- Duration: 37 min
- Platform: zoom
- Attendees: Ben Ornstein, Ben’s iPhone 16, Michael Houck
- Source: Read.ai 01JMD4V5NHXYH2BZMZP774VASR (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JMD4V5NHXYH2BZMZP774VASR)
Transcript
[Ben Ornstein]: Yo, what’s up, man? How you doing? Pretty good. Didn’t sleep well again, but that’s pretty, pretty normal for me at this point. [Michael Houck]: What’s going on? [Ben Ornstein]: I mean, not anything specific. Just, you know, grinding a lot of stuff to do. Can’t really point out anything. How are you? UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: How are you feeling? [Michael Houck]: Like with the Obviously, with Rina’s abrupt kind of departure, at least temporarily, like how’s your. Bandwidth, stress level, all that stuff like are you are in a good spot? Is it too much? Yeah, give me some. [Ben Ornstein]: I’m good for now. I was struggling to figure out the the engagement stuff this morning. Hopped on a call with Rafael to just. Figure out like a way to simplify it a bit. So now when I since I figured that out, it got it got a little bit better. Yeah, I don’t know. Startups man, I’m I’m just used to it. So it’s yeah, it’s kind of like just be be upfront with me. [Michael Houck]: Like if there’s a time where you’re like, look man, like I need a day like I we need to shift some of these responsibilities. Like I’m not going to look at that like oh, you know, Ben failed at balancing all this stuff. It’s like no, like you’re. You have a lot of new stuff, A, being taken away, and there’s like transition, and then B, being thrown at you to replace it. So it’s a very chaotic time right now. And like, yeah, it’s definitely not like some sign of failure or weakness to just say, hey, look, there’s a lot going on. So if you find yourself getting to that point, whatever that point is for yourself, all I ask is that you sort of be upfront with me so that I can find a solution for it. [Ben Ornstein]: That’s it. Yep, sounds good. I think I’m good for now. I can power through. It’s it’s the name of the game startups, right? Like this is and also. The thought of keeping the team small is so powerful like that that drives me to. Grind like an extra 10% that I didn’t know I had. Because like, That that’s the type of environment I want to be in, and I think that’s where we’re going to succeed as well. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I I actually I the more that I’ve thought this since Max left, in particular, I think the more the longer we can do this for, and like, I actually think Blake can help out with more stuff than just sponsorships, as need arises. But just based on sort of my early interactions with him, but the more that we can do this and just be like a really tight knit small team where you know, we’re doing huddles, we’re, you know, talking through different things and solving problems together. That’s where we’re going to be most bought in. And that’s also where we’re going to get the best results. So, um, I definitely don’t want to go out there and hire like five people or something like that in the next six months. I want to be at a point where we can manage this with just a couple of people. Um, obviously, you know, like the writers and, and the engineers are our teams, but, um, as far as like the Rye Valley core team, like right now that’s you, me and Blake, right. Um, and Rina when she’s back. So the longer we can keep it like that, the better in my mind. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Absolutely. [Ben Ornstein]: No, I totally agree. Vimcal came in, which I was excited about. Crazy situation with another one. So I sent these, this was one of the first guys that I had responded to and I thought I saw, they expressed some interest. I reached out to someone on the She directed me to their head of, I don’t remember, it was not all that relevant. He checked us out, said, yeah, I don’t know if this is great for us, but let me introduce you to another one of our teams. I think it was a team that was under their company. So maybe like an acquired company or something. And I gave them the wrong unique average numbers. I just, I vastly over exaggerated by accident. Um, I said like the average unique clicks were like 400 to 500, uh, for featured placements, which is, that’s not the case. It’s a little high. And so I sent the invoice to them cause they agreed to one featured placement. And then I looked back and I was like, guys, I at risk of losing this deal. Essentially, these are the correct numbers. So if, if this changes, I apologize, but this is, this is the truth. And I think they really liked that because they got back and said, I’m happy to do one feature placement at this price, three K or sorry, two, two featured placements at this price, three K. I said, lowest I can do is four. Can you guys do that? And they said, yes. So, um, so yeah, I, I saved that and I realized like, and that’s me at my core, I’m all about transparency. So the money should be coming through. And so, uh, Um, yeah, I realized, I know I’m not leading partnerships too much longer, but, um, Oh, clearly like, first of all, right decision. [Michael Houck]: Like that’s, that’s the right call. Um, but yeah, if I just look at the, what is the, why am I, why am I not able to type right now? There we go. Yeah. If I look at it, if that comes through, like, I think pipe drive, I don’t know what’s happening with them, but let’s say that one comes through. That’s what that’s. Nine, that’s over 10 K that you’ll have closed in basically a month. Um, Nope. Are you. [Michael Houck]: Okay. Hey, can you hear me? Yes. Can you hear me? Yeah, I can hear you, but your video was glitching out pretty bad. Okay. Um, is that better? Yeah, that’s, that’s fixed. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Yeah. [Ben’s iPhone 16]: So I, every time this happens, every single time I click an external button while I’m on Google meter zoom, cause I tried up the sponsor Rev table, my computer just freaks. So redownload zoom. [Michael Houck]: But my point was that if that if this one closes in 4k, then you will have closed over 10k of deals in like less than a month, which is great. [Ben’s iPhone 16]: Yeah, no, that will be I’d be really excited about that. [Michael Houck]: I know you’ll probably see some more trickle in to from those combos that you put your way. Like, just because Blake is jumping in on the new stuff, you know, doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t take, you know, continue sort of taking Max’s opportunities and any that you source in the couple weeks to conclusion. And obviously, you know, we’ll make sure that you’re set up for that. [Ben’s iPhone 16]: So, yeah. Yeah, no, absolutely. I’ll continue to push through with that. And yeah, I guess while we’re on this topic. Looking at the sponsored rev table, is there an easier way to differentiate between who closed what other than what I just did? I put the question mark next to that one, because I don’t know if that was already paid out to Max or not, but [Michael Houck]: It was not. [Ben’s iPhone 16]: That one’s you. Got it, OK. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, so no, I think that’s fine for now. No need to build some system for this. Just throw it on the sheet and and then at the end of the month when I’m doing stuff in Thera, I’ll take that into account and make sure that. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Got it cool. [Michael Houck]: OK, well that’s that. Also, just pretty crazy that Blake closed something like on his 6th day basically. [Ben’s iPhone 16]: Very impressed. Yeah, I have a really good feeling about him. I love his his drive. It’s his tenacity. It’s clearly there. You can see it. [Michael Houck]: We just we just had our first like real one on one right before this call. And he’s like got some ideas for process on the sponsorship side and like improvements and also some interesting channels for leads that I hadn’t thought of But also he’s like throwing out ideas for other stuff too. So yeah, I’m excited. [Ben Ornstein]: I think he can be a good addition to the team. Amazing. I’m going to try rejoining on my computer real quick. Okay. Okay. There we go. [Michael Houck]: Okay, let me put my camera back on then. Sorry about that. [Ben Ornstein]: I am not going to click anything else. You’re good, man. [Michael Houck]: Okay, so I have one thing that I want to go through real quick, and then we can go through the rest of the stuff on the agenda. So before my call with Blake, I had a call with other Blake and Tanmay, Waleed’s ghostwriter. And we were talking about Waleed, because I don’t I don’t know if I’ve looped you into this situation, but Waleed has been like an incredibly challenging client. He’s been like, basically the TLDR is that there’s this big disconnect between Blake and Tanmay and Waleed in terms of like, Waleed thinks he has to do a lot of research for the content. And Tanmay and Blake are like, we’re doing all the research for the content. What is this guy talking about? So it doesn’t really make a lot of sense, but I’ve dug into it on both sides. And basically we’ve realized that is just like content in certain templates rather than like, you know, trying out different things and stuff like that. So what we need to do is create a Google sheet where we go back through the content since we started posting for him and basically log the URL of the post, how many impressions it got, how many likes it got, how many reposts it got, how many comments it got. And then I’m going to go in there, classify those by different types of posts. And then we’ll present that to Waleed and be like, Hey, you say you want templates. These are the formats that are performing best. Are these what you want us to double down on? And then he’ll be like, okay. And then we’ll finally have alignment between, between both sides. So, um, I will send you info after this and like the spreadsheet and the date to start from, but in the next, I’d say like two days, if you can go his content, it’s just like a couple months worth of posts and just log his posts and the metrics about them. That way we can get alignment with him by the end of the week so that next week Tanmay is working on this like more aligned system with him going forward. [Ben Ornstein]: I’ve seen in the, and I did message Tanmay on the side because I saw that we only have content scheduled through Thursday and I like to keep up with that. So I’m like, hey, I don’t know if you guys are in touch. And so he sent me a message actually. So I was actually, I had a tiny bit of context. So I didn’t realize how difficult it was though. [Michael Houck]: That’s unfortunate. Yeah, he’s been threatening to churn like every week for like six weeks now. I’ve been like, we’re gonna change writers, but then we realized the problem actually isn’t Tanmay, it’s Waleed. So it’s like delicate dance and- Tanmay is great. Yeah, I think Tanmay is really solid. I do think there’s a slight disconnect between like, you know, just a cultural disconnect, because he’s not a US-based writer. He’s not in the startup world and stuff like that. So I do think that exists, but as far as like writing content that performs, he’s great. He’s great. We’ve seen it on Waleed’s account. [Ben Ornstein]: I mean, there have been a few that have crushed it. Yeah. Waleed himself is like, yeah, I’m getting a lot of leads from this. [Michael Houck]: Like it’s working for me. And I’m like, okay, then why do you want to churn? If you’re making money from it, that’s that’s weird. [Ben Ornstein]: That that also doesn’t make sense, but whatever. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, at the end of the day, we’ll just just solve the problem and the rest. Rest will handle itself. The score takes care of itself, right? That’s what they say. But yeah, so he’s committed for another month, so we were going to try this out and I’ll send over the date that you should start from and and And I’ll send you like a template spreadsheet you can use and we’ll go from there cool. [Ben Ornstein]: I’ll make that a priority. And then I want to start working on viral examples today. That was another thing I want to get ahead on that. So I’m not freaking out on the last day and then you having to make edits and all that. So I’m going to try to do that. And then so I might push. I guess I can still probably get it done tomorrow. I may not get the hoop research to until Thursday or Friday. Is that OK? [Michael Houck]: Not not a rush at all. That’s low priority. Get it to me by the weekend and we’re good. [Ben Ornstein]: Got it. OK, yes. So I can, I can make that happen. Cool. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Okay. Um, okay. [Michael Houck]: So let’s go back to, let’s go back to the, the list. What else you got? Um, yeah. You want to, the first item, the strategy for expanding offerings. [Ben Ornstein]: So I didn’t go back to that message you sent with a bunch of replies. I probably should have read that again. Um, the services. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, look, the TLDR is like, I mean, well, do you have a specific question you just want me to sort of Go for it. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: So, yeah, I mean, TLDR is the insight is clear. We built a service. OK, we built a couple of things. We built a community. We built an info product business, the case studies, and we built a service business, the service business dwarfing the revenue that we’re making from the other two combined. Right. So clear that founders want services and they have the money to pay for those services. And they trust me. To deliver high quality services to them through my brand. So yeah, basically what we need to do is identify, and this is not urgent, this is something we should do like in March, right? Just like identify what is the second service business that we should build and then spend some time in Q2 finding the right sort of co-star for that, right? The Blakey Ma equivalent for that and then courting them, giving them some offer. You know, they’re not gonna need to quit their job or anything like that. Like Blake still works on his own business, basically full-time. And then just start setting it up, right? Then we set up a landing page or a Notion doc even. We have a name for it. Maybe we incorporate an LLC, I don’t know. But yeah, then we just set it up and then it’s just running with this person and we leverage their credibility ability. Ideally, they have an audience too, but even if they don’t, like if it’s a design agency, you know, people will be like, Oh, like I’d rather work with a designer from Airbnb who has no audience rather than some influencer who didn’t work at Airbnb. You know what I mean? Um, so we’re going to need to play that game a little bit, but yeah, I mean, that’s the idea. If we can get to the end of 2025 and we have, you know, we have megaphone studio number one, but then we have like two or three other businesses spun up that we can pitch at various times in the newsletter and on social. Combine that with Jacob now writing social posts for me, I think we’ve got a very clear path to something pretty exciting. So I was actually, I was talking about this in a WhatsApp group chat. I’m in with like Eric Torenberg, Greg Eisenberg, Ryan Hoover, people like that. [Ben Ornstein]: It’s a good one. [Michael Houck]: It’s just, it’s focused on creator businesses. That’s all we talk about in there. Um, and the, um, one of the, the GPs of slow ventures is in there too. And their new fund is just focused on creator led hold coast. That’s what they want to do. Oh, I didn’t know that. Interesting. They’re no longer doing the, with the new fund, at least they’re no longer doing the traditional venture game. Um, and so, Yeah, lots of I should have shared our milestone in there the other day and just like lots of positive positive stuff like yeah, this is a signal times are changing. So the more we double down on it, the better. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: But [Michael Houck]: So yeah, so we need to find out who that person is. We need to define what the nature industry is that will be building something in and then we just need to set it up. And the key thing is. We don’t just want to say like, you know, this is. Like an engineering agency or whatever, right? We need to say, this is an AI powered, like cutting edge, forward thinking, you know, engineering agency, if we do engineering, right? It needs to stand out because it’s like offering something new that you can’t get from traditional teams, or at least they’re not built from first principles to deliver. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Yeah, that’s interesting. Yeah. [Ben Ornstein]: What were the, I mean, I forget which ones you listed. You said like recruiting, like an agency, like a very, yeah. What were the ones you listed? I listed recruiting. [Michael Houck]: I listed design. I think design is an easy one that a lot of founders. Well, okay. A couple of things about design. One, a lot of founders don’t know how to do it. Right. Two, it can be very expensive to do it well, but it’s not actually that hard to do it well. Right. You just need like a good designer who knows what they’re doing in Figma and you’ve got something good. It’s not like it’s like some crazy high price thing. So there’s like price arbitrage there that we can play. Um, and then three is that I have a lot of credibility in design because launch house was really known for its brand. Uh, our brand was, you know, someone got a tattoo of our brand. Like it was, it was a well-liked well-respected brand. So, um, I wasn’t a designer. I don’t know how to use Figma, right. But I have that sort of attached to my personal brand. So, um, and also the founding journey brand and megaphone brands are, are pretty So, um, I think it’ll be easy to get clients for that fast if we partner with a very credible designer. So in my head, that’s the one that makes the most sense right now. But, um, I’m also, I haven’t put any thought into it at all. That’s just like my gut, my gut instinct. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Yeah. [Ben Ornstein]: Design, that does make a lot of sense that, uh, for design. Recruiting is always interesting. It’s hard. Competition so much, right? I mean, yeah, yeah, that’ll be interesting. We don’t need to have the full like brainstorm right now. [Michael Houck]: Let’s do that sometime in March, but just planting the seed like this is a path that we will probably be on throughout this year of trying these out, spinning these up and seeing how they work and at the same time executing against the sort of megaphone studio growth strategy that we talked about where we eventually expand into higher ticket offers and things like that. So that’s how I’m thinking about this year, basically, aside from aside from mantle, because if mantle blows up, then it can dwarf everything else. And maybe it’s just worth the majority of our time. But this is sort of a tried and true path that we know we can take to double or more the business in the next 12 months. Yep. [Ben Ornstein]: No, absolutely. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Cool. That’s exciting. [Ben Ornstein]: Regardless, whatever path we take, that’s exciting. OK, you want to talk about Rena? [Michael Houck]: Yeah. Have you have you heard from her yet at all? [Ben Ornstein]: She messaged me like late last night. [Michael Houck]: I think it was like Tuesday morning for her and she was like heading to the hospital at that point. So that was good to get that message because the way we had left it before was that You know, I don’t think they have, like, great health insurance in the Philippines in general. And so she was, like, trying to, like, raise money from her, like, community. And she did. And I gave her a bonus, too. That’s good. But she apparently had raised enough. That message that she’s going to the hospital was confirmation to me that she has raised enough. They’re able to take care of this now as we need to wait to do it, because this is the kind of thing I’ve watched two months like house. But like, If you have a tumor on your brain that’s putting pressure on your brain, you can stroke at any moment, basically. It’s good that they’re getting it taken care of right away and hopefully they can do surgery and it’s not too close to the brainstem or anything like that. But yeah, super scary. We’ll see how it goes. She could be out for two weeks. She could be out for three months. I have no idea. [Ben Ornstein]: We have no clue. I mean, brain surgeries are, yeah, I mean, you know, insane. I can’t even imagine. So there’s the massive spectrum of what could happen. I’m glad she is getting care now though. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: It’s, you know, um, we’ll, we’ll, we’ll see, you know, you never know in brain surgery what can happen. Uh, so, um, wishing her the best. Yeah, no, absolutely. [Ben Ornstein]: I’m glad to hear that. Um, that’s good. [Michael Houck]: Well, um, I’ll let you know if I find somebody who would be a good fit to, to take on some of her stuff. I did think about like one or two other small tasks that she does, but I’m just going to do it myself for now. Like around like reporting some metrics to Athena for their newsletter and like little stuff like that, not worth transferring to someone new unless we bring like another assistant onto the team. So yeah, I’ll let you know. And then you could probably offload some of the stuff that you took on to them. [Ben Ornstein]: Sounds good. Yeah. The engagement stuff is, it’s not terribly difficult. It’s just time consuming and tedious. So that’s like the biggest thing. [Michael Houck]: The other things are, it’s, it’s, it’s not work that is like incredibly fun to do. And I understand that again, startups, right? You just gotta, you just gotta do it. Okay. Good news. Good news about Preston though. I fixed the, uh, the thing in Stripe. Basically what I did is I just canceled the retry on the failed payment. And he had, me about it last night too. He was like, Hey, I saw this like weird charge. I was like, Oh yeah, it’s an error. We’re fixing it. Um, so he’s fine. Uh, I then need to reset the billing date and that’s what I tried to do this morning, but I think his account like blocked the charge again or something. So I need to get him, give the thumbs up on that on his end. But, um, it’s fixed. We just need to sort of turn it back on. [Ben Ornstein]: Great. I saw that it was the correct amount that was charged. So that’s good. That’s a step in the right direction. Making progress here. And I’m actually glad the first time he didn’t get charged that I would have been not as good, but yeah, it would have been worse. [Michael Houck]: Worse for sure, yeah. OK, I want to. Let’s talk about video stocks. I want to make sure we we chat through that. So look. Are you feeling the same way I’m feeling about it? [Ben Ornstein]: I’m I was feeling the exact same way about it like I like couldn’t. Was corporate-y, and that’s why I messaged you, because I knew we were feeling the exact same way. Corporate-y, boring, not engaging. And the second one was even worse. So, yeah. The second one was worse. [Michael Houck]: The first one was a little better, at least. Yeah. And that’s their style that they’ve used. [Ben Ornstein]: They use that in the shorts. [Michael Houck]: I think it worked in the shorts because it was just hits, right? But when you’re like, when you’re watching a video of that, I think it’s different. [Ben Ornstein]: Yeah, no, I agree. And so I looked up this YouTube video that had like, 14 different explainer video styles. That was the video title. And like, and it was interesting. I’m not fully convinced by any of them either. Like, just because like our our style of like the history of Silicon Valley video, that’s our style. And I’m not saying we should copy that. And I can’t even say that’s our style. We’ve only done one video. But it’s gonna be very interesting to test this different type of video. I’m worried about it. [Michael Houck]: I really am worried about it. I don’t know what the answer is, because I don’t have a good reference point to send them. [Ben Ornstein]: I’ll send you this video that I sent so you can get all these different ideas. It’s a quick hit like you can just and now we can talk of We can talk async about that, but 14 different styles. Some of them are obviously not applicable to us at all here, but Yeah, there is no easy answer to this, which makes it a little difficult. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I mean we have to find something and we have to find something like by basically tomorrow so they have enough time to do this before next weekend. [Ben Ornstein]: But when we hop off, that’s what I’m going to keep looking at before viral examples. I’m going to see if I can find something that like catches my eye that will work for this. That I’ll spend like maybe like an hour on that if if I have to. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I don’t know man. Because we can’t just do it of me sitting at the computer with like little graphics popping up. We can. We can maybe splice that in, think it’s stronger to just like tell the story straight through with some like visual style I do think that’s better and I think people will get you know sort of the the rest of it because it’s on my channel already right I can see the other videos we’ve done but yeah it’s it’s frustrating it is frustrating because I don’t know the answer and I don’t have a strong strong direction for I think maybe what I need to do is just watch this video you send me to and then also just spend some time tonight just like looking through endless YouTube videos to try and find other style options. [Ben Ornstein]: I don’t know. Do you know anyone that has YouTube channels that that would know a good style? Like someone who’s on the top of their fingertips would just be like, oh yeah, you got it. You should use this style. [Michael Houck]: I know one guy. Yeah, I know, I know one guy, I actually know a couple people, but one guy would 1000% have an idea. He’s um, let me send him to you. I think I have his email. He’s this guy sending the zoom chat here. He’s built the YouTube channel to like 14 million subscribers. Before. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Oh, wow. [Ben Ornstein]: Wait, that name sounds familiar. I’m looking up on my phone. So my zoom doesn’t crash. Yeah, no, he’s, um, he’s super legit. [Michael Houck]: He actually reached out to help us with YouTube back when we were just thinking about the podcast, like last May, but he’s like super expensive, obviously. So it’s not really feasible, but I know that he would be down to just like hop on a call and chat, but I don’t I don’t know if you’d be down to hop on a call and chat in the [Ben Ornstein]: next 24 hours. Yeah, exactly. I got to run to this ghost writing sales call, but let me know what you