- Duration: 39 min
- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01JJW26G1JPA1448ZJVG24RWNG (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JJW26G1JPA1448ZJVG24RWNG)
Transcript
[Michael Houck]: Hey, what’s up, man? How you doing? [Blake Stewart]: Good. How are you doing? [Michael Houck]: I’m good. I’m back from the gym. So apologies. I got some, some lunch here. [Blake Stewart]: I might be munching on during our call. Hope you don’t mind. Help yourself. Are you in Santa Monica? [Michael Houck]: Or? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. [Blake Stewart]: Santa Monica. So West Coast and you’re in Miami. Is that right? No. [Michael Houck]: So I was in New York for a while. I actually used to Monica though. [Blake Stewart]: Really? Yeah, I was at six in California. Nice. Nice. Awesome. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, but I was in New York until like a month or two ago, and then I actually divorced my wife. [Blake Stewart]: So now I’m in Argentina for the winter. Okay, awesome. Where are you originally from From New York, actually. So you were born and raised there? [Michael Houck]: Born in New York, mostly raised in Philly, college in Miami, and then Uber in LA, and then up to SF and was there for a while. Awesome. Very fun. [Blake Stewart]: Yeah, all over the place. I’m from the East Coast. I’m from North Carolina. Hit and kind of wanted a fresh start. So just moved out to somewhere I knew something was happening. I’ve been in North Carolina my whole life. I’ll probably move back there eventually. But yeah, I wanted something fresh and new. Angeles was calling it that way. Yeah, it’s been great. I love it out here. [Michael Houck]: What what part of North Carolina because I’m when I get back to the US, I’m probably not going back to New York. And so I’ve had a couple cities on my list, like Raleigh is one of them. [Blake Stewart]: So yeah, what am I missing out on? Yeah, it’s great. I’m from Greensboro, which I mean, it’s just suburban, you know, nothing you probably should move back to. But Raleigh is really nice. And Durham’s really nice. So Raleigh is been rated like, you know, top five, top 10 in the country of cities, pretty consistently, it’s growing really quickly. It’s a lot of fun. And Charlotte’s great as well. North Carolina, it’s just a great state, you know, you get a little bit of everything. It’s hard to compare to California, because you know, you can hit the beach and the mountains in the same day. But you know, they’re four hours apart in North Carolina. It’s nice to have some seasons, you know, you got like a true summer or true winter. But it’s just a good easy going place. Yeah, I like it. Nothing too extreme on all sides, but yeah. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I’m gonna figure it out either later in the spring or maybe early fall before I sort of figure out where to plant roots. So that’s helpful. [Blake Stewart]: Yeah, I mean, Charlotte, I would say is a lot younger and kind of more socially probably going on. Raleigh’s is growing so fast. You know, more middle age, later stage life, but still a lot happening there. So yeah, we’re checking out. And then, you know, Asheville and Wilmington are out there too, but a lot smaller. So if you’re in New York and whatnot, then you might not be tapped there, but they’re playing. [Michael Houck]: No, I’m looking, I’m looking for something totally different. I’ve lived in, you know, big coastal cities, my whole adult life. So it’s, I’m open to all experiences right now. [Blake Stewart]: Very cool. How long are you in Argentina? [Michael Houck]: You said a couple of weeks? Yeah, I got here like a month ago, right after Christmas. And then I’m here for like two and a half more weeks, then Brazil for two weeks, and then coming back to Texas for a conference. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Nice. [Blake Stewart]: You did it right. [Michael Houck]: That’s awesome. We’re lakeside right now. [Blake Stewart]: Wow. That’s beautiful. Oh my gosh. Good for you. Nice. [Michael Houck]: Well, dude, thanks for reaching out. It’s always good to see familiar faces reach out because, you know, there’s some like implicit level of trust. Right. Yeah. Sorry to hear about Colonel. Like, I really I really always loved Colonel and I was rooting for it. It’s it’s it’s sad to hear. It’s it’s been fun, man. [Blake Stewart]: And so I’ve been going at it for about three years. And I mean, like at the end of the day, it was really just me. We’re we’re a tiny team. I don’t know if you know the full story, but yeah, Ryan Holmes. He founded Hootsuite back in the day. And this was kind of like his passion project. And yeah, he runs his own accelerator. He knows early stage founders. And he kind of just wanted to keep exploring in that area. And so we set it up. Yeah, the platform was great. The development was awesome. We had an awesome bubble developer, Paul. So we built something really cool. And yeah, it was just kind of me using the platform to figure out what to do. And try and monetize it. And I mean, we tried everything and went down all the paths. And I think we’ve especially kind of, you know, started to beat a dead horse. It’s just been, it’s been a little hard, but yeah, it’s been fun. I learned a lot, met a lot of cool people and yeah, the network’s expanded. And yeah, I guess like turning internally and reflecting on like what I want to do. I love the space that we were in, you know, helping founders and, you know, working with their passions and helping people go from zero to one and learning about new startups is always fun and I kind of think it’s futuristic. And so, yeah, I see a lot of overlap with what you’re doing. I think your brand’s really cool. It’s been awesome to watch your story and how you’ve done a great job, you know, being open and honest. I think that’s, you know, half of the brand right there is building trust with your readers there. So it’s funny, I know you just from like reading your your story everywhere. So yeah, I’m happy to give you more about my background, but I don’t know where you want to start with this, I guess. Yeah, I mean, I guess we can start like a bunch of different places. [Michael Houck]: Honestly, I guess let’s start the most important place, which is like, what do you want to be doing? Like, what’s going to make you super excited? Like, if you’re working on this, if we’re working on stuff together, like, what are you going to gravitate towards? What do you want to own? All that kind of stuff. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Blake Stewart]: Yeah. Um, so I’ve been thinking about my, like wanting to do something similar to you, but I, I’m not at the point yet where like my name where a, I want to get my name out there and be like, I just don’t really want to run a brand under my name. I want a different brand to run. Um, I think you’ve done a great job with yours. And so, uh, I think that’s really cool. And so what I love doing was, yeah, working with founders, Obviously, I was doing like sales with ads and, you know, we were running multiple newsletters and I was finding deals and partnerships and trying to, you know, continue to expand that way. So that’s always fun. But I think it all comes down to the founders and understanding like what they want, what they are looking for from what you’re putting out there. And I really enjoy the community piece of what we’re doing. So, I mean, I love how, I mean, you’ve got a bigger vision of, you know, your and you want to kind of branch out and have a lot of different solutions. And, you know, people come to the founding journey and your Rye Valley, and then they could go, you know, in multiple directions with it. You know, like, it’d be fun to set up, you know, kind of more of a path for founders to take. Like, hey, I’m looking for some SaaS products. Like, here’s your deal page. Like, you know, here’s your guide, your one, two, three, get off the ground. And, you know, eventually, So we took a direction that I don’t know really how I felt about it. We went from bootstrapping and networking and validation to more of the VC route. I don’t really think fundraising is for everyone. You’ve been down that path and you’ve probably seen the ugliest side of it. And I think it’s interesting, but I don’t want to push everyone down that way. So I think it’s cool that you have a nice top of funnel and I’d want to help kind of like segment that funnel, bringing people in, kind of like, you know, organizing them, listening to what they want, and, you know, providing those resources so that they continue to grow. And then, you know, you’re kind of with them at every step. So it’d be interesting to, you know, take them from zero to one, and then, you know, then onward to like, I guess, zero to one, you can have several segments within that. But yeah, I liked, I mean, what you’re looking for is know, just ad sales. And I kind of know the industry well, I can find good partners and, you know, help relate your brand to your readers and, you know, tell people’s stories and sell products that way. I think that’s interesting. But yeah, I kind of love your big picture more. And I’d want to plug into other projects and see how like, how you want to be either micro sasses or like building your own projects to kind of all fit on your umbrella. I’m still kind of in that exploration phase where like, I don’t know what I want to commit to if it’s like one small little company. I love the idea of a lot of different projects at once where you kind of hit a bigger population. And I want that population to be early stage founders. [Michael Houck]: Very cool. I mean, that is that’s pretty aligned to sort of what we’re trying to do. Right, and it’s cool to hear that like, yes, you can do the ad sales and sponsorships, the partnerships, that side of things, which is kind of our biggest need right now, because my longtime guy, my longtime partnerships guy just got an offer to be employee number one at a new company that Alex Lieberman and Austin Reeve are starting together. [Blake Stewart]: That’s like, so like, yeah, you can’t say no. [Michael Houck]: So I get it. But yeah, so that’s our biggest need, like we have revenue coming in every month. Like this month, for example, we made like 60k in sponsorship revenue, not always that high this month, it happened to be. But we need that plug, right? Like we have leads in the funnel, my like, ops guy is handling it right now. He’s not a sales guy. So that’s, that’s our biggest need. But at the same time, you know, we’re a really small team. And so anyone who joins, we want them to A, be able to, and B, actively want to sort of scale up and sort of be the, you know, whatever needs to be done across the business to help it grow. So that’s, I mean, that’s great. That’s right in line sort of with, with what I’d be. [Blake Stewart]: Yeah. I kind of want to be that, that multi-tool. At Kernel, I was doing a little bit of everything, so it was fun. And I still kind of have that itch of, you know, like, tell me what needs to be done and I’ll go figure it out. [Michael Houck]: Would it help if, because we don’t do a good job of like talking about everything that we do or how it’s set up. [Blake Stewart]: Would it help if I like give you the kind of lay of the land of the business? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I’ve got some like, I’ve got a notes up and I’ve got like a rough idea of what I think it is, but no, it’d be great to get some concrete. Okay, cool. So Rye Valley is the holding company. Underneath that, there’s Founding Journey, right? In Founding Journey, we make revenue through sponsorships, we make revenue through memberships, and sometimes affiliates and things like that too. But it’s really sort of like the centerpiece of the whole business. Cause we advertise all the other stuff through it. We also have another newsletter that we don’t talk about as much called Viral Examples. It’s just viralexamples.co. Smaller subscriber base, it’s like three or 4,000 right now. That is a top of funnel for sort of the social media growth side of the business. And so we pitch megaphone in there, which is our sort of creator network, social media growth tool. Um, and then we also pitch our ghostwriting agency through there as well. And the ghostwriting agency is growing really fast, especially with newsletters. Um, you know, we think that we can make that a pretty big chunk of the business this year. And then the goal is grow it for one to two years and then probably flip it at that point. Um, so. That’s something we’re really excited about. And that’s sort of, you know, if you have like founding journey, viral examples, we get both of them funneling towards that, but viral examples is specifically designed to be the top of funnel for that. And we’re really focused on growing that newsletter as top of funnel this year. [Blake Stewart]: Sorry to jump in there. What’s your realistic goal for Curlin? If you’re at three to four, where do you see yourself? [Michael Houck]: So this is the exciting thing. A friend of mine, this guy Matt, he’s like a Teal fellow, his last company went through YC, like super legit guy. He’s probably the best data scraper and cold emailer that I’ve ever met in my life. And so what we’re doing is we’re forming a partnership between my ghost rating agency and his data business. And every data client that like lead gen client for startups that he gets, he’s going to pitch a newsletter as the best way to keep those people engaged. And every ghostwriting client we get, we’re gonna pitch, well, you need to grow your list, so work with this guy. And rather than doing paid ads on social that you’re gonna pay like, you know, anywhere from 150 to 250 per subscriber, with his method of, you know, incredibly targeted cold email, he can get it down like 50 cents. And so we think, and obviously since we’re partnering, he’s giving us like a crazy deal on our two newsletters. So our goal for the end of 2025 is that founding journey go from like, we’re like 65 K right now we kind of turn some people out intentionally. Our goal is to get that to 200 K minimum by the end of the year. [Blake Stewart]: And our goal for viral examples is to get that to 50 K minimum by the end of the year. Okay. Nice. That’s awesome. That’ll be fun. Okay, cool. And then I guess like what, what kind of ads have been working for you? So I mean, you have so many products that you could sell, like you keep pushing your own membership. What’s been working? [Michael Houck]: What are you looking for? Yeah, I mean, the 2024, the most common, like, sponsorship partnership that did really well was there’s like offshore hiring companies like Athena, or somewhere Oceans, Micro One, right, all of these. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: And we’re still seeing that, like, deep partnership with Athena, we’ve done dinners together, a whole bunch of stuff. [Blake Stewart]: And we go straight their newsletter. [Michael Houck]: But I would imagine that in 2025, it’s going to shift more towards AI tools, because a lot of these tools are funded now. And you know, it’s not just as simple as putting a tweet up that you have some AI tool, they’re actually need to start competing for growth, and you’re paying for growth. And so I would imagine that that’s where it’s going to shift this this year is the best performing and most common ad that we do. Interesting. [Blake Stewart]: Yeah, that makes sense. And then, yeah, looking at your packages, I love kind of like the founder deep dive. I think that’s what I would enjoy selling the most. It’s like, hey, let’s have you a founder. Let’s hear their story. Let’s hear why their tool is great. And then I bet that also converts the most for them. But I’d be interesting to know what kind of packages you enjoy doing and selling. And what do you like throwing in your newsletter the most? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: I mean, I love doing the interviews because it’s, it’s actually, it’s surprising for a lot of the people that we do them with because they think, Oh, I’m going to interview this guy. And it’s either going to be just like a straight up interview in the, in the email or it would be like an ad for the product. And we like pretty explicitly don’t make it like that. The, the goal is to align with them on like an angle, like some kind of insight that they have that would actually be useful to the founders. That way the founders read through it all that way. It comes off much more organic. It converts. Better for them. So, yeah, I really enjoy doing that. But honestly, man, I mean, the number one thing I want is just like, you know, let’s get every slot filled. It’s usually like 90 plus percent filled, I would say. Let’s get every slot filled. Let’s get, you know, anything we don’t fill, we can just use our GoString agency. But yeah, I mean, the more, the more deep dives we sell, the more founder stories we get to tell. That’s, you know, that makes me feel great. [Blake Stewart]: Awesome. Um, yeah. And then I like your YouTube strategy there too. Are you, how do you, how do you research? [Michael Houck]: Um, yeah, so we were doing the podcast, just pause the podcast. Reason is we did YouTube backwards. We thought newsletter audience would translate to podcast. It turns out people who read newsletters mostly just want to read newsletters. You gotta, build the YouTube audience is sort of a separate thing. So podcast is on pause, but we are in the next, like, I’d say two weeks or so going to start putting out weekly long form YouTube videos, like the entire history of Silicon Valley and like, you know, like, deep dives on certain companies and how they make money, stuff like that. Using proven sort of viral templates and other niches on YouTube and just applying it to start Cool. [Blake Stewart]: Okay. Yeah, that’s interesting. Uh, sorry, I’m kind of taking over the questions, but go for it, man. I love it. [Michael Houck]: Um, can we jump back to the membership, um, journey? [Blake Stewart]: Uh, so I see you got a bunch of just archives and like blog posts and what else is in that membership that, um, I mean, are you trying to grow different offerings there? Yeah, we’ve tried a lot of things over the last like year and a half. [Michael Houck]: At first it was a subscription. Now it’s a one-time. Lifetime payment that people do. We found that’s, you know, converts better and better LTV. So the main thing right now that we’re selling through that is a library of case studies, where either myself or Ben, who’s our kind of ops guy, will interview a founder, and then create like a case study on what they say and their journey. And then we have a library of like 100 of them at this point. And we’re trying to add to them, you know, every sort of like starter story, but for venture-backed companies. [Blake Stewart]: So yeah, that’s the idea. Gotcha. Would you consider like a Slack community? [Michael Houck]: We tried Circle at first, found it was tough to drive people to Circle. Then now we have a Telegram. I like Telegram. I think Slack might be better, but it’s just too expensive. Run one of these communities. I think even Lenny’s community, he doesn’t pay for Slack, which is crazy because so many people are in there. So it’s like, again, kind of hard to get people to go into Telegram all the time, but it’s active. People are asking questions, and they’re helping each other. [Blake Stewart]: But it’s not the focal point anymore. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: OK. OK. [Blake Stewart]: That makes sense. Cool. OK. Yeah. Where are we now? Let’s see. Reporting all these ads, I know you use Beehive, and there’s obviously the ad network in there, but what does the report look like for a campaign, pulling clicks and open rates? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, we don’t use Beehive’s ad network at all. It just doesn’t pay enough. I’ve talked to Tyler about this. I told him that, you know, we’re friends, like we’re good friends. I was like, I was like, you guys are communists. Like I got really deep in the weeds on it. And I like explain like the marketplace dynamic theory about why it is not good for publishers, et cetera, et cetera. Anyway, it’s good for the smaller newsletters who don’t make any money, but the bigger that the ad, the ad partner, there’s no, there’s no way to price in brand equity. Like that. So, so we don’t use it. We get the tons of requests, but we just don’t even acknowledge them. All of our ad sales come in through either outreach that we do or inbound from the newsletter. We’ve got like a pretty robust outreach system. I’m sure it can be improved 10x, but it works. And, and yeah, and we’re forever new also. Okay, cool. [Blake Stewart]: Yeah, I want to talk about the outreach system as well. Like what you’re using. I also do some sales on the side for an e-commerce company. And I’ve, I mean, I use HubSpot. And so it’s, it’s super simple for me with sequences and whatnot. So I like barely touch it anymore. It’s nice and simple. So I don’t know what you have going. [Michael Houck]: So we probably should use HubSpot. I’m open to it. Right now, what we do is database that has tons of sponsors. Everyone who sponsored any newsletter related to startups or founders, we track. And then we find the LinkedIn’s of the right people at those companies. And then what we do is we take those people and we put them into outreach sequences in a tool called Salesforce. It’s like one of these like cold email tools. And then from there, Once they reply, it goes right to, excuse me, it went right to my old partnership guy’s inbox, like his actual inbox in Superhuman. And he just sent like tons and tons of reminders in Superhuman and kept following up every couple of days. [Blake Stewart]: And I’m sure there’s a better way to do it, but that’s how we do it. That’s fine. But yeah, I’d probably want to organize that a bit. I get you. Well, yeah, this is awesome. I mean, I’ve got like a million questions listed here. I want to go back and ask you about launch house. I know that’s in the past too. But yeah, I mean, do you have any questions for me? Where do you? [Michael Houck]: I mean, look, we’re you’re the first person I’ve talked to, we sort of went through a couple of the initial people who reached out over the last couple of days, I was very excited to talk to you. So we’re going to chat to a few more people over the next couple days, probably through mid next week, I would guess. But I’m sort of judge jury and execution here. So there’s no long process or anything like that. Look, yeah, I would say like, like, okay, like, if you were going to set this process up and take it over sponsorship and ad sales in particular, like what would you do differently than this like crazy convoluted process that we’re doing today with the superhuman reminders? Right? [Blake Stewart]: Well, it sounds like you need a better CR I am in place. I mean, Airtable, I could probably build one within there with your existing data. But yeah, once it gets in the email and you’re setting reminders for yourself, that’s how you lose everything. So I, I’m comfortable with HubSpot, even the free version, I could run pretty well, but I’d explore different options. That makes sense. That’s not too big of a change for you so that you could still just, you know, hit your Airtable bookmark that’s on here. [Michael Houck]: No, no, make a, make as many changes as you want. Your, your dream, your dreams. [Blake Stewart]: Um, then yeah, I’d probably throw it in HubSpot or, um, yeah. And if you’re on Notion too, I can be able to see a couple of CRMs for kernel within Notion. Um, so I would clean that up for you and just make the outreach a little more simple. Um, the sequence is good that you already got that with Salesforce or Salesforce. Um, so that’s easy to keep, keep outreach going. Um, yeah, I mean, I’d probably just throw it in HubSpot. Increase your outreach strategy, you know, hit more people and, you know, manage your endowment a little bit better. We’ll see how it’s going. I mean, so you could raise prices once you get more subscribers into the end of the year, which would be interesting. I mean, the end goal would be to like organize that so well that it could be nice and simple. I guess a bigger question for you too, is that I don’t know if you’re considering all those offshore companies that you already talked about. I mean, you could hire some much, you know, some cheap labor to continue the process. But my goal would be to make that simple, you know, clean, organized, so that it doesn’t take that much time so that I can help you on other projects, expand elsewhere, while also, you know, hitting your goals. And I would track everything to make sure that, you know, I’m, I’m progressing with, you know, I, you’re obviously hired just for this one thing. But yeah, I’d want to that for you and then kind of see where else I can help. [Michael Houck]: So, okay. So let’s talk about those other, those other things then, like what else would you want to jump in on? It can be stuff I mentioned, sort of how the business is set up today or new stuff that we’d want to set up to help, to help founders. [Blake Stewart]: Yeah. That’s tough. I think both, I think it would all start with top of funnel. I guess one question is like, how far out are you riding? [Michael Houck]: Like is your content This is this is my worst habit and you know you I need to change this Maybe maybe you would help me change this. I write the newsletter like the night before I Write a few these letters and they’ll sneak up on you. [Blake Stewart]: Yeah, I get it Yeah, it’s like I want to give people what’s like right on my mind like fresh like what am I seeing that week? [Michael Houck]: But it’s a really bad habit. We should have a content calendar like a hundred percent. Yeah. Yeah. [Blake Stewart]: So I think that would be something, obviously you need room for, you know, trends coming up, like deep seek hits, you know, the internet, you need to, you need to talk about that. But yeah, I mean the, the, the bigger content you have, the longer out we could see, the more we could plan, that would make my job selling ads easier. If I’m going to write about like data scraping, I could find a, you know, bring that in and promote it. But like the more, the more, you know, I could see down the road, the more I could make the ads more relevant, kind of higher conversions there. So I want to start there, you know, top of funnel with your newsletter and help you like kind of, or not really help you, it’s obviously all yours, but I’d want to see what you’re doing so that I could kind of figure out how I could integrate a little bit more, you know, tie these ads in a little bit better. You know, growth will most likely handle itself on that aspect. And then, I don’t know, like, there’s just so much to do. Like, repurposing content is interesting to me as well. I think you’re, I reached out about Megaphone, I think a few weeks ago. I think that’s an interesting, like, what you’re doing there is really cool. Yeah, we’re excited about it. I think it’s hard for me to really say what I want to get involved with without knowing. So the, I think it’s a, a good opportunity just to start with the ad sales and kind of, you know, that’s easy for me to focus, but also allows me to really get a better understanding of, you know, how you operate and what’s going on. And then, um, I’m pretty good at, you know, filling the gaps and, um, you know, seeing opportunities and, and kind of holding everything together for you. [Michael Houck]: So one, one thing that I think, um, could definitely make sense is, um, so my friend, Matt, who I, who I mentioned to just, the data scraping and the email stuff for newsletters. We are also spinning up a joint venture, probably in the next like one to two months, where we’re going to build a media company, totally outside of Founding Journey, totally outside of Rivalry, totally outside of his company, just something in the middle. And the idea is that we’re going to use his method to grow a bunch of like newsletters like Agora, you know Agora, right? [Blake Stewart]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: like we think it can be like Agora 2.0, like a bunch of niche newsletters with subject matter experts leading them, able to grow at an unfair rate because we have this data advantage. He’s built a database of 200 million people’s emails, and those emails are tagged not just by job title, but also by who they follow on social media, what topics they write about, what they engage with, what’s in their bios, and it’s all structured data. So we can get like social media ads level targeting, but with like writing people’s inboxes is super powerful. We think the media company is a fun thing to build with it. So we’re going to take our content expertise, his data expertise and create this like new venture. And so as we grow those newsletters over the next year, two years, et cetera, we’re going to need to make money from those as well. And it’s going to be a huge opportunity to sell ads into those, help us build products. And so the idea is to bring someone in now who helps us get founding journey, doing the right thing, helps us grow the revenue from viral examples as well and get that off the ground. And then as we grow this other thing, loops in and kind of takes the lead on all of that stuff. [Blake Stewart]: So that’s the dream right now. That’s really cool. Yeah, it’s awesome. That sounds fun. Yeah, I’m just imagining all the types of newsletters It’s anything and everything, man. It’s crazy. [Michael Houck]: Like, um, if we wanted to build a newsletter that was like, we, if we want to get a million subscribers on a newsletter about, you know, F1 and we become the number one email newsletter about F1, obviously it’s great for whoever’s working in that. Cause they get to go to the races and things like that. But, um, we think it’s a very high leverage position in like society to be in. And also it’s a really fun company to build. [Blake Stewart]: So that’s the dream. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay, cool. Yeah. [Blake Stewart]: That’s awesome. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: But yeah, okay. [Michael Houck]: I mean, look, what we’re gonna do, I know we’re at time. I’ll chat with Ben, who’s my ops guy. We’re gonna chat with a couple more people over the next couple of days. Are there any time constraints, both in terms of timeline for you or in terms of like how much bandwidth you have on a weekly or monthly basis? [Blake Stewart]: No, I mean, I can start whenever I don’t need. Yeah, no, not really. I can, so I was doing like 40 hours a week for Kernel. So I know you said part-time, so I’m happy to start slow and ramp up, but yeah, I’m good with whatever. I’m pretty flexible. Whatever you need. And yeah, I work from home. So you know, 24 seven. [Michael Houck]: So if you hit me late at night, I’ll probably be late at night, you don’t have to please. [Blake Stewart]: No time constraints on either in there. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. [Michael Houck]: And then just give me a rough sense like comp wise, like what makes it worth it for you? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Blake Stewart]: Yeah, honestly, No, so I mentioned that other thing I’ve got kind of optimized and running for me. So that kind of, you know, covers the bills nice and comfortably. So I’m happy there. I’m looking just for kind of a, yeah, the bigger picture here. At some point, it’d be fun to have equity in a new company. It sounds like there’d be opportunity here and something that you’re building. So kind of more interested in that kind of compensation. Yeah, and it’s tough to say with your ad sales, especially if you’re happy to work mostly off commission and kind of prove myself there too. Colonel is paying me 5k a month, but I know that sounds probably high to start. I’d be, you know, happy with a few thousand just to start. So I don’t know, whatever, I’m flexible. You could hit me with a number with what you guys already have in the budget. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. Cool. [Michael Houck]: As we build up that new media verticalized company as well, that’s where sort of equity would come into play. Depending on when we start that, we’ll look at the team and we’ll give out equity in that. So I assume that if you would join this, you’d be part of that as well. And that’s where we would factor that in. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: That sounds great. Yeah. Perfect. [Blake Stewart]: Cool. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay, man. [Michael Houck]: I’m going to talk with Ben and then probably follow up. I don’t know. Same thing next week at the latest and go from there. [Blake Stewart]: Take your time. Enjoy that view in Australia or Argentina. Sorry. Yeah, cool. Great to connect. And yeah, I’ll talk to you soon. Sounds good, man. [Michael Houck]: Have a good weekend. Talk soon. You too. [Blake Stewart]: Bye.