- Duration: 23 min
- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01JJA6KJXB1NVR393ZR4SMQRWM (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JJA6KJXB1NVR393ZR4SMQRWM)
Transcript
[Richie Cartwright]: And what’s the joint venture? [Michael Houck]: Well, you know, I have my GoStrikes agency as well as a couple other things, and he has his sort of like data services business. And so the joint venture is basically this new media company where we’re going to be fulfilling our own media assets and also helping clients build their own as well. So the combination of our two businesses. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Amazing. [Richie Cartwright]: And I had a little bit of context from, for reference, I think with both YC founders and different groups and we’ve come across each other a few times before. And I knew he knew stuff about emails and I had a question to him so that I reached out to him. What are the kind of main products, main services you guys are providing in this joint venture? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I mean, so it’s really two things. So I guess just for some background on myself, I did the big tech thing for a while, Uber and Airbnb a while back, and then founded a company called Launch House. We raised our Series A from Andreessen, ended up turning it into a venture fund, invested in a bunch of startups. And now I’ve basically built a bootstrap personal holding company over the last couple of years. And so the Ghost Training Agency is part of that. What we’re doing together is effectively helping people build media assets for their startups. [Richie Cartwright]: So that’s typically- We were talking about Jacob the other day, by the way. He’s a launch house as well, right? [Michael Houck]: Jacob. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He was the third co-founder we brought in. I suppose I’m really cool now, superhuman, or superpower. [Richie Cartwright]: We’re in health care, so I think we cross paths that way. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Cool. [Michael Houck]: Sorry about that, Michael. No, I’m good, man. So yeah, so I built a newsletter to 70,000 subscribers, most of whom are founders. And I’ve built some other newsletters up over the past couple of years as well. And what we realized is that there’s no better way to say mind for customers and convert them into prospective customers to actual customers than to stay in their inboxes with an email newsletter. And so basically what we’re doing is we’re offering the ability to grow an email list incredibly quickly that’s both cheaper and more effective than like paid ads, which is what you would typically do for a newsletter. And also then create the content for said newsletter if the startup we’re working with doesn’t have a content team or just wants to outsource it to us. The way the process works is basically we built a database of 200 million people’s emails, sort of like you would get from like Apollo or Zoom info or something like that. The difference is they have data on sort of like the demographics of the person, right? We have interest level data. So we’ve gone through Twitter, we’ve gone through other social media platforms, and we’ve taken what they engage with, who they follow, what’s what they post content about. And we’ve turned that into a structured data set. And so that allows us then to write queries against the data set and pull out lists that are not just targeted by what job title someone has, but the same sort of interest level targeting that you would normally get through paid ads, except that you’re writing people’s inboxes instead of showing up in their newsfeed. And so we think that’s really powerful in a few ways. And the first way that we want to explore it is by building media assets. And so we’re looking for startups who understand the value of staying in people’s inboxes, staying top of mind for them, and either building up those assets that they already have or creating them in tandem with them. [Richie Cartwright]: And you say build up assets, that is the ghostwriting part. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, so if you guys had a newsletter, we would just be adding subscribers to that newsletter who are extremely aligned to the topics and your potential customers, your ICP, versus if you don’t have one, we have a a very highly vetted team of writers who I’ve worked with for a long time who can create it for you. [Richie Cartwright]: And so say we had, I think we probably have more than 100,000 leads that have signed up for emails. How much could you grow that by a month? [Michael Houck]: I mean, it really comes down to what your budget would be. We can do it at very effective prices. If you’re getting subscribers for a newsletter, for an email list, Facebook ads, Instagram ads, TikTok ads, things like that. If you’re going to pay anywhere from $1.50 to $2.50, maybe even more than that, depending on the niche and how effective your ads are, we can do it for cheaper than that. Depending on the niche and depending on the volume, we can do it for anywhere from $1 to $0.50. And again, these are people who we see time and time again have higher engagement with the emails than you’d also get through paid ads. So it’s a win-win. [Richie Cartwright]: Okay, yeah, interesting. And how do you know they’re high quality or how do we know they’re high quality? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, so a couple things. First of all, we know that they’re aligned with the topic because we know their social media activity, we know what they’re talking about, we know who they’re following, right? So that’s one piece. And then the second piece is that we actually send cold email campaigns to these people on an ongoing basis to sort of pen test their inbox, make sure it’s active, make sure they’re opening emails, reading emails. And the people who are most active are the ones that will prioritize adding to your list. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Makes sense. [Richie Cartwright]: And I think, because I reached out to Matthew originally basically being like, wait, does LLMs make D2C personalized cold outreach on emails work in a way that B2B works? And he was like, kind of, maybe you’ve tried it. He was like, actually, what I think is newsletter and add people to it, that’s That’s what we’re talking about here, correct? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, correct. Basically, we’ll send the cold emails ahead of time, but then we’ll deliver the ones who actually meet some engagement criteria with those emails to you, so you’re getting sort of the cream of the crop. And, you know, the thinking is better to hit them an unlimited amount of times with a newsletter than just, you know, three to four to five times with a cold email. [Richie Cartwright]: So a newsletter is basically the best tool to use for the same function. Correct. Correct. And his idea was basically that they haven’t signed up for the newsletter but they won’t mind it because they’re like oh I didn’t realize I like did I sign up for this oh it’s perfect yeah yeah I mean there’s [Michael Houck]: this weird misconception that people have where like cold emailing is illegal but it’s not you can just email people as long as there’s an unsubscribe link and an address in the footer which you know newsletter platforms have by default [Richie Cartwright]: and so as long as you have that they can unsubscribe if they want okay so it’s basically using the newsletter as a proxy for cold email just way the b2b cold outreach works but now you’re like using letter we’re [Michael Houck]: we’re delivering value through the newsletter either entertaining content or interesting information news whatever the case may be um to them yeah it sounds good and I think yeah how would we what would you need to see from but just [Richie Cartwright]: for reference we’re talking about um our medical weight loss our prime brand is uh male medical weight loss so male obesity middle age middle class middle america about 10 000 patients kind of stage. And then I think… What’s up? I was going to say, I said congrats. That’s huge. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: 10,000. [Michael Houck]: That’s great. Thanks, man. Yeah. [Richie Cartwright]: And definitely have a hundred thousand email leads and SMS, et cetera. What would you need to see from me to get that to a 50 cents a lead? I think obviously the price per lead is a big thing here. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. So We probably wanna do, so we’re formalizing our pricing right now, but basically what we’ve been doing is if you’re doing 10,000 a month with us or more, we can have it at 50 cents. That’s what we’ve been offering. [Richie Cartwright]: With more volume, because I think we could probably do more, is there any way we could bring that down, or is 50 the cap? [Michael Houck]: We can’t go, it doesn’t make sense for us to do it below 50, but yeah, we can do it at 50, whatever volume you want. [Richie Cartwright]: So we’re basically talking 10,000 times $0.5 is $5,000 a month, that kind of level? And then in terms of gross writing, is that included in that or is that extra on top? [Michael Houck]: Gross writing is separate. It depends on the cadence of the newsletter. So if you want to do like a weekly newsletter, which is what most people want to do, that’d be $3,500 a month. [Richie Cartwright]: If you wanted to do a bi-weekly newsletter, that would be $2,000 a month. So basically $1,000 a week for gross writing, depending on the cadence for the discounted monthly. It’s one way to think about it. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, correct. [Richie Cartwright]: Can we basically try and see how we’re feeling after 30, 60? Yeah, we’re totally month-to-month. We appreciate 30 days notice, of course, so call it 60. [Michael Houck]: But yeah, there’s no long-term lock-in or anything like that. Cool, good. [Richie Cartwright]: And how would you advise, I know you have a little bit of bias in this game as well, but you probably know They’re getting very well. Um There’s two services here, right? There’s inbound and there’s ghost writing, uh, like a growing email list and ghost writing, uh The growing that’s you you guys And then the ghost writing is just like you’re clearly just very good at it. How would you say? Should we take that ghost writing piece on ourselves? Are we being okay about that? Are we being completely dumb? Like how do how do you think about that? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I mean Look at the end of the day Our job with the ghostwriting is to learn your content voice, whatever you want in terms of format, tone, how we speak to the audience, the lingo. We do our own research, obviously. But in the initial week or two, we’ll want to gather some info from you that helps us sort of get up to speed. Look, if you don’t have that content muscle already built out, it’s easier to just send it off to us. But if you have somebody on the team who you feel like, yeah, they can write a newsletter, and it’d be great, then that’s You know, that’s totally fine. We’re not going to pressure you one way or the other. [Richie Cartwright]: Would you, would you be open to, uh, be like, show us what we’re missing kind of vibe. Like we, we do have life cycle. She does write great content, but maybe it’s not great content. Like, who knows? Would you, would you be open to, we can commit, I think to two months. So like 30 plus, uh, 30 days notice of, um, uh, the, the email leads. That was like very interesting. And he says in Tessa, so that’s a like minimum, I guess it’s, um, 10,000 leads at 50 cents. And then let’s do one month of the ghost writing. And if you prove to us that we don’t know shit, then we’re like, yeah, keep doing it. And obviously, then if after a month, we’re like, no, we should probably do this in house, then we’ll bring that in house, but keep doing the leads. How does that sound? Yeah, that’s totally fine. [Michael Houck]: But what we’ll do, I recommend two months on the ghost writing, just because the first month, there’s a lot of context gathering, getting things set up, getting the first few emails set up and all that. So if you do two, that would be that’d be better on our side. But basically, what we do is we’d get you an account set up with probably Beehive, the best newsletter platform out there. We’d get a welcome sequence set up, we’d get some other automation set up, and then we’d write the first few issues of the newsletter. Process there would be pretty simple. I would send you some anonymized examples of writers on our team. You’d pick the one who you think could do the voice you guys want the best, and then the three of us will get on a kickoff call. [Richie Cartwright]: Just so I don’t cut you out for some other reason. [Michael Houck]: Oh, just because we have a few writers and, you know, it’s, the content that they’re writing is for other clients of ours, right? So I could put their names on the little Google Doc that we have if you want, but I don’t think it’s gonna make too much of a difference. [Richie Cartwright]: But anonymized as in not the brand or not the person? [Michael Houck]: I’m just confused at the anonymized part. Just completely anonymized. All you’ll see is the content that they’ve written and you can judge it on merits, basically. Okay, cool, cool, cool. But then we’ll do one kickoff call. You’ll fill out one onboarding form. Once that’s done, Then it becomes a weekly async process. We set up a slack connect channel every monday. We’ll send you like a couple topic ideas You or someone on the team picks which one and answers some questions with a just a single voice note Um, and then we get to work if we get the voice note back by wednesday You get the content by friday, basically and we’ll we’ll also do that a few weeks in advance So that it’s not a scramble on a week-to-week basis Cool makes sense. [Richie Cartwright]: Yeah, I’d be keen. Um basically, you can have the second month of ghost writing if it’s like in the right direction and well I’m not going to be a dick about it but obviously if it’s like no this is like not worth three and a half gigs I know that right so that’s what I’m saying if you absolutely hate the ghost writing we’re not gonna we’re not gonna force it on you for sure um so yeah roughly uh roughly happy with this [Michael Houck]: uh structure what do you need from us to get started cool so I’ll shoot you an email over um after this stripe link onboarding form uh and then Is the email that you’re on this call with the right email [Richie Cartwright]: to set up a Slack channel with? [Michael Houck]: Yeah. Do you use WhatsApp at all or no? We do. [Richie Cartwright]: We can use WhatsApp if that’s preferable. No problem. You’ll be working mainly with Jamie. She’s our lifecycle lead and I’ll be involved. She can set up Slack for Richie and Jamie. Just the only thing is to get to me, I’m definitely best on WhatsApp. So if you want to send over the stripe on WhatsApp, I’m going to be quicker at it there than I am on email. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: That’s the only thing. [Richie Cartwright]: You can send the email to those two, but like anything you need me to do, probably best on WhatsApp. [Michael Houck]: You got it, man. [Richie Cartwright]: What’s your WhatsApp? Yes. I’ll send that across. [Richie Cartwright]: I actually already have Matthew as well, so if you want to create a group, that’s fine. [Michael Houck]: I’ll do that right after this call. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Sounds good. Any other questions that we should answer? [Richie Cartwright]: thinking. No, probably just the metal one of like, oh, there’s obviously a lot of trust in this game of like, I don’t know the quality of the leads, I don’t know how they’ll convert. Sure, of course. So just like, if you could just be fully open with me on like, the good, the bad, the ugly, just so then I can kind of calibrate on like, how good you think the leads are, what your is like really good at and not good at just like you can be open um I’m kind of like putting some trust in here and it’s worth a test for us basically and I’ll trust you way more if you just like can guide me on what’s good and what’s bad basically so never feel to never be be hesitant to be candid always I will um and if we run into any issues I’ll flag them to you right away we can [Michael Houck]: work through them um you want me to do I guess I’ll do that in slack just so jamie can can see it as well but uh yeah I mean look We’ve been running this for two and a half months now, both with my own newsletter and then with seven beta customers. And 100% of the beta customers converted from free test beta to paid. Open rates are the lowest open rate we’ve seen is 57%. The highest is 75%. Click rates are going to vary based on the content of the newsletter and the structure of it, but they’re all higher than their average for every single one that we’ve done compared to other channels. So we feel pretty good about it. It’s new, um, but we’re, we’re pretty excited about it. So if you have any things that come up in terms of snafus with the process or anything like that, I asked the same thing. Just be upfront, candid with me and, you know, I’m a problem solver. [Richie Cartwright]: We’ll dive in and we’ll figure it out. Michael really appreciate it. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Cool. [Michael Houck]: But you talk soon, man. I’ll send you that WhatsApp a little bit.