- Duration: 24 min
- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01JFDX4JNV0JB0YDE6YBD9NMH1 (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JFDX4JNV0JB0YDE6YBD9NMH1)
Transcript
[UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Hey, Matt. What’s up, dude? How are you? [Max Palmer]: Good, man. How are you? [Matt Johnson]: Good. I’m back in California. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Nice. [Max Palmer]: Matt, how you doing, man? [Matt Johnson]: Good to meet you. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Good. [Matt Johnson]: You too, man. Sorry. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Sorry. [Michael Houck]: What’s that? A little back and forth there. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: What did you say? [Matt Johnson]: I said I’m finishing up an email real quick. [Michael Houck]: Oh, all good. No worries. Hey, Austin, how you doing? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Good, Michael. [Austin Daniel]: How are you, man? Good. Good to meet. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Likewise. [Michael Houck]: What’s up, Max? Hey, Austin. I like the art museum you got going on behind you there, Austin. You’ve got some great artistic skills. Thank you. I’ve been working. [Austin Daniel]: I’ve worked pretty hard on them. I dig it, man. It’s wonderful. One of those things now where I’m like, I don’t want to let my five-year-old down when she swings by of like, hey, where’s this one thing that I drew you? Yeah, pretty soon the brick wall’s going to be gone too. Yeah, yeah, exactly. She likes to cuddle. Well, cool. [Michael Houck]: Good to meet, guys. I don’t know how much background on me Max gave, but I can do a quick intro if that’s helpful. Toss this to you guys, maybe do the same before we dive in. So on my side, I’m Michael Houck. I was in big tech for a while, at first Uber, then Airbnb, then founded a company called Launch House. We raised our Series A from Andreessen Horowitz. We then raised a venture fund, invested in about 50 companies as well. And for the past two years, I’ve been building a personal holding company. We have the founding journey media company. We have a ghostwriting agency and some other things as well, SAS platform and a couple other things. So that’s pretty much me, at least for TLDR. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Sweet. And then Max, you and Matt connected, is that right? Yeah. [Austin Daniel]: Yeah. [Max Palmer]: So Matt and I have chatted a couple of times over the last 10 or so months. [Austin Daniel]: Sweet. Well, I can introduce myself. I’m Austin. I oversee growth here at Midwestern, which is client relationships and recruiting. [Matt Johnson]: Or sales and sales and recruiting whichever we’d like to say client relationships just to be a little more formal Go ahead max and I’ll close it off Yeah, so I’m max. [Max Palmer]: I’m a house chief of staff So been working on on our different businesses with him for for over a year and a half now Sweet. [Matt Johnson]: Matt Johnson, founder and CEO of Midwestern. Founded in 2012 and alive and kicking and growing. So that’s right here, man. Yeah, man. Uh, we, uh, I think, you know, a little bit about us, but our main offerings are scoped projects, mainly in the software space. And then we do embedded, which is Staffog US based talent, and then we do recruiting services as well. So tell us a little bit about the deep dive. And I want to preface this with like, I think we’re going to do this regardless because I’ve been wanting to try this for a while. Um, so there’s no selling necessary other than the fact that the success of this will undoubtedly either unlock more sponsorship opportunities for you or not. And so I wanted to get us all on the call here and just how do we make this a massive success so that we can continue to keep your work together? That’s kind of the goal here. So I know Max, you put some notes over on what you guys were thinking. We’d love to just kind of overview that and just kind of high level, let’s devise a plan here and let’s work to make it happen. Yeah, sounds great. [Michael Houck]: I love the brand. I love what you guys are doing. I love the mission. Max, do you want to go over what you did share I can, we can dive in from, from there. [Max Palmer]: Sure. Um, so, you know, I made a few points in the email. Um, we, we definitely don’t want to have the like angle of the piece be just talking bad about foreign hiring, um, because we have worked with, with other brands, um, you know, who do do that. So we can definitely, you know, touch base on what the benefit of US hiring are, but we don’t want that to be the full angle of the piece. And then, yeah, I mentioned Hauk, like, I mean, Hauk, you can elaborate on this, but like, you are interested in, you know, US-based companies and US, you know, job growth. So I’ll let you elaborate there. And then I personally, and I think Hauk, you agree with me here, bringing up how you guys work with u.com They’re a very reputable, I think they’ve raised like 50 million. They’re a very reputable player in the AI space. And so bringing them up in this deep dive, I think would look great. And it would make you guys look reputable. And then Lyft too, because I saw on your website that you guys did some work with them. So yeah, I can elaborate. [Michael Houck]: I think to Max’s point, U.com is a brand that our readers will know. So it does make sense to sort of highlight that case study to some degree. And yeah, I think that the broader point or the broader framing that we put the piece in, it probably doesn’t make sense for us to be, as Max said, like to talk about the bad parts about international hiring is like the main focus. We can obviously touch on them, especially since we’ve had experiences hiring internationally and sort of run into some of those challenges. But I don’t want it to be a piece that just bashes other folks especially people who have been in our orbit in the past. I do think there’s just a lot of benefits of hiring domestically and hiring with the embedded model that you guys use as well that we can talk about as why that’s better than other options without necessarily crapping on those options too much. So I’m aligned broadly. I’m very enthusiastic about America first companies and things like that. So I think that the more we can do there, the better. So yeah, I’m, I’m super behind this. [Matt Johnson]: Yeah. And just to be clear, we, we definitely are not the type of organization where we want to bash international or any of that type of stuff. Like that’s not who we are. So we wouldn’t want to do that either. We want to talk more about what we’re for rather than what we’re against. And I think there’s plenty of content there that we can, we can attack it from that, that angle. As far as like how we get, people to our lead list or to where we can contact them from this? What have you guys done? What are the strategies you’ve done that have worked well? Let’s talk about that a little bit. What do we need to set up on our site? What has worked well for you in the past and how can we put our best foot forward on that front? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, so I’m thinking back to deep dives we’ve done in the past that have performed well. In those cases, there was not necessarily a full co-branded, but at least a customized landing page that talks about this specific funnel that we’re sending people through and mentions me, maybe has my photo or something like that, depending on the structure of the page, has some offer attached to it for some sort of entry, trial, discount, however you guys normally do your offers. We’ve seen a variety work, so there’s no single formula I’d recommend there necessarily. And then the piece itself, we’d probably just link to that page multiple at multiple like touch points throughout the piece and we probably wouldn’t have that many other links if any other links in the actual piece that way any traffic that someone’s clicking out of their email up on their phone it’s going to you guys as long as we make it easy to capture emails on that page excuse me or book a call or whatever you want the action to be that’s probably gonna be the smoothest, simplest funnel. Matt, I think you’re muted. Austin, do you have any thoughts on that? [Austin Daniel]: No, I’m more curious on the newsletter as a whole. Matt, have you gotten any metrics as far as open rates, click-through rates? Do you guys have data on that of who’s actually engaging with the newsletter? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: So our average, I’m going to just look at our, our recent sense of our average open rates around 60%. Uh, if I look at the past few weeks, 59.57%, that’s a little bit down over the month before 62% the month before, um, click rates, it varies a lot. We, again, don’t include a lot of links in our, in our posts. It’s more about the written content. Uh, so our click rate is like usually around 1%, one to 1.5, I would say. Um, but again, outside from our partners, we’re not going through and putting a ton of links in there. Some other newsletters will try to, you know, juice their CTR as much as possible for deliverability. We’re thankful we don’t have deliverability concerns. So we don’t worry about doing that. [Austin Daniel]: So it’s mostly just sending clicks right to our partners. Nice. And then how many for the out of that 59%? [Michael Houck]: How many did you guys send that last one? Send our last one? What? How many readers? Yeah. Oh, 67,000. Sweet. Awesome. [Austin Daniel]: I need to subscribe. I just sent our partnerships page in the chat, Austin, so you can go there and see some more details. [Max Palmer]: I think I’ve sent it to Matt over email as well. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, we actually updated the branding on this to the new branding. [Matt Johnson]: So we’ve got a few different ways we can track like some of this. Obviously there might be, I don’t know, putting in an email. We don’t do a whole lot of that. Like we just haven’t had a whole lot of success and people like put your email in to reach out or contact or things like that. But we do have things where we can track if they’re on LinkedIn and then make followup requests and things like that. Are most readers like from LinkedIn, like where do you guys gain a lot of your subscribers? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, so one thing I would throw in there before that, I’ll struggle back to that in a second. The way you’re talking about your page made me think about some other offers that have worked well in the past. If you guys have like a lead magnet to collect those type of emails, that’s what we see work the best. You’re offering value. You’re not just trying to convince somebody to book a sales call with you or something like that. So if you guys have some like PDF or database or something like that you can offer for free, that’s what will probably convert the most people right on that first page. But yes, to answer your question, we get a large portion of our initial subscriber base was directly through content marketing on my profiles on X and LinkedIn. Then we sort of graduated on to doing what most newsletters do, which is doing paid ads and newsletter referral networks and things like that. And then more recently, we’ve actually sort of built our own cold email strategy. And that’s been converting people to really, really high rate for us. I’d say it’s a mixture of all four of those channels. Uh, the more recent folks probably are less from, uh, organic content, but these are all folks who are on LinkedIn. They’re us based founders and or aspiring founders who are looking to build their own companies. [Matt Johnson]: Um, so yeah, they’re all on LinkedIn. Okay. Yeah. I’m wondering also if we put together some of our, like how we approach product process, um, potentially. And how to structure teams for flexibility. That might be a good download that we could share with them that we’ve learned over the years. And maybe we can touch on some of that, Michael, in the deep dive. Just how we’ve learned to structure product teams and how we’ve learned the best way to go about product process to get the desired outcome on the timeline that you want. Maybe. I don’t know. It’s just an idea. [Michael Houck]: If you guys are going to put together a lead magnet like that for the piece, the more that we can frame the piece around that concept, the more downloads you’re going to get, the more click-throughs you’re going to get. So as much aligned to the core goal of what you want to say in the piece, we can make that lead magnet results. [Matt Johnson]: OK. Sweet. Well, let’s do that. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: What’s the process? [Matt Johnson]: Because we’ve got like three minutes left here on this call, I think. No, no, we’ve got more time. What’s the process for getting a deep dive written and getting everything aligned? And then because we’re about ready to break for a couple of weeks. And then my guess is we’re not going to be in the January newsletter. Maybe we would, we would be in the February or what, what’s your guys’ process for that? [Michael Houck]: No, I mean, for, for deep dives and for our partners, you know, we like to, we like to move fast. So it’s really on your schedule more than ours. What we’d want to do is probably have at least. At least one, ideally two weeks to do research on our side, really, really prepare well for the interview that I do with you, Matt. And then we’d hop on a call, probably either 30 or 60 minutes, depending on your schedule. 60 is better for us, but we’re flexible. And then after that interview, I’d be able to write the piece and publish it within two weeks. So if we say that we want to schedule that interview for, let’s say, either the first or second week in January, we could get it out by the end of the month. Actually, Max, correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe we do have a free free slot with no sponsors at the end of January on Saturday. I think it’s January 25th. If so, we could slot the piece in for them. [Max Palmer]: Yeah. The Saturday the 25th is open as of now. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. [Michael Houck]: So yeah, we could do Saturday the 25th as long as we get the interview done by say, you know, the, would that be Friday the 10th? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. [Austin Daniel]: What about one other question I have in looking at this site that Max, you just sent over Do you have any information as far as I see, you know, the founders percentages, which are back for bootstrapped age breakdown? Do you have any percentage of founders that are in the United States versus overseas? [Michael Houck]: I can see if Beehive lets us grab that or if there’s another way we can grab it. But it’s it’s a very, very high percentage. We explicitly target U.S. Based founders. There was a period like a year ago, year and a half ago, where we were targeting more international folks, but haven’t done that since then. So I can probably get you the exact percentage, but it’s the vast majority. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Sure. It’s great. Cool. [Michael Houck]: So Matt, any other questions or Austin, any other questions from you guys on the process here? I don’t think so. [Matt Johnson]: I think the biggest key is to make sure that we have what we need, where we feel really comfortable that it’s going to be a success whenever we So I’m just naturally concerned that maybe we won’t have time to set up the, uh, the lead magnet page and the, like the email on, on that right timeline. I think we can definitely get it done, you know, by sometime in mid February with all the other stuff that we got going on. Sure. I want this to be a success. I want us to be a repeat, a repeat customer. I don’t want to just want to send you the money and then be done and then return it to you. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, no, we want to be partners with you guys for the long run. We’re not trying to get you in as quickly as possible. Most people we work with, they push us to move as quickly as possible. So that’s my modus operandi. [Matt Johnson]: But mid-February works fine as well. Cool. Well, then I think, how do we get on a slot to where we’re like, hey, this is going to happen on this date. And then let’s build back from there on making sure and get all the stuff done to make it a success. [Michael Houck]: So I’m looking ahead at February now, and I think that we could do, what would that be? That would be the, I think we could do the 15th. 15th of February is open right now. So we could grab that Saturday slot, and then we would just need to do the interview sometime in January, whenever works for you, if that gives you guys enough time for the lead magnet and the funnel. [Matt Johnson]: And then do we, you essentially are just sending them to our, our site. Like we’re not sending them to your site. And then from there, you said there was like a co-branded thing. [Michael Houck]: No, no, no, no. So we’ll send them the email, obviously in the email, it’ll link directly to this like custom landing page. That’s not actually on your main site, just kind of hidden on the site. And that page will have some sort of branding that references me or founding journey or something like that. Side, you guys, that way they feel comfortable sort of putting in their, their email. [Matt Johnson]: Okay, cool. Well, I’ll talk to Austin and we’ll make sure and get you guys a thumbs up or a thumbs down by the end of the week. [Michael Houck]: Cool. Sounds good. If you guys have any more questions or anything like that, I’m happy to hop back on and chat more too. Um, but yeah, look excited for this and, uh, hopefully this is a 2025 long and beyond thing. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah, man. [Matt Johnson]: Hey, where are you located, Michael? [Michael Houck]: I’m in New York right now, but I’m actually moving out of New York next week after four years. I’ve lived in first Miami, then LA, then SF, now New York, but I’m moving first to South America for a bit and then to Texas for a bit. [Matt Johnson]: Okay, cool. Sweet. Max, where are you located in California? [Max Palmer]: I’m just back home for the holiday, but I’m in New York full time. Okay, cool. Are you leaving New York too? No. There permanently, but nice. We’re part of New York. I’m in East village. How care and Williamsburg, right? [Matt Johnson]: Yeah. Cool. That’s awesome. All right, guys. Thanks. Appreciate it. [Michael Houck]: Good to meet you, Austin. Good to meet you, Matt. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yep.