- Duration: 19 min
- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01JFG150XXTSTGWCYVXAS9Z6YE (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JFG150XXTSTGWCYVXAS9Z6YE)
Transcript
[Mel van Londen]: Hey, Michael. Mel, how you doing, man? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Good. [Michael Houck]: How are you doing? [Mel van Londen]: Good. [Michael Houck]: Good to meet you. Look like you’re in a little tiny phone booth over there. Yeah, sure. I am. Are you in? Where are you based? [Mel van Londen]: Menlo Park. [Michael Houck]: Oh, Menlo Park. Got it. Nice. Where are you based? Right now, New York. But actually moving out next week. So. [Mel van Londen]: Oh, nice. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: All right. [Mel van Londen]: Where are you headed? [Michael Houck]: Uh, South America for a couple months. Um, and then kind of TBD after that. Wow. Wow. It just says just for fun or, um, yeah, just a personal recharge sort of, um, life changes and things like that happening. So just kind of taking some time to check out somewhere new for you, man. [Mel van Londen]: That’s a brave thing to do, but when people do it, they usually see some benefit out of it. Yeah, that’d be fun. [Michael Houck]: Plus get to spend some time in wine country with no agenda, which is great. But since we only have a limited amount of time, we can jump in. So yeah, I mean, look, excited to learn about what you’re thinking for content ghostwriting. I took a look at your LinkedIn. It looks like you get some decent engagement on some stuff that you’ve put out recently. So yeah, I guess just like give me some context on where you’re at with it and sort of what you see this being and if this is social media, if this is newsletter, anything like that. [Mel van Londen]: Yeah, I think it could potentially be both. Just to give you some context, we’re seed stage startup. We have five full-time employees. Everyone’s an engineer. Including myself, but I’ve kind of learned sales on the job kind of thing. And marketing is still kind of like a new concept for me. We have done really well in the digital telehealth space with telehealth companies in the metabolic health space prescribing GLP-1s. And so we’ve got a good, of the top 10 telehealth companies that are prescribing GLP-1s, once, we support six of them. And so we’ve done a good job entering that market and kind of becoming the de facto prior authorization benefit verification solution in that market. Now, you know, in order to really show strong proof points for our Series A, we need to show kind of like green shoots in the in the traditional provider market, because that’s really where most of the dollars are in the industry still. So we’re trying to move into health systems into pvms, uh and looking for ways to build top of funnel there and and so, uh working with um, Uh go-to-market advisors named derek glansrike and he he recommended you guys um He um, he saw he he subscribed to your newsletter and he was like these guys seem to know what they’re talking about so he I don’t think he’s met you personally, but he recommended you as a potential option. [Michael Houck]: Well, tell him thanks already on my behalf. [Mel van Londen]: His philosophy is kind of like, post a bunch on LinkedIn, get someone to write the post for you, build more of a presence, especially within this market that’s a bit more risk averse. Cycles are longer. They’re looking for more proof points. They don’t necessarily have an engineering team, so we have to build EHR integrations. So the audience we’re after is VPs or directors of pharmacies at health systems, ideally over 500 employees in that health system. And so we want to generate content that they would find interesting. And we’ve run a bunch of outbound campaigns on LinkedIn. We have a ton of emails for people in our target audience. We’ve built up a pretty good, after doing outbound campaigns for about a year, with this target audience, we have a lot of connectivity with these folks. But I think we’re falling short on staying top of mind for them. [Michael Houck]: and keeping that relationship kind of fresh on the ongoing basis. Exactly, exactly. [Mel van Londen]: So that’s kind of what we’re looking for. I realize you guys don’t necessarily have like healthcare specific expertise probably. But yeah, I’m curious kind of what you think would, you know, given those constraints like and what we’re looking for, what do you think would make sense? Okay, yeah, that’s super helpful context. [Michael Houck]: I do think one person on the team might have have kind of relevant experience that could be helpful here. I’ll check in with them today and I can get back to you afterwards. But overall, I think the strategy makes sense. Sort of what Derek is saying is is coherent, does make sense. The way I like to think about it is that, you know, you’re advertising yourself, that people can trust you and then the brand and the product, obviously, on social media. And then you sort of gather their emails, you get them into the newsletter. And from there, that’s where you’re really sort of, you know, especially with higher ticket that’s where you’re really converting them to become your customers. So that’s what we see work time and time again. That’s what I do. It worked in this case, right? Derek joined the newsletter, and then now he’s recommending you to do our ghostwriting. So that was pretty proven. What I can say is that we can totally take this over for you, totally done for you. And I can walk you through sort of like what that process would, would look like, And so we work with founders, that’s our customer, you know, who we who we service. So we build the process around them need to be busy, not going to put a lot of meetings on their calendar. [Mel van Londen]: Sorry, I’m just gonna go into the other. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Numbers. [Michael Houck]: Um, My wife chose this minute to make her lunch. Okay, so yeah, so our process is super lightweight. It’s super straightforward. Basically, we have no meetings on your calendar ever except for one kickoff call at the beginning. And so from that, we would do like an onboarding week that kind of culminates with that kickoff call. You’d fill out a form, you’d give us more context on the audience, on the voice you want, inspirational accounts of like who has the audience you want and also what style you want to sort of use because you know you can do like a Sean Perry like lowercase style very casual writing or you can do more formal depending on who the customer is different styles might be appropriate. So we’ll kind of collect all that info from you in the first week and we’ll also do background research on the niche ourselves to sort of understand how we think you should attack that niche. Then we’ll do the kickoff, you’ll meet writer on the kickoff. And you’ll actually have selected from an anonymous list before that of like who you want to partner with. So that way you’re picking someone who, you know, we know that you, we know that you will want to work with. And so it’ll be me, your writer and you on that kickoff call. And then from there, we’ll get started on the first batches of content. Any content that we end up sending to you will have gone through review from either myself or my partner in the agency, Blake email, who has an even bigger audience than I do. We’re actually, we’re the only agency that I’m aware of that is actually led by creators ourselves. Most of who like have creators involved. It’s like they wrote a small investment check and they sit on the board and they collect their, their, uh, you know, their, their payments every, every quarter or something like that. Uh, their distributions. But we actually edit and review the content. Nothing gets sent to you without us taking a look at it first. The writers are folks who, between the two of us, we’ve worked with for a while in one capacity or another. And all are very, very high quality folks. But again, I think I have someone in mind who may have the relevant experience for this that could be good. Well, we’ll see. I’ll check in with them. And then the weekly process is super simple. So we’ll have a Slack channel, Slack Connect. It’ll natively show up in your Slack and our Slack. And at the beginning of the week, we’ll send you some topics, questions about those topics that we want your kind of unique subject matter expertise on. And all we ask of you is just give us a rambly voice note, you know, talk for five, 10, whatever, however many minutes you can spare. And that’ll help us build sort of the unique voice for the account. So the more of that we get from you, the more the content sound uniquely like you. [Mel van Londen]: So the rambly voice note, is that just to calibrate on the tone of voice or also for the meat of the content? Or is that something that you guys research and kind of come up with? Both. So we do our research on each individual topic. [Michael Houck]: We’re not like relying on you for that. But usually what we find is that because you’re a founder in the space, you know it better than, you know, random things we’re going to find online will be. So getting that little bit of unique flavor from you will let us go deeper, faster, and kind of hit the bar of, hey, we understand this niche now, as quickly as possible. [Mel van Londen]: Okay, cool. And, and there’s a Notion doc with some some details. Could you send that to the chat Let me grab that. [Michael Houck]: There you go. Yeah, this is great, by the way. [Mel van Londen]: I really like the succinct kind of distillation of what you do. And then the transparent pricing is super nice. So if you would do daily posts, and you said the voice note it’s once a week or once a day or just once a week should be sufficient. [Michael Houck]: If you want to send us more, you know, that’s great for us. Um, and it’ll, it’ll always be good, but we’ll send that to you on Monday. If you get us voice notes by Wednesday, then we’ll get the content to you by the end of the week. [Mel van Londen]: Okay. Awesome. Um, and then do you, you know, do you have like the login to the LinkedIn and kind of post everything or is that something I would do? Yeah. [Michael Houck]: So if you go, with our full account takeover tier, then we’ll do everything. If you just go with the lighter tier, then we will still schedule, we’ll get your login, we’ll do scheduling. But if you want us to do everything like replying to people who leave comments on your content, which is good for boosting in the algorithm, because I see conversations happening in the comments. And also if you want us to engage with like thought leaders who are well known, have big audiences in your niche, to get some free impressions on their posts that go viral, we’ll do that too. On a daily basis. And then any other sort of custom ops stuff that you want us to do, we’re happy to take that on as well. [Mel van Londen]: Awesome. Do you have any examples of clients you managed today that I could just like take a look at their feeds and see kind of what the posts look like, [Michael Houck]: Yeah, this thing about ghostwriting, it’s all anonymous. So I can’t share names. But what I can do is we had a client who joined recently, like at this point, four weeks ago. Who I think sort of seems like they’d be a relevant example here. So I can share some screenshots of sort of the engagement that they’re getting. Again, this is a new account, but the engagement’s been really, really solid, so I think happy to share that. [Mel van Londen]: I would also love to get a sense of the content, if possible. You don’t have to share names or anything, but if you could share anything around like the… I just want to see some examples of what the content would be or what kind of content to expect. Yeah, that’s fine. [Michael Houck]: I can share some some examples there. What I would say, though, is that the contents could be highly defined by the process we go through in the first week with you, where we’re like, OK, this is what you know, this is what the desire is. So that’s what we’re going to deliver. We’ll obviously help drive that process, but it’s it’s driven a lot by you as well. So, you know, what I don’t want to do is say, hey, here’s this content in this other style. Isn’t something you’re going to want. And then you’re like, oh, these guys can’t do what I want because that’s, you know, that’s just not true. [Mel van Londen]: Yeah. Yeah. And I hear you. Like the, the, the style could be completely different. I, yeah. If you could show, share some examples of like, maybe like a, a good, like a deeper technical niche, you know, where, where it’s not like, um, it’s something that’s maybe like a little bit like pretty industry specific. I could I’d see this being a pretty industry-specific application. I’d just like to get a sense for when there’s a more scientific or complex topic, how do you guys build your content around that? I’m not a special snowflake here, but I think this industry is particularly niche and and just want to make sure the content can reach that bar. Yeah, sure. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Happy to. [Michael Houck]: I would say, again, in that first week, if you have Notion docs and research and anything like that, just give us access to it, and we’ll be able to adapt that to the content without an issue. [Mel van Londen]: OK. Cool, cool, cool. Awesome. Well, right now, I’m kind of in full transparency and the diligence of it. Kind of talking with a few folks, seeing what might make sense here. Anything you could share in terms of examples would be helpful in assessing on my end. We’ve got your pricing here. You seem like someone that’s done this before. You’ve got your own following and your own base. You’ve definitely made this happen. So yeah, excited to continue the conversation. Give me a few, like a week or two, after the holidays to do a little bit more diligence and then Would love to potentially take next steps here. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Cool. [Michael Houck]: No problem. Another thing I would just throw in there is that Unlike I think every other agency that you’ll probably talk to we have a network of creators 400 or 500 creators at this point who have tens of millions of followers across LinkedIn and x2 if that’s of interest and you get a free subscription to our platform to actually engage with them and have them leave comments on your posts as part of this. You still need to pay the creators to engage, but we waive sort of our fee that we take for people to get access to that network. Do you have healthcare creators? I believe we do. I will triple check on that for you, but I believe we do. [Mel van Londen]: Cool. Yeah, let me know. Cool. Well, Michael, thank you for taking the time and then look forward to reconnecting if you need a few weeks time. Yeah, sounds good, Mel. [Michael Houck]: Looking forward to it. [Mel van Londen]: Have a good New Year. You too. [Michael Houck]: Bye. Bye.