- Duration: 18 min
- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01JKXHBXVDYPXWFKG6HEXE9W86 (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JKXHBXVDYPXWFKG6HEXE9W86)
Transcript
[Jae Yoon]: Diamond is building in the B2B accounting space, and I’m looking to increase my digital presence, LinkedIn X. I love your newsletter. I follow it all the time. Thank you. I was watching the podcast yesterday with Shu, what’s his name? He dropped out of college, started a field fellowship. What’s his name again? [Michael Houck]: Luke Sofinos. Yeah, I was watching that one. [Jae Yoon]: Talking about vertical solutions, and Diamond is building in the accounting vertical space. Yeah, I just wanted to learn more about Megafone and what you offer there, really. [Michael Houck]: Well, yeah, I mean, we really have two sides of things, right? We feel that content and influence happen when you have good content and good distribution. And so we built the Megafone platform to help with the distribution side. And we also have a ghostwriting content agency to help with the content side, if that’s of interest as well. On the growth side, we have a network of, at this point, I think it’s like 500, 400, 500 creators. I don’t know the exact number. In various niches, and what happens is when you sign up, you get access to the platform, and you can basically do two main things to the platform. So you can build your own sort of private group of your connections and your network, and you can also access our creator network. Build your own private group, that’s free. No need to pay a subscription or anything like that. You can just set it up. You get, I think, six or seven people you can add to that for free, and then when you share your post on social media, drop the URL in the megaphone, and we’ll send it directly to them, like via WhatsApp or Telegram or SMS. So you don’t need to be copy pasting links to a bunch of different people and spending your time on that. If you want to use the Creator Network, there is a subscription. There’s two tiers. There’s a pro tier and a starter tier. Pro tier is 89 per month per account. Starter tier is 49 per month per account. Difference between the two tiers is that with the pro tier, your posts get shared with creators right away. With the starter tier, there’s a one hour delay before we start sharing it with them. And you know, one hour is not going to make or break the success of a post, but it will have an impact on the eventual impressions that the post gets. And so each creator sets their own prices for then how much they want to charge to engage. You’ll set a budget per post, sort of like ad spend on a social media ad. And that goes into the network. We don’t take any commission on that on your deposit or anything like that. And then sent to them. If they don’t engage within one hour when we send it to them, we send it to a different creator instead. And so you wouldn’t get charged if that first creator engages. The way we track engagements is we’ve built a pretty robust scraping bot ecosystem where they’re going to go in and check to see if engagements are made on time. And that’s all verified by a manual person as well. So double verified. And then and that’s it, nothing gets taken out of your account until the engagements happen. There’s a lot of scraping you’re doing there, huh? Yeah, we do. We do a fair amount of scraping. Yeah, we really do. It’s been a long project, but it’s pretty sophisticated now. [Jae Yoon]: Yeah, that’s really cool. Thanks for sharing that. So now let’s say the creators see my post. Let’s say the $89 plant here, and they see the post. Where are they seeing it? You said WhatsApp, like text message. Is that the route? [Michael Houck]: OK. Yeah. Sign up, we get their contact info, we see what platform they want us to send posts via. In most cases, it's WhatsApp or Telegram, sometimes SMS. But they get the link, they get maybe one line of context from you. And you can write that when you're when you're sharing it, about what you want them to say. You can also add some other sort of filters or settings like, oh, I only want comments, or I only want quote tweets, if it's Twitter, right? I only want creators from these countries, or with this minimum size audience, and things like that. And yeah, so we send it to them and the timer starts and they get notified and then they'll go drop a comment on it or repost it or whatever you've asked for. [Jae Yoon]: Based on what you've seen, what's been the high range of what creators are charging versus like the lowest range? [Michael Houck]: A good way to think about it is based on their audience size. So for every 100,000 followers that a creator has, they're roughly going to charge $10 more. For a comment. So somebody who has 50,000 followers might charge $5. Somebody who's got 400,000 followers might charge somewhere between $30 and $50. So it's going to vary. And then reposts and quote posts are more expensive. And those vary significantly. Some creators will actually price them exactly the same as comments, although that's the minority. The majority will make it anywhere from doubling it to, in some cases, even more. But what our matching algorithm does is make sure that your post is being prioritized to the people who are the best fit and also the best value. [Jae Yoon]: Got it. And the people joining, not the creator side, but the folks joining, are they mostly startup founders? [Michael Houck]: We really have three different types of people who get value out of Megaphone. One is founders and marketers at startups who want to grow the startup's presence, either the founder's personal brand or the company account. The second is like emerging creators themselves people who just want to get that social credibility of having big creators comment on their their stuff or reposted and can grow followers that way and then the third type is is ghostwriting agencies right people who want to just juice the Engagement for their for their clients. So you definitely fall somewhere between that first and second bucket. [Jae Yoon]: Okay, cool Yeah, can you tell me more about the ghostwriting part? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, sure So, do you know Blake Emall? You mentioned him on the podcast, his name. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Jae Yoon]: He's got an even bigger audience than I do. [Michael Houck]: A really, really smart guy. He was the first CMO at Copy AI. Basically, we've teamed up to build a ghost trading agency. We've been running it for about a year. He's sort of in the weeds every single day with the writers. I'm working with the clients, making sure they're happy, bringing new folks into the agency. And I will review content sometimes too. But the two of us have partnered up, we've got a team of writers who between the two of us we've worked with in various capacities for a long time at this point, all super legit writers. And we work with founders, so we sort of know that we're not trying to put a ton of meetings on your calendar or anything like that. If you want to do content interviews with the writer, you can, but no obligation to. Our process can be totally async through Slack except for one kickoff call at the beginning. Basically, every week on Monday, we'll propose some topics that we think are interesting and have specific questions about those topics based on our research. We want your subject matter expertise on those questions. And so the ask is, if you can record a two to three minute sort of rambly voice note in a shared Slack channel, that gives us sort of the emotion and intonation that we need to add your unique insights and make it in your kind of unique voice. If we get that from you by the middle of the week, it'll be incorporated to that week's batch of content that we deliver at the end of the week. And yeah, everything's tracked in Notion. We help out with sort of content ops on the account as well. So if you're, excuse me, if you're working with us, then we'll go in and we'll identify people in your niche who we think they have the audience you might want, and we'll work with you on who those people are. We'll engage with their content from your account. And therefore, you know, when they have posts go viral, you'll get some free impressions on your reply. If it's a little bit funny, or maybe a little bit insightful, and you'll get views on your profile and hopefully convert some followers from that. We'll also reply to people who reply to the content we post from your account to keep conversations going and let the algorithm know that this is a post that's generating discussion. And so we have two tiers for ghostwriting. One is sort of that all-inclusive. We take over the account. We do all the ops. We deliver full batches of content daily post for the account. That's $3K a month. 29.95. And then we have a 2K or 19.95 tier where we’re just delivering sort of smaller batches of content and not doing the sort of opposite of it as well. Awesome. [Jae Yoon]: And when it comes to like the smaller batches of content, how many pieces of content generally do you offer there? It’s going to vary based on what you want. [Michael Houck]: And so what I mean by that is, you know, some clients will want like really long essay type content or like if you’re on X, it would be threads. If you’re on LinkedIn, it would just be long form posts. Some people want screenshot essays. Some people just want to build sort of that high frequency showing up in people’s feed more often with shorter posts. So if it’s a shorter post, you know, it can be somewhere between maybe five and seven a week. If it’s a longer post, it’d probably be closer to two or it could be a mix between the two as well. We do one long form a week and a couple of short form. So yeah, that’s how I think about it. Cool. Okay. [Jae Yoon]: I think I’m interested in like starting out with a megaphone piece and then see kind of what I can do there. I want to explore that option. So how does that work? [Michael Houck]: Do I just sign up for a link and take it from there? You can just sign up on megaphone.network, our main site, and you’ll go through onboarding. You can pick what tier you want, add your accounts, choose your niches as well. That helps us with the matching. And then, yeah, you’ll get into your dashboard. And on the dashboard, you’ll see you have your broadcast metrics and stats. Thanks, Ben. For sharing the link. And you’ll also have, you’ll also be able to build your inner circle. So the inner circle is that sort of private group that I mentioned before. If you’re on one of the paid tiers, you can build that group to be as large as you want. You can add 100 people to it if you want. If you’re on the free tier, you can only add, I think it’s six people to it. So yeah, that’s just a choice you’ll make during onboarding. [Jae Yoon]: One last question is when I add them, are they like already agreeing to be on that platform? [Michael Houck]: more do I have to ask when I add them? Yeah, so if you want to send you’ll get like a customer referral link for yourself. And if they they then have to obviously sign up and add their contact info to an onboarding flow that shows up for them when you when you invite them. They can obviously just choose the free tier that’s not going to impact how many people you can add if they choose the free tier. But if they do choose a paid tier, you will actually get a recurring commission on that forever as well. Okay, got it. Cool. Thank you for that. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: This is great. [Jae Yoon]: Let me know if any questions come up, feel free to shoot us an email. [Michael Houck]: Happy to hop back on and chat. But yeah, excited to have you on the platform. For sure. [Jae Yoon]: And I know you, I know you do like consulting on the side, like, do you still do that? [Michael Houck]: I might want to take it. I don’t I don’t advertise it too much, but I still do do it. And, you know, be happy to happy to discuss something that’s interesting. [Jae Yoon]: So as your main focus right now, running the podcast, newsletters and these products? Yeah, I mean, you know, our grocery agency is exploding. [Michael Houck]: We’ve doubled in the last month. So we’re seeing a lot of success with newsletters as well as with social media. So we’re starting to do a lot of newsletters for startups. Basically, just a way to sort of stay top of mind, build trust with potential customers and things like that. So that’s That’s sort of been our main focus since January 1st is because of how quickly it’s been growing. But yeah, the media properties are a big focus as well. We’re actually launching, Ben has been in the weeds editing a YouTube video that we’re really excited about, not podcast related, but just like a long form video. We’re gonna publish that probably on Saturday if we get it done this week. So yeah, media is a big priority, Megaphone and the ghost rating agency as well. [Jae Yoon]: Cool, yeah, it’s hard to get accountants trust. I’m always looking for ways to get better with that. So cool. Sweet. Thank you, Michael. Appreciate it. All right. [Michael Houck]: I’ll follow up with an email, and we’ll go from there. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: All right. [Jae Yoon]: Please do. Bye. [Michael Houck]: See you.