- Duration: 37 min
- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01JHJT8EG8BXCYSDXA0RFBM2ST (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JHJT8EG8BXCYSDXA0RFBM2ST)
Transcript
[Jacob Shipley]: Yo, what’s up, dude? Not much. How are you doing? I’m good, man. [Michael Houck]: So you were in South America. [Jacob Shipley]: Are you back in the States now or what are you up to? No, I feel like I just got here. [Michael Houck]: I’m here for like two and a half months. Oh, really? I was in Chile and now I’m in Argentina for the next like six weeks. [Jacob Shipley]: Okay, cool. People there just like wanted to get away? [Michael Houck]: No, I mean, there’s great wine country in both countries. So right now I’m in Mendoza, which is like the Malbec capital of the world. And then this weekend, I’m doing Buenos Aires. And then I’m going into Patagonia for like a month, basically, to spiritual recharge, you know? Yes, and I go to Brazil for for that before I come back to the States. [Jacob Shipley]: Oh, dang, dude, that’s wild. Exciting. It’s it’s it’s pretty fun. [Michael Houck]: Get to check out new places. I like Chile a lot. I would go back to Chile. [Jacob Shipley]: OK, I have a buddy that’s Mormon and he served his two year mission in like the very southern part of Chile. So obviously like that’s like a different experience, but he loved it. Like the area was like, you know, gorgeous. Scenery and just love the people. And so that’s awesome. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I didn’t get far north or far south in Chile, but I was just sort of in like the middle area near like Santiago and Valparaiso. But it was a beautiful country and surprisingly modern. Enjoyed it. Nice, man. [Jacob Shipley]: Well, yeah, I wanted to touch base on a couple things as far as I mean, like the ghostwriting stuff. I feel like the stuff with Brindis is going really well like her account is I mean poppin and then no it’s It’s it’s good. It’s really good. The only caveat is it’s just like the review process is not ideal, but it’s also like well, you know, what are you gonna do? But performance is good and he says he’s not getting like crazy viral stuff like Brindis is but he said he’s getting inquiries like inbound leads. So it’s like, well, it doesn’t really matter if you’re going viral, if you’re making money, you know? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, his primary goal is to grow the business. So as long as he’s getting leads, then I think he’ll be happy. You know, the process, I think it’s just we got to deal with it for these fintech companies, you know? [Jacob Shipley]: Yeah, no, absolutely. Yeah, so that’s going well. Let’s see. I don’t think I sent this to you. I sent it to Blake, but one thing that’s really interesting that I’ve been testing is searching the client’s niche or industry in Read.AI, and then sorting by the most viral posts of all time, screenshotting that, and then giving a take as the client. I did that for a couple of years, and I’ve been doing that for a couple of years now. For rendis for like somebody said, it was like the, my boss said, I’m not allowed to work from home. So I took teams and stuff off my phone so that I can’t work from home anymore. You know, like one of those kinds of stories. Um, I just screenshotted that and shared it and that one did. I’m going to find the numbers on it. It was pretty bonkers. [Michael Houck]: I was just talking with her last night. She She wants to do a newsletter, too. [Jacob Shipley]: So I don’t know when it’s gonna start but Yeah, she’s a she’s pretty pumped about that well, yeah 1734 likes on that But I think it’s a cool format that we can test out for other clients to have screenshots, because it’s like you let Read.AI do the work of finding what goes viral, and then you’re going to capitalize on that. So something to be thinking about, I guess. [Michael Houck]: You could also do that on Twitter, because you know how to use Twitter’s advanced search features? Right, yeah, yeah. Like the min faves equals this number, or whatever. They have some powerful stuff there. You should totally share that in the Writer’s Room channel, and let the rest of the team know that they should be that too, because I agree format makes total sense. [Jacob Shipley]: Okay, cool. I will do that. And then for asking you about your personal newsletter, so I’d love to just like hear your two cents on this, you know, you mentioned the sub stack recommendation engine. I’m only at like nine or 10,000 subscribers. So, you know, kind of a different level, but do you feel like it’s been worth your to be publishing to both Beehive and Substack? [Michael Houck]: Well, it’s not really my time. I just pay Rina, my assistant, to do it. So if you have an assistant, then why not? But if it’s going to take you even like 20, 30 minutes a week or something like that, it’s probably not worth it until you would get up to like 100K subscribers or more. I remember when we were doing it for a long time, I would get like less than an average of one new subscriber per day that way. So it, the recommendation engine is, it definitely is a sort of the rich get richer type scenario. [Jacob Shipley]: Totally. Okay. And so are your, is your list on Substack and your list on Beehive completely, those are separate audiences? [Michael Houck]: No. So, uh, Rena then, um, every week, I forget what day every week she takes this from each and reports them to each other. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. [Jacob Shipley]: So are they getting two, like when you send out a newsletter, are they getting one from, like, how do you determine that? [Michael Houck]: Substack lets you post or email and post. So we just don’t. Okay. [Jacob Shipley]: So you never email from Substack, you just post? We did, we did once and it was crazy. [Michael Houck]: So many people who like forgot they were on our Substack list or got multiple emails, like they unsubscribed from the Substack one in particular. Lost like, I don’t know, maybe 1000 subscribers that day. [Jacob Shipley]: So yeah. Interesting. Okay. Okay, cool. I mean, yeah, that makes sense. But then you’re now you’re at like, so when you started on substack, you didn’t import the beehive list. [Michael Houck]: I did. Yeah, I did. At the time, I was doing the second thing since like, I don’t know, maybe day one of the newsletter. It’s just been something we’ve done in the just for like, I think over two years. [Jacob Shipley]: So I don’t know when exactly it started. It might’ve been the first issue. Okay, cool. Okay. That’s interesting. I mean, thanks for connecting me with the people from Kik. I’m gonna try to get that going sooner rather than later, because doing the QuickBooks is like, yeah, we’re dookers. [Michael Houck]: QuickBooks is the worst, and all the accountants and bookkeepers want to use QuickBooks. And what I’ve found with Kik is that, I mean, at least at the size of the business that I think, you know, we would both are both our business that we would fall into. You don’t really need like a formal bookkeeper or anything. So something like Kik that has like some simple automations and AI stuff does the job, you know? So yeah, it’s great. And their team is super friendly too. [Jacob Shipley]: Okay, cool. Any updates or I’m just scroll. This is kind of bouncing around. I’m just scrolling up through my list of questions. So I know at one point said Brindis was considering moving to three times per week. Are we still holding on that? [Michael Houck]: She said she wanted to wait till after the holidays. And then when I messaged her yesterday about that and the newsletter, she was more excited about the newsletter. So that’s probably what we’ll do. But you know, if we keep seeing great Result maybe it also goes to three times a week I don’t know some people feel weird about three times a week, which to me is crazy. [Jacob Shipley]: Uh, but you know, it’s okay yeah, I mean Well, yeah, that was one of the issues with jade was that it was she was just like very adamant about like posting frequency of like I don’t want to overwhelm my it’s just yeah a fundamental misunderstanding I think of how the algorithm works, but Again, I want to apologize on that. Like I know my track record was not perfect on that client either. So sorry for any like, you know, hiccups that caused man. [Michael Houck]: No, it’s okay. She was she was difficult in the first place. Obviously, you know, there were a couple little things, but nothing that I think damaged the relationship. I think she just is how she is. I talked to her pretty extensively on a call, like I mentioned, and then we emailed back and forth a bit. And she wasn’t even willing to pay the second part of the 30 days notice. And so I was basically like, yeah, look, maybe this isn’t best fit. Um, so that’s just how we left it, uh, like two weeks ago or so. So don’t worry about it. You know, some clients are just tough to deal with and, um, it’s all good. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: No worries. Cool. [Jacob Shipley]: Um, all right, let’s see. And then, uh, yeah, go ahead. [Michael Houck]: One thing I want to talk to you about maybe not right now, but maybe in like a month or two, depending on how, uh, some growth things go. I want to start posting regularly on LinkedIn again myself, and probably also like copy pasting that to threads and sub stack as well. We have the big readership on sub stack might as well use it. Totally. I don’t want to work with you on that out of anyone. [Jacob Shipley]: So no, of course, man. [Michael Houck]: I don’t know what the timing to be, but I’ll keep you in the loop. [Jacob Shipley]: Okay, cool. Yeah, I’d be super excited about that, dude. Great. Yeah, it’d be really fun. And I was gonna ask to the Okay, I just love like, as much detail as you’re comfortable sharing about what you said in the writers room the other day about this new like, email newsletter, magic thing you created, like, just super curious on that sounds fascinating. It’s crazy, man. [Michael Houck]: My friend slash, I guess, co founder on this, Matt is, we’ve been trying to work together for like nine to 12 months now on something. Basically, he has like very, very advanced data scraping capabilities. And also, he’s just really good at cold email, too. So we’re using that for a while. But basically, we’ve created a database of like over 200 million emails. And we’ve enriched those emails with data about who they follow on social media, what posts they engage with, what’s in the bios. So it’s like very, very interesting data set. And then we’ve turned that into sort of structured data that we can write queries against and pull different groups and things like that. And so it’s very powerful. And we think the first obvious way to use that that’s hot right now is to help people grow their newsletters really quickly. Because basically in the US at least, and the international is a little fuzzier, but it’s still on the right side of things. You can email anyone, right? There’s no laws against sending an email to somebody. And so as long as there’s an address that they can contact you at and an unsubscribe link in the email. And so what we was, well, Beehive has that stuff automatically. You put an address in, create your account, there’s unsubscribe link at the bottom. So what that means is we can effectively use Beehive to email anybody from branded emails, and we can let them unsubscribe if they don’t want to get any more, basically. And we have this huge data set of people who we can hyper target based on what concepts they’re interested in, you know, more than just their job title that you can get through like traditional data brokers and things like that. So the idea is basically use all my contacts to find newsletter operators and startup founders. And for the newsletter operators, just send them some subscribers at like a cheap rate. Cause we already have the data so we can underprice compared to paid ads. And for startup founders do the same as like lead generation for them, but also write a newsletter for them so that they, you know, they’re actually putting content out there. Building an email list. We think the sales pitch is pretty strong. And 100% of the people I’ve talked to have been interested. So we’ve been doing a pilot for like, two months now, and 100% of the pilot customers want to renew, which is great. So we’re putting together a landing page, we’re putting together like a corporate entity and everything this week. And then the idea is to start selling. Selling this to startup founders, basically bringing in a ton of cash through ghostwriting and through this growth method together. And then, you know, it’s a high margin business, basically, because we have the data, we don’t need to do anything. And so then the idea is, well, what do we do with all that cash? And we think that the best plan is to basically just keep leveraging that but for ourselves and basically build a media company where we can spin up any newsletter in niche, always write subject matter expert or, you know, give us feedback on the content or even write the content themselves in some cases, if they’re good at it. And either continue to own those and sell sponsorships and products to them, or build them up to like a million subscribers and then sell to companies. So we think that it’s a pretty ambitious thing. And obviously, you know, you’re building on newsletter So there’s some level of platform risk, less than social media, but still some. But we haven’t run into any roadblocks so far and we have happy customers and we have a great team of folks who are here to help out. So we feel like this can be the kind of thing that is like a very, very large business in a short period of time without needing to raise money from investors, which is really exciting. [Jacob Shipley]: Yeah, that’s really cool. How do you get around like Behav’s terms of service where you import subscribers and it says like they have knowingly opted in, like, what’s your strategy on that? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I mean, I’m an investor in beehive. So I can just text Tyler and be like, yo, like, you know, your system find us for something. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah, that’s cool. [Michael Houck]: Corruption helps sometimes, I guess. Yeah, yeah, exactly. [Jacob Shipley]: Okay, that makes sense. Because like, so you’re saying like, it might be against terms of service, but legally, you can just send them emails and if they don’t want it, they can unsubscribe. [Michael Houck]: Correct. And in the long run, if we ever run into issues with beehive, we’ll have enough cash by the time they like really notice that we’re here is and decide to play hardball with us. Yeah, we’ll have enough cash, we can literally just build an email sending protocol ourselves. So you know, again, there’s roadblocks to None that we found so far. So the idea is let’s just keep rolling with it. [Jacob Shipley]: That’s awesome, dude. I know we’re at like the 15 minute mark. Do you have… I got time. I’m good. Okay. I was going to ask you too, I think what I originally messaged you about was just like, I’ve been talking to Blake about it too, of like, just kind of racking my brain of, you know, have built this not huge, but I’d say like halfway decent following on LinkedIn of like 40, 45,000 followers. Translated that to nine, 10,000 email addresses that, and it’s all social media marketers in some form or fashion. So some are startup founders, some are entry level social media coordinators, some are the social media director at Walmart down the road in Bentonville. So very, very, or agency, very broad, but all around that focus of social media marketing. And I know there’s a path, like I fully believe The current assets I have, there’s a path to sustainable recurring revenue that I could live off of It’s just, I don’t know what that is. I’ve tried several things, but really, maybe my problem is I’ve tried too many things and haven’t stuck with anything for long enough, or maybe I just haven’t tried the right thing. But we’re just curious. I know you are kind of the king of building an audience and leveraging it for your business. I love your two cents if you’re willing to part with it. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, of course, man. So, I mean, at 10,000 subscribers, you’re at a point where if you’re selling the right thing, you probably can live off of it. Obviously, if you grow that by a few X, it’d be easier to do so. I would say the first question is, when you say live off of it, want your lifestyle to be because you could probably easily live off of it if you’re doing like consulting or advising or things like that, right? But I assume you don’t want to just be selling your time and probably end up even with a more chaotic schedule than you have right now. Is that fair to say? [Jacob Shipley]: Yeah. I mean, I don’t want to do exclusively consulting advice. I mean, I do quite a bit and I’m okay with that. But yeah, I wouldn’t want to do that for 60 hours a week, you know, but yeah, I’m gonna be in the product portfolio Yeah, I mean, it’s a good way to start That because that’s literally what I did before [Michael Houck]: we even sold any sponsorships in founding journey back when it was Cox newsletter The first thing I did after leaving launch house was I’m our list was like Around the same size actually 9,000 maybe a little bit less the first thing I did was make it very, very clear to everybody who was opening the emails that I was looking for some advising clients. And so, excuse me, we were lucky and we started signing sponsors only like a month and a half or so after that, maybe less. And that, you know, rates were really high at the time. This was like Q1, 2023 before there were newsletters. At least with this like new wave. So CPMs were like ridiculously high. It didn’t really make sense. And we were able to use that then to build some lead magnets that blew up our subscriber count when we posted about the post went viral. And so then sponsorship money went up and it just kind of was this like vicious cycle. But if I was in your spot now, I would say, yeah, probably, you know, I mean, the work you’re doing high ticket work too, right? So stuff like that can help. High ticket work for a few clients. And then, I mean, have you talked to the audience? [Jacob Shipley]: Do you know sort of what they’re looking for and what have you tried so far? Yeah, I am selling sponsorships, like, which is good, you know, like the social media strategy summit is like a virtual conference that they’re willing to pay a very high price because their conference ticket is a very high price. And so that makes sense if they pay me a thousand, but they make, you know, 2000, they don’t really care what the CPM is. You know, it’s like, it’s as long as they’re always positive, they’re cool. So I’ve done that. Let’s see. I mean, I’ve also just put out like, I’d say probably not as explicitly as I should have, like looking for like consulting clients. I’ve tried like a premium version of the newsletter in a different capacities one would be like we started like a private community on like through slack but it was like the idea was like a workspace six or foxwell digital for organic social right so like a very like application only high level you know low acceptance rate and that was just it was I would say it was successful but it was just hard to to scale um especially when like we wanted it to be the people that get in the community are people that have proven they’re experts in the field of organic social. But as a result, that means like we were turning away 90% of people that wanted to give us their credit card number, you know, which was not ideal. And now I just have like a premium option on beehive where it’s, I’m just building like a database of like case studies of something like, I think right now I’ve got like 50 or something, but I’m adding another one, at least one a week. So the idea would be like, you can filter by, I want to see how food and beverage brands have grown on Instagram, or I want to see how, um, you know, higher ed has grown on Facebook. And then you can find case studies based on that. Um, and again, like it’s, you know, 30 some subscribers on that. So I mean, it’s not like that’s a pretty low conversion rate considering 10,000, you know, subscribers on the, on the big list. [Michael Houck]: Have you been pushing it? Because I’m hearing what you said so far. And I would say, yeah, the paid community route is tough, especially now. I feel like people are sort of inundated with paid communities. Even mine, we don’t push the community aspect of the premium offer. We push the case study library, actually. OK, interesting. And yeah, so I would say the community is tough. If you want to do like a, well, maybe something you could do. I don’t know how this would work. Or your audience, as well as it would for a founder audience, but maybe it still would. You could do high-level masterminds and targeted discussions for that sort of premium group, but it’s also more open to the sort of more entry-level people who want it. And you can say, oh, we’ve gotten 50 people who want to do this. And based on their experience, we think that there’s really two or three tiers within here. You don’t say that to them, but you group them that way. So that’s something you could do. Sponsorships at 10K are tougher than they used to be. I would say you probably want to get to 2025 before they’re really going to start coming in regularly. But yeah, tell me about the case studies and how you’re positioning that. [Jacob Shipley]: Yeah. It’s going yeah, I have been promoting it. I’m sending like the I’m sending it to the The I have kind of two separate lists not two separate lists. I have one list That’s one has sometimes I’ll exclude like hasn’t engaged in You know, however many days and that brings the list down to like five thousand ish. Um, so That means like about half the audience hasn’t clicked in, you know, three to six months, but the kids I mean, like I’d say, I think it’s valuable. I think the people that are subscribed think it’s valuable. It has a pretty darn low churn rate. The way I’m positioning it is yeah, ever growing database of, you know, see how the best in the business have scaled their social media accounts and how they’re converting that audience into profit. You know, 20 bucks a month, a hundred dollars a year is the current pricing. [Michael Houck]: And those, those are our case studies that you’re writing, right? Like you’re doing the research. Yes, partly. [Jacob Shipley]: Some of them, yes. Some of them, I had a podcast back in the day that I was one of the typical like I did 12 episodes and then was like, man, this is a lot of work. But I’ve gone back and turned those podcasts into case studies. So like one of the guys was the social media director at the University of Missouri. So how did you grow the university’s social accounts from zero to 750,000? And so we did like I turned into a case study So a lot of it too is like I’ll also reach out to people that are just doing cool stuff And I’ll be like, hey, would you answer these questions and let me turn in a case study and nobody ever says no so we did like how Brendan Cox he runs marketing for Escape which is that robot massage company. I don’t know if you’ve seen them. They’ve kind of gone viral they’re basically have several locations now, but It’s like a yeah masseuse, but it’s a robot. Um, and so as you can imagine that went pretty viral on tiktok Um, and so yeah built that out into a case study. So yes, I am doing it, but it’s also Um, I have help in the form of subscribers that want to share what they’re doing Got it. [Michael Houck]: Um Yeah, one one other question and then I’ll share some thoughts. Um Are you sharing like these case studies in the news? Newsletter sometimes? Like, are you making that your issue of the week or whatever? [Jacob Shipley]: Yeah, pretty much once a week, I’ll send it to the whole list with a paywall after the intro. So I’ll do like, this is like this person is this is what they really accomplished. Here’s how I did it dot dot paywall. And that’s the strategy so far. And I have given a few away for free. I’ve been like, Hey, this is what we’re building. This is how many we have. You know, here’s You can see what it’s like, So I played around with that as well. [Michael Houck]: OK, cool. Yeah, that’s the right strategy. That’s what I would do, too. That’s what we do do with the case studies, actually, pretty much the exact same thing. Yeah, I mean, look, I think the case study angle is good. If you look at like starter story as an example, right? Of course. He made like hundreds of those before. Started to see real exponential revenue growth and stuff. And he also got some really big people on them who then blasted out to their audiences. That helped. What we do for case studies is, you know, we look at crunch space. We look at recent funding rounds. We find the founders’ emails and we send them cold emails basically saying, hey, you know, I’m this guy. I have this credibility. I have this newsletter. We want to do a case study on you. Um, and then similar to yours, basically everyone says yes. Everyone people love talking about themselves. Yeah, totally. And then we, and then what we do is we have, uh, Ben actually interviews them and then, um, he writes the case study. I edited it and then it goes, it goes live. So, um, we haven’t seen crazy exponential, exponential revenue growth from it either. We price it at a hundred and 90. Five dollars lifetime, no subscription. We did this subscription thing for a while, but the dollar values are low and the churn for media subscriptions is just high. And especially with like, if the case study library is the main thing, then, you know, people get access to the case studies, they check them out and they make their decision. So we found one time payments have just worked better in terms of monthly revenue But, um, and that includes everything else. So, um, we haven’t seen crazy exponential revenue growth from it. I’m optimistic that as we do more and get bigger and bigger names and get them to post about it, kind of the same thing that happened with Smarter Story. He’s also very good at SEO. That’s something we haven’t invested as much in and is expensive to do well. But he did that over time. It’s not like he did it all at once. I think the answer is like, that is probably a long term game to do the monetization. Unless you have like, I don’t know, unless you have like a high ticket offer that converts really, really well, or you have a SaaS product, like we have Megaphone that does well. Anything else is going to probably take more time to get tons and tons of views and tons and tons of conversions. But the case studies sound like I’m optimistic about that for you, so I would say keep doing that. [Jacob Shipley]: Okay, cool. Well, dude, that context is super helpful. I appreciate it, man. No, I’m glad. [Michael Houck]: I’m going to check it out. What is your newsletter called? Actually, I don’t know. [Jacob Shipley]: Social Studies. Oh, right, right, right. [Michael Houck]: I was confused because because my old co-founder from my last company also had a newsletter called Social Studies. [Jacob Shipley]: Oh, really? Yeah. It’s funny. Ish Verduzco. I don’t know if you know that name. He runs social for, okay. Yeah. It runs social A16Z crypto, but he wanted that name and I had just taken it. And so his is social blueprint. And so I’m just, yeah, I was pretty proud when I figured out that he tried to get it too. So yeah, he’s, he’s a smart guy. [Michael Houck]: Here, let me, I’ll send This is, uh, my old, my old co-founders, social studies newsletter. He stopped this when we started building launch house and when it took off, um, different angle, it’s, it’s not about social media. It’s about like social psychology and tech. That’s interesting. [Jacob Shipley]: Yeah, it was, it was pretty cool. [Michael Houck]: Um, but here I’m going to stop yours. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay, cool. [Michael Houck]: Oh, interesting. Uh, you’re on your subscribe page. The button is white, which makes it impossible to see. Oh, no way. [Jacob Shipley]: Yeah. So I can type in my email, but then like, it looks like I can’t do anything. Oh, okay. That’s not good. I will fix that. And that’s just on like the main, like social studies.com. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yep. Okay. [Jacob Shipley]: All right. I’ll fix that. Thank you. [Michael Houck]: I appreciate you catching that. No, no problem. And it’s kind of similar thing on the upgrade page. The pay button, the text is white, so I can see the text this time, but the button is the same color purple as the background and there’s no border. So it’s hard to see. Okay. All right. I’m on it. But cool, man. I’ll let you know about, as we start to get some clients coming in from the email growth stuff. My expectation is that in pretty big numbers in the next, like definitely before the end of Q1, probably in the first half of Q1. So I would love to fill up your calendar with with more clients as much as you let me. [Jacob Shipley]: Yeah, for sure, man. And then once you productize that, you know, newsletter growth thing, I’d be super interested to hear about pricing as far as like, you know, in the social media marketing space. So keep me in mind as you build that out. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. I mean, if you want to do it, we can do it. The, uh, the, the sort of homie price is a 50 cents a subscriber. Okay, cool. Don’t let me know. I can send over some screenshots of what the early clients have seen. Generally open rates are like 65 to 75% click rates obviously vary based on the newsletter and how many links they add, but it’s typically higher than what the newsletter sees from other channels. [Jacob Shipley]: OK, sweet, man. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, send that over. [Jacob Shipley]: I’ll take a look. I appreciate it. [Michael Houck]: Cool. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Sounds good, dude. Awesome, dude. Have a good one. See you. Later. See you.