- Duration: 25 min
- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01JFG677CVJ9FZAE9643EX4C2E (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JFG677CVJ9FZAE9643EX4C2E)
Transcript
[Michael Houck]: Jake, what’s up, man? Hey, Michael. How are you? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Good. [Michael Houck]: Here we go. What’s going on? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Oh, living the dream. Yeah. [Jake Huber]: Well, you probably do better than me. [Michael Houck]: Right now, we have an exterminator who came and my entire apartment is going crazy. My, uh, it made me take my couch away from the wall. It’s all like the whole apartment is like feels a lot smaller right now. [Jake Huber]: I’m sorry. It’s okay. [Michael Houck]: Total chaos. Um, but yeah, man, other than that, doing okay. Um, I’m actually leaving New York next week for good. Oh really? Where are you going? South America for a bit. And then, uh, I don’t know. Very cool. [Jake Huber]: All right. [Michael Houck]: We’re in South America. I’m doing Santiago, Mendoza, Bariloche, Buenos Aires, and Floridapolis. Dang. All right. [Jake Huber]: A little adventure. I like that. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: Getting divorced and just time for something new. Yeah. Um, but anyway, um, yeah, excited to share, I guess, more about the process to sort of answer any questions you have about what’s been going on so far. Um, and also kind of give you a heads up about where it’s going, what to expect over the next month or so. And, um, what we’re seeing across all the clients we’re working with for this now, cause it’s actually grown into a, its own business now, which is pretty cool. [Jake Huber]: That’s awesome. Yeah, my big thing is I want to understand, well, the big thing I want to understand is the funnels for everything. So what happens when people are, where are they coming in? Where are they signing up for the manual uploads? What are they seeing? How does that kind of work? I just want to get a sense so I know, just so I understand, okay, a lot of these people are coming in through this channel, so I can engage them in different ways or whatever it is. So that’s one big takeaway I’d like, And then yeah, just anything like high level or you mentioned like setting up tagging and all these other things, just understanding the inner workings of how the process and the flows of the newsletter are working now. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Cool. [Michael Houck]: Can you, since I’m not in the newsletter anymore, since we gave the spot to Rina, can you share your screen? Yeah, give me a second. All right. Let’s do here. There we go, window. Sweet, okay. So if you wanna go into the segments area, that’ll be the first thing I’ll show you. It’s the second one, the second one, and then you click on segments in the little menu that pops up. Cool, so we’ve added four segments in here. Add a fifth as well. I don’t know why so many are showing up in pending. That might be something Rena set up incorrectly. So I’ll need to share some screenshots with me and walk through that. But basically, the way this process works is, well, actually, maybe since so many are in pending, I can show you on mine instead, and that’ll be more effective. Okay. Let me share my screen. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Stop sharing. Okay. [Michael Houck]: So you’ll see here I have the same four set up here. Newbie failed, newbie graduated, newbie activated, newbie pending. Basically, what happens is when we import somebody, actually let me take one step back first, because you wanted to see like what happens before that. So until now, what we’ve been doing is we have a cold email campaign set up, as I mentioned before, in Smart Lead, that tool we use. And we set that up in a certain way with leads who we know are in your ICP. And we send email campaigns to them. If they engage with a certain amount, then they get imported into the newsletter. So our old process was basically that. If they met our sort of engagement criteria, with that cold email campaign, then they would get imported to the newsletter and they’d get tagged. They wouldn’t get segmented into these new segments, they’ll talk about in a second. When they got tagged, they would go through the welcome sequence and all that and start getting the regular newsletter as well. What we learned is that, well, the reason we were doing that is for basically to make sure you know, it was an active inbox essentially, right? Like this isn’t gonna bounce, it’s not gonna impact your deliverability as a result or anything like that. But we’ve actually uncovered a way to identify the most recent time that somebody opened an email from their inbox. So what we can do is we have like a list of people who are in your ICP, we can say, oh, these are the hundred that have opened most recently that have opened most recently, right? So we know that they’re active in boxes already. So what we’ve started doing is setting up these segments where we have the list of people, we’re going to import them into the main newsletter. And they’re not going to actually get the weekly or the biweekly issues right away. So instead, what’s going to happen is they’re going to go into this newbie pending segment. And I don’t know what just happened there. Basically, if they’re tagged with our tag, and they haven’t opened at least two emails yet, and they have our custom field as well, then they’ll be in this pending state. And if they’re in this pending state, then they’re going to be going through an alternate welcome sequence, basically. So this is the version that we set up in your newsletter. And so they go through this and kind of every step of the way we’re checking if they’ve met the engagement criteria or not. And if they have met the engagement criteria, then they get put into this activate segment automatically. And so engagement criteria for me is two opens or one click. I believe it’s the same as as yours, but I can double check on that. But basically if they’ve met this, they go into this segment and the reason they do this is because in beehive you can have automations trigger based on when people enter a segment. So we have this alternate automation called activate that says when somebody triggers this segment action, meaning they enter the segment about being activated. What we do is we turn their status as a newbie to false. And when we turn their status to a newbie to false, they then move on to the graduated segment. At this point, they’re getting your main newsletter. These are people who’ve met the engagement criteria, they’re on the main list, and they’re gonna receive the bi-weekly emails. If they don’t meet the engagement criteria through the welcome sequence, then they go into this failed segment, and, you know, another tag called newbie failed and they’ll be unsubscribed automatically. You won’t ever again. These are people who they opened our initial cold emails or now they’re just not opening these these emails. So that’s sort of how the process works. We’re phasing out the cold email because a it’s just a huge pain to manage that on an infrastructure level. And B, we get the same fidelity and we’ve tested this with my newsletter. We get the same fidelity of like eventual pass fails just by using this new method around like inbox activity monitoring, basically. [Jake Huber]: So I guess, are they, they’re not necessarily opting into the newsletter. We’re just seeing if they are engaging with our emails opening and then like, and we’re making sure that the initial input is the ICP. Is that right? [Michael Houck]: Yes, correct. Basically, a successful newsletter subscriber is somebody who’s in the ICP and is going to engage with your emails. And so we already know that the first one is true with this sort of welcome sequence process, we’re validating that the second portion is true. And I think a lot of people wonder, oh, well, if they didn’t explicitly opt into my newsletter, like, can I email them? The answer is definitively yes. We’ve done extensive research on case law, can spam, all this kind of stuff. 100% fine and compliant. All you need to do is give an explicit opt-out link, an unsubscribe link, and an address, which Beehive does by default. So you’re basically, the way to think about it is that you’re basically cold emailing these people from your Beehive account, and the ones who opt out are gonna opt out before they get the main newsletter. So yeah, so that’s how that works. I think we’ve seen pretty good results on yours so far with these sort of early cohorts that we’ve added. You can correct me if I’m wrong or if you feel otherwise, but I think we’re seeing good engagement from them. And I’ll work with Rena to get that segmentation issue fixed. I think she must have just said something up wrong when we transitioned from the older process to the new one. [Jake Huber]: So where will they, these segments, temp, the newbie series, which is the failed active graduated pending. And then there’s one called email growth. Like where, where will the quote unquote opted in or not even opted in, but like the ones that are like getting the newsletter, like how do I know how many people are actually getting the newsletter? [Michael Houck]: Yes. So the ones who are getting the newsletter are going to be the ones who show up in the graduated segment. [Jake Huber]: Graduated. Okay. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: The old process was the email growth segment would be the ones who are getting this, but because we moved the sort of validation process, us from out of beehive into beehive. Going forward, it’ll be the graduated ones. And we’ll adjust that segment to account for the people who made it through before as well. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. [Jake Huber]: Okay. So then, so if I want to go in and really understand, so right now I think on the dashboard, it’s just the total. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. On the main dashboard, it just shows you like metrics over the last 28 days or whatever it is. And you can adjust that. And that’s just for email sent through the main newsletter that doesn’t account for emails that are sent through automations and things like that. [Jake Huber]: So when I look at active subscribers right now, I have 1045. Yeah, but not all 1000 are getting the newsletter. Is that right? Correct. [Michael Houck]: A portion of those are not yet graduated and won’t receive the main newsletter when the next issue goes out. [Jake Huber]: Got it. Alright, so then what I what I want to look at that as I go to the audience segments and it’s either You said we’re gonna ship the email growth into graduated, but I’m really looking at the newbie Graduated segment [Michael Houck]: as like that’ll be the official number of people who are receiving the newsletter That’ll be the official number of people who are receiving the newsletter who’ve come in through this process There’s like the 180, I think it was, who were in the newsletter before. They’re folks who won’t be in that segment. We can create another segment that’s like total actives to give you full visibility into everyone who’s, who’s, who’s active. Okay. Yeah. [Jake Huber]: Just knowing that would be, that’d be helpful. This is also helpful. Just understanding like, okay, this is how the process is working, how things are moving around. Okay, everything else is built out in the automations. [Michael Houck]: One, one other thing I want to flag is that we’re working on something right now, where what we’re going to do is, you know, with your okay, of course, is add some recipients to the newsletter, who are essentially like AI is who are just going to reply and click on your links. So that even though we’re importing a lot of new subscribers, your deliverability has no chance of being impacted whatsoever. It’s not going to be to the degree where like Beehive would flag it for bots because I know what their thresholds are because I’m an investor in Beehive. But it’ll be enough so that like if we ever have a case where, oh, a couple bounces happened or, you know, it just keep your deliverability at like 100% all the time, no issues there. [Jake Huber]: Okay. Just like tag those accounts with something so that like I know and if we need to remove or whatever, we know how to do that very easily. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, of course. Cool. We anticipate that’s going to go live in January, so no immediate action there. [Jake Huber]: OK. You mentioned like, you know, potential changes or things like, you know, just expectations for the next couple of months. Anything else you want to talk through? [Michael Houck]: The main thing is just acceleration, right? Like, I think we’ve been going at this for a little bit. Now that Matt’s on board, we’ve sort of got our infrastructure in a better place. So I would expect that over the course of January, we’re able to sort of dramatically accelerate what we’re delivering, because I know we’re behind our target right now. So just wanted to, you know, put you at ease, make sure you feel comfortable with that. We’re going to catch up in January now that his systems are operational. [Jake Huber]: That’s good. Yeah. I was gonna, uh, that was good. I would want to see how things played out before I like brought that up. [Michael Houck]: I knew we were, you know, you have to like gradually increase some of these things. Yeah. It’s also just setting up, setting up the new, the new process for us. [Jake Huber]: This became a business kind of accidentally. So, uh, yeah. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. [Jake Huber]: Um, yeah, that sounds good. Anything else I should know about? Like infrastructure set up anything else? No, I don’t think there’s anything else right now. [Michael Houck]: What I would say is that as we start adding more folks like this, it might be a good idea for us to build out some more automations around sales. So if people meet certain engagement criteria, do certain things, let’s get venture scaler in front of them in more ways. So that’s something we can talk through as we start to add more over the next month or so. [Jake Huber]: Okay, yeah, I like that. So when are we transitioning away from using any of the cold email outreach? [Michael Houck]: So we still have campaigns active right now. Let me open up our master sheet here. So let’s see, where is… Yeah, okay, so we have one campaign that is 22% complete. So still a fair amount of people that are gonna come through that over the next few weeks and then month or maybe even two months depending how long it goes for So I wouldn’t expect that process to be totally done anytime soon but As long as I have to go ahead from you, we’ll start the the new process basically with this weekend’s issue Okay, and that’s just directly importing them into Like into beehive right directly importing into beehive. But again, they won’t get newsletter until they meet the engaging criteria in the alternate version of the welcome sequence that we set up that I think includes the scale OS in there as well. [Jake Huber]: Cool. Alright, yeah, I’ll take a note to also just like go through those flows as I haven’t seen them yet. Just like you know, see how they’re set up and [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I’ll I’m going to talk with So by end of day today, if she’s still online, she’s in the Philippines, so I never know when she’s going to be off for the day. But if she’s still online, then today we’ll get that fixed up for you. [Jake Huber]: If she’s not online, then it’ll be tomorrow. OK. That sounds good. Yep, that was that’s really what I want to get out of this call. [Michael Houck]: So thank you. How’s it? How’s it been working with Andrew? [Jake Huber]: Andrew’s great. Yeah, he’s fantastic. He’s always on top of it. I told him what’s really helpful. He does a good job of taking the initiative and planning the next issue and all that. But he poses a question to me. He’s like, hey, here’s what I’m trying to dig into more. And this week, he’s doing how to scale culture. And he asked me more tactically, what are the things that you’ve done? What have you seen as companies grow? So I’ve just been in the habit now of shooting like a five to 10 minute loom video. I take a few notes ahead of that. I kind of just talk through like different stories, different tactics, different things, try to give him inspiration or things to pull from so that he can then go back and like, you know, add, add more, add more meat to what he’s putting together and like more of my own experience. Yeah, I think it’s been working really well. [Michael Houck]: So I appreciate it. Cool. He said something similar. He said it’s been good. Some clients are kind of less responsive, I think, than you are with adding their own unique expertise. And that’s really what makes the pieces different, stand out in people’s inboxes and things like that. So I think both of us appreciate that you’re down to do that for each issue. [Jake Huber]: It’s great. Yeah, I need to do more. Earlier on, I was jumping in. I was adding little pro tips and tweaking some things to just make sure it was more my voice. Every time I read it now, it’s like, OK, this is really good. And I’m busy working on something else. It’s like, OK, this is great. I’m going to let it go. So I want to get a little bit more involved. But at the very least, that’s what I’m trying to do with Andrew, is give him that initial brain dump of, OK, here’s how I think about this specific topic. As it pertains to scaling and give him some things to work with, so. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, definitely don’t hesitate to jump in and, you know, details, but at the same time, you know, the more we can take it off your plate, the better, so. [Jake Huber]: No, he’s taking it pretty much all the way off the plate, so that’s been very nice. [Michael Houck]: That’s great to know. Yeah, he’s good. He’s one of our best. Okay, cool. If anything else comes up, let me know. I will follow up with you buy tomorrow at some point about what I’m going to talk to Rena about, which I have notes for here. And we’ll go from there. [Jake Huber]: That sounds great. Thank you, Michael. I appreciate it. I appreciate the time. Talk soon. See you.