- Duration: 23 min
- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01JK93BW27K4P74WEQSX13HFE5 (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JK93BW27K4P74WEQSX13HFE5)
Transcript
[Taylor MD]: Nice to meet you. [Michael Houck]: Nice to meet you as well. [Taylor MD]: Thanks for grabbing some time. Yeah. You came in about a thousand decibels there. I loved, I loved your, your last little research note there that you put out. I think it was a week ago on DeepSeek. It’s amazing. [Michael Houck]: Oh, the Saturday piece. Yeah. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Yeah. [Taylor MD]: It was a fun one to write. [Michael Houck]: Lots of stuff. And I feel like a lot of the reporting on it is just very surface level. [Taylor MD]: So I wanted to get more into the kind of dynamics of what’s actually happening. Yeah, we’re in the business of providing infrastructure for the hyperscalers. So we build big facilities. And so yeah, I mean, those are all potentially our customers, right? So for them to go, oh my gosh, know. But they all actually put their press out. Fairly quickly saying yeah that’s doesn’t rate. I mean yeah it’s- one press release you know and unfortunately I myself even get pretty. Upset sometimes you read something and you’re like oh my god the world’s change so but you gotta kind of put it in than ever and it’ll probably yeah to do that so it’s. [Michael Houck]: Yeah it’s a lot is going on right now and it’s in some ways we’re just hanging on for the ride and other ways we’re trying to kind of direct what track the ride goes down so. [Taylor MD]: Yeah but you know what you’ve got a nice style so good good for you guys. I’m ex Gartner meta so I really like good quality reading I skim through most things and I probably read one out of every ten so the fact that I read it twice. Thank you. Yeah. So I did want to connect with you and just kind of talk a little bit about our business. And I really appreciated your pre qualifier there in terms of if you have budget, I don’t have budget. I am marketing and sales right now. And until we actually start to scrape in, we’re a multi billion dollar startup. Because that’s what it is. And, you know, anything that I can do, as you chose your words, carefully amplify my voice, speaks volumes. So I just, you know, whether you want me to tell you a little bit about us, or if you want to share with me, it’s your call. So share with me about you, like, honestly, I’d love to know what you guys do and how we could collaborate somehow and support each other would be great. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, for sure. Excited to kind of hear more about your side, too, but I can just start and throw something out there. So we have a couple parts to our business. We’re big on social media and newsletter growth. We think those are two areas to get the word out and build trust with customers that is today. Yeah. So we focus on LinkedIn X and newsletters. That’s what we do. And so we can help in a couple ways. One is by actually writing content. Right. So that can be thought leadership content branded around someone’s personal brand. It can be brand account content or branded newsletter around the startup to bring people further down into the funnel. Lots of ways that we can go about that. And then we can also help with growth. So we have Megaphone, which I’ve mentioned in the newsletter a couple of times, so you might already be familiar. It’s like a creator network platform, basically, where you can get big creators in your niche to engage with your content for a fee. [Taylor MD]: OK. [Michael Houck]: and we match you with the creators based on our system and our network. And then we’re also working on something new for newsletter growth as well. [Taylor MD]: But right now on the newsletter side, we just do the content writing. OK. Yeah, I thought the engagement style, I appreciated it. I liked that there was some hooks throughout the thing. It wasn’t too gross. It wasn’t too long, but it was meaningful. I have a tendency to over publish, And I do think that when things sometimes are technical in nature, you can just get on the soapbox and it becomes a disgusting diatribe of all of your weird thoughts that you can get in your head through to, you know, sometimes your own ethos or your own bend on, you know, the reasons or… [Michael Houck]: You’re not speaking for the reader’s benefit then. Get everything in your head out. And that’s not what the reader wants. [Taylor MD]: And sometimes like, that’s the one thing about AI that I’ve appreciated because I’ll put it into AI and go, okay, now remove all of that. [Michael Houck]: Remove that. [Taylor MD]: Just tell the AI, just be concise, tune it up and we’re good to go. Yeah. So, well, that sounds interesting. And so, you know, ultimately I’m looking eventually to have somebody offload all of this stuff for me. We don’t post a lot on X, we have in the past. But, you know, it’s there. We do have some followers. We’re also on Facebook, we have seven followers. [Michael Houck]: Big, big audience, a big, big audience to start with there. [Taylor MD]: Yeah, yeah. Well, we are, you know, B2B for sure. Right. And But LinkedIn seems to be the place, and I do think developing a newsletter, I’ve done that. We’ve issued 15 newsletters. We have 800 followers or something like that, which is okay on LinkedIn. [Michael Houck]: It’s a good start. Yeah, it’s a good start. [Taylor MD]: What we have not done is push newsletters out by email. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, honestly, that’s where everything’s going, in my opinion. You still need social media to be the top of the funnel, the megaphone, if you will. But taking that audience from being rented on a social platform to really owning it, having the ability to contact who you want directly with email addresses, it’s a much better relationship for a company to have with their potential customers. Because if you post on social media, you’re at the whims of the newsfeed algorithm. If they don’t want to show your post, even if it’s really important to you in the business, you have no control over that. Whereas if you get through people’s emails, it’s much easier to sort of say, this matters, and we’re gonna write a compelling subject line and the hook at the beginning of the piece, and you’re gonna check this out. [Taylor MD]: So, great game. And do you have distribution? How does that work then? Do you sort of, when people, so I joined your newsletter and you sort of know who I am now. So then would you push out interesting pieces to me of some of your other partners or other customers? Like, how does that work? [Michael Houck]: So the way we do it is we write new newsletter issues every week, right? So the Saturday deep dives, the kind of Tuesday weekly summaries that we do, we’re writing those every week ourselves, that’s all our own content. And sometimes we’ll have partners who sponsor an issue. And so we’ll mention them and things like that. But it’s all it’s all our own writing. And we have our own products to push and services to push as well. Okay. With our clients, what they end up doing is similar playbook. Their main goal usually is to grow a really big list and to get those people to convert to be customers of the business. And so we’ll write content that that audience, that customer profile would want. It doesn’t necessarily need to be like a life cycle marketing comms where we’re just pushing out transactional emails. These are newsletters. This is current events or evergreen content that will interest this demographic. [Taylor MD]: How do you get those? I know the answer, but how do you get those lists? Yeah, so there’s a few ways to grow newsletters. [Michael Houck]: There’s really only a couple good ways to do it. The one that you start with is content marketing, because those people are like on social media, because those people are going to be the people who probably already know you to some degree, have highest level of trust, right? They’ll be good people to get that early feedback from about the content too. Then if you want to scale a newsletter, there’s really only three ways to do it. Way number one is paid ads on social. So you run Facebook ads, Instagram ads, Twitter ads, you know, whatever. And you acquire subscribers for roughly 150 to 250, depending on the niche per subscriber. That’s kind of the old way. Then more recently, there have been two new strategies that have emerged. One is called co-reg. And what that is, is basically you partner with other newsletters. And when people sign up for their newsletter, they get prompted to sign up for yours as well and vice versa. That tends to lead to not very engaged subscribers because they’re primarily signing up for somebody else’s newsletter. The third way is the way that I’m most bullish on right now, which is cold email. So you set up other domains unrelated to your newsletter. You send emails related to your niche to these people. And if they’re interested in those, they’ll probably be interested in the newsletter as well. So then you start dripping them into a couple of newsletter issues, seeing how they engage with those. And if they have high engagement, then you keep them on the list. And we’ve tested that out with some clients over the past couple months and have had really good success as well as with my own newsletter. [Taylor MD]: Okay. And so you’ve got all the tools then to sort of watch that and manage engagement and all that. Okay. Okay. Cool. Like I do have probably, oh, I don’t know if I send an email to everybody I have in my distribution, it would be tens of thousands. Of people, but whether or not they would want to opt in or not, that’s a whole different thing, right? Yeah, it is. [Michael Houck]: But there’s an easy way to test that, which is send it out in small batches to start. And when you send out a newsletter, there’s an unsubscribe link that you can put in there. You can put a button at the top if they want to unsubscribe too to make it easy for them. So I think a lot of people get this wrong and sort of get nervous about sending email to people. [Taylor MD]: But it’s true, you don’t want to be blackballed, right? Or whatever that’s called. Yeah, blacklisted. [Michael Houck]: But the thresholds to get there are higher than people think. And if you give people ways to unsubscribe, the vast majority will just do that rather than reporting you as spam or anything like that. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Yeah, yeah. [Taylor MD]: So you have a lot of followers on LinkedIn, too. So what do you see with LinkedIn as a platform and business? Because I use, like I’m pushing advertising out. Post an ad, I’ll make my own little ad, and I’m posting that out. And I’m kind of wondering, like, now I’m finding LinkedIn is actually pushing my algorithms down, even though I’m using the same hashtags, I’m finding like engagement is lower. Whereas I was getting 1000 views, I’m getting much less now. I don’t know why. So. [Michael Houck]: So I mean, it’s hard to say exactly without looking at the specific difference between the content could just be, you know, the algorithm, like some content doesn’t like others. But one thing I would say is that, you know, I think, basically, since I think Elon is great, personally, but ever since he bought Twitter, there has been a slight exodus of a certain type of people who go to [Taylor MD]: other platforms. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, that can be, you know, Instagram threads, or in a lot of cases, it can be LinkedIn. And so what you saw, maybe two years ago, or three years ago, where attention on LinkedIn and impressions on LinkedIn were like, incredibly underpriced, which that much good content, it’s still underpriced, but not by as much. And so what you see is that there’s more competition to show up in people’s news feeds in terms of content quality. [Taylor MD]: Yeah. And I think that with AI, too, people are more willing to write. Don’t you think so? [Michael Houck]: Maybe, although you can usually tell if content’s written by AI, at least in my experience. And that’s the kind of stuff that, you know, these platforms are also looking out for, right? Like, if you just have chat GPT, or Jasper, or one of these tools, like help you write your content, you have to imagine that a multi billion dollar, you know, business like LinkedIn, is going to or Twitter is going to be able to, you know, have their machine learning engineers build models that look for this stuff and not show it as often in other people’s feeds. [Taylor MD]: I see. I see. OK. So what would you suggest? I mean, we do have followers. What could we do, Michael, to build something between us that we can build up eventually and become a client? What could we do initially to engage or support each other and then actually look to build a really nice program? Because I’d really like that. I really, I like your style and I like a lot of stuff about what you’re, what you guys are engaged in. [Michael Houck]: Well, I appreciate that. Um, it, you know, that’s why we do it to, to deliver value to people. So that’s good to hear. Um, it’s tough. You know, our model is basically that we work with startups to help build their, you know, either founders or just people on the team’s personal brands or, um, or we build newsletters for them. Right. So there’s, there’s not really, like a step before that for us. But what I’m happy to do is if you have questions or you want to know like what you guys should be doing, feel free to shoot me a note and I’ll kind of help you guys make some decisions as [Taylor MD]: needed. [Michael Houck]: And when you guys are at the point where it makes sense, we can jump into something. [Taylor MD]: And then so what would the first thing be that we could do to engage if we were to hire you to do something and get a contract going? What would that package kind of look like, [Michael Houck]: I’ll send over a Notion doc via email later today that has everything laid out, but just the kind of lowest friction package to get started with would be a monthly newsletter. So not a weekly newsletter, but just a monthly one. That would be 1k a month. And basically what we do is we take either the whole email list or a portion of the email list, and we’d start writing content. For them and delivering it to them and talking about the company, but also talking about sort of the thought leadership topics that are of interest to them that month. So that’s the lowest friction way to get started. If we wanted to do social media, our lowest tier there is 2K, and that would involve weekly content batches. And depending on how much content we’re doing, it could also potentially involve some operational support of managing the account as well. And then there are other tiers that are more expensive that I will include in the Notion doc that I send over. [Taylor MD]: OK. OK. That’s super. I appreciate it. So nice to meet you. You’re famous. I saw you have so many followers. No, it’s great to meet. [Michael Houck]: I am happy to help out, and I hope that we get to a point where we can formalize something down the road. [Taylor MD]: Me too. I’m excited. And keep the good content rolling, because I’m looking out for it now, and I’m sharing it with others. So all right. I’m on it. Appreciate it. Take care. You too. Bye. Bye. Yeah.