- Duration: 24 min
- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01JKXPD1TX54665QX7BEFJXA9R (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JKXPD1TX54665QX7BEFJXA9R)
Transcript
[Michael Houck]: I’m jealous. I was just in Patagonia this time last year and I need to- Yeah, I was in Argentina and Chile. I did Chile last month. Where in Argentina were you primarily? [Conference Room (Jameson Pitts) - Speaker 2]: Well, we were in El Chalten and also in, oh, why is my mind blinking right now? We were just hiking. We did like Mount Fitzroy and the Patagonia logo. And then we did El Perrito. Ice Glacier and all around and then we went over across the border to Chile and did the W track. And yeah, ate a bunch of steak, drink a lot of Malbec, had a great time. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I’m with you on most of that. I think you did the hiking more intense than me. I’m just hanging out in Bariloche, just my little German Swiss mountain town. [Conference Room (Jameson Pitts) - Speaker 2]: Are you skiing or what you’re in the summer, but that’s the big ski town isn’t it? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, big ski town lakeside stuff is nice to just doing some hiking but Yeah, just a good place to chill out and kind of decompress. So it’s nice. Wow. I want to come co-work with you Bring Jameson to Yeah, we’re here in Austin the Augment office. [Conference Room (Jameson Pitts) - Speaker 1]: Oh, cool. I stare right at Noel. Our desks face each other. He’s home right now with the new baby. Yeah, yeah. Big, big, big change for him. [Michael Houck]: Big time. Yeah. [Conference Room (Jameson Pitts) - Speaker 1]: Well, thanks for setting aside a few minutes. Basically, like, we’re new getting to the marketing team, getting plugged in here. I’ll be, the title’s Head of Marketing, so I’m just coordinating everything. My mission is kind of like to professionalize the marketing organization, get Knoll, get the co-founders out of it, bring discipline to, you know, the way that we manage every channel, have specific benchmarks for each channel that ladder up to the business goals they’re trying to do, which really, to kind of open up a whole inbound side of the collective funnel for Augment. And that’s like really the mission. They’ve been doing it. You know, the capital markets team have pretty much been doing it old school. So now we’re here. And so, yeah, I just wanted to catch up. I know you, are you, Noel told me about Megaphone, which I think is your product, your company, right? And then I know there’s like some like service scope with your team managing Knowles, LinkedIn, is that right? Do I have it right? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: So some background on me. So I’ll go very quick TLDR. Spent four or five years in big tech. I was early, helped build Uber Eats, started a few cities. Ended up at Airbnb after a couple of years, product manager there for Airbnb Plus, built that product. Got laid off during COVID, started a company called Launch House. We raised about $23 million from Andreessen and some other firms, including a venture fund that we raised as well. Ran that for a few years. It's now sort of become the venture fund, a weird sort of progression there. And then since then, it built up sort of a personal, excuse me, personal holding company. We have some media assets. We have Megaphone, the kind of marketplace SaaS platform. And then we also have our microphone studio, which is our kind of content agency. We work with Noel through the content agency primarily. We do his LinkedIn, as you said, and we've been seeing some good success with it. So we also now have started growing the Pulse newsletter. We have like a sort of offshoot service from the Ghostwriting Agency where we help grow newsletters as well. And so we just signed that and started doing that, I think, the day or two before he went out. [Conference Room (Jameson Pitts) - Speaker 1]: I know. OK, sweet. You said the agency is Megaphone Studio? That's like the studio of Megaphone and Megaphone Studio. OK, gotcha. And then how do you do that? How are you growing the newsletter? Because I know I've met Adam Valenta, who I understand is writing the newsletter. But you're working to build a list. Is that right? Yeah. [Michael Houck]: So we're not writing the newsletter today. That's a separate thing. We've talked to Noel about potentially consolidating. I think he just maybe will revisit that when he gets back, you didn't have time to really dive into the details on what that transition would look like beforehand. We've talked about it. As far as the growth side, we've basically built up a very unique database of about 200 million emails. And so it's sort of like you'd think about like a Zoom info or an Apollo. But the difference is, instead of being able to classify people just by their job title or their geography or things like that, We've also tied that to their social media activity. And so we can tell who they're engaging with, what's the sentiment and topics of the content that they're posting, what's in their bio, and turning that all into structured data that lets us pull incredibly targeted lists. It's like social media newsfeed advertising, but directly in people's inboxes. And so we've started to do that for my newsletter, for a few of our clients. It's gone really well. So I talked about it with Nolan, he was interested in trying it out. [Conference Room (Jameson Pitts) - Speaker 1]: So that's where we're at with that. Sweet, sweet. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. [Michael Houck]: And that's through a Megaphone or Megaphone Studio? Yeah, Megaphone is the SaaS platform. Basically, we have this creator network of like four to 500 creators. And when you're posting content on social media, you can take the URL, drop it into Megaphone, set some parameters, and then we match it and send it via like Telegram or WhatsApp to those creators. And they get paid to leave an engagement and amplify it to their audience. [Conference Room (Jameson Pitts) - Speaker 1]: It's like when we post something on LinkedIn and send it in Slack and try to get everyone to comment. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: It's with big accounts. [Conference Room (Jameson Pitts) - Speaker 2]: And that newsletter feature is through Megathon as well then? [Michael Houck]: No, so it's all sort of the same business for contract purposes, but you just got to think about it Megaphone is the creator network platform. Megaphone Studio is the content writing and newsletter growth. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Cool, cool, cool. [Conference Room (Jameson Pitts) - Speaker 1]: So I have a question. What do we do? What do we do with the Augment company LinkedIn, which neither no one is running or no is doing themselves. And so I feel like it's just like a huge missed opportunity. The like company the company's own channels, you know? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I definitely think we could be doing more with it. I talked to Noel about this when we first got started on his LinkedIn. The thinking at the time was that, you know, sort of in like, I know how much you guys are following startup influencer people, but like, Andrew Gazdecki, acquire.com, you're familiar with him? [Conference Room (Jameson Pitts) - Speaker 1]: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: So he's, you know, he's done a really amazing job of sort of building his personal brand in the niche, putting out relevant content. And then it was really easy for him to build the company account once that was true, because people automatically trusted a company that he was promoting all the time. So the thought early on was that if we had to choose between Knoll's LinkedIn and the company account, it probably made more sense at the time, at least, to focus on his account. Whether that's changed now, I don't think it's been long enough to say for sure that it's changed. But I definitely think we could do some things with the company LinkedIn, because right now, to your point, I know. Much is happening there. [Conference Room (Jameson Pitts) - Speaker 1]: Yeah, I mean, and I just have like, real, like, you know, just like marketing department problems of like, they've hired a bunch of people. And like, no one's writing LinkedIn posts about these people on return on maternity on paternity leave, right? Like, I'm just like, What are you talking about? Right? Like, like, you know, what do you mean? How's that the process? So um, yeah, I don't think we'd have to choose. That would be something that's like kind of on my just like, you know, sketching out the channel coverage and who's doing what, like that's like a problem for me. Like company socials is like a question mark, like no one's doing it. So if there's some way to discuss like expanding our engagement or something, I'm totally into it. I know that Noel really liked the way the content has been working through his profile, like the process and the content and everything like that. So I think it would be natural to just broaden that, if that makes sense. Maybe your service is like 10 times expensive than I think it is, and that's why you picked one, but I don't know. I think it's gonna make sense, so yeah. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, no, we just decided to test one initially to get and see how they fit the 50 stabs, but yeah. Of capacity, the writer who currently works on those account is Jacob, who's probably met the slack. He's honestly like, he's I don't want to say I don't play favorites with the team. But he's one of our best writers. He's the guy who actually will be writing my own LinkedIn as well. We're starting that up next week. So I love trusting him to take on sort of anything we throw at him. And he has capacity to do the company account if you also want him to take on the newsletter or anyone else on the team who amplify their voice. We're happy to do that. We price on like a per account basis. And so the volume will determine what like the actual increase would be if we want to do, you know, daily posting from the company account versus like just one a week and we're high touch, it's totally fine. So you let me know what scope would be, I'll come back with a with what the proposal will be. And since we'll be packaging things together, we give a 10% discount on everything too. Okay, great. [Conference Room (Jameson Pitts) - Speaker 1]: What's the frequency that Noel's account is at? Yes, so let me triple check. [Michael Houck]: I don't want to give you the wrong info. But I think he's on our full account takeover plan, which is basically, he's doing short form or long form primarily. I think he's just doing a mix of the two. Yeah, so we're paying $3K a month for that right now. And so that’s going to be full content ops. So we’re in there engaging with thought leaders in the niche, driving conversations and the replies of his posts. We did a profile audit and optimization when he first joined. Right. And then we’re delivering weekly batches of basically the equivalent of three really solid long form posts or like, you know, 10 plus short form posts. [Conference Room (Jameson Pitts) - Speaker 1]: It’s usually going to be a mix between the two. Yeah. OK. I think we could do worse than just like double that to include the company accounts. But so maybe could you, could you give me like, you know, whatever you like you’d recommend. I know you’ve got the, the best idea, the strategy or the way the, you know, the, the him, you know, CEO, founder account interacts with company account. Maybe that’s overkill or maybe you can be like two options. Like here’s one a week and here’s the full Warren thing. And then I’ve got like, I’ve got like an, in our series with Sakura that it’s going to be happening like bi-weekly or something. And who the heck is going to run it? Who’s going to run it right now? No one, right? I don’t know. Me, Noel, right? [Michael Houck]: We’re just going to get in there and write some rights. So like, I don’t know. So… We can make this run a little smoother to take out some of the question marks from the equation for you. No problem. That’s fine. [Conference Room (Jameson Pitts) - Speaker 1]: Go ahead. Sorry. As far as the newsletter, let me get back to you. I haven’t talked to the guy who’s writing it yet, so let me find out about that. But that’s kind of like a maybe. And I would say this is like, social is just like a hot, you know, I don’t know, gap for me to fill, but also is like, I don’t know, over the next couple of weeks, when I see how everything’s running, you know, it might be good to like sync back up again. And it might be like, whatever the heck, right? Like consolidating more things change the process a little bit. Oh, could you tell me a little about the process right now? Is it, it sounds like Jacob’s maybe like queuing up posts in some tool, Noel’s reviewing them, and then if that’s true, which tool, and then is Jacob interacting with Augment Compliance at all, or is Noel doing all that? [Michael Houck]: Yeah. Yes, so the way it works right now is that on Mondays, typically Mondays, Jacob will send some ideas for topics and maybe specific questions about those topics, we’ll get responses from Noel for those, basically his unique insights and expertise. And then if we get those in a reasonable amount of time, we get the batch done by the end of the week with those incorporated. Once that’s done, then we send it to compliance. And that all happens in our notion. So we have a notion set up. I can add you to that. I can add you both to that. There’s a column, I believe, with you guys specifically for the compliance review as well. Person is actually in the Notion can review in there too. And we get a few weeks ahead also, so we’re not scrambling from week to week to make sure that we hit some posting deadlines. So yes, it’s all integrated in that process. [Conference Room (Jameson Pitts) - Speaker 1]: It all happens in Notion and Slack. Do you know if your team’s interacting with the compliance tool, Hadrius, at all? Or not? I don’t think we are. You probably know. So I wonder if this is just the These are just small in the weeds workflow things for me to streamline. I think someone is taking it from, because for FINRA, we have to log everything in a compliance tool. So someone is copying it from your Notion and pasting it in there. And I don’t know who, definitely not Deetra. No way Deetra is doing that. So maybe one of the compliance associates or someone is doing that. So anyway, I just got something for me to figure out. And that might be exactly what you’re doing. It might be the best way to do it. I don’t know yet. I just want to track down all the players. [Michael Houck]: You let me know what works best. We have an ops guy on the team, too. So if that’s something you want to follow on us, we’re happy to take that on, get it off your guys’ plate, no problem. But yeah, we know the compliance step is important. And we’ve been doing what the original plan was there. [Conference Room (Jameson Pitts) - Speaker 1]: If we want to change it, that’s totally fine. OK, no, I got you. I’m discovering right now. And then I will. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: us. [Conference Room (Jameson Pitts) - Speaker 1]: Okay, I know, I know we only have 15 minutes or time, you’ve been really good to us, like answer my questions, anything else you want to talk about anything else that like, any other products or services that augment should [Michael Houck]: be using or things we should be doing differently that you want me to know, like, I think today we’re in we’re in the right spot. We’ll I’ll send over an email after this just sort of summarizing everything options for the company account as well. I’ll mention the newsletter too, in case we want to go that route we can check in on that in you know later this month or next month or whenever works um but yeah look we’ve loved working with you guys so far and we’re sort of excited to keep doing that and and I guess working with you guys now too primarily as you get up to speed on those models and everything so I’m excited us too thank you so [Conference Room (Jameson Pitts) - Speaker 1]: much for your time cool all right we’ll see you around on slack cool good talk soon all right see you bye Bye.