- Duration: 34 min
- Platform: meet
- Attendees: Adrian Parlow, Adrian’s Circleback.ai Notes, Michael Houck, adrian@pointone.com
- Source: Read.ai 01JM0AN208MHVWY0DQJ5F76S37 (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JM0AN208MHVWY0DQJ5F76S37)
Transcript
[Michael Houck]: us on the sort of content side, him on the sort of lead gen side for the newsletters that we would write for folks. So it’s been great. We were helping a bunch of startups. Our agency has grown a lot, but yeah, good to meet. And thanks to you for grabbing some time with me too. [Adrian Parlow]: I appreciate it. Yeah, that’s interesting. So you were a founder before, right? And then now you’re doing this newsletter thing both like yourself and on an agency basis? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, so let’s see. I was in big tech for a while with Airbnb, then found a company called Launch House. We raised Series A from Andreessen, raised a venture fund as well, invested in like 50 companies. And then in the past like two years, I built up a personal brand and sort of personal holding company, totally bootstrapped. We have some media assets. We have a SaaS platform. And we have an agency. And so the agency side is ghostwriting content. We can do LinkedIn, we can do X, we can do newsletters. We work primarily with startups and their founders. [Adrian Parlow]: Got it, interesting. I guess, I mean, I don’t know if you want a little bit of introduction to me, but yeah. So let’s see, we’re a seed stage legal team tech startup, so I used to be a lawyer and then spent some years at a series of FinTech startup. And then we’ve been working on 0.1 for about a year and a half. Winter 24, raised a seed round coming out of that, about three and a half million. We have sold mainly to small and mid-sized law firms, more recently focused on big law firms. So kind of primary focus now at big law firms. Thinking about different channels to basically, well, do a couple of things. One, generate some recognition in the market at the enterprise level. But also, I would say, maybe even more importantly, is build up mindshare in the small to midsize, like the SMB market. Because it’s pretty much like a distribution game, much more so than a product game. And it’s really hard to get lawyers to answer you. So my overall sense is that content marketing works pretty well in legal, but you’ve just got to get the eyeballs, essentially. [Michael Houck]: You want to attract less than sell, basically. [Adrian Parlow]: Yeah, lawyers are really like, they have this knee-jerk reaction that they really don’t like being sold to. But at the same time, they definitely want the thing that we’re building. So it’s like, how do you educate them and make them aware that this is a thing, but without them feeling like you’re trying to sell to them. So yeah, outbound email is pretty hard. It can work. We’ve had some amount of success with it. But my sense is that SEO and more passive stuff, yeah, maybe a newsletter makes sense here. But at the same time, we’re pretty bandwidth constrained. And so trying to figure out, is this something that makes sense to invest in? How do I think about ROI on this? Obviously, it’s both time and money expensive to get it up and running. So yeah, that’s kind of the phase that I’m at right now. Cool. Okay. [Michael Houck]: And just so I have some context on where the business is at, how big of an email list do you guys have to start with? [Adrian Parlow]: Yeah, I was talking to Matt about this. I mean, it kind of depends on how broad you want to go with that. Initial email list. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. [Adrian Parlow]: I was telling him that like I can, you know, I can pull together like some conference attendance lists that we’ve been to. I can pull together like every person that I’ve had a touch point with over the last 18 months and you know between all of that it’s like I guess 3 to 5k contacts maybe. But obviously like I haven’t asked these people if they want to receive a newsletter so I assume you last in person, see what happens, basically. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I mean, look, if you have their emails, if they’ve given you permission to email them in general, then there’s no real reason not to add them to the email list and, you know, give them a way to unsubscribe. And if they unsubscribe, that’s fine. What we do is we’ll always set up automations as well, where, you know, pretty aggressive early on kind of auto churn engagement criteria that we look for. And then we can relax that over time as sort of the initial list settles in and the people who want it have already done so. But yeah, it makes sense. So I guess, what else are you evaluating, just so I know sort of how to talk about sort of newsletters and what could be valuable there for you guys and content in general? [Adrian Parlow]: A couple of questions in my mind, I guess. One is like, how How to build this up and like how quickly you can build this up? Two is How do I think about roi like I think you know max voting something like a dollar fifty per subscriber For growth, how do I evaluate that upfront cost versus what it will be worth me in the longer run? And then maybe three is like what kinds of founders or what kinds of companies do you see this being? Successful with and not successful with. Okay. [Michael Houck]: And then has he already given you sort of context on his process and sort of where the data comes from and how we get the subscribers and all that? Or do you want me to go into that too? [Adrian Parlow]: I don’t know, maybe not intentionally, KG, but he was a little bit vague with like where the data comes from He was like, it’s not LinkedIn. And I was like, okay, so where is it? And he was like, we have our ways. Okay. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: That sounds like Matt. Okay. So I can, I can shed some light on it. So we have kind of two sides of what we do. One is our business. One is sort of we white label his service. Our business is the content writing. So myself, you know, I’ve built up an audience of a hundred thousand between X and LinkedIn over the past few years. My newsletter goes out to 70,000 founders every week. It’s an advice column. And they drive a million dollar business for us through that newsletter. So I’ve done this, I’ve set up the funnel, I know how it works. As far as the agency goes, Blake Emal is my partner in the agency. You might know him from social media. He’s got an even bigger audience than I do. He’s in the weeds with the writers every single day. And the writers are folks who, between the two of us, one of us has at least worked with for years at this point. Between our content and the agency. And so really high quality writers, vast majority are US based, but everyone meets our quality bar before we bring them onto the team. And our process is simple and sort of optimized for founders. So we don’t require a ton of meetings. We don’t put any time on your calendar at all, actually outside of one kickoff call at the beginning where we sort of go deep on content pillars, that kind of stuff. And then after that, we set up a shared Slack Connect channel. Every Monday, we’ll send over some topics that we’re thinking about, as well as specific questions about those topics that came up during our research. That’s what we want your sort of unique subject matter expertise on. And the best way to respond to those is not to spend 20, 30 minutes writing out some long answer. It’s just to record a quick two or three minute voice note where you ramble into Slack. We take that. We get the emotion, the intonation. We turn that into your voice. If we get that from you, by the middle of the week, it’ll be incorporated into that week’s batch of content that we deliver on Friday. And we’ll always be a few weeks ahead as well. So we’re not scrambling from week to week to make sure we have enough to post. Everything’s tracked in Notion. We handle all ops and scheduling as well. So we’ll take over the account. We’ll get the credentials on social. We’ll post the content. We’ll engage with thought leaders in the niche. To your replies to drive conversations in the responses. Same sort of thing on the newsletter side. We’ll handle all the automations, all the segmentation. We’ll do reporting. We’ll set up a welcome sequence. We’ll handle design help, even if you need that, although a lot of clients like to do the design themselves with someone in-house. But we have a designer on staff as well, if needed. So it’s sort of entirely done for you. All we need is those little voice notes in Slack. And if you don’t get them to us, we’ll still put together a good piece of content and it’ll be slightly less unique because it won’t have your sort of unique insights. That’s the content side of the business where we sort of just take that off your hands. Any sort of immediate questions that come up on that or should I go into sort of the growth side of things too? [Adrian Parlow]: Okay, so that’s posting the newsletter and that’s also like LinkedIn is basically, you know, not a lot of lawyers on X. So LinkedIn is kind of the main thing. So are you talking about posting content on LinkedIn as well? Or like, what’s the total scope? So it depends. [Michael Houck]: You basically can pick between the two, add them both together. We’ll give you a discount if you do both, a 10% discount. How much content we’re doing for LinkedIn and how frequently we’re sending the newsletter are up to you. Pricing would be $34.95 a month for a weekly newsletter, or $19.95 for a bi-weekly, or $9.95 for a monthly if you want, although most people choose to stay of mind for potential customers more often than that. And then for LinkedIn, it would be $29.95 for a full batch of content, full operational takeover of the account, or $19.95 for just smaller batches of content per week and limited to no ops support. So yeah, if you do both, you get the 10% discount. Otherwise, those are the prices. [Adrian Parlow]: Okay, got it. That makes sense. Okay. Yeah. Let's talk about the growth side of it then. Cool. Okay. So growth side is for the newsletter. [Michael Houck]: We do have sort of a growth option for social media too. We built a creator network of about four to 500 creators who we can sort of, you set a budget, they go engage with your content based on earning some portion of that budget. So they amplify it to their audiences. We don't have a ton of people in the legal space though. So I don't think that'd be relevant for you guys, not huge creators in the legal space that I'm aware of, or at least that we haven't contacted yet. But on the newsletter side, we can target anyone. So what we have is essentially a giant database of a couple hundred million people's emails. And we've enriched that data, not just with like Apollo style, job title, seniority, background, education, etc. But also with their social media activity from some platforms. And so what that lets us do is take unstructured data, like what topics they're talking about, and also structured data, like who they're following and what's in their bio, and turn that into a full data set that we can query against and know who will be a good fit for your newsletter. Then what we would do is we'll send emails to them to almost pen test their inbox to see if they're an active person who's in subject lines like the topics that we'll be talking about in the newsletter. And if they are interested, then we'll add them to the main newsletter list, and we'll send them through an automation in Beehive to sort of make sure that they are going to keep engaging with the content from this newsletter specifically. If they meet engagement criteria within that process, then they graduate to the main list, and then you're paying for the subscribers at that point. So everything we're doing before that But you're not paying for those subscribers if they churn out or they mark something as spam or they say they're not interested. It's only the people who pass those double sort of actually triple validation to get to that level. [Adrian Parlow]: Got it. Okay. And so in these emails, so you're basically, are you sending them like a direct email? Like, I guess, what are you actually sending them? I'm curious what the messaging is to get Yeah, we're doing basically traditional cold email. [Michael Houck]: I'm not sure how deep you are in the cold email world, but attractive subject lines for the topic, the message itself, very concise, spin text, all hell, and so sort of personalized as well. And we're advertising basically lead magnets in their niche. And if they're interested in those lead magnets, the assumption is they'll also be interested in more content about the niche as well. The lead magnets, you know, we don't have the lead magnets for them. We're just pen testing. Are they interested in it or not? That's not branded with you at all. So they sort of, you know, there's no impact on your brand. This is just like receiving a random cold email and seeing if they're interested or not. [Adrian Parlow]: And so a lead magnet is like, we have this piece of content, like, would you be interested in it? Something like that? Yeah, something like that. But you don't actually have the content. And then if they are interested, then you just sign them up for the newsletter, basically. Correct. See, and then you see if they engage with the newsletter or unsubscribe or whatever. [Michael Houck]: Yep. And so that initial check sort of makes it, uh, extremely less likely that they'll mark the newsletter as like spam or something like that, because they'll already have already filtered out the spam people basically. [Adrian Parlow]: Got it. What percentage of the people that respond to the initial lead magnet ultimately like engage with the newsletter? I'm just curious. [Michael Houck]: It varies by two things. It varies by niche. And it also varies by how aggressive we want to be with the engagement criteria that we set up. So for example, if we're sending a weekly newsletter, that's four emails a month, essentially, right? Maybe we want to say that, okay, you know, our standard to start with is if they open two of the newsletter emails, or if they click on something in one of them, then they can graduate. But some clients like to be even more sort of open and say, no, they just open one or click on one. I'm good. Other clients say, no, I want to see them open or click on more than one. Right. So we're flexible with that. We can work with sort of what you want there. But my recommendation would be, let's start with two and one. And if we see that unsubscribe rates are high or churn rates are high or spam rates are higher than we expect, then we would just adjust that and look at that criteria. Out. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Gotcha. Okay. [Adrian Parlow]: I know you're making money off your newsletters directly, right? I assume that's sponsorships. Is that where the revenue comes? Like for my newsletter? Yeah. So we make money a few different ways. We make money from sponsorships. [Michael Houck]: We have a founder membership that we sell as well. We have a case study library where I've interviewed like a hundred founders and written case fundraising journey. And we also sell access to the Creator Network as a SaaS platform and also talk about the ghostwriting agency a lot in there as well. So the combined revenue from it, I think we're on track for like last 12 months, 1.6 or 1.7. So it's pretty substantial. Obviously, you have to make sure the right people are reading the newsletter so they will convert to things. But what I've found is that the newsletter sort of has slotted in between social media and actual sales of the product, where you can build trust, get unlimited shots on goal, and let people go deeper and make a more informed sort of purchase decision about whether they trust you or not than they would if you're just selling them a social media ad or a post on LinkedIn or something like that. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Adrian Parlow]: The other thing that I think is kind of interesting with this is stacking it with a webinar, regular webinars, so that basically this just is a way to get lots of people to show up to my I'm hoping. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, it's funny you say that because Matt and I are actually experimenting with doing a webinar for what we're doing based on my newsletter in a couple of weeks. So yeah, I think your mind is right to go there. [Adrian Parlow]: Yeah, lawyers love webinars and also you can they have to do these things called continuing legal education and you can give them credits for showing up to your webinars. It's like they get a credit that they have to get anyways and then you can kind of like pitched them at the same time. [Michael Houck]: Wow. OK. I wanted to be a lawyer when I was a kid. I said it when we went to Little League Regionals. That was my announcement. I wanted to be a lawyer. And it sounds like a very different world than what I ended up in. [Adrian Parlow]: You made the right decision. Yeah. I would not recommend it to most people. Yeah. OK. Let's take the assumption that I'm not trying to monetize the newsletter directly, right, um But rather use it as a channel to drive business for the company, you know It may be if the company goes south and sure like I'll have that later on but sure right now that's the idea Like how would you think about like valuing? [Michael Houck]: Each incremental subscriber versus the dollar 50 that it cost me to get them signed up yeah, I mean look it's just being candid with you, it's hard to do that until we know, until I know two things. One is like some semblance of conversion rate to sale for you guys. And there's just no way for us to know that right now. And two is like what the LTV of a customer is for you guys, which obviously the number, you know, I don't know that. Um, but what I would say is that for a long time, I ran paid ads on social media to grow my newsletter. I did that with Facebook, Instagram, X, we even tried TikTok at one point, the best you're gonna get doing that, like the best, if you have a killer lead magnet, killer creative on the ad is about 150, maybe even a little higher than that. And those people aren't going to sort of be, they're not necessarily gonna want the newsletter, they're gonna want the lead magnet, right? And so what we're doing is taking that, able to apply that same idea, but do it in a way that's more targeted. So instead of trusting social media to show it to whoever they think might be interested, we know people are interested and we can get right in their inbox. So again, more shots on goal with these people. So the idea is more repetition in front of those people, the better. And again, the vast majority of social media ads, if you're running them for a newsletter, you're going to get like 250 per subscriber. Like I worked with Matt McGarry's ad agency. He's like the number one paid ad guy for like I worked with Sawhill Bloom, a whole bunch of people. We were averaging about $2 per subscriber over the course of a year. And the quality and conversion to paying customers for us was not meaningfully different than what we see from what Matt and I are doing. Actually, the open rate and click rates are higher with what Matt and I were doing than that. So the short answer is there’s no way to know for sure yet. The long answer is what I’ve seen from my newsletter anecdotally, is better performance. [Adrian Parlow]: Right, yeah, better performance relative to paid ads. But the decision for us is kind of like investing in this or not investing in this. Sure, sure. And so that’s what I’m trying to weigh. It’s like, OK, I guess if I had 50,000 people in a newsletter, would that be worth $75,000 to me? You know, like, gut vibe says yes, but I don't need I need actual numbers. So I guess that basically what you're saying is I need to figure out how many of those people can I actually convert into contracts and then what's the LTV on those. The LTV is easier. The conversion rate is kind of like the big thing that I really have no idea. [Michael Houck]: Look, what I would do if I were you, just founder to founder, is I would say, I would map it out. I'd say, OK, we have 50,000 people on this list. If 1% convert to paid, Here's what that means for us. If 3% convert, 5%, 10%, right? Just pick out some conversion numbers and say, okay, here are what we would need to happen. And then, you know, we're month to month. We're not going to lock you in long-term. We need 30 days cancellation notice, that's it. So if it's not working out after some time duration where you feel comfortable testing it, you know, we shut it down. But, you know, our clients have been very happy in the couple months we've been doing this for them. So actually, almost all of them have expanded the amount of subscribers we're adding to the newsletter since they started, with, I think, two exceptions. So we had one guy go from 2,000 to 32,000 per month. So yeah, I can't give you exactly what it is. But what I would just say is set up thresholds for yourself. We give it a try. And if it's not meeting those thresholds, then we either adjust and iterate, or we call it a day. [Adrian Parlow]: Right, yeah, set a time box, whatever. If x% convert within whatever, three months or six months, then that's good. And if we don't hit that, then yeah, okay, that makes sense. Okay, so then applying this in our situation, basically what you'd be doing is you take all these people, you've got their email, which is easy. And then you've also got all their social media activity, which is a little bit harder. And then basically you're gonna run something kind of a search to try to figure out like who's interested in legal tech or legal AI or something like that based on what they're saying on LinkedIn or on Alex? Well, it's, yeah, we match that based on what you tell us. [Michael Houck]: So during the first week that you'd sign up, you'd fill out, it's a pretty extensive form. It's actually, you know, it's long for a reason, but it is long. And we take all the information we gather from you and we run that through create a search based on that. And that's who we start pulling. And then we start testing those people to see, you know, are they active? And the ones who are most active respond fastest, they go to the kind of the front of the line there. [Adrian Parlow]: Got it. And then what's the typical growth rate that you guys are targeting? [Michael Houck]: It really varies by client. It's based on your budget more than anything else. We have literally hundreds of millions of people's emails tagged this way. So, excuse me, if you want to grow by 50,000 or 100,000, a month, you know, we can try to make that happen. If we want to do five or 10,000 a month, we can easily make that happen. Right? Our biggest client is the person doing 32,000 a month today, but I don't expect them to be our biggest client for for long. [Adrian Parlow]: Okay. But I mean, even 5000 a month is like fucking massive, like you're good. So I wonder if this is like how much this works within like narrow verticals, right? Because lawyers, I mean, in the US, there's like roughly a million lawyers, give or take, internationally, maybe a couple million. And so what percentage of that can you realistically penetrate even over a long time period? I can't imagine it being more than 100,000. Even that seems like a lot. Yeah. I mean, hard to say. [Michael Houck]: We would scope the market, and we'd say, OK, based on the emails that we have, here's how many we think could be relevant for you above some certain threshold. Of relevancy. And we would target those. And then we get all those in the newsletter. And we say, Okay, great, we want to keep growing the newsletter, maybe, maybe the newsletter is becoming valuable on its own for you guys, too. We want to keep growing it and just keep targeting our core, our core user, but adding more people to it. Or maybe we say, we're happy with this list, let's just focus on converting them with the content from here rather than continuing to grow. So that's totally up to Got it. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: OK. [Adrian Parlow]: All right, this all makes a lot of sense. And I know I've already taken you over time, so. No, you're good. You're good. All good. Anything else we should be talking about? That's all that really comes to mind right now. [Michael Houck]: No, I don't think so. I would just ask, what is your guys' timeline for this? Next steps on our end? Just sending docs over and getting started. So if there's any blockers on your end, any questions that are lingering, let me know. [Adrian Parlow]: Yeah, I mean, biggest thing for us is just deciding that we want to invest whatever it is, like $5K a month or whatever, to do this properly. I probably would do newsletter and not LinkedIn. I don’t mind doing LinkedIn myself, especially if I have stuff to work with. But yeah, it’s really just deciding that this is something that we want to carve out of the budget, given that we’re still at seed stage. So that’s something I’ve got to talk to the co-founders about and give some reflection internally. [Michael Houck]: Cool. Sounds good. You guys chat. And then if any questions come up, happy to hop back on and chat more. I’m traveling tomorrow, but flexible basically all next week. So let me know. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Cool. [Adrian Parlow]: Thanks, man. Appreciate the time. Good to be back. [Michael Houck]: Talk more soon.