- Duration: 64 min
- Platform: zoom
- Source: Read.ai 01JJYJV1Y6K3T7JR48SGFXE0KM (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JJYJV1Y6K3T7JR48SGFXE0KM)
Transcript
[UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: There we go. [Austin Schlessinger]: Hey, how are you doing, man? [Michael Houck]: I’m good. I’m down here in, uh, in Barlow. [Austin Schlessinger]: Jay just got to a new Airbnb. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Uh, feeling good. [David Lobo]: That’s awesome. Hello, David. Oh, look at this new, new year. You hair colors, many AI note. Uptakers. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: A lot of, um, too many. [David Lobo]: Um, one is like a default one. Can you kick the otter one? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yep. No problem. [Michael Houck]: Oh, don’t report. [David Lobo]: Just kick it out. How come a lot to Espanol? No, let’s see. [Michael Houck]: I’m told me Espanol is a poquito. I’m not going so well down here. [David Lobo]: I wouldn’t recommend, I wouldn’t say that Argentina is the best place to learn either. I can barely understand. From what remaining Spanish I have left, Argentina is not one of the countries I can very easily follow. [Michael Houck]: I’ve been on the move down here between Chile and Argentina for over a month now, and I’ve managed to get by despite speaking no Spanish at all. And despite only having my Amex with me. So I’m pretty proud of myself being able to do both. [David Lobo]: I’m surprised you could use your Amex working down there. [Michael Houck]: You and me both, man. I forgot my MasterCard. [David Lobo]: I was going to have to use a business card for everything, but luckily the Amex has come through. Can you get your, you should get whatever, you need, you have tap to pay though, right? You can tap to pay with your MasterCard and stuff? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Perfect. Sweet. Awesome. Great to meet you. Yeah. [Austin Schlessinger]: Great to meet you too, David. [Michael Houck]: So I’m glad we’re able to move so quickly on this, David, and excited to help you guys out. You know, we talked about sort of high level what this is going to be, but just for context, this call, Austin’s going to leave the call. You guys will get to know each other. He’ll ask you some questions, kind of going deeper on the answers that you added to the form. And also from the notion doc that you had shared. And then, um, you know, it’ll be a little structured and also a little free form. Um, we’ll go as long as we need to within an hour. [David Lobo]: Um, and then, um, at the end, we’ll go over next steps and we’ll get started. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Awesome. [David Lobo]: Cool. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Sweet. [Austin Schlessinger]: All right. Let me share my screen. [Michael Houck]: Let me give you permissions for screen sharing and then, uh, yeah, you can take it Can you guys see my screen? [Austin Schlessinger]: Yep. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yep. Awesome. [Austin Schlessinger]: So, David, just, I guess, a little bit about me. I’ve been ghostwriting for four years. I’ve written newsletters, social content for over 15 CEOs, founders, and executives across various industries, mostly in tech, but I’ve also written another industries as well. I have 16,000 followers on X. So I have experience building on my own audience as well, even though I don’t post much there anymore. That is something that I’ve done in the past. Outcomes of the meeting. First thing is we want to just document some of these things you’ve already sent over. And I started to proactively put some of that information in here. But the goal here is to kind of fill in any gaps. But we want to go through your goals, identify your target audience, identify three to five content pillars, align on posting schedule, fill you in on kind of how our process works, and then go through some next steps. Any questions on that or anything else that you wanted to discuss on this call? [David Lobo]: Yeah, two things. One would be, I know we’ve signed up for two things here, right? Like the newsletter is one aspect, the other one is like the social media thing. So is that like, are we covering everything here? Are those similar across the board? Should they be different in any way? So just like helping me clarify that. And then separately, just a discussion around like, right now, I wanna like do what’s best for the company and right now, there’s like two sort of resources here. One is me, myself, and how I’m trying to do things, or like kind of like my social, that’s just maybe the easiest way to say is like my personal brand. And then there’s like the CEO’s personal brand and thought leadership and things like that. He’s a little bit more, I’ll say reserved in like what he’s done online and, has like a, maybe like a more, he’s more particular about what he wants to post and things like that. So I want to be able to like leverage both of our stuff. If the, whatever is going to like kind of like yield the best results for, for, for what we’re, we’re trying to accomplish here. So I can take both of those. [Michael Houck]: So first question is, are we going to cover both the newsletter and social answer is yes. Um, even if some of the questions are geared more one thing or the other, we want to talk through both with you. And I think just talking about it will sort of help us figure out, you know, should the newsletter be more aligned with one person’s social? Should it be branded with the company? We can talk about that strategically during the call and probably also a little bit afterwards too. And then a second question around best approach. Honestly, the best approach is going to be focusing on one of you guys, like just in terms of driving results, in terms of driving followers, in terms of driving growth, you’re going to see more if we turn one of you into someone who posts more frequently rather than splitting it up between the two of you. If there’s things like product launches and fundraising announcements and things like that, that maybe the CEO wants to take on and that’s not the main account they’re working with, we can figure that out. But in general, you’re going to see results by focusing, um, focusing on one account. Yeah. [David Lobo]: Like with that, with that in mind, and I have to like, and we talked about this separately. Um, so I think that I think the C at least the CEO, who’s like a really smart guy, but like with everything that we’re doing, which I, again, we have like a little different, different opinion on this. He’s like, you know, everything has to be like super high quality, like review 10 times, like, that sort of thing, which, like, for example, I drafted him, like, we’re like, we’re revamping the website. I like, and he’s gonna like, put his he still hasn’t put the company on his like, LinkedIn. So I’m like, you should do a post. And I wrote the post up for him. And he hasn’t like got back to me. And he’s like, I do want he’s like, Oh, I think I should post on lot. But you know, it has to like meet some certain bar. So I’m like, Okay, well, maybe this is the right thing to do. We’re like, the craft of voice and like, you’re like, I’m just like, Oh, on the other hand, like, it could just be like, a lot of back and forth and not a lot of posting if he’s the person who’s gonna have to like, he doesn’t feel comfortable with it. He needs to review it before like sign off and everything. Yeah, this is where it’s like, I’m my bar is a bit significantly lower. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, this is something that we’ve seen over the first kind of year of building the agency. If you have a situation like this where there’s one person on the team who’s like, let’s just get stuff out. Let’s see how it does. Let’s iterate. And the other person is more particular about their brand and their voice being like, you know, the bar is at a certain level, right? Obviously, we want to get the brand voice right, no matter what. But we’ve seen that it’s better to work with as the primary account, the, uh, the, the, the personality sort of more willing to get data points. Yep. Yep. That’s, that’s going to be me. So that would be my recommendation is, is that we make your account the primary account. [David Lobo]: Yep. Sounds great. Um, okay. Sounds good. And then with that in mind, like just to, cause like, can communicate this is, let’s say I am the person primary account, and then we will want to do some launch posts and the fundraising announcement and stuff like that. Is that something you guys can help with as well? I’m going to run this back to Will later, but I have to figure out for these one-off things, which again, could come from my account, but like, you know, probably some things are going to be more effective for him. And like, he’s going to have like way more important and interesting people. Um, look, like come look at our company then me, hopefully that changes over time as like followers go up and reach gets bigger. Um, but, uh, yeah, I just like, don’t, I, I think he’s Yeah. So anyway. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: I think I would you want your recommendation there on a week where you guys are like, all right, we want to write, like we’re gonna do the fundraising announcement in a week or two. We want to write the posts for that now. Um, basically what we do is instead of writing a long form post for you that week, or a couple of short form posts, we’d take that kind of allocation and just apply it to him. So you’d have less content coming from your account that week. [David Lobo]: And we just, uh, apply it to his. Okay. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Great. Perfect. That sounds great. Cool. [Michael Houck]: And those, those, it, It’s not like we’ll be doing that every week. Like big things like fundraising announcements and product launches, like those aren’t super common. [David Lobo]: I mean, I can tell you the time, like just in the next three months, like I think we’ll do, well, he’s going to do this launch post next week, which I don’t know, like he’s waiting for the new website to go up and then he will eventually read the doc that I put together and then maybe he’ll post and see what that happens. Like, um, and then, I don’t know if you saw, I just posted about a billboard that we got in San Francisco. And like, I did that because like, he wasn’t ready to post about it yet. So which is fine. It’s good for me. I’m happy about it. But so anyway, then there will be I think we should do when we have like when we’re like GA and like available to people, we should do like a product launch at some point. And then we should do like, hopefully when we have it, we have a newsletter to like get people to like go and check out our product on page. And then we will do a fundraising announcement. Probably we’re targeting sometime in May. Um, so like, there’s like, I don’t know what happens in between there, but I just don’t think there’s going to be like, unless he wants to like really turn stuff up, like there’s not that many of those events that are going to happen per year. [Michael Houck]: Okay, cool. And if it does become something that’s like, you know, frequent and he ends up really liking what we’re doing and he wants to add his account to, you know, we just need to sort of up the budget per month to account for Austin’s additional time that he’d be spending between the two accounts. Sure. OK. Sounds good. Cool. [Austin Schlessinger]: Take us away, Austin. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Cool. [Austin Schlessinger]: So the first thing is talking about goals. And I saw the main thing is to drive waitlist signups. Is that accurate? Is there anything else? That you guys are trying to achieve with kind of this initiative? [David Lobo]: Yeah, I think once we’re generally available, it won’t be like waitlist signups anymore. It will be like people who, I guess, sign up for the product is the main goal, I assume. So waitlist signups is the current one. In the future, it will be actual signups. In an ideal world, it would be great to attribute that from social media, newsletter, and do that sort of attribution. But that’s kind of later. And then, yeah, I think that’s the primary goals. Secondary goals, followers seems like the most relevant thing here. Some might say that followers are kind of helpful, but impressions are the more important thing. So I don’t know. I’ll defer to you guys. I’m less concerned about PR ops, more concerned about driving followers and impressions. Unless you think that PR ops is what we should be doing. I don’t know. You’re talking about specific. Things that would drive PR? Personally, I wouldn’t. [Michael Houck]: Early stage PR is typically more of a founder vanity thing than anything else. Like we use an agency at Lunch House, you know, the TechCrunch articles and the New York Times article and all that stuff. Like it never really like it helped our brand. But we were a brand centric company that was trying to sell an experience to people. Right. You guys are you guys are a software company. Obviously, you’re trying to make people’s lives better, more productive. But it’s, it’s, it’s not apples to apples. And so in your case, I would say focusing on building an owned audience is top priority. [David Lobo]: Great. Like in this case, I mean, newsletter signups is also, I would say like a primary goal, right? Or secondary goal. I don’t know where you’d put it here. Actually, it’s probably a primary goal given it’s one of the two services we’re talking about. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: But, yeah. I don’t know. Actually, I don’t know. [David Lobo]: You tell me. We should think about it like a funnel, right? The primary goal is get people to try the product. Get them on the wait list, get them using the product. Is wait list, yeah. Right, right, yeah. [Michael Houck]: The way that they’re going to get there is by we put the beacon out on social media, they check out the newsletter and then they try the product from the newsletter. That’s what we want. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Right. [David Lobo]: Unless we’re saying that people are going to go to the product from social, so which are the two sort of funnels. So I don’t know. Yeah, I guess. It could be social, the newsletter could be social to sign up, it could be newsletter to sign up. Yeah. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: If they skip the newsletter step and just go away from social because they think the content, the product both are compelling, then great, that that works for us too. You’ll get their email that way. Anyway, we can import that to the newsletter. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: So it’s, it’s, you know, we got a little Yep. Yep. All right. [Austin Schlessinger]: Um, I think we answered this, like, well, actually, now like what, what exactly needs to happen in order for you to consider like our work together a success? [David Lobo]: OK, so the numbers, ideally, numbers are going up on both the signups, the follower count, the newsletter count. And then, David, do you guys like numbers going up? [Michael Houck]: like specific goals for like what the waitlist length size would would be in you know three six months? [David Lobo]: I mean I think I can answer that um well let me think out loud and tell me how accurate it is so yeah I think the state right now Yeah, let’s go let’s go video off so we can hear [Michael Houck]: because I think I don’t know if it’s my internet this new Airbnb or someone else’s but I didn’t get any of that David, are you there? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Hello? Hey guys, can you hear me? [Austin Schlessinger]: Yeah, I can hear you now. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: OK, sorry about that. [David Lobo]: It was better than before. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah, yeah, OK. [David Lobo]: Um, so let me just kind of think out loud for a second and then help me, uh, feel free to like distill how you think this might be best for like most appropriate. So I can’t give you like really a really great definitive answer on this right now. Um, I think we’re kind of at this stage where I’m like, all right, we need to build like an amazing product because I think there’s like virality inherent in our product. Um, and Austin. Just to catch you up, I’m sure you kind of understand already. Two people, you add Workmate to an email, a scheduling email, Workmate is like an EA, handles the back and forth of email, schedules the meeting, sends the invite. So like inherently, if people, just same way with Calendly, it’s like, oh, book on my Calendly. It’s like, someone’s like, oh, what’s Calendly? And they sign up for Calendly. We have that same, I think, viral loop built into our product. So right now, the most important thing for us to do is like make sure we create a really product experience. And so I don’t think having a thousand users would be better than having like 10, like 10 users if the thousand aren’t really engaged. So I’m not like super, for me, waitlist signups help. Like if we have lots of signups, hopefully we can get signups from the groups that we think are going to value our product more. So it’s not sheer quantity, it’s like quantity of people we think will be relevant to our use case. Is that helpful? [Austin Schlessinger]: Yeah, it’s almost, you want people who are raving about your product because of how great it is. It’s not so much about the sheer quantity of people who have downloaded it or are using it. [David Lobo]: Right, and for what it’s worth, you can’t necessarily control who’s going to about it. So like, like, for us, like, that’s part on the product, or like, how do we make a really good experience, but it’s part on like, you know, making sure we’re, you know, we’re not selling swimsuits to people who live in Alaska, like, we should be trying to target this product towards like, people who have scheduling problem that are going to use the product and really enjoy it. [Austin Schlessinger]: Maybe it’s something along the lines of people responding to some of your posts, like talking about their experience or how happy they are with the product, something along that. Yeah, I think so. Yeah, yeah, yeah. [David Lobo]: Honestly, like something along those lines. I’m like, okay, is it like people who resonate with things that we’re posting. I’m not exactly sure. I kind of want your help on thinking through that a little bit. [Austin Schlessinger]: I guess my initial thoughts are if these metrics are increasing, we’re increasing the chance that that happens because we’re building that target audience who are interested in the content, which essentially means that they’re interested in what you’re building. So when they’re on the wait list and they end up becoming users, then I think that’s kind of directionally where we’d want to go. [David Lobo]: Yeah. Yep. I think that’s fair. [Austin Schlessinger]: All right. Cool. So I took this, so next thing is audience. I pulled these two like main ICPs that kind of overlap, but this was just based on the information you had sent over. Is there anything else you’d want to add to these? Is this kind of encompass everything? In terms of like who you’re looking to target? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah, I think that’s I think it’s fair. [David Lobo]: I think. This seems like a little bit like I’m not maybe founders are probably like encapsulated in this. But I think founders will be An early adopter prototype here, for sure. Founders, agency owners, and professional services owners. Agency and professional services owners, I guess. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. And these are pretty much all knowledge workers, so we can. [Austin Schlessinger]: Yeah, just focus on this, if that makes sense. Let’s pull this up here. Value and efficiency, manage complex. OK. Cool. All right. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: So we can check that off. [Austin Schlessinger]: And then is this the same audience that you want to target in your content? It seems like yes, but are there any nuances that you’d want to call out? [David Lobo]: There’s probably people who are like AI enthusiasts or people who are learning about AI or investing in AI who might, like some version of like what we put together for content might attract those types of people, but they may not necessarily be the best users. They may not turn into people who use the product. [Austin Schlessinger]: People who are interested but may not become long-term users. [David Lobo]: People who are interested may want to try it out. [Austin Schlessinger]: Do you guys have like a beta product now? We do. [David Lobo]: Cool. [Austin Schlessinger]: And then do you guys have like a timeline when you’re going to go GA? [David Lobo]: I think you said May before. I mean, I’d say. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah, I’d say by Q2 sometime in Q2. [Austin Schlessinger]: And forgive me, this is already called out, but do you guys have like an email list that you’d want to start with for the newsletters? Um, sort of, sort of [David Lobo]: So we have like anybody who’s tried our product, I think we could probably, you let me know how to best engage those people to join the list or just add them to the list. I can do that pretty easily. Um, and then maybe like concentric circles around that. Like there’s, I’m not sure if we should, to add our investors, we guess we could add that. We could. Yeah, I’d say probably the easiest thing is anybody who’s tried any version of our product in the past, which might be 50 people or something like that, would be a starting point. And then anybody who’s email that we, yeah. So maybe there’s like some list. I don’t know how engaged that list will be or how happy they’d be to receive emails, but I kind of defer to you on how to get them on. [Austin Schlessinger]: How come I’m going to leave on lead on you there. Like if there’s an existing list, how would you recommend like engaging those people? Are we okay with just adding them or is there? Yeah. [Michael Houck]: I mean, we should totally just throw them in there. Like any emails that we have, if they’re, you know, if they’re lying around, even if we haven’t talked to them in a while, you know, that’s our, that’s our starting, our starting crew. So we should throw them in the newsletter, um, just right away. And we’ll set up an automation, uh, David, so that, you know, if they don’t engage with the first few issues, then we automatically sort of turn them out of the newsletter. Obviously they’re still on your email lists, but, um, that way we don’t like drag down our deliverability or anything like that. But yeah, no, I mean, they’ve given you permission to email them, no reason to not throw them on the list. [David Lobo]: Okay. Can we add a question to address later, which is like email list versus like, like mailing service? Like I just had a discussion around like, where we should be sending emails from which account? Like all that sort of stuff. I don’t want to talk about it right now, but at the end of this conversation. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, for sure. Uh, the, like the logistics of the newsletter, we’ll probably dig into those. We can do them on the call, but I would imagine that some of it will spill over into Slack, uh, like next week too. So we’ll be setting up a lot of that stuff for you guys after, um, we get a beehive account set up for you and, um, And any questions that come up during that process, I’ll flag. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Great. So next thing is content pillars. [Austin Schlessinger]: What are kind of like the three or five main topics that you want to cover across newsletter and social? And I also made a few call outs here. About those one-off things like the product launch and fundraising announcement but these are kind of like the main like what are we going to build our content engine around what do you want to focus on yeah I don’t know [David Lobo]: this is where like I would defer to you guys like I I’m not sure like given the goals and given the people we want to reach Like what do you think? How do you think I should answer this question? [Michael Houck]: Also, do you want to take a shot at it or you want me to chime in? [Austin Schlessinger]: I can take a shot at it. So if we’re targeting people that are interested in. These are people that want to have an executive assistant that don’t. Have, I guess, the resources for it, or maybe would rather engage with some sort of technology to delegate things. So I think there’s a certain level of education around maybe how to, the importance of delegation and productivity. The other piece is kind of AI industry insights, like if something comes out, what is your POV on that? But I think it’s more about the, if we’re trying to target the users, then it’s likely gonna be more about the delegation productivity, showing how the product works. So I feel like it mostly falls under productivity, delegation, advice on kind of speaking to maybe even sharing like other AI tools that might be helpful for people? How, is there anything else that you would add here? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I mean, I think I fall into the category of like this target customer myself, And I think the, the number one thing that drives this sort of urge for me is not necessarily even about productivity, which might be a little counterintuitive. It’s more so about what productivity enables me to do. Right. So if I’m saving time in a cost effective way by, you know, using work made, um, rather than a human assistant who maybe might require more back and forth or time getting up to speed or whatever. Um, if I’m like hyper aware of that productivity. Gain that Workmate is giving me. I want that because I can, you know, go on a hike or I can play tennis or I can watch Netflix, right? It’s a limited amount of time that I get outside of work. So the people who are going to be marketing this to are very, very busy and high switching costs in their day to day. So we should talk about productivity, but we should talk about it in a little bit at least, or at least test this out in terms of like what that innate people to do. So whether that’s case studies, whether that’s aspirational posts, you know, whether we go long form or short form, I think we can try both and see what works. But I would definitely make it more of like a, I don’t want to say like a lifestyle thing, but at least some benefit outside of just like what this does at work. [Austin Schlessinger]: Yeah, like pointing out the, all the stuff that that this person is gonna be able to accomplish because they don’t have to manage their calendar or they can throw work made on a CC line instead of having to open up Slack and get outside of the work that they’re doing to Slack like an executive assistant to set up a call. [Michael Houck]: I would almost think about it similarly to remote work in a way because obviously, very different in terms of how we’ll talk about it, but in terms of what the person is gaining. With remote work, you gain a lot more flexibility. With productivity tools, AI tools that are taking care of things for you, you get a lot more flexibility and time back. So it’s sort of that similar thing. So yeah, what I would say is like, Jacob has the one client in the remote workspace right now. Maybe talk to him and see also what’s worked well for them and we can sort of leverage of those insights to create the strategy here. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Cool. [David Lobo]: Along those same lines, I know, Hauk, you mentioned you had like a AISBR company that you’ve worked with in the past. And so along those lines, like some part of me, I think some of the things you said resonated. Similarly, like there’s like some aspect to like agents are all the rage right now. So maybe there’s something you know, I don’t know what’s maybe the better before like recommending something I feel like what’s potentially working at other AI agent companies, their newsletters, newsletters that are focused on that sort of thing. Yeah, that sort of stuff is kind of like top of mind. I think there’s like a theme of like, what can like jobs you can give to the like AI And I don’t want to be like necessarily, I’ll do whatever’s effective, but I don’t necessarily think like that’s going to be like, Hey, like let’s feature five new AI tools this week. [Michael Houck]: No, no, you’re, you’re, you’re totally right, David. At this point where I think we’re over a year, maybe even two years at this point into the, the, you know, the, the AI newsletter craze. [David Lobo]: Right. [Michael Houck]: And I, I know a lot of the people who run those newsletters and, you know, you know, confidentially between you and me, they all say the same thing, which is growth has gotten a lot harder when all we’re doing is sharing like the news updates and the new hot tools, because it’s, it’s just a different game than it was two years ago. And people are already subscribed to two or three of those newsletters at this point, they probably unsubscribed to two or three of them at this point. So we need to take a different angle with the, with the newsletter and not just sort of fall into that, that same trap where it’s an easy unsubscribe at this point. [David Lobo]: Yeah. [Austin Schlessinger]: So I guess I’ll do a little bit more research in this area. I’ll reach out to Jacob and talk to him and see what’s resonating for the company that he’s working with. And then also do a little bit more research on some other companies that are building in the AI agent space and seeing if there’s any, like, what are some of the trends? Like, what do those post formats look like, [Michael Houck]: Yeah, we’ll do that internally, but also, David, David, if you have specific AI agent companies that you’re like, man, I really like their strategy. I really like how they talk about AI. It resonates with our brand too. Like send those to Austin in the channel. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. [David Lobo]: It sounds good. I don’t know. I’ll have to think about it. So I’d love you to take the lead on that. And then I will just remind me and I will like, just I’ll just take another what comes to mind. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, well, we’ll send some some initial research and options over. And if you have more that you want to add, just feel free. [Austin Schlessinger]: No, no rush. Sure. Great. Then as post formats to I can do a little bit more research on that and kind of what’s working. But Dave, is there any like like post formats. [David Lobo]: Yeah, I would say probably memes will probably not go on this list just based on the CEO’s preference for more serious stuff. Yeah, long form and short form sound great. Threads are fine. Screenshots are fine. Profiles of people in your industry probably sound good. I don’t know exactly what, can you give me an example of what that is? Like a story of somebody or a company or something like that. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: What does that mean? [Austin Schlessinger]: What I’ve seen is it’s highlighting like leaders in the space. So it’s like, uh, talking about breaking down, like, do a breakdown of Steve Jobs, like Steve Jobs is, you know, X best, you know, uh, speeches that he gave or talking about like Elon Musk or, um, but industry specific. [Michael Houck]: I don’t, I don’t think it really, um, this is like, this is like, um, the, the thread that went mega viral, um, a couple of months ago, which was like how, um, Jensen Wong from NVIDIA manages 50 direct or something like that. Yeah. Yeah. [David Lobo]: This is fine. I mean, this is, this, all of this stuff is like, I think all of this stuff is fine. So long as it like makes sense within the content, like whatever form I love, it’s like, uh, I’m more or less fine with anything so long as it is within the things that we talk about targeted, like it, It matches up with the content pillar, which is leading to the goals that we’re driving. [Austin Schlessinger]: So yeah, whatever, we’ll figure out what works. Cool. And also, once we get into a rhythm, we’ll be able to kind of see what’s working, what’s resonating, and double down on the stuff that is doing well. OK, posting schedule. Do you want us to schedule for you or? [Michael Houck]: Oh yeah, Austin, sorry, this doc is a little outdated. We’re handling all the content ops for David and the account. [Austin Schlessinger]: Okay, cool. [Michael Houck]: David, the main question is, and I actually don’t think we need to answer this right now, but the main question we need to figure out over the first few weeks is, you know, are we seeing short form posts resonate more? Are we seeing long form posts resonate more? And therefore, what does our posting schedule become from there? So we’ll figure out if we get something up there every day, or if it’s a couple of days a week with longer form stuff. [David Lobo]: We’ll probably want to test out both if you’re comfortable with that. Sorry, can you say that again? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, sorry. It’s not a decision we need to make right now, and we’re going to want to experiment with both probably. But we’ll want to figure out for social what the sort of posting cadence is, whether it’s shorter form stuff every day, or a couple of days a week with longer form, more detailed posts. So we’ll just figure that out over the first few weeks, but just something to keep in mind. [David Lobo]: Yeah, also for reference, I’ve been like posting some longer form recently and just getting like super low engagement I’ve been doing like three times a week and then you know we’re post here and there and so yeah I don’t know like it’d be good to experiment but yeah I’m not sure what’s gonna work so we’ll experiment I guess sounds good Um, and then, um, you’re still in New York, right? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. [Michael Houck]: Uh, so we’ll probably post in the morning Eastern time. Um, we’ll work with our content ops guy to figure out exactly what time, uh, makes the most sense, but, uh, sometime early in the morning is going to be going to be best for sure. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Cool. [Michael Houck]: Um, Austin, anything else you want to go over either for social or the newsletter here on your end? Nope. Uh, David, anything we didn’t get to that you’d want to go over aside from like next steps? [David Lobo]: Um, what, I guess, um, what is the, I guess like, what is the cadence both the newsletter and the, I don’t mean like the, the, when to post, but like, what does the back and forth between us sort of look like, How do we like nail down voice style content? Like what does, you know, kind of like, what does that look like, Yeah. [Michael Houck]: So the first few, the first two weeks here are going to be, uh, you know, Austin’s going to be doing a bunch of research, uh, throwing some examples and questions out to you. I’ll be setting up the beehive account with the automations and setting and all that. And then going into that third week, we’ll have hopefully a backlog of content to start posting by then, or at least we’ll be able to get the first issue out. And we don’t wanna sort of stress you guys out by sending content over sort of the week of or anything like that. So our aim is to get a couple of weeks ahead. And so that’ll all be in, we’ll notify you in Slack when that comes through. If there’s input that we want from you on specific pieces or specific questions where, like, your subject matter expertise can be helpful, which it probably will be. We’ll drop a question or two in Slack on, like, Mondays. And then our ask of you is to sort of respond with a voice note where you can just ramble for a couple minutes. That’s the most helpful way to get us sort of the intonation and emotion and all that that we want for the voice. So involvement from here is basically the first couple weeks helping with setup. We’ll manage that, but you know, we will have questions. [David Lobo]: And then after that, just responding to sort of content requests as they come up on, on Mondays. In terms of, in terms of in terms of like success metrics here. So how, how, how do we like know if things are going well, how do we know to change? How do we like figure out like, what’s that? [Michael Houck]: What does that like review process look like, Yeah, so we’re always reviewing performance internally. And we can share. I mean, you’ll see it on the account, obviously, but we can share summaries with you as well in Slack. And we’ll probably be pretty proactive there, especially in the first couple months where we’re testing out different things and how they So we’ll be pretty proactive and we’ll always be communicative with what we’re doing and why we’re making the changes that we’re making. But yeah, we’ll send over results and interesting strategic decisions on iteration that we think of as they come up. Okay, so if you have specific goals, again, like what we were talking about at the beginning, if you’re thinking about this more and you’re like, oh, you know what, in order for this to be a success, success, I want to add X followers in the first three or six months or whatever, let let us know. And that’ll help us sort of, you know, guide ourselves against that. [David Lobo]: Well, yeah, I don’t want to I don’t want to like, so I do. So here’s, I don’t want to like set something unrealistic. But I also want to set something that’s like, like, aggressive. So I guess the question is, like, what do you guys think is realistic? And what do you think is aggressive? But can we can we pick something and try to sort of track towards it? Yeah, totally get that. [Michael Houck]: I think that’ll be easy for us to do after we get some data points out there. So maybe what we do is we check in on this at the end of the first month and just say, all right, based on what we’re seeing in the first month, here’s what we think we can do across the [David Lobo]: first six months or something like that. [Michael Houck]: OK, we want to get some data points on the account and the audience. And how engaged your existing followers are and things like that. [David Lobo]: Okay, yeah, that makes sense. Okay, then the separate separate question I had was around, like, sending service. So I know we’re gonna do like beehive. And I guess, like once our website is up, which will be The next few days, we’ll have an updated website. Right now, all of the links from this updated website are for signing up to the waitlist, not signing up to our newsletter. I don’t know if that’s good or bad. I don’t know. But also, I guess all of the waitlist sign-ups, I’m pushing to loops, which I just set up to leave. [Michael Houck]: use loops for product emails. I guess. [David Lobo]: Okay. So how, like, what should I be using loops for? What should be like, what should be going out over beehive? What should be, how should we use the loops? How do we like, and then, you know, the CEO just like mess with me. He’s like, Hey, can like, rather than using an email service that like shows up in your marketing emails, we send it as our account. So it just arrives in people’s inboxes instead. And so I just like want, if you have a perspective on what’s the right setup for all these things to obviously keep high deliverability and it landed somebody’s inbox, ideally in their main inbox. But yeah, I don’t know if you have any perspective on that. Yeah, so it’s super simple. [Michael Houck]: The easiest way to do it is Beehive sends the newsletter and everything else you guys send out through Loops. That’s gonna be the most effective way to do it. Reason for this is because A, it lets us sort of brand the newsletter as its own kind of fun thing. B, we’re not sort of mixing product marketing emails with content marketing emails. And also eHive is just very, very optimized for sending newsletters for everything from reporting to how they have their sending infrastructure set up under the hood to how to write like the canvas to write the content on. Everything is just, you know, automations and segmentation. It’s all set up specifically for newsletters. So highly recommend we use Beehive for the newsletter. Highly recommend we use something else. In this case, sounds like Loops for everything else. [David Lobo]: Yeah, so can we, when the Beehive’s set up, can you give me like a walkthrough or if you want to send over here? Yeah, it could be good to like walk, go through it together. Just have an understanding of like what you’re setting up. So I can understand what’s in the account. Or if you want to, do it over Loom or something and I can ask questions async, that’s also fine. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, cool. Either works. [David Lobo]: We can hop on a quick 15-minute call or something and do it that way. Let me think. Anything else? I don’t know. Is there anything else that I should be chatting about right now? We’re kind of getting started from scratch. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. I don’t think there’s anything we’re missing right now. As we set things up, I will have questions for you and I’m sure Austin will too on the content side. So nothing that really makes sense to cover right now, but it won’t be too much, just little things. [David Lobo]: Oh, one other thing, which is like the brand, the newsletter, right? What do you recommend in terms of like how it should be branded? Who’s like writing the email? Emails, things like that. Oh, sure. Because it’s signed off by that sort of stuff. [Michael Houck]: This is something I probably want you to add your, your, your CEO to the conversation about, but would, you know, there’s really two paths we can go. Path number one is it’s branded around the company. And if we brand it around the company, it can either be like the work made newsletter, or it can be like, you know, the, the AI itself. I think we talked about this the other call we had, like the AI itself can be the person writing the newsletter, so to speak. And the other angle that we can go is sort of making it its own thing. And if we make it its own thing, it can be like, you know, totally different, like a new brand that we created for it. That might be a little bit overkill. I don’t know, maybe not. Or we can brand it around one of you and it can be the CEO writing it or you writing it. That’s more of a strategic decision, I think, for you guys. I think if we’re going to focus on your social as the primary account, and if we were to have the newsletter be from one of you, it would make more sense for it to be coming from you rather than him. [David Lobo]: Yeah, that’s only kind of one one of those options. Yeah, that is fine. Um, okay, so I’ll, I’ll, I’ll sync up with him on that. I do think it’s kind of whack. I don’t know how often I’m reading a specific company’s newsletter. You know what I mean? Like I feel like usually I’m following people’s newsletters or like, you know, third party branded newsletters personally. I don’t know if that’s like a good representation versus like the, you know, I’ll make something up, whatever company names newsletter. Do you have like a strong perspective I’m like, what will have the best performance here? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I mean, in my opinion, people follow people, and they also follow like, non corporatey stuff. So you guys are a startup, so you’re not super corporatey in the first place. And the brand itself is kind of welcoming. But I understand sort of why you wouldn’t necessarily want to make it seem anywhere near a corporatey thing. So I guess my recommendation either we brand it as its own thing, and if we brand it as its own thing, that can be, you know, written by some AI, it can be a new brand that we create together for this, or we just brand it around, I guess, around you as the person who’s sort of leading it. We can give it a name so it’s not like the David Lobo AI newsletter or something like that. [David Lobo]: Subscribe. Yeah, yeah, yeah. [Michael Houck]: I’d say we should go in one of those directions. Directions. [David Lobo]: Yeah, the I think that like, but coming from the AI, it’s like a little kitschy. And it could be interesting or it could be Yeah, I don’t know, it could be interesting. It could be more of an experiment. But like, I don’t know, I don’t know, maybe like feel a little risky, but I don’t really care. Also, if it’s like, not like the, the, my, my hunch is like the farther it is away the company or CEO, the less like professional and buttoned up it has to be, which may or may not be good for like, which may or may not have an impact on like, yeah, engagement. I’ll call it. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: It I honestly, I really do think this is like you guys internally should have this conversation first. And then you and I and then Austin can jam on finalizing it. But I I think this is more of an internal decision. My recommendation would be to brand it away from the company in one way or the other for a similar reason, as you said. But I also don’t think that’s black and white. We can have success if the newsletter is just called Workmate. And it’s just like, people are like, oh, what’s Workmate? Oh, Workmate is a newsletter. And they have this really cool software product. And oh, wait, there is a bunch of money for it. That’s cool. Let me check it out. [David Lobo]: Okay. Would that potentially restrict how like the voice and stuff like that? [Michael Houck]: In my opinion, no, like our launch house voice was lowercase and, you know, Mimi and controversial and that was fine. Um, but it’s you and your CEO figuring out sort of what are you comfortable with? [David Lobo]: I just mean like, just, just for reference, like, well, I’m just saying like, like, Maybe to be more explicit like when I wrote like my first the first loops email I had like emojis and like was like very informal like it was like written from like a person or like somebody, you know almost and See, I was like, oh we can do better than this I can you know, this is you know, blah blah and all right, that’s fine We can have it more professional. That’s completely fine. It’s a work product. It depends on you. Whatever. He’s trying to figure out of still figuring out the voice Now, will something like that perform better or worse for a given audience? Maybe we’ll have to find out. [Michael Houck]: We have client newsletters that do both. We have a very successful, very well-known client whose company is doing close to $100 million in revenue at this point annually. Their newsletter is branded around the company. And it’s super buttoned up. They have like a very professional voice and they’re going after sort of, you know, I’d say very senior business owners, founders, people like that, not early stage so much. And it does great. You know, engagement is great. Click rates are great through to their blog, through to try the service. So they’re very successful that way, but what works for them won’t necessarily work for for you guys. So I think knowing, based on the voice on who the demographic is, and if that’s someone who’s gonna get inundated with information and therefore want that something to stand out in sort of a fun way, then cool, let’s do that. If they’re inundated with information and they don’t have time to worry about it a fun way, and they just want the information super dry, that can work too, but it might not work for you guys. So I’m happy to be part of that conversation, but I don’t I think we can have that conversation without the full crew. [David Lobo]: Okay. Got it. Fair enough. All right. Any other homework between now and when, what are the next steps? [Michael Houck]: So next steps, Austin’s going to get started on everything we talked about. I’m going to go through and do a profile audit for your LinkedIn. I’ll do a loom and I’ll send it to you. And then We’ll get started setting up the Beehive account on Monday, and I’ll loop you into things we need from you for that. And then I would say, just take this kind of back to CEO, and you guys talk internally about the sort of open items. And then next week, let me know where you guys land, and we can, you know, I’m happy to, again, be part of that conversation, but we can build from there. [David Lobo]: Okay, great. Of the things or one other thing, which was for the social media thing, like a part of what was interesting was like you going in and like doing that, like doing the sort of actions that like will increase engagement where it’s like liking and commenting on other people’s posts and stuff like that. How, how does that fit into all of this? [Michael Houck]: Yeah. So you will also share your login with Ben on our team. In the channel already, and then he’ll get that started next week as well. I’m going to send a follow-up message in Slack like I do after calls with like everything, next steps and everything, so no need to worry about it right now, but I’ll send it later today and direct Ben to grab [David Lobo]: that from you. Okay. All right. Sounds great. Cool. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Anything else? [Michael Houck]: No, I definitely think we’re good. We’ll get started and loop you in for any questions or anything like that that comes up. And yeah, I’m pumped, man. This is going to be dope. [David Lobo]: We’ll build that wait list for you guys. All right. Fantastic. All right. Awesome. Great to meet you. Have always a pleasure. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Cool. [Michael Houck]: Talk soon, dude. [David Lobo]: Talk soon, David. All right. Talk guys. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Bye.