- Duration: 29 min
- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01JHGGEA7GDRKZAAHSER7DNN4G (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JHGGEA7GDRKZAAHSER7DNN4G)
Transcript
[Michael Houck]: Happy Monday, what’s going on? How was your weekend? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Pretty good. [Ben Ornstein]: I wish I got more progress done on this command bar stuff and maybe I’m like way overthinking it maybe I am I must be way overthinking this. Cause if you’re like, should not take very long, maybe I am thinking something completely different. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: My, my, my read on this is that because it’s like in the product customer facing and you’re normally sort of behind the scenes when it comes to the megaphone stuff that you’re just, you’re overthinking it a little bit. Um, I don’t know what’s maybe, maybe I’m wrong. [Ben Ornstein]: What’s the, what do you feel like is, Is big about it so If I look at the linear task It says like create new user experience for the new broadcast model so if I’m going in the product and I’m logged into yours right now, so I’m looking in to the like create a new broadcast and am I Am I doing the entire experience from okay, here’s the dashboard here what it should look like like here’s the next thing, the entire process from like zero to finish and like redoing the user experience or recreating. Maybe I’m just completely misreading and understanding this task in general. Maybe. Yeah, I’m not really sure what you mean by the new user experience. [Michael Houck]: Maybe the word new user experience is throwing off. I’m not asking you to redesign like the UX of the product or how people interact with the product. All we’re doing is going into command bar and when somebody loads page X, have a product tour with these three or these four or these five steps show up. And those steps should probably each be able to be written out in at most a couple sentences. Okay. So I think that maybe it is a word new user experience making you think this is more about like, like almost the design or way someone interacts with the product. This is new user experiences like NUX is like what people say when they’re talking about what do people see when they hit this page? Or in general, what do people see when they first sign up for the app, right? So post onboarding, what’s the new user experience? That is this product tour that helps them navigate this page and their dashboard for the first time and all that stuff. It’s not changing how the product is set up. [Ben Ornstein]: Okay, that makes it much easier more clear. Maybe I should have, well, I should have asked earlier, I guess, but that, that makes sense. So when I hit the new broadcast page, where can I put the tool tips? [Michael Houck]: Where can I put the product or what are the steps? Like where do you place them? What are they? And then the text copy for, for what they actually say and recommend. All right, let me add that real quick. Sorry for the confusing terminology. I should have clarified what new user experience. [Ben Ornstein]: certain things where it’s like, you probably think, oh, he knows what I mean when I say this. If I was more in the product world, I probably would. [Michael Houck]: I shouldn’t assume that that’s that’s as much on me as it is on you. But it’s cool. I don’t think that this will take a crazy long time. Obviously, there’s a decent amount of them. The most important one that we have to get right, and they’ll probably be more detailed than the rest of them is literally the new user experience, completing onboarding, landing on the main dashboard for the first time. That one we need live. The other ones with the maybe exception of inner circle will be smaller is my guess. [Ben Ornstein]: Got it, okay. Now that I can actually envision beginning to end here, I think this is much more clear. So it’s like where to add the tool tips, why we add them in this specific spot? Yeah. [Michael Houck]: The way I would think about it is like, write a bullet point list of like, if somebody lands here for the first time, they’ve never used Megafone before, maybe they don’t even know that much about creators or content growth or anything like that. It’s the people who ask you those questions in intercom who are like, I don’t even really know what this is. It just looks like it can help me, right? If we’re designing onboarding the document for them. What are the header rows in that document? And then how does that map to the way the dashboard is laid out? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yep. [Ben Ornstein]: OK, cool. All right. I’m feeling better about this. I was thinking about this all weekend. [Michael Houck]: I could tell you were stressed if I saw it on your face. [Ben Ornstein]: It’s all good. No worries. Yeah. OK. I’m feeling better about that. That’s good. I can make that happen. [Michael Houck]: That’s doable. OK. Let’s touch base on that on Wednesday. And we can, you know, you don’t need to have it done by Wednesday, but I just wanna see like, hey, are we heading in the right direction? What questions do you have? [Ben Ornstein]: Things like that. Yeah. And now I have access to like a live account where I can map an actual live URL to. That also helped significantly. I think I won’t have too many questions on this. So, well, but I won’t say, 100% won’t. Thank you for that. I think we can move on to the newsletter stuff now. [Michael Houck]: Cool. Okay. Yeah, I think that’s probably all the megaphone stuff for right now. Well, okay. Actually, before we move on, pass megaphone then. Megaphone growth. So we’re gonna talk about the PLG stuff with Max later this week. And then we also wanna start running the ads for viral examples. Because you’re probably going to do a mix of the email growth and a little bit of paid ads for viral examples. Probably not a crazy high budget, but put some behind it. We’ll see, though. Matt may just want to add 100,000 subscribers to viral examples, in which case, problem solved. That’s true, yeah. But I got to talk to him about that this week. But yeah, if we don’t do that, then we will put some budget behind paid ads. Um with max out I can just show you How to manage these paid ad campaigns in facebook ad manager. It’s really it’s really straightforward. Um Because we’re not going to be changing that much all we’ll be doing is like adding new creative Sometimes and you can interface with the guy on upwork who makes it for us like it’s it’s pretty straightforward. Um But that might be something we talk about next week. Um After we determine whether we’re going to do cody not the cold email, I keep calling it cold email, but you know what I mean, the email growth stuff for it. Speaking of which, we’re also talking today and tomorrow about a name. So we’ll have a name for it soon. Oh, cool. That’s cool. Building a domain, set up the actual LLC, all that fun stuff will be done. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: All the fun stuff. Nice. Cool. [Michael Houck]: But anyway, yeah, so I just want to mentally go through that before we move on from Megafon to make sure there’s nothing urgent for right now, but I don’t think there is. [Ben Ornstein]: Cool. I’ve done Facebook campaigns before at my first startup, again, extremely basic level of like creating different ad sets. And so like, I’m familiar with the UI, which is a little bit, I don’t know how much has changed since, I don’t know, it’s 2021, but at least I have some background in that, but sounds good. [Michael Houck]: Okay, I mean, that sounds good then. It’ll be easy to pick up. But again, we might not invest a ton of budget, might not invest any budget, but my hypothesis is we’ll invest some. Sounds good. Okay, before we dig into the newsletter stuff, which is obviously a big topic, is there any other smaller stuff that we should knock out and get out of the way first? [Ben Ornstein]: Well, in terms of the newsletter stuff today, the newsletter growth stuff today, I think you are correct. In that all of the graduated numbers being less this week than last week, the only logical thing that makes sense is because of that change we made in the failed segment. Because the graduated segment excludes anyone who has the failed tag. [Michael Houck]: And so if we erroneously did not tag people with failed, but then did tag them with failed, they would now not show up in that segment. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Right. [Ben Ornstein]: And I think for all of the ones that I investigated, because now I actually understand the segments and I can logically run through, okay, this is excluded here for this reason, here’s where I move depending to activate it for this way, all that stuff. I at least higher level understand that. So when I’m going through all these to see what could have happened, and I did update the failed segment for all of them, except for scale smarter, just because the setup was different. And I sent a message that was way too long to you, but it said, I updated all of them, so I think you’re correct in all of them. AI2 report, the graduated number was cut by almost 50%, which is not great. And it could be right, but it’s a massive drop off. So yeah, I’m not totally sure on that number. [Michael Houck]: That was the only one that changed like unbelievably Let me ask you this I’m opening a tool report right now. My computer is a little slow. Um, let me see this How do the graduated metrics look the open rate click rate unsubscribe rate compared to last week? [Ben Ornstein]: Uh similar on all on all of them That’s interesting. The only thing that changed for ai tool report the unsubscribe went back up to that 17% that it did two weeks ago. For graduated? Oh, failed. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, no, graduate, graduate, yes. That’s weird. Let me confirm that. I see that it’s back up to 17.9%. That doesn’t make a ton of sense. Man, I can’t wait till we get the API thing set up. Because it kills me. [Ben Ornstein]: I know, I know. [Michael Houck]: The fields themselves look right. OK, so I think that the thing we need to debug is whether we, OK, if you look at AI2 report, it doesn’t have that many failed either. It only has 200 failed. [Ben Ornstein]: Which I actually didn’t even notice that, which that can’t be right either. That number should be much higher. [Michael Houck]: We can’t have removed 1500 or so from graduated and then not be being added to failed. So there’s something. Yeah, yeah, there’s something wrong there. Okay, we don’t need to debug this live on the call. I think I have to catch up on a bunch of stuff after this call. So can you take the lead on doing that? And then we can touch base later today. Like before the end of the day, and see where we’re at. And if I need to do stuff tonight, I’ll do it. But I’m behind on some other time-sensitive stuff that I have to do first. [Ben Ornstein]: Got it. AI2 report is really the only one outside of ScaleSmarter that I’m concerned with. [Michael Houck]: So I’ll part. [Ben Ornstein]: What’s the issue for ScaleSmarter? [Michael Houck]: Wait, maybe it wasn’t ScaleSmarter. [Ben Ornstein]: Sorry, the performers. And the reason I was concerned about that is failed didn’t increase at all, but neither did graduated. Does that make sense? [Michael Houck]: Or because we only added like 69 subscribers last week or whatever. And so they might be still pending. I don’t know. I don’t have access to the performance from my account. So I can’t easily see it. Log out and log into arenas. But I mean, the other ones you feel like are good. I thought you were concerned about the other ones too. [Ben Ornstein]: That was after I investigated the setups and everything, given the failed. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Got it. [Michael Houck]: So that’s why I’m not concerned about the rest. [Ben Ornstein]: Did the number of failed go up? Like in the rest of them? Yeah. I believe so. I’m going to do SMB increased by 11. And oh, I didn’t even notice this. The failed increased by 11, but the graduated decreased by 11. [Michael Houck]: Perfect. Perfect. Okay. Yeah, that gives me some level of confidence. I mean, it’s kind of weird because you would also have expected probably, well, okay, maybe it’s not so. So great. Um, that that looks good, right. But the issue is that since we added subscribers to SMB deal hunter, in theory, like, it’s not like nobody graduated in SMB deal hunter last week. So failed should have gone up by more than 11. So maybe there’s some issue with failed, not like, okay, multiple potential issues. One failed isn’t correctly finding everybody who should be failed. Right? So it’s not it’s not picking them up for whatever reason. Are you frozen? [Ben Ornstein]: Yeah, you’re frozen. [Michael Houck]: you. [Michael Houck]: Check it. [Michael Houck]: Are you back? No, you’re not back. I think I’m back. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: You’re back, but you’re very slow. [Ben Ornstein]: Is that on your end or mine? [Michael Houck]: Nah, it’s on my end. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Oh, you’re back. You’re good. [Ben Ornstein]: It’s because I opened like six different Google… When I’m in Google Meet and I open something else, it destroys my computer. I don’t know what it is. It’s very odd, but so I was looking at all those different Google sheets. I opened like three or four and yeah, it was bad. [Michael Houck]: That was on me. All good. Okay, so what was I saying? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Oh yeah, potential issues. [Michael Houck]: So one potential issue is that the way the failed segment is set up is not correct. Capturing everybody who should be failed. Potential issue number two is that the graduated segment is missing people who should be graduated, and we like filtered them out for some reason. And potential issue number three is that it’s a leaky bucket, and somewhere along the road, people get lost from the process and aren’t being picked up anywhere. Those are the three things I can think of [Ben Ornstein]: Okay, yeah, I’ll do another deep dive on everything. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, it’s tricky. It is. I’m so used to being able to solve things independently. [Ben Ornstein]: So like being able to, or not being able to, being forced to being like, yeah, how I can’t figure this out. Like, it’s so frustrating. No, it’s all good. [Michael Houck]: It’s all good. It out. Okay, so you’ll take a pass at that. We’ll check in at the end of the day. I’ll look into it tonight if I have to. It’s fine. No big deal. Don’t worry about it. This is new and it’s buggy and it’s weird. What else? What else is going on? What else is top of mind? Or is it really just that? [Ben Ornstein]: Yeah, I mean, that top of mind it’s it’s that stuff it’s uh getting it was those two because the other two in terms of like uh I’m looking at my to do um the 50 ideas for long form videos [Michael Houck]: I’m at like I have like 30 30 is good 30 is good you don’t forget the 50 it’s okay um get as many as you can if you have time get more I’m gonna do the same but um 30 gives us to get backlogged I really just want make sure that we got all of these that Max could find too, since he’s obviously not going to be around. I think this week is his last week. Wait, that doesn’t seem right. I think he has two more weeks. [Ben Ornstein]: If you said it was three weeks, then I think he has two more. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, he said the 27th is the first day that he’s not here. So there’s one more week. Yeah. But either way, I wanted to make sure that we went through this with him. Because you and I can keep doing it on an ongoing basis. Basis. So, okay. Cool. Anything else? Yeah. [Ben Ornstein]: The other thing I was going to say is like, yeah, I’ve been trying to think about like where it makes sense to either shift my focus or where to like put me in terms of replacing Max. And I’m still like, Like, should I take the ads process? Maybe, but I don’t know if that means relinquishing something. Yeah, I mean, I think what you and I should do is, I mean, probably like today, let’s get the reporting thing done. [Michael Houck]: But then later this week, we should jam on like, all right, here’s exactly I mean, you have that Google Sheet, I actually haven’t looked at that in like a week or two. So I don’t know if you’re still updating it. But I was I was looking at it very relatively regularly. You have that Google Sheet, which is like where or you’ve been spending your time. Okay, so I’ll just take a look through there and then maybe we jam on it later this week and be like, all right, how do we prioritize your time to make sure that it’s most effective between all these different things you could be doing plus the new things potentially. I think what is probably gonna make the most sense is to bring on somebody part-time specifically founding journey sponsorships. The reason for that is because if this new co is successful, we’re going to need multiple people in that role full time across various media properties eventually. So it would be good to have somebody dedicated to it, to learn the ropes, learn how we do things for founding journey. But I think a lot of the other stuff could make sense to go to you instead of someone new. So since I think you probably have more overlap, and we pick it up faster, is my guess, than someone new that has to join the company and figure everything out. But you have a limited amount of time. So we need to make sure that we’re prioritizing right. So let me take a look at that sheet again, and then we can jam later this week on sort of a time prioritization process or whatever. [Ben Ornstein]: Cool. That works. [Michael Houck]: OK, let me write that down. That sounds like a plan. And then, yeah, I don’t think anything else urgent from my side. Let me look at my to-do list really quick. Yeah, I got the content stuff. I’m going to do the intro for Saw Hill. Going to record that tomorrow morning. [Ben Ornstein]: So that was everything I was going to mention cool. Okay, and then Like the last one this one’s pretty much done. I just gotta have them merge the once that the intro is edited Merge it with the rest of the show. Um update time codes and just upload everything but um Cool. Oh, it’s not on my to-do list, but I am going to go through the process and I already asked rena what she does in terms of uploading the podcast like what her process is, um, so I can help her update it when we do this with the new podcast, when we upload to Spotify creators instead. [Michael Houck]: Yes. We’ll make sure there’s no kinks there. Let me know if you need anything from me about access or decisions or anything like that. But sounds good. Let’s just do that tomorrow before we get to Thursday. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yep. [Ben Ornstein]: That’s on my to-do. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I’m going through my My stuff, I think that’s it. All the other stuff is just stuff I’m blocking other people on. So I need to get that done. But yeah, OK. So just loop me in on the reporting stuff later if needed. We can hop back on a call, no problem. And we’ll get it figured out. I can’t believe how annoying this is and how, like, I don’t know. It seems so simple, but it has really been a convoluted process for you, me, Reena, everybody. Very surprising. I don’t know. Maybe we’re just dumb. I don’t know. [Ben Ornstein]: I don’t know. I wish there was a way that we have like a dashboard that showed. Okay. Yeah, eventually. I know. This is the very, very early days. Yeah. This is this is where we’re not even, you know, we’re not even fetal yet. [Michael Houck]: We’re like, yeah, it’s very very, very early. But yeah, we’ll have a dashboard where we can literally just press a button and automatically send X number of subscribers into their beehive and we’ll see how they’re pacing and all that stuff. [Ben Ornstein]: Right now we’re hacking it together, but yeah, we’ll get there. Yeah. And then what this call was actually supposed to be for was the process for writing the document for like the newsletter growth process. [Michael Houck]: Right. Well, let’s make sure we have the process settled first before we write the docs. So I’ll move this call as it was meant to be. I’ll move it to, I guess, I guess Wednesday. [Ben Ornstein]: What’s your schedule like on Wednesday? But now the only call I have is that PLG call. [Michael Houck]: I actually, I can’t move this for some reason. [Ben Ornstein]: I don’t know why. Oh, maybe it’s on the owner. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, you should change your settings to give permission to move for guests. But yeah, it looks like you’re the owner. [Ben Ornstein]: So I’m going to set that as a default now. It was the only one that modify event wasn’t checked. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. Okay, so maybe I can’t move it now. Let me refresh my screen here. No, I still can’t move it. It’s okay. Do you wanna put that at 2.30 Eastern time on Wednesday? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Done. Okay, cool. [Ben Ornstein]: Then we’ll touch base on that then. [Michael Houck]: Until then, let’s just make sure we have the process process all set. And I still have a message out to Beehive. I haven’t heard back yet, but I should soon. [Ben Ornstein]: Got it. OK, so I’ll dive back. The first thing that I’m going to do until I’m going to solve, look at the next three, four hours if I can’t do it, is finding what is going on with these damn segments. [Michael Houck]: And then maybe one thing that I’ve done before when I was setting these up and looking for bugs initially was, excuse me, was literally writing out like a decision tree of like what happens. And that way I see like, oh, we had a case for one time where people were going nowhere, right? Like, oh, they need to go somewhere, so they need to change the conditions or something. So it might be helpful to just grab a pen and paper and do that as you go along. [Ben Ornstein]: I’m going to try that. That’s a good idea. And if I do figure that out, then I’ll go and try to do the Nookstone. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, and if not, no worries. We can get back to that tomorrow or Wednesday. [Ben Ornstein]: Newsletter growth, highest priority. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, highest priority. We just need the Nuxt stuff at least for the new user dashboard, like landing on the dashboard and for inner circle. We at least need those done by next week, by whenever we launch. So the other ones, if it happens after, it’s not a huge deal, but I think we’ll have bandwidth to get them all done this week. [Ben Ornstein]: We’ll see. Yeah, now that I know what to do, I don’t imagine it taking a crazy amount of time. [Michael Houck]: Cool. OK, man. Well, let me know. We can hop back on. If you’re getting to the end of the day and you’re like, I need to eat dinner, then let’s just talk for 15 minutes. And if it’s not solved yet, then I’ll dive in afterwards. Sounds good. [Ben Ornstein]: Thank you.