- Duration: 28 min
- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01JK6DG6ZMTT6GKY2R6BHX6H4T (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JK6DG6ZMTT6GKY2R6BHX6H4T)
Transcript
UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Dan, how are you? [Dan Barry]: Hello, mate. I’m good, having a meeting run over and politely trying to end it. Sorry about 60 seconds late. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: No worries. [Michael Houck]: We’ll make sure you get out of this one on time. [Dan Barry]: I’m free as a bird after this, so we can talk for hours if we need to. [Michael Houck]: Go off on some tangent talking about a million different other things unrelated to newsletters. [Dan Barry]: We could do that. Yes. Tariffs, AI, the weather. All the buzzwords. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Luca Donchitz. [Michael Houck]: Luca Donchitz, crazy. [Dan Barry]: Anyway, good to meet. [Michael Houck]: Thanks for making yourself available. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Appreciate it. [Dan Barry]: No worries. How can I help you? [Michael Houck]: Well, newsletter sales, ad sales, leads at least. Let’s see, TLDR. We have two newsletters. 70,000 subscribers, a little under 70K, and is growing. All founders, startup founders, mostly venture backed, some bootstrapped, some more like aspirational future founders. And it’s an advice column, two issues a week. And we’ve been doing deals for about two years now. We have good renewals, good partners, but my longtime ad sales guy, partnerships guy, just got an amazing offer that we couldn’t match. And so, you know, I said, more power to you, man, go take the reins over there. [Dan Barry]: So just looking for- Is that Max? Yeah, it is Max. Yeah, I met Max in New York at the conference. Well, we actually hung out for half a day around New York. Yeah, he’s a good dude. [Michael Houck]: The Morning Brew guys, Austin and Alex, are starting a new company and they’re like, you should be employee number one. And I’m like, I get it, you know? So he jumped over there like last week and yeah, just looking for some help. We have someone who’s like, can kind of take calls and things like that. So at minimum, Um, maybe that evolves into the full offer that you guys have, like the 4,500 offer too. Uh, but TBD, I think, start with leads and kind of see how it goes from there. [Dan Barry]: Okay, cool. That makes a lot of sense. Um, so post in a post max world, do you, do you still have someone closing, closing deals? Yeah, sort of [Michael Houck]: He’s my, my sort of like Swiss army knife ops guy. I’ve sort of plugged in there for now. We’re debating hiring someone else, like basically evaluating, do I hire someone else part time? Do I just work with you guys and some other folks to bring in deal flow and maybe end up closing some of it myself? Who knows? All in flux, all trying to figure it out as we go. [Dan Barry]: Cool. Okay. Where are you based? Whereabouts are you? [Michael Houck]: I was in New York for like four years. Now I’m I’m currently in Patagonia, in Argentina, just hanging out. [Dan Barry]: I don’t actually have an apartment anymore, so I don’t know where I’m going to be based. That’s fun. Is it the main newsletter? Because you sent me a couple of websites. I’ll drop the link. [Michael Houck]: It’s Hauk, the U is like a W, it’s German. But we changed the name from Hauk’s newsletter to Founding Journey. So foundingjourney.com is that website. And then we also have this other newsletter, which currently is not doing any revenue, only has like, you know, 4000 subscribers, but we’re going to be investing a lot to grow it over the next few months. So later this year would to be big enough to start bringing in some sponsors for that as well. [Dan Barry]: Okay, what’s the audience there? [Michael Houck]: It’s like social media marketers, growth marketers, founders who are trying to build their personal brand. What we do is we send two issues a week. One is a couple templates for like posts that went viral. We templatize them, make them practical for people. And then the other issue is like a very short sort of like vignette, single insight advice for, for those same people. [Dan Barry]: Nice. Okay. That that’s a, that’s a good audience. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I think it can grow pretty good. Um, and we, um, we have a, uh, like a proprietary growth method that we’ve built around, um, uh, around cold email. Cause my, my friend is like a world expert on cold email. And so, um, we’re kicking that off. This month. And we’re anticipating being able to grow by like, you know, five figures per month, starting later this month. So good time to start bringing in some new partners. [Dan Barry]: Okay, cool. Proprietary cold email subscriber growth. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, subscriber growth, not for not not for we could use it for leads to I guess I thought about that too much. But the main the main priority is to grow the list as big as we can. [Dan Barry]: Yeah, sure. Cool, okay. Is that, you’d have to tell me, is that kind of a just start sending people content and then actually put the people that engage to a certain threshold in the list? Is it that format? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, sort of like that. We have some unique things about how we, who we send it to and some other things that make it more unique than just like a typical cold email than filtering people in, but by and large, in practice, we can think about it that way. [Dan Barry]: Okay, cool. Not allowed in Europe. Yeah, I know. [Michael Houck]: We’re US only. Although, to be fair, we did look into this. In Europe, even though there’s GDPR and everything, there’s no actual proven case law about it yet. So the law hasn’t really been tested with regard to doing this stuff. In theory, it could and probably would be tried, but there’s no case law that says anyone would win in any certain way, so it’s still up in the air. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Yeah. [Dan Barry]: Is that going to be your argument? [Michael Houck]: No, that wouldn’t be the argument. We’re not sending to your people anyway, so it’s not our problem. [Dan Barry]: It’ll be someone’s problem. Yeah, it’s my problem, but cool. Okay. Yes. So how much do you, I’ll just go through what we, what we do. Um, and then kind of like we can go from there, see if it, see if it makes sense. Timeline details, et cetera. So that’s all the services, the agency leads and deals as a service as you sounds like you’ve, you’ve already looked at things. Um, Lisa service kind of handles everything, uh, for you up until we get a positive reply and the most effective handover is usually a now CC’ing in, Michael or whoever, with a accounting link and a meeting link and a little contextual, whatever question they ask, usual handover. Michael can take it from here, grab time. Sometimes they book a meeting, sometimes they don’t. My reasoning behind going with that handover and not calls booked is that You don’t need to jump on a call to sell ads. It’s always beneficial, but yeah. [Michael Houck]: I was going to say, we almost never get on calls. The only times we do is when like, we just signed a deal a couple of weeks ago with a partner who wanted to do like a 43 K deal. And so over like a year and so we’re like, okay, well for you, we’ll hop on a call, but we always try to avoid, avoid calls. [Dan Barry]: I would always encourage them from a sales perspective. But yeah, if you don’t want to, then we just won’t use a company link, that’s fine. [Michael Houck]: We can do this every deal. I’m just saying that we’ve been able so far to close most deals async without having to. [Dan Barry]: But yeah, if we want to offer it, I’m fine with offering it. Nice. Cool. I mean, yeah, that’s not too much of an important factor anyway. So yeah, we handle the code email infrastructure, finding companies, contacts, emailing them, And then, yeah, sending you the code replies and reporting at minimum once a month. If you want to know what’s going on more often than that, then just ask, and we’ll always say. Communicate over Slack. Flat monthly retainer of $2,700. No commissions or ring-fencing or anything like that. Very simple, kind of lead-gen agency model, but very hyper-niched into newsletter sponsorships. And there’s one case setup for you as well, which goes towards coding email infrastructure, which is more and more annoying by the week. But then deals as a service, sorry I’m getting a headache coming on, I get them all the time. Deals as a service is, but yeah, covering the full sales cycle, it’s built, I suppose you know AdAstra and MadRev. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I work with both of them. [Dan Barry]: Yeah, so it’s built intentionally different to that model. Great model, I know that all those guys there They have a bunch of publishers and a bunch of advertisers on the books to match you up opportunistically. It’s great, low on no effort deals for whatever percent you’ve agreed. This is, as opposed to that, it’s an alternative to hiring a salesperson in-house. Cheaper than, as I understand, what it would cost to hire in the US or the UK or a similar country. Less risky with all the data and software and AI extensions that that person would ever need. Or hands off. Um, so yeah, it’s covering the full sales cycle, the leads team, the gent doing nothing, feeding our salesperson of which we have four already in our space in South Africa, um, West Africa, because they speak English as a first language and they’re on a very similar time zone to the UK and take a trip down to Cape town sometimes beautiful down there. We are planning that. That’s a perk. Is not going to mention, but equally as important. [Michael Houck]: Equally as important, yeah. My favorite place on earth, actually. [Dan Barry]: Yeah, one of our most recent hires who’s signing the contract today, he’s a sales engineer, which wants to get more into sales. Well, has already had a sales background and has an engineering background, which I think would be very useful, because we don’t. He was like, yeah, I’m in. Is really, really good. So we’re quite keen to have him. It was like, my one condition is that you have to come to South Africa and we have to meet. But anyway, so yeah, that’s, those are the two offerings. The retainer is four and a half a month for the deals of service. It’s like, again, dedicated pipeline as opposed to, and you get every two weeks reporting on the pipeline as you would report to a manager, this is what’s going on, these deals are going to close, hopefully this will not renew and we just hand over when the IO is signed. We don’t, the policy for kind of campaign management or ad ops, we would like to be CC’d in and know what’s going on so we know how to invoice or how to renew. But the actual campaign operations is done by you guys. Cool. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: That’s fine. [Michael Houck]: That all makes sense. You probably get this question a lot. Obviously, you can’t tell me how many deals are going to come through per month. I know that. That’s fine. I just want to understand, if I’m working with MedRat, RadAstra, or hiring someone in-house and paying them commission, I want to be able to make that sort of judgment a little bit. So any rough estimation, what you seen from other clients, maybe in similar niches of like, you know, the way we price is like our flat price is 3k for our featured placement. We give discounts on that, you know, to drive conversion frequently. And then we have like smaller ones as well. [Dan Barry]: Just like rough estimate, like what can I expect per month? From the leads or deals? [Michael Houck]: I guess. Let’s do the deals. If we hand off everything to you guys, how many deals roughly, or how much revenue roughly would I expect per month? [Dan Barry]: Yeah, so we really kind of expect to get to good ROI. Can you hear me OK, by the way? Yep. Sounds got a bit weird. Expect to get to positive ROI. Within three months, it’s a three month term. Obviously month one, looking like we are going to be positive on the two clients that have been on board of this month, which is great, but not within expectations. So yeah, looking, again, as you said, it’s hard to give a number to it, but if we’re not closing more than a small handful, two to four deals a month, initially, within kind of like months three, four, then yeah, that’s what we expect. Obviously, we’d aim for more than that. When you’re talking five, four, five, six months in, as the pipeline and the circlebacks have got back into the pipeline and there’s renewal deals floating around, then we don’t see why it wouldn’t be kind of like more than that. But there’s so many variables, including renewal rate across It’s hard to say. [Michael Houck]: If we did then, if we did the other option, if we just did the leads, maybe that’s easier to estimate. [Dan Barry]: How many leads would you guys be sending us per month? Yeah, so we say 15 to 30 is where most range in if it’s 15 to 30. Average I think is right in the middle of that 22.8 something. December, because it’s December, but the member average was 22.89, I think it was. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Okay, cool. [Michael Houck]: That makes sense. And that’s helpful. Trying to think what other questions I would have now. Oh, yeah. Okay. So if we do move forward, how quickly would we be able to get started working together, bandwidth on your team, stuff like that? [Dan Barry]: Yeah, good. Question so We have capacity Calendars I’ll give you an accurate answer Yeah, we can so the timeline would be We do a kickoff call where we have a great time for half an hour and discuss the strategy and who we’re targeting and lock that in. And then we go to work for a minimum of 15 days to let the mailboxes warm up. I’m copywriting other things as well, but it has to be a minimum of 15 days. The kickoff call, we could do this Thursday. And then, yeah. Add on 16 days from there in terms of outreach life. Okay. [Michael Houck]: And then we obviously have a large list of sponsors who we’ve either have worked with in the past, are working with on a renewal basis, or we’ve reached out to, and for whatever reason, maybe it wasn’t the right person or whatever, they didn’t convert, we didn’t hear back, things like that. Is there a way to sort of de-duplicate that list so that A, you guys aren’t reaching out to our current partners and B, if there are people we have reached out to, you guys at least have that information to [Dan Barry]: sort of make sure you’re sending them the right messaging. Yes. Yeah. That’s a block list for existing clients, uh, partners or late stage conversations is very much the norm. If you want to give us kind of previous conversation data as leads almost that would also be useful for sure. Um, Yeah. Yes. [Michael Houck]: And if we send that, that’s not going to be used for your other clients to try to grab those sponsorship dollars for them or anything like that, right? No. [Dan Barry]: In terms of existing partners, that’s for a block list to stop us reaching out to. If you want to send us existing conversations, no. It’s all siloed. We’re not going to do that if that’s what you’re asking. No. Okay, cool. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. [Dan Barry]: Do you want us to do kind of a re-engagement campaign? It’s not what we typically do. But we can also do that if that would be helpful. We’ve done it for a client the other week. One thing I… Yeah, we can do that as well if that’s helpful. Yeah, it could be. [Michael Houck]: I’ll take a look at our list and see what I think of the people who we haven’t reached out to, how big that list is. How recent they are, things like that. Maybe we’ll find some cutoff to make it make sense. But OK, cool. Anything I can answer for you to make sure that you have all the information you would need? [Dan Barry]: Yeah. I mean, core questions in terms of what makes a good fit is, is someone able, with the ad inventory and the resources, to get good ROI on the feeds if it’s on the lead side? Obviously, if each ad is only worth 800 bucks, even with the best salesperson in the world, it’s going to be an apple struggle to get a good ROI. With you, assuming that’s fine. And when you mentioned someone wearing 17 hats and also closing, that is fine. A few of our clients have kind of, I’m aware a person dedicating their spare time to closing is sometimes it can be two days a week, sometimes it could be two hours. We’d love to get an understanding without prying too much like where on the spectrum they sit there because we have had where we set up with people and been doing a good job sending them lots of leads and they follow up once and don’t follow up again because they don’t have the time And it’s like, yeah, then they churn and you guys have wasted your time basically. [Michael Houck]: I totally get it. Um, no, that wouldn’t be the case for us. Um, so, you know, revenue generation is our top priority always. So this guy, his other tasks are getting delegated to our, we have like a team of VAs who handle a lot of the ops stuff. So some of this other stuff is getting delegated to them to prioritize this. Um, I don’t know how many hours he’s spending on it because this is like only the really first or second week that he’s been doing it. But, you know, he’s already closing deals, he’s setting tons of superhuman reminders to follow up with people. So I’m CC to all the emails. So I see I’m seeing everything come through. So he knows his priority. And again, we might also hire someone internally to sort of manage just this on a part time basis. So that’s another kind of decision I have to make over the next week or so. I don’t know that that would influence our decision here one way or the other. Depends on who that person ends up being and what their skill set would be. [Dan Barry]: But we’ll have coverage is what I’m trying to say. We’ll be fine. Okay, cool. It’s a diplomatic way of asking that question. [Michael Houck]: Totally get it. [Dan Barry]: Cool, awesome. Yeah, it sounds like a good fit from my perspective. I’ll send a quick follow-up. It’s all the information that you already have, to be honest. And yeah, let me know your thoughts and we’ll go from there. [Michael Houck]: Okay, cool, man. I’ll follow up by end of the week at the latest. [Dan Barry]: Awesome. Are you going to Austin in a few weeks? UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: I actually am. [Michael Houck]: I will be there. Yeah. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Nice. [Dan Barry]: Okay. I’ll be there with my business partner, Jack, as well. I’ll see you there. [Michael Houck]: I’ll see you there, man. I’ll probably talk to you before then I figure this out. Yeah. Yeah. Hopefully. All right. [Dan Barry]: Good to meet you.