- Duration: 24 min
- Platform: zoom
- Source: Read.ai 01JKRHRCN1TG0V9TNS31GBPJMN (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JKRHRCN1TG0V9TNS31GBPJMN)
Transcript
[Blake Emal]: Yo, what’s up? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: What’s up, man? [Michael Houck]: How you doing? I’m good. I’m good. You’re at an abnormal location today, or is it just blurred? [Blake Emal]: Same, just blurred. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: I’m celebrating Super Bowl win, feeling good. Oh, you’re an Eagles fan, huh? Well, I’m from Philly. I was excited for the game either way. It would’ve been cool to see the three-peat, but it does feel pretty good to shut it down also. [Blake Emal]: I’m pleased. I was rooting for the Eagles. I mean, it wouldn’t have mattered to me either way. I’m a Seahawks fan, so. Oh, yeah. But I was happy it went that way. The Kansas City fans can weep for a little bit. [Michael Houck]: I’m OK with that. Yeah. You know, I think it’s a little early coronation was going on. And as a Philly native, always good to be the spoiler and to sort of play the underdog. [Blake Emal]: And that’s more my thing. We crushed him. Crushed him. More my jam. So I was I was excited about it. Not a particularly great game, to be honest. [Michael Houck]: No, I enjoyed it thoroughly. Yeah, I mean, the coaches, they decided the game before the game started. One could one team game plan better than the other team could could defend against. [Blake Emal]: So it was a Yeah, the commercials really sucked. [Michael Houck]: I thought, okay, I thought I was the only one I thought all of the commercials were bad, like cringe. [Blake Emal]: Yeah, like, Okay, so some of my pet peeves. I hate it when they assume that Gen Z wants to see old celebrities doing modern dances, like TikTok dances. And it happened like six times in the commercials. [Michael Houck]: The Gen Z outreach was clearly made by like Gen X and millennials. It was out of touch. [Blake Emal]: I thought the only one that was like, oh, that was kind of funny was the Eugene Levy, Little Caesars eyebrows one. If you saw that one. [Michael Houck]: I don’t think I saw that one. [Blake Emal]: That one was fun. Other than that, I was like, these suck. [Michael Houck]: These really are not good. Yeah, it got to the point where I was watching on my computer, because I can’t VPN, because I’m in Argentina, from the TV. So I would turn on Netflix on the TV during some of the commercials, because they were just so bad. Yeah, no bueno. Anyway, let’s see. So what do we got? I just talked to Waleed, we got on a call. He’s pretty much done with Tanmay, like we thought. They’re just not a good fit for each other. So maybe a learning for us there. [Blake Emal]: I don’t know exactly what it would be, but Yeah, I mean, the biggest learning, I don’t love either side of it. Like I mentioned in Slack, with Tanmay, I don’t love the complaining. It’s like, yeah, I get it. I’ve had clients that suck for sure. And then just do what you can. And then if it doesn’t work out, you kind of just let them make the decision to leave and you do your best, you know? So like with Tanmay, when he’s saying it’s taken him hours to do these short form, like I’ve read them. It doesn’t take too, I don’t know if he’s saying it takes two hours to do one or the whole batch, but I’m like, well, if it takes you two hours to do the whole batch, that’s kind of normal. You should be spending time on them. [Michael Houck]: I read it like he was saying it was two hours to do one. And I think I didn’t say anything to him, but if he brings it up for a future client, I will, but like, yeah, it obviously doesn’t take two hours to write a short form post. Like that’s insane. So I agree. [Blake Emal]: What he’s referencing is he’s getting comments from wallet about those short form ones and going back and forth. So I think in his mind, he’s like accumulating them and maybe, you know, that could happen for a post or two, but equating that out to, it takes me two hours to write these now because I have to do so much research. I don’t buy that, but I think he’s valid on the other side where like, wallet has not given him much, but he does give feedback. And from what I’ve seen in the Notion docs, the feedback is not that helpful. It’s like, hey, we need to change it up. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. So look, I mean, I think you and I are on the same page here, sort of issues on both sides. So let’s just break them up. I pitched the idea of sticking around to wallet lead, he’s interested in doing it. And actually, ironically, he said he’s getting enough leads where like, he’s like, he doesn’t want to overwhelm himself. So it is working for him, whatever we’re doing. [Blake Emal]: So all he wants is more engagement, right? [Michael Houck]: He wants engagement followers and like social clout from it as much as clients at this point. So it’s fine. Andrew’s in to help, but Waleed proposed that we either do lower frequency per month or one month on, one month off. I don’t know if any writer would really wanna do that, so I’m gonna propose just a lower frequency per month and see how it goes. I think we have a chance to keep him that way if we do a one to two threads a week for him or something like that. [Blake Emal]: Not doing short form as much, just threads. [Michael Houck]: I don’t know. We’ll see what he and Andrew discuss. But I mean, the good news is, he does seem like he wants this because it is driving results for him. I just think they’re a bad match. So we’ll give it a shot with Andrew. If he ends up not being happy, then we turn them out. And it is what it is. [Blake Emal]: Yeah, he seems it seems like they’re red flags there. So I’m not gonna be shocked when he’s like, this isn’t working either. But at least with Andrew, I know the communication is going to be there. Wallet or sending stuff on Saturdays. And he’s like, can you edit this urgently? I’m like, well, I didn’t see it. I mean, yeah, I probably should have been online a little bit more, but like, [Michael Houck]: Oh, dude, don’t don’t. [Blake Emal]: It’s not a weekend thing. It’s just like the due date. You know, it’s Wednesdays is when we deliver batches. And he’s like, well, I kept having to do tons of revisions. I’m like, I get it. But you didn’t communicate that. And so then you put it on me on a Saturday. So there’s. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I had to kick off with Tanmay for Max earlier this morning. And we talked, we did a little huddle afterwards, and I think Max is gonna be good. But yeah, Teme brought that up. He’s like, does Blake not work on weekends? I’m like, no, Blake doesn’t work on weekends. It’s fine, just wait till Monday. If I see it, I’ll help out. [Blake Emal]: But he’s done that a few times where it’s like, Saturday, he’s like, can you get to this urgently? I’m like, if you would have, I have a schedule that I keep to, and you know how quick I can edit stuff when you send it to me. [Michael Houck]: So yeah, I get it. [Blake Emal]: I told him, I set the expectation. [Michael Houck]: I’m like, look, follow the schedule. He’ll get to, if you send something over the weekend, he’ll get to it on Monday. Like it’s, you know, rarely is there something actually that urgent is basically what I said to him. [Blake Emal]: Yeah, exactly. That’s, that’s my thought process. Like, I don’t have anything against working on a weekend. It’s just that I don’t tend to check Slack on a weekend. [Michael Houck]: That’s fine. [Blake Emal]: Oh, it’s like, But anyway, so we’ll see. I wanna, not that I think he should be on probation or whatever. I think we should just monitor how he does with the next client and be willing to say maybe he wasn’t as ready as we thought. Cause he did have a couple of things pop off and it looked pretty good, but I think there’s some immaturity there with the process. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, and if I need to be bad cop there, I will be. He’s got two clients now that are just starting, Max and Dhruv. Yeah. For Drew on Friday. So we’ll see how he does with these. These are both very legit founders, venture backed founders, you know, known in SF. So this is a big opportunity for him to do well. Totally. Okay, moving on. Athena. So yeah, I don’t know. I don’t even know. Well, you got my context from them. I think I’ll have them deliver pretty quick after we’re done here. Yeah, I think with the new person, it’s a total Stephanie has been saying she’s going to leave once they hire someone for a while because they want her to be the full-time person she doesn’t want to be. So, you know, it’s a total unknown. The new person might want to keep doing it. [Blake Emal]: They might not. We’ll see. Yeah. I’ve taken a peek at all of them. And the one, there’s one that I’ve already written the full piece on my side of things. And this is just like the concise version of it. And the chat GPT for that one was like pretty decent. Cause it was just a paragraph and it was a story format. That was the only good snippet period. The other two things is awful. So I think we’re, we’re solid on that front, but you never know what she likes anyway. Like she kind of, she sends that stuff to me too. It was like, I GPT this and I think it’s pretty good. [Michael Houck]: I’m like, it’s pretty bad. Yeah. She doesn’t have good instincts, it’s okay, it’s fine. Okay, and then with David, with Auragold, I think he just, again, he has his own agency that he’s running, so I think he just didn’t, I don’t know, he followed his own process or something. I don’t know. I already reached out to him. [Blake Emal]: I’ve been talking to him this morning. So I just reiterated process, let him know it was no sweat, because it’s our first batch and he delivered like 15 things. They’re all super short form, so I just need to see if that’s for sure what the client wants, if they want any medium to long form, because there wasn’t any of that in there. But he’s already got 15 things in there. And he just asked, basically, he’s like, cool with process going forward on timeline. The only thing he asked was if he could do it biweekly, but just get ahead. And I was like, I don’t care. If you’re already ahead of schedule now, and now you’re just getting ahead and delivering things to me every other week, but the client doesn’t know any difference, I don’t care. [Michael Houck]: So. Yeah, that’s fine. As long as we don’t exceed 30 days ahead, because that’s what we have committed to the client. Yeah, yeah, yeah. [Blake Emal]: He’s planning on just doing like 15 posts every two weeks or whatever, instead of doing it every single week. So I don’t think he’s ever going to go beyond 30 days ahead. It’s just getting a week ahead basically for himself. I think you will see what the client wants. [Michael Houck]: My guess is they’ll want to test out some threads screenshot essays and long form posts too, but we’ll see new client figured out. Yeah. I’m guessing. [Blake Emal]: Cause I don’t, I don’t know if you’ve seen any of them. They’re all like two liner, three liner tweets and they’re, they’re good. I mean, they’re, they’re like interesting. They seem like they have color in them and whatnot. So, but, but there’s like not variety. So we’re just going to see what topics and things they like, And I’m sure we will get the feedback that they want to see something longer and that’ll have to get rectified. [Michael Houck]: but the good news is that the client seems happy. He already made a referral to me for another crypto client. So I’m gonna talk with them this week. Nice. Okay, that’s solid. Okay, new clients. So right now there are three clients who we are setting up newsletters for. They’re blocked on different things like setting up the DNS or design or the welcome sequence. So these are Crowdsurf, Workman, and Fela. So respectively, Jacob, who’s doing Workmate, Andrew, I think is doing Workmate. And then Andrew’s also doing Fela. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So those are still sorry, Austin, Austin’s doing Workmate, not not Andrew, my bad. Those are still like onboarding, not Crowdsource, we should be able to get the first issue out by like midweek this week, because we have the designs ready for it now. Workmate, we’ll get the first, like everything set up except for publishing this week, and then Fela, same deal, we’ll probably publish next week. But we should be reviewing content because we need to get the welcome sequence kind of set up too. So with future newsletter clients, I’m gonna have a better process of writing a playbook for it, because I think there’s more operational pieces with like having Ben step in to help out with the settings and ensuring the design gets done on time. [Blake Emal]: And we’re doing it all through Beehive now, right? [Michael Houck]: Because of the… Yes. Bella wanted to use some other software, but we moved over to Beehive. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Cool. Okay. [Blake Emal]: So I haven’t seen anything on the welcome sequences yet. Are the writers going to share that with me or should I reach out proactively? [Michael Houck]: So, okay. So it’s kind of twofold. Like a templated welcome email and also whole welcome sequence if we want from my newsletter that we’re just going to port over and what we’ve historically ported over to the newsletter clients, just like copy paste Madlib style. But since we’re also going to be growing the Crowdsurf and Fella newsletters, not the Workmate one, just Crowdsurf and Fella, we will also have used the initial issues, like the first like three or four issues of the newsletter as a sort of evergreen template. So when I say welcome sequence, we don’t necessarily need a welcome email because we have that. But for those clients, we need like a couple issues ready to go when we launch it. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. [Blake Emal]: All right. So not really much editing work on the initial welcome sequence that you can kind of just patch stuff in. I’m guessing they can just ship that. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. Sweet. [Blake Emal]: Good on new clients then. Else in the pipeline that feels like it’s gonna happen this week? [Michael Houck]: Yes, so potentially two. There’s a company called refresh.me. They are a personal finance company. I talked to them in like early December. And they were like, we’re in for Twitter and a newsletter. And it’s like, great. But then I didn’t hear from them for six weeks. Basically, the founders mother died. I think I might have mentioned this super sad. Yeah, yeah. Grace still might take the client because she’s just like a perfect fit for the niche. She knows it really well. If not, we can have someone, maybe Andrew or even someone else do it as a backup. But they’re back in. I’m just waiting for them to pay. So I’m expecting them to pay this week. And then second one is this company called Notick, which is like a community for for like HR people, like chief HR people. How do you spell that? [Blake Emal]: K-N-O-E-T-I-C. [Michael Houck]: And their referral from Wilson, the guy who used to work at Athena, who was actually pretty good. So he works there? No, he doesn’t work there now, but he’s friends with the founder. I met with the founder, seems like a very high maintenance guy. Like he literally said to me, like, my time is my greatest asset. I must get value in the first month. And I’m like, all right, like, I don’t know if we want to really take this guy out as a client. Just seemed very high strung. So, and he’s like, he, at first he wasn’t willing to commit to more than a two week trial. And I’m like, it’s not worth my time. Like, it’s not. Yeah. [Blake Emal]: For, for a client like that, I almost wonder if we flip that on him. And we’re like, OK, if you want to see results in the first month, we’re going to assume you mean first month of publishing. So we’re going to spend an entire month gathering context and getting the backlog. Yeah, we could do that. [Michael Houck]: He’s he’s asking for like to speak with another founder that we work with. And I’m like, well, we haven’t done that. You know, we keep our clients anonymous. I’ve never asked them, which maybe we should ask them if we can do case studies with them. I don’t know. [Blake Emal]: But we eventually. [Michael Houck]: But he, I wasn’t about to make that, break that ice for him. Cause I don’t really care if he converts or not. [Blake Emal]: I think that’s, that’s smart. We probably need to have a better result or outcome that we’ve gotten somebody before we really go into that. It’s been micro, you know, something went viral here and there, but once we get to, Oh yeah, they grew 20K. Followers with us in three months, then, then we could do that stuff. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I mean, it’s, I think we’ll want to really show that more for newsletters anyway, because we want to niche down as much as we can on on newsletters. So Oh, also speaking of newsletters, I think I shot you know about this like late Friday night or something. So we probably didn’t see it. I talked to Tyler from beehive. And he’s, you know, he’s already sent two leads to the weekend and you know, he’s like, how can we partner more deeply? I would love to work with you guys on stuff. So I talked to him about it, see what the opportunities are. They have that media collective with like higher profile clients now that could be exciting. Um, so we’ll see what he comes back with, but at the minimum, he’s going to be sending us a regular leads whenever, you know, someone asks him, I need a writer for my newsletter. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Sweet. [Blake Emal]: And, uh, is the return that we just like use beehive as the platform? Is it that we send 10% to him? What is it? [Michael Houck]: I asked him if he wants a referral fee. He knows we already use Beehive, so it’s fine. I asked him for a referral fee. He didn’t reply to that yet. That was this morning. So if he wants one, we’ll give him one. But, you know, they’re making so much money that I don’t think it really matters. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah, cool. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, that’s exciting. That could be fun. [Blake Emal]: Yeah, it could be a good long term thing for us. Maybe potentially a wedge to get more writers somehow from Beehive. [Michael Houck]: Yes, that is a good idea. I was thinking about posting something Slack community too, because I saw a post from, you know, Alex Brogan. He made a post, it’s like, I need a writer for this person’s newsletter, whatever. And like, you know, 20 people replied and shared their links to their newsletters. And so it seems like a good place to mine, mine writers from Yeah. [Blake Emal]: I think that’s probably smart. There, there are going to be a few of those communities too. I don’t know if like Copyblogger has one and I’ll do more research because I could probably join a bunch of those for free or for cheap and just start like I probably don’t even need to post in them I’m sure that they’re already pre-existing threads like you’re saying where people are just volunteering up their services yep I did I did post about it on my Twitter and I got quite a few DMS but like I was not impressed with almost any of it which is to be expected I got that I’ve now, but they haven’t gotten back to me yet. I told him to take like a week just so I could like work out some stuff. I don’t have the whole thing in type form or anything. So I just like take, take your time on this one. Then going forward, we can do it on a crunchier timeline. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Cool. [Michael Houck]: I’ll get that set up in type form and everything this week. Um, but okay. I actually need to use the bathroom before my next call. So I’m going to pop off, but, um, yeah, uh, we’ll talk more about