- Duration: 75 min
- Platform: zoom
- Source: Read.ai 01JGY1WTPGN2A03W089DCZ2YF3 (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JGY1WTPGN2A03W089DCZ2YF3)
Transcript
[Michael Houck]: I just hopped on a quick call with Ben and gave him a heads up. He will, I know you guys will talk once you have transition plan set up, he’ll probably reach out with questions about whatever we need him. [Max]: Um, yeah, my guess is that most things will go to him in the, in the short term. Yeah. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. Oh man. [Max]: What’s the new company called? Greater Talent Agency. Greater Talent Agency? Creator. Creator. Got it. Yeah, their website isn’t even set up yet. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: That’s cool, man. Oh, man. [Michael Houck]: Well, we got to meet up in Buenos on our day then. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Max]: What, I don’t leave till late. I think my flight’s at like 9 p.m. It’s a red eye on the 16th. The 16th. [Michael Houck]: Okay. Yeah. I get in at, I think 2 p.m. That day. So probably after checking everything, probably be like, say I’m free after four or five or so. Let’s do it. Let’s like get dinner or something. Yeah. If you want to, I have like already booked some spots for the next few days. So if you want to pick a place, um, you know, anywhere you want, I’m down. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: We could even let me see it. I don’t think they have any openings. I was going to say Don Julio. Yeah. When I looked yesterday, they only had openings at eleven thirty p.m. Or eleven thirty a.m. It’s like a New York City restaurant. [Max]: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Have you been there? I’ve heard from a few people that it was overrated, but I’m sure it’s good. I’ve heard from a lot of people. [Michael Houck]: overrated, but it’s only like 30 bucks, which shocked me. Even though it’s Michelin star, it’s just like, it’s just like you get a steak. Like it’s not like a big tasting. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: No, no, I don’t know. There were a couple others I had on my list, but if there’s any that you have on your list that you haven’t booked yet, let’s do it. [Max]: I haven’t booked anything. Is that a city where you need to book reservations for spots? I didn’t think it was, but [Michael Houck]: I mean, for the good spots for some of them. Yeah. Nice restaurants. Yeah. I booked, um, let me pull up my calendar here. I booked Aramburu on Friday and I booked Tresha on Saturday and then I booked Don Julio on Sunday. And those are like, I think the three Michelin restaurants in Buenos. Let me see. Yeah, those are the three. So there’s some other ones that are recommended and acknowledged, too. And there’s also some others on World’s 50 Best. I heard that Anafe was good, or Anafe. I don’t know how to spell it. [Michael Houck]: So yeah, I don’t know, take a look, whatever you wanna do, I’m down. All right, cool. Oh, Ben just got here. Hey. Hey, Ben. [Max]: How’s it going? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Good. [Michael Houck]: Okay, so we have two back-to-back, we’ll see if it takes a full 90. Or if we just merge the two kind of together here. But let’s do the megaphone stuff first, because I think that’ll be meatier. So the sort of impetus here was to evaluate different growth channels. Let me pull up our chat. Evaluate different growth channels as the right ones to invest budget into for 2025. As a reminder, we basically did the wrong thing, went backwards where we had to build some things into the product before we invested in growth. Most of those things were foundational, infrastructural, and so not necessarily at risk of being left obsolete by not doing growth at the same time, but still not what we wanted to do. But regardless, no longer the case. So we now have the option to move some budget from R&D into growth. And so I flagged some channels. Maybe there’s more you guys thought of too. Maybe not. But either way, goal of this conversation should just be to lay out the land. If we do this, here’s what would happen. How do we prioritize these? How many should we even take some time to do? And yeah, I think that’s it. The last thing is that we obviously already have one of these happening, which is SEO, because we have the, we have TiVo’s agency creating articles for us now. And those are going up daily, I think, or weekly. So that’s the only thing we have going on right now. So I don’t know where you guys want to start. If someone wants to throw something out there first and we just roll with it, or if you have anything in mind, go for it. [Max]: Yeah, I mean, let’s start with product-led growth. Because I think that’s, I mean, that’s the obvious one that we want to work on. Well, right? Because there is no, like, there’s no cack with that. I mean, we obviously have to pay for engineers to create these futures, but you mentioned, like, our main futures, they’re built out. And the group’s future is built out. So in a perfect world, our product is selling itself. And the group’s future is working, people are joining these groups and paying for Megaphone. And I found a tweet from the founder of Typefully. I’ll share it in the Slack right now. And he basically said like, it’s mostly product led growth, 100% word of mouth via their shared draft future and collaboration. Workflow stuff. So they’re a similar tool. Yeah, that’s the lever we want to work more than anything, right? Yeah, I agree. [Michael Houck]: That is the lever that I think has the, like if that lever works, then we don’t necessarily, we have more control over much we can invest versus not invest in other channels because we have inherent growth, organic growth happening. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: The group’s product should, like by all intents and purposes, should allow that. We’re probably going to be launching it in the next one to two weeks. It’s like done. We’re just figuring out the rollout plan. It’s interesting you mentioned typefully the kind of last big feature that we’re gonna build this quarter is a scheduler. And so I think it’ll be good to analyze the existing players in the scheduling space first and see like, you know, what are they doing right? What are they doing wrong? What’s encouraging people to join? And all that, that’s a good point. [Max]: Yeah, TypeFleet, TweetHunter, TapLeon are the three big players. [Michael Houck]: What’s the other one? There’s newer ones too. Well, Hype Fury is another older one. There’s also Pally is a new one. Assembly is a more team focused one, but it has some really cool features and a good team behind it. [Ben Ornstein]: Two of the older ones are Hootsuite and Sprout Social. [Max]: I guess I’m talking specifically Twitter and LinkedIn. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, it’s hopefully TweetHunter, Taplio, and the other ones are all like omni-social basically. Yeah. Okay, I see what they do to encourage people. That makes sense. Okay, so I think one thing that, one like action item from this call that could be good then is, is you guys both have those test accounts now that Raphael set up. So it could be good this week to go through and just like audit and see like where we could be improving the UX to encourage growth and sharing. Until Groups is live, it might be a little tough to do that, but it might also, there might be some opportunities pre-Groups that we can see too. One thing I would say is that when you’re doing it, just have Groups in mind. So even though the Groups product might not be live when you’re doing it, just be like, oh, this could be an area where we plug sharing your inner circle or joining a group or something like that. [Max]: Yeah. I’m actually gonna use the product to post that Google thread I’ve been talking to you about. So I’ll… The legendary Google thread that may or may not ever exist. That I, yeah, that I need to get to. [Michael Houck]: But yeah, so I’ll go through the product and see if there’s anything. Okay. That sounds good. Ben, any thoughts on haven’t covered. I agree. [Ben Ornstein]: Like this is probably in terms of you said, like in terms of cost, time to value and impact, max covered costs in terms of it’s literally just paying the engineers to like finish building this out and maybe add a couple other small things related to PLG that we that might be like another loop, like a growth loop. If we identify the right thing in terms of PLG, the value is literally exponential. It could blow up if we are identifying the right thing that has that, that initiates that growth loop. And it should be kind of quick. And I guess I meant to say the impact is exponential, like in the sense of it could grow itself. But time to value, since it’s already, since like we, since you’ve said groups, inner circle both are kind of You believe that is going to be the PLG loop that that maybe maybe you believe it right? That the time to value could be pretty quick, because we’re almost done kind of with it already. [Michael Houck]: It could be, but if we basically didn’t nail the initial implementation and or if there’s other features that people want. Then that would that would take it from very quick to like probably not so quick, right? So it’s like sort of an unknown when it comes to time to value. It could be like I’ve been telling Rafael about this, you know, the business could change overnight where people are sharing their inner circle with, you know, three, four, five, six people each. And we go from hundreds of users to thousands of users or then tens of thousands. Like it could happen. Do I think it will? I don’t know. Um, but we should be prepared for it. So that’s why we’re spending some more time on engineering too, to make sure the system is going to be more resilient, just in case that does happen. Um, okay. So I’m going to start marking them down like this, like cost time to value and impact costs, very low, potentially time to value unknown impact, very high. Um, yeah. What’s next? What do we want to talk about next? [Max]: We could just go down that list you have. [Michael Houck]: Okay. Well, first, before we do that, are there any that are not on the list? [Max]: So the one I mentioned that’s not on the list was meta ads. And I mentioned it after you had said the CAC is like, you know, 280 or 360. Probably a little lower. But then you said a little bit lower. So yeah, I mean, meta ads is the one that came to mind when the CAC was at high, where I was like, oh, if we made really good meta ads, like, we could potentially scale this really fast with meta [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: ads that work. [Max]: So we need to do some research on exactly how some SaaS tools are crushing it with meta ads. But it’s also something that we could test in a few weeks. And see if it works pretty quickly. Small budget too, doesn’t need to be a big budget to do a ton. Yeah, we could spend a thousand bucks or whatever. Yep. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: Um, yeah, that makes sense. Would you, do you think that it would make sense to run these for megaphone or for viral examples? I think just direct to megaphone. [Max]: Uh, yeah, yeah. Like, like, you know, obviously if we want to grow viral examples, we can do med ads as well, or we can just use our cold email stuff. Um, we should probably just use our cold email. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: stuff. [Michael Houck]: We’ll get we’ll get to that. [Max]: We’ll get to that. Yeah. But yeah, no, we should just run it direct to Megaphone. Our landing page is good. The website looks good. Like, I just be very curious if it works. So and then we could scale that quickly. [Michael Houck]: When I talked about this with Matt McGarry at some point in earlier Well, I was gonna say this year, but last year. And his thought was that it probably would work, but we’d have to set up like a specific flow for it. He like actually outlined it for me. It’s one of those Slack messages that I have just a reminder set that I like check on every month or so. And so I can dig back into that and see like, all right, if we want to do this, what is the ideal flow for this type type of product, how much time would it take for us to set that up, and we can consider that. Because I agree, the CAC is high enough that in theory we should be able to support it with this channel if we have like a optimized funnel. Glad I never stopped. About those messages. We did do a small test, I think, back when we were working with Matt, like a while ago. Yeah, I remember that. Yeah, I don’t think we optimized it or anything, like the messaging or the funnel or anything like that, so it didn’t perform that well, but maybe things are different now if we optimize it. [Max]: And was that before we had a ton of features? [Michael Houck]: Yeah. I mean, it was, it was back to be one of the product. [Max]: There wasn’t really a good website. [Michael Houck]: Website wasn’t great. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. So, um, definitely improvements we can make. Um, Ben, any thoughts on meta ads? [Ben Ornstein]: I don’t have enough experience with, um, ad testing. I did it in, the first startup I was a part of and like I was just testing everything. And it was it was a shit show. It was just we were throwing things at the wall. I don’t have enough experience and exposure with paid ads to kind of Be able to. Have like an impactful conversation about it, but if you guys are confident in it, at least for as a test, then I’d say why not? [Michael Houck]: We might as well. Yeah, I think it probably does make sense to test. The thing I need to figure out is like, what is the pre-work we need to do before then, right? Like what is the, in order to make the test actually valuable, to control the variables and just make it make sense. Because just throwing people at the current landing page, maybe it makes sense, but I don’t know. I wanna do more research on what Matt thinks, or yeah, what Matt thinks too, so. But it probably does make sense to do a test. So yeah, impact could be very high. Yeah, it could be huge. Kind of value could be very low. And cost, I guess cost would be, it’s hard to say cost because it would basically just net out. Yeah, we just don’t know what the CAC would be. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. [Michael Houck]: Well, OK, let’s then move on to using two viral examples. Could we sort of hit on that a little bit? So what do you guys have for that? I mean, my thought is, like, we’re already doing it, right? [Max]: And it’s not taking, like, a ton of time. Like, it takes me an hour a week to write that one edition. And then Blake does the other one. I don’t know how much time. Him but like it’s it’s not super time-consuming for us so on that matter it’s low the yeah either paid ads or free email course I mean once you have a create a free email course it’s that’s pretty easy to do it doesn’t take any additional time and then we would just use use our cold email stuff to scale it. So I think this is actually one of the better growth routes for Megaphone because we’re already experts in newsletters. We’ve now figured out a way to grow a newsletter for free, basically. And this isn’t taking a ton of our time. So this might actually kind of be best growth channels. Yeah, we don’t know yet. Like you mentioned in the slack, like it’s anecdotal that we’ve had people converting from this. So I wish we had the hard numbers there, but yeah, that’s all I got. [Ben Ornstein]: If we are seeing conversion though, even if it’s anecdotal, like, I mean, that, that’s that we should definitely invest more resources into it. [Max]: Yeah and we’re seeing clicks like every week we plug it we plug Megaphone in Vile Examples and it gets clicks. [Ben Ornstein]: Yeah that’s that enough that alone gives me you know confidence that that is this this could be a huge growth channel. [Michael Houck]: My hypothesis is that we’re actually seeing the majority of people who sign up for these days come from either just word of mouth referral or through viral examples. And that’s like the vast majority of where people are coming from So I don’t have hard data, but if that’s true, then yeah, obviously it would make a ton of sense to invest more in this. Let’s see. And yeah, I think since the cost is basically minimal, since we can just do the cold email instead of having to do paid ads to grow it. It’s a no-brainer. Matt actually randomly messaged me, not Matt McGarry, Matt DeMarcantonio, messaged me over the weekend and was like, your viral examples newsletter is so good, we should scale this. [Max]: So he’s already. Okay. An NFL newsletter. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. Okay. So time to value is potentially very low since we already have it and impact is very high. Cost is minimal. Okay. I’m on board. I think that one’s great. The free email course could be interesting, but that’s more, more of something, one thing we would use for paid ads, if we can just grow it with cold email, then we don’t necessarily need the course. But one thing we could use the course for is, and this is actually something our designers, let me actually share my screen so I can show you guys what they’ve been working on. So we built a new site, a new public site for Megafone, it’s not ready yet, but it should be in the next week to two weeks. And the reason for this is because the existing site, it was gonna be really hard to scale the site in terms of adding pages and optimizing for SEO, just because it was built by our old front-end engineer who was not that good. And so Mahul wanted to redo it, And so I just had the, I had the designers basically make a new site. And so this is what’s gonna, obviously the copy is like, you know, default copy from the designers, but it’s gonna look like this. [Ben Ornstein]: Super sharp, right? [Michael Houck]: So much better. Wait, go back to the top. [Max]: Hmm, okay, so that’s, I’m gonna go through content partnerships. No, no, ignore the copy entirely. [Michael Houck]: Okay, okay. The design is really clean though. [Max]: The design’s great, yeah. [Ben Ornstein]: I like that orange that we chose. Yeah, I remember you’ve said in the chat, yeah, yeah, yeah. You guys picked the right one. [Michael Houck]: It looks really good. And so we now have all these other types of pages too. Like for each product, like the creator network, groups, campaigns, whatever else, we’re gonna have individual pages for each one of those. We’re gonna have individual pages for solutions, so Megaphone for agencies, Megaphone for startups, Megaphone for creators, right? Obviously the B-roll will be replaced, we’re gonna have them do some custom imaging. Megaphone for X, Megaphone for LinkedIn, right? How to grow on different platforms. And the reason that’s interesting is that we’re also gonna have these templates for free tools and courses. So we’re gonna have Rafael build like a Twitter bio generator or like an AI reply thing, like we already have the AI system built out for. Polly, which is one of these schedulers, uses this strategy really well, building these little tools as like SEO anchors. And so we’re gonna do have a page for each one. Pricing page obviously looks really nice too. But what’s not here yet is templates for the learn page. I don’t know if we’re gonna call it learn page or not. But basically these little micro courses on how to do different things that can also be these sort of SEO magnets or SEO anchors. And so there’s a benefit to doing email courses to bring this back we were talking about, benefits of doing email courses that’s not just related to building the viral examples email list, but rather as like an SEO anchor on the site too, to bring traffic to Megaphone. So the course has multiple purposes and it could be worth considering as like something to invest time into on its own. But yeah, that’s all I got, so that’s why I was, in my mind. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: That’s awesome. [Michael Houck]: So, I mean, let me bring it back to what we’re talking about then. Email courses, I don’t think it’d be too hard to create them. We’ve said we were going to create them a while ago. We got distracted by other things. But yeah, what do you think? Any downside to investing some time in creating them? [Max]: I don’t think a huge downside. I’m just not sure the upside is there, though. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I think it depends on how much we prioritize SEO. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: Right, like if we’re saying SEO is going to be a channel, if we’re going to invest money in these blog posts and backlinks and things like that. And we’re going to, you know, We should go all in at that point. We’ll have the engineers build these little micro free tools. We’ll have these email courses. But if we’re not going to do that, then it might not make sense to invest the time in these because they wouldn’t really serve a purpose outside of that. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: OK, so I’ll just say these are tied to SEO, not necessarily their own. Thing. Um, okay. What do we, uh, what do you want to do next? Should we do SEO? Sure. What do you guys think? [Max]: Well, what’s our current state of SEO? Cause I know we’re, we’re paying to go for it. [Michael Houck]: Yes. So, Until we get the new site up, our current state is not going to be great because as slow load times, there’s a bunch of like syntactical structural issues that are going to prevent it from ranking well. But we anticipate that if the design is done in the next week or so, then we’ll be able to get the new site up this month. So in theory, you know, February, we should start to see some increase there. And then depending on how well it does, could be a six month thing, could be a three month thing before we start to see meaningful results. [Ben Ornstein]: The way I thought about this channel was the time to value, and that’s the biggest problem with it. We know it’s a longer term game with SEO, but the impact I think is really high. I always think of like Grammarly’s content marketing and SEO and how well it impacted their growth. But in terms of cost and in terms of time to value, a lot of it’s already set up, correct? Like it’s all of this is in terms of the blogs specifically. Time to value isn’t getting it set up. [Michael Houck]: Time to value is when we start to see meaningful users come in through the channel, right? So for SEO, time to value is going to be, it’s going to be our longest. For sure. Right. Um, but it’s one of those things once that happens, obviously it can be pretty big. Um, cost is also high relative to other channels because I think, um, the articles are like, we’re getting like one article a day or something. Um, I think it’s like, it’s somewhere between 1K and 1.5K a month. So not huge, but it’s not like it would be if we’re just growing an email list with cold email and it’s basically no cost. So yeah, that’s current state of costs. [Ben Ornstein]: In terms of all of these channels, I would rank this towards the bottom in terms of what we should be spending resources on solely because of the time to value being so long. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Max, do you agree? [Max]: I would rank it ahead of some of these other ones we have listed here, but I wouldn’t put it ahead of product-led growth and examples. It actually, yeah, it’d probably be third on my list. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I guess you can consider the small free tools as part of SEO too, because there’s really no purpose in doing them outside of that. The thing with SEO is we can sort of, you know, it’s how much we want to invest. We can invest nothing and we can say we’re going to focus on PLG Enviro example, if we get enough growth from that, no problem. Don’t need to worry about SEO and spending money there. We can say we’re going to have this blog, maybe we’ll pay for some backlinks to the blog. We can say we want to invest engineering time into building these small free tools over the course of like a month. They make a couple of them. And then we can say that we want to invest time in email courses too. And and different pages on the site, because the more pages you have, the better it impacts your domain rating in terms of if those pages have specific purposes that actually share useful information about the product. So if we go all in, it becomes a decent expense across engineering time, writing time, paying for the blog content, paying for backlinks. It can get expensive, right? And at the same time, it’s like, well, if we’re not going to go all in, does it make sense to invest in this channel at all, or just focus our time, energy, and resources on the others? So I think that’s the big, big decision here is like, how much do we want to go all in? If at all. [Ben Ornstein]: I wonder if there’s a way, I mean, we already have like, once we launched the new site and then like the blogs are live, cause that’s the plan, right? When the new site goes live, that’s when the blogs will go live or, or are they technically live already? [Michael Houck]: They’re technically live already. They’re not sure they don’t show up on like megaphone.network homepage, but you can go to the blog through like a direct link to the blog. Um, But we’re probably not seeing the main benefit of that. If I go to, if I open Feather right now, let’s see what we got. Yeah, our traffic is like minimal, like under 10 viewers, page views per day. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Ben Ornstein]: Like, I feel like we can make a decision on that, on going all in or not on SEO, until we see the blog linked to the new site and then reconvene. That would be my approach, at least, just to see what the impact is organically. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. Also, probably the impact of the domain rating and placement just for the new site in general, right? Cause there’s all this technical SEO stuff with like how the pager headers are set up in the HTML that like, you know, um, it’s just not optimized right now. And we’re being penalized as a result of that. And I was going to have Mahul do a project about it, but he told me that it was so extensive that it just made more sense for us to, you know, do a new version of the site. And so that’s what we did. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: So maybe we take baby steps here. Maybe we launch the site with the blog, with the technical improvements. And then if we start to see people trickle in from SEO, then we invest more in like the free tools and backlinks and things like that. Okay. Anything else? Or should we move forward? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: You can move forward. [Max]: I think that’s all I had on that. [Michael Houck]: Okay, let’s do affiliate networks and just affiliates in general. Yeah, so go ahead. No, no, go for it. [Max]: Well, so Ben, for a little context, we looked into this months ago, or is it a year ago? I just, Hawk, I just pinged it, you know, know, in that other thread that was a year old. And we had this Google Sheet where I think I had dreams find some affiliates. And now for some reason, that Google Sheet has been deleted. But and then I looked back at our slack messages, how and it looks like we had set up a cadence in instantly our old cold email tool and actually sent, you know, some cold emails to these different social media tools and blogging websites to try to set up affiliate deals. And I’m pretty sure it just didn’t come to fruition, really. So we’ve tried it. Could we try it again and put maybe more effort and try it in a different way? Sure. But that’s kind of where we’re at, what we did with that. [Michael Houck]: So you guys might not have I think Ben, you might know this because you’re a little closer to the engineers for Megafone, but we’re finally launching a fully integrated referrals page with Tapfiliate, which is the affiliate service that we’ve set up an account with, into the dashboard of Megafone. That’s going live alongside the group’s MVP. And that’ll have like a couple assets that people can use if they want to share it that way, it’ll have an FAQ, it’ll have the tracker for the referrals and all that. And they’ll be able to earn money to spend on the platform, or if they’re a creator, they can get paid out. So that’ll be actually in the product, which is good. But we haven’t done anything. I think another thing we talked about before was better leveraging the creator and their audiences as affiliates. We never really pursued that, never did much there because this integration and page wasn’t set up. So the launch of that may change some thinking there. So just want to throw that context in there before we get too deep into the chat on this one. [Ben Ornstein]: I was, and I had messaged you about this at some point about the creator affiliates, or it’s like if creators had their own unique links and they were incentivized to not only engage with content but share, since they do have big audiences, if they were to share Megaphone on social media, which is an interesting game because it’s like, this is a cool tool. By the way, I’m getting paid to retweet. It’s an interesting, like, I don’t know. [Max]: They don’t want to talk about Megaphone, right? That’s the problem. [Michael Houck]: Traditionally, they haven’t wanted to talk about Megafone, but as part of this launch of the new site, we’re probably going to be repositioning Megafone away from engagement network and more to creator partnership platform, because we’re going to be launching what we’re calling campaigns, which are like ways for users to pay creators for things other than engagements, like newsletter ads, podcast ads, Twitter space, product testing, right? We’ve talked about that. That will be going live probably alongside the new site, either at the end of this month or early February. So maybe that changes things for them. Maybe they’re more willing to talk about it without the branding of, hey, get paid to retweet being so in their faces. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Ben Ornstein]: Given that, I think this is a cool strategy, especially since we’re building like the referral links directly into the page. It’s not like there’s that much, like what expense goes into this, this channel after that? [Michael Houck]: Is there any? Well, it’s sort of a contra expense because someone, we’re not paying people for their affiliate signups, but like in terms of like upfront, but we lose money on those users, right? So it’s like, are the amount of money that we’re earning for them is just, you know, it’s cut in half, basically. So that’s still better than zero. But the upside is lower. Got it. So I think, OK, so we have a normal affiliate program where people within our user base become ambassadors, basically. We have a creator-focused affiliate program, which we don’t know if they will go for because of their hesitance to advertise paid engagement. And we have a, um, like the traditional affiliate network route where we partner with affiliate networks and, um, other companies, um, as like perks and things like that. Where they push us to their audiences. Those are the three channels for affiliates as I can see. I think there’s reason to be skeptical of all three. My guess is that we probably want to do the same thing here that we do with SEO, which is take baby steps. And if by launching the page, we see the natural ambassadors happen, then okay, the affiliate offer is compelling. Let’s Let’s invest in trying to position it better for creators and affiliate networks. [Ben Ornstein]: I agree with that. [Michael Houck]: Okay. Okay, next is we’re going to skip over free tools. We’ve talked about that in the context of SEO. Next is me doing podcasts. So the reason I thought this was on here is because even to this day, you know, we still get people who sign up for Megaphone who found us through the Passion Fruit podcast that I did like over a year ago because it became the number one video on their YouTube channel. And I talked about Megaphone pretty eloquently and well in that. So does this make sense? Sense, is this worth spending a bunch of time on doing these podcasts? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: What do you guys think? [Max]: I don’t think it’s like a super scalable approach. But but I don’t think like, if I mean, if if a great podcast asks you to be on, then obviously take it. But I’m not sure we to reach out to five dozen different podcasts, trying to get you on to them, because the majority of podcasts have very small viewership or listeners counts. And yeah, just because we had one work doesn’t I mean, you know, a bunch of others are going to work. I always look at the upside of this. [Ben Ornstein]: I’m biased because I just love podcast, right? So I think like anytime this is going to this is going to work if we put enough resources into it. But I always think of the Sam Korkos like success with podcasts with levels and his and his creator. And obviously, had one of the co-founders spend their entire time doing it. So that’s going to be impossible for us. But, um, I, the upside of this is if you do get on a tier one or a tier two show, it’s one hour spent, maybe, maybe an hour and a half, max two hours. And then plus you want to do a little bit of research about the podcast beforehand, uh, to make sure you get the audience down, right. And what you’re going to, maybe it’s an extra hour. So like Like per show, let’s say max three hours. Um, that’s for like a tier one show. Probably that’s a lot of time for one show that could have an impact. But, um, in the sense that it’s not scalable, it also is in the sense of you’re reaching a bigger audience. Again, we’re assuming a tier one show. Um, the way they did it when I was doing research for, for levels was they reached out to investors of theirs like all their angels and, um, tried to get a connection to a podcast through, you know, their connections. Um, I don’t think that would be impossible for us right now. Like you probably have people you could reach out to, um, that I, I don’t know. I’m, I’m assuming that. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. We, the problem won’t, wouldn’t be getting necessarily access to shows that have We could do that. I have a bunch of people who either have those themselves or who know people who we could ask. The cost here is social capital, right? The cost is that we’re calling in our favors with these people. So if we did this, I actually think we probably want to do what Sam did, which is spend more than just a couple hours preparing for each episode. Because if we get on like, I’m not a big podcaster, I don’t know like the top show, let’s Tim Ferriss, right? If we got on the Tim Ferriss show, then, you know, Ben, I’d want to spend like the better part of a week with you preparing for that. So, but you know, that one podcast could make all the other ones maybe worth it. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: So I don’t know. [Michael Houck]: This feels very spiky to me. And outside of our control in some ways. But I agree that, you know, the cost of just doing them is minimal. And if we get offered to do shows, it doesn’t hurt to do them except for like an hour or two of time, unless it’s one of those tier one ones, in which case it’s a bigger investment. [Ben Ornstein]: I just thought like the minimal to zero cost is so attractive in terms of money, financial cost. But yeah, the time cost does add up. And the impact is, as you said, out of our control. That’s true. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, the social capital costs is the one I think that’s the biggest, the biggest. [Max]: So when you say social capital costs, like you’re saying, you’re saying you have the net, the network, and you know, the people to get on some of these good tier two podcasts. [Michael Houck]: I’m sure we could like I haven’t like mapped it out. Like, hey, here’s who knows this person, right? [Max]: But like, you don’t want you don’t know if you want to use that ask for this. Right. [Michael Houck]: Like, I don’t want to go to like, I don’t know, like, Yeah, I don’t know if I want to use it for for this particular because we don’t know what the impact will necessarily. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Max]: You don’t know if you want to go to Andrew Chen. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, like, for something like once or twice a year, you know, twice thing. Right. [Max]: Makes sense. That does make sense. [Michael Houck]: But I think to both your points, if people are asking us to do their podcast, and it’s not like, totally irrelevant, and there’s more than like four people who listen to the podcast. It’s an hour of my time. It’s not that a good deal. Yeah. I just did the AI tool report podcast. Last week, it should be going live today. Okay, so we can see how that does. [Max]: And yeah, yeah. [Ben Ornstein]: So maybe, maybe we’ll see if some people come in from it. It’s, it’s so annoying, because a lot of these we keep saying, like, it’s a wait and see approach. And a lot of them are hard to track, too. [Michael Houck]: I mean, some of them are easy to track, like affiliates, And PLG will have all the data about. This one in particular, it would be really, really hard to know. Because it’s not like I’m going to be like, go to this special landing page for this podcast. Maybe I should. I don’t know. That actually would probably be a pretty good idea, if we build out a special landing page for each podcast that we do. Cool. And then two more. I think we’re running out of time on this, but two more. One is cold email outreach for megaphones specifically. So this is not using cold email to grow viral examples, which we already know we want to do. This is using cold email specifically to get people excited about megaphones. [Max]: Didn’t we try this? [Michael Houck]: I want to say, yeah, let me open up, um, we did. I think we tried it with like, yeah, with like social media managers. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Right. [Michael Houck]: Didn’t we get a list of social media managers from Drake? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Max]: And like marketing people. [Michael Houck]: Yep. Yep. Um, let me look at our sequences. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: here. In terms of my list, I have this as number two behind PLG. [Ben Ornstein]: Like I, I still think this could be crazy effective if we can target the right people. And the reason I have it as number two is don’t we have access to a ridiculous amount of emails from, um, and I know it’s not the same purpose, but through the newsletter growth product, could we use those Yeah, [Michael Houck]: I mean, we should assume that we can get anyone’s email at this point with the database that Matt has built. It’s like 200 million emails and growing. [Ben Ornstein]: Which is just ridiculous. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, it is. It’s insane. It’s a huge advantage. But the thing is, when you’re sending code emails at scale, you can basically burn the health of a domain by if the reply rates and open rates are too low and if the like spam rates are too high, right? So there’s like infrastructural costs and you don’t want to just keep burning domains. So the question is, could we make a compelling cold email sequence that gets, you know, above a 5% reply rate for megaphone if we maybe do it around some like lead magnet, but if we’re gonna do it around that, does it just make sense to put them in viral examples? Like why separate it, you know? What do you guys think? Yeah, I don’t know. [Max]: I’m not, I mean, cold email works, like we know that, but for some reason I’m not as bullish on this as the other stuff. It’s kind of a hard product to explain over a cold email. [Ben Ornstein]: What if we have a short video in the cold email? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, it would fuck up the deliverability. [Max]: Yeah, you can’t include anything besides text. No links. Yeah, exactly. So it’s, yeah, the whole deliverability thing is just a logistical nightmare, kind of How long does it take to warm up a new email? [Ben Ornstein]: I mean, a new domain? Two weeks. [Michael Houck]: Two weeks. Yeah, I’d say that’s tough. Yeah, they make it hard on purpose, you know. It’s meant to be it’s meant to be hard maybe I’m less bullish on this on this channel now yeah look I mean this is a good channel but it’s just like I don’t know if it makes sense to do for megaphone or if it makes sense to just do it for viral examples get people on the email list and keep getting megaphone in front of their faces that way you know plus that way we’re we’re leading with value you know we’re sharing the value and they’re gonna trust Right. [Ben Ornstein]: An inherent trust is big. Yeah. Maybe it’s worth just doubling down efforts on viral examples, then. Yeah. Yeah. [Max]: I mean, I think the conclusion we’ve come to is product led growth and viral examples are our two best options. Yeah. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: And then the last thing is that’s not on this list that I was thinking about. This might be more true for ghost trading than for Megaphone. But now that my life is sorted out, I want to start making content again myself for LinkedIn, maybe for Threads and Substack as well, just copy pasting between the platforms. So yeah, I guess thoughts on content marketing, like founder content marketing as a channel. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah, I like it. [Max]: Although if you’re just constantly shilling, you like you won’t perform well. No, no. I mean, obviously, we wouldn’t just be constantly shilling. [Michael Houck]: But like, yeah, benefits, like basically repositioning myself on these channels to talk about social media growth, and the importance of that and the benefit you get from that. Instead of talking about startup founders and fundraising and Yeah, I mean, yeah. Because we don’t we don’t need that channel for founding journey. [Max]: We just need the email stuff. Yeah. Yeah. I don’t know. [Ben Ornstein]: It over time seems to work for a lot of different founders, like specifically on LinkedIn, I’ve seen so many found, like I think of, um, Cyrus from Haven, um, and I know he’s not even writing. And I think one of our clients, uh, is, is writing his LinkedIn stuff. Um, but I like the approach. I just don’t think it’s something we’re, we’re already creating so much different content, um, not the podcast anymore, but there’s the long form YouTube. There’s the long, the short form YouTube. Um, and you’re saying this would be content specifically for like LinkedIn. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: It’s written content and we have 43,000 followers on LinkedIn. Like we have a megaphone there, no pun intended. Um, and our audience is mostly founders or like people who want to become Yeah. Um, I think this probably would make more sense for ghost writing than for megaphone because higher ticket sale can build trust through the content. [Ben Ornstein]: Um, yeah, I think if you could, I’m in like batch right content and then just schedule it just so it’s there then. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. Then why not? [Michael Houck]: Um, Yeah. We need to think about how to position it. Because I think, Max, I hear the hesitance in your voice, and I have the same hesitance myself, which is we don’t want to abandon the audience that got us here, basically, and start talking about something totally different, even if it’s not totally different. Yeah. Instead of reposition. Yeah. [Max]: And it’s probably a little less valuable audience than the one we currently have. And and also like there’s a chance founding journey can be massive still like with the cold email stuff like it could be hundreds of thousands of subscribers and Yeah, and I still want to get your Twitter back to. [Ben Ornstein]: Oh, yes. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah, one day. [Max]: Did you email those two guys they sent you or? [Michael Houck]: No, I was gonna wait till after the new year. [Max]: So it’s on my to do list for this week, actually. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. I’m curious if that produces anything. But yeah, we’ll see, man. Don’t I’m not holding my breath. But yeah. Anyway, okay, so maybe maybe we just start experimenting with this again. Not totally repositioning, but just just working it in a little bit more. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Cool. This is good. [Michael Houck]: So top contenders are PLG, viral examples, and potentially direct ads on meta as well. There’s some unknowns there we need to look into. We see as like baby steps affiliates we see as baby steps, podcast circuit, opportunistic, cold email from megaphone, not going to do, and then content marketing, just sort of working it in to what we would be doing for that channel. Does that sound right? [Max]: Yeah. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. Okay. [Michael Houck]: So I guess we, we bank on PLG. Can you guys both go through this week and just do an audit of where we can be improving there, both in the dashboard and also maybe go through onboarding as well. And then I’ll look into what Matt McGarry said, read the perfect funnel for meta ads for a SaaS product like Megaphone. And then we’ll start to grow viral examples as well via cold email. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: I’ll talk to Matt about that. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: Anything we’re missing. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay, I think so. [Michael Houck]: Okay, I think we’re going to probably also set up like better tracking for a lot of this stuff. On my to-do list, so make a note of that. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Bye. [Michael Houck]: Okay. Sounds good. Shall we move on to just touching base on content stuff? Sure. Okay, so I talked with Lara over the weekend. And it was actually kind of weird. So when I first mentioned the long form YouTube stuff to her like a month ago, she said it would be 1000 extra per month to do a weekly long form video. And I said, Great, that sounds good. And then I told her we’re going to discontinue the podcast for now. And just do long form And she said it would still be 3.5K per month. Which doesn’t make sense, because shorts only originally were taking up like 500 to 1K of the 3.5K. And she told me it was just because basically they have to assign an editor or not assign an editor, so the costs are pretty fixed on their end. And we can add more stuff on, it’s like cheaper to add stuff on. But basically it forced me into a decision where I wanted to reduce cost for the video stuff. So I asked her what’s the best price she could do to just do the long form, and she said 2K a month. So that’s a decent cut off 3.5, so I said okay. So basically for at least January, we’re just gonna do the weekly long form video, we’re not gonna do shorts. I know, I wanted to do both, but I also have a lot of personal expenses around the divorce now. So I need to reduce some costs. So I made the hard decision, made more sensitive long form, because that’s where we’re getting. That’s what we’re seeing, I think, you know, not necessarily seeing better results. But that’s where I think I have confidence that we can see better results in a shorter period of time. So for January, at least that will do we won’t do shorts, and maybe we’ll revisit, we’ll revisit shorts in a month or two. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Ben Ornstein]: I had some great stories for today. That’s unfortunate. [Max]: My one find was a short, but I actually think we could turn this short into a long form video. What is it? [Ben Ornstein]: The long forms are going to be really good, though. I’m doing research for all of those. [Michael Houck]: I’m very excited about them. Sweet. [Max]: Yeah, I’m going to write the first script tomorrow. Oh, yeah. [Michael Houck]: We already have those great ideas for the long form, the European Union versus US. What startup ideas are you tired of being pitched? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Is that me? [Max]: Not me. [Michael Houck]: OK, hold on, I’m going to be so I can watch this video. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, that was pretty good. And I can see why we would be able to make a long form for it. Yeah. Work were startup ideas or the tar pit startup ideas or something like that. [Max]: Yeah. And we could even crowdsource questions from From the paid audience or just from the newsletter, have people submit a bunch of questions, and then you create a 10 minute video answering 10 of them or five or whatever it is. And I don’t know if it would be a super but it wouldn’t take much to create. [Michael Houck]: That’s true. Um, although this short, the shorts, their best performing short ever. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Really? [Michael Houck]: Uh, here’s a question. Uh, what startup? [Max]: Yeah, it is 243,000 views. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Oh, wow. [Max]: Okay. [Michael Houck]: So it is, it is an outlier. Interesting. [Max]: I don’t know how to do it as a long form, but yeah, the thumbnail will be, I answer your startup questions or whatever. Well, that could be one. The other one could be just like, here are like the worst, worst startup ideas, right? [Michael Houck]: And it could be like, you know, like an app to meet people in a city. It can be like the tar pit ideas that everyone talks about. And we could do it in a way that’s not mean to the ones that exist, but just is helpful to people to avoid building those, and here’s why. Oh, absolutely. That’s a good one. OK. Well, OK. Here’s what I want to do then this week. Can all three of us spend some time researching YouTube and come back with like, this is going to sound crazy, but like 50 ideas for long form videos. And maybe there’ll be some overlap, which is good. Maybe there won’t be, which is fine, but I want to each, each of us come back with 50 when we meet next week. And the goal will just be to go through them and have like a that we actually want to prioritize and why. And I think more reps will help us, help us realize what’s good and like the little things that make it good. [Max]: Okay. Do we need to find examples? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yes. [Michael Houck]: I would recommend using those tools like Vellio or view stats, like just choose one. I’ll cover the cost of it for you guys. For this month at least. And yeah, basically just find outliers, find the videos that outperformed other ones on the channel. We don’t even necessarily need to watch the videos. I’m not asking you guys to go watch a ton of videos, maybe watch the intros if you want, but just topic, thumbnail, packaging, what makes people wanna watch. Um, in our niche. Okay. Okay. So I’m going to, I’ll do that too. So when we meet next Monday, um, we’ll go deep on those because we already have the first few weeks covered. We have like, I think three or four videos that are ready for me to write and record. Uh, so I’m going to do that. Uh, but then we can start working through this, this longer list that that we create too. Okay, that’s all I had for the content stuff today. Did you guys have anything else you wanna talk through? No. Yeah, no, not, because we’re not doing short form. [Ben Ornstein]: That’s about it. Okay. [Michael Houck]: Ben, I might reach out about doing some research for the newsletter issue this Saturday. I haven’t decided what it’s gonna be about yet. I’m gonna figure that out today. The one we did was really good. So I think we should, we should do that more often too. Sounds good. All right. Okay guys. Thanks. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Talk to you on Slack.