- Duration: 29 min
- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01JMANRY1M2MB42HJHNX5C8H6E (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JMANRY1M2MB42HJHNX5C8H6E)
Transcript
[jordan hoo.be]: Where is that? Where in Brazil? [Michael Houck]: It’s very far south. It’s like an island right off the coast. It’s like the ritzy beach island of Brazil. All the people from Rio and Sao Paulo come down here for the summer vacation. [jordan hoo.be]: Unbelievable. Are you Brazilian? No. [Michael Houck]: I’m just doing a little South American trek this winter. I was in Chile. A few places in Argentina and now wrapping it up here with a nice little beach break. [jordan hoo.be]: Unbelievable. Well, I might need some recommendations because this is my only thing you’ll hear me brag about, hopefully. This is my Brazilian soon-to-be wifey and my Brazilian little boy. Oh, no way. That’s amazing, man. Yeah, that’s why I’m intrigued by it. Everything’s happened. Quick in the last four or five years. I wanted to get to a place, like when we had the little guy, I had to make sure that we had someplace we could call home that she was proud of and that they felt cozy. And I have taste. And so I want to have a beautiful celebration. And weddings these days can be pretty pricey. I plan on getting married in the next year in Brazil. And I ultimately want to own a house there someday. So I’ll be bugging you for recommendations, but I think it’s called, my pronunciation with everything’s awful, but Boezus or something. Is there a beach town called Boezus? [Michael Houck]: I actually, I don’t know Brazil that well. You probably know it better than I do. I’ve been to Rio and Sao Paulo before, but nowhere else. And so I would definitely recommend Floripa is sort of the sort of slang version of what they call it. It’s very beautiful. The food is great. It’s all modern and new. And happy to happy to give some recs. [jordan hoo.be]: It’s been it’s nice and beautiful right now. So yeah, unbelievable. Well, I do. We’re already essentially married, but I plan on proposing there in the next two or three months somewhere in Brazil, probably Rio. And then and then I hope to do my my wedding there. [Michael Houck]: Where are you based right now? [jordan hoo.be]: I’m based in Las Vegas. I’m from Boston. I met Bianca in Boston. We moved here. We were living in Back Bay of Boston up until the day before they stopped doing flights for the pandemic. And we packed up and moved to Vegas. I had a business partner that was working out here at the time, and I didn’t want to be stuck indoors if it was going to be as long as we thought it was going to be originally. So since then, we’ve called Vegas home. We went back to have the little guy for like a nine month period, I put her right next to her parents so that she was comfortable through that whole thing. [Michael Houck]: But yeah, we’re in Vegas. Amazing, man. That’s dope. I’ve actually I’ve barely explored Boston. Sadly, I grew up in Philly. So I’m East Coast guy myself, but didn’t make it up to Boston too many times. But it’s just just too cold for me. But yeah, Vegas. [jordan hoo.be]: Yeah, well, I spent some time in Philly and I love my my East Coast people. There’s a little bit less fluff and get down to the point a little bit. But I appreciate you taking the time. Tyler speaks very highly of you. I think just to give you just a brief background, I founded Hubie when I was about 24 years old. I’m now 32. Hubie 2.0 was founded right at the start of the pandemic. I built something very similar to a link tree dating back to like 2016 that I shelved for a couple of different reasons. We had to reimagine things when the pandemic hit. We rolled out kind of what I had built originally, this idea of like the central location on the web. I’ve had some great people that have gotten behind the project, like a lot of our big users, like the, whether it be like the David Dobrik’s or the Harry Jousey’s or kind of like the Tom Brady crew, they’ve been very supportive as either investors or as um, advisors of the company. Um, and I feel like I’ve got a lot of, uh, stories to tell. I’ve, I’ve helped and found that other companies during the time we have, uh, during the same time, we’ve had to have a skincare company, an Italian skincare company called Aloativa, um, that we, we founded around the same time as Hubie, not intentionally. Um, and then we had the little man shortly after. So it was a chaotic couple of years, but, um, We’re building tech right now at a faster rate than we ever have on the Hubie front. I had to create a little bit of a story because we didn’t, admittedly, I’m not a technical founder, I do love product. My team gives me a hard time because I try 15 new products a week and they’re like, there’s no way it can be productive. And I’m like, guys, is it okay if I have a hobby and I like products, but I love trying out new products whether it be like knowledge-based stuff, whether it be more of like the new school kind of documents or like a to-do type products, calendars, all that jazz. I think I’ve tried every single one offered in the space at this point, so I think that it would be probably productive to put some of that experience to use. I have a lot of strong relationships in the space. I think I’ve taken in a very unique approach as it pertains to founding a company, raising money, how to get creators to connect and to use and ultimately how you leverage them using your products in a way that can be effective. The thing that I was most proud of in the early going is we were an invite only platform at the start. And I never paid or incentivized any of our users to use the product. And we ended up getting some of the biggest names in the world. Still like the Alex Earls, the Jeff Bezos, and Tom Brady’s, to use the product organically. So I think there’s an interesting story there. And then I would love to figure out a way to highlight some of the incredible people we have building and working on the project. So I’ve planned on doing this in the past. I’ve got a lot of shit going on, so I end up not following through on it. And I know with things like this, you have to be consistent. And so I think that’s what led me to you. [Michael Houck]: Okay, that is really helpful context and also sounds like a pretty fun journey, especially with sort of setting up multiple things at the same time while the family is growing and all that stuff. That’s pretty cool. A lot of respect to you for being able to balance all that. But yeah, I mean, look, this is what we do. For some quick background on me, I was in big tech for a while, four or five years at Uber and Airbnb. Part of the early team at Uber Eats helped hyperscale that business. Then went over to Airbnb, built Airbnb Plus, got laid off during COVID and started a company called Launch House. We raised a Series A from Andreessen, about 23 million in total between two rounds and a small venture fund that we raised. Ended up folding the company into the fund and just investing in the amazing founders that we met. And the past two years, I’ve been building up sort of a personal holding company. So, you know, I built my own audio to 100K on between Twitter and LinkedIn. I have a newsletter that goes out to 70,000 startup founders like an advice column every week. And then more recently, I’ve spun up a SaaS product called Megaphone, where we have a network of four or 500 creators that you can pay to engage with your content on social media and basically get amplified to their audience. And also this content ghostwriting agency where we help founders sort of tell the story of their startups. So, you know, we’re pretty lightweight because we know that founders are super busy. We’re not trying to add a bunch of meetings to your calendar or anything like that. But yeah, the goal is just to pair you up with a writer on our team who, you know, sort of can be your thought partner, can download your brain and kind of get the message and the stories out there. My partner on the agency is this guy, Blake Imahl. You might know him from LinkedIn or X. He has, even a bigger audience than I do. Nothing will kind of go back to you for final review until one of us has thoroughly reviewed it with the writer. I think we’re one of, if not the only, like content agency that’s actually operated by creators ourselves. Like a creator investor or something like that. Excuse me. So yeah, so we do newsletters, we do social media, X and LinkedIn specifically, you know, threads if you’re interested in that. But yeah, I mean, look, from what I’m hearing from you, it sounds like it’s, it’s, there’s a lot of stories that you want to get out there. There’s a lot of ways that you can tell those that can maybe encourage people to use the product, or maybe it’s just more of a more of a personal newsletter, kind of sharing your expertise. So I’ll throw it back to you, sort of how do you see that, that vision? [jordan hoo.be]: I have a lot of thoughts. One of my biggest hurdles and issues is taking all the madness and refining that into something that’s digestible. And I like to, I like to storytell internally to my team has always been the most important aspect of it for me. But then being able to kind of like take that or like a stripped back version of that and share that at scale. One of the things that people don’t know about us is it’s kind of been operating in stealth mode, but it’s more so been just like, we don’t of the bandwidth to really market it effectively, is this idea of, we were an invite only platform at the start, and we were really focused on just the people, the high traffic drivers that were migrating audiences from platform to platform. And as part of that, I realized very early on, by nature of our platform, we have a better understanding than any or than most of who’s actually influencing what. And what I mean by that is we know who’s driving the most traffic to hair care products or to health based products. And we have a marketplace layer called Creator Pass where we can allow brands access to those creators in order to activate on these campaigns. And I believe our first party data point is as good of an indicator as any of who the right fit creator is for a certain campaign or brand. Or offering. And so I think that part of what I want to do is storytell to create a sense of more inbound. One of the things that we did early on was we did a lot of event-based stuff in launching our brand. For instance, like all of David Dobrik’s events. Like I convinced him to put the first one on and it’s got me in trouble because now we’ve had like 50 Cent and All-American Rejects and Snoop Dogg perform at his events. But the week following, those is the highest inbound we ever get. I’ll get emails from brands being like, Hey, I don’t know what the hell you’re doing, but we were interested and we want to learn more. And so I think bringing some clarity to that, like David gave me a Rolex for instance, on, on his birthday, just as a sign of like, thanks for like keeping following through on your word. And so like, after that, I’ll get a lot of inbound. Once again, people don’t really know what the hell it is I do, but they’re like, Hey, you must be doing something right. And so creating more clarity on that and driving more inbound and then giving the platform or just a stage to the rollout of our different features and products because we’re moving quicker on that right now. We have a newsletter of like, or like currently of like 350,000 or whatever. And so we can use that as a starting point for me. I don’t think a lot of people, I’ve never like, it’s never been important to me, especially after the little guy to be like, Hey, it’s me, Jordan. I’m the, I’m the who be guy. But, but I I think bringing a little bit of personal touch to that and kind of just a more of a face behind it will help give people a little bit more of a clear sense of who we are. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I think also, you’ve been living this now for quite a few years, right? You’ve had these stories, you’ve had these experiences, you sort of know what’s going on behind the scenes. A lot of people don’t see that. It’s one thing to have messages that are trying to convince people of those things or persuade them to do something or try something out when it’s from a brand, it’s a totally other thing where it’s from you, right? Where it’s face behind it, it’s written in a personable style. Yeah, 100%. [jordan hoo.be]: Yeah, I also think one of the things I mentioned before, it’s even outside of our traditional offering. I think there’s stuff that we can offer people. On my skincare company, we raised a million dollars there every dollar was from influencers themselves. And so like the pairing of influencers with early stage deals is something that a service that I think people would be, because you don’t want, when you’re an early stage company, you know, this, like you need effective frequency, like having anyone doing one post, unless it’s Alex Earl, it’s like, not, you’re not going to get your money’s worth. It’s when they hit them four or five, six times. And then I hear it from a couple of different credible sources on, on different angles where you actually start to see the conversions come. And so I, think that highlighting that certain stuff can just bring more business interest inbound. And I think we’ll streamline a lot of what we’re doing here because it’s a lot of it’s like the, the one we need to get out of the business of the one-to-one stuff, um, or, or filter down to like, ultimately these are the people we’re having those like real long one-to-one dialogues with. Cause it’s just not scalable. Yeah, I totally agree. [Michael Houck]: That’s when, that’s when you’re going to drive conversion. It’s like a, it’s an exponential curve. You, you throw one offs out there, you drive some, but then they see it from multiple data points, they get the convincing social proof from multiple places they trust, and it skyrockets. Look, I mean, it sounds interesting. Sounds like a project that I think we’d be excited to take on. So I can tell you a little bit about our process, sort of how it would work, and we can go from there. That’d be great. So as I said, super lightweight. We work with founders. We know you’re busy. We do one kickoff call at the beginning, where it’ll be 45 minutes to an hour, you, me, and the writer on our team. I have someone in mind already who’s worked with other creator-focused clients on our side before would be a good fit for this. So yeah, we’d hop on, we’d chat through things. You filled out an onboarding form beforehand and we’d have gotten started on research. That call would be actually pretty productive. We’ll now write on content pillars, formats, timing, things like that. And then from that point, we’ll set up a shared Slack channel. And every Monday, we’ll throw some ideas in there, some specific questions based on our research about those ideas. All we want from you is like a two to three minute rambly voice note, or longer if you want, where you sort of give us your unique expertise perspective on those questions. That way we can draft something up that comes from you. And then we deliver it by the end of the week. If we get that from you by midweek, it’ll be incorporated. And that’s it. We’ll work to get a few weeks ahead, of course, so it’s not ramble from from week to week basis. So yeah, we’ll have a notion board where you can see all past stuff, all ideas and things like that. But it’s it’s pretty lightweight overall. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Very cool. [jordan hoo.be]: This would be awesome. Cool. [Michael Houck]: Okay, so pricing, weekly newsletter 3500. And that includes, you know, we’ll do a welcome sequence, we’ll do re engagement sequence, we’ll set up all the settings, we can help out with design and brand if you want, but you know, a lot Clients like to kind of take that side on themselves, up to you. We have a designer on staff kind of in the wings either way. And if you wanted to layer on social too, we could do that. That would be 3K for sort of a full account takeover where we’re engaging with the right thought leaders, we’re replying to your replies, we’re optimizing your profile, all that stuff. You probably already have done some of that stuff yourself or a process is set up for it, but if not, we’re happy to take it on. And if you wanted to just have kind of small batches of social that we would send you, that would be 2K without sort of the ops and like the full content batches each week. [jordan hoo.be]: Cool. I’ve never been effective on X. It hasn’t been my platform. Like, honestly, like on social, the extent of my presence, I was active for a little bit on LinkedIn. On social, it’s been like, hey, like I’m on Instagram, I’ve got like a handful of pictures with cool people and as social proof and like, Some big people follow me. So I think people do the BS check of like, oh, they clicked Instagram. Oh, this person, this person, this person follows him. Must be the real deal. I’ve never been active. I probably haven’t posted on Instagram since June of last year. I’m not very active. But I think if there’s one, I think that the echoing of the same messages we’re creating for the newsletter onto a platform like LinkedIn to drive some more additional inbound could be effective, but I think that can be something that could be layered on as a secondary step. Cool. [Michael Houck]: That sounds good. We can get it started with the newsletter. And then if we’re seeing good results, if you’re liking the content, uh, we can, we can talk about layering on LinkedIn. We do a 10% discount if we, if we do both, uh, both together as well. So how about that later? Um, cool. Okay. Well, look, I can send over sort of a TLDR notion doc that goes over everything we talked about, summarize is everything. But I mean, sounds sounds good. Any sort of blockers on your end? Before we get rolling? [jordan hoo.be]: No, I mean, the only thing is, is that like, to going back to one of my initial points is like my, my issue of, of kind of like, I have a million docs and ideas that are just like, like chaos. So like, yeah, like the the kind of the brain dumps into slack might be like, hey, here’s a bit of this bit of this bit of this. And I just don’t know if that’s like, sort of sifting through the noise to find the signal is something that’s easier for these writers. I imagine they’ll see the bits that are like, okay, this is money, get rid of this shit. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, that’s, that’s what we want clients who have like a lot of internal ideation, docs, writing samples, things like that. Those are the easiest clients to work with, because we’ll very quickly get a sense of like, okay, there’s all this stuff in here. We think these are good and of the ones we think are good Here are the ones that Jordan really likes and wants to wants to put out there quickest feedback loop for us. [jordan hoo.be]: So we love that. That’s great Okay, cool Yeah, I think we’re golden. I’ll have my assistant Isabella who actually lives with us. She’s half Manny half assistant, which is very Convenient. Yeah, I’ll have I’ll have her looped in on all this so that I don’t drop the ball in a communication And then yeah, it sounds good. I think I I think Tyler already already hinted at sort of the price point there. I think this can be hugely effective if done correctly, so I’m ready to proceed. Cool. [Michael Houck]: All right, man. I’ll look out for a note from Isabel. If I don’t hear from her tonight, I’ll shoot one over to you and then- No, you just get that dialogue going. [jordan hoo.be]: If you don’t mind, I’ll loop her into that. [Michael Houck]: Cool. I’ll shoot you a note right after this and we’ll get things rolling. [jordan hoo.be]: Great meeting you, man. Appreciate the time. You too. Excited to work together. Talk soon. Talk soon. Bye.