- Duration: 23 min
- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01JKXMWZNGDD101QX6HG8AV68B (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JKXMWZNGDD101QX6HG8AV68B)
Transcript
[Chuhan Wang]: cruising along in Patagonia while working on the startups. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, that’s the vibe right now is building from somewhere where it’s warm. I live in New York normally, so it’s been snowing there. I’m glad to not be there right now. [Chuhan Wang]: Yeah, where are you? [Michael Houck]: A town called Bariloche. I don’t know if you’re familiar with Patagonia. It’s like the kind of northern side of Patagonia where there’s more of a town, more infrastructure. You go further south, it’s all about the hiking. Here you get good hiking skis too, but it’s, you know, you get a town also. [Chuhan Wang]: Oh, interesting. I’ve never been, but I’m really looking forward to going at some point. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I would recommend Bariloche. It’s nice. A lot of, like, Swiss-German architecture due to immigration, like, a hundred years ago. And so it’s got, like, this a lot of, like, chocolatiers and beer halls and, you know, German food. It’s a very interesting place. [Chuhan Wang]: Really cool. Really cool. Well, I am also interested what you’re building and potentially just understanding if it could be useful to my startup. So I guess it’s getting to know you, getting to know the founder story and also getting to know the product. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, for sure. I mean, so we do a few different things. The business is a holding company, right? So we have like our, our first, our media assets was like a founding journey newsletter. It goes out to 70,000 founders every week. That’s like an advice column, basically. But then we also have Megaphone and our Megaphone Studio, which is our ghostwriting and content agency. Those are kind of two sides of the same coin, right? So in order for content to perform well, for you to get good distribution, you need good content and the right distribution. So we sort of built these two things together. So on the content side, we have our content ghostwriting agency where we work with founders and startups to build newsletters, to grow their LinkedIn presence, to grow their presence. And we have a team of writers we’ve worked with for a long time. My partner on the agency is Blake email, who actually has an even bigger audience than I do. He’s really great. He’ll get in the weeds with the with the writers, nothing will get sent to any client without sort of him or I or both of us in some cases reviewing it first. And we work pretty async because we work with with founders, and we don’t want to put a ton of meetings on your calendar. So if you want to do Content interviews, we’re happy to do them. But we find that most of our clients are fine with doing async through Slack, where on Mondays, we’ll send a few topics that we’re thinking about and questions that, based on our research, we want your specific subject matter expertise on. All we require from you is a two to three minute rambly voice note where you just share your take and your impression and opinions. And then we use that to turn it into unique content that’s delivered to you on a weekly basis. We’ve got a few weeks ahead, so we’re not scrambling from week to week to deliver. We also do content ops around that. So if we’re doing social media, for example, we’ll go in and we’ll identify thought leaders in your niche who you should be replying to. And we’ll actually write and send those replies on your behalf, so we get some free impressions from their viral posts. And then same thing, we’ll drive conversations in the comments of the content that we post from your account. We’ll optimize your profile, all that sort of stuff. On the newsletter side similar story we’ll set up a welcome sequence turn sequence re-engagement automation segmentation we’ll do reporting we handle the whole thing and then the other side of it of course is distribution and so we have this creator network of about four to five hundred creators in various niches and if you’re doing social media you can send the url of a social media post to them through our network and they’ll comment on it repost it do a quote post just to give their audience, who we match with you to be a good fit, exposure to your content. So that helps drive followers. [Chuhan Wang]: Curious about how much of the work on the ghostwriting side is done with AI, because you mentioned that you have real human writers, and we’ve been actually doing a combination of human and AI ourselves too. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, it’s probably not in my financial best interest this, but we don’t use any AI at all. We’ve sort of taken the ideological position that while AI can be good for inspiration and kind of learning about topics, which we’ll use it for research, as far as writing the actual content, nothing gets done with AI because our goal is to get your unique voice and the amount of prompting and training that we need to do on the AI side to get it to that level, it still wouldn’t get to the point where a human can just sort of get the intonation from your voice notes, check out your content on social media, check out the content of influencers who have the voice and the audience you want already, and turn that into something unique for you. So it’s actually, we think, our hypothesis is still not quite at the level that it would need to be to get to the level that we would be able to get it to. [Chuhan Wang]: I see. Got it. And are you talking about primarily text-based social media and blogs? So not so much of the, I guess, we also do video interviews where we sit down with founders to talk about, I guess my company focuses on board management, investor communications, so we’ll sit down with founders to talk about their best practices, things that happen in the boardroom, but that wouldn’t be part of what you guys would be able to cover, right? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, no, I took a look before the call. It’s cool, very interesting. And I think that we wouldn’t be taking on sort of the video production side of things, but if you wanted to take on clips out of those and for us to write little like, oh, here’s what this person was talking about. Here’s this insight that they had. We could totally do that. [Chuhan Wang]: And we do do that for some of our existing clients. Got it. Got it. Interesting. I mean, interesting kick on AI. Also, I was wondering about your creator network. You mentioned that you have about 400, 500 creators in various different niches. I wonder, you know, what kind of niche do they cover? Do they work better? Prosumer products because we are more of a I guess an enterprise product, and I don’t know I mean I have had a hard time Maybe I just didn’t look and we’re didn’t spend enough time looking Finding influencers in my [Michael Houck]: space has not been super easy for us Yeah, I think what I would say to that is that you know the people who are Going to be your guys customers. They’re following and if the the sort of startup entrepreneur world influencers as well And so while I’d say the majority of those people’s followers are going to be maybe earlier stage than might need the product, the same people will be in that audience. I would imagine you guys have a higher ACV than those earlier stage companies do anyway. So the volume probably, you wouldn’t need as many deals to close for it to be positive ROI. That’s my hypothesis. You tell me if I’m wrong. But if that’s the case, then they’re in those audiences. It’s showing up in their feed. So it would be the same thing. If those people are commenting on your stuff, we have a ton of creators in that niche, then they would see it for sure. [Chuhan Wang]: Got it. Is there a way to see just maybe a mapping of your creators and their niche and their audience and following just to get a sense of who they are? [Michael Houck]: Yeah. So because it’s paid engagement, we sort of keep anonymity on board. Sides pretty firmly. We’d never tell someone you’re using paid engagement or anything like that. But what we can do is, you know, maybe we can share, oh, in the niches that you’re interested in, we have this many creators, and they have aggregate this many followers, we’d be happy to provide that. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay, okay. [Chuhan Wang]: Yeah, because to your earlier point, my worry is that if it’s too early of a founder, usually, I mean, I when I started the company, I was hoping that companies would use us when they form a company, when they form the first board. What we learned the hard way is people don’t usually start to think about this as a top priority until they’re a series C and maybe beyond. So at that point, I don’t know if they are still paying that much attention to the startup influencers because they feel like they’ve made it, like they’re graduating from that class. We also have non-profits, higher education, which which is another, I guess, a different sector of people who also need to manage boards. And I don’t know if you have creators that map to those audience. So I’m just curious to… [Michael Houck]: I think we have a few people in education. I can get back to you on that. Nonprofit education and sort of the startup space. I totally hear you on sort of them being later. I think, you know, we made it through a series A for my last company and we never even had I totally hear that. I think I think you’d be surprised at how active some of those later stage folks are on social media, not to learn from the influencers necessarily, because they’ve already sort of gotten the company to that point. But just sort of stay connected to the startup culture. I mean, you know, even myself, I’ll spend endless hours scrolling through a bunch of stuff just because I want to know what’s going on, either its current events, or it’s what are people talking about? What’s like the current thinking and So again, maybe they’re not going to be as high volume, but I wouldn’t say that they’re not engaging with those people’s content. [Chuhan Wang]: Got it. Got it. And what made you, I guess, what inspired you to work on this? [Michael Houck]: Oh, it was really simple. So I was building my last company. You know, I’d worked at Uber and Airbnb for a few years before that. I got laid off during COVID and basically as my last company grew, we became pretty profile and I realized that, you know, we wanted our customers. And so the best place to get those customers was through content marketing. And so I decided to build up my own audience. I built a network of creators myself and I went from 400 followers to about 55,000 on X and from about one to 2000 to 43 or 44,000 LinkedIn in like a pretty short period of time. And the way that that happened was because I had people like, you know, saw Hill bloom, who’s a good friend of mine, engaging with my stuff, showing it to his audience, Lenny Ruchitsky, big people like that, right? And so I was like, well, okay, the only reason I was able to do that is because I have this high profile startup, I’ve made these connections, I’m good at meeting people and all that stuff, but not everyone has the time necessarily to devote to that. And so if I can provide that as a service from these people who already have big audiences and help people grow and get more distribution for their personal brand or for their startup, You know, that seems like a good mission to me. So that’s what we started doing with the platform first. And then we just had so many people who were asking us, well, we really like your content. Your content performs really well. Can you just write it for us too? [Chuhan Wang]: I was like, all right, let’s build an agency. Got it, got it. [Michael Houck]: And how big is the team right now? Yeah, so we have nine writers who are active. And then it’s myself, Blake, who’s like my partner on the agency, and then Ben manages all. Of the content ops side of things, and just generally all that. Everything else in between, the glue between a bunch of different stuff. So that’s the agency. And then for the platform, we have a team of four engineers. [Chuhan Wang]: One’s full time, three are part time, and a designer. Got it. [Michael Houck]: And the writers are all over the world? Majority are US-based. We have two that are in India, but the majority are US-based. And between Blake and I, we’ve worked with them in various capacities for years. So it’s a small, tight-knit group, but we’re continuing to add it as we’re adding more clients. The agency has actually doubled in size since January 1st. [Chuhan Wang]: So we’re growing fast. January 1st of this year. Wow. Well, congrats. Two last questions for you while we have two final minutes on the call. Um, what kind of customers are your sweet spot right now? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Like size industry. [Michael Houck]: I mean, because on the, on the, uh, distribution side or on the content side, maybe both. So on the content side, it really varies. I mean, we have writers who have expertise in everything. We’re, you know, one of our newsletters is a cannabis newsletter. Another one is a education, like for teachers newsletter, right? It’s like a wide variety there. Tools, right? We have a whole bunch of people who are doing AI tools with us right now. So with that, we have expertise across the board. On the platform side, the startup entrepreneur world is definitely, I’d say, our bread and butter. Also a lot of stuff on marketing and a few other niches as well. So yeah, on the writing side, I wouldn’t say that there’s a clear focus. Our clients are all over the board. [Chuhan Wang]: Got it. OK. And cost-wise, for me to do a mental calculation of the ROI, what are we looking at? I guess on the distribution side, I’m more interested. The ghost writing side, I’m trying to assess. If your writers are based in the US, I assume they’re not going to be cheap. So I’m just trying to understand that. [Michael Houck]: No, you’d be surprised, because we’ve worked with them for a long time. We actually have pretty good deals set up with them. So I’ll give a quick pricing on that, and then we can talk distribution. On the content side, so if you want to do a weekly which is like, I’d say the standard for most newsletters at this point that we build, that’s $34.95 per month, so $3,500. If you want to do a bi-weekly, it’s $19.95. And if you want to do a monthly, it's $9.95. For social media, it’s $29.95 if you want sort of the full account takeover, where we're posting daily content, we're engaging with thought leaders, we're optimizing your profile, we're driving conversations in the comments, all that stuff, that's $29.95. If you just want, say, smaller batch of content per week, maybe one to two long-form posts and a couple short-form posts as well, that’ll be $19.95 or $2K a month. So the pricing is, I think, more affordable than most people think. They hear content agencies, oh, $5,000 or more. That's not how we operate. And if you were to package those things together, it'd be a 10% discount on both. And then on the distribution side, we have three tiers, actually. We have a free tier. The free tier kind of lets you build your private group with your network to sort of share your posts with them just for free, that you can get up to six people in that group at one time. If you upgrade to one of the pay tiers, that group becomes an unlimited size. You can put 100 people in there if you want. Rather than copy pasting your URLs of your posts in a bunch of group chats or DMs, just send it once through us. And then you also, with that, get access to the creator network. So there are two tiers of paid. One is $89 a month. One is $49 a month. That with the 89-month tier, we're going to send your posts to the creators immediately once you send it to us. With the 49-month tier, there's a one-hour delay. And one hour is not going to make or break the success of a post, but it will have an impact on impressions. Those immediate engagements do make a difference. And then when you're sending posts, you add a budget to each post. We don't take any percentage of your deposits. Everything gets put into the network. But creators have their own prices. And a good way to think about is that for every 100,000 followers a creator has, they're going to increase the cost of a comment by roughly $10. [Chuhan Wang]: And what would you estimate to be a reasonable budget to start trying this? Yeah, so average budget per post is like $30. [Michael Houck]: For a big announcement or launch or something like that, people tend to spend over $100. But for an average post, it’s usually about, I’d say, between $25 and $30. $35 as an average. [Chuhan Wang]: Okay, so if we're doing $49 or $89 a month to you guys, and then we're doing, say, a post every week to the group, that would be... Is a post every week the right cadence to be thinking about this? [Michael Houck]: That's sort of a content strategy decision for you. Some people post every day, some people post once a month. You want to allocate your budget. [Chuhan Wang]: Okay, so we're looking at a sub 400-ish total monthly spend to just give it a try to see if it works. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, and we don't want our creators spammed with a bunch of stuff, so that's why we do limit it like that with the upfront subscription part too. But we know you put in actually goes into the network. [Chuhan Wang]: The $30 budget per post, that’s per creator sharing it. So if you get three creators engaged, no, okay. It’s going to vary. [Michael Houck]: So for example, for one post, you might get matched with a creator who has 300,000 followers. They charge $30 for their engagement, right? But on another post, maybe you get matched with six creators who have between 40 and 100,000, and they'll charge between $4 and $10-ish for their engagements. [Chuhan Wang]: I see. Got it. Okay. Cool. Interesting. Well, I would love to learn just a bit more, whatever information you can share about your creators to see if it makes sense for us to give it a try to just see if it works with our audience. Cause I’m still a little skeptical about just how niche our audience is. Yeah. And, and congrats on the, on the progress so far on the, on the agency side, it’s really impressive. Yeah, thanks so much. [Michael Houck]: I’ll follow up with an email tonight just summarizing everything we talked about having kind of TLDR for you. If you have any questions, just let me know and we’ll go from there. [Chuhan Wang]: Will do. Sounds great. [Michael Houck]: Great to meet you. Nice to meet you. [Chuhan Wang]: Nice to meet you, Ben. [Michael Houck]: We’ll talk to you later. Bye.