- Duration: 23 min
- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01JGM4BW6Q4TTF5NREP9VENAN7 (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JGM4BW6Q4TTF5NREP9VENAN7)
Transcript
[Max Palmer]: He’s like right on Copa pretty much. So he’s lived here for eight months. And yeah, it’s fun. I mean, New Year’s here is insane, obviously. So it was fun. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. How’s Santiago? [Michael Houck]: It’s good. It’s like, it’s literally exactly like LA. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: It’s crazy. Huh? [Michael Houck]: Like the weather, the landscape. The how everything’s spread out and not super walkable. Yeah. But like climate wise, like it feels exactly like LA. So I’ve been, I’ve been, plus the wine here is way better than I expected it to be. Um, so I’m going to bring a couple bottles home. [Max Palmer]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: Are you just in a Airbnb? Yeah. I just, um, I’m in like the Eastern part of the city, just in a, in a little Airbnb. [Max Palmer]: Oh, nice. Yeah. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: It’s not bad. [Michael Houck]: If you go over, if you look on the balcony, you go over that side, you can see like the snow capped, like Andes and everything. [Max Palmer]: So that’s pretty cool. Yeah. So yeah, I can, he can see, uh, the, the Cristo statue from his balcony. That’s dope. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. When I went up to there, it was like the foggiest day of the whole time I was in Brazil. And so we could like barely see the statue, even though we were standing like right. Really? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. Okay. [Max Palmer]: Yeah, I was going to go up. You think it’s worth it? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, it’s cool. It’s I mean, we didn’t see the view from up there, but we went up another one of the like mountains or hills or whatever. And the views up there are ridiculous. [Max Palmer]: So it’s definitely. Yeah. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: OK, cool. [Michael Houck]: I think I’m going to do that this weekend. [Max Palmer]: How long are you there for? It’s a Wednesday and then I go to Buenos Aires. [Michael Houck]: Got it. And then you leave like the day I get in. Right. I think so. Yeah, I get in. What is it? Two Thursdays from now, the 16th. [Max Palmer]: I leave that night, like late that night on a red eye. [Michael Houck]: I don’t know what time my flight is, but where are you staying in Buenos? In Palermo. [Max Palmer]: I didn’t know, I don’t know if it was Hollywood or Soho, but it’s right in Palermo. Cool. Yeah. That’s the spot. [Michael Houck]: I’m excited. I’ve never been to any of these places I’m going to. It’s always good to go to. Same. Um, cool. Well, what’s on, I mean, top of mind, I think for me is like, let’s, now that we’re past the holidays, let’s get some of this sponsorship money in the door. Cause I think with some of these bigger ones, it’s just kind of been lingering over us. Um, and it’d be good to, good to get that out of the way this month. So I guess what is your confidence in that happening? I guess. [Max Palmer]: I mean, I mean, that, that’s my full goal. Like, so I just sent a, an invoice out for a deep dive. And this one is almost for sure closing. It’s 6,500. It’s with the Joe from the recruitment company that I was chatting with. Yes. He surprisingly had an interesting angle, right? [Michael Houck]: Yeah. Yeah. [Max Palmer]: And yeah, because he works for like this other company, but then he has this niche consulting recruiting firm. And so he was like, Oh, I don’t think this other company is interested, but me and my partner might actually be interested. I had a call with him and he’s like, he’s like, yeah, but we might be interested. I was like, Oh, okay, great. And so I just sent in a voice to him and it looks like it’s going to close. [Michael Houck]: It’s so crazy about these deep dives. Like, I think it’s been like almost a year since we’ve done a deep dive. Oh God, that’s bad. I think the last one was in like, like, maybe March of 2024. But now I feel like we have like three or four that are potentially closing all within a short period of time. [Max Palmer]: Yeah, the last one was in February. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: It was a gamma. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, too long as last one. But yeah, now we have Midwestern, we have bamboo, we have this recruiting firm. And then, you know, Who knows what’s up with Freck? And maybe one more too, so I don’t know. [Max Palmer]: Yeah, I think Freck is unlikely. Bamboo, I followed up with him, I think, I forget if it was yesterday or today. Bamboo, I think it’s going to happen, but it’s just going to be a long process, obviously. Yeah, yeah, yeah. [Michael Houck]: Let’s try to get it. There’s nothing you can really do. You’re doing everything you can, following up with them and everything. If we can get the recruiting firm, Midwestern and Bamboo, plus then HubSpot paying us, all happening this month, that’ll be a great month. That’ll be a really good month. Which is good timing. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay, cool. [Max Palmer]: So that’s my main priority is getting these through the door. And then, you know, there’s a few others that like, told me I’ll reach out in Q1. And so of course, you know, I’ve already reached out to some of them. And we’ll see what happens with those. But yeah, and you know, Q1 budgets are in so like people might have stuff to spend. We’ll see. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I think it’s a good time for us to be aggressive with outreach to right now, just because New Year, I think last Last year we saw a big uptick, if I remember correctly, in January going into February too. Just with new people. Probably a good time to be aggressive. Anything I can do there to help? Make sure we have enough leads to reach out to and things like that? [Max Palmer]: I don’t think so. I’m reaching out to new people pretty much every day. [Michael Houck]: Does it make sense to… If we had dreams to take on more hours and we give her an email address and everything, can she double the outreach that you’re doing? Like, can you train her on how to identify the right details to include in the email and stuff like that? [Max Palmer]: Or is it going to be too much work and actually detract the number of outreach you’re going to be able to do? Um, it might, I don’t know because like the, The work is in all the follow-ups, you know? Yeah. So I’m not sure if… [Michael Houck]: I feel like someone like a VA could execute the follow-ups, but I don’t know if they can have enough to say to motivate people to… [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: Because you change up the wording and you have different ways of… [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Max Palmer]: Yeah, I mean, most of my follow-ups are And I do a lot of shortcuts within Superhuman just to copy and paste stuff. But then I’ll add touches on a lot of the emails. Okay. [Michael Houck]: Let’s get these, let’s get the cash in the bank from some of these ones that have been percolating for a while. And then maybe we devote some time to helping her try it. And if it’s not working, then we just, we can just stop it. Back in the U.S. And not traveling around. It could be a terrible idea, I don’t know. But I’m going to give it a shot. Update from me on the stuff with Matt. Things are going well. All the metrics look really good for the clients. I think it’s only been one week with your guys, but I’m expecting that to Maybe two now, because I guess the email went out. [Max Palmer]: Yeah, two. [Michael Houck]: Well, three actually, because one went out this morning. Okay. Yeah. So all the metrics we’re seeing are really good. No real reason to not accelerate this as much as we can. Yeah. So Matt is starting to send some cold emails as of this coming Monday. And he’s basically just going to blow up my calendar and put a ton of sales calls on with I see startups and other startups just to see if they want to build a newsletter. And then we get to double dip because we get ghostwriting revenue from it. And we also get revenue from this new thing. So the new thing will sort of be a separate bank account and everything, but the ghostwriting revenue just goes straight into the existing stuff. So very, very good for us. And my thinking is that by the end of January, at a point, maybe even before then, where it’s going to make sense to have you start doing sales calls for this too, and us just sort of tag team and do as many as we can. At that point, we’ll actually become can we get enough good writers. So that’s probably need to solve this month before it becomes a problem. But yeah, everything looks good. People are renewing, everyone’s happy. So I really think that this is just going to be a bomb in the first half of this year, and then we’ll see where it goes. We’ll see. Still, we don’t have a landing page up or anything like that, but no red flags yet. [Max Palmer]: Yeah. Yeah. So Ben sent the performance report for me. So I just want to understand this better. Segments. Yeah, yeah. OK. Beehive, it says 443 graduated. They have a 99% open rate, which is crazy. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. [Max Palmer]: I mean, I wouldn’t expect that to. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Right. Yeah. That’s insane. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. Um, so what does graduated mean? [Max Palmer]: It just means they open two emails. Yeah. Grad. [Michael Houck]: Basically what we do is we import people and then they meet engagement criteria. And so, so far the engagement criteria we’ve used for everybody’s newsletter is open to or click on one. And then they graduate. And then at that point they become a subscriber who was paid for, basically. So you’re not paying for imported subs, you’re paying for graduated subs. And if you think that maybe we should tweak the engagement criteria, that’s fine. But click rates look pretty good, 4.2% of these graduated folks. [Max Palmer]: So I don’t think there’s any… Yeah. No, I think that’s fine criteria. Okay. Yeah. And then when will they get to the failed or the churn phase? [Michael Houck]: Right. Don’t graduate after they go through the welcome sequence, or I guess with yours, we did the new method. So after 28 days, they either have met the engagement criteria or they haven’t. And if they haven’t, then they’ll be churned, basically. So by the end of one month after we animate the upload, you’ll see how many end up failing. But right now it looks great. You know, half of them effectively have met the engagement criteria and probably more will over the next, um, next like two weeks or so. [Max Palmer]: Yeah. Okay, cool. Um, great. Yeah. I mean, my brother and I might want to scale that up too, if that continues to work in well to work. [Michael Houck]: I mean, dude, let’s, let’s make it a newsletter that you guys can make some money. [Max Palmer]: Exactly. Find some find some soccer sponsors to get I know I know off to do that. [Michael Houck]: So next steps there. We’re debating whether to sort of try this blow up method that Matt, you mentioned, basically where we’re effectively doing what we’re doing for your but just at like a massive scale for a newsletter that we would quote unquote own. So rather than having a client pay us for some amount of subscribers, you know, if it’s our own newsletter, we can do whatever we want. So what we would do is we’d upload them to, we first do like a cold email thing with them to validate the inboxes. And then we’d upload them to a Beehive account and basically start sending them branded emails around some new newsletter brand. And the thought is, do we do that to founding journey? Which then sort of is like, well, what’s the relationship between Founding Journey and this new company? Like I don’t necessarily want Founding Journey to be part of that, right? Or do we just spin up some other newsletter and try it and see if it works? And the thinking is that if we can spin up like, what’s a good example? Let’s say we spin up an F1 newsletter, right? We blow it up to a million subscribers and we have like very strict engagement criteria. So we turn people out very aggressively so we don’t fuck up or anything like that, if we had a million person subscriber F1 newsletter, I mean, not only could we make a lot of money, sponsorships, products, partnerships, and things like that, and build a full team around something like that, also it’d just be an amazing asset to have. We’d get invited to all the races, we could cover everything. [Max Palmer]: Yeah, I’ve been thinking of starting an NFL newsletter that would be very similar to my soccer newsletter, I’m obsessed with the NFL and I watch way too much football. [Michael Houck]: And like, I know way too much about it. [Max Palmer]: Like my friends joke that I’m like a fucking Wikipedia of the NFL. So I’ve thought about doing that. Cause I know I could create a really fucking good NFL newsletter. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: Look, I mean, if we have subject matter expertise on the team, that’s what we would want to do. We want to find those topics. We’d want to figure out some sort of arrangement. Where yes, you get ownership and upside in it, but so do we, you know, something like that. Don’t know exactly what that structure would be, but those would be the lowest hanging fruits for us to build, right? But yeah, basically, there’s no limit on this thing that we’ve run into yet. And so the thinking is, you know, by the end of 2025, this could be a scenario where we have a massive media company with verticalized newsletters making tons of money and all different verticals. And they’re all majority owned by us. So we have them all in one place. Matt was saying we should do a fashion newsletter so that we get invited to Paris Fashion Week. I’m like, OK. I don’t really care about going to that, but OK. [Max Palmer]: We might have a Super Bowl or F1. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, a Super Bowl would be great. But yeah, so that’s the thinking. Again, there’s maybe more limits that we could run into or red flags. We’re not in the clear until we do one of these big ones. Yeah, and typically if it’s too good to be true, it usually ends up that way. Right, exactly. But no blockers yet, so still full steam ahead. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. [Michael Houck]: And that’s also great because it really, really reduces is the complexity around the ghostwriting agency. We’re doing some new year outreach and things like that, but if we can just get clients for the ghostwriting agency as part of this, it’s a no brainer and lets us kill two birds with one stone. And then megaphone gross stuff, we’ll talk about that. Anything else on your side? [Max Palmer]: No, I mean, I’m just, I just really want to close these bigger deals. Yeah, I know. It could be a good month if we can get a couple of them done. Yeah. Oh, this guy just said he’s going to pass. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah, okay. Okay. Cool. [Michael Houck]: And also just want to say like, I feel like I’ve been sort of all over the place for the last couple months, just while I’ve been dealing with everything about divorce. I just want to say like, I feel like I’ve been slow to respond to things and take care of some things. So apologies for that. You in a couple instances. [Max Palmer]: So no, you’re fine. Don’t worry about it. I’m, I’m all settled now. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, it was it. [Max Palmer]: I mean, sure, it’s tough. Dude, it was brutal, man. [Michael Houck]: I mean, I told her in August, and then sort of decided to not do it. And we tried to work through it didn’t work. And then in December was just like, you know, we’re planning to go to Cape Town again. And I’m like, I’m not gonna, you know, put this off another three three, four months, like we just got to deal with it. So yeah. Onto the next, but yeah, I just want to say like, apologies if I’ve been sort of normally slow with things. No, don’t worry. But cool. All right. Well, let me know if I can help with any of the sponsor stuff. And then when you get back to the US, let’s set dream stuff and, and you can try to teach her. And maybe, I don’t know if she’d be the right, maybe she would be the right persons. And she already knows a lot about the sponsor, like where things are, but yeah, we’ll see. [Max Palmer]: I don’t know. Okay. [Michael Houck]: Sounds good. Cool. All right, man. All right. [Max Palmer]: Talk to you later. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Later.