- Duration: 33 min
- Platform: zoom
- Source: Read.ai 01JKRCK7Z4XDTQ1D7W1DFAKXMD (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JKRCK7Z4XDTQ1D7W1DFAKXMD)
Transcript
[tanmaysinghchauhan]: Hey, hi, Michael. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Hey, Demi, how you doing, man? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, just doing good. I prepared, yeah, so I wrote down some notes on this for him. Oh, sweet. It feels nice. I love it. [tanmaysinghchauhan]: Yeah, it’s all also called field notes. [Michael Houck]: No, no Max yet, but we’ll give him a couple of minutes here. Let me pop into the Notion 2. And let me enable screen sharing in case you do need to share your screen. You can keep this more organic if you want. That’s fine. But let me open this up. OK. And we’re redoing this doc right now, by the way. So future clients will be a little different. I’m gonna roll that out probably later this week. Okay, cool. [Michael Houck]: How was your weekend? [tanmaysinghchauhan]: Yeah, it was great. Bought this new Mac. So I am excited. Yeah, it’s really fast. Yeah, this M4 is really fast. That’s dope, dude. [Michael Houck]: I’m pumped for you. That’s great. It looks like we’re both at desk. I’m almost never at a desk. But today I’m at a desk. Oh, man. [tanmaysinghchauhan]: Oh, is the meeting in progress? Like, is it according to it. [Max Marchione]: and we’ll pop into it. Hauk, Tanmay. Max. Hey. What’s up, man? Hey, guys. How are you? Good. Finally over this head cold. So feeling good at last. How are you? How are you guys? [Michael Houck]: How was the weekend? Dude, the Eagles won the Superbowl. [Max Marchione]: How could it be a bad weekend? I didn’t even realize the Superbowl was NFL rather than baseball until… [Michael Houck]: No rugby here, man. It’s all football here. [Max Marchione]: But I feel like everyone’s talking about it, so pick up on it pretty quickly. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I grew up in Philly, so it’s a point to beat the Chiefs. [Max Marchione]: Feels good. Yeah, nice. Man, what a crazy series of events in terms of, like, the reflexivity of social media advertising, how it all links, the Kendrick thing, the Drake thing. Like, what a crazy series of events. [Michael Houck]: I’ve never seen a diss track in front of 100 million people before. That was wild. [Max Marchione]: Have you seen what Yeezy.com is right now? [Michael Houck]: Yes, I have. It’s crazy shit, man. Yeah, it’s really crazy. Anyway, I don’t know. I don’t think I’ll be buying a shirt, but, you know. Oh, my God. [Max Marchione]: I spent two million dollars on an advertisement and then put that on the side. [Michael Houck]: Eight million. They cost eight million this year. [Max Marchione]: Eight million. Yeah. Oh my God. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: That’s like so many seed rounds. We’re going to have so many new companies. Wow. Wow. Nuts. All right. Look, we’ll get into it. We might not need the full hour. We scheduled these for full hours historically because we didn’t have the onboarding form be so thorough before, but now that we do, they tend to run a little shorter. So you might get some time back. We have a lot of good answers from that. So basically Tanmay is just going to walk through any remaining questions he has. Some of those might be in a Notion doc. [tanmaysinghchauhan]: Others just might be kind of off the cuff from him. [Michael Houck]: And this cute little notebook, I must add. [tanmaysinghchauhan]: I wrote questions for questions for Max. [Michael Houck]: I love that little book. It’s cool. And then at the end, I’ll bring it back and we’ll just talk about next steps and getting started. Started. But yeah, we’ve already been doing some some research. So should be should be pretty easy. [Max Marchione]: Sweet. Sounds good to me. Cool. [tanmaysinghchauhan]: Yeah, so I just quickly introduce Yeah, yeah, just quickly introduce myself. I’m 24. I’ve been ghostwriting for almost two and a half years now. Like, I’ll be in my third year in the next two or three months. So yeah, this is what I do full time. And yeah, I’ve got some questions to for you. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Right. [tanmaysinghchauhan]: So yeah, so I actually went through your ideas library in the notion. Can you tell me a little about your idea generation process? Like how does it look like I saw some brain dumping here and there. I saw you outline some of the things I have I went through it like how does it look like, [Max Marchione]: Our first caveat that that idea dump is there’s a lot of old things in there that are now. The process has looked like a combination of different things. One is just off the cuff. What do I want to write about and what do I think is interesting? Two is based on different topics or themes. So I’ll pick a topic such as, I don’t know, business model breakdowns of companies. And then I’ll say, what are the interesting companies within that? Or I’ll pick the topic building superpower. And I’ll say, what are the things that people are always asking me about? And there’s really only like five things people always ask me about. It’s like, how do you launch? How do you fundraise? How do you get a big wait list? And there are a couple of others as well. And then there’s probably a long tail there. Then one thing I’ve thought about that I haven’t done is thinking about content series I might launch. So I’ve thought about doing like tar pit ideas in healthcare as a series or like midwit curves, as you guys might know the midwit curve, midwit curves as a series. Because there are like hundreds I’ve come up with and I think they’re so fascinating. [Michael Houck]: The most widely applicable meme. It can apply to everything. [Max Marchione]: I’m pretty sure. Let me check if I’ve still got it hosted, maxmarketing.com. Yeah, I’ve got a whole list of ones I’ve got there. So that’s another series. I’ve thought about doing a series such as like a weekly roundup kind of thing. It’s less a series and it’s more like a weekly roundup. Not that good for like a resonance, but good for reach. I think about this dichotomy and reach a fair bit as well. To date, I’ve prioritized things that are resonant, that build brand rather than things that reach a lot of eyeballs. I think that works well on LinkedIn, works better on LinkedIn. I think on Twitter, it’s important to also optimize for reach and that’s what I want to be doing more of Yeah, so that’s like loosely speaking how the process works. [tanmaysinghchauhan]: Yeah, so actually, I had this question, like, can we do content series for business breakdowns? Like, I was thinking if we have some like very fixed format, like I’ve seen some other founders do weekly or monthly roundup, like, okay, this is what happened in the business. Here’s what we shared, here’s what happened, hiring and any other stuff. So maybe, yeah, maybe we can do that. [Michael Houck]: Or also like what happened in the niche, right? Like in this kind of modern new take on healthcare, going on. Um, that could be, that could be interesting too. [Max Marchione]: Yeah, I do. I do think like there’s a world of breaking down modern interventions or healthcare, um, like therapeutics that are coming out or diagnostics. My sense, I could be wrong with my senses, business model breakdowns are very hard to do in a non generic way. And I’d be somewhat concerned with doing them in a non-generic way. Generic way. I think when I’ve done them in the past, it’s because I’ve had a lot of unique insight into a specific business or a lot of opinions in that business. We might be able to effectively share them by this sort of discussion, but we might also find it hard. I’m also down to experiment with all of their stuff. It’s hard to know until we just give it a go. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [tanmaysinghchauhan]: So from your newsletter, just adding on top of that, from your newsletter, I could see like your writing is very evidence and research Like you’re always quoting things. So how does that research process look like, [Max Marchione]: My sense is like my newsletter style will look different from say Twitter, which looks different from LinkedIn. I think my LinkedIn posts probably map closer to Twitter. And they do quite well. Like I’d say a third of our, maybe half of our funding and investors have come from like my LinkedIn posts, which is just crazy. To think it’s just like this small channel around probably 10% of our waitlist has come from me just posting on LinkedIn and probably 15% of our hiring. So LinkedIn has worked well, which is why I want to start focusing on Twitter. I think Twitter done right is a more powerful channel. I think Twitter builds more of a parasocial relationship with someone. So I’d look there more so than my articles. If I was to look at my articles, they tend to be like analytical insight in the opinionated way. Like I tend to have a thesis which people might disagree with and I will structure an argument for why that thesis is true. And I make them thought leadership ask, but I don’t plan to be doing many more articles. I just find to put out a good article, it takes so fucking long. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Um, yeah. [tanmaysinghchauhan]: Okay. Uh, So what does your content diet look like, Like what are you consuming on a daily basis like newsletters, social accounts or like any other podcasts? [Max Marchione]: Yeah, I listen to podcasts or audiobooks more or less every day or two when I’m at the gym or like cooking or just in between tasks. I scroll Twitter daily and that’s about all I do daily. Weekly basis. I have one email where all of my newsletters go to and I check that in a weekly basis and once or twice a week I’ll check Instagram. I don’t use my personal Instagram. I have a separate Instagram that just follows things I find interesting. So cool companies, brands, health and wellness, architecture and I’ll scroll that for probably like an hour every Sunday. That sounds like a lot but I see it as one like me but to like also learning because everything there is like tasteful okay like so most of most of the things I learned now probably come from discussions and [tanmaysinghchauhan]: thinking about things um rather than content consumption uh and how would you like make the communication with me for those ideas like anything that’s happening these con How can I get access to them? [Max Marchione]: Good question. My senses are not like… My sense is the ideas that happen in those conversations are very niche, thinkboy-esque that won’t work that well on Twitter anyway. They’re quite nuanced ideas. And I think they potentially work for some like techno philosophizing long form article, but I don’t think they’re quite right for Twitter. Hmm. [tanmaysinghchauhan]: Um, so I, what I would recommend is, uh, if you have like a very process to note these things down, I will, I can just access to it. Like, or maybe you can just bring them, them into Slack channel, maybe a quick voice note here and there, and then we can just raffle on it and see like what’s building Yep. [Max Marchione]: Um, that sounds good. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. [tanmaysinghchauhan]: So what would you prefer me taking advantage of your idea lab reading or me coming up with the ideas myself? And if you, if you’re like, can you give me some directions? [Max Marchione]: Um, yeah, I think probably half, half, um, the, I think most of the idea library is, is pretty trash. There’s the most helpful helpful section is probably in the content strategy page. So it’s just a single page rather than the database. Yeah. There are some toggles in there and you would have seen all these tweet ideas or thread ideas from Trash ABT with the threads from Trash ABT. I think some of them are particularly viral. I care more about building a brand that’s related to building superpower in public and building a company rather than like another health and wellness influencer brand. And yes, so that’s something to bear in mind as well. Okay. [tanmaysinghchauhan]: Is there anyone else like very closely related to your niche? Like I’ve seen all the examples you mentioned, like, okay, there are some of the brand accounts you like, but is there anyone else who’s building very similar, very something similar in your own niche that I can just look at? [Max Marchione]: My sense is that it’s less about like the niche is starting a company. I want that to be the niche more so than starting a health company. And then if I look at like, who are people doing starting a company content in an authentic way? I think that, what’s his name? Brett Adcock did a good job before he started Figure. I think Tyler Denk has done a very good job of building a universal brand around human beehive. I think the Limitless AI, Rewind guy has done, Dan Sirocco has done a pretty good job. Slightly more health related, I think Tara Viswanathan has done a good job. She doesn’t have a big following, but a lot of resonance. I’ll send you her name. Yeah. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Max Marchione]: So a lot of resonance and she’s put out some good threads and they’re not, haven’t always been threads on them. So just being long single posts. I really liked Lulu’s content style. I think the reason why is she doesn’t, one of the things I find interesting is like how to, I could have spelled her name wrong, but it should come up if you search that. It’s like how to break the norm of the content people are expected to seeing. Like if I look at my LinkedIn content, I break a few rules, but I think as a result, uh, the right audience gets the post and they’re like excited to read it. And I get a lot of engagement and it doesn’t get 5,000 likes with random people But he gets like three four hundred likes with really really important people Um, I think Lulu breaks the trend a little bit in Twitter as well. So I think Lulu breaks the trend a little bit I think Who else would I say break it breaks it I Like how Sam lesson does his content he kind of originally He and George Mac originated the screenshot style. I like how Bill Ackman does content as well. You want the giant Ackman essays? Yeah, I think like, and it’s hard to build up to that because if I started posting essay style like Lulu, Bill or Chamath, at the start, no one’s going to read it. And it’s like, but I do believe that once you build your brand to the point that people are like, Oh, I’m excited. There’s an essay that brand effect is way more powerful than just like, okay, another thread. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I agree. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: I agree. [Michael Houck]: This is, um, it’s something Greg Eisenberg did really well, like a couple of years ago, like back in like 2020 before he really built up his personal brand as large as it is today, you know, at the time it was threads, we didn’t have like long form posts or screenshot essays or anything, but he would, his threads were like anticipated, like they wouldn’t drop on a regular cadence. They’d always be about something interesting. They’d always have a unique perspective and you’d be like, Oh, like what is he going to drop next? Right. Um, so yeah, that, that type of anticipatory vibe really builds your reputation, the brand resonance. [Max Marchione]: Yeah. And like that comes over time. I think where, where that’s challenging, is when people use that as a way to say okay therefore I won’t post because it has to be perfect and the reality is like if I get from very little posting to some posting that works well. I also think that things related to superpower work particularly well one because there’s like clear company ROI on it but two because superpower is hype and that acts as a platform to add authority to anything I talk about and then three there’s a lot of like learnings in things we do that are opinionated and unique and, and potentially worth, um, sharing. So I think there’s a lot of interesting threads related to that. Um, yeah, I would have the main things to come up. [Michael Houck]: I would just double kind of bump on that a little bit. Um, you know, you guys are doing something very different than the traditional, what people traditionally do in the industry. It’s, it makes a lot of sense, I think, to a lot of people right now. Especially within this demographic of people building companies that you want to build an audience around. So obviously, you said we want to focus on you as a person who builds companies, not necessarily a person who’s building a health care company, which is fine. But I do think that we should highlight the unique things that you guys do and why this approach is going to be a billion dollar company and all that, that it very well could be. So we shouldn’t shy away from it, is all I’m trying to say. [Max Marchione]: Totally. I like this. Narrative of like building a $10 billion company in public, I think that can be something people follow along. Like rather than saying follow along for like frameworks and business model insights, it's like, no, follow along whilst I build a $10 billion company in public, I think is way more interesting. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. [tanmaysinghchauhan]: So what are some of the starting points like for the content idea? Do you have any starting points, even from your idea library? Do you think maybe this is a good starting point? [Max Marchione]: Yeah, let me pull it up now. Give me a sec. [tanmaysinghchauhan]: You can share your screen if you want. [Max Marchione]: Okay, cool. I’ll pull it up, then I will share with you. Okay, so this is probably the main page. And then you would have seen that you saw this page, right? [tanmaysinghchauhan]: And then the database as well. [Max Marchione]: Yeah. Okay. So this is probably more useful than the database. I think in here, the thing that’s probably the most useful is this building superpower toggle. And there are a bunch of ideas, some mine, most from chat GPT, that are good starting points. So yeah, I’d probably start with some of these, all these sub-toggles. Have ChatGPT written threads already, they’re okay. They all need work and editing and things to add distinctiveness, but they’re okay. So there’s a lot in here. And I think that’s the best starting point. Let me make a comment. Starting point. Beyond that, I’d be curious if you went through, where’s… If you went through this calendar or the database, to be honest, I probably wouldn’t bother going through all of these, or I guess in the pillars it’s probably easier. I probably wouldn’t bother going through all of these. So many of these are just like old random ideas. I don’t think there’s much in here that’s super helpful, but you can if you want. If something jumps out as well, like if you’re drawn to something, I think that’s an interesting sign that other people might be drawn to it. I think in the calendar there are probably things that I was thinking about writing about sooner, which could be worthwhile. This was done from the lens of LinkedIn. And to be honest, I don’t think many of these things would work well on Twitter. I also think many of these things are probably a little bit too nuanced. And yeah, so I’m not sold. So I think the best starting point to your question is that what I showed you before, wherever it’s gone, this in here. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: OK. [tanmaysinghchauhan]: Yeah, that makes sense, yeah. [Max Marchione]: And then I also want to be guided by your suggestions. You guys live and breathe this, and you, I’m 100% certain, have a better idea of what works on Twitter than I do. So you might say, actually, Max, personal health could really pop. Do a sleep deep dive, do a mold deep dive. You might say to me, oh, this trend of venture equity might be interesting, or this trend of health as a new church might be interesting. Or you might say to me, I like this idea of the tar pit ideas in healthcare series. Can you send through notes on 10 tar pit ideas in healthcare and we can do one per week. [tanmaysinghchauhan]: So yeah, I’d love to be guided by what you think could work too. So yeah, what I feel personally is the format which are currently very trendy is posting a YouTube video screenshot and then And very next to it, there is just a screenshot essay. So if you have something very close to that, I think we can take advantage of it. [Max Marchione]: I’m hesitant. I think some YouTube videos could work. I’m hesitant to post to be too much of a curator of content. My sense is that results in a lot of reach, but I have yet to see someone build a really like resonant brand off the back of just curators. Um, so yeah, down to try it. I don’t have a good sense of what it looks like, Um, probably have some hesitations, whether it’s the right, uh, right play. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: And I, I think we’ll sort of get the hang of where that balance between like reach and residence lies for you over time too. Um, cause that, that stuff does get reach, but you know, you’re right. If you’re just curating, if you’re not providing kind of original ideas, um, and things like that. It can be tough to resonate from that. So we just need to find out where that balance falls for you. [Max Marchione]: I think a lot about as well conversion to follower and I think there are some things that are inherently viral but not likely to convert to followers and some things which are reasonably viral and very likely to convert to followers. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: So I think that’s something I bear in mind as well. [Max Marchione]: My sense is personal health and building superpower in public are the two things which convert to followers most effectively because of the build with superpower one, someone’s like, I’m going to get something out of following, which is learning how to build a company and personal health. They’re like, I’m going to get something out of following, which is learning how to improve my health. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Right. [Michael Houck]: Max, for what it’s worth, we’ll get back to this at the end, but one of the things I’ll do over the next day or two is just like a quick audit. Of your profile. I think it’s probably pretty good. But I just like to do them just to see if there’s any little improvements we can make. So I’ll record a little loom and send it over if there’s anything we want to suggest. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Sweet. Sounds good to me. [tanmaysinghchauhan]: Yeah, I think Michael, I have mostly what I needed. I think the next steps would be from here is I generate like maybe five to 10 ideas and take advantage of Max’s own life And then from here, once everything get approved, I’ll start drafting. So I think I have most of the thing. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Cool. [Michael Houck]: Great. Yeah, Max, your answers on the form were really good. So we got a lot of what we would normally ask on this call there, and also from the docs you shared too. So thanks for that. But okay, so next steps, basically, as Tim I said, he’ll continue doing research, he’ll start generating some ideas. Goal over the first week or two is really just to sort of, you know, pen test where you fall on a lot of stuff. And so we’ll send you a variety of ideas. Um, you let us know just candidly how you feel about them. You’re going to hate some, you’re going to love some. Um, and then we’ll start getting the first batch ready for you. I’ll do the profile audit. Um, and we’ll get things rolling. Everything will just be in Slack. If you want to hop on and do like a content interview with Tanmay or if you ever want to hop on and chat with me, obviously happy to do that. But you know, we know you’re super busy. Building the company. So we don’t want to put meetings on your calendar by default. [Max Marchione]: Sweet. Um, sounds good guys. Decided to get the ball rolling here. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: It was funny that, uh, that Tyler, yeah, literally I was like to him, um, do you use a ghostwriter for your newsletter? [Max Marchione]: And he’s like, no, but I can put you in touch. I thought if you’re looking, I’m like, yeah, sure. He’s like, I think I know the exact person. Like, okay, cool. Um, that’s good. Yeah. But I think I’ve been thinking about it. I’m going to start by writing my newsletter. I’ve got a pretty simple format, and then I’ll see how I go from there on the newsletter front. Yeah, no pressure. [Michael Houck]: Happy to help if you need us, but no worries either way. We’ll get started on the social stuff for Twitter, and we’ll go from there. And just I’ll probably check in with you in a few weeks to see how things are going. And otherwise, Tamay will be taking the lead from our side. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Awesome. [Max Marchione]: Sounds good to me. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Cool. [Michael Houck]: Good to see you. Yeah. Thank you so much for the call. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Thank you.