- Duration: 16 min
- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01JH604P3HKG98YGWR4QG9JAH4 (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JH604P3HKG98YGWR4QG9JAH4)
Transcript
[UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Hey, give me one second to finish this email. [Usman Saleem]: Sorry, I have a guy who’s saying that he didn’t receive something. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: There we go. Okay. [Michael Houck]: What’s going on, man? How you doing? Good, man. How are you? [Usman Saleem]: How’s things? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, good. [Usman Saleem]: How’s Megaphone? Megaphone’s good, growing. [Michael Houck]: Ghost Ring Agency’s good and growing. Newsletter’s good and growing. I’m down here in Argentina getting out of the cold, so it’s a win-win all around for me right now. [Usman Saleem]: I was there in the, well, in their winter over the summer, in August for a few weeks. Where did you go? Mostly Buenos Aires. There was this Solana sort of pop network state kind of pop up, so I was there for that. Back in June though, my co-founder is Argentinian. So we’re trying to basically meet a few times a year and I’m going for a wedding in Brazil in June. So I was like, listen, if I’m going to come up for a wedding anyway, I might as well just take the trip down to Argentina and then we’ll kind of do a bit of working together, you know, so. [Michael Houck]: That’s cool, man. Where are you? I’m in Mendoza right now. Next week. And then I decided to spend a month in Bariloche. Which I don’t know if I’m gonna, it’s just like a chill town. We’ll see how it feels. [Usman Saleem]: This is Patagonia, right? Bariloches in Patagonia, right? Yeah, like the northern part. [Michael Houck]: Nice, sweet. Yeah, I mean, it would be, I mean, I’ve seen pics. [Usman Saleem]: I only went to Buenos Aires, which was, I don’t know, it was work and it was quite busy, but I want to see the rest of the country at some point for sure. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, it’s nice. I would say, personally, I like Chile more so far, but Argentina is cool too. [Usman Saleem]: Yeah, I wasn’t like wowed by BA. I’ve only been to Brazil. And I was always like, when I went to Rio, I was just wowed from the moment I was there. And I think it’s also like sometimes certain cities connect with you better. Like I’m a huge foodie, but I don’t love too much steak. So I felt like Rio, the cuisine was like way more suited. Like it was just more variety. There was a bit more stuff. But yeah, I mean, it’s a cool city. Let’s see. I want to definitely explore more when I return. But yeah, thanks for taking the call. I know we have like a short slot. I think you reached out to me, but you’re not on Twitter anymore, right? [Michael Houck]: No, not right now. I’m working on getting my account back. Basically, we were sending out a bunch of DMs to people to like talk to them about threading and megaphone and other things. I hit some like DM threshold and so I’m suspended until I get some push from Andreessen, which I’m hoping happens in the next couple of weeks. [Usman Saleem]: Sweet, cool. So basically, I think you reached out like When I think before your account God and I sort of had made a note of and I said listen We’re fundraising when we do fundraise. I will sort of get back to you and we kind of now Well, we’ve closed our fundraise. So I’ve been thinking a lot. So yeah, it’s great like free seed done so Now for me, it’s like I’ve been thinking about sort of we’re building in obviously encrypt. So I don’t know bit of background, right? Building the crypto space focus specifically on real-world assets that it’s sort of subsector we’re focusing is in gold tokenization. And I think one of the things, the reality is that a lot of the users that we’re targeting are not in crypto and that’s fine, but a lot of fundraising and narrative and momentum, and especially eventually when we do launch token comes from crypto Twitter. So I sort of know that it’s a space that I wanna ace. The reality is I wanna be a better writer as well. So it’s kind of like the balance between trying to figure out it’s you know start writing myself and then working with yourselves or work at because that’s the thing right is that ultimately as as a founder I I realize that it’s a muscle that I want to cultivate this year for sure and it’s a skill I want to cultivate so it’s not something that I’m like hey let’s I feel like it’s it’s a bit like in my mind it’s a bit like cheating the system as well which I don’t like ever but I also realize that hey you know times like this we’re we’re I’m in the hold zone of I want to keep a very small team so just me and my co-founder and uh somebody who’s working with us from social media, but like very, very lean, right? So there’s a lot that happens. And so even though I have this best intention of every Sunday, I want to like drop the week and it’s never really happening. But yeah, I mean, I want to understand a bit more about, because the kind of tweets that I don’t, I want to put, again, you tell me, right, because I think ultimately the objective is to sort of increase the following, increase the sort of the influential sort of nature of the account, right? But it’s not necessarily about, oh, here’s a thread on, I suppose, like, oh, you know, the usual sort of viral threat that’s going, but I wanted to understand, like, how do you sort of, specifically within the crypto space, do you guys have any clients in the space? How do you guys sort of work with those clients? What sort of, how do you sort of capture the voice of that unique individual, right? Yep. [Michael Houck]: Makes sense. And also I admire that this is a skill you want to work on yourself too, because I think some people just hand the whole thing off to us and other people actually have more of a viewpoint, more of an opinion. Which sort of helps us get to what they want faster. What I would say is there’s sort of two ways to train that muscle. So way number one is sort of what you said. You’re gonna sit down with Sunday, you’re gonna write a batch of content, you’re gonna see how it performs. Way number two is by you sending us information, subject matter expert stuff just from you. We turn that into content and we get performance data that way. And you sort of see, all right, well, here’s how they translate it here’s how the content did, you sort of get the first first receipt to that. So as a second way, we do have one other client in the crypto space, can’t share exactly who. One other client in the space, where we work with them is pretty similar to how we work with other clients. There’s not really huge differential differentiation. The difference is just the writer that we match up with that we matched up with them has crypto knowledge and sort of already knows the sector to some degree, right? Our process is super simple. Basically, we work with founders, so we don’t require you to get on a bunch of calls or anything like that. If you want to do interviews with us, that’s fine. We can do it that way, like a weekly or a monthly content interview. But the way most founders end up wanting to do it because they’re so busy is every Monday in a shared Slack Connect channel, we’ll just send you, hey, here’s some topics we’re thinking about, and here’s a couple of specific questions about those topics. Give us your subject matter. Do you like those topics? Or should we go back to drawing board and pick new one second for those questions? Like, what do you think? And all we ask is that you record a rambly voice note in response to those, the longer and more rambly, the better. We want the intonation, we want the emotion. And then if we get that from you by the middle of the week, then by the end of the week, we get the content back to you. And you can review it, we can revise it. If you have changes you want us to make, that’s totally fine. And then we handle scheduling, publishing, we’ll engage with replies, we’ll go engage with other accounts in your niche as well to sort of build awareness of the account, you know, with something either a little bit insightful or a little bit funny. Either way, they tend to get some engagement. Just writing the sort of free impressions that the already big accounts get. And so the hope is that that drives followers to you. And then from there, people, you know, you build up an audience, you build up that thought leadership authority. And then when the token comes out, you know, have an audience to sort of pitch that to and share that with. So process-wise, it’s pretty straightforward. It all happens in Slack and Notion. [Usman Saleem]: Okay, fine. And like with this existing sort of crypto sort of plan that you’re working with, like what’s been sort of the growth that you’ve sort of evidenced in his or hers Twitter account? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, so a couple months in with them, we’ve grown the account by 3,000 followers so far. They started at like 600, I think. I don’t like to promise results because your account is different. Every relationship is different. People have their own different preferences, but we pretty consistently see good results. The writers that we have on our team are the people I would be using if I used a ghost writer. I’ve thought about delegating my LinkedIn to one of our team members actually recently, but because I’ve been so bad about getting content. But yeah, so good folks. And we’d find somebody with subject matter expertise on the team, as I said, to sort of take it on. [Usman Saleem]: It wouldn’t be like a total crypto newbie. Although they will rely on your deeper subject matter expertise. Yeah, of course. Yeah. Okay. I think it makes sense. And this is like 2,900-ish a month, right? Yes. [Michael Houck]: So there’s two offers. There’s the 3K a month, which is we do everything. We will create a full batch of content. You’ll have like a full weekly batch of content coming out. We’ll handle replies. We’ll go find the thought leaders in your niche and engage with their stuff proactively. Like it’s a full account takeover at that point, basically. If you want to do 2K a month, we’ll do a smaller batch of content per month, less shots on call, and we won’t do the sort of other operational stuff. So that’s up to you. [Usman Saleem]: And that’s kind of like the, that’s sort of the final, there’s no negotiation in that. That’s kind of your marketing. Yeah, we’re priced pretty competitively compared to other agencies. [Michael Houck]: And at the end of the day, I have to pay the writers a good chunk of that anyway. [Usman Saleem]: Yeah, that makes sense. Cool. Okay, man, I think let me have a just, I want to do this. So I just need to think about it. I’m gonna think about it, like sleep on a few more days. I’ll get in touch. And like, what’s the minimum sort of time like I suppose, because there’s no like contractual thing, right? It’s like one month. I think you said 30 minutes, 30 days notice, right? [Michael Houck]: Yeah. As long as it’s 30 days notice, it’s fine. Um, so, you know, month to month, but with 30 days notice, um, we generally recommend people to spend at least three to six months before they would decide if they did want to cancel so you can see results. But, um, at the end of the day, we’re not going to hold you to anything except the 30 days notice. [Usman Saleem]: Yeah. Okay. Perfect. Perfect. No, I think if I want to do it, I think the, I want to use this kind of as the opportunity to kind of explore. I think it’s like, it’s like, You know when you’re sort of getting a personal trainer, right? Either you can learn from the personal trainer, or you can kind of just go to the gym and close your eyes and just get out of the session. I don’t want to be in that zone, right? Because I think I’m going to use this as a way to amplify. But eventually, hopefully, I think, I do think that obviously using ghostwriting and stuff is all great, but eventually the truest, most authentic form of writing comes truly from within. And so that’s what I want to eventually get to, hopefully. So maybe this is kind of like, let’s say, a tool hopefully I use to sort of train myself. There’s a bit of like writing and then there’s like learning to master the game of what works right and I want to kind of use that use this as a tool to kind of you guys obviously know the best let’s say tricks of the trade right so I’m going to use that to kind of understand that bit of the game because actually like yeah okay I think it makes sense just give me a couple of days um and then yeah let’s let’s definitely try and sort of kind of you know kick this kick this together for sure that’d be great cool let’s let’s touch base next week no pressure and no longer, and obviously, so, you know, if [Michael Houck]: you’re like, all right, I get it now, I’m going to go do it in three months from now, more power to the day. [Usman Saleem]: That sounds crazy. I think I want to do it, like, because the next few, let’s say three, four, five months are pretty instrumental in the sense that we’re obviously going out live with a product at the end of the month. And then I want to kind of figure out the market to market’s really hot. So it’s kind of also just being smarter, smart enough about we’re pre-seed, we’re going to be seed, get the traction users we want and then use that sort of momentum to go raise this follow on round before the market let’s say crashes, right? And that’s kind of where I want to use this sort of, I suppose, profile on the internet to be able to boost out. And I think that’s really the main objective here and the point of time is like, how can I use this to sort of benefit the business, right? Obviously it’s great to kind of be a, as well as Twitter, KOL or whatever, right? I’m sure that’s all great. But I think that’s also that there’s also a bit of like, I want to do this for the business and that’s that’s the reality behind it, right? And I think hopefully because of that other, not just fundraise, but hopefully like 10,000 other opportunities come up as being more and more and more visible. Makes sense. Yeah. It’ll be a good way to build trust as you go about that too. [Michael Houck]: And we’ll go through like the first week that you sign on with us. The first week is just gonna be about onboarding, context gathering. And so we’ll have one kickoff call where we’ll go really deep on like who’s the audience, who’s the profile. So we’ll get all that information up front. [Usman Saleem]: Perfect. Perfect. Sweet. Great. Well, also, by the way, love the work you’re doing in the newsletter, I think is definitely is definitely the my most favorite thing. That’s sort of one of my most everything that’s really, really well written, really sort of good spotlight on some good speakers, good notes. I think there’s always like someone can learn from it, which is which is pretty phenomenal. So well done. Interesting. Obviously, you kind of take a different approach to sort of building after launch hours. Brett’s taken a different approach, but it’s super cool to sort of see that. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: We, we, uh, we went different ways, but I wish him the best with the, um, the email company. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Usman Saleem]: And then obviously like, uh, Jacob’s doing some super cool stuff with superpower. Right. [Michael Houck]: So he just, uh, yesterday he acquired, uh, the company of one of the launch house members from back in the day, actually. It was very interesting. [Usman Saleem]: Oh, wow. Nice. It was honestly my first sort of interaction to kind of the world. World of, I mean, crypto is amazing because actually it’s probably one of the few spaces where it’s very easy to find community and people who are building in the same space much more easier than I found in my previous startup. But Launch House was definitely one of the few places where I actually met my sort of first, let’s say, cohort of people from, even though it was all digital and I was not into physicals, but it was a pretty cool experience. [Michael Houck]: So we enjoyed it. But yeah. Well, look, let’s help build some authority around this new this new one. And yeah, let’s touch base next week and we’ll go from there. Perfect. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Perfect. [Usman Saleem]: Amazing. Sweet. Sounds good. Good to talk, man. [Michael Houck]: Talk to you soon.