- Duration: 22 min
- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01JJQ5Z5VEKBAXDF224SN50G4C (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JJQ5Z5VEKBAXDF224SN50G4C)
Transcript
[Michael Houck]: Yo, what’s up, sir? Noel Moldvai: Not much, man. [Michael Houck]: How you doing? Doing well, doing well. I’m checking in lakeside from from Argentina right now. Hey, there you go. Getting out of the cold for the summer for for the winter, summer for me. Noel Moldvai: Where in Argentina? In Patagonia. [Michael Houck]: It’s a place called Bariloche. Oh, shit. Yeah, it’s super dope. Yeah, dude, it’s nice. We got a little lake view. You can’t see out the window because of the brightness, but it’s got a little lake view going on. It’s very nice. Noel Moldvai: I want to be right now, man. It’s fucking cold. Calm down, man. It’s all good. Come on down. Dude, I’m having a kid next week, man. The timeline moved up. So I’m like, trying to get everything fucking done this week before I go to dark for a week or two. Well, shit. [Michael Houck]: Okay, we can we can get into it then. I appreciate you taking some time to chat with chat with me while it’s going on. Noel Moldvai: That’s some serious business. Congrats. Thank you, man. [Michael Houck]: Thank you. Appreciate it. Okay, so we’re gonna talk about newsletter. So first of all, just checking in happy with everything on LinkedIn. It’s going great. Yeah, Jacobs. Was one of the best. If I was going to pick somebody to do my social media on our team, it would be him. I’m not just not just say that I’ve actually talked to him about it, too. So yeah, so newsletter, took a look at what you guys have, I think it makes sense why people like it delivers information, concise way, no nonsense. But as I said, it’s just it’s just sort of dry, I think we can kind of spruce it up a bit. And still sort of be information dense and heavy and all that too, which make it a little more entertaining. Um, we, we can tack that on. If you want, we can consider strategically, like we want to change the voice, change the structure, or just keep it the same, but change the sort of tonality of it. Uh, and also, um, one of my friends is this guy, I don’t know if you know, uh, Matt DeMarco Antonio. Um, uh, I don’t think so. Noel Moldvai: He’s he’s he’s out in SF all the time. [Michael Houck]: He’s a Teal fellow. His last company was NYC before this. He’s basically. He’s basically the best data scraper that I know. And so he’s built a database of 200 million people’s emails and enriched that data with not just job title stuff from Apollo or LinkedIn, but also their interests based on their social media activities. So who they follow, what they talk about, what’s in their bio, who they engage with, all that kind of stuff. And so we sort of teamed up to deliver that to newsletters. Because obviously it’s super powerful, you can get really targeted beyond what you can even do through paid ads, but right in people’s inboxes. So we think it’s going to be a pretty big thing this year, newsletters in general for startups, but also growing them in this way. So that’s what we’re doing. So we could either take the whole thing on, we could just take on the content side, whatever you want us to do, guys as well if you want it to be. Noel Moldvai: How does it? So how does that work? So you get a list of people? [Michael Houck]: What do you do with it? Yeah, so basically, we’d identify, okay, who are the people in the database, and we’re always adding to it, of course, but who are the people in the database would be a good fit for this newsletter for this frogman for the product. And we would send those people cold emails unrelated to your brand. It would just be basically pen tasting the inbox. Are they active? Do they care about stuff that’s in the subject line, stuff like that, right? And then we would do that at scale. And if they pass some engagement criteria, we’d add them to the Beehive account in like a very organic sort of slow drip way. So it comes off very, you know, very natural. It doesn’t flag anything on the system. And then they’re in there and they’re just getting your newsletter. Noel Moldvai: How do you do that? How do you do like a slow drip? So they wouldn’t, like they wouldn’t, or like, how does that? So two, two things. [Michael Houck]: So one is we would do like small daily imports instead of like a big monthly one or a big weekly one. Um, and we’re building an API connection. So it would just be like randomized times throughout the day, people dropped in. Uh, but I also am good friends with Tyler CEO of beehive. And so, uh, you know, if we, if, if anything ever came up, I could just text him and be like, yo, we Can you like fix his account? He’d do it. Noel Moldvai: Oh, okay. So like, so they wouldn’t, they wouldn’t know that they’re subscribing, but then they just get emails from the false or something. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, correct. So we’d have a custom welcome sequence for them set up, which is like the greatest hits of what we want to get in front of them. Noel Moldvai: Um, and they’d get those first before they even drip into, to anything else. [Michael Houck]: Okay. So they, they get emails or That’s number one. And then once they pass engagement verification check, then they get in. And basically, the option would be we have this greatest hit sequence of things you want to get in front of them. Or since the pulse is more like current events, news, things like that, maybe we do just drop them into the newsletter and let them see if they like the content before they get the normal welcome email. Because what we want to avoid is them getting a welcome email as the first thing from you guys, rather than testing it out first. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. Noel Moldvai: Got it. So you’ve cold email and then you have, there’s some engagement metric, which is like, I don’t know, they respond to you or something or something that tells you that they’re interested in this particular thing. Yeah. And then you get, so you get a massive list and then you grip those slowly into our subscriber list. Uh, and I fucked around with the hive a little bit over the past week. You could like tag them of like, this came from here. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, the API and all that stuff, tags, segments and automations, we’d set it all up when we when we get in there. Noel Moldvai: Okay. And then I just have I just have a bunch of subscribers. [Michael Houck]: However many you’d want to add per month, we’d be able to do it, we’d recommend not going beyond like 20% month over month growth on the list just to like, again, keep it keep your deliverability high and everything like that. But This is the kind of thing where, you know, it’ll compound very quickly. Noel Moldvai: And is that going to hurt? I guess, OK, because we’re sending it from Augment, Pulse.Augment.Market. OK, so that could hurt my deliverability. But we just monitor that closely, I guess. Is that how you kind of remedy it? [Michael Houck]: Yeah. And we have aggressive sort of auto churn automations that we’d set up to. So if people aren’t meeting some engagement criteria within the newsletter, they’d also get churned out really quickly. And the The other piece is that we’re actually building, this is going to sound crazy. We’re building what we’re calling a bot army, which is basically like 100,000 inboxes, which we own, which are just by like some team in the Philippines. And they’re set up with AI to auto respond to newsletters and click on links in them that come from the newsletters that we send them. So that would, you know. Noel Moldvai: You’re like warming up the newsletter stuff. Got it. Exactly. That sounds interesting. What does that look like, So you guys would take over content and then just kind of do that, and that would be like, I wouldn’t have to touch anything or worry about anything. That definitely sounds interesting. So on the content side of things, yeah, you’d spruce it up personally, which is, or make it more personable, I guess. We used to do that. I actually have my friend writing right now. That’s the only contention is that I got to be completely honest. But I think he’d probably be OK with it, frankly, because he’s doing other stuff. And I would rather have you guys write it. What does that look like in terms of cost? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, so if we’re doing weekly, it would be $3,500. Give you a discount cause you’re already with us for social. So probably like it’s called 10% off. Um, and it’d be off the bulk. You’d get the discount off of the social and the, uh, the newsletter. So in total would probably come out to something close to 20% discount. Noel Moldvai: Um, and yeah, that’s if we want to keep it weekly. And what, and what if, um, what about just the, um, the, uh, second part of it, the part two of the, That’s price per lead, so per subscriber. [Michael Houck]: So if you wanted to do like a couple thousand a month, it’d be a dollar, I think. I had to check with Matt, my partner on this, but I think it’s a dollar. And if you’d go up to like 10K or more a month, then it would probably drop down to 50 cents, I think is what he’s pricing at that level now. So again, I need to check with him, but top of my head, that’s what I think it is. Noel Moldvai: to do the lead stuff now. And then let me talk to my friend, see where he’s at on this. Really, I don’t know. Could you guys write a sample one? I know it’s a big ask. [Michael Houck]: I can ask if Jacob would be up for it as a pro bono thing. Otherwise, I’d have to pay him anyway. But it’s fine. Let me check with him. I’m sure he’d be down since he’s already working with you guys. And he knows the brand. So yeah, we can do that. I’ll check in with him to confirm. Noel Moldvai: We can probably do that. OK. OK, sounds good. So if there’s a Bot Army, then I guess would you guys tag that subscriber differently? Yeah. Bot Army’s not active today. [Michael Houck]: Bot Army wouldn’t be active. Like probably realistically two months or so. But that is on the on the roadmap. Okay. Noel Moldvai: Yeah, I mean, I’m down to I’m down to do the the I don’t know what do you what do you call it? What do you have a name for it? We just call it content and growth. [Michael Houck]: There’s the two sides. That’s it. So you’re talking about the growth side. Yeah, I’m down for the growth stuff. Noel Moldvai: I think that makes sense. And then How would I, like, how would I measure, how would I measure if someone converts, like, on Augment, like, they, so they’re, they’re, they come in from you guys, come, comes through API, you know, they’re a subscriber, they’ve been a subscriber for a while, they eventually click on a link or they find out or go to a site And then they sign up on Augment. Oh, I could probably just. This beehive has an API or something. Beehive has an API. [Michael Houck]: Easiest way to do it is probably just in the newsletters. Well, one, yes, they have an API, so you can just have one of the engineers like look at the lists and see if they’re on the beehive list already. You can also set up, you know, typical like attribution links in the newsletters, like every link to Augment is an attribution. Link? Noel Moldvai: Yeah, attributions links work. I think the annoying thing about attribution links is that, like, I use Fever Human and I just click on the little top right thing and, like, the domain of the sender and it doesn’t grab the attribution link. I think there’s a lot of cases like that, but I’m sure we could find, I could probably just export a list and just compare it to my users on Augment, so. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I mean, the API is going to be the best, but I’m not trying to put engineering time, suck up your engineering time, doing some Google Sheets list deduping thing is probably sufficient. OK. All right, sounds good. Noel Moldvai: Let’s do that for now. And I’ll have an answer for you on the other thing hopefully soon, but I’ll be delayed probably the next, I don’t know, while. [Michael Houck]: You got bigger fish to fry. On the growth side, how many subs you want to start with per month? Can we just start with a thousand? Yeah, sounds good. Noel Moldvai: Okay, cool. [Michael Houck]: I will get that set up. I’ll follow up probably tomorrow after I chat with Matt just to confirm we’re good on pricing and we’ll go from there. Noel Moldvai: Okay. All right. [Michael Houck]: Thank you, sir. Noel Moldvai: We’ll get this taken care of before you go out of the office for a bit, man.