- Duration: 30 min
- Platform: zoom
- Source: Read.ai 01JJCQATDKZNXWPS2KT6553XVH (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JJCQATDKZNXWPS2KT6553XVH)
Transcript
[UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Hey. Hey. [Michael Houck]: Are you out of that Airbnb? I am. [Ben Ornstein]: I just, uh, said screw the Airbnbs and at the Sheridan now. [Michael Houck]: Nice. Yeah. Nice little, nice little Lake view. They’re doing like, I don’t know, they’re moving all the furniture around in the apartment above me for some reason, but, um, much better here for sure. That’s good. Okay, so let’s talk about ideas for long form. I did not do this homework, so I am gonna rely on you guys for this initial pass. So how should we do this? How should we start? Do we just wanna dive in? Does someone wanna do a first batch? I imagine we’ll spend different amounts of time talking about different ideas and all that. [Max]: So how do we want to start it? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: I’ll send my batch in the chat. [Max]: I found 50 and I just got the link for them. That’s it, and the name. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Sweet. [Michael Houck]: I assume we don’t want to go through 50 videos, or do we? [Max]: No, I don’t think we want to go through 50 videos. [Michael Houck]: Are there any that you feel like stand out and should be prioritized from the list? [Max]: No, not that I know of I will say, though, all of these were at the very top performing videos for all of these creators. So whenever I would find a good channel, I would go to videos and then popular and I’d find one that was, you know, typically top five performing for them. [Michael Houck]: Got it. Were there any trends you noticed like formats for thumbnails or titles that we could learn from [Max]: Um, it’s all just like the click baity titles and that you can see all the titles here. [Michael Houck]: Um, yeah, but like, I mean, I mean like, um, you know, were, was it things like, do people care more about inspiration for startup ideas? Do people care more about how to, you know, do something is like case studies, like what’s the, what do you, what do you see? [Max]: Um, I think like the, the how to’s, um, were really good and like how to build a company metrics dashboard, how to build a startup without funding, uh, like 10 tips for starting your own business. These do well, like people want actionable, device. Even just creating a video, how to set up the back end when you’re starting a company, like creating a Stripe Atlas, like, you know, banking with Mercury, like these simple things that I think people would watch in a video, I think they could be valuable. And then some of these are like stories. Best startup lessons from X. I just got the video examples. I didn’t even write my ideas down. [Ben Ornstein]: Like while I was putting them in the sheet, in my sheet, I of course had some, but I didn’t write any of them down. [Michael Houck]: That’s fine. We’ll have time to go through and do things. Um, we’re probably also going to want to go through and analyze the thumbnails to death a little bit. Um, cause that’s an area that I feel like we are not at all experts in. Um, let me open your shoot up to here, Ben. Okay, cool. So you, you have the titles of the videos. You just, you didn’t turn those into like ideas, which is fine. Uh, and so what we’ll do is I’m going Yeah, both of this is title. Oh, those are titles too, yeah. Oh, oh wait, these weren’t your ideas. [Ben Ornstein]: Sorry, I’m a little confused. [Michael Houck]: Does the title have dot dot in it? So no, it doesn’t. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: These are basically like week. [Max]: These are the titles of these. So this is how Elon Musk spends his time and we can fill out the dot dot within with whoever we want. [Michael Houck]: Oh, okay. So some of them are specific, like the best businesses and start with chat GPT and others are sort of like formats. [Max]: Yeah. When there was a variable to input, I’m like put in a dot dot dot. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Got it. [Michael Houck]: Okay. [Max]: But for the most part, a lot of these are just the exact title that’s on these YouTube videos and we could literally make like a video on the same Okay, cool. [Michael Houck]: That sounds good. Cool, so I’ll have Rena go through and add some data to these two Google Sheets, probably combine them into one, and then I’ll probably just spend some time with the list and come up with some ideas and things like that and write down some, um, some patterns and then we’ll, we’ll prioritize some. And then Ben, I’ll turn them over to you for, for research on, on the first couple. Cool. I’m going to just combine these into this into one sheet now. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Cool. [Michael Houck]: OK, is there anything that we should talk about and we have time? We don’t necessarily need to use it, but is there anything that we should call out now about these? [Ben Ornstein]: Well, I noticed the same thing that Max did like the how to’s. If you look at my 40 that I got how to was the vast majority of them. Yeah, I think for the same reason like, People talk about OK, I’m going to go start. I like, I love Max example. People are going to go ahead and start a company. Okay. Like how do you actually do that though? Like, what are the steps to it? Do I, do I get an LLC first? When do I open a bank account? When there are so many examples of things like that, where it’s like, people just say, start a company. Okay. How the hell do you do that? What are the actual steps that can be applied to? I think so many things in the startup world. How do you get a valuation? I love that one. Um, or how do value your company? Um, again, more niche than others, but, um, I think they do, they kill because they’re, those things aren’t straightforward to all founders. Okay, cool. [Michael Houck]: Um, that makes sense to me. So, okay. So I guess, I guess the action item here then is I’ll just have Rena add some data about views and, and specific stuff here. And then I’ll probably just spend a couple hours going through these. But these are all outliers, right? They all performed, you know, top of the class. Very well. [Ben Ornstein]: Yeah, I was on view stats and I was, I was searching by like outlier amount. Sometimes these were 10 X, but they were all outliers through view stats. [Michael Houck]: So yeah. Okay, cool. [Max]: Yeah, I still think there’s a big opportunity with YouTube to create good long form videos for the startup space. Why Conrad is the only company doing it well? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, it’s true. What videos would you create, Max, if you were if you were starting this from scratch? [Max]: That one I just said, like just just actionable startup content, like how to build a dashboard, like how can you build these really good dashboards? You’ve shown them to me, like literally just going through those steps and like sharing your screen and sharing how you build a dashboard for a SaaS product. Like that’s super valuable information. Um, I guess that takes something for granted. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. [Max]: That’s, that’s viable information. You could talk about why it’s important. You could talk about which metrics to, to track, how you track it, what you use to track it. Um, And then there’s other stuff like billion dollar startup ideas. That’s more so to get the clicks, not as actionable, obviously, but, you know, might do well. How to find product market fit. That’s more arbitrary, but like ultimate pitch guide with examples like what this video do. Let me see. Like there’s no way this guy is more about pitch decks than you do. 102,000 subscribers. Yeah, I mean, this is one of his this is his sixth best video. Like we already have the entire. Lead magnet with a bunch of pitch decking, right? Like you can literally go through, talk through, have your head pop up like loom in the corner and talk through three different pitch decks, why they’re great, why they’re not. Almost, almost like a course. Yeah, I was, I was actually thinking about that. [Michael Houck]: Like we have our, we did the one course, um, that was okay, but it might be better to just post this stuff on YouTube and have like, you know, every month been and we’d make like two sort of like shoot for the stars, click baity videos and two, maybe it’s three in one, I don’t know, but just some amount of like actual niche focus content so that, um, you know, we have like another playlist on the channel, which is like, you know, learning how to be a founder or something like that. Right. Um, And that way it sort of shows the credibility as well as like brings in the views. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: 100%. [Ben Ornstein]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: I think it’s going to be a big part of what we do this year. Um, so I’m going to record, I might record two, but I’m definitely going to record one this weekend now that I’m in a stable living situation for the next few days. [Ben Ornstein]: I think there are probably so many things. That you overlook or take for granted where you’re like, oh yeah, I just know how to do this. I could imagine there’s so many of those like, oh, you just do this. Oh, it’s just this, but it’s like, And a good test. A good test could be me because I know some stuff, but in terms of how to explain evaluation, no shot. I could explain it like very quickly and easily to you. So that could be one of doing it. You know what I’m saying? Like you’d be like, Hey Ben, do you know, you know, how would you explain evaluation? [Michael Houck]: I’m like, no clue. Good video. I like that. Yeah. I just having that to like bounce the idea off of would be, would actually be really valuable. Um, cool. Okay. Well, I got some homework to do. So, um, I will get on this over the next couple of days and we already have the first two videos we’re doing, but we’ll add in some from this list for February as well. And going forward, I guess. [Ben Ornstein]: You know, we got a bunch to work with, which is good. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, we got like a whole year’s worth of content here, easy. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: All right, look, well, I think that’s it then. So unless there’s anything else we should flag about these now, I’ll just let Rena know and she can get started adding the views and the other structured data that I want her to add. Cool. [Ben Ornstein]: A couple of questions on Mantle that we could just chat about real quick. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, sure. Max, if you want to hop off, no need to stick around. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: All right. See you. [Ben Ornstein]: See you, Ben. OK, so the ones that we don’t have a graduation rate for, obviously, we’re sort of guessing what the imports per week should look like, Is that correct? [Michael Houck]: What are we guessing for? Oh, because we don’t have the graduation rate, yeah. Good question. In that scenario, I would say, I mean, the formula, does the formula in Airtable show up or does it show up? [Ben Ornstein]: I did look at it. Yeah, yeah, I found it. Well, it doesn’t show up, but like, or yeah, basically I clicked edit field and I can see your formula. [Michael Houck]: Right. What I’m asking is what does the value show in the the rows that you’re talking about. So like, for example, I’m looking at the effective entrepreneur. It says infinity in an imports per week. That was my question. Cause there’s no graduation rate. So it doesn’t have a number to, um, to use. So what we should do in that scenario is basically assume a 50% graduation rate. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. [Michael Houck]: That way we are What is it? We’re not going to be behind. We don’t want to get into a situation where we’re behind. So as long as they have a number for graduated per month, and we assume the graduation rate is 50%, then there should be a number that shows up in imports per week, and we can use that. And then when you do the adjustments, the monthly adjustments of graduation rate, in in here, it’ll it’ll kind of self correct. [Ben Ornstein]: Got it. Okay, so that might change a couple of the numbers that I asked for in terms of Okay, I gotta in fact, I should just cancel the message to Matt because I gotta Yeah, I haven’t heard from all day. [Michael Houck]: So he might be doing something might not be on this till the weekend. I’m not sure. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Sure. Okay. [Michael Houck]: I’m going to delete this anyway because I got to. And I realized I didn’t ask for the effective entrepreneur either. Yeah, I noticed I was just figured we talked about it. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: So, we should be getting it for them to. [Ben Ornstein]: Yeah. Assume 50% rate if we don’t actually have one yet. I’m going to update it February 1st so we have. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: The actual numbers. [Ben Ornstein]: And then. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: OK. [Ben Ornstein]: Yeah, no, I think that’s that’s pretty much it done. OK, cool. [Michael Houck]: And yeah, Matt and I are figuring out. The legal stuff. There’s some complications that I was anticipating on his end. So I’m trying to work through those with him too. So if he’s slow to respond, he might just be, I don’t know, figuring stuff out there. [Ben Ornstein]: Okay. Well, yeah, I guess that’s why it’s good that we’re sending this stuff on Friday. [Michael Houck]: So he’s got, you know. Right. Yeah. It’s good to get ahead of it. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. [Michael Houck]: And then don’t worry about Dynasty Pulse. I know we added, I just added the graduation rate for that. They’re active again but they have like a longer process before we import for them so don’t worry about asking for them and then also playground post I put that in my message am I supposed to be asking about that one now just to just to get the leads if it’s not in their table don’t worry about it we’re waiting for them to fill out the form if they don’t fill it out in time that’s on them got it [Ben Ornstein]: okay understood so I won’t put the ground post and I won’t worry about dynasty pulls for now. Cool. Um, but yeah, the rest we should be good on. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Ben Ornstein]: Especially with the, with the assumptions and, um, 50%. Okay, cool. I think I’m set then. Cool, man. [Michael Houck]: Um, let me know if anything else comes up, but, um, if not, then, uh, yeah, then we’re good. Yeah. [Ben Ornstein]: I think the only thing I’m, I’ve been starting the research for, um, the mural I think that’ll be a cool conversation. Actually, startup recruiting is so different from regular recruiting, so like I’m coming. I’m going to come up with some interesting questions there, I think. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I think we should figure out like the angle for the piece. I mean, I think didn’t didn’t actually put that into the shared that part for the mural group. [Ben Ornstein]: Yeah, yeah, I think. [Michael Houck]: It’s you know, we don’t want this to come off like an ad. That’s number one thing, so we don’t want to ask like, I don’t know anything that would I don’t know what questions would even send us that way, but we just, we don’t want to seem like an ad. I think this is the first deep dive we’ve done since you joined the team, but we did like four or five of them before that. And then they just haven’t booked any for a long time. But now we’re going to have like two or three in short succession. So it’s interesting. But yeah, I’ll send you an example of a couple past ones that did well. And you can just see like the formats. Let me find it right now. Android.com. [Ben Ornstein]: Are the deep dives, is Max selling those or are you kind of sourcing those? [Michael Houck]: No, Max is selling them. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: I’m going to send these in, um, and here you dive examples. There’s like three that did, that did well. Is this one? And then there’s this one. Yeah, so just, they’re all sort of different, but just take a look and see how that there is a core lesson that each one is teaching the reader that is legitimately valuable and interesting. Or in Gamma’s case, it’s more so just like an interesting case study of their growth. But in any, in all three, there’s like, there is value first and foremost. And it’s just, hey, it is in this context and it’s from this person that I talked to. That’s it. Cool. And actually there’s, There’s one more that did OK too. Let me show this. Yeah, there’s this one. So I guess there’s four that did well. Cool, I’ll check that out. [Ben Ornstein]: And then you said the conversation is the 29th, I believe. So. [Michael Houck]: The conversation is the 29th, yes, correct, next week. [Ben Ornstein]: So I’ll probably work on this this weekend or like finalize it, maybe even finalize on Monday, but I’ll pretty much done by Monday. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah, that’s fine. [Michael Houck]: The 29th is what, Wednesday next week? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, as long as you get it to me by like, I don’t know, Monday night would be great. Tuesday morning is fine. As long as I have a chance to review it and ask any questions and follow-ups before I would get on the call, then that’s really all we need. [Ben Ornstein]: Oh, actually, what I wanted to chat through was also Mantle like the setups for, I think I’ve set them up correctly. What I noticed is Max didn’t have a welcome sequence. Sorry, can you hear me? [Michael Houck]: You’re breaking up pretty bad on video. Might be my Wi-Fi. Now it’s me. [Ben Ornstein]: It’s every time I open Beehive while I’m on Zoom or Google Meet. It’s crazy. [Michael Houck]: I just turned my video off to make that the signal less intense, but that’s really weird that it’s beehive. [Ben Ornstein]: That doesn’t make any sense. It’s every time I have multiple tabs open and I open beehive. So I’m not going to open it. But, um, what I remember is max doesn’t have any welcome sequence, not even an alternative voice. He doesn’t have any welcome sequence. So how, how is that set up working for him then? [Michael Houck]: Well, it’s the same way it’s set up for a tour port. They get the main newsletter first. [Ben Ornstein]: Okay. So that’s, and that’s gonna be the same for, I guess, my newsletter too then. [Michael Houck]: We don’t need a welcome sequence. Yeah, I mean, if you guys don’t have a welcome sequence already, no need to set one up for this. We can just do the current events process where they’re getting the main newsletter and we’re grading them against their engagement with the main newsletter. [Ben Ornstein]: Got it, okay. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, that’s probably just best then. Yeah, if there’s like, you know, Yeah, it doesn’t really make sense to set up a welcome sequence just for this, because those emails that we’re going to be grading their engagement against aren’t really reflective of the newsletter emails that they’ll be getting on an ongoing basis, right? So I would stick to that and just do what we did for Max’s. [Ben Ornstein]: It kind of makes sense, too, because it’s like we want them to want to see how they’re actually doing. And we have this conversation. So I get it. Yeah, that okay, that makes sense for those. I did when I was setting up the new ones, I didn’t include anything with greater secret is hits or greatest hits churn because obviously that wasn’t applicable. And I think the setups are correct. I’m pretty confident because I pretty much copied like founding journeys without any of that kind of stuff in it. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I’ll go through if you want to send me the list of the ones you did this for, Again, I have like a few messages of yours about this stuff bookmarked. I just keep not getting to it. So I will get to it this weekend. And if you want to send me the list of the ones I need to audit, I’ll also do that. [Ben Ornstein]: Okay. Yeah. I’ll, I’ll do that. Cause I set up, I guess the two I set up were just the effective entrepreneur and the draw were the ones that I have set up like kind of on my own. Yeah. Okay. I’ll send a separate message on that. Okay. Yeah. Once we get reporting under, you know, under control, that will be really, really good. Oh, in fact, I am going to finish the stuff this weekend because I want Monday to be focused on reporting. And hopefully everything goes smoothly on Monday. But so I’m going to get this research done definitely before Monday. [Michael Houck]: Cool. Sounds good. I’ll take a look at it on Sunday night or Monday then. [Ben Ornstein]: No, no rush. [Michael Houck]: Sounds good. All right. Okay, dude. Solid. I hope that the reporting stuff I can figure it out this weekend so that next week is easy on you in that regard. And I’m trying to think of anything else, but no, I think that’s it. Well, you know, obviously no more Max after today. So if there’s anything you need to ask him or that’s lingering or, you know, whatever, just, you know, make sure to do it this afternoon. [Ben Ornstein]: Yep. We’ll do, and I’ll send the message in writer’s room, unless Max is doing that for the last time today. I’m not sure. [Michael Houck]: I think he normally does it on Wednesdays, so it wouldn’t be today. [Ben Ornstein]: Oh, oh, why did I think you said Fridays? OK, maybe that was on me. OK. [Michael Houck]: Does it the same day that he writes the newsletter? I think the issue is that since he wrote this week’s newsletter last week, he probably didn’t do it this week. So that might be, cause I’m looking back and yeah, the last one he did was last Thursday. Oh, I guess it was on Thursdays. Um, but yeah, if you want to do one, uh, for this week, just use the three that went out in the viral examples newsletter yesterday. That’s fine. [Ben Ornstein]: Cool. I’ll I’ll write that. I’ll just take care of that real quick. [Michael Houck]: Cool. Sounds good, man. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Awesome. [Ben Ornstein]: All right. All right. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: I’ll talk to you.