- Duration: 20 min
- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01JMD6MN9A6C1CJTYMW4SVH9G8 (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JMD6MN9A6C1CJTYMW4SVH9G8)
Transcript
[Michael Houck]: Hey, Michael. Steve, how you doing, man? Pretty good. How are you? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Good. [Steve Spurgat]: Good to meet. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, good to meet. Got to say thanks to Waleed for connecting us. Yeah. It’s funny, because I was talking to him about some TikTok stuff. [Steve Spurgat]: And then we were just talking about how do we get business. And he’s like, yeah, I use Twitter for everything. And he said, but you run it for him, basically. [Michael Houck]: We do the posts, we write the posts, we schedule the posts, we optimize his profile, we engage with thought leaders in the niche from his account, we reply to the comments that come through on his content, we’ve done some giveaways and things like that too. Yeah, I’d be happy to give some background on me and sort of what we do and all that if that’s helpful. Yeah, that’d be great. Yeah, so I was in first big tech for like five years, Uber and Airbnb, early team at Uber Eats helped hyperscale that business and then got laid off from Airbnb during COVID and built a company called Launch House. We raised about $23 million in total between a couple rounds and then a small venture fund that we raised as well, backed by Andreessen. And then after that, basically folded that company into the fund. The fund is still active, but the rest of the company is not. For the past two years or so, I've built up a personal holding company and a personal brand. So I have 100,000 followers between X and LinkedIn and a 70,000 subscriber newsletter. And so built a kind of like SaaS marketplace platform called Megaphone, where we can match people's social media content with relevant creators in their niche who are online right now and willing to engage with it and amplify it to their audiences. I've been doing that for a bit now. I have a few hundred creators on the platform. And a lot of the people who are putting content into that to get amplified were like, well, my content is not actually that good. So I need some help with that too. And so then sort of organically built this content agency on top of it. I've been running it for about a year now. And we help founders. We help investors. We help startups with newsletters. LinkedIn X and even threads if you want. And yeah, our process is pretty lightweight. I partner in the agency is this guy Blakey mall has an even bigger audience than I do. And, and that's it. That's kind of the TLDR on, on, on what we do. That's cool. [Steve Spurgat]: How does, so do you do the megaphone thing for while eat as well, or just the content management piece? Sometimes, sometimes he'll, he'll put some budget behind posts. [Michael Houck]: It's sort of like ad spend. You got to put budget behind posts to that the creator is interested in engaging. A lot of his stuff is performed organically. We haven't even needed to. Because I think the topics he's talking about are popular interest right now. So he's had pretty good results even without that. [Steve Spurgat]: Nice. How do you deal with the fact that, I mean, I don't know how many clients are like this. But in our case, we're SMEs, right? We're subject matter experts on certain things. And you probably don't know what we do as well as we do. So do you, is there like how much autonomy is there and like, do you need us a lot or is there a certain process around getting data from us or how does that work? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: So, you know, we work with busy people. That's what we do. Um, and you know, I've been a founder for years now myself. I know how it goes. Um, so our past is super lightweight. Basically when you first start, we'll have you fill out like a, it's long, it's like seven minute long on board. We get a lot of data from there that kind of helps us. And then we do one kickoff call. That'll be an hour. It'll be you, me, and the writer who we sort of match based on their expertise with you. We'll go deeper on content pillars, the voice you want, accounts that talk in the way that you want to replicate on your own. And then from there, that's the only required meeting we'll ever need from you. That's it. What we do on a week-to-week basis is on Mondays, We'll send over a couple topic ideas and specific questions about those topics that came up during our research on them. All we ask from you is if you can go in Slack, we have a shared Slack channel that we'll set up, Slack Connect. And if you just share like a two to three minute sort of rambly voice note, where you just brain dump on us. Yeah, you get the emotion, you get the intonation. If you want to share any internal notion docs and stuff like that, we're happy to read through those as well and leverage those. Usually the voice notes are sufficient. If you wanted to do content interviews with the writer, we can totally accommodate that. [Steve Spurgat]: It's totally fine. But we find that most of our clients prefer the Slack notes. Got it. Trying to see the Texas client. That's cool. Do you do business accounts as well? Individuals? Yeah, we we do we do a mix. [Michael Houck]: We have some clients who, you know, we start with the founder account, and they're like, Oh, can you just take over a company account to or vice versa? Or just one or the other is fine as well. I kind of wonder what works better. [Steve Spurgat]: Yeah, I mean, it's interesting we do. So we kind of do our own Instagram, then we don't do anything on X because it just never really did well for us. And frankly, it's just like, was hard to manage. Um, because you needed for X, like you really need to, I mean, as you know, need to, you need frequency, you need to like stay engaged and comment and stuff like that, which you do all of that. So that's kind of how we never bothered with it. Um, so I guess if you, so it's how much is it a month again? [Michael Houck]: So it's three K if you want sort of the full account takeover, that means we'll do like daily content. We can repurpose it between LinkedIn and X if you want. Um, we'll do the content ops where we're engaging with thought leaders and also driving conversations in your replies. We'll optimize your profile, all that kind of stuff. That's three K a month. If you just say, I just want a few posts every week. Um, just like good quality stuff. Then that's $2K a month without the ops. [Steve Spurgat]: Got it. I see. And if you do X and LinkedIn, it’s still $3K a month because you're just using the same content? Yeah, we won't be able to port everything over. [Michael Houck]: Obviously, some of it is optimized for whatever the primary platform that we choose will be. But for something like a screenshot essay, or a short form post, or even now, some of the longer form posts, you can port over pretty easily too. We'll just take care of that for you. [Steve Spurgat]: Got it. And then what if it's two accounts and there's some crossover there? Is there like a discount there? If it's like our, say it's my account and the BigHuman account? Yeah. [Michael Houck]: So it depends how much content we'd be creating for each account. So we need to get in the weeds a little bit and figure that out. But if you're doing multiple accounts with us, there's a 10% discount across the board. [Steve Spurgat]: Got it. OK. And I guess with the, so how much are the occasional megaphone posts? What do you charge for that? [Michael Houck]: So that that's going to vary, uh, as a, as a content client, you'll get a free subscription to megaphone, but you'll still need to put budget behind your, behind your broadcasts. Um, and the sort of guidance I would give you on that is that it's, it's probably cheaper than at least most people think it is, uh, for every a hundred thousand followers a creator has, they've charged roughly 10 dollars more per comment. So you might put, say the average is like $30 per, per post you put through there. You might get three creators with six figures of followers, or you might get, you know, five or six with, with smaller audiences. Our minimum is 20 K, um, for something like a big launch or an announcement, people generally do a hundred plus. [Steve Spurgat]: Got you. Um, a hundred plus what? [Michael Houck]: Oh, a hundred dollars or more. I don’t know. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. [Steve Spurgat]: Got you. Yeah. That makes sense. And then are those also targeted, though? Do you have people who will comment who are in tech and who are in our vertical? Gotcha. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: When you sign up, you’ll mark the niches on your account, and the creators do the same thing. We have an algorithm that takes into account how well-priced they are in terms of price relative to audience size and also past performance, as well as how aligned they are to your niche. It all happens automatically the second you share the post with us. [Steve Spurgat]: Got it. Very cool. Are you seeing X different now with Elon craziness? [Michael Houck]: I get this question more than I would even think, but I guess it’s fair. [Steve Spurgat]: It’s hit or miss. [Michael Houck]: There’s definitely been somewhat of an exodus of some people to LinkedIn, for example. There’s more competition in LinkedIn now than there was two or three years ago for good quality content. But we still see X performing well. Waleed is an example of that. He’s had, I think, two posts in the last week do some serious numbers. But yeah, look, I mean, startup world, a lot of folks are still on there. I think more business-focused folks probably spend more time on LinkedIn rather than Twitter than they did before that. [Steve Spurgat]: Yeah, got it It’s cool. Um I think that’s all my questions Do you have like case studies or things like that that you could send through I could share with my head of marketing Yeah, I can share some sort of anonymized examples of clients [Michael Houck]: and sort of the numbers that they’re seeing on on recent content that we’ve created for them Um, and I can share over some other stuff too. So I’ll get that all to you, uh later today, uh, and then um We can go from there. I don’t know if I mentioned, we also do newsletters, if that’s of interest. We’ve seen a lot of people come to us for newsletters in the last few months. We actually partner directly with the founder of Beehive, who’s a good friend of mine. He sends us a lot of newsletter clients, too. So our newsletter operation is pretty robust at this point. So if that’s ever of interest, we’ll work with that, too. [Steve Spurgat]: Yeah, I mean, it’s frankly something that we used to do ourselves, and it’s got behind on. We’re kind of particular. Our own audience, I take it your newsletters are to or retention, not to not to? Or do you have lists? [Michael Houck]: It depends, we do have, we built a database of 200 million people’s emails. And we’ve actually, unlike Apollo or zoom info, or something like that, we don’t just tag those by job title and geography and things like that. We also actually have scraped their social media data. And we can, you know, target them by who they follow what they talk about what’s and their bio, things like that. So if you want to go down that route, it would be cheaper to grow a newsletter that way than with paid social media ads, which is the most common way that people grow it. [Steve Spurgat]: How do you get away with not getting spam reports, though, if they’re unsolicited? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, so my partner on that side of the business is a Teal Fellow who’s a world-class cold email And so what we do is before we would add anyone to the beehive account or the newsletter account. We would be sending them basically like pen testing their inbox for activity and likelihood to report a spam by just sending them cold emails about not related to your brand, but just like the same topics and see how they respond to them. So we have all that data and we prioritize the people who are who are low risk. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: That’s interesting. [Steve Spurgat]: Okay, that’s cool. Yeah, I mean, if you have anything to send them, on that as well, I would definitely look at it. [Michael Houck]: Cool. All right. I can summarize everything we talked about. I’ll shoot you over one pager later today. And if anything comes up while you guys are chatting internally, happy to hop back on and chat through anything else, too. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Awesome. Cool. [Michael Houck]: Steven, good to meet you, man. Yeah, it’s good to meet you, Michael. [Steve Spurgat]: Excited. We also have clients that this could be relevant to. I’m talking about for myself now, too, but there’s you know, potential for, for some work with our clients that I’ll let you know about as it comes up. [Michael Houck]: I mean, it sounds, it sounds great. We’d love to, we’d love to, to put the foot in the door with, uh, with you. And then if you’re happy, uh, you know, talk about clients from there, but, um, that, that all sounds great. Amen. Sounds good. All right. Talk more soon. I’ll send that over. Thank you. Bye.