- Duration: 23 min
- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01JKE6G74TB3J84RESG6B27AQV (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JKE6G74TB3J84RESG6B27AQV)
Transcript
[Michael Houck]: I mean, oh, I think you’re muted or maybe something’s wrong with my settings. Oh, okay. [Jamie Wilde]: It doesn’t say I’m muted, can you hear me? No, I can hear you, yep. [Michael Houck]: Okay, cool. [Jamie Wilde]: I mean, I’m figuring out, you know, my own personal equipment after using work equipment for a while, so it could have been me. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I totally feel you. When I got laid off from Airbnb, I was like, do I do now? I don’t even know. I was all over the place. [Jamie Wilde]: Yeah, there’s a lot of little things. I’m like, wait, I don’t think my camera hooks up to this one. [Michael Houck]: Oh, I’ll figure it out. Yeah. But I looked at LinkedIn. You you know, you know, Toby from Morning Brew when you guys when you work. [Jamie Wilde]: Yeah, yeah, we work together. [Michael Houck]: You know, I had, I hired him at my last company, actually. [Jamie Wilde]: Oh, how cool. Yeah, he’s great. [Michael Houck]: All of our content. He was He was really, really good. [Jamie Wilde]: Yeah, and he killed it when he got to Morning Brew. He took over social for me, which was nice. I was wearing all the hats, so it was nice to have something taken off. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, the hand-to-hand combat of social is kind of the easy first thing to just be like, you know what? [Jamie Wilde]: It’s kind of OK if someone else does that. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, definitely. Well, yeah, I know you probably have no context, but my team, multiple people on my team flagged your tweet to me. And said we should chat. So happy to sort of share my background, share what we do. And then very curious to kind of learn more about what you’re looking to do next and kind of hear more about you and what you’ve worked on so far too. [Jamie Wilde]: Yeah, that sounds awesome. Also, where are you talking to me from [Michael Houck]: I’m always curious when I’m on a call. [Jamie Wilde]: I’m in Patagonia in Argentina right now. [Michael Houck]: Oh my God, how cool. Yeah, I’m traveling through, I hate the cold. In New York most of the time, but [Jamie Wilde]: Yeah, just avoid it, just leave. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, just leave, you know. [Jamie Wilde]: So I wanted to go a little further south. [Michael Houck]: How about you? [Jamie Wilde]: I’m in LA. Oh yeah. [Michael Houck]: I didn’t realize there was a fake background at first. Oh yeah, that’s not, that’s not real. [Jamie Wilde]: I mean, it’s a good fake background, but there’s no snow here. No, I thought you were in like Wisconsin or something. [Michael Houck]: I don’t know. It’s drizzling here. I mean, that would be a sick living room, I was in Santa Monica for like two years back when we were starting Uber Eats, just like going to restaurants and grabbing burritos and putting it in people’s cars. [Jamie Wilde]: But yeah, so I’m Michael Houck. [Michael Houck]: I was in big tech at Uber and Airbnb for a few years and started a company called Launch House. We raised 23 million bucks across a few rounds from investors like Andreessen raised a venture fund and started investing in the founders who joined our community. Basically, we threw these co-living experiences and global membership programs for founders who wanted to get connected in the Silicon Valley world. And that’s where Toby was with you, right? [Jamie Wilde]: Yeah, I remember that. So it was great. [Michael Houck]: We sort of folded the company into the venture fund about two years ago. So we still have that, make investments out of it. And since then, I’ve built up a personal brand. I’ve built up a holding company. So I’ve grown to like 100K across LinkedIn and Twitter. My Twitter’s currently suspended for sending too many DMs, unfortunately. Oh, I was trying to look up your Twitter. That makes sense. Yeah. And my newsletter goes out to 70,000 founders every week. But we have this holding company. We have a ghostwriting agency that’s growing crazy fast. We doubled in the last month. And a SaaS product, and a media arm, and a couple other things. So it’s a fun business. But the ghostwriting agency is sort of the thing that’s growing fastest right now. So we’re looking to grow the team for newsletter writing, and also writing for social, kind of without the hand-to-hand combat community and accountability. Inside of things, just the co-founders. [Jamie Wilde]: That’s all very cool, very exciting. Yeah, 70,000 founders is also huge. It’s a great smaller newsletter. Yeah, it’s fun. [Michael Houck]: It’s a good mix of folks. We have a lot of venture-backed folks just from my network. Then we have bootstrap folks, and then also the aspirational founder cohort, like future founders, people in tracking. So it’s, it’s good. Yeah. [Jamie Wilde]: Um, so I, I mean, do you want me to talk to my, about my background a little bit or yeah, I have a, I’ve nichified into having a lot of business newsletter experience at this point in my career. I did start in marketing with paid search and social, um, honestly, just because out of college that paid better than journalism. I’ve been doing journalism in college. Uh, I was freelancing. At a lot of places that paid me, you know, 50 bucks an article or whatever and interning. [Michael Houck]: It was hilarious. [Jamie Wilde]: And then, yeah, I did a stint in social media that ended up being a good way to learn, honestly, how to do analytics and also ended up coming in handy for reading earnings reports. Anything really numbers focused that I did not do in my creative writing major. But I went from that to this market research firm called Y-Pulse. It is still pretty small, very and I wrote their newsletter. That’s when I started doing, yeah, newsletters. I did a daily, a weekly newsletter, and I contributed articles to them. And that was kind of like mostly just me. Like I had my one boss and I just, you know, did the editorial team and all their social media, of course, because that’s how startups are. And then, and then I found out about Morning Brew a bit. Luckily, my friend was friends with Alex in college. So, that helped me get into Morning Brew when it was pretty small, which is exciting. And we grew a lot, obviously, got acquired. And then Robin Hood found me to write Snacks, if you read it, which is a very, like, Morning Brew had gotten more general over the years. And so I liked that Snacks was still, like, very business focused, and honestly, like, more nitty gritty than I was used to writing. So I did have to learn some stuff, like, they’re very in the when they do like an earnings report roundup or anything. Yeah. And I learned a lot. I was mostly writing snacks until they launched this new site. If you’ve seen Sherwood news, I do, I did contribute to that, but snacks was definitely my main focus, the newsletter, just because that’s a lot of work putting out that it was like a very detailed newsletter, you know, it [Michael Houck]: took a lot of work. I loved snacks. I yeah, it was one of the few, like I saw thing happened with Morning Brew that you were talking about where it sort of became part of the culture and therefore had to take a wider lens and at that point I lost interest. [Jamie Wilde]: I think we saw that where a lot of people who were much more business and finance motivated lost interest but we had found that so many people that was their only source of news every day that they made that generalist decision. I think it’s smart now they have that markets newsletter. I don’t know if they still have that. [Michael Houck]: They should have something more business focused. At this point, they’ve expanded into a bunch of sub-brands. It’s the right strategy for them. That was my trajectory with it. Totally. A lot of people had that trajectory. [Jamie Wilde]: I kind of want to write that stuff. That was interesting. And then you’re like, I’m out. [Michael Houck]: Robin Hood, here I come. [Jamie Wilde]: Mostly just because I kind of want to get nitty gritty on any topic as opposed to being really broad. I like to dive in a little more. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, same here. If you’re not getting the sort of information under the surface, then it’s probably so much time in the day as a reader. Totally. But cool. OK, so give me some context on what you’re looking to do next. I’m sure you got hit up by a ton of people after you put up that tweet. So first of all, thanks for grabbing some time with me. But second I just want to like what’s exciting to you right now? [Jamie Wilde]: Yeah it’s been a pleasant surprise honestly how many people really want like a business newsletter writer. I thought that was pretty niche but I actually think there’s a lot of interest. So I was just laid off last Thursday. I am debating if I kind of focus on contract freelance work for a while just because I’ve worked non-stop since college. Obviously I have just a lot of writing business finance stuff, so that would be fun, but I could kind of expand beyond that, honestly. I like the craft of writing more than the content at the end of the day, which a lot of journalists like the content. I was a creative writer. I specialized in poetry. I mostly enjoy actually stringing together the words. [Michael Houck]: That’s the fun part for me. [Jamie Wilde]: That’s fun. [Michael Houck]: This is probably somewhat embarrassing. I wrote very terrible poetry for a bit in late high school, early college. [Jamie Wilde]: I bet those are great to look back on though. [Michael Houck]: I know they’re great to look back on, but they’re nostalgic to look back on. [Jamie Wilde]: Also, who knows if they’re terrible, because I think everybody hates their own poetry. I got good marks on my poetry and I look back and I’m like, ooh, really cringe, really cringe. That’s the vibe. That is definitely the vibe. Everyone thinks it’s cringe. So yeah, I’m probably mostly interested in compact land stuff. Although if like the perfect full time role comes along, which I think would include me having a lot more ownership, for instance, and something rather than just being like a contributing writer, then I would consider that. But yeah, it has to be something I’m really passionate about, I think, to go back to. I’m kind of enjoying this not Monday through Friday, nine to five life for a minute, just after 10 years of doing it, you know? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I feel you. It’s the ironic thing is that, you know, when you If you’re doing the freelance contractor stuff, you’re like, I have total flexibility, total control of my time. And then I took that one step further and I was like, well, I’m just going to build a business and I’m like, that’ll be good. [Jamie Wilde]: But now instead of working nine to five, I work five to nine, you know? And generally you end up working a lot. Most of my founder friends work an insane amount. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, but it’s worth it. It’s fun. Um, so, okay. I mean, that’s good. Um, Right now, we’d be looking to do contract stuff based on the client. I could send you clients and you let me know if they seem interesting, worth your time. Okay, cool. We went from about somewhere 20-25K at the beginning of the year to now we’re doing 56K a month and continuing to grow. We just unlocked a very exciting growth channel has no real signs of slowing down and is sort of unique to us. So we’re very excited about that. Um, we’ve never had a newsletter client churn in the history of the agency, uh, social where, you know, tend to be sort of more, uh, finicky about their voice, your industry in general. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: So we’re, we’ve niched down on newsletters. Uh, we still do so for people, but newsletters are our focus. And, um, we also have like good ways to grow newsletters and partnerships with some of the growth agencies for newsletters out there too. So they refer people to us, we refer people to them and it’s been working out really well. So yeah, I could just send you some clients as they come in. Obviously it seems like you’re mostly interested in the kind of business finance niche, but are there others that I should keep an eye out for for you? [Jamie Wilde]: I mean, business finance ends up covering so much that there are definitely some other topics that I drilled down into. You know what I mean? Like it’s literally writing about everything and that’s why Morning Brew ended up appealing to me. I was like, oh, so I can write about, I love writing about gaming and gaming companies. Tech in general is definitely a specialty of mine within it. Like I could pretty confidently write for tech or entertainment. Yeah, I think those are the top ones. Anything culture or like I can talk about social media really well. I’m like too, you know, there’s a Wikipedia page for extremely online. I feel like I always know the like Gen Z memes and stuff and I’m too old too. And it’s like, I don’t know. I’m just really, really on there. Okay. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: I’m starting to feel like that old guy who’s like sitting on the side of the [Jamie Wilde]: Oh yeah. I totally am. I should not like some of the slang I use. I’m like, I’m too old for that. I shouldn’t be using that like, but whatever. It works. My little cousin seems to think I’m cool. So it works. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. That’s, that’s really the barometer, isn’t it? [Jamie Wilde]: Yeah. Your little cousin in college and she thinks you’re cool, you’re doing pretty good. [Michael Houck]: Sweet. Okay. Sounds good. And then for reference for me, what makes it worth it for you from a comp perspective, if you’re going to do like a weekly newsletter with somebody? A weekly newsletter? [Jamie Wilde]: I honestly, it depends a bit on the complexity of what they want covered, like how much fluff they want versus how like super dense they want, you know, like snacks, for instance, was so dense, like every there was like a stack and a source in every single sentence. So that does affect maybe how much I would charge. Maybe we can figure out together. In the past, I’ve been paid a dollar a word, but I think that just really depends on the piece I’m writing. So it’s flexible, if that works for you. I’ve been debating how to get people an exact parameter, I tell them, but I’m like, I don’t know. Some things I can write in 20 minutes and other things will take me three hours, you know, or longer. [Michael Houck]: Makes sense. The sort of two ways that we position newsletters, because we work with startups for the most part. So we’re either going to help with a sort of an editorial thought leadership thing, maybe from your founder, or we’re going to help you out with like a kind of current events, news, what’s going on, roundup, like that. So I feel like what you’re describing is probably more in the latter category, the editorial stuff into be less cited and sourced and just more like, you know, we get a content interview or some voice notes from the founder and turn that into something compelling. [Jamie Wilde]: So, yeah, maybe what we do is we have- That sounds like something I could whip up, you know, not with too much difficulty, that kind of thing. So, yeah. I don’t know if you have parameters you’ve been paying people, I can definitely consider those. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I mean, it varies a little bit based on people’s experience. You obviously have a lot of experience with this, so we’d probably be able to be on the high end of what we would do. But it does also, to your point, depend on the client too. So I’m sort of in that same boat on the other side. Maybe the best strategy here is that when we have one or two of our next new clients come in and they seem like they could be a fit, I’ll just send them to you and I’ll be like, hey, here’s what I think we could offer for this based on what they’re paying and we’ll see if it makes Totally, yeah. [Jamie Wilde]: I like it being a conversation. Yeah, I guess, I mean, another thing I think I’m talented at, if you ever need this, is I can just whip things up very quickly. Because in the newsletter business, you do it immediately. So if you ever needed something quickly, I can probably help with that also. [Michael Houck]: OK, cool. That’s great to know. And then are you interested at all in the social side of things, too? Or do you just want to do newsletters at this point? [Jamie Wilde]: It depends on the social. I mean, I’ve noticed a lot of people want like LinkedIn writing and that to me is very different than writing like an ex post, you know, it’s long. Yeah, that’s true. [Michael Houck]: That’s like writing an article basically. Yeah, we have some people who are more like quick kitty, like highly formatted, highly templatized LinkedIn stuff. But then there are the other people who want like the sort of mini essays on LinkedIn. So it varies. But okay, I’ll keep that in mind. Invite to our Slack. You can hop in there and then as people come in, I’ll just flag them to you. [Jamie Wilde]: You have to download that. All the things you need to get. You got to get Slack. [Michael Houck]: You got to get Notion. [Jamie Wilde]: I love Notion. I’ve always used Notion for my personal life. So now I’m like, I’ll make a person like a work side of it, I guess. Yeah, yeah. I do the same thing. [Michael Houck]: I wait too much. I spent way too much of my time in Notion. [Jamie Wilde]: I really should be less less structured it’s just so it’s so pretty I don’t know i’ve set mine up so like beautifully it’s a nice little it’s like hanging on a little tea house or something yours yours sounds better than mine mine is just like link here page here mine’s nice yeah I found like the perfect template and like personalized it exactly it’s really nice I can track how many iced coffees I drink in a day on mine [Michael Houck]: oh my god okay you definitely got me beat You can see like trends. Like when I have three iced coffees, I get more done. When I have one, I sleep in the afternoon. [Jamie Wilde]: I think, I think you need to scale back your caffeine maybe. Cause for me, one is like good. And if I go over, I start to get like anxious and I get less done. [Michael Houck]: I need to like wait a while. Yeah, yeah, yeah. [Jamie Wilde]: That’s fair. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: That’s fair. [Michael Houck]: Cool. Okay. Well I will, I’ll follow up. I’ll shoot you an invite to Slack. Is this email on the calendar invite the best one? [Jamie Wilde]: Yes, it is. Need anything from me. I do have, you know, I have a resume and samples if you want to take a gander. [Michael Houck]: Cool. Yeah, samples would be great. Cool. Anything that you’re curious about that we didn’t talk about that I could answer? [Jamie Wilde]: No, not that I can think of It sounds all pretty in my wheelhouse and I’d love to just, yeah, chip in and we can see where I can chip in. That sounds great. [Michael Houck]: Cool. I’m pumped. We got a big growth plan for the next six months or so. So I’m sure I’ll have more than a few to send your way. [Jamie Wilde]: Exciting. Well, I hope you enjoy Patagonia. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: It’s got to get out for a hike. It’s 75 and sunny out here right now, which as a New Yorker, I’m a fan. [Jamie Wilde]: That’s normally how it is in LA, but it’s been raining. [Michael Houck]: We need it, but Yeah. You guys do need it after the fires. But yeah. OK. Well, we’ll talk more soon. OK. [Jamie Wilde]: Sounds good. It’s really great to meet you. [Michael Houck]: You too, Jamie. See you. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: you.