- Duration: 36 min
- Platform: zoom
- Source: Read.ai 01JKGKK7MP5Y8J36P0AYPB17E2 (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JKGKK7MP5Y8J36P0AYPB17E2)
Transcript
[Michael Houck]: Yo, mind if we go camera off? My Wi-Fi here is spotty at best for Zoom, so. Yeah, no problem. As much as possible. [Ben Ornstein]: How you doing? Pretty good, pretty good. Cranking out a lot of stuff this morning. There’s been emailing and mantle imports and setup and agency risk, you know, social risk, a lot of crap has gone on, not crap, good stuff, but a lot. [Michael Houck]: So yeah, well, hopefully we’ll be able to get some of that off your plate as soon as next week. So Blake is based in LA. So I think he’s like probably just waking up right now. So hasn’t seen my email from late last night, but expecting him to follow up today, close the deal, and then we’ll get him situated for Monday. So, sorry, a truck decided to drive by right now, or a caravan of trucks. Oh, man. Anyway, yeah, so hopefully we’ll be able to get that off your plate. And then we have the handoff meeting for the stuff with Matt. Just knowing Matt, my guess is that he’s not going to retain all the information when we first chat. So we’ll probably need to work in tandem with them next week. And then by the following week. Hopefully they’ll be able to take it all on. [Ben Ornstein]: Yeah, no worries I. I have this really nicely organized notion page that. I’ll be able to share during the call, so I worked I. I wanted to make it as smooth a handoff as possible. I only recorded one loon just because I did so much other stuff to do this morning, but the other stuff is. I like I feel like there’s going to be like questions from him and and maybe there will be more just next week, which I I kind of expected that, but Yeah, I think this this notion doc will kind of help for sure. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, thanks for doing that. On top of everything else. I think this is a really good deal for us. The more I think about it, because you know who knows what? Who knows what the future here is? Is, but I think this sets us up in a kind of a hedged way where we’re sort of helping the other parts of the business as well. And obviously growing ghost trading clients is number one thing right now. But if he’s going to add, you know, somewhere between two more like six or seven to twelve to fourteen K new subs per month for founding journey, that’s going to put us in a real good spot to assuming we’re able to do it in a way that doesn’t get us in trouble. [Ben Ornstein]: Yeah. It seems to be getting a ton of heat right now. This tweet is very viral. [Michael Houck]: No, it’s not that bad. It’s fine. You have to remember at my last company, people were claiming they were sexually assaulted when they weren’t. So this is nothing. [Ben Ornstein]: I guess for you, you’re like nothing. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, it’s fine. So the way this stuff works is that it has a news cycle. And then people get tired of it and then it moves on. So you know it’s fine. [Ben Ornstein]: Not a big deal. And we’ve minimized downside here so I mean. You know we can only do what we can and again you have checked this out. You’ve said it’s not illegal. It’s not against any rules, maybe by certain people who have vested interest in certain things. [Michael Houck]: It’s it may be frowned upon and they don’t like it, That’s yeah, that’s if you built a $1,000,000 business on top of charging people a price and then someone came through and they were like, hey, actually we can charge them like half of that. [Ben Ornstein]: Obviously people would be those people would be your enemies. But What was I going to say? So how did the the Tyler partnership happen? Oh, yeah, I just emailed him. [Michael Houck]: I was like, Hey, man, how you doing? Because he sent out his investor update yesterday. So I got that all the business is doing well. And I just I emailed him and I was like, Yo, how's it going? And we should do this. We're growing really fast. And we have a really good team. And we're trying to niche down on newsletters as much as possible. And he was like, Oh, dope. Yeah, let's happy to help it out. And so he said he's gonna start by sending us a few folks, I don't know in what context, like who those folks will be, but regardless, it's very exciting because assuming we service those clients well, then, you know, who knows, as the agency grows and we become a bigger player, this could become more formalized. So it's pretty cool. Yeah, that'd be awesome. [Ben Ornstein]: And this is for ghostwriting, newsletter ghostwriting Yeah, yeah, specifically newsletter ghostwriting clients. [Michael Houck]: You know, if people want to do social on top of it too, that's fine. Like for example, Preston from Crowdsurf and Brindis from WeWorkRemotely are both DMing me right now, you know, saying, oh, we should consolidate with you guys. Let's bring our social over here. Let's bring our newsletter to you. So this type of stuff is very natural for them to do both if they're well-funded companies. So I imagine we'll get some of both from Tyler too. But obviously the majority will be newsletters. [Ben Ornstein]: Yeah, for sure. On the ad side of things, I was thinking, why don't we reach out to people like Pujun and offer them a really nice discount on a package for being a part of the podcast? Would that be something interesting for a newsletter sponsorship? He just got a ton of funding. He definitely is the funding Did they get funded again? Well, you know, their most recent funding. Oh, okay. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I mean, we can do that. What I don't, you know, I don't like to, yeah, I guess we can do that. He's a friend, so he wouldn't be offended by it or anything. I don't like to sort of like try to extract as much money as I can from the people I know, you know? [Ben Ornstein]: Yeah, yeah. Trying to find the right balance of how you phrase it. I get it. I was just trying to think of like alternate. Alternate ideas for that. Yeah, I don't know. [Michael Houck]: I mean, I'm not opposed to you checking in. But I also have like a convo with him in progress about ghostwriting from like a month ago that we sort of put on hold till later this quarter. So I'd rather get him in for ghostwriting than for one or two newsletter sponsorships. So. It's good thinking, but I think with him. Maybe not, maybe not until we know for sure if he's going to do the ghost writing or not. [Ben Ornstein]: For sure, for sure. And yeah, definitely will make these more structured going forward. That's a good idea. So we're not just talking. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, because before before we were just doing sort of like you know more informal catch ups. Now it's like especially with Max gone now like you know when I have an idea or when you have a problem, we only have each other basically. So we, um, so yeah, I think making it more structured just with an agenda will let us use the time as well as possible. Cause there's so much for us to talk about every week, you know? Yeah. [Ben Ornstein]: There's, it's going to be, it's good that we have these weekly. I definitely agree with that. [Michael Houck]: Um, let me actually make sure the calendar invite got updated to weekly. Um, cause sometimes it, it Google calendar, like sketches out a little bit. But let me make that change now if it's not already made. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Gotcha. [Michael Houck]: Oh yes, it didn't save it. Okay. Yeah. Okay. So now it'll be, it'll be weekly going forward. Awesome. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Ben Ornstein]: I really want to close that, that client from timescale. The one that's the similar size deal is Bamboo. That would be huge. She, when I sent her the first email, she opened it twice. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, it's fine. You don't need to. You don't need to loop me into the sort of details. They're not going to close probably for a few weeks to a month or two, so I'm not expecting any big big updates there. Obviously you keep on it, but But I'm yeah, they're probably not a February close. [Ben Ornstein]: Yeah, probably not. I just wanted to give you the yeah, there's the rundown. I may have missed one or two, but that was those are definitely like the the bigger ones. But yeah, I've been I've been cranking out responses every day. New emails so. [Michael Houck]: We're getting we're getting more leads in like we're from from the air table like dreams is adding them and you're able to take those and put them into the sequence and everything. [Ben Ornstein]: I haven't used that air table actually. [Michael Houck]: OK, let me get a group chat started with dreams to make sure that. Those in Salesforce, we already have the automated kind of drip campaign set up there. Any dreams? Are we still adding sponsors to the air table? Yeah, so when she adds them in there, you should be, she'll add like the contact info for LinkedIn people who work there. And then you should be adding those people's emails to the Salesforce campaign so that they get our welcome They get our outreach campaign for newsletter sponsorships and you should make sure those are sending from your domains, like the ones that are Ben at, instead of the ones that are Max at. [Ben Ornstein]: Got it. Okay. [Michael Houck]: I'm trying to think of the... [Ben Ornstein]: I don't remember Max showing me that part of this whole thing. He showed me like a and Airtable, and I guess I didn't know how that all connected. But what, yeah, what I've been doing is I've just been, if I've been using the Sponsor Ops channel a ton, that one is where I've found new opportunities, and then all the newsletters, but okay. [Michael Houck]: Those are good, but the difference is that we just get a feed of basically anyone who books up sponsorship on paved and so a lot of them won't even be relevant to like, won't even care about getting in front of founders necessarily. The ones that Dreams is adding to Airtable are folks who sponsor newsletters that are on a target list that Max and I came up with a while ago. So we have some evidence that those sponsors would be interested in sponsoring us as well. So it's higher signal by a lot. Not to say we can't get deals from the paved channel, but the majority of the deals that we've historically gotten have come from what Dreams and Mac set up there. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Got it. Okay. [Ben Ornstein]: I'll check that out again. I guess that's one part of this that I just overlooked. Yeah. The flow is pretty simple. [Michael Houck]: Basically, Dreams will add the companies when they sponsor other newsletters on our target list to Airtable, and then she'll go in and find contact info of partnerships managers growth manager, growth marketing person, and put them in there. And then you go in and you take those emails and you import them into the Salesforce sequence, which is called newsletter ad sales, and make sure that it's coming from your email addresses, like the aliases that are like Ben at joinfoundingjourney.com or whatever. And then they just get the drip campaign and If it resonates, they'll reply and those replies will get routed to your main inbox. And then you just have a conversation with them. [Ben Ornstein]: Got it. Okay. Yeah. I'll check that part out of the, the handoff doc again. And by the way, for paved, I haven't just been reaching out to every single person on that, you know, every new deal that comes in. I, I definitely look to see like who their clients are and if they're what their product is and if it's relevant for founders. So I've been and curating that within the channel. Cool. Sounds good. [Michael Houck]: So that's that. Let me know if you have any issues with the Salesforce stuff. We'll see what Dream says. She had some computer issues for a while or something, but either way, there's probably more people in there, even if she's not adding them, that we can use. So yeah, let's try to get that set up today for Monday, if you can. Yeah, I'll look and I'm going to add that to my to do here. What else? What else is going on? [Ben Ornstein]: OK, long form research, so I haven't made any progress on that since last night, but Yeah, there's. There's so many ways we could take it and I I think to create something truly unique and different, I think it's gonna be really interesting to obviously look at all the different frameworks and step function processes that some of these startup experts have come up with. But oh my God, how bad was that one video, that one outlier? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: sometimes things just get some traction because people like the content and like that, like what they're saying and it kind of overcomes its, its faults. Um, but I mean, it's encouraging if something like that does well, obviously we can package up similar content in a much more engaging way. So my guess is that when something like that happens, the video just got shared somewhere that got a lot of attention, like a viral social media post or, a webpage that they drove a lot of traffic to somehow or whatever, or in a newsletter. So yeah, I don't know, but we can definitely do 10x better. So that's encouraging. Definitely. [Ben Ornstein]: Let's see, what else? What else? Well, sorry, I don't want to skip over that because I think if I'm going to be, we're going to be doing that. [Michael Houck]: I just want to I want to make sure we're on the same page, so. Yeah, I mean, how do you feel format wise like you? You shared that post earlier that that message earlier and I thought that was pretty insightful. But like, yeah, the three paths like we aggregate frameworks, we create a framework or we ignore frameworks. Those are really the three. The three options I think they all kind of have pros and cons. Like the latter two position me as the expert more versus just a curator. The but the first one would be easier to write like a hook for like, oh, you're going to see frameworks from, you know, Elon Musk and Steve Jobs and blah, blah, blah. And people be like, oh, I should check those out. So. I think there's pros and cons to each one, so I guess like when you look at the videos that have done well, aside from just that one that was sort of an accident outlier. Um, which, which format makes the most sense to you? Cause you've done more research on this than I have. [Ben Ornstein]: The, the one that was most compelling was, and YC did like a few videos that were, that were close to, to this, uh, and including of course the two inspo videos. The one that caught the most attention from me was when they talked about framework for coming up with startup ideas, but then they actually Michael Houck and and Caldwell, they applied actual, you know, very successful companies. And I have one of those that did Airbnb, Coinbase and one other one. And so they applied not only the frameworks that that they came up with and had talked about, but they applied the actual company examples with their stories, too. So like, It was a it was such a combination. It was such a great combination of storytelling, but also actionable framework. And I think that's the angle that we should take. So because if we can tell a story while making it actionable, that's going to be the most successful outcome, because I think that that gets the people who are going to be like, shit, I'm going to take the exactly what how just said and apply this to do startup idea that I wanted to do, but I had no clue where to start, but also the people who are just want that entertainment of, well, I want to hear cool stories about startups. I think that is the angle. Did they come up with those frameworks? [Michael Houck]: Like were those like Michael Houck and Dalton Caldwell frameworks? Or was it like, hey, these are just frameworks that exist or or whatever. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Um. [Ben Ornstein]: They didn't credit anyone else at the beginning of the video, and I'm going to double check that, but I'm pretty sure. I'm pretty sure it was just like YCs. I'm not positive. I don't want to say something before. [Michael Houck]: I mean, that would make sense if it was just like, They weren't saying. These are my frameworks or whatever, but they also weren't or anyone else, basically just positioning themselves as people who know the frameworks of Silicon Valley and how startups work and stuff like that, like more generally, you know, like this [Ben Ornstein]: is the framework. I'm pretty sure that's how it was. They didn't say this is so-and-so's framework, this is YC's. I think they were kind of more spitballing, honestly. And I think obviously positioning you the authority and making sure the screen is on you with relevant B-roll when possible, engaging B-roll. There could be something really, really cool created from all that. I think that is the one we should model off. [Michael Houck]: Well, it's tough to model off that one because that was a conversation between two people, right? [Ben Ornstein]: I think in terms of like... Yeah, in terms of the content. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. You know, obviously for the history of Silicon Valley, we're doing a ton of B roll for this one. It seems like you're saying we should do less B roll and make it more like me talking to the camera with like opportunistic B roll. [Ben Ornstein]: Is that is that accurate? [Michael Houck]: That's correct. [Ben Ornstein]: It's definitely less B roll than the other one for sure. OK. Cool. You're good, you're good. Yeah, no, positioning you as the authority, applying real examples, and it could be even like where possible, applying like your unique examples with Launch House, potentially. Yeah. I mean, we want to use the big names. [Michael Houck]: Like, I don't just want to talk about Launch House, but I do think weaving in some of my own experiences, and even if it's companies that I've worked with in other capacities or Launch House itself, or what we're doing right now in any way, that takes it to another level, right? Cause that's something that the YC guys, obviously they've been successful founders before, but they're not talking about that experience that much. They're more like startup world, public assets at this point, public utilities. So they just use more broad examples. And I think we should too, but I think we want this channel to be positioned around me rather than positioned around Y Combinator, for example. So it makes sense to make it more personal. [Ben Ornstein]: Absolutely. And then weaving in both Launch House's experience, your own experience, but also, of course, the big names, as you said, that there will be a nice mix of, we'll know when to apply both kind of is what I think. [Michael Houck]: Cool. Okay. Notes about what we just talked about into the linear thing. So I have it for when I'm writing a script in a couple of weeks. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. Sweet. Okay. [Michael Houck]: So for this handoff that we're about to do with Matt, I guess I'll let you kind of take the meeting and Matt will probably ask a lot of questions and then I'll jump in as needed. Now we only have a half hour, So we got to keep it concise. But yeah, I would imagine that he'll just be asking you questions for the most part, and I'll be jumping in kind of on an as-needed basis. [Ben Ornstein]: Yeah, that makes sense. I figured I'd run through the Notion doc first, high level, and then just let him run with questions. And I'll note follow-ups that are needed, because I'm sure I didn't cover everything. Yeah, I figured that's how that would go. Cool. [Michael Houck]: Sounds good. [Ben Ornstein]: The last question I was thinking about was stuff on, you talked about the paid ads. I think that's really interesting. The newsletter ads. When do you want to, when do you think we're going to start that? [Michael Houck]: I mean, I'd like to start that sort of in tandem with when you're handing off this mantle stuff and the partnership stuff to Blake, assuming Blake says yes. So, Um, yeah, I mean, realistically, we'll probably start talking about a little bit next week. I'll probably implement it the following week. So, uh, yeah, I think the key is getting it set up where it's positive ROI, because, you know, looking back before you joined the team, the way that we grew the newsletter list to basically the sizes that now even a little larger was by just basically burning a ton of money on the hope and prayer that it would lead to us making more money on sponsorships. And at this point, we've made back that money and considerably more and be able to fund other parts of the business and things like that with it. But it's not sustainable, right? We can't, like, you can play that game to a certain point, but now if we wanted to add, if we wanted to double, if we wanted to add another 60, 70,000 subscribers, we would not be able to double our sponsorship prices. And also we have other parts of the business that have expenses where we can't just say, hey, founding journey, you know, go from being a net positive asset to being a loss leading asset for the next six months. Like we just can't do that. So the only way that we can make this work is if we are able to make enough back per subscriber within a short period of time where it's actually revenue generating. So we have like those two ways to sort of get probably about 50 cents per subscriber each. So like consider like somewhere between a dollar and a dollar 50 we're getting back. So if we're paying two bucks, we're getting a dollar, dollar 50 back. We need to make that other money back somehow. And you know, the best ways to do that, really the only way to do that well are to sell products. Right now our membership offer does not convert well enough to make that happen, which is why we've held off on paid ad growth. The ghostwriting offer plus Megaphone being in viral examples probably does. So that's why I think that's the one that makes sense to start with while we sort of work to reposition the founding journey offer probably over the next like month or two, and then loop that in as well. [Ben Ornstein]: Makes sense. Yeah. If we could turn it into a revenue generating thing, obviously then that would be. [Michael Houck]: It just has to be like, it doesn't work. Right. There's no option. Yeah. Like, you know, if we wanted to try to grow a hundred thousand subscribers with paid ads, you know, that's like consider it $200,000 to do that. And so we need to make back those $200,000 at least ideally we making you know, more money off of it aside from just like being able to increase sponsorship prices eventually. But we at least need to make back the 200k in like within a short period of time after adding the subscribers. So it’s it has to be through products because the referral networks and things like that don’t pay enough to cover it on their own. [Ben Ornstein]: Got it. OK, cool. Well, we’ll chat more about that next I’m excited to learn more there and implement that. And then last couple of things before we hop off, command bar followed up asking them if we could get two more. They said they would chat with the team. Still haven’t heard back. That would be awesome to get those last two nudges. And… Yeah, check in with them on Monday. [Michael Houck]: And if they say no, then like, that’s fine. You know, we’ll adapt. Not a big deal. Yeah. Okay. Made a note on that as well. [Ben Ornstein]: Yeah, I think that’s all for now. I’ll make these more structured so we are not just spitballing next week. Yeah, all good. [Michael Houck]: It’s when we, it’s always going to be tough for us sort of going forward with these to hit everything. So we got to be like, I don’t know, I’ll see you on the