- Duration: 27 min
- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01JKV3WPZ2FW0VNRGTZXRNGX5R (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JKV3WPZ2FW0VNRGTZXRNGX5R)
Transcript
[UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Hey, how are you? [Michael Houck]: Hey, Genevieve. Nice to meet you. [Genevieve Bellaire]: How are you doing? You too, Michael. [Michael Houck]: I’m good. Where are you? [Genevieve Bellaire]: I am in Patagonia in Argentina right now. Wow. That’s one of the more interesting answers I’ve gotten recently when I’ve asked where someone on the other line is. [Michael Houck]: That’s so fun. Are you traveling? Yeah. I was in Chile. Then I went to Mendoza, which is like wine country down here. Buenos Aires for a weekend. Just basically hit the three Michelin stars in a three-day span and hopped on down to Patagonia. So it’s been nice. [Genevieve Bellaire]: That’s amazing. Is this like a planned trip or just kind of continuous traveling forever? [Michael Houck]: It was a planned trip. I’m going to Brazil, Florianopolis on Friday for a couple of weeks before finally coming back to the States. Nice. [Genevieve Bellaire]: That’s amazing. Well, enjoy. Thanks for taking the call. I’m good. I’m in Washington DC right now. So splitting my time between here York for the most part, but nowhere near as interesting. We’re about to get a bunch of snow, so hopefully that’ll make things less dreary in the wintertime, but yeah, can’t complain too much. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I know. I’m not a cold winter person. I lived in New York for a while and just can’t do it. [Genevieve Bellaire]: Not very fun. But listen, I’m so excited to connect with you. I feel like your name has come up a bunch and I think it’s something I heard about you maybe years ago and then got on your newsletter and just loved the content you’ve put out. And yeah, it’s great. I particularly liked what you’ve been talking about, about the LLMs and kind of like the commoditization there and how that translates to application layer and all that, because we’re building in the AI space. But anyway, we’re sort of looking for some growth oriented support. And so it caught my eye that you guys have services around that. So I just figured it might be worth a quick chat to introduce myself. See how you guys typically work and kind of talk through a couple of things that we’re focused on right now. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Cool. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. I mean, I took a look at you. I took a look at the business, I think super cool business and like, you know, I would have loved something like that when I was going out of college and I didn’t even know what a startup was at the [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: time. So yeah. [Michael Houck]: And I saw that you guys are building in the AI space now and sort of taking the playbook and applying it to like, I guess some sort of a or agent that can help with that. I didn’t see the details on that in particular, but [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Genevieve Bellaire]: I can guess who are there too. Exactly. The whole idea is like, we’ve been building in this like adulthood space, so to speak for years. And it started as an education product. It’s very much evolved into a productivity product, still grounded in education. So we cover everything like from finance, health, insurance, tax, employer, paperwork, pets, having a kid, like all of the different things, travel. And the way that it’s evolved really over the last years is like, there was always this missing piece where as much as we would tell you, here’s the things that you need to do, or here’s like the way to set yourself up for success. Like people just wouldn’t do it. And part of it’s because it’s annoying. People can be lazy, like, et cetera, et cetera. Fine. But what’s so exciting is like now with agents and agentic workflows, like we can do a lot of that stuff for you. So it’s kind of this final, like real product market fit moment. That’s been really exciting. And so I’ve tried to, um, position the product first as like a repository for all of your life information. So a place where you can store your passport, TSA pre-check number, health insurance card, and use AI to like really seamlessly organize those documents, pull out the important information, set reminders for you, like when your passport’s expiring, give you a heads up for the process there, things like that across all these parts of your life. Where we’re going is really kind of twofold. The first is to be almost like your own personal LLM where we can train the model on like your data so that you could ask questions instead of calling your mom or your dad, you could be like, or Google or chat GPT, you could be like, how much more can I contribute to my 401k? Can I go to this doctor and my health insurance plan and have the essentially like actual in a moment answers. And the second piece is that agent lens. So being able to say like, you need to book a dentist appointment every six months, but like, we’ll look good for you. And we’ll kind of go through that process from the agent side. So it’s a really exciting like moment right now, frankly, and there’s there’s still a lot more product side to be done. But the last thing I’ll say is like, we’re very product heavy right now. And I feel like we don’t really have our footing on the marketing side. And so I’m trying to figure out ways to supplement that, at least initially, we’re picking off a small raise right now to just bring in a bit more capital to kind of like fill out some of those holes, but [Michael Houck]: figure it was worth a challenge. As somebody who who literally in the two minutes before this call was trying to find which dentist in Austin, Texas is in my insurance network. Sounds great. Yeah, totally. I mean, you’re not alone. [Genevieve Bellaire]: It’s like, why is this stuff so hard? And soon I think it actually will be, which is what’s so exciting. Yeah, I agree. Cool. [Michael Houck]: It sounds like you guys are ahead of the trend, which is awesome. You know, we love to work with clients who we think we can be with for the long term. So that’s great. Obviously a problem space. So yeah. Okay. So I can give you some context on how we work, what we do, and we can just sort of go from there and see where it goes. So we have our content agency, Megaphone Studio. Basically we have writers on the team who I’ve worked with in various capacities for a long time. We have a lead editor, Blake E. Moll, he’s my partner on the agency. With an even bigger audience than I do. As far as we know, we’re the only, like, you know, agency, content agency, ghostwriting agency, whatever you want to call it, that’s actually led and operated by creators who built audiences themselves. There’s some others out there that, like, you know, there’s a creator who’s an investor, or they founded it, but now they’re kind of hands off. We’re the only one where we’re actually the ones making sure the content that you get is high quality week in and week out. So we also work with founders. And so we know we’re not trying to put meetings on your calendar or anything like that. We’ll do one kickoff call at the beginning. But then if you don’t want to do content interviews, if you want to go async for weekly idea sharing back and forth, that’s fine. We honestly prefer that. So we can do the interviews if you want, of course. But we find that most of our clients don’t. So our process on a week-to-week basis is we do that kickoff call initially. And then on Mondays, we’ll send you ideas. Like, hey, here’s topics we’re thinking about. Some specific questions that came up during our research that we think your unique subject matter expertise could create some unique content off of that. And so we’ll ask you about that. All we need from you is a two or three minute rambly voice note. You just go right into Slack, leave a rambly voice note. That’s it. If you want to write out your answers, that’s fine too. But we find that the voice notes capture more of the emotion and intonation that we’re looking for. So that’s it. If we get that from you by midweek, then it’ll be incorporated into that week’s batch of content. We deliver content every week on Fridays, and we’ll try to get a few weeks ahead pretty early on, so it’s not like a stressful weekend, week out thing where we’re trying to hit some deadline. Now, we can do this for X, for LinkedIn, and or for a newsletter. We find that newsletters are great ways to stay top of mind for current customers, but also converting potential customers. And so it depends where in the funnel you kind of would see us fitting in, whether it’s a very, very top of the funnel on social or whether it’s sort of that building more trust layer with the newsletter once we get the emails. We do both as well. We give you a slight discount if you package them together. And that’s pretty much the high level of how it works. Any question on that or else I can go into pricing and things like that. [Genevieve Bellaire]: One question is more on the logistics side. Like we use customer IO right now for our existing customers. Like do you guys come in and into some of these platforms and like schedule all that stuff? Send us loose content? Like, what does that look like, You segment your the market? Like, how do you think about that? [Michael Houck]: So okay, so we typically will work out of notion to initially write the content, you’ll have like a little CRM in there, when we’re ready to actually publish it, it’s been edited, we get it in front of users, we’re sending it out. At that point, you know, we can use customer IO, we prefer beehive, we find that more optimized for newsletters in terms of it has robust segmentation, automations and things like that. But it’s just the workflow is better for newsletters. But if you’re dead set on customer, you want to keep everything in one place, that’s fine. We can adapt and work with their editor too. That’s fine. Okay, cool. [Genevieve Bellaire]: So just so I understand what we would be paying for, because the other piece of what we’re missing right now is that’s kind of top of funnel is more like the product marketing, kind of like user journey, so to speak, once you’re in the product. And that may or may not be within your scope. But wanted to mention that as well, because that’s where I I think customer IO can be super helpful depending on how it’s set up. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I mean, we’re happy to take that on as well. I have a bunch of experience doing that. I did that a bit when I was at Uber and Airbnb, and then obviously for my own startups as well. So I’ve been doing, been in that world for years. So it’s not something most clients come to us for, but we have done it for clients before. [Genevieve Bellaire]: So we’re familiar with it. Okay, cool. That also I think is less of like a constant content production, more of like 10 workflows essentially. [Michael Houck]: So that’s good. [Genevieve Bellaire]: Great. Yeah. Tell me about pricing. [Michael Houck]: So social media side, if we’re going to do like a full account takeover where we’re writing daily content for you, including maybe multiple long form posts per week, screenshot essays, and you know, we’re in the account, we’re replying to your replies to drive conversations and impressions. We’re identifying thought leaders in your niche to go comment on their viral posts to get some free profile views and followers. From that, we’re optimizing your profile, all of that stuff, that’s 3K a month, $29.95 a month. If we're just doing a smaller batch of content per week and no sort of like ops around the account, that's 2K a month, $19.95. On the newsletter side, if we’re doing a regular sort of weekly newsletter, you want to stay top of mind for people, in that case, it’s $3,500, so $34.95. And we do everything there. We set up a welcome sequence, you know, re-engagement campaigns, auto-churning to keep deliverability high. We’ll do reporting and analytics, and obviously we’ll write the content and help with the branding and design and things like that too. If you want to do a less frequent newsletter, like say a bi-weekly newsletter, that’s also 2K, so $19.95. And then if you’re like, hey, I just want to stay top of mind for people like once a month, that’s it. We can do that too for 1K. That’s, yeah, we can do that too. [Genevieve Bellaire]: Okay. Do you have pricing around more of the product marketing just like set up? That would be less of a monthly retainer, I guess, and more of kind of like a project based. Do you do project based work as well? [Michael Houck]: We do do project based work. We price it ad hoc. So I think I’d want to get sort of in the weeds with you a little bit on what that’s going to entail. But you can think similar sort of pricing based on based on the work. [Genevieve Bellaire]: Okay. Cool. I know we’re almost out of time, but I wanted to ask, just knowing what I know now about Chats with BT, content production using AI, et cetera, how do you guys produce your content? Like, is there an AI element? Like, I understand that’s what we’re paying for, so to speak. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, and so this is probably not in my personal financial best interest. We don’t use any AI whatsoever. We have a team of nine writers. [Genevieve Bellaire]: I’m going to blame you if you did, just to get the thoughts going. I’m just curious as to like how you think about it. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, no, no. We’ve sort of taken the stance that our job is to sort of imprint your brain onto a specific writer who will be your sort of thought partner throughout this whole thing. And if we have to take it one more layer and sort of put that into this AI brain, it just tends to not be, we have to spend enough time editing the AI content anyway. So we issue it at least for now until it gets better. And the goal is sort of capture your unique voice. So we have a team of nine Each has their own sort of specialties in terms of niche and in terms of what type of content they are best at writing. We work together very early on to figure out who’s the best fit for what we’re looking to do here. I have someone in mind off the top of my head, but we want to get more context from you. But no, you’re paying for a human writer edited by a human being. And everything, as I said, is edited by either Blake or myself before or it goes to you. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Cool. [Genevieve Bellaire]: And then I have one other question for you. Oh, how do you think about success metrics? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yes. [Michael Houck]: So what we like to do is take the first 30 days and say, the first one to two weeks are basically the research period, throwing some data points and ideas at you, throwing some content examples at you, seeing what you like while we write that first batch. And our goal is to sort of get the first piece of content out there in week three. And so what that does is that gives us approximately two to three weeks before we hit the one month mark. And at that point, we then have some data points from the real world about how people are responding. [Genevieve Bellaire]: Oh, Michael, sorry. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: I lost you. Oh, sorry about that. No, no worries. Okay, great. [Genevieve Bellaire]: You cut off right as you were saying. One month mark, we have some data points from real world about how people are responding. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, so we get some… Sorry about that again. This Airbnb is not my friend today. But yeah, so we’ll get some data points from the real world. And then we’ll basically say at that point, okay, based on if it’s social media, how many followers the account has, or if it’s an email list, how many emails is it? And how are we converting those into customers? Sort of already, we’ll use that combined with sort of those initial data points to say, okay, we’re at this point, let’s make a plan for what we want to hit and sort of what we’re targeting will depend on your goal. So if that’s, I want to build as big of an email list as possible. Okay, great. Let’s figure out how to do that. If it’s, I want to maximize engagement on my tweets. If I want to, you know, go viral on LinkedIn three times a month, we’ll figure out what that, what that means and sort of make it custom to you. But until we get those initial data points, I always hesitate to be like we’re gonna get you 10,000 followers in 90 days or something like that, you know, yeah Great. [Genevieve Bellaire]: And then last thought is is there any discount if you do multiple of these options? [Michael Houck]: Yes, so if we package together social and the newsletter In one way or another we’d give a 10% discount And one other thing that people like to ask is long-term commitment we’re totally monthly the month. All we ask is 30 days notice before cancellation. We’ll send over a doc for you to look at before we finalize and move forward. OK, great. [Genevieve Bellaire]: I think this is pretty much what I need to bring back to the team. Is there any resources? Are there any resources or anything online that you can send me or direct me to that might have more stuff to share? Yeah, I’ll send you our one-pager in Notion. [Michael Houck]: And it has basically what we talked about, but it’ll have it all in one place. [Genevieve Bellaire]: Perfect. This is great. So nice to meet you. Thanks again for making time while you’re traveling. Hopefully you have some fun plans for the rest of today. But this is super interesting and I will circle back with everybody and then get back in touch. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Great. [Michael Houck]: Thanks for grabbing some time, Genevieve. Good to meet you and stay warm up there in the north. Thank you. Bye. Talk soon. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Thank you.