- Duration: 60 min
- Platform: zoom
- Source: Read.ai 01JJ2VBS8KADWJWG19YSCXW5VT (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JJ2VBS8KADWJWG19YSCXW5VT)
Transcript
[Jacob Shipley]: Hey, what’s up, man? [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 2]: Preston’s here, so I’m gonna let him in. I’m just gonna do a quick intro. As a reminder, we’ve worked with him before, so he probably won’t have as many questions about process, but you’ll leave just like normal and ask any questions. It’ll help with the newsletter, and then when it gets to the growth stuff, if he has any questions about that, I can take him. I don’t think it’ll take the full hour, because we’ve worked with him before. [Jacob Shipley]: Sweet. I went ahead and added the kickoff call and got that document ready. I can’t figure out how to get the Crowdsurf account out of the churned section into active, but [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 2]: Okay, I’ve had like, I’ll look into that, but probably won’t get to it until tomorrow. I had like the worst travel day of my life and I’m still trying to get some things figured out. So I’ll send me a message on Slack later and I’ll, remember to do that. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. Cool, man. Cool. Hey, how’s it going, y’all? Hey, Preston. What’s going on, man? How you doing? Doing well. [Preston Troutt]: I am pulling into my driver right now, so I’m going to jump on my computer in two seconds. Oh, yeah. No, no worries. We can wait to get started if you want. No rush. OK, cool. Yeah. [Jacob Shipley]: Let me I’ll leave this and then I’m walking in right now. Cool. Sounds good. Awesome. Thanks. So what are you still in Argentina right now? [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 2]: Yeah, honestly, I Argentina sucked and in a lot of ways. Yeah. Chile was way better. I’m at my third city now. In Patagonia, third city in Argentina. And it’s just, it’s a mess. Everything down here is brilliant. My experience has been awful today. It caused me to miss a bunch of calls. I’m way behind on some important stuff. I’m just not a very happy camper at the moment. And the Airbnb that I’m at, very clearly, be like, you know, you can you can say it nicely that they exaggerated some things about the process and where it’s located and the place itself. Yeah, I’m just I need a shower. [prestontroutt]: Yeah. [Jacob Shipley]: Well, the we a couple one girl on my team in particular, she lives in Argentina on my team and for Benzinga. Whenever she talks, it always just sounds like I’m sure it’s different. There are different areas of Argentina, but it sounds very, I don’t know, chaotic, like the pace of life is just different. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 2]: You know, they just don’t seem very organized and everything’s also kind of run down. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: It very much feels like a country that used to be rich, but no longer is. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 2]: It very much feels like that. Everything is not well kept and taken care of and just. Yeah. You feel bad, but like, um, you know, Santiago, Chile in comparison felt like, you know, it felt like LA. Yeah. [Jacob Shipley]: Although my buddy that used to live in Chile, he said, there are some parts where like, if you’re not careful, you’ll wake up without a kidney, you know, like it’s like, it can be pretty scary, you know? Yeah. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 2]: But I mean, that’s the case in any South American country. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: You just got to know where to go. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 2]: Um, everyone here has been really for the most part, but yeah, I’m supposed to stay here for a month and I’m just, I’m dreading that month. All right. [Jacob Shipley]: That stinks. Yeah. Are you, are you recording? I know you got your read AI. Is that recording a video call as well? Uh, yeah. Okay, cool. I just wanna make sure my, uh, fathom wasn’t working, so I just wanna make sure we had a recording somewhere. Oh yeah, yeah, no, you’ll, you’ll have it. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: I’ll give you the link afterwards. [prestontroutt]: Hey fellas, how’s it going? Doing well, I’m here in Nashville right now. I’m at my girlfriend and her family’s house and so a bunch of noise kind of going on. But my brother and his wife had their baby this morning, which is pretty cool. First grandkid in our family, so that’s fun. And then I’ve got my birthday dinner tonight, so it’s kind of Well, we we appreciate you spending some time with us. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 2]: I don’t think it’s going to take the full hour, so we should be able to get you out of here with some time back. [prestontroutt]: Cool, awesome, I love that. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 2]: Well, cool, I guess I’ll let you and Jacob kind of meet. I’m excited for you guys to meet and then he’ll sort of walk through things on the newsletter side like the content side. You guys will jam on that and then if you have any questions about how the growth stuff is set up, that you want to ask me, we can do that at the end too, before we hop off. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Cool. I love that. Cool. Cool. [Jacob Shipley]: Well, yeah, I’ll just do a quick, quick intro and then we’d love to, yeah, have you do like a, you know, quick 30 second, you know, intro as well. But yeah, so my name’s Jacob. My day job is I’m head of social for a company called Benzingo. It’s a financial media company. Based out of Detroit. I am in Northwest Arkansas, so like Bentonville area, if you’re familiar. I have three daughters and I have another kiddo on the way in May. So that’s between the day job, working for Hauk and the kiddos, that’s pretty much 99% of my schedule right there. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: That’s awesome, man. [prestontroutt]: It’s good to meet you. You know, I didn’t realize, I think we might’ve like LinkedIn messaged like way before. I don’t know if that was LinkedIn. I forgot even what that was about. But something like that. But awesome, man. It was good to meet you. Well, yeah, man. So yeah, my name is Preston. I live in Dallas and now kind of split in time between Dallas and Nashville. My girlfriend and her family are here and then my brother and his wife and now kid are here as well. Been in some time up here. I started CrowdSurf a few years ago. And basically our whole kind of thought is, you know, individuals are becoming companies and but there’s really no access to capital for individuals. And so the best place to start is by, you know, funding creators, you know, because they have so many different revenue streams and tying them all together. And allowing people to invest in them and then take that capital and deploy it however they want. You know, I come from like an investment background and one of the investments we made was this same concept except for in racehorses and then they’re funding golfers. And so, you know, we had a horse that before we ever raced, 392 owners came in, then he won the Derby, had a bunch of interesting, cool, fun stories there and then, Um, and so I’ve always kind of hovered around like, man, I want to do some sort of news newsletter, even if it’s just to start getting some of my thoughts down and some of the story and like, even just for my own internal use. Um, and so, you know, and how it could kind of reached out on some of the written as well as some of the growth. I thought it was pretty interesting cause we just took a little bit of funding and at the company level and now, a huge part of this is to go step on the marketing gas. And so I’m doing this as a big part of that. [Jacob Shipley]: Sweet. Okay. Awesome. Let me go ahead and share my screen. And I also, I pulled up our LinkedIn messages. Uh, yeah, it looked like we were messaging back and forth in July. Um, and we never hopped on a zoom. [prestontroutt]: So here we are. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah, here we are. [Jacob Shipley]: Let me share this real quick. Well, that’s awesome, dude. [Jacob Shipley]: Okay, cool. So did my intro, a lot of this, I know like you worked with Hawk before, so some of it might be repetitive. So apologies if, you know, you’ve been asked some of these questions before. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 2]: Jacob, you can make it, you can go off script a little bit since we already have some of the stuff from press. Yeah, yeah. As organic as you wanna make it, no need to go by the book so much. Okay, cool. [Jacob Shipley]: Yeah, I mean, I just love to hear too, like, so you said, you’ve always kind of been toying around with the idea of a newsletter. Um, what made now like this, I know you said you’re like ready to step on the gas, like marketing wise, but what made now like a, you know, the, the time when you want to kind of step into that. And I’d also love to hear too, like when you picture that, what does that look like, [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Feel like, sound like, um, yeah. [prestontroutt]: How have you envisioned that in the past? Yeah, I think, um, I think part of it’s just. Personal story, and what I’m currently learning, struggles, pain points, things we’ve learned, you know, on both like the work as well as some of the personal side. And then kind of really intertwining some of like, hey, what we’re just what we’re doing on the work side, you know, I think sometimes the Twitter and LinkedIn, you can’t do as much of that. You know, this is a little bit more long form. And so it’s, I just view it as like our, our thesis is just around a personal brands and the value that those are going to have longterm. And so mine isn’t going to be as much short form as it is like written and getting some of and structure in place, bringing a bunch of people that could be potential customers for the rest of my life, along with my own personal journey and story and what we’re currently doing on the work side, I kind of view this as that. I think why now? I think, honestly, I think having this investment fund come in and give us runway for 18 months, uh, at least like, that’s a huge part of it in my mind. You know, I think there’s just like, I can actually like, okay, we’re not, we’re not crazy. Like there’s at least another group who is either crazy also, or, you know, believes in us. Um, And I can actually start taking some of this and, uh, like putting it into written form, you know, and starting to really talk about it. And it’s like, it gives us a little capital to go get a large number of investors. And so I think, I think it’s honestly just like the legitimacy in my mind, maybe of having an outside party. Um, now it’s really kind of time to hammer home. Yeah. And get a lot of these personal stories and things that we’re doing and have done and are going to do down on paper. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Cool. [Jacob Shipley]: And so think about like ROI, like what KPIs are you are, what’s the first thing you’re gonna look at to see like, alright, is this we’re crushing it. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: This is going really well. I’m super stoked. [prestontroutt]: Um, I mean, I think like my number one is like people who convert to investors on our platform. Yeah. Okay. Cool. You know, we can take $50 increments. And so, um, number one KPI is yeah. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: People who invest on the platform. [prestontroutt]: Um, I think everything stems from there really, you know, I, I do, I think, does it, you know, does it, feel like me like I think this will be a very collaborative process I think it'll be a lot of me giving a lot of my personal story and certain things I want you know and then you helping kind of format it so I think a big thing is like does it you know does it feel like me does it feel real you know my you know my my Twitter and LinkedIn right it kind of feels just like, they're just stories, you know, it's, it's, it's like, they're not necessarily meant to feel like me as much. Although I may want to, I am changing that. With this, this is very personal, in my opinion. So I think that's like the next part of that. It's, it's just like kind of telling stories. Like I I think like I do view this as, all right, let's sit down and send me a voice memo on, you know, the five biggest things that happened this month, you know, and let's put it at the company. All right, something personal that you're learning, you know, like a big part of my journey is kind of Lord woke me up in a pretty big way seven years ago before that. Basketball was my entire identity. I played basketball in college, um, just got into some really bad habits and ramped alcohol and drugs and everything. And, uh, Lord kind of radically saved me seven years ago. Um, honestly, if I want to talk about that and some of this, um, and so I think just like being real and personal with it and then having someone who can really help structure it like, Hey, this is, this is how we can do this to optimize open rate readability. You know, like that side. [Jacob Shipley]: I don't know if I've told you, or we might've talked about it on LinkedIn, but I actually, I used to run social for you version, like the Bible app that's owned by a life church. So that's like faith, like, intersection of like faith and social is like a huge part of my like background. So that's super exciting. [prestontroutt]: Oh, I love that. That's huge. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 2]: I didn't want to bias your your choice of the writers Preston. So I didn't give you that knowledge. That's awesome. [prestontroutt]: I love this. All right. I love it. Yeah, I mean, because that was not such a fun place. [Jacob Shipley]: That was at Life Church. But yeah, such a fun. So anyway, like all things like, you know, faith related, I I'm super excited about talking about. Okay, so this feels really cool. When you think of like structure, maybe the best question to ask is, what newsletters do you open every time they hit your inbox? [prestontroutt]: And then from there can kind of back into like, you know, what do you like about it? That's a good question. How can I read your newsletter? You're on. I think it's an interesting on on some of the Twitter posts. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: That's a good question. [prestontroutt]: What do I read? You know, who's else I actually read? And I like their layout is who's that dude who's doing the meme? [Jacob Shipley]: Jason Levin? Yeah. Is that name Lord? Technology? [prestontroutt]: I got him Lord. Yeah, yeah. He actually has a pretty interesting, and I'm wondering why. Let me go to his stuff. See, this I would honestly lean, be interested in y'all's thoughts. So I guess it's what, meme alerts? No, that's, it's just Jason Levin, I guess. I think he's got two. The original one was called Cyber Patterns. I don't know if he's still doing that one or not. [Jacob Shipley]: Well, his positioning is so interesting because like meme alerts is priced at $6.90 and then his like memes as a service is either like $420 or $690. You know, it’s just like he’s got a very unique voice and personality. I got here. I think my old company. No, he worked at launch house for a bit. Oh, did you really? [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 2]: Yeah. Um, cool. [Jacob Shipley]: I’ve got him pulled up. I don’t know if this is a good example or not. But you I’m trying to think of some other ones that I would generally read Going back like when you like picture your newsletter like At one extreme would be like plain text just like my thoughts, you know, like written You know, like I’m sending a message to a friend versus like super, you know Formatted of like different sections and every week we have different like segments almost, like where do you see, how do you envision that kind of coming together? I think an in-between. [prestontroutt]: I mean, I tend to like writing that’s like, just like you’re talking to a friend, like you’re sending a run-on text at times. Yeah. But I like it structured. Like sometimes when it just flows all together, I think someone can be almost a little bit overwhelmed. Yeah. But I don’t like a super just clean, neat as much. But I actually don’t know the different sections. I think there’s like, I do these creator highlights. It’s potentially a component of a creator highlight. What I would start upcoming is like, like, you know, I’m gonna be doing these like sit down interviews with like really big creators. So like, clicks, who’s a huge fortnight, he’s the biggest fortnight streamer, I’m gonna do one with him, I’m probably gonna do one with a guy named Preston, who’s a good friend. So I think there’s potential to like intertwine some of those. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [prestontroutt]: Yeah, I don’t see I think there is a level of like I would be kind of interested in your thoughts of What this could look like, you know, I envision Obviously, you know kind of talking about what we’re doing like there’s like almost a section of company related Section of almost like personal related. Yeah, and then maybe one that’s like almost just like agnostic of that, where it’s like, like a creator highlight type, you know, a creator deep dive. [Jacob Shipley]: I mean, I love you keep saying like stories, just like personal, like, you know, things that have happened. Do you have any place where any of that has been documented already? Or do Will we be starting from kind of like scratch and kind of bringing some of these to life? [prestontroutt]: We’d be starting from scratch and bringing some cool life. [Jacob Shipley]: Sweet. OK, cool, how? What am I not asking that I need to be asking? [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 2]: I mean, there’s there’s the more tactical stuff that I think maybe will flesh itself out as we chat slack and kind of send some examples and things like that. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: But yeah, we’ll want to we’ll want to narrow in on the format pretty quickly of like, what does that newsletter like, And obviously, you know, I’ll caveat that by saying that we don’t need to nail it with issue number one. Like, even with my newsletter, I experimented with formats for the first, like, few months. And, you know, it won’t take us that long to figure out what works. But that was, you know, the first one I was doing. So I was experimenting with a lot. So yeah, I guess my kind of a dual point is we should figure out the format, but we don’t need to have it set in stone. By issue number one. [prestontroutt]: How do you have any thoughts on on given kind of a little bit that I’ve said what what kind of format we could do you know because I do like the idea you know it’s like I’m going through this like we’re doing a rebrand on our site and you know what I’ve been kind of just reiterating and saying is is, you know, cause we have, we have like a agency where we do like brand deals for creators and [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: management. [prestontroutt]: And what I’ve been saying is like, we originally were talking about a number of things, but then what I kind of like came back to was, well, when we say we do a lot of things that we do nothing. And so what’s the reason why someone is, my newsletter? What’s the reason why someone’s sharing it? And maybe that is a multi-pronged thing. Maybe it is someone who talks about how he loves the Lord, is super real about past struggles and what he’s currently going through, and has some really interesting things in tech that he’s working on. Maybe that is it. You know, maybe. Yeah. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 2]: What I’m hearing is that I feel like there’s two avenues that we can explore. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: One of them is sort of exactly what you just said, which is like basically making you the creator. Right. And you’re a super authentic guy. You’re doing interesting stuff so that the content has like some level of interest to it just because of what you guys have built and your journey. And that’ll appeal to some type of readers, right? And then there’s like this other avenue where we go really hard into the creator side of things. And you being the expert are creating this content that’s, you know, all the stuff people don’t normally know about either how creators set up and run their businesses or how to work with them or just thought pieces on like where the creator is going and how crowd surf obviously fits into that. And sort of the blocks that would make up each of those two newsletters are different, right? Like maybe with the creator one, we’d have like a roundup of links of creator economy, creator driven newsletter or content each week. Like what’s interesting that’s happened that people might’ve missed. And then maybe there’s the thought piece and break or something like that, right? That’s the more tactical stuff we can get into later. But I see those two as you can weave one into the other, of course, but I do think that they are two distinct newsletters that will attract two different types of people. So the question, I think, goes back to who do you want the audience of this newsletter to be? If it’s more so making you a creator and sort of living the creator life, what while running this creator company, great. We know the angle to go with for that. If it’s more about educating people of how they can invest in creators and sort of going behind the curtain in that way, we know what that looks like too. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: But those two things are probably different. [Jacob Shipley]: Well, I think too, we have a client, Noel, who’s the CEO of Augment Markets. A lot of his content is around educating people of how to invest in the secondary market. So companies that are like pre-IPO. And so like, it almost feels like that there are some similarities there of like, there’s an education part of like, yeah, behind the curtain of what does it look like to invest in creators as a business? Yeah. Curious when Hawk was saying that, do you have like a gut reaction of what audience, like when you picture someone opening your email, who is that that you wanna be hitting? [prestontroutt]: Mm-hmm. Well, if we work back from ideally what we want are people that are investors. Right. It seems like having at least some of option tool to expert and creators is, a big part of it. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [prestontroutt]: So it almost seems like the expert in creators is like at least a section you know at least like you know because that’s like where we’re going to be able to talk. You know maybe we’re maybe we’re deep diving a creator’s business from a monetary place once a month. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: Yeah. And you can either structure that in terms of like, you know. Once every X number of issues we do X type of content or you can do it like within each issue we have X, Y and Z. Block of content, right? So it could be like, you know, I’m not saying we would do this, but if it’s every week we want to break down another creators business, you know we do that and then there’s also like a Like sort of a a more open-ended piece in there from you talking about how, you know, either some aspect of your journey that resonates, it’s just like a good note you wanna share with this type of reader, or it’s related specifically to what that creator does and what it inspires in you and how you’re thinking about that in relation to your own journey in some way and some lessons that you’ve pulled out from that. There’s a lot of different ways we could go with it. We would just need to make the decision, do we have a set format each week or are we sort of trying out different formats? And I would, I would actually encourage early on trying out different formats is not some bad thing. Like, you know, I think a lot of people would think it would be at first in the early days. [prestontroutt]: You kind of want to do that to some degree. Yeah. Yeah. I think we should definitely test formats out. Um, well I’m trying to think of what I think what we’re trying, you know, if we think about what we’re trying to do, is there is a level of trying to show, hey, these creators are not just funny people on social media. They’re making more money than you really can in any other job. And then here’s how this works with what we’re doing now that you have, now that you’ve seen how much these people can make each year, this is what we’re doing. And then you almost play out like, well, what if you would have invested? Like, uh, you know, it’s like you bring it all back to the investor side of like, well, what does this mean for me? Um, not saying we do that every week, but I’m saying there’s more, there’s interesting like progressions of what you know, cause it’s like, okay, creators are companies and they’re making a lot of money. This is how, you know, so there’s like that, Oh, this is what we’re doing. And this is how people make money. This is how you could be a part of that and invest in that and make money from that. Yeah. Yeah. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: I, I think your, your approach is right. I would encourage us to, to, you know, test stuff out over the first few issues and, um, and put in some like reader feedback section, like little polls, like, how do you like this section? Or how do you like this section? Wherever we get the best responses, you know, we’ll know that we probably want to double down. [prestontroutt]: Yeah. [Jacob Shipley]: Chris Kerner does that a lot in his newsletter. Um, where it’s kind of fun to me, you feel like play a part in deciding the content. He’ll always, he’ll do like polls of like, what issue should I do next? And then, you know, whatever wins, that’ll be next week’s, you know, so stuff like that’s kind of fun too. Like you get a bunch of data from it, but it’s also, I think like the involvement is a huge sell there too. What data do you have on the average person that invests on the platform as far as like demographic, psychographic, like what do we know about that person? [prestontroutt]: It’s going to be 95 90 90% male you’re gonna have kind of in that age of I mean we had 18 all the way to like 60 you know but I would say it’s probably 22 to 45 male you know, a lot of them are people that see what this industry is doing, but like, didn’t really know their creator, you know, um, the creator had a super young audience, but it’s going to be all tailored towards male, uh, generally people who are like, like some of the edge you’re investing, like crypto investing, like, startup investing are willing to take risk. I don’t think we’re going to pull anyone from, oh, I do my traditional stocks. I do my traditional S&P allocation. We’re not going to pull money from there. We’re going to pull money from, oh, someone who puts a lot in to the crypto startup investing side. I think most everything else that I wanted to hit on is like more tactical stuff. [Jacob Shipley]: So I don’t know if we want to hold off on that, but as far as just like scheduling, if that’s going to be our team or your team scheduling time, I don’t know if you have a strong preference on days or you know, when you want it to go out, but I think what do you mind? [prestontroutt]: Yeah, what what do y’all propose for that? [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: I mean, we can definitely take care of all the all the ops for you, like in terms of scheduling and getting everything set up and beehive and all that. As far as day of the week, I my personal opinion is that people like, Overthink this. I really don’t think it matters that much what day of the week you’re sending stuff on. Like for example, everyone tells me don’t send emails on Saturdays, but I send mine, my long form essays on Saturdays. I’ve sent them that way for two and a half years and you know, my open rates, 65%. So I don’t really buy into that. If the content’s good, people will open the email and read it. Um, I would definitely recommend sending in the morning you’ve investors. So, you know, some of them probably be up pretty early. So I would say an early send time, you know, maybe. 6 AM something like that is probably fine. Yeah. But in terms of day of the week, it really doesn’t matter that much. So if you think it’s if the format ends up being more long form, I would recommend a weekend day if the format is going to be more like quick hitters, hot takes, things like that, depending what we decide to do doesn’t sound like that necessarily. But if we do, then I would say move it to probably Tuesday to Thursday, somewhere in there. Okay, cool. [prestontroutt]: And then y’all will be the one that can get everything set up on Beehive? [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: Yeah, so I’ll send you our link and you can sign up for Beehive through there. And then that’s all you’ll have to do. We’ll get the welcome sequence set up. We’ll handle all the logistics and settings and things like that. We’ll handle reporting out of there too to help you out with that. What question for you Preston is, I know you guys obviously have designers on the team. Will you want your team to brand the newsletter in some way related to the Crowdsurf brand or just reminiscent of it? Yeah, we have it on the team, but most clients tend to prefer to do the branding themselves. [prestontroutt]: I mean, I guess maybe y’all, I mean, cause if y’all did, I guess it would just be a super quick little, I mean, I don’t think it’s that big a deal. I mean… Yeah, maybe I just… [Jacob Shipley]: If we have a hex colors and a logo, you know, like that part’s not a heavy lift, but… Yeah, yeah. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: The logo, banner image, and maybe a header image for the issues too, like a thin header image. So it’s just a matter of like, coming up with those assets and the design of those assets? Is that something you’d want us to take on or is that something you’d have the team? [prestontroutt]: Maybe I’ll just take it on really quick. I mean, I can get the logos and stuff, but I know maybe like once I see what it is that’s needed, I can quickly we can quickly do that in like two seconds. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: OK. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: Sounds good. Then, yeah, that would be it. The only thing that you’ll need to do is set up the account and we’ll handle handle the rest from there. And that’ll happen in tandem with, you know, while Jacob is working with you to sort of do this initial context gathering period, ideate some formats, get the first content set up. So it’ll happen in tandem during the during the first couple of weeks. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Cool. [Jacob Shipley]: I like that. And then probably tomorrow or I’ll start messaging you in our Slack channel of just like, you know, getting a process set up or whatever way is easiest for you to communicate. Cause we like, you know, hash out ideas. If it’s like voice memo, love it. If it’s just writing it out, that’s fine too. But I’ll kind of brainstorm on my end that there’s, you know, anything we can kind of get started with. And then I love the idea of just like, you know, you mentioned just like, here’s a story that illustrates a point. And then, yeah, if we could try pairing that with, you know, some kind of creator highlight. I don’t know, like Calc said, we’ll test out formats and kind of pairings and possibilities there. But yeah, I’ll dive deep tomorrow and then either late tomorrow or early Wednesday, I’ll start sending you some stuff and then kind of start going from there. [prestontroutt]: Cool. I love that. And then, Hauk, on the growth side, do you use this on your newsletter? [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: Yeah, we’ve been running a beta for the last two months with my newsletter and with six beta clients that we’ve been working with. And it’s great, man. The open rates and click rates are higher than I get from any other channel. [prestontroutt]: And so talk to me about exactly what that means. So on the open rate and click rate, is that once a, yeah, just walk me through what the process looks like again, really quick. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: Yeah, so in terms you know, the lowest that we’ve seen for any client so far is, I believe, 65%. The highest is close to 80%, which is great. And basically the way it works is that we have, you know, my co-founder on this is a world-class cold emailer, Teal Fellow, YC, Bacta’s last company, and a data guy. And we’ve built this incredibly large database database of 200 million emails, and those emails are enriched with social media data. So who they follow, what they talk about, what posts they engage with, what’s in their bio, and it’s turned into structured data. And then what we do is we can cold email those people in like a compliant way. And we can either do that through the Beehive account or we do it on our own before we add to the Beehive account, and that decision’s up to you. We’ve been doing it just through Beehive and haven’t run into any issues at all, so in my mind, there’s no reason not to do that, but we understand some clients might prefer to do it if we just do the cold emails outside, so it’s up to you. But basically, they get imported into the Beehive account, and then they go through sort of a unique welcome sequence. It’s not your typical welcome emails that we’ll set up, it’s like what the first few issues of the newsletter that they receive should be. So it’ll be in the format that we want to use for the newsletter. And they’ll get those over the course of a couple weeks. And if they meet some engagement criteria that we define, so for example, for my newsletter, if they open two emails or if they click on one, that tells me that they’re engaging in some way. So I pass them. And if they meet that criteria, then they sort of get added to the main list within Beehive, as opposed to sort of being segmented off and not getting the main newsletter normally. So if they don’t meet the engagement criteria during like the first few weeks during this process, then they just get unsubscribed and do not interested. [prestontroutt]: And, you know, they never hear from you again. And for yours, it was, if they open the email and then click see full posts is how they were added or they, yeah. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: No, so if they open two emails from me or if they click on, or if they open one and click on one. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Gotcha. Okay. [prestontroutt]: And when you say click on one, what does that mean? [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: I mean, just like engage with part of the content. So it can be looking to sign up for premium or it can be clicking a link in my like link roundup of the week. [prestontroutt]: Either one counts the same. Gotcha. Gotcha. Cool. That’s really cool. Okay. And then from there you said, or from the people that you’re calling on to, that’s where that 65% comes to. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: Yeah, exactly. So the, with, with honors that are, we get 70%, uh, the, the lowest we’ve seen for any clients so far is 65. Um, but, uh, my open rate overall is also 65 from all channels. [prestontroutt]: Cool. That’s awesome. Okay. Cool. Uh, if any questions come up on, just let me know. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: But basically, we’ll also get that started sort of in tandem. So as Jacob sort of setting up the first few issues, we’ll put those into like a separate segment too, so that we can run this other cohort through them. If you have an existing email list for Crowdsurf, we should probably add them to this too. So I don’t know how many, how many emails do you guys have to I think we have close to 4,000 or so. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: That’s pretty good. Um, we won’t need to run them through this other sequence. They’ll just get the normal sort of welcome sequence, uh, because they’ve already, you know, sort of signed up to get those emails from you. [prestontroutt]: Yeah. There’s part of them that we have. We can give you the ones that have signed up and then there’s others that we have that were more or just like we had pulled from something. Okay. Yeah. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: Whatever you got, I would say just throw it in there. You know, people will self-select in or out eventually. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Cool. [prestontroutt]: Awesome. Cool. Okay. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: Jake, have you got anything else on your side? Nope. I think I’m good on my end. [Jacob Shipley]: If you want to stay on, I have a couple unrelated things. I just want to run by real quick, but I think that’s all on my end. [prestontroutt]: Okay. Cool. Awesome. All right, y’all. I appreciate it. And then I’ll talk soon. Cool. [Jacob Shipley]: Sweet, man. Nice to meet you. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Awesome. [Jacob Shipley]: All right, y’all. Well, I was wondering, too, on I just kept thinking of the parallels with Augment. I wonder if there’s any way we can leverage these clients for each other, because like there’s a very good type of people that that are investing in the secondary market are probably also the type of people that would be investing in like, you know, this kind of alternative investment. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: I don’t know what your process looks like around that. Yeah, you’re right. Um, I was actually going to mention something to you too. We, we shouldn’t mention to each other. [Jacob Shipley]: Sorry dude. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: No, it’s, it’s okay. I just don’t want, you know, I don’t want Preston to worry that we’re going to go around town. Um, yeah. But yeah, I mean, it would be, it would be good if there was some way to do that and we could probably do it in like an anonymized way where like, Hey Noel, like we have this other client where I think there’s some synergy. Are you comfortable with that? Totally. And just do whatever, whatever they say. Cause I mean, you’re right. And it’d be a big value add if they could sort of compare notes in some ways. But it also comes down to them because I could just as easily see their position being while they’re competing for the same dollars. Right. Yeah, for sure. So I don’t really know that sector well enough to know how they would feel about it, but it’s definitely something we can bring up at some point. [Jacob Shipley]: Cool. Sweet. And then on the actual like formatting, so like as I’m writing a notion from newsletters, is Ben handling like the taking that copy and putting that into or am I owning that? [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: Ben can do that. We can just, we’ll need to create a template for him in Beehive. This is why we’ll need some design elements too, because it’ll probably be like a custom divider or something like that in there. Hopefully his team can help out with that. If not, we can ask Selene to do it. But yeah, I mean, Ben can handle all the ops. You can also write directly in Beehive if you prefer. People like to do that. So whatever your process is, it’s fine with me. [Jacob Shipley]: Okay. Sweet. Um, I think there was one other thing. Okay. If I think of it, I’ll shoot you a message, but I think that’s all for now. Oh, sounds good, man. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: Um, I’m going to let you know, once I kind of get settled here, um, I got to plan out sort of the next few months running it back to the States. So, I don’t know when I’m going to be by, but I will be coming by to check out. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Jacob Shipley]: Awesome, man. Yeah. Keep me posted. Happy to give you a tour, grab a beer, grab a coffee, whatever you want, man. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: Let’s do it, man. I want to know the hotspots. [Jacob Shipley]: Yeah. Well, I mean, you got to remember that my hotspots are probably the children’s museum, the parks, the playground. I can show you some sick playgrounds, man. No, I just mean, like, where’s the good restaurants to eat at? Yeah, totally. Also, I didn’t know you had a fourth kid on the way. That’s so crazy. Yeah, dude. Thank you. Yeah. May 7th is our due date. So that’s, uh, it’s going to be coming up fast for you real soon. I bet we’re waiting to find out the gender. So it’s the first time we’ve ever not known. Um, so, yeah. Um, you hoping for whatever the other, just letting it come as it comes. Yeah. I mean, like we’ve got So part of me is like, I would just love to have like a fourth girl and have all girls. But at the same time, it’s like, it would also be really fun to have a son too. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: So I don’t know. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: We’ll be stoked either way. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: Cool, man. Well, congrats again. That’s amazing. I’m happy for you. [Jacob Shipley]: Thanks, man. I appreciate it. Well, if you need anything in the meantime, I’ll get to work on some of this stuff and start messaging Preston tomorrow or Wednesday. But yeah, if you need anything in the meantime, just hit me up. Oh, I remember I was going to ask you. One strategy I’ve been using on LinkedIn to convert people to newsletters is I have a LinkedIn newsletter, which is garbage because they actually, they don’t give you the email addresses, right? But I mean, a quick little Apollo integration kind of fixes that, and then you can scrape it. And then I’ve just been adding those to my newsletter because my thought process, whether it’s right, wrong, or indifferent is, well, they’re opting in, to getting my emails. They’re just, they don’t care if it comes from LinkedIn or if it comes from Beehive. That’s been pretty successful, honestly. I don’t think my open rates are from that are near as high as yours, but they’re good. So I don’t know if that’s ever a strategy you’ve ever used with clients of like starting a newsletter on LinkedIn, especially with like, I’m thinking of like Brindis that like her account is growing super fast. Like when you start a LinkedIn newsletter, it auto invites every follower to subscribe and then you can go through it. It is a bit of a, it’s either really time consuming to get those emails or really expensive to like scrape all of them at once. But something tells me you probably could figure out a way to do it quickly and cheaply. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: So I, I did this. Um, I did this at one point I, I didn’t realize LinkedIn newsletter was so shitty. And so I was going to send my LinkedIn emails. One people, you know, I was going to do both. Um, but then people just got too excited. So it was bad. So what we did was we used Phantom Buster. Have you heard of this? Phantom Buster? Yeah. We used Phantom Buster. We set something up with that to allow us to get X amount of emails per day. And then Reena was like using something in a Google Sheet. And it was pretty convoluted. I think what she had to do is manually visit people’s LinkedIn URLs by logging into my account, drop those URLs into a Google Sheet, run the Google Sheet through the Phantom Buster, and then she would get their emails. But the yield, if I remember correctly, was only like 30-ish, maybe up to 40, probably not, percent. [Jacob Shipley]: So- As far as like open rate, you mean? No, no, no. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: As far as the yield. So the amount of names we’d put in versus the- Oh, yeah. We would get. [Jacob Shipley]: Apollo, I would imagine, has better yield than Phantom Buster does, but it’s probably- Yes, but it probably like no more 50 to 60%, which is okay. The open rates are good. I mean, probably like 45, 50%, which is respectable. And that is the thing too, when you look at the subscribers of any given newsletter, that’s not its own page. So you can’t just copy and paste that URL to scrape it. You have to go to each individual profile and copy their URLs, which is just… They did a good job making it hard for you to copy. To leave the platform. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: I talked to my LinkedIn creator manager guy about this and he was you know vague and non-committal to improving the experience. [Jacob Shipley]: Yeah I mean it which makes sense like I get why they don’t want you to leave the platform but at the same time it’s like yeah it’s a bit of a nightmare to try to grow an audience. And my reach on LinkedIn has tanked in the last like two months. Like really? Oh dude, it’s horrible. I used to be able to, I mean, like my bad posts used to get 30,000 impressions. And now like a good post gets 5,000 impressions. I’ve seen, yeah, I’ve seen the same thing. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: I haven’t posted much, but the posts I have, I have made, you know, it’s just sharing the podcast, but so there’s a link in there and I can’t expect it to be too big, but I’m getting, you know, 10% of my followers at most. At most. Yeah. [Jacob Shipley]: Which is crazy, though, because like Brindis, like we’re having some posts that just like murder for her, you know, that do so well. So I don’t clearly like some people are still getting a reach, you know. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: I honestly I think it might be because a meaningful cohort of people at this point have actually left X and they are using more. There’s the old thing was that LinkedIn doesn’t have that much good content. So it’s like underrated. I don’t know if that’s as anymore. I think it still is true, but probably not as true. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. Yeah. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: I don’t know, man. But I got to figure out what I’m going to do with LinkedIn threads and substack between the three. Yeah. We’ll see. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: We’ll see. [Jacob Shipley]: Yeah, I was I, I took your advice and I took the beehive, my beehive list, put it in substack and I saw because I got I got an email that pissed me off because I specifically said do not send a welcome email and it got caught like they kept they kept denying it so I was messaging Substack support and they manually imported them and those people put in they must have clicked send a welcome email and I was very specific I do not want to welcome email so I was pretty pissed off this morning but it is yeah no it was no big deal it didn’t look crazy different than just another email from you. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: So if I didn’t know that you were probably going to be doing that, I would have just thought, Oh, something like misfired or whatever. [Jacob Shipley]: I just, yeah. Or whatever. Yeah. We were, uh, we took my, it’s so cold here today. So we took our kids to the mall just to walk around and they were on one of those like ride things at the mall. And I got that. I was like, Oh, I was just like, yeah, fuming. But yeah. What are you going to do? You know, it’s like, I was mad for 30 seconds and it’s like, well, you got to move on. Yeah, dang. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: Well, now you’ve got it set up, I guess. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 2]: Yeah, that’s true. [Jacob Shipley]: So we’ll see if the recommendation engine starts to work at all. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: They must have gotten more strict about their imports because, I don’t know, I never had to deal with their support when I was importing folks. So maybe it’s, maybe they’ve gotten more strict. [Jacob Shipley]: Maybe it was a volume thing, because it was over 9,000, you know, at once. I don’t know if there’s like a to where they just auto-deny. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 2]: Oh, maybe it’s because you started with like zero on your substack, right? [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: Yeah, I had two. [Jacob Shipley]: So yeah, I went from two to 9,067. Yeah, that’s probably why. If you’re adding 9,000 to a bigger list, maybe it wouldn’t be. Yeah, that’s true. If you’re starting from basically scratch on substack at least. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: Right. Yeah, that makes sense. That makes sense. Yeah. All right, man. [Jacob Shipley]: Well, I appreciate it. Let me know if you need anything and I’ll keep you posted. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 2]: Cool, I’ll get Preston set up Beehive. Once you guys figure out what formats we want to be testing and the direction of the content and all that, let me know and we can jam on welcome sequence and stuff like that. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: Okay, cool man. [Jacob Shipley]: I appreciate it. Cool. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Talk to