense to do that. We want the agency to still have its autonomy. So yes, so I would say let’s offload offboard the megaphones I have to review that doc that you sent and also let’s off board the ghost writing ops, but we need to hire someone for that. So I needed to get on that and do that. And then your focus will just be all the research and also then kind of doing the biz ops with me for this new thing. [Ben Ornstein]: Yeah, that sounds good to me. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 2]: Okay, cool. As long as that works for you, then I feel good. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Yeah, yeah. [Ben Ornstein]: I guess I’ll let you know about, I’ll do some math real quick on- Yeah, yeah, yeah. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 2]: No rush. Just let me know. And then that would kick in Jan 1 and run through March or sooner if we need to make changes sooner. But yeah. Is that this has like high potential and will quickly become our main time sucker to focus. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Cool. [Ben Ornstein]: Okay. Yeah. Now that I think that works for me. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Yeah. [Ben Ornstein]: I’ll have to talk with the fiance again. I don’t with the increased rate. I think she will be Just let me know what works for you. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 2]: Obviously don’t want to put you out or in a bad spot. So just let me know and we’ll make it happen. And again, then we’ll just keep touching base about how quickly this is growing and go from there. [Ben Ornstein]: Sounds good. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Cool. [Ben Ornstein]: I appreciate it, man. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 2]: Of course. Let me send you this planning doc that I was using to brainstorm at the find it and send Notion somewhere. I think I fixed all the Notion issues, but now I need to format everything. So everything’s all over the place in Notion. So let me find this for you. I’ll send it to you. Drop some comments on it. Drop some thoughts. And then either tonight or tomorrow, I’ll also start looping you into the processes for this new thing. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Sounds good. Cool. [Ben Ornstein]: Anything else we should go over now? Um, yeah, I have the onboarding doc stuff for Raina. Should I? Yeah, I guess we’ll do that eventually. Yeah, I have I have that in my like slack reminders. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Yeah. [Ben Ornstein]: And then I’m gonna, I’m gonna give the free month that one dude and then the last thing on the podcast. So I did the everything set for Pujan and Alexander other than a Thursday email. Although we don’t have clips for Pujan or Alexander, are we just not doing those just completely? [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 2]: I think I think if we want to do them, we can. Is that blocked on me that I didn’t? [Ben Ornstein]: They weren’t in they weren’t in Trello at all, like just like comments on, on clips or anything. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 2]: Um, but like, is that, is that because like you and Max didn’t go through and identify options or is that cause I never looked at the options. [Ben Ornstein]: I think it’s, I think you hadn’t looked at the options that were sent, but I don’t, if we’re not even going to post them, then why waste the slots on those? [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 2]: Yeah. So technically those aren’t part of the slots. Um, technically, what we’re doing is we’re paying for five shorts and a podcast and relevant shorts as like two separate things. I think there’s some value in sending them to the guest and seeing if they want to post them. But I also don’t know, like it might just be better to say, Hey, can we stop doing these for the episodes and instead just add more shorts instead to Yeah, that might that might be good, especially because I mean, [Ben Ornstein]: yeah, I mean, it would be it’s it’s nice for the guest to post, I guess, and we could use it for social. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 2]: But even then, I don’t think anyone we’ve sent them to, and we haven’t sent them to everybody. But I don’t think anyone we’ve sent them to has actually posted one. [Ben Ornstein]: Yeah. So maybe that’s not the point. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 2]: Maybe we just don’t even do the clips then. Yeah, I’ll make a note to talk to ClipWing about reallocating. [Ben Ornstein]: Especially because if we go all in on long form YouTube, short form YouTube. And then. Yeah, I I’m enjoying doing the research for the US versus EU. There’s a lot that I learned, so I have a ton of sources in there, but now I have to just kind of like, Put it into something succinct that will make things easier for that like handover. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 2]: Yeah, the the stuff you’ve been getting is great, Just keep doing what you’re doing. I need to get in there and write the script, so I obviously was sidetracked this weekend, but I’ll be getting on that in the next few days. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: And then we’ll just edit them, and then record, and then send them to Clipwing. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 2]: I think YouTube can be a really good channel for us. I really do. Definitely. Let me know where you guys land. Things out and what makes sense. And then, um, you know, assuming that it’s a number that, you know, also fits, then I think everything’s good. Uh, and I wouldn’t anticipate it not being, um, but yeah, just let me know what that number is and then we can do that through Q1 and go from there. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Okay. Sounds good. Cool. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 2]: Um, all right, man.