- Duration: 34 min
- Platform: zoom
- Source: Read.ai 01JMD1CE41SE5CS66FK347KR2C (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JMD1CE41SE5CS66FK347KR2C)
Transcript
[UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: What’s up? [Michael Houck]: Yo, how you doing, man? I’m good. [Blake Emal]: I don’t know why this thing keeps trying to join. I canceled this like a million years ago. [Michael Houck]: So I had the same issue with Fathom. I had to get on a 30 minute support call with one of their engineers because the support staff didn’t even know how to do it. [Blake Emal]: It’s the worst one. Oh my gosh, yeah. I’m trying Granola now. I’ve tried everything, every single one of these AI transcript things, I think now. And I still, I still am not sure if any of them are useful at all. [Michael Houck]: I like the read AI one because it only has to join once. So if multiple people on the call have it, it just joins one time and then it sends it to their, their accounts. But I don’t, I don’t, I don’t go back that often, but sometimes it’s, it’s helpful to like look at the transcript and stuff. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Blake Emal]: I just never have to lie since I don’t have a team. You never have to like funnel information down, you know? Hey Tanmay. [Michael Houck]: Hey, hi, hi, hi. [tanmaysinghchauhan]: So good to finally have a call with you, Blake. How are you? Yeah, good. How are you? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: I’m doing good. [Blake Emal]: How are you? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Good, good. Cool. Okay. [Michael Houck]: I can kick us off. I don’t know if we’ll need the full half hour, but want the, one of the flexibility. Thanks for making this time work Tanmay. So, okay. The TLDR is that while it has sort of been back and forth about whether he wants to keep going and how happy he is or whether he wants to downgrade and you know all these different things. It’s kind of been a hassle to manage that on his side, but I think that the core thing that he keeps coming back to and like now he’s been happy with sort of the performance over the last, you know, two weeks or so. We can have for so so he’s not, you know, He’s no longer planning to leave at the end of his current billing period, which is like the end of this week. So that’s good. We saved it. And nice work, Tim. I mean, I’ve seen, I think three of the posts have done some numbers in the last week. So really, really good job there. But I think the kind of topic of discussion is why he feels differently than we feel, right? We feel like, OK, we’re doing a lot of research on this. The posts are performing. Seems happy. He’s he’s he told me on a call that he’s getting leads for the business. He’s generating revenue from this, so it’s clearly like working for him. So all those things are true from what we can see, but he still feels like we’re not hitting the content formats that he is convinced are the ones he wants to do and that he has to do more sort of research than he like thought he would have to do or So I’m just going to quickly read. Exactly what he said to me and then we can sort of hash it out between the three of us and and discuss the right next steps. So OK, what he said to me is let you know for another month. I’m really happy with how these recent tweets have turned out. That said, results haven’t been super consistent and I felt like I had to push more this past month in order to see traction. If you guys can take a deeper dive into what’s performing best for me, so he wants us to look at what’s performing best. And then focus on those formats for about 80% of the content, then I’ll be open to keeping things going. At this point, we’ve done a lot of testing. Let’s just own our top three content formats or pillars. I’ve also noticed that the content formats and styles aren’t quite broken down the way I typically analyze them, which is one of my top tweet formats. I’m not sure what he’s talking about there. Rely on you guys for that. So I’ve been spending extra time cleaning things up. I guess that’s like a formatting thing. I’d love to get a sense of how we can, what’s he saying here? Streamline the process. Research and proofreading takes some time, but I’m happy to set the tone for the week by sharing links to a few videos and apps as a starting point. That’s basically what he said. And then he says, I also need to, but if I also need to clean up those tweets a lot at the end of the week, to justify. So he just wants us to basically analyze what’s working and then deliver those in the style where he doesn’t need to make a lot of edits at the end. That’s what it sounds like to me. But what does your guys read on that? [tanmaysinghchauhan]: What’s your reaction? Why are we seeing this sort of disconnect? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Blake, you wanna go? [Blake Emal]: Well, yes. From what I’ve seen in the middle bit is definitely a perception versus reality thing. I think we’re at a point now. So I’ve agreed with Tanmay. I’m like, it seems like we’re doing research. It seems like we’re bringing more to the table than he’s than he is in terms of idea. Like, so all that justified, I think we’re kind of at a place now with this client where it doesn’t matter what we think we’re doing. Our his perception needs to become our reality at this point. Otherwise, it’s going to go south. And again, for a client like this, who knows, we could do everything right. And he could still try to justify things away. So all we can do is what we think is best for him. And probably for that, it means like kind of giving into what he wants here and testing that out. So what I would think is, I’m not 100% clear on these like three formats that he for sure wants to do. So Tanmay, I don’t know if you know exactly what those are. I don’t know if that’s ever been called out expressly. I think first off, what he’s mentioning is, let’s go through the data that we have of the posts that we’ve published so far, and pinpoint the ones that have worked. So we can control that we can do that. Tanmay, I would recommend that you do that. I’m sure you have already. But what are the top three to five performing things? Do they have anything in common? If they do, then Absolutely, let’s just make the format of that thing, something we do every single week, no matter what. If there are other things that have performed really well, that maybe there’s not a pattern, we should probably call that out in the Slack channel to him and say, are these kind of the pillars that you’re thinking you wanna see? So as long as we are aligned on the three things that he wants to see every week, I don’t really care at that point, if it feels repetitive, on our end, in terms of format, don’t care. If that’s kind of the direction he wants to go, if anything, it should make it easier for you to make because then we’ll have a clear format that he’s just okay with. And we don’t have to feel the need to be super novel in terms of let’s try a giveaway. Let’s try this short thing. Let’s try this long thing. So maybe it may be actually the constraint makes it easier for us. And then we can spend a little bit more time on the research there. Those are my thoughts initially. There’s still the question of what are those actual formats he’s talking about and we just need to ask him if he has the crystal clear example or if we can just pull that. [Michael Houck]: But yeah, I I think that the like an actionable next step there would be if I go to Ben and I say hey Ben, can you go through Walid’s tweets since we started working with him? Put them all in a Google sheet with like how many likes they got, how many impressions they got, etc. Etc, etc, and then we just rank them by impressions or or whatever, and we classify those by like, OK, this was a giveaway. This was a, you know, app breakdown. This was this. This was that. And then at that point we say OK app breakdowns do the best whatever this does. Well, this doesn’t do well and we go to we go to. We go to Walid. And we say, hey, well, we analyzed all the tweets. This is what we’re seeing work well. Is this lined with your expectation? And then how do we proceed from there? [Blake Emal]: That’s sort of- Yeah, I agree with that. And then from there, we kind of do a second round of, okay, so let’s say app breakdowns are a clear format we wanna keep going back to. The second layer of that is Tanmay, generate a list of 30 of those companies and then send them to him and say, these are ones I’m thinking of, you can add to this Google sheet anytime. And that’s basically the post idea. So instead of needing to do like, here are the hooks I’m thinking, at least for that one, we’re going to break down one of these companies. And if you want to add anything, Waleed, then you can comment on the Google sheet. And that way, there’s a little bit of that on him. But he can have clarity into that. Some of these pillars may not break down so easily, where we can just have a list of running list of companies that we want to target, but like at least that one, for example, would. So if we can try to systemize it a little bit, I think that’s going to run to our benefit. And then other than that, um, I guess the other part is just the writing inside of it. And if he’s feeling like there’s, I don’t know, from that note, he talked more format than anything. I don’t, I don’t know how much he’s thinking of If the writing’s on par, if he’s noticing anything about tone that we need to work on, but that might be a secondary part. I do think that’s a, that’s a separate part. [Michael Houck]: I’d be curious to me to get, to get your thoughts on that. Like, um, Do you feel like he’s going in and changing the voice or the tone significantly at this point? Or what are those? What are those Friday end of the week changes he’s talking about? I don’t have visibility into that. [tanmaysinghchauhan]: So basically I think it’s not a writing or voice thing. It’s mostly about he just wants me to go deeper into the research. So let’s say I’m breaking down an app and I’m saying OK, this is the content format. It’s basically a taste thing like I would look content and how you would look content, of course, he’ll have a better taste because he is in the niche. So what I used to do, he usually like he’ll agree with somewhat 60 and 70%, which I think is a good hit rate. And he’s coming in and doing the 30% what he wants me to do is he wants me to do like, he wants me to do his job. Basically, basically, he wants me to not get him into like in any sort of He wants me to like just write it out to perfection, which is simply isn’t possible. I think like I I think I would eventually need his guidance because it’s eventually his breakdown. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, maybe maybe we solve this by basically doing it before you write the content in the first place, right? So like on Monday of each week you have the research on what’s going to be that week’s batch of content done from the previous week, right? And you have maybe some bullet points like hey, we’re thinking about doing an app breakdown or whatever for this company. Here are like the three or four major points that I found insightful about this. Can you send me or record a voice note with like what you find insightful about it so I can make sure that we emphasize that. [tanmaysinghchauhan]: So that’s actually basically a separate issue. I’ve been communicating a lot just with Blake. Like he simply doesn’t show up on time. Like I may have to do all the research by myself. I actually asked a couple of times time to Blake, like, should I wait for his notes? Should I wait for him to answer all these questions? I usually I’m very, I’m very on time. I’m, I send them on Monday. Like, I don’t think I missed any of the weeks, but I don’t get any response till Thursday, then Friday. Then I asked Blake, he’s like, Hey, you’re not responsible. If the client is not responding, we have to, we are supposed to deliver the content anyway. Right. So then, so then when I come up with the content, he’ll come up with the research. Yeah, right. Yeah. Basically, I’m doing a lot of research. And I don’t know. And also, I just want to get some clarity. If it’s five posts a week, then we are producing a lot more than that. Because right now the content I’m posting for him, it’s not five posts a week, it’s actually five short forms, which have actually turned into long forms, because I am doing all the breakdowns and those screenshot essays and everything and then separate I’m doing two long forms again. So if we look at the content, I am actually delivering a lot more than we have actually discussed. So maybe what we can do from here is we can just say, Hey, we are scrapping all the long forms. Let’s just do five X a week. And I’ll just, I’ll just merge the two long forms with the three short forms. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. So when he’s paying for our full, our full package, right? So full package, the way we think about that is either, either three long forms or a mix of long forms and short forms. So if he’s only doing two long forms a week, then it’s totally fine that we can deliver a couple a couple short forms as well. But my hypothesis is that well, two things. One, if he’s pushing the short forms to be long forms as well, then yes, that’s more than that’s more than he’s paying for him. We can. We can push back on that. I can. I can be the bad cop there. Don’t worry about that. But if. If the I lost my train of thought. Yeah, I’ll just give you an example, like what I’m talking about here. [tanmaysinghchauhan]: So this is actually, I’ve actually done all the research on what’s performing best for us and what he wants to double down on. So this is basically I’ve created a template out of it. Like the this is the short form template, like what I’m producing every week. And in addition to that, I’m also producing two long form. So let’s say you can just see the example like playbook from a YouTube video. This is basically a long form like a screenshot essay that he said that goes into it. It’s basically a long form. Then you can just scroll down and he also wants me to do some more separate video breakdowns like what you’re not sharing your screen. [Michael Houck]: Are we supposed to be seeing something right now? [tanmaysinghchauhan]: Yeah, I’ve actually shared something in the chat. [Michael Houck]: I don’t see it. [tanmaysinghchauhan]: I don’t see anything. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Meeting group chat. Okay. [tanmaysinghchauhan]: Okay. So basically, the first short form is actually long form because the resource that goes into it, like I have to watch the whole video, then I have to summarize it, it actually takes to 50 to 60 minutes to wrap it up and like put up for the screenshot essay. And then I’m doing two more of these. Sometimes even three more than he’ll come up with. OK, let’s do a short form on this video breakdown. Then it takes me some time and thinking into it. So we are actually producing a lot more than he’s paying for. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I’m not. I don’t know if we’re producing a lot more than he’s paying for. He’s paying for our full thing, so he should be getting no. [tanmaysinghchauhan]: So yeah, what he should be getting is at least let’s say, three long forms, and two short form or three short forms, right? What I am producing for the past two weeks is almost four short forms, and then four long form as well. That’s what we are producing for the week six and week seven. Got it. Got it. [Michael Houck]: Okay, well, that’s fine. We can we can just be more targeted. I think the first step is let’s analyze the formats that have worked. Let’s present that data to him. And let’s say, hey, this is what we’re seeing working. This is what we’re we want to narrow in on and then we’ll know how many of those we can do per week and it’ll be more standardized. [Blake Emal]: Yeah, I’m guessing most of those are going to be longer form too, right? So like the ones that we want to templatize and keep going back toward are probably the longer form. It’s this one. It’s this one he wants to double down. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, and he might. He might just want to do three of those per week. I don’t know if that’s a great strategy. I’d recommend that we don’t just do three of those per week, but at least at least one of those per week and then we can see how the other formats play in. I need to see the data before I feel strongly about what we should be prioritizing versus not prioritizing, but [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah, I. [Michael Houck]: I will definitely be in a place where we’re not delivering more than he’s than he’s paying for him. I’m not super worried about that. I think the bigger the bigger problems are aligning with him on expectations around content formats, which we have now a process that we’re going to run to do. And two is the sort of lack of responsiveness from him. That sounds like it’s a pretty disruptive issue to me for your for your workflow and can get us into a situation where we end up having to produce more content than we think we maybe should be. So I think that I can talk to him about the responsiveness and try to come up with a way to to solve for that. But we can only If he’s not going to reply, you know we can’t. We can’t force him to so. We’ll find a way to. To sort of either deliver less if he doesn’t respond or you know, just say hey, this is what we did within this week’s batch. You weren’t engaged. It is what it is sort of deal. Because we want to protect your time to 10 May. You have other clients with us. You know we don’t want to. We don’t want to get bogged down with this one. Okay, so it sounds like the issues are aligning on expectation on content formats, lack of responsiveness, and the lack of responsiveness leading to sort of extra large batches of content being produced. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Is that fair? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. Okay. Blake, any… [tanmaysinghchauhan]: Yeah, I just have more thoughts. I think we will eventually going to lose valid. That’s my hypothesis. I think, yeah, because, and I think what we can do, because I’ve been doing the, this is how we landed Max and one more client. I have one more in the pipeline. I’ll bring him into. So I think what we can, what we have done really good in this, like we now know how the AI and TikTok is working. So I think we have a very solid strategy that will work literally for anyone in the niche. Yep. If we just, if we just change the strategy and put like anyone else apart from Adi, I think we’re going to crush this. Yeah. Because he’s simply, he’s not doing the work and we can easily take it over. I have like few people in my target area. What I’m going to do is that content strategy that I created for one is I’m actually going to put a megaphone’s name on it and I’m going to pick them. Like, so this is what I’m thinking to replace wallet because yeah, this is what I’ve been thinking. Just to, just to know, like, I don’t have clarity on that. How much, It’s the full package. I don’t have clarity on that, like what it calls to be the full package. [Michael Houck]: Oh, I can send you our notion doc that has our TLDR stuff so you can you can share folks. Has different the different offers in there, but Yeah, OK, so that makes sense. I also think we’ll probably lose him either after one or two or three more months. I don’t think he’ll make it to the to the summer, but we’ll we’ll see like any. Any other thoughts on your side? [Blake Emal]: Yeah, yeah, a few things. So on the on the feedback thing, the inputs, that’s a real thing. I have not seen him giving inputs on the front end. And then he’ll he’s a client that will pile it back on in the back end. Doesn’t seem to realize that there’s not anything we’re going to do to like, make him active necessarily. But some things we can do to cover our bases a little bit more. So I don’t know what you’re what you’re doing for research right now, Tanmay. But whatever you’re doing, I think it’d be off like, like how basically mentioned this, have a spreadsheet or a doc running, where you just list out the ideas, and then the research for that, and share that with them. If you want to use like perplexity, so you actually have sources, or I think Chad, he’s got one now where you can search and get sources that can at least give you places to look for ideas on, like stats and stuff. Because a lot of the time when clients are saying, I don’t feel like it’s research, what they’re really saying is, I don’t see details, I don’t see stats and numbers, I don’t see it like a unique story or a quote or something like that. And 99% of the time, if you can find an accurate, accurate is the important word here, you have to like double check this stuff. But if you can use like perplexity to find a ton of sources, and then narrow it down, then you’ll probably get the content that’s going to make him feel like it’s well researched. And you’ll also have the source in there, so that he can never question if it’s like fake or whatever, he can come back to it. So I would highly recommend that even if it’s just a few bullet points for each idea, you’re probably doing something similar to that already, just just throwing that in there as well. Because that way, even if he doesn’t, doesn’t give inputs on it, we’ve done our part and we’ve documented that. [tanmaysinghchauhan]: So I actually had many calls with wallet, like maybe for the past three weeks, they have been like huddling and then we are doing some zoom In where he actually like told me like this is how I research. He actually gave me some premium account access. I think it’s called pipettes maybe. And then he also giving me his TikTok account and everything. I’m doing, I’m following everything to the T. Like I’m not missing anything. But then he would come up and he would say like something that’s not mentioned in our research. He’ll come and say, okay, let’s find out what’s the, what, how many numbers are doing this brand? What’s the number of impression the last study that somebody that I cannot simply find that data. Even with Yeah, it’s something that only the account owner would have access to. So now he’s actually just keep his pushing more than he had actually taught me. [Blake Emal]: Yeah, I got you. I mean, general advice there is just going to be if he’s going to push back on all this stuff, just do what you can just have a process for yourself. Keep doing it, be as transparent as you can across all of it. And then if he decides to leave for whatever reason, at the very least, what we can learn from this, if we feel like he’s eventually going to leave, we can feel like we’re getting better at this process of researching for a more demanding client so that it doesn’t they don’t become as demanding the next time, so that we’re better at documenting for the next time. So it’s none of this is wasted. Even if he goes away, none of this is wasted. We’re learning things about about how we could handle a client like this. And hopefully we’d clients like this out a little bit more. And coach them up front so that they’re better. So there’s that. And so I just wanted to get clarity, make sure that we’re all clear on next steps and who’s going to do them. Because the next thing that needs to get done is compiling all of the current posts, all of them, and then just putting the data in there. So I’m guessing Ben’s gonna do that. So how you’re probably of reach out to him and get that. Then from there, we are going to write up a super quick one pager I’m guessing of like, looks like these are the top three things. Is this what you want to do? And then from there, I think we need to also find out what that mix of short form versus long form needs to look like based on the formats that are represented in the top performing posts. And then that’s kind of like the line in the sand for, okay, now let’s go right. And implement all this stuff. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, basically I have a one-on-one with Ben in like 30 minutes, so I’m gonna talk to him. He’ll get started on that today. When he gets that back to me in the Google Sheet, I’ll share it with you guys, and then we’ll align. We’ll say, okay, these look like the best. We’re on the same page, great. I will then write a Slack message to Waleed in the channel, and I’ll be like, hey, Waleed, we did this research. Here’s what we’re seeing. Is this aligned with your expectation? Here’s the link to the full post database if you wanna take a look at that too. In case he has like other ones that aren’t top performers that he wants us to keep doing for whatever reason. But yeah, that’s it. And then we’ll start executing. And I’ll also talk to him separately about sort of the front loading the feedback to make it easier on tech too. So yeah, that should all happen this week. So by next week, we should be executing against sort of the new approach to this. [Blake Emal]: And Tanmay, that should take take off the plate having to do extra things, it should be crystal clear. And if something at that point goes out of scope, you can very clearly call it out to us. And we can enforce that more easily because we should be refreshed and realigned with him fully. And, and then also, I know you’re already delivering everything on time, like most I think every time you’ve you’ve delivered on time. So as long as you’re doing that, and we and how to say like, hey, Tammy’s delivering on Monday, these ideas, whatever. And he knows that, and then Hal just asks, can you leave a voice note or leave comments in the doc? If he doesn’t do it then, it’s gonna suck, but you know, it’s possible. But then it’s on him, and we will still have to proceed. So it’s not like we can just, you know, go back to not publishing this stuff, but [Michael Houck]: The key point there, though, is that if that happens, while lead will not be able to say, oh, you know, you guys aren’t doing research like no, we aligned on this same exact page like a week ago. You you opted into this process. You’re saying you don’t want to do this now. We’ll deal with that if we if we have to, but it’s not on us and he can’t sort of put it on right. [Blake Emal]: And then Tammy, it’s not on you as much anymore. So hopefully from this call you can feel like you’re going to get more structure and you can focus on writing and researching. And if it goes beyond that, we have even more alignment now to push back against him. And so hopefully that you can feel some relief from that. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. [tanmaysinghchauhan]: Okay, I just want to just want to quickly touch just want to quickly touch droop as well. We have delivered most of the things but I think it’s almost you say for me and I haven’t received any comments from him at all. [Michael Houck]: Okay, just just tag him again in slack. [tanmaysinghchauhan]: I just did actually send them last Thursday. And it’s already Tuesday now. I haven’t received any inputs from him. I actually tagged him again this evening. [Michael Houck]: OK, if he doesn’t reply by tonight my time, I’ll DM him one on one and I’ll get him to jump in there. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: So thanks for flagging that. [tanmaysinghchauhan]: OK, and that’s it. [Michael Houck]: That’s everything from my side. Yeah, OK, cool guys. I’ll get Ben moving on this today and we’ll get this fixed.