- Duration: 51 min
- Platform: zoom
- Source: Read.ai 01JJ4WKKMCYPE7SNS8307MRC2W (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JJ4WKKMCYPE7SNS8307MRC2W)
Transcript
Blake Emal: yo what’s up what’s up man how you doing I am good I’m good where you at are you uh are you still in gosh what country are you in I was in chile now I’m in argentina um this is [Michael Houck]: my third stop in Argentina, honestly, Argentina has been kind of disappointing. And this place in particular, the check in was just awful yesterday. So I’m, I’m behind on so many things. And just I’m in this like, beautiful place, right? Like, it’s like, super gorgeous. Like, there’s a giant lake right down there and everything, like amazing. But like, I just want to get out of here and go somewhere else. Blake Emal: Is it the food? The vibe, what is it? [Michael Houck]: Argentina, have you ever been to Argentina? No, it very much feels like a country that used to be rich and has slid into a decline for a very long time. You can just tell like everywhere. And so just not very pleasant. And then this place. Like they advertised a pool in the gym, and a gym are on a different property that I have to drive to. And the drive is like a very precarious cliff situation and the tires are spinning out. It’s just not very safe. So I’m kind of isolated up here with my two bottles of water and a mini fridge and hoping to have enough sustenance to survive. Blake Emal: Nice. Yeah, so when I was living in Geneva, there were a ton of Argentinian people there for some reason. [Michael Houck]: Oh, interesting. Blake Emal: So they talk about it, like obviously it’s where they come from So it’s like the motherland and they say the food is the best in the world. Everything’s amazing. It’s like South America, Europe, but I don’t have any exposure to it. I’ve been to like Guatemala and areas like that, but never that far down South. [Michael Houck]: So I went to, I started here in Mendoza, which is like their wine capital of like Malbecs of the world. And then I did Buenos Aires. And then now I’m in Patagonia. And yeah, all three have just been disappointing. I was at Santiago, Chile. That place was popping. That place was great. I wish I would have spent the whole time there. It’s like LA. It’s perfect. Blake Emal: That’s cool. Yeah. Eventually I’ll get down there. Once the kids are old enough where it wouldn’t be a nightmare to go. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, you look out the whole row of seats on the plane and the logistics are probably 5X every single cost you have. Yeah, not great. Not great. Well, I’m excited to chat. Blake Emal: So like on the newsletter stuff, my general sentiment is I really suck at the newsletter thing, mostly consistency wise. So I still don’t know what I want the newsletter to be and if I’m going to stick to it. Right so that’s that’s where I’m at um it’s been a very frustrating thing because i’ve had this list it’s a very small list it’s never made me money uh even when it’s my open rates have been okay it’s never done anything so it could be misalignment of stuff I was promoting or whatever but I just kind of got away from promoting altogether on it because it just never did anything uh but social did so I just went that direction and then I stopped writing two years or more and uh I brought it back a couple times but I just never felt like I had the right concept for it kind of always made it more like a branded thing than just my newsletter which I don’t know if that’s a mistake or whatever but my uh i’ve been just very confused about what I want to do with that thing so uh I have no answers on the on the newsletters I don’t know what like my the I have full confidence that the thing would work to grow it. My problem right now is what would that mean? If I grew it to 10K, am I going to make the most of it? Because I have never made the most of it. So like, I don’t know. I don’t know. I’m seeking your counsel. Yeah, man. [Michael Houck]: No, happy to, happy to share my take. And I’ll probably ask you some questions to sort of get more info. But based on what you just said, I think the obvious first thing is, You really don’t have a newsletter today. You have this list, right? But like even if you were to email them, and even though they have received those emails before. It’s going to feel like it comes out of the blue like they’re they don’t feel like they’re subscribed to your newsletter, not seeing in their inbox every week, right? So we should sort of treat it like starting from zero, really. And I think the other thing is like the decision between branding it versus having it be branded around you because of your social media following and because you’ll probably be talking about this if you do do it on social media at times. Like that’s where you’re going to build that instant trust, branding it around yourself. If you, you know, come up with a like founding journey, ask brand for it right away. It’s not going to feel as familiar immediately. Right. Um, like, you know, we called mine how it’s a newsletter for two years before we changed it. Um, And long-term, it’s good to be founding Journey, because I can sell it if I want to, right? But, you know, it’s early on, you want to build that trust first and foremost. And so, yeah, I would say, you need to run it yourself. Blake Emal: It’s probably a smart move. Yeah, that makes sense. I’ve gone back and forth on it. Honestly, with Twitter or whatever, I felt like my brand there is in decline for a long time. I’ve been losing followers for a long time. I think I was at like 96.4 or something at my max. And then I was writing on it, but like, I wasn’t posing a ton and I got less consistent. Then Elon took over. Not that I’m blaming that or the algorithm or whatever, but like things definitely changed. Like, I mean, you know, things are different now. The way that you grow is way different. So I was growing like crazy during the thread era. And I got up to close to 100K pretty quick, then all of it changed. And now I’ve just been losing followers for the past couple of years, slowly. So it’s just like weeding out bots, but it’s weeding out accounts that don’t really exist. So it’s not, I don’t care about that, but I have never been actively gaining even when I’ve been consistent coming back into it. So now I like the idea of branding it around myself because it’s just easier for people to associate that with me, but I do feel like my Twitter and my LinkedIn are going down because I don’t think I posted [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: the right stuff. Blake Emal: I don’t know. I guess I paid a lot of attention to it because I’ve been I’ve been more on fulfillment side for a long time now. So the marketing of myself has taken a huge backseat. Yeah, same same here, honestly, except for the newsletter. [Michael Houck]: It’s been the only thing that I’ve sort of kept doing around my my brand for Um, so I think the counter to that would just be that if you’re going to, you know, be less consistent on social and keep kind of, you know, not focusing on that as much as you used to, you know, you want to probably still have that personal brand out there somewhere, right. At least in the short term. And so it’s a good way to build up that list, have your personal brand still be in people’s faces all the time. And, you know, some of them will remember the threads and they’ll remember, you know, when you were going viral all the time on X. And I don’t know, I still feel like it’s the stronger play early on to brand around you because as we’ve seen with founding journey, like you can make that transition. And if you do it well, you don’t lose any, you know, any, any, I mean, I’m sure you’d lose some people, but you don’t really lose any people. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah, for sure. Blake Emal: Yeah. I mean, I’m totally for that. I’m not scrapping anything. If anything, I just keep convincing myself. That I want to do all of it. So I’m like, oh, I need to do videos too because I think you can build trust at a level in video that you just can’t anywhere else. So I’m like, there’s another thing that I wanna do. And eventually I wanna clip that and like redistribute through short form and stuff. And so then I just don’t really end up being consistent across the board. I’ve been consistent enough on Twitter. Like I have posted consistently most of the time, just a couple of lulls here and there. But yeah, like when I post now, mostly crickets. Like I, for the amount of followers I have, I used to get, it used to be like when I had 5,000 followers, I was going viral and getting an insanely disproportionate amount of impressions. And now it is fully flipped. There’s no way I’m getting anywhere close to, I’ll get like 3,000 impressions, maybe 10,000 on a good post. To 100 likes on a post I’m like that’s freaking awesome now and it used to be I would be depressed if I got 100 likes on a post so it’s like that’s fully flipped it’s hard to know it was easier back then to validate ideas and then be able to build off that and like double down on what works now it’s just so hard to figure out if I’m not just like viral chasing and doing sharing infographics or whatever then I’m just not getting that level of engagement so I don’t know if That part’s tough. The newsletter, I think I’m, I recognize the value of that. My biggest issue mentally right now is just, I think even if I got, if I doubled the list, it would still be 8,000 followers that I’m not engaging. So like, do I, do I need to get good at consistency or do I need to force myself to have to get good by starting to invest in it? Like, I don’t know if this is right. [Michael Houck]: I mean, my honest recommendation would be that you should, you know, think strategically about how much time you have and how to invest that across different channels. And once you’ve made that decision, then like, let it play out for a few weeks and be like, all right, I am, you know, I do actually want to do this because I see myself actually doing it after I’ve made the decision. And then once you’re doing that, you sort of get a feel for what the content would be. And then we layer in the right people after that. So my recommendation actually wouldn’t be to start today, let’s say, but rather to, rather to make that decision and then put a couple issues out and then we can start growing it whenever. Blake Emal: Yeah, that makes sense to me. So for context, for some of the big ideas that I’ve gone through, I feel like all of them are kind of played out now. Initially it was, I was just sharing my like random marketing thoughts and it was all over the place. Then that evolved into, okay, now I’m just focusing growth. So a lot of audience building stuff back in the day, when I was growing on, on Twitter, I was kind of just sharing all the stuff I was doing there. It was a little more targeted. Then I got more into this, like, you know, the marketing examples, newsletter, something closer to that, where it’s like, I’m just going to call out cool things that I’m seeing and share a few examples. And I’ve done different iterations of that. And it just, it seems like that’s all played out now. I’ve never done the, Storytelling type newsletter where it’s like a legit list and I’m just every day or every few days. I’m Writing about a full topic. I’ve just never done long form that much It’s more of in curation So I don’t I guess it duration things gonna work because I want to make money from it Like that’s the goal for my newsletter. I eventually want people to keep me top of mind for and anything else I’m going to launch related to that, and then be able to sell little microservices along the way. That’s kind of what I would like to do with it, but I don’t think that that’s going to point people toward that. I think it’s going to get too broad. So maybe I have to build a smaller newsletter with more targeted, specific people. [Michael Houck]: I don’t know. Yeah. I mean, a couple of thoughts. One is that like sort of unintentionally, maybe you’re already sort of doing that, um, with our viral examples in this letter, you’re writing those, uh, like, like shorter form like vignette pieces almost for that every week. And we’re going to start growing that with this growth method in the next like couple weeks. So that’s sort of already happening. We’ve like I think three or 4000 subscribers on that. But obviously that’s owned by sort of the company rather than you individually. I guess for your own newsletter like what? You mentioned the goal is obviously driving people who are going to pay for services and you know, products and things like that. Like, who are those people? What do they want? Why are they coming to those services? Blake Emal: Usually the best clients that I have long-term are marketing, like founders or heads of marketing, where there are multiple marketing functions at a company, usually SaaS. Those are the most successful. Cause they, they’ll come for all kinds of different services and they’ll stick and keep requesting more and more stuff and want to work with me on different projects. So it’s like SaaS marketing teams, multifunction teams where they’ve got content people or ads or product marketing or whatever. Product marketing is actually probably the biggest one, honestly. I’ve never been a product marketer though. So it’s interesting to like have to talk to that audience because they’re my target customer, but I’ve never really stepped in their shoes that much. So That’s probably the biggest one that ends up being the decision maker. But then there are other people, like just generally people that work in marketing. I have high confidence eventually they’ll be in a spot where they’ll need copywriting or need conversion rate optimization, landing page stuff, whatever. And they’ll think of me. So it probably just needs to be adjacent to that. The problem is, I guess, I’m just in a mental block with what not only what to write but what would I like writing so I would stay consistent with it and what actually isn’t out there that would be helpful because like right now I think the big stuff that I’m seeing not even not in marketing that kind of in marketing but just overall the big thing that’s got all the buzz is just you can build anything with AI cursor uh replet like that’s the stuff that’s in my feed constantly all the time it’s just you you can build stuff. Anybody can build stuff. Marketers can build stuff. And I just don’t, I I’ve done some of it, but it’s not like I’m an expert on that part of it. So I don’t really think I can catch a hype train or anything. I just have to build something smaller probably, but I don’t even know what I would want to do. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: Honestly, my, like you can obviously build a big email list by talking about the hype train stuff, but, you know, A, there’s gonna be someone who’s more of a specialist than you are in that anyway, almost regardless of what that is, right? And I’ve sort of always held this view. This is why, sorry, this is why at Launch House, you know, we would host a crypto cohort, but we would never launch a token or become a crypto company, right? Same idea. So you can build a big email list that way, but like, I know a lot of the guys who run those big AI newsletters now, And, you know, they make money from sponsorships, but it’s definitely gone down and their email list size is also going down, which is why a lot of them are thinking about working with us or already working with us because going through traditional channels is just not there for them anymore. People aren’t as like, there’s a high chance to die out is what I’m trying to say, right? Build a brand around that. You sort of put yourself at risk and it becomes a game of getting the newsletter acquired before anyone else realizes that’s happening. So you don’t want to get into that that game. At the same time, you don’t want to be too general either, right? Like I hear you talking about just like, oh, these people will need some marketing related service eventually. That probably means they’re not going to necessarily think of you as the guy for X, right? They’re just going to need something. And maybe they happen to see something in your newsletter and check it out. This is a problem we’ve dealt with with founding journey is that, you know, obviously we sell the ghost writing agency through it. We sell megaphone through it. We sell our founder We study membership through it, and we make money from all those. I mean, we convert people, but not as much as if I were like the founder who helps you go straight content in, you know, right? Like it’s just not the case. So if you’re starting out with a smaller list, I mean, my recommendation would be the more specific that you can make it and just sort of force yourself to write it on that topic every week, that’s probably going to lead to the highest conversion rate and the most trust built up in the fastest amount of time. Blake Emal: Yeah, my and also another part of this, I don’t consider myself a copywriter, even though I like I run the the business. I’m very different than somebody that you’ll pay 10 grand to to do like a six week project on one page. I’m very much a generalist. I’m going to help you across all these things and do a good job. There are like conversion copywriters that have been doing it for 15 years and it’s like the same project every single time. So they’re like, I’m never gonna compete on that kind of stuff. Even if on a one-off I could outperform them, it’s just not the same, right? So I don’t love the idea of just making it about copywriting because I think there are people who do it better than me or like more passionate about the craft of copywriting than I am. I get the sense that people mostly know me for like landing pages. And I just have never felt like, is that too specific or is it anything at all? Cause I’m not a design guy. So then you think landing pages, sometimes you just default to design. So it seems like, I don’t know. I don’t know. I think you’re in like a mental space. [Michael Houck]: I think a lot of people feel about newsletters and how I felt about it for a long time, which is you’re like designing, newsletter, right? Like this is like your newsletter, and you need it to represent you. And all that really a newsletter is just a functional step in a funnel. Right? And so we have viral examples, that’s more targeted towards these people who want to grow on social media, right? And we have founding journey, which is more targeted towards people who want to level up as a startup founder. Both of them are my newsletter, but neither one is really my newsletter anymore. Right? So obviously, going back to what we’re originally talking about, this would be a data point to not branded around yourself and just branded around some very specific thing. Don’t lean into the personal brand, but obviously talk about your experience. And then if it goes well and you’re driving a lot of business for one specific part of what you offer. Start another one for another part of it, right? Then eventually you have a copywriter on your team who’s writing five newsletters for you a week, and all of them are for specific things with specific target audiences. Yeah. Blake Emal: Yeah, that makes sense. I need to get out of my head. I know that that’s the big problem. [Michael Houck]: It’s just. It’s tough, man. Blake Emal: It’s a good next step for me is. Spend like an hour getting to getting strategic about it and just like do something about it, write something. I have written newsletters within the past two months. I’ve written a few of them, so it’s not like it’s never been happening, but I think I’m close to the right track. I just need to I’d like to make it a little more personal maybe like it’s so formulaic every time that I do it because I felt like oh if I do that I’m more likely to just be able to drop myself into it fill out the formula ship a newsletter and that’s been true to some extent but it also hasn’t been very personal I haven’t injected anything about myself in there it’s just been like totally curated we’re going [Michael Houck]: through this process with Preston from crowd surf right now too because he’s sort of in the same boat he wants his newsletter to help him bring in investors for his, you know, his, his business helps connect investors with creators, right? So he wants to bring in investors to their network through the newsletter, but he also wants to be very authentic, personal to his journey and, and all that too. So we literally just had to kick off with him yesterday. So, you know, Jacob, I, and probably you will talk through how to sort of thread that needle. Maybe some of those learnings you could apply to, to this too. Another thing I would say is that, you know, Well, two things. One, there’s no reason that you have to do it every week, right? If you make it bi-weekly, that’s fine. You’ll still stay the top of mind for people. They’ll still sort of expect those emails, not quite to the same level, but you can at least get in the habit that way. And then if it’s working, double down and make it weekly. And then the other thing would just be, I think I lost the other thing. Yeah. It’s not a thing, but it’s gone. Blake Emal: I’m going to be looking for some insights in that call for sure. So for me, like next step, I’m just going to make a decision as quickly as I can and dedicate myself to writing a little bit here. And I’m going to tell you when I’m, when I do it, like, I’m going to, I’ll be your accountability, buddy. [Michael Houck]: No worries. Yeah. Call it, just call it like a Blake’s dumb newsletter or something. Yeah. Blake Emal: I just keep looking for like, what’s a clever thing that nobody else is doing and probably shouldn’t focus on that. I probably should just write it, write a thing and let it be bad and then let it be consistent. [Michael Houck]: Oh, the other thing I was going to say is that like people also get worked up with like needing to know the format of the newsletter right away. You don’t need to do that. Like you can send a very personal thought piece and then the next week send like a, curated list of news that week, and basically just testing out what people like from you. With Hauk’s newsletter back when we called it that, I think I tried four different formats, maybe five in the first couple months, and added in different sections. I gave founders homework to try to keep them accountable. I did all sorts of crazy, dumb stuff. And it took a while to kind of settle in on what worked. So there’s no rules. There’s unlimited shots on goal. There’s no rules. You can try out a bunch of things and if you hate it and if the readers give you thumbs down, then don’t do it again. Blake Emal: That’s simple. Fair enough. Okay, I got my steps there. [Michael Houck]: I wanted to chat cold email as well really quick. Blake Emal: Okay. Have you like started really ramping that? [Michael Houck]: Yes, so here’s what we’re doing. So the reason we’ve had a slight delay is because we are incorporating the company and there’s like some partnerships that we need to set up both between Matt and I, and also with some other people that we’re going to be working with on like ops and cold email stuff. And, um, because I have my company and he has his company already, we can’t just set this up like a normal LLC. It has to be like technically like a joint venture. Right. Um, and so there’s like legal stuff we’re working through. We’re hoping to get that resolved this week might linger into next week. Once that happens, we’ll be able to sort of dot our I’s and cross our T’s and start massive outbound right away. Like Matt thinks we can get to the point where my calendar is basically full every day of just, you know, calls, sales calls. And so if we’re there in February, you know, we’re gonna be adding multiple clients a week for sure. And maybe, you know, maybe at a higher rate than that, we’ll see. But everyone I talked about is interested. I’m planning to do a big push tomorrow and Thursday with like people I know and just pitching them this kind of combined service, especially now that we’re at the landing page is gonna be ready this week too. So the answer is we’ve started, but we’ve been blocked on sort of ramping it up in full and that’ll change soon. Blake Emal: How are you thinking about targeting for this? Like where are you finding, where are you pulling leads from and how are you thinking about the specific people you want in the funnel? [Michael Houck]: So, For sales, not for like a specific newsletter, right? Yeah. We’ve seen success so far with two different like ICPs. One is people who have newsletters already and just want to grow faster. They’re making sponsorship revenue or product revenue and they can just reinvest that. Like we’re working with AI Tool Report. I don’t know if you know them. They have like 400,000 subscribers. They’re one of these like AI newsletters, right? They started out doing a couple thousand a month with us and they just increased to 32 K a month. Um, so seeing a lot of success, um, but that archetype one, so like I know newsletter people and I’m just going to keep reaching out to more of them. And then two is startup founders who maybe want to start a newsletter as a way to stay top of mind for their customers. And for that, we’ll do the ghostwriting and the growth. Um, we haven’t gotten more specific within sort of startup founders, but we’re going to be sending thousands of cold emails a day, so we’ll figure that out pretty quickly. If you have any thoughts, let me know, but It’s not a huge concern for me right now just because of the volume we’re going to be sending. But yeah, those two those two to start and then the idea will be if we can. If there’s a dog outside, that’s interesting. If we can, uh, you know, get to a point where we’re making like a hundred K a month in revenue from them, then what we’re going to start doing and probably even sooner, cause you know, we have that call with Austin on Thursday to do the, like a beta version of this. We’re just going to start taking that capital, paying writers to create our own brands and then blowing those brands up and then selling sponsorships and maybe products eventually through them. And maybe even selling some of the newsletters off to companies, sort of like HubSpot to, uh, to the hustle. So our goal for the end of Q1 is to reach 100K, or I’m sorry, our goal for the end of Q1 is to reach a million in ARR, so 83K MRR, and our goal for the end of the year Blake Emal: is like at least a few million in annual revenue. Nice. So are you just like, is it all custom scripts and stuff to find those people, or are you using SalesNav, or are you using? [Michael Houck]: Oh, Yeah. So part of why Matt is so valuable is that he has built a database of over 200 million emails that are enriched by their social media activity. So this is like who they follow, what they talk about, what they engage with and what’s in their bio. And then he turns that all into like a structured data set that we can search against. Um, it’s basically a way more powerful version of like Apollo or something like or Zoom info. So there’s obviously a lot of stuff we could do with that, but we think the first fun thing to do with it is build a big media company. Blake Emal: Yeah, totally. We’re gonna use the same writers that we have access to now for the initial people. [Michael Houck]: We’re gonna need more real quick. I’m anticipating that we’ll be at a writer bottleneck in February, by the end of February at least. Blake Emal: Yeah, we should, I’ll try to brainstorm what we should do to like get that, get ahead of that. Cause we should probably just have like a dedicated page to apply and unless you’ve already got that set up. No, no, no, no. [Michael Houck]: We, we definitely need like a site and a place where people can apply and all that. We have a new version of the megaphone like product site, which is going to have a way to talk about and link to the ghost writing, but we need sort of a separate setup for that. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: And [Michael Houck]: Yeah, any other ideas you have, just like let me know, because we’ll want to we’ll want to set that up for writers really, really quickly. And, you know, we’ll be able to afford sort of, you know, good quality writers as well, especially for our internal publications that we want to build. So, yeah, that’s very quickly going to be the biggest bottleneck will probably remain the biggest bottleneck all year. Honestly. And then the other thing I was thinking about was. Just in terms of timeline, so. I know we originally our plan was sell after one year and I think that that would be the case if this opportunity served with the email stuff wasn’t in front of it. Yeah, dude, like, I honestly think that this is going to sound hyperbolic because we’re literally at like under you know, what are we at, under 30K a month or under 40K a month or something like that. But I really think that this can be like an eight figure business pretty easily with this email stuff and with this growth stuff. So we’ll see, roadblocks can happen. We can get booted from the internet. My last company fell apart, so I know it’s possible, but we haven’t run into any roadblocks yet and I’m feeling optimistic. Yeah, I mean, I’m never gonna put, grow the thing as much as I just want to be, you know, I want to have that dialogue between us because you’re the only equity holder in this thing besides me. Um, and, and then, you know, obviously the way it’s structured will be that megaphone studios is its own company. Matt’s sort of data company is its own company. They both have some sort of exclusive, uh, agreement that’s indefinite and permanent with this new company. And every ghostwriting client that comes in through the new company will basically keep like a small referral fee for the ghostwriting and pay the rest to Megaphone Studios. So yeah, revenue potential is crazy high. Do you have a couple more minutes? Blake Emal: I just have a few more questions. [Michael Houck]: I think so, let me check. Yeah, I’m good for another like 13 minutes. Okay, cool. Blake Emal: So if eventually we sell, this has like almost nothing to do with me, if eventually it sells, what does that mean for, so the person that buys it, one of the valuable mechanisms is this database that allows to basically target the right people at the right time. What does that look like when you sell? Have you talked through that with, is it Matt? Is that his name? Yeah. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: If we were to sell the main company, then what would happen, I mean, I don’t think we would sell Like it’s one of those things where we’re not going to need to raise VC for. It’s just going to be a cash flow machine for like years, right? Hopefully. If that ends up playing out, we probably wouldn’t sell, but if it does, I mean if we do end up wanting to sell, we get some crazy offer or something, then. What would happen would be that the new company? Which technically like doesn’t have that many assets and like might have a small team of like maybe a couple engineers or designers people and things like that. They would continue to own the media brands that we create, the client relationships that we have, and then the agreement between Matt’s company and Megaphone Studios would be that we basically have some agreement that is part of what we’re negotiating right now with the lawyers of how long we need to continue servicing for. My guess is that the data side will service indefinitely, and that’ll just be part of the deal. And on the ghostwriting side, we’d probably need to service for X amount of time. Maybe it’s one month, maybe it’s six months, maybe it’s a different amount of months depending on whether we want to keep equity in the new company or just take a cash out or something like that. So that’s something we would talk about, like I talked about with you at the time too. And there’s also a world where we get the new company to a point where maybe we build some crazy A, writer thing and we no longer need this giant team of writers, we just need a smaller team. In that case, maybe we absorb some writers into new company, we convert your equity in Megaphone Studios into some of that, or maybe we just sell the ghost writing agency and we take a cash out from that. I don’t know. That’s like hypothetical future stuff, but all scenarios are good and involve a lot of money, which I’m excited about. Blake Emal: Backtracking a little bit. On the cold email stuff, or not cold email, the newsletter stuff, the pricing for it. Can you walk me through again how everything’s gonna be, like all the packages, and then also for the writers that we bring in for that, what we think the kind of standard pay is gonna be for that. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, so for the ghost writing that we’ll do, it’s the same. It’s the same pricing, weekly newsletter, $3,500. Bi-weekly newsletter 2K. And monthly newsletter 1K, although we probably won't want to take on too many monthly clients. On the writer side, I still kind of want to price it by writer, like based on how senior we think they are, right? And that'll be something we'll need to evaluate as we're sort of interviewing these folks. Our highest paid writer right now, the couple of them are at 2K a month for a either a full social media thing or a weekly newsletter. And I think our least expensive does like, it's like $1,500 to $2k a month for the full package. And then it goes down from there. So hopefully we can stay near that range, but obviously there's folks who can command higher, and we can evaluate that on sort of an ad hoc basis, working on too. But as far as the pricing on the growth side goes, we have the data, so there's actually not that many expenses. And so what we've sort of figured out is that people are willing to pay between $1.50 per subscriber from this channel. And it’s like a no-brainer at that level, right? It’s not, oh, I need to decide how much budget to take away from my other paid ads or whatever. It’s like they’re just like, yep, done. So what we’re going to do is up to our minimum is going to be 1k and up to 5k subscribers a month. It’s a dollar. And if you go above 5k, then we drop it to 50 cents. We might add a third tier in the middle at 75 cents at some point, but that’s sort of how we’re thinking about it for right now. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Cool. Blake Emal: Yeah, that’s awesome. Last thing I was going to say is I know we’re going to have a bottle for writers. I’m going to be thinking about how we can get a bunch of good ones in, especially on the newsletter side. I think that’s where we’re going to need more help. And I’ve been focused more on social people. Even then, I’ve only brought in two writers, so it’s not like… [Michael Houck]: Yeah, but the two that you’ve brought in are our most reliable best two. Yeah, I felt really good about them. Blake Emal: So they’ll be consistent. But then for newsletter writers, I’m going to try to do some stuff to… I’ll think about how we can get more quality people in the funnel. And then I was just gonna say, if that’s a huge bottleneck, I can be a writer for one or two of these things to start off with if we need to. Keep that in mind if you want like somebody you know is gonna actually do the thing, not make it a problem. If it becomes a bottleneck quick and you’re like, we need people, I can step in for one or two of those things as well to get to that point. [Michael Houck]: Okay, I appreciate that. I think as much as possible, I want to try to avoid that because if we are going to run into a situation where we’re growing really quickly and we’re seeing like, you know, a small exponential curve of new clients coming in, your time is very quickly going to be wrapped up in editing, coordination, staying on top of people. Um, and adding writing on top of that is just going to be a headache for you. So my, like, obviously it’s like a, like a safety valve last resort. Sure. But, um, definitely want to avoid that if at all possible. Blake Emal: Totally, yep, same page. Sweet. Cool. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: I’m excited. Blake Emal: Things are moving, that’s fun. [Michael Houck]: Dude, this is gonna be the best year yet, I think. I really do think that. I’m pumped. I’ve never felt so sure about what the path is to build something big. Even with Launch House, when we were top of the Twitter world and all that stuff, we were still figuring it out. $100 million in revenue, right, which we had to do because we raised venture. This is like, we can make it as big as we want. And we don’t need to raise money. And the path is like execution XYZ to get there. Blake Emal: Yeah, you know, it’s funny, though, I think you get to the point like this in any startup in any place, where if you get good enough, what you’re doing, then it starts, you start feeling like I’m kind of in a place now where I think I feel like the editing stuff right now, I’ve done it so many weeks in a row. There’s not like, there’s client problems and stuff that come up, but it’s like, I just, it’s all muscle memory. And now I’m in a place where I want to do something on top of it or like keep pushing. Yeah. Like at a startup, you just can’t, I mean, you know, you can’t just say this, or if you have the mentality of the startup person, like I do, it’s kind of not fun to just, keep status quo and like right now I’m like, I need to do more stuff because I feel good about the processes now. [Michael Houck]: Let me know what those things are as you think of them. I mean, the top thing that comes to mind for me is that again, as we’re adding clients sort of at this faster rate hopefully, we’re gonna get to the point where A, you’re not gonna wanna do that muscle memory across tens and tens and tens of different clients every week and B, you’re not gonna have time to. Right? So we’re gonna need to elevate some folks on the team to take on some of those responsibilities or bring on some other people specifically for those roles too, those like intermediate editor roles. You know, good problems to have, but your sort of role and the way that you manage the team will, you know, new challenges will emerge there, I think. Yeah, totally. Blake Emal: I will have opinions when we get to the editor thing, because I have worked with only ones that I did not enjoy. [Michael Houck]: Dude, honestly, the more the more opinions you have, the better, because you have my like carte blanche trust with this stuff. And I am not going to have bandwidth to deal with all of it. So the more that I can just be like, this is Blake’s domain. I don’t get in his way. He does his thing. Blake Emal: That’s that’s my dream world. So, yeah, sweet. I think editing will be easier on newsletters. They’re working on one long piece is so much easier than 10 disparate pieces in a week. [Michael Houck]: Oh, yeah. Yeah, for sure, for sure. Blake Emal: Plus, tone and voice, it’s so much easier to just nail it if you’re writing longer form, I think. So I feel pretty good about how we can scale that up. [Michael Houck]: One thing that you should think about, too, is that we have a few engineers on the team who’ve been working on Megaphone, right? And we’re almost at the point, I’d say probably by the end of Q1, my guess is that we’ll be at the point where all of the features that I’ve been about having in Megaphone will be launched. And then it’ll just be about a growth game for Megaphone. We’ll probably do that by growing the Viral Examples newsletter, right? So their time on the engineering side will free up. And if there are things that we want to build to make the editing process faster, to let you go through more in a shorter period of time or delegate it more effectively to somebody else, you know, think about your dream tools to build for these sort of businesses. And we’ll have some bandwidth to have a designer sketch something out and the engineers then go build it. Blake Emal: Awesome, I will think of that. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Cool. [Michael Houck]: I appreciate your time. I’m gonna think through my newsletter. Blake Emal: I’m also trying to stand up a little bit of cold email for myself, but baby steps. I’ve gotta do one thing well before I do everything. [Michael Houck]: If you want, I don’t think I added you to the newsletter group, team channel that we have. But I can do that just because. You should talk to Matt because he’s like, again, like a world level expert at this stuff. So he knows way more about it than I do. He could probably give some tips on the cold email stuff in particular for like lead gen. Blake Emal: Yeah, I’d love it. I don’t want to impose on him if he’s he’s busy or whatever, but definitely. [Michael Houck]: Well, I, I also have a selfish, selfish concern. Which is that if we blow up your other stuff, your time for our stuff goes down. We’ll see then. But yeah, happy to help with whatever. And always down to Jim and Chad, you know that. Blake Emal: Yeah, we just know that if page tear blows up more, it will push me to the point of having to hire people for the first time, which means I will still not be, I will be doing less and less fulfillment. Okay. It could work. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. Blake Emal: I don’t know. Yeah. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: Look, I mean, honestly, you having you be part of this team, I’ve, I’ve told Matt this, I’ve told other people on the team, this is such a valuable thing for us because especially as we’re interviewing writers, like, you know, when I was talking to Tanmay and other people too, they’ve been like, Oh, like Blake, I’ll be working with Blake. Like, that’s amazing. That’s such like an amazing thing for me to be able to do learn from him. So, um, I definitely see this as a big long-term thing for us. And I want your role in that to be as big as you want it to be. Blake Emal: So yeah, I love it, man. It’s been a pleasure. Enjoy Argentina. Where are you going next and what timeline? [Michael Houck]: I’m going to Florianopolis in Brazil, which is like the it’s like they call it the Beverly Hills of Brazil. It’s a beach town, supposed to be beautiful. I’m going there, but not for like four Oh, dude, I’m stuck here in Patagonia, which I thought I was going to love. Maybe I will. Maybe I’ll maybe I’ll turn the corner on it. But bad, bad first impression. Blake Emal: Isn’t it like crazy cold there right now? [Michael Houck]: No, no, it’s like 75 degrees. Blake Emal: Yeah. OK, it’s flipped. It’s flipped because Patagonia does get really cold, though, I think. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: World class skiing and hiking and stuff like that. But no, right now it’s it’s very mild, like San Francisco weather. Blake Emal: Cool. Well, I’m sure you’ll, you’ll do some cool stuff. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I’ll be up. Wait, when I get back to the States, um, I’m going to, I’m going to Texas first for like a month, but after that, I’m going to probably come up and hit, I’m going to go see, uh, Jacob in Arkansas and I’m going to hit Nashville too. So I’ll probably see you in like a couple of months. Blake Emal: Yeah. That sounds awesome, man. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Cool. [Michael Houck]: All right, dude.