- Duration: 29 min
- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01JEXQPT901T8J5A8TBTBB578C (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JEXQPT901T8J5A8TBTBB578C)
Transcript
[Marco Sepasi]: I’m in New York. What about you? Sweet. Toronto. East side. [Michael Houck]: I feel like the Athena crew is all spread out across the world. I never know where anyone is. I never talked to Catherine. I’m like, what country are you going to be in right now? [Marco Sepasi]: Yeah. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Marco Sepasi]: Definitely on Catherine’s side. She’s definitely all over the world. But the rest of us on the go to market side are spread throughout US and Canada. The main hubs are like Vancouver Toronto SF and It’s a bunch of our AEs like middle America. But uh, yeah, how big is the whole team now? On the revenue side I Mean just in general. [Michael Houck]: I don’t know. How big are you guys? [Marco Sepasi]: So Like our North American side like our go-to-market is Maybe like 20 30 people now. Oh nice. I growing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely. Yeah, I think like, Maybe 20 North American on the go to market side. Actually, maybe a bit more. I don’t even know, to be honest, I don’t even know. Outside of people like directly on the revenue team, like I barely interact. No, there’s definitely more than 20. Yeah, there’s more than 20 North Americans. I’m just like thinking of who is even on the go to market. But yeah, no, yeah, for sure. We don’t see each other too often, but yeah. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, hopefully you guys can all come together at some point. [Marco Sepasi]: I feel like by then there’ll be 20 new people as well. I mean, we’re all going to the Philippines in late January. Oh, nice. That’ll be fun. Yeah. So I’m excited. Cool, cool man. [Michael Houck]: Um, well yeah, excited to chat on the newsletter. I guess what context on this do you have? Cause that’ll tell me where to start. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. [Marco Sepasi]: So I’ve, Very limited context actually. The only person that had an idea of what was going on with the newsletter seems like from our side was Wilson. And then Wilson dipped in like August. So I’m like pretty far removed because I’ve just been focused on like trying to get more people on the team and like hiring out. And then for those hires, like onboarding them, like basically like trying to run the rest of growth. So I’ve like, I apologize for my lack of communication with and you and Stephanie has just been like my inbox and like my Slack and every other communication channel we’ve had has just been like getting destroyed. So. Yeah, no, it’s all good. [Michael Houck]: Don’t, don’t worry about it, man. I know how it is when you’re in hyperscale mode. I’ve been there. Um, so, okay. So I’ll go back to the very, very beginning very quickly. Uh, basically last year, uh, I interviewed Jonathan and I did a deep dive in my for Jonathan. And we sent that out to a bunch of people, people loved it. And Jonathan in particular really loved it. And so then fast forward to the spring, Jonathan and Catherine asked me if I wanted to do ghost rating for Athena in some way. And at the time, I was like, you know, debating starting a ghost rating agency. And ended up doing that a couple weeks later, brought them in as one of our first clients. And we’ve focused I know you guys have a couple of writers doing like social media versus this or that. We’re focused on the newsletter. And so every two weeks we’re sending out an issue and we’re writing sort of this backlog of content. So every week I’m writing two different, basically like vignettes that we can use for the newsletter. And those range from like tactical, how to delegate this, how to level up your delegation, obligation in this way to more storytelling narrative focus things to get people to go read the blog or check out playbooks on the website. So I’m delivering those to Stephanie. She joined basically at the same time to sort of project manage the whole thing. And also some of the other writers I think she works with too. But yeah, so I sent her those every week. She reviews them. Sometimes she’ll have like Catherine or Robert review them too. And then we publish two of them every other Sunday in the newsletter. So far, we have like a 20,000 person list for the newsletter. And I’d say that’s every active member, as well as like a bunch of other emails that you guys have collected on the site, and I guess in other ways, I’m not sure. The focus from Robert so far has been on existing subscribers, but obviously the majority of the list is people who are not Athena members yet, right? [Marco Sepasi]: And we have like two, I think we have like 25 or 2,600 clients right now. Yeah. On the list. [Michael Houck]: Let me open it up so I get you the exact number. I think it’s like 20, 21 K. Um, yeah. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. [Michael Houck]: It’s actually 22 K now we’ve had some more, um, And if I look at the breakdown, we have about 3K who have been customers or members at one point or another. We have 21K which are tagged as leads. Some of those have obviously unsubscribed. That’s why it’s higher than the active number. And then there’s another couple thousand which are like lost opportunities that we’re trying to re-engage. Okay. And so content has been focused mainly on like helping existing members delegate more effectively, but something we’ve been toying around with and, um, between Robert, Stephanie and myself is like, how can we also make this, you know, obviously keep it good for retention, but also keep also make it something that can bring new members into the ecosystem. Um, and so that’s kind of where we’re at right now. [Marco Sepasi]: Got it. Okay. So right now, Was it Robert’s assumption that these emails were only going to our current clients? [Michael Houck]: Not that I know of No, I don’t think so. [Marco Sepasi]: So he knows that it’s been like broad to basic most with people like in our HubSpot, I guess. [Michael Houck]: As far as I know, we’ve sort of gone through different POCs over the last six months where at first it was Catherine and Stephanie. And then it was Jonathan and Stephanie. And now recently it’s become Robert and Stephanie. And in the middle, it was Chris and Stephanie too. [Marco Sepasi]: Okay. So, okay. [Michael Houck]: I didn’t know Robert was involved with this at all. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. [Marco Sepasi]: As of like two weeks ago, he’s become more involved. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. [Marco Sepasi]: Fair. Okay. Okay. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Nice. [Marco Sepasi]: So, so what’s next then? Like what’s the [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: So the reason I to chat with you is because if there’s appetite on your guys’ side to start using this thing as a growth channel instead of just as like, hey, we have these people who’ve already sent us their email and, and or are already members, right? Cause that’s the whole makeup of the list right now. If we want to use this as a true top of funnel, we have a way that we can help you guys do that. Basically, I don’t know how familiar you are with like the newsletter boom and newsletter space right now, Any context on what’s happening in the newsletter space? [Marco Sepasi]: Uh, not like incredibly familiar, but yeah. [Michael Houck]: Okay. I mean, the TLDR is that basically whenever someone’s building a newsletter, 90% of the growth traditionally comes from paid ads, social media, meta, Twitter, TikTok, right? Um, you inquire subscribers are like roughly $2 depending on the niche. Um, and so that works for most newsletters. Um, but what we've ended up doing is building an engine that we, well, first we've collected 200 million, uh, emails, um, like similar to like an Apollo or a zoom info. And we've, and we've tagged them based on interest. So you can get like social media newsfeed level targeting, but directly in people's inboxes. Um, so super powerful. And what we started to do is both with my newsletter. And with some of our clients is offer this as a service where we will work with you to identify exactly who the ICP is. Obviously, for you guys, we sort of already know. But then we can basically add subscribers to the newsletter who are we know are interested in the content and go through a validation process to make sure it's like an active inbox and things like that. So we can do that for roughly 50 cents to 150, depending on the scale. Per subscriber, so it's considerably cheaper than traditional newsletter growth methods. Yeah, and are you considering this top of funnel or bottom of funnel? [Marco Sepasi]: I mean, for most newsletters, it's top of funnel, right? [Michael Houck]: Because most of the clients we work with are newsletter-first businesses or startups that use their newsletter as top of funnel. For you guys, it might be a little bit different, and that might change how we target a little bit, but the content we're already writing is very applicable. To folks who want to or are interested in delegation, but aren't already, you know, Athena members. [Marco Sepasi]: If it was super top of funnel, how are you measuring like the attribution side of things for your other clients? Or like, how would you do it for us? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I mean, for you guys, we would probably look at, you know, who's being added to the newsletter, and we just set up, you know, tracking links in the newsletter. So when people are getting the emails, they're clicking through, to the website and to book a call with you guys or become a member. And, you know, we just track it that way. You'd have visibility in Beehive of like, oh, this person signed up, then they click this link and we could build a report for you based on that. [Marco Sepasi]: Okay. So if we're actually driving like true sign up sign, it is like pretty like lower funnel then. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. I mean, again, you guys are sort of different. Yeah. In style of business, higher ticket business. Than a lot of the other folks we're working with. [Marco Sepasi]: Yeah. Cool. I'm definitely interested in it. If you think that it'll help us out to give you like a gauge of the metrics. I basically need a two thousand dollar cap. [Michael Houck]: That's all I actually care about. [Marco Sepasi]: So if this can get a two thousand dollar cap, then I'm down to scale to the moon, to whatever makes sense. Okay. I don't want to ask you, oh, what do you think the cac is going to be? Because like, it's like kind of difficult to just like know that top of top of mind. So I'm down to do like a test and actually like get a proper gauge. What do you think would be a fair test for this? [Michael Houck]: And how long would it take? So as far as how long would it take, basically, we would start running our validation process and getting our ops set up. That would probably take one week. And then in the second week, we would have emails starting to get added. And so by the end of the two week sort of sequence that people would have to go through to validate that they're active inboxes and are interested in the content, we would start seeing metrics by the end of the third week, probably sooner than that, honestly, but just to be just to be a little conservative. As far as CAC, it's hard for me to say again, because you guys different than the other folks that we're doing this for in the like beta that we're running for right now. But like intuitively, just knowing how many subscribers we'd be able to add at that $2,000 level, I think it’s pretty likely that we’d be able to hit that probably like by a decent margin. [Marco Sepasi]: Okay, so let’s see. How much money would you need to test this? [Michael Houck]: Um, it probably makes sense to do a couple thousand for a test. It doesn’t need to be like a crazy amount, like not talking like 10 K or anything like that, but just a few thousand so that we can get enough subscribers into the funnel to see like, you know, again, cause you guys are higher ticket sale. So it’s a little different, um, the math on my side, but yeah, I’d say a couple thousand, whatever you guys are comfortable with. [Marco Sepasi]: I almost feel like a couple thousand isn’t enough. Like if, if we’re expecting, a couple thousand dollar capped and like that’s only one client. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: I mean, we can go bigger if you want. We have the we have the data, we have the bandwidth, like there’s no there’s no blockers on our side. [Marco Sepasi]: Yeah, I’m definitely down to go bigger there as a test, like, I’d say around like the 10K range is probably like will give us like, Very good data. To know if we actually want to scale. But if it doesn’t work at 10k, it’s like all bets off, basically. Or like, what’s your thoughts on like, the first 10k of spam? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I would imagine that if it doesn’t hit at 10k, then either our targeting is very off for some reason, and we need to adjust it, but we’d probably catch that way before we go through the full 10k. So I would imagine if it doesn’t hit at 10k, and the offer’s just not really resonating. And so that’s, you know, be fair. Maybe high ticket wouldn’t work as well for this or something, but there’s no intuitive reason why that wouldn’t be the case. We sell high ticket items myself through my newsletter, you know, all the time for our ghostwriting and for some other stuff. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: So. [Marco Sepasi]: So these people that would be added to this list that we’d be sending to, do we not have to get their consent? For us to send them emails? Like, who is the email coming from [Michael Houck]: Yeah, so the email is coming from the newsletter. [Marco Sepasi]: Our newsletter. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, basically the way it works is that, you know, with the CanSpam Act, we’ve done research on the case law and all the stuff around this. You can email anyone in the United States. You can email anyone you want, as long as there’s an unsubscribe link that’s easily visible and an address in the email, both of which are by default on all BeHype emails. There’s no limitation to us to do that. If they want to keep receiving it, they can. If they don’t, they can opt out and that’s totally fine. Um, so we’re in the clear a hundred percent. Um, yeah, we’re sending people emails this way. [Marco Sepasi]: And just so people don’t need to subscribe to a newsletter, we can just like start adding anyone we want, like through like an Apollo email. [Michael Houck]: It’s, it, this is like a common misconception because people think like, Oh, a newsletter, it’s like a list and therefore it’s like a business and therefore it’s different than cold email. But it’s in legal terms, it’s not different than cold email. [Marco Sepasi]: That’s so crazy. Interesting. I didn’t know that. Okay. I guess like, what’s like the risk of it? The risk is like a bunch of people mark you spam and like your email domain gets like, starts getting like, flagged Google. What’s like the like, yeah, like our email, right? Is it our domain that’s at risk with this? Or is it through Beehive’s server? Whose servers? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: So deliverability and domain health are based on a few different things. They’re based on the domain level, the inbox level, and then there’s also an infrastructure level below that. We are currently using the main Athena domain to send these emails, but we have the to change that to a Beehive email if you guys would feel more comfortable doing that. And that’s just one setting in Beehive. So no issues there. [Marco Sepasi]: Yeah, I mean, I would like, I’ll let you decide basically. You know, like a lot more than like anyone at Athena about email. So that would be up to you. Okay, so I think this is cool. In terms of next steps, then, could you help me with like, put together some sort of like roadmap what you need, what the tests would look like, at what point you’d be allocating budget, if let’s say we had like, let’s act like we have 10k here, like what that would look like, how many emails we would send out? Is it like email per person? Or is it like, [Michael Houck]: Yeah, so technically, the way it would work would be that we would be importing leads into the newsletter, those leads would be blocked from receiving the main newsletter. And instead, for for the first two weeks, they’d be going through an automated sequence that we set up in the Beehive account. Once they complete that sequence, either by engaging with the emails in a positive way, or by unsubscribing, or by just not continuing to open the emails if either of those things happen, we mark them as churned, and they never get the main newsletter. But if they do engage with the emails, then we them is interested and they start getting the main newsletter instead of this automated sequence. So as far as what I need from you guys, it would really just be as much detail on the ICP, both like demographics, psychographics, anything else you think is interesting. And that’ll let us zero in on who we want to import and start testing. So yeah, there’s really no other blockers. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. [Marco Sepasi]: Got it. You asked about, you asked about scale as well. [Michael Houck]: I need to check with my, my co-founder on this project, uh, to be sure, but I would imagine that at a 10 K spend and, um, with what I know of the ICP, I would imagine that we can get you folks for maximum $1 per sub, maybe a little bit lower than that too. [Marco Sepasi]: Um, Let me check with him today and I can get back to you. Okay, cool. Okay, got it. Yeah, I mean, like, if this test shows that we can get a cac at 2k, then like, we’ll, we’ll scale it hard. If it’s over that, then it’s like, okay, how much over? It’s a lot over. It’s like, okay, we can’t do it. If it’s a little bit over, then it’s like, okay, maybe be on a very slow cadence or at a reduced budget, depending on if we need extra demand during x times, then we can have it as a bullet. But if it does well in the beginning during this test phase, then it should 100% be an always-on initiative for us. Love that. So yeah. I don’t know how much control you have over the costs of each lead that we add to the newsletter, but if it’s fully in your control, it might make sense in the beginning to make them cheaper, I guess. You have all these leads, basically, and you’re just like, yeah, I’ll charge them this amount, or how does it actually… [Michael Houck]: Yeah, we have this giant database of leads, but the… Um, there’s also like tagging them based on interests and like identifying them. And we have some of that data, but whenever we onboard someone new, we invest in like getting more of that from other sources and getting more comprehensive picture. So I would imagine, I want to hesitate and not like over promise here, but I imagine that we can get it under a dollar per sub, but I don’t, uh, I don’t want to confirm that before I talk with [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Matt. Okay. [Marco Sepasi]: Perfect. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Um, Okay. [Marco Sepasi]: And then in terms of the current newsletter, like how, where’s like the standing with that? Is that like an always on initiative or are you on like a, are you on like a contract expiration date? Like what’s happening? [Michael Houck]: No, it’s, it’s just ongoing. It’s technically a month to month thing with like a 30 day cancellation notice on it. But yeah, we’ve been doing it since May I think. Um, and it’s just, yeah, just an always on thing. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. Got it. [Marco Sepasi]: Got it. And there’s no differentiation in the messaging based on where people are in the fight. Everyone gets the exact same newsletter. Like Stephanie was asking me, she’s like, oh, like she feels like the newsletter. Someone was saying it seems like the, okay, just gonna confirm the mix. Robert’s issue is that the newsletter is too bottom of funnel and tactical. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Marco Sepasi]: Wondering like what the mix is. Of like the client was. So I was like, or the subscriber list. So I was like, okay, is the goal then to have like a different set newsletters for like the people in different stages? Like what’s up with that? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, we talked with, I talked with Stephanie after she had that conversation with Robert and then we went back to Robert as well. And we’re all on the same page. We’re changing the style of the content, less playbook tactics driven and more narrative. Like Andrew Wilkinson style story content. And we’ve already started to move it in that direction. So that’s where we’re changing it. Okay, okay. [Marco Sepasi]: So nothing to be done on like my end for the segmentation or? [Michael Houck]: I don’t think so. I mean, if we wanted to write like a different newsletter or a different style of newsletter for different segments within the list, talk about that, that’s sort of out of the purview of what we’ve been doing so far, what we’ve been contracted to do, basically. But I’m open to talking about that if that’s something you think will be impactful. [Marco Sepasi]: OK. OK. I mean, I’ll talk with like, I guess Chris isn’t even on anymore. Also, I’ll speak with Chris about it nonetheless. And yeah, we’ll get on that. I think we’re getting a new, VP marketing soon, so you should actually have some legit support internally. [Michael Houck]: Honestly, I love everyone on the team, so it doesn’t even matter. It’s been chaotic, but it’s fine. I love Catherine, I love Jonathan, I love Chris. Chris is great, we had dinner in New York when he was here a while ago. [Marco Sepasi]: And I don’t know Robert, but he seems fine. Yeah, fair. Okay, cool. Next steps then? Can you send some information on like what the test would look like, what the costs associated would be, what the timelines are, what you need from our side? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: I’ll shoot over an email this afternoon and we can go from there. But look, I’m excited. I’ve been sort of like, you know, not pushing, but like mentioning basically since we started the newsletter that I think this can be a big, like, I guess for you guys, it would be like in the funnel. Not top of funnel, but a big channel for converting people. So I’m excited to test it out. [Marco Sepasi]: Yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely. Even like all of our nurture sequences, like our weakest out right now. It’s like, we definitely do need more value that we’re providing to like these leads in the funnel and whoever else. So yeah, I think this is a, this makes sense. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Cool. [Michael Houck]: I’ll shoot that over today. Good to meet, good to chat and yeah, we’ll go from here. [Marco Sepasi]: Cool. Thanks, Michael. And apologies that I missed yesterday’s meeting. Oh my God. It happens, man. [Michael Houck]: You get in the zone and it’s just, uh, then you realize it’s like three hours later. [Marco Sepasi]: I was locked in. But, uh, okay. Have a good rest of your day. You too, man. [Michael Houck]: Talk soon. See you.