- Duration: 26 min
- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01JEY8WPHZ3BVZFS04G9GHXZXP (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JEY8WPHZ3BVZFS04G9GHXZXP)
Transcript
[Ben Billups]: to Scott Chisholm. Are you are you also in Highland by chance or no? [Michael Houck]: I’m not in Highland. But Scott’s a friend and I went out to Montana for the summit. I did like a little newsletter roundtable content roundtable there. Oh, nice. Right on. Right on. [Ben Billups]: Yeah, I just joined. I think I just joined like three weeks ago. So yeah, get the next one. Scott is a really good guy. [Michael Houck]: I would love another excuse to go out there is absolutely beautiful. So yeah, I mean, out there for the next one. [Ben Billups]: Maybe so, maybe so. Very cool, man. Well, yeah, I guess, I guess apart from that, how did you, how did you bump into us? [Michael Houck]: I think I saw something on LinkedIn or maybe in one of like the newsletter communities that I’m in. I forget exactly. I’m like, you know, I have so many slacks that I don’t even know. I’m not sure exactly where it was, but yeah, I found you guys. I checked out the site, looked you up and I was like, huh, it sounds interesting. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Ben Billups]: Very cool, man. Cool. Yeah, well, I guess I assume that this is, I see that you do some, like you have a megaphone, looks like you have another newsletter called Founding Journey, a few other things going on. So yeah, happy to chat and just see if we can help. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I mean, a little personal holding company, basically. We have Founding Journey, which is like a media company focused on startup founders. So the newsletter has been going on for like years. And then we’ve recently launched a podcast on YouTube as well. And then megaphone is a SaaS platform, basically to connect creators to people who are putting out content on social media in a certain niche, and they want to get more exposure to the creator’s audience. And so they partner with the creator on specific posts, the creators engage and blow it up to their audience. [Ben Billups]: Yeah, I I think I actually heard about Megaphone from Max Bidna, Marketing Max. Oh, cool. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, Max. I was just talking to him today, actually. Yeah. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Ben Billups]: And so, I mean, Max and I have worked together on some newsletter stuff. So yeah, small world. There you go. But yeah, I might try out Megaphone at some point. I’ve kind of been doing the full round of things for social media engagement. I did the Chase Diamond stuff for a little while. I’ve worked with Legacy Builder for a little while. I’ve kind of done a little bit of everything, but microphones I haven’t tried yet, so maybe I’ll try it. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, Chase is a good guy too. We’ve known each other for a while. Sorry, there’s like an emergency going on outside or something. Oh, yes. Anyway, yeah, I think, you know, nothing but good things to say about him. But yeah, feel free to give it a try. [Ben Billups]: Happy to toss a free month on for you and everything, so yeah. Slick, slick. But so yeah, I guess when it comes to newsletter growth, I assume we’re talking about founding journey, yeah? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, we do also have a newsletter for Megafon that we don’t advertise a lot called Viral Examples. Basically, we find usually three posts that went viral recently on Twitter and LinkedIn. And we sort of break down why that happened. And we give people a templatized version they can use themselves. So there’s some appetite to grow that one too. That’s at 5K subscribers. Smaller. So I don’t know, that one feeds more directly into revenue, whereas founding journey is more sponsorship and affiliate based. So open to discussing either one. Very cool. [Ben Billups]: Yeah, I mean, we, we specialize in growth. And I can I can basically show you kind of how our system works. It could it could potentially work for either of them. And it actually just because you’re, we have all the same friends. This isn’t public yet, but I’ll tell you, we’re working on building basically a dedicated newsletter platform for B2B. There’s basically going to be a lot of features built into it where it’s not designed to replace a CRO, but it’s designed to use newsletter as a top of funnel way of driving pipeline for B2B type deals. It’ll have our growth strategy built into it. It’ll just have deliverability just done for you. You just hit send, you don’t have to worry about it. Like, you know, all this kind of stuff that like, it’s honestly like, it’s kind of going to be a hodgepodge of like, because a lot of our clients are in the B2B space, which is why we’re kind of building the features for them. But then at the same time, there’s honestly just like a lot of the more that I’ve been in the email space, the more I’m just like, why aren’t a lot of these features just like default and ESPs? Because you can just kind of like, you can make it so that it’s like bowling with bumpers. It’s like, you just can’t not hit a pin. But instead, these platforms just kind of like, all right, you open an account, like whatever, like you’re kind of on your own to some extent. [Michael Houck]: So. They have their little tutorials or their micro courses, but like, as far as setting it up and configuring everything and also like more advanced stuff, you gotta kind of do it all yourself. [Ben Billups]: Exactly, exactly. So that’s kind of where we just, we just brought in a dev shop to, we’re kind of like knocking out phase one right now. And then I’m planning on getting max involved in that and a few other things. So could get cut. It might get interesting. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: Just to clarify for myself, are you saying that would replace my need to use Beehive or something? Pretty much, yeah. [Ben Billups]: Wow. That’s cool. Yeah. Yeah. Please keep me in the loop. [Michael Houck]: Will do. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Ben Billups]: I love Beehive, and I think the Beehive guys are great. But honestly, as time is going on, they’re very clearly designing their platform for independent news media and creators, which is totally fine. That’s a good niche. But all of my clients are B2B, and there’s like 1800 features in Beehive, they just do not need. And I’m just like, you know what I mean? So, yeah. So I mean, I’ll walk you through this quickly and you can kind of just tell me if you think this might make sense for one or both. But basically what we do is, you know, we start with some kind of ICP. So I assume for Megaphone, for you, that’s like basically founders, et cetera, or like different personalities who are posting on LinkedIn, essentially. [Michael Houck]: We have three different customer types. One is like founders or growth marketers at startups. Two is emerging creators. And three is ghostwriting agencies. Yep. Yeah, that’s perfect. [Ben Billups]: So, you know, we start with an ICP or then I guess, and I assume for founders journey as well. It’s a lot of like founders reading about founders. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: So how to be a better founder, how to grow your startup faster, how to be better for fundraising, all that kind of stuff. [Ben Billups]: Yep. No, it makes sense. And then, so we with that kind of ideal, whatever you want to call it, ideal reader profile, ideal customer profile. And then we’ll actually source an email list that’s based on an exact match according to that profile. And so we work with a bunch of different data vendors. I’m sure if you’ve ever done cold email outbound, you’ve bumped into a few of them. But they’re basically these big compliant vendors where you can get a list of emails. But getting your hands on a list of emails is easy. Knowing what to do with it is hard. And that’s like the main value in our service. So we’ll basically source an email list based on on the ICP, we’ll process it super aggressively. So obviously do things like basic validation. But then we’ll also run that list, for example, against a global opt-in database that will tell us if somebody has recently opened or clicked on an email from another sender. So we basically get an external engagement layer on top of those emails. And then for each newsletter we work on, we set some type of monthly growth target. So this could be 1,500 subs a month, could be 5,000 subs a month, like whatever that number is. That’s what our contracts are actually based on. It’s just a month-to-month contract. [Michael Houck]: We deliver against a quantity each month. What happens if we either don’t hit that or for some amazing reason, we go beyond that? [Ben Billups]: We typically over-deliver just slightly, but if there’s something that happens that causes us to under-deliver, we can either do partial refund, but most of our clients just say, I’ll just give them to me next month. We just make sure that basically those credits are applied in some way. But yeah, we’re typically over delivering by like at least 100 or so, just to make sure we hit it. So yeah, it’s just a simple SOW. So once we have that, we have an ICP, we have a list, we have a monthly target, then we back it into what we call a daily prospecting wash. So essentially what we do is, you know, in your case, like we basically push a really small quantity of contacts into your beehive each day. And then we typically just send them a copy of whatever newsletter you sent out most recently. And there’s like, we actually started doing this strat for publishers and we just tested a ton of variations, right? We tested like welcome emails or like you could cold email, like subscribe to my newsletter, like a bunch of stuff. And we just found that like, well, what we really want to know is like, do they actually like this content? And so we’re like, just send them the content. And then if they engage with it, Like that’s really the basic idea here. [Michael Houck]: Sorry, just so I’m super clear. So these people wouldn’t go through my welcome sequence that I have set up. They’d specifically go through and get whatever my most recent issue was? Yeah, pretty much. [Ben Billups]: Well, that’s what they would start with. So they could still get the welcome sequence. But what we’ve actually found works best on welcome sequences for this acquisition strategy is after they engage with a piece of core content, then they drop into your welcome sequence. Because then it starts, it doesn’t make sense like, why they’re getting it, right? Right. [Michael Houck]: Otherwise it’s like, welcome to the founding journey. We’re like, what is this? [Ben Billups]: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Got it. So we basically will send this if they engage, which means at least if they open this first newsletter, they drop it to a core segment, which we built for you. And your core segment is just, you know, whatever, whatever subscribers you’re getting off of LinkedIn, Twitter, et cetera, plus engaged contacts that we provided are what go into this segment. Okay. Segment that keeps getting weekly, daily, however often you mail. And so basically the experience of the receiving end is someone in your ICP gets a random valuable piece of content from you in the form of a newsletter. And if they engage with it, they keep getting it. If they don’t engage with the first one, we’ll drop them into what we call a retry. So we’ll give them anywhere from like two to five chances to engage. Like maybe you just caught them on their day off, whatever the case may be. If they engage with a retry, they drop into the core, but if they don’t engage with, say, four or five emails in a row. Typically, we stop around three. Then we just segment them out. [Michael Houck]: We just stop sending them emails. Do those people count for the 3,000 allocation, or are they like, hey, they didn’t work out? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: They do. [Ben Billups]: And that’s actually something that in our tech overhaul I’m planning on changing. But the reason why that they currently count is just like, let’s say, hypothetically, instead of doing this, you ran ads on Facebook, right? And then you pay $2 to get someone to subscribe, right? And then half of them open, you're like, okay, well, that's $2 per subscriber. And that’s a $4 opener, right? So for us, the way that we look at it is like, it's 75 cents for the for an ICP contact to kind of enter your database. But then typically, with a good content audience match, we can get a little over half of them to engage. So it's like a buck 50 per opener. [Michael Houck]: So okay, yeah, so still economically like not terrible. Okay, that's fine. I mean, it's actually pretty good. So. Yep, exactly. [Ben Billups]: So yeah, I mean, that's the that's the basic how the strategy works. Like, it's just we've, we've done this at scale for publishers, and kind of worked out all the kinks. And then a year ago this month, we kind of just productized it into this. [Michael Houck]: So and there's, there's no like, you know, with list sourcing, like, I've got all my subscribers through paid ads through just content marketing, on social media with my own audience and things like that. And obviously referral networks and that stuff too. There's nothing about like the fact that these people didn't opt in to my newsletter. Like I'm just adding them to it. Like that's, that's fine. [Ben Billups]: That's kosher. Yeah. So from a compliance perspective, we only do us audiences. So it's like the controlling regulation in the U S is canned spam. So it's just, it's an opt out country. There's more of these state level laws, popping up like CCPA, for example, but those pretty much just have to do with like pixel hygiene and third party data sharing, like a bunch of stuff that we don't really get into. But yeah, so like we don't do Canada, we don't do Europe, etc. Just because, you know, it's not legal there, but we'll do US audiences. So it's pretty clean. Honestly, like most of our solution is built around deliverability, like just keeping really high opens and clicks and low spam complaints, etc. Is honestly pretty easy. Okay, I guess it was US-based. [Michael Houck]: I mean, I know Europe, I know Canada, but I know Europe is a lot stricter than the US. What about engagement? What kind of open and click rate should I expect from this channel? How do I make sure the unsubscribe and spam reports don't get out of control? What's the thinking there? [Ben Billups]: Yeah, so a big part of what keeps the negative engagement under control is just the fact that we stop mailing folks very, very quickly if they don't engage. And so you're not going to get 15 emails if you're not appreciating the content. And so spam complaints are super low. It's typically like 0.004, well below any threshold where you start running into problems. Yeah, that's fine. And depending on your baseline, there may be some elevation, but it's not going to turn into a problematic ratio. Unsubscribes will be higher with this strat, which is not a huge surprise. It might be anywhere from 5% to 15%, depending on the math. [Michael Houck]: over what time period, like how soon does that 5 to 15% hit? [Ben Billups]: That's a really good question. I want to say that's like a 30 day or like a 60 day, but I should get some more info on that. And then opens and clicks, because we're filtering for engagement from the get go, like our average open rates are north of 40%. Our average clicks are like anywhere from like two to five, depends on if you're looking at CTR or CTR. So, but that's very like content dependent. Like we have some clients to get pretty low clicks. We have some clients that get 10% plus clicks. [Michael Houck]: It just depends on what's in there. We don't include a ton of links in the newsletter. So I'd imagine our click rate will be on the lower end of that. But our open rate normally is like 60 to 65. [Ben Billups]: So this would be like a lower, sounds like open rate channel. That's a possibility. I think the biggest driver in performance is kind of the content audience match and just overall list hygiene. For example, we do newsletter growth for a guy that does, he runs a community for the owners of property management companies and his open rates are still 70% and two thirds of his list is us. But that's just because he's got a hyper specific niche and we get him into that niche. But yeah, our global average, I think it's like 43%. So it just depends. Okay. [Michael Houck]: I mean, I'm not opposed to seeing what would happen. And going from there. Is there anything I'm not asking? Obviously, this is very different than what we've done in the past. So I'm just like, what questions do people generally ask you that I'm not asking? [Ben Billups]: I should ask that question. I have more sales calls. [Michael Houck]: That's a good question. [Ben Billups]: Not a ton. I mean, those are the main ones. Honestly, this is not a very complicated idea. I think if anything, we'd want to drill down a little bit more on ICP, depending on which newsletter you might want to try this out on. And then I guess the other question that we usually get asked is basically TOS type stuff on Beehive or ActiveCampaign or HubSpot. Because what's interesting is you've basically got the law and then the law is one layer. The next layer is deliverability, which is Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, whoever. These are the numbers they want to see. And then you have platform terms. We've done this with success on ActiveCampaign, HubSpot, Beehive, etc. But Beehive in particular has been varying in strictness, if that makes any sense. I think because they're a smaller platform. We haven't had a client ban from Beehive yet, but there's definitely within the little community, they're like, I can't believe these guys are just cold emailing newsletters. And so that's part of the reason why we're building a platform because we're like, well, this is legal and it works really well and we should just build our own. I'm basically just kind of tired of negotiating with all these platforms and saying, hey, we're legit, we're not shredding your servers. So I guess that would be the only other concern. I have a good relationship with the Beehive guys. [Michael Houck]: Actually, I was an early investor in Beehive, so I have a very good relationship with the team over there. [Ben Billups]: We have a lot of Beehive accounts and they're all open. Occasionally, an automated compliance system might flag it for some other reason. I've seen weird reasons why compliance systems might flag accounts, but then it always gets unlocked. They're like, oh yeah, they look at the numbers and they're like, this is fine. [Michael Houck]: Let's say that I want to go gung-ho into this. I'm like, I love this. We have budget. We're going to see ROI. I can map it out. If we decide to turn that on at some point, like what's the most that we could do per month, let's say. [Ben Billups]: That's a good question. Um, so you're at, if we're talking about founders, 70 K right now and viral examples, five K right now. [Michael Houck]: And then how often are you mailing? [Ben Billups]: Like how often are you sending? Uh, with viral examples twice a week, it's Thursday and Monday. [Michael Houck]: And then with founding journey, It's Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday three times a week. [Ben Billups]: Three times a week. So three times a week times, let's just call it four weeks. So your monthly send volumes like 840,000 on founding journey. That sounds about right. Um, viral examples would be about 40, 40 to 50,000. Yep. Um, yeah. So basically like my, the general benchmark in my head is like if our cold blend is like 10% or less of your total set volume. It's like, we basically don't have to think about it. Like everything's going to be great. We've been much more aggressive than that on a few accounts without issues. But I would say if you're just looking for like a number to start on, like for viral examples, maybe you'd want to start at like around like 4,000 or so. And then founding journey, you have capacity to, you could probably do like 10K or 20K even if you wanted to, and then assume half of them engage and stick around, right? So yeah, I mean, you definitely have capacity in those. And as part of the service, we, our team just like, we'll just check your KPIs every single day and just make sure everything looks good. [Michael Houck]: Okay, so it sounds like it's like, for like, founding journeys, obviously the the bigger one, so be like 10 to 15% net growth, basically. If we're talking about the ones that are already like not counting that get filtered out. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Right. Yeah. [Ben Billups]: So if we, let's just say hypothetically, we come in and we add, you know, 10,000 subscribers in a month, 5,000 engage, you know, you go from 70 to 75 on your core segment. You know, if we had 20 K, you'd go from 70 to 80, um, and it'd be healthy. And, uh, and assuming that your spam complaints aren't already like high, then like, yeah, it's not going to be an issue. Um, so, and then, yeah, we can start to, if you want to start start kind of like on the higher end, like that, typically we can kick in bulk pricing around like 8,000 subs a month. Like we can usually go all the way down to like 50 cents a sub. So then you're talking about like $1 openers. So, wow. Okay. That’s, that’s pretty good. [Michael Houck]: If they’re targeted, right. [Ben Billups]: That’s pretty good. [Michael Houck]: Yep. Okay. This is also why I want to build my own sitting infrastructure. [Ben Billups]: I’m like, somebody could literally come on my platform and buy and like pay for like 50 subs a month. And like, it just wouldn’t make a difference to us. We’re like, here, your 50 subs, like, right doesn’t matter. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: That’s Yeah, that’s powerful. [Michael Houck]: That’s powerful. Okay, cool. I don’t think I have any more questions right now. Let me do some budgeting for 2025. And then I’ll get back to you probably next. Maybe we do a test as we head into the new year and see how it goes and go for that. I am you know, I have the terms of service thing in my mind, but it’s not like a block I just need to sort of, I don’t know, let it sit. You’re like, yeah, it sounds good. For sure. [Ben Billups]: Yeah. And I think like, I mean, I’ve never even been kicked off a high school softball team. Like I’ve never been banned from anything. And so like, I mean, I don’t want to, I don’t want to like downplay it. It’s just some folks are more worried about it than others. And that’s just, you know, it’s like a kind of a accessibility thing. [Michael Houck]: Not everyone’s a fit for the, for the business, I guess. [Ben Billups]: And for what it’s worth, you can about this too, Max paid us to do it for like two or three months and then he figured out how to do it himself. So I think Max has been doing this on behind for like months. [Michael Houck]: He’s a crafty genius kind of guy. We’ve had a couple of clients do that. [Ben Billups]: And I’m like, listen, as long as you’re not out there trying to compete with us, I don’t mind. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: It’s whatever. [Michael Houck]: Cool. Um, let me get back to you. Sounds interesting. Um, and yeah, we’ll just go from there. Cool. Sounds good, man. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Ben Billups]: Good to connect. Maybe I’ll see you in Montana. So yeah, good to meet man. [Michael Houck]: And, um, yeah, the next highlight, it’d be great. Uh, it’s so beautiful. If you’ve never been, you just, you gotta go. It’s the best. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Awesome. [Michael Houck]: Awesome. All right.