- Duration: 32 min
- Platform: zoom
- Source: Read.ai 01JH8QHH00JJB1B0A055C2BXRX (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JH8QHH00JJB1B0A055C2BXRX)
Transcript
[Michael Houck]: Hey. Yo, what’s up, man? How’s it going? Good. How are you? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Pretty good. [Ben Ornstein]: Matthew called me, which which was great. I hadn’t chatted with him before, so it was good to meet him, catch up with him. And he just had so many questions about beehive setup and I was trying to answer a bunch of questions for him. [Michael Houck]: Don’t worry about it. Yeah, Matt’s great. You guys are gonna be working together a bunch. And he had great things to say about you, because we hopped on the call to hash everything out like before, like a half hour ago or whatever. And the first thing out of his mouth was, man, Ben is so great. [Ben Ornstein]: That’s awesome. [Michael Houck]: We talked once. [Ben Ornstein]: So that’s, that’s great. That’s a good sign. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. And you, you built trust quickly for sure. It was very, very evident. But yeah, I think so something to keep in mind with Matt is that he will want to solve any problem that you give him just like I will. Right. And so I would say there’s stuff that we’re working on. There’s stuff that is in his domain, like the data stuff. We can, you know, we can obviously say, Oh, we’re working on something here, but we get into a too many cooks in the kitchen situation. If we’re like, Oh, here’s like the 10 things that are a problem over here. You know, you know what I mean? [Ben Ornstein]: So I probably should have asked before. I don’t know. I’m glad we went through that. Cause now I know like the bound, the, the, the using home boundaries, but just kind of how, it’s structured. He does his side of things, we do ours, we work together, but I got it. [Michael Houck]: I got it. The way to think of him is like, the data and product side, that’s all him. The sort of sales growth and operation side, that’s all us. And he’ll probably help with sales eventually too. And also the content side is all us. He knows nothing about newsletters or content or anything like that. That’s not his thing. I think about him like a, like, I guess, like we don’t have our titles figured out yet, but like COO, CTO, CPO, something like that. That’s sort of his domain. [Ben Ornstein]: Got it. Got it. Okay. That makes, that makes a lot more sense. The other thing that I realized and what caused so many issues for me is I was in the air table and for some reason I overlooked all the different and I had been stuck on Raina’s board the entire time. [Michael Houck]: You’re probably so confused. So that’s why I’m like, why is he so organized? [Ben Ornstein]: Does he have a separate place for, cause I’m looking at this board and I’m like, where, what is going on? [Michael Houck]: You’re probably losing your mind. [Ben Ornstein]: Well, that’s why, that’s why I felt like I was so much farther behind than maybe I actually am. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, no, I, we’re going to be creating new views. That’s what they’re called views. Basically, we’re going to be creating new views as we need them, right? We can create one anytime we want. But the Yeah, I think the active ones are probably, you know, the ones will be using the most, at least for now. This is not the first time I’ve used air table. [Ben Ornstein]: That’s why it’s embarrassing. Like I knew I knew that there was the views, the views view on the left. So I don’t know whatever it was when you sent that loom like, oh my God, I’m such a I’m an idiot. So that explains a lot. That explains a lot. It’s all good. [Michael Houck]: We haven’t been keeping it updated. So there wasn’t really any new info in there that you were missing out on anyway. I just realized Rena has not gotten back to me about something I need her to do today. She’s offline. That’s weird. Okay, I might ask you to do this then afterwards, because I want to get it to Matt today, so we can keep doing some stuff over the weekend. But the new tab, the batches delivered tab, Can you go in and add the batches that we’ve imported for each newsletter? Because I don’t think she’s, it looks like she’s offline. And I sent her a loom like two hours ago. So I’m surprised she was offline that early, but it doesn’t look like she’s going to get to it today. [Ben Ornstein]: She’s been offline like a little bit earlier than normal. Uh, recently I have noticed that, I don’t know. [Michael Houck]: I think it’s because, um, she’s no longer doing the, the megaphone monitoring. And I mean, you gotta remember she’s, She’s literally, I think it’s exactly 12 hours off from us, or at least from you. I’m 2 hours ahead now, but So you know if she was up till 3 or 4 PM, that’s 3 or 4 AM for her. [Ben Ornstein]: So like I right, right, right? That makes sense. I asked her a couple weeks ago. I said like what time do you usually work until? Because I wanted to know when I should take over like the intercom. [Michael Houck]: She said 3 PM so. Yeah, I don’t know. If it becomes an issue, I’ll check in with her. But this is the first time that I think I’ve had something urgent for her that we haven’t gotten to. [Ben Ornstein]: So I don’t think it’s a big deal yet. Yeah, no, a hundred percent. I just wanted to bring that up. Okay, cool. So when you say upload the batches, every one that we’ve done? [Michael Houck]: Yeah. So for each newsletter that we’ve done, all the active newsletters, right? So Scale Smarter, S&B Deal Hunter, AI Tool Report, Actually, it’s called the AI report now. Unicorner, The Performers, Nutmeg Soccer, and then Founding Journey too. I can do Founding Journey. But for the other ones, yeah, go into the batches delivered tab, link to the newsletter in question, add the date that the import was made, and then add the number of subscribers that actually got added to BI. [Ben Ornstein]: For everyone that we had started with. [Michael Houck]: Yes. For most of them, the batches started in early December. I think for Scale Smarter, Founding Journey, and maybe one more, it was earlier than that. [Ben Ornstein]: Yeah. Rena sent me the dates. I asked her those, so that’s good. For Founding Journey, which should I start with? I can handle Founding Journey. [Michael Houck]: I can do that. Because I think a lot of them I was importing manually myself early on too. [Ben Ornstein]: So I’ve got it. Awesome. OK. Yeah, I can handle that. [Michael Houck]: OK. But yeah, so we’re going to use this going forward. We keep it more up to date. Do you know how like roll up fields in Airtable work and everything? [Ben Ornstein]: When you say roll, could you? Maybe it might be able to might. Might be good to show me what you mean. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, no problem. So there’s different kind of fields. Obviously in Airtable, right? There’s like there’s a date field. There’s an email field. There’s a number field, right? Stuff like that. There’s also this thing called a roll up. You link two tabs together and we have, uh, we have a field in here called. Just called batches, not batches delivered, but just batches. Uh, this is a linked field to batches delivered the table where basically if I add on a journey here and I say, you know, the delivery date was Monday and I say we added 200 subscribers, right? Then all of a sudden it shows up in here. The ID number one. Right. Number one, the ID shows up in the batches column. And what that does then is we have all these other rollup fields you’d see by this icon that use the data in the batches delivered table and combine it in some way to present it in this other table so that all the data is in one place. And so even though we’re only adding these three columns here, we can get more information in aggregate for each newsletter. So, right. Let’s say I add another batch for founding journey that was on December 4th and we added 43,000 subscribers then, right? Then what’s gonna happen is that total subs added is gonna be the sum of all those batches. Subs in the last 30 days is automatically looking at when delivery date in batches delivered is within 30 days and summing those. And subs per month is what we’re supposed to be doing. So let’s say it’s 10,000 for founding journey or whatever. So we can look at this and we can compare and we can be like, wow, in the last month, we’re pacing really slow for founding journey, right? And so that’s the indicator then to go to Matt and be like, hey man, we need more data. And you see it now has one and two in here, because they’re linked already. This is the sum of the number of batches that have been delivered. And then these are the dates of both the first and most recent batches. So all that stuff gets updated automatically whenever we add more batches in here. That’s how it works. Yeah. [Ben Ornstein]: That’s awesome. That’s great that we can just, that’s huge. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: So all that, all that data is going to be in here for every newsletter. And so if we need to answer questions about the data, we can just go here. And if you have questions that aren’t answered by the data that’s in here, flag that to me and we’ll come up with some other way to manipulate the data to show it. Got it. So yeah, so that’s how that’s going to work. So that’s why we need to add all the historical batch data into here. [Ben Ornstein]: Cool. [Michael Houck]: I’ll do that after we hop off. And then that’s it. That’s just numbers. We can think about if we want to change the engagement criteria or the purgatory time or anything like that. But for now, Let’s just get the data in there and then we can we can decide that next week. Yep. OK, so. What else is? We can get into the megaphone stuff later, but for the newsletter growth, what else is question open open question kind of on your mind that we should talk through? [Ben Ornstein]: Yeah, so we I was going through each each list kind of or sorry each newsletter And we were looking, Matt and I were looking at, okay, how much do we need uploaded? Which I was confused about, because we had sent him all of that. [Michael Houck]: The difference, so I thought so too. When I talked to him about this, he wasn’t typing this part out for some reason, but basically yesterday we decided that Rena was going to try importing additional subscriber data that she had of people who like hadn’t opened the emails that we’d sent them in the cold email campaigns. Now, obviously the graduation rate for this cohort is gonna be very low, right? Because they were not opening the emails. So we expect it to be really low, but he needs to know, okay, here’s the number of getting from Ben about how many behind we are, but I don’t know how many Rina already has, how many Rina already have for each newsletter. So he’s like, well, Should I pull 2,000 for a scale smarter or should I pull 500? I don’t know if Reena already has 1,500 or whatever. So that’s why we need Reena to, excuse me, to just share that number. [Ben Ornstein]: Understood. Got it. [Michael Houck]: Okay. [Ben Ornstein]: So when, and then when I was going through these numbers again, and I, again, I don’t want, I don’t want to be like, look, I can’t figure this out. Can you debug this? But when, when Matt and I were going through the numbers. [Michael Houck]: What should I be opening right now? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Sorry. [Michael Houck]: Oh, just like, I’m going to, I’m going to go through it with you right now. [Ben Ornstein]: So what, what is an example? So I was looking at the numbers for, um, no, not that one. So one of them was nutmeg, just given that there have been no failed, but he also stopped me and said that there aren’t going to be failed because of something. I don’t remember why, like the number of zero for failed, even though we’ve up imported 959 made sense. And I forget what he said, but Or maybe that was for scale. See, this is why is why I’m confused. As you can see, Um, one of them, maybe it was even scale smarter. Let me look up those numbers real quick. Um, the graduation rate was 937 of almost 1200 imported, which is really, really high. And he gave me the reasoning is because he was, he was, um, grabbing people that had already followed venture scaler. [Michael Houck]: He’s talking about AI Tool Report. That’s what he’s talking about. Yes, that’s right. [Ben Ornstein]: Or maybe SMB Tool Hunter. [Michael Houck]: Those are the only ones that have a Twitter following that I think he did that for. But personally, I don’t think that whether they follow them on Twitter or not is a great indicator of whether they will stay subscribed and graduate or not. With AI Tool Report, the reason the graduation rate is so high is because because we send them a shit ton of emails during the test period. So their chances of hitting the engagement criteria are incredibly high. They send a daily newsletter five days a week. [Ben Ornstein]: Oh, it’s daily, wow, okay. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, they’re a media business, like they’re an operation. But as far as the other ones, yeah, I mean, Matt wouldn’t really have context on how the segments are set up or why they’re failing or not failing or anything like that. That’s what I mean. Too many cooks in the kitchen. You’re getting information from multiple sides. It just confuses things. So yeah, I think let’s take a step back from that and maybe we can open up the notion numbers or I don’t know, where do you want to go? What’s going to be most helpful? [Ben Ornstein]: That would be smart. Yeah. Well, maybe even the spreadsheets because a couple of them here, and I can just share my screen if you want. Yeah, go for it. [Michael Houck]: Go for it. Go for it. Okay. Um, so for SMB deal hunter, Oh wait, zoom is requesting. [Ben Ornstein]: Okay. It was, it had some weird error. Um, okay. So this is 1345. That’s it. Extremely high. Do we know why? This is where I’m like, okay, I see a number. I see this as an extremely high graduation rate from imported. How do I verify that that is correct? It’s an unbelievably high rate. [Michael Houck]: Well, it’s important to think about whether it’s unbelievably high or not within the context I’m pulling my Kamala Harris coconut tree out here, within the context of that specific client, right? So SMB Deal Hunter, I think they send three emails a week, just like we do for Founding Journey. So I could be wrong. Maybe sometimes it’s two, sometimes it’s three. But if you’re getting three emails a week and you’re in the ICP, your chances of opening two of those emails over 28 days, that’s like what, 12 emails, your chance of opening two of with compelling subject lines are pretty hot. So I don’t think that that’s an absurd graduation rate for SMB Deal Hunter with the engagement criteria that we have set right now. Now, if we increase the engagement criteria, and maybe this is a data point in favor of doing that, that would change. But in my opinion, no reason to necessarily increase the engagement criteria unless the metrics are bad. And if you look at the metrics, the metrics are actually quite good. The open rate is great. I don’t know how the click rate compares to her overall click rate. Let me open S&P Deal Hunter on my page here. Yeah, so her normal click rate is 1.4% and we’re getting them 5%. There is no reason in hell that we should increase that engagement criteria. [Ben Ornstein]: 100%. And I’m curious what Helen talks with you about next week. That’ll be interesting. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, for sure. [Ben Ornstein]: But, okay, right. I need I need to apply the further context. So that’s very helpful. [Michael Houck]: Thank you. Yeah, there’s there’s two sets of that context for each one, right? There’s there’s how many emails are we sending them versus the engagement criteria that we’ve set for them, right? And there’s how’s the performance metrics versus that newsletters average performance metrics. [Ben Ornstein]: Yep. Got it. Okay. That’s helpful. That’s really helpful. Okay, so that makes more sense. Sense. Now the other thing that’s odd about this is the total number of graduated and failed. Shouldn’t that add up to our total imported? [Michael Houck]: No, because there’s a bunch of them that are still going through the welcome flow. [Ben Ornstein]: Right, OK, got it. So. Wait, mean in theory? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: No. [Michael Houck]: Well, pending, plus graduated, plus failed, plus activating the ones that are in the activate segment, that should, in theory, add up to our total imported. But, you know, for all intents and purposes, all the client really cares about is how many have graduated and at what rate and how their metrics. [Ben Ornstein]: Right. Okay. Got it. OK, that clears a few things up. [Michael Houck]: That’s good. Now, one question I have here that we didn’t talk about is why is row 2 negative 195? [Ben Ornstein]: That was another question I was going to bring up. This is just the difference between last week. So there’s less in funnel, right? Is that really? [Michael Houck]: Oh, right. No, that’s that’s correct, because we’re not adding more to the email campaigns anymore. Right. That’s fine. That’s not a concern. [Ben Ornstein]: Okay. That’s why I didn’t bring that up. [Michael Houck]: Cause that’s what I thought the answer was. Yeah, no, you got it. [Ben Ornstein]: You, you, you, you have that one on point. Got it. Okay. Okay. So that’s good for those. What were the other things I wanted to cover? [Michael Houck]: Um, let me bring my book. [Ben Ornstein]: Mike, I don’t know why you can see my organization. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. Your organization’s insane. [Ben Ornstein]: I love this stuff. It’s very important for me. Um, I have each one of these. Here. Amazing. [Michael Houck]: It’s the only way I know how to operate. [Ben Ornstein]: It just, it’s that simple for me. [Michael Houck]: I used to do that when I was at, when I was working in big tech and then I became a founder and I gave up. I could imagine if I was in your shoes, I would not be able to do this. [Ben Ornstein]: I wish though. [Michael Houck]: Sometimes I really, really wish I was more organized. I need to remember like, Oh, when I see something, I have to type like the first word of that Google sheet into my Chrome bar so that it shows up list of options. [Ben Ornstein]: I do that all the time. I still do. I still do that for some things. There are some things I don’t have in a, in a, one of these folders that I just know I can find there. Um, but okay. For this one, what was the question I had? [Michael Houck]: Was it Venture Scaler? Scale Smarter is Venture Scaler. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: We should rename that. [Ben Ornstein]: You know, it’s funny. It here, but do it on the spreadsheet. Yes. Yeah, Venture Scaler is his hiring business. [Michael Houck]: Skill Smarter is the newsletter. Yep. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Got it. [Ben Ornstein]: Okay. I don’t think I had a question here. [Michael Houck]: It was Unicorner. [Ben Ornstein]: So Matt looked at these numbers and he was like, zero fail. That’s got to be incorrect. And again, I know he doesn’t the context, but maybe it would be helpful to go through this like the segments and figure out like what is going on here. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, for sure. Zero failed definitely does sound wrong. And it’s great that Aurek, is it Aurek? [Ben Ornstein]: Is that how you pronounce it? It’s great that Aurek isn’t asking questions about that, but we obviously want it right. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, look, if I just changed the failed segment in Unicorner. The only thing it’s looking at now is whether it has the subscriber tag newbie failed, and there are zero people with that tag. So maybe there is something wrong. If I go into the automations, how are we setting people to be failed? Um, let’s go to the newbie welcome sequence. Let’s scroll down to the newbiewelcome sequence, and then it’s supposed to apply the tag if they reach the end of the branches. It looks like there are a lot of people, there’s 50 people who have to receive one more email before we determine if they’re gonna fail or not. But this one, I think we just started a bit later, so people haven’t made it that far in the flow yet. I’m looking at the numbers as I go through the steps of the flow. And yeah, there’s only 50 people who’ve made it this far. So basically a lot of the people have opened the emails and met the engagement criteria, but there is a cohort that haven’t, they just haven’t made it to the end yet. [Ben Ornstein]: Okay. [Michael Houck]: That explains a lot. That makes a ton of sense. Okay. We should consider, you know, when we’re onboarding new folks that, you know, there’s going to be a lag in the number of fails, just because it takes a while for them to fail because they have to go through like 28 days of email and then wait for engagement criteria and then next email, you know, so it just takes a while. [Ben Ornstein]: Got it, got it, got it. OK, this is great. I’m getting these extra layers of context that I never had. [Michael Houck]: Sorry, we’re moving fast. [Ben Ornstein]: I forget. Oh, no, you you can only do so much right. You have to focus on other things. I get it. So, no, this is very helpful. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. [Ben Ornstein]: I think that’s all the questions I had in terms of looking at these numbers and understanding them. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. [Michael Houck]: If you want to spend more time on it, we can. I have a ghostwriting sales call in five minutes, so I’m going to do that. But if you want to hop back on later, I’m free the rest of the afternoon, so happy to chat more. [Ben Ornstein]: Cool. Okay. I guess for the last five minutes, so I can actually make progress in between, and maybe we can hop back on to chat a little bit more because I would like to understand the segments so I can when I am messing around with them. But anyway, well, yeah, we can chat about that later. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, let’s hop back on and do that. We can honestly do it in like 15 minutes of calls. I could take that long. But for do you want to talk about the the linear thing I was? Yeah, you went on so we can we can just quickly do that too. Yes, let’s do that. Okay, so for this one, for ad company name. Let’s take a look at this together. So priority is low. It shouldn’t be low. It should be nothing. [Ben Ornstein]: Oh, I put that because you said add low priority to this one. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Oh, sorry. [Michael Houck]: I was just saying that this one is not really that high of a priority. So the chances this one will be included in next sprint when we actually ruined the sprint is pretty low. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Understood. [Ben Ornstein]: Got it. Okay. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Um, okay. [Michael Houck]: Add company name section in onboarding. User wants to put their company name in billing. This doesn’t show up on the pricing page where they input their credit card to subscribe. [Ben Ornstein]: Maybe I could reword this or make it more clear. [Michael Houck]: Um, yeah, I mean, I think, I think it’s clear. It’s just, it’s a little, I don’t know. [Ben Ornstein]: Too many words. I think. [Michael Houck]: It’s not exactly clear what we want the engineer to do, right? Sorry, go ahead. No, sorry. I got you off. [Ben Ornstein]: No, it’s okay. [Michael Houck]: I guess it says add company name section onboarding. So it is clear, but onboarding itself is pretty vague. It’s like five different steps in onboarding, right? So I would say something like add optional company name during payment or something like that. [Ben Ornstein]: That field is what I was looking for. I could picture it. I couldn’t really like, so add optional company name field in on pricing page. [Michael Houck]: I would call it payment screen, but pricing page is fine too. Payment screen. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: That’s good. [Ben Ornstein]: Yeah. Okay. That so right. I can understand those two felt like, so the top one, as you said, and what the engineers need to actually And then the bottom would be like a little bit more context. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: And you, you can be wordy in the bottom. Like you can write an essay in the bottom. If you want, the engineers will actually appreciate that. The key is, is just, you know, just being, being clear. So they don’t come to you with questions afterwards. So a user wants to put their company name in billing. This doesn’t show up on the pricing page. So I think that sentence is a little, a little clear. This doesn’t show up. What doesn’t show up? I would frame this like a user wants to attach their company name to their payments. There’s no way for them to do this on the pricing page. And then I would add another sentence, which is similar to what you had, which is like, when they input their credit card, we should have an optional field that lets them input their company name. Pretty similar, honestly. It’s just the way it’s worded, I think, just knowing how the engineers will read things. Yeah. Yeah. OK. I think I understand, like, OK, that makes sense. [Ben Ornstein]: Oh, and by the way, the labels I put were just onboarding and features, since it doesn’t exist yet. [Michael Houck]: Oh, right. Yeah. I would add payments to this because it’s related to payments. And then size. Yeah. I would honestly say extra small. I don’t think that’s what I had it as originally. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Ben Ornstein]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: Honestly, the engineers are going to go and change the sizes anyway, but just good for us to have an estimation. So yeah, it looks good otherwise. Got it. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. [Ben Ornstein]: While you’re on your call, I’ll go ahead and and go through more of these. I think I get it now. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: I feel good kind of turning you loose. If you want to do a batch while I’m on this call and then we can talk through more in 15, that’s fine. [Ben Ornstein]: Awesome. [Michael Houck]: Sounds good. Cool. See you then.