- Duration: 12 min
- Platform: zoom
- Source: Read.ai 01JJ7WTQ235647NG49E7RCXYS5 (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JJ7WTQ235647NG49E7RCXYS5)
Transcript
[Gill Gross]: the summer, which I would love to do. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, makes sense. Makes sense. I got out of the cold myself just now. Was based in New York for a while. Now I’m in Argentina at the moment. We’ll see where we go from here. [Gill Gross]: Okay, nice, nice. Are you liking it? It’s hit and miss. [Michael Houck]: I’d say I like Chile more. I was just in Chile a couple weeks ago. Argentina is okay. I don’t know that I’d come back, but it’s fine. Um, anyway, man, excited to be partnering up and, and helping you guys out, uh, with growing the newsletter. Um, I guess, you know, we can use this time. We already got all your information from the form and everything. So I don’t know that we’ll need a ton of time, but just wanted to get some time on the calendar and, uh, get a sense of sort of, you know, meet each other and get a sense of, uh, how you’re kind of measuring this, how we can most be, uh, effective for you and make sure we’re getting the right people in there. And also to answer any questions you have that, uh, that, you know, Ben didn’t already cover. [Gill Gross]: Cool, yeah, sounds good. [Michael Houck]: So yeah, I mean, to get started, just, you know, I guess like we’re going to be delivering the first batch, I believe, on Monday when we do our next cycle. So I just want to throw out there any questions you had throughout the process so far, or about sort of what that looks like, and we can sort of dive in from there. [Gill Gross]: No, yeah, no questions initially. Do you do you have anything? [Ben Ornstein]: The one thing that I brought up to you how the other day was because our click through rate is pretty decent. Do you think we should increase our? Our engagement criteria compared to some of the other ones, or I don’t know if there’s a certain rate where that should be changed, or maybe that should be adjusted afterwards. [Michael Houck]: I’m not sure. I think preemptively we shouldn’t do anything. The first few batches perform over the first few weeks or a month or two. And then if we’re seeing that the subscribers coming in aren’t matching the quality that you guys are seeing in terms of engagement, obviously then we can increase the engagement quality or engagement thresholds that we set. But we’ve seen in every newsletter we’ve worked with so far, as far as I know, the click rates of the people we add are above their average click rate. I don’t know if that’ll be the case, because you guys have the best click rate that we’ve worked with so far, but if it’s not even in the same ballpark, obviously we can adjust, but no evidence would suggest that’s [Gill Gross]: needed right now, at least. Yeah, I will say I was a little bit unsure of what to put on the form when it said, are you going for engagement? Are you going for list size? [Michael Houck]: I’m actually not quite sure. Okay, that’s fine. I mean, We can blow up the list size as big as you want. [Gill Gross]: Ultimately, the goal is to be able to sell really good, have really good brand partnerships through the newsletter. So that’s number one. Then number two would be, I guess the other way that it also feeds into my business is it does also promote my content on other platforms along with other people’s content. So those are the two things. [Michael Houck]: Okay, I mean, if that’s the case, I would say that until we see evidence that any brand deals or anything like that are being impacted by some terrible click rate that we would provide, obviously we wouldn’t provide that, but my sense would be, with newsletters, I don’t know how familiar you are with the newsletter world, you can, especially with your content on other platforms, you can probably command brand deals pretty early on, you know, obviously we’ve seen that, but for most newsletters, you don’t really start getting tons of newsletter brand deals until you’re in like the 25,000 subscriber range. Um, that might’ve actually gone up a little bit. That’s what it was when I was building mine early on and what I’ve heard from some people anecdotally since then too. Um, so yeah, I, I would say let’s play it safe for now. Let’s keep it rolling. And then, um, if we see the engagement go down, And then if we see that translate into you guys not feeling good enough about how to position this to potential partners, then we can reevaluate, right? [Gill Gross]: But we’re far away from Yeah, far far away for sure. [Michael Houck]: But OK. On our side, it’s pretty simple. Yeah, we’re already in there. Ben obviously is already in there, but we have our account on there too, so we’re just going to be adding people. Ben, if we haven’t already set up the automations, did, but we’ll run through a test run before the first batch just to make sure everything’s good there. And then we’ll start delivering weekly on Mondays. And then starting on the following Monday, we’ll be doing reporting as well. [Gill Gross]: Okay. And what? What should I expect as far as like slack activity? And by the way, apologies, I’m going to respond to that that message. I know there wasn’t a call to action, but I’ll respond. But I’m not on Slack in my day-to-day, so it is sort of an outside kind of thing that I don’t even have set up on my phone right now. [Michael Houck]: That’s totally fine. Would you prefer that we send updates through email instead? We can do that if that’s easier. [Gill Gross]: Yeah, if that’s easy, it’s probably better. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I don’t want to make you change your whole workflow just for us. Do then is every Monday will send an email with reporting and just confirming that the batch was uploaded successfully and all that stuff. Perfect. And if you need to, if you have any questions that are urgent or anything like that, feel free to hop in slack, but no pressure. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. [Gill Gross]: Nice. Sounds good. Cool. [Michael Houck]: Um, I mean, I think that’s it for now. If you get to a point where you would want us to help out with content writing, ghostwriting, things like that, we have a service for that as well. Um, if you have any folks who are kind of in a similar boat, you’ll want to transition from these like social media platforms to an owned audience in a newsletter, uh, and they want to grow it to send them our way. Uh, we offer a 50% of the first month of whatever they do, uh, up to 2,500. So it can be pretty sizable referral fee. Um, so let us know if that’s, uh, if that’s appealing or, you know, anybody there who could be a fit, um, But yeah, that’s it, pretty simple process. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Nice. [Gill Gross]: Well, appreciate the help here and I’m glad that we found, well Ben, Ben and you found each other and this all worked out really, really well. So I’m excited to get going. [Michael Houck]: Good to put a face to the newsletter and we’ll touch base on Monday once we get rolling. Awesome, very good. Cool, thanks Gill, good to meet you.