- Duration: 32 min
- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01JMFKQ28JG6GDTVFC227D7PAK (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JMFKQ28JG6GDTVFC227D7PAK)
Transcript
[Dave Schools]: to Amar Parmar, the podcast host, ehehandbook.com? No? I don’t know. It doesn’t ring a bell. [Michael Houck]: I do more podcasts than I keep up with sometimes, but it could be. [Dave Schools]: I believe it. It’s this publication. Let me see if I can find you real quick. Let’s see. [Michael Houck]: It vaguely looks familiar. The branding. I’m not sure. Anyways, how are you doing? I’m doing I’m doing great. [Dave Schools]: I’m excited to chat with you. Yeah, man. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: I’m pumped. [Michael Houck]: Blake said, said good things that there’s some potential to to do something together here. So excited. Also, it seems like you’ve had a crazy journey from early, early hop in through through the pandemic. Everything that happened there. So yeah, that’s, you know, we’ve, we’ve been through some crazy stuff on our side too. [Dave Schools]: So that’s how it goes. Yeah, man. I’m, I learned a ton at hopping about like hyper growth up and down five years, saw a lot. And then now Pratt, like putting it into practice with, with this company. [Michael Houck]: Sweet. Yeah. Same deal. Early Uber eats helped go through hyper growth for that business and then left Airbnb for a while. And then just been building. Building stuff since then. So that’s how it goes. You learn how it works, and then you go out and execute for yourself. But yeah, man. I mean, tell me about the product. We write our newsletter in Beehive, in case that’s helpful. But yeah, we’d love to hear about it, and then also see if there’s ways we can partner for the content agency. [Dave Schools]: Cool. Yeah. And I wanted to ask more about how that works. But what Singulate does, it’s like, I don’t know, Blake, how much you share. With you, but it’s been called like the conversion copywriter’s dream tool in the, in the sense where it’s like beehive. It’s like clay meets beehive. And it’s not so much like cold outreach, like Apollo zoom info clay with sourcing new contacts and like blasting cold outreach. It’s more like existing. When you have existing customers, you have data on them or they’re mid funnel. They’ve been to an event. They’ve interacted with your newsletter, and you have context on maybe what they’ve viewed, clicked on, interested in, they filled out like a form maybe, or like you know when they signed up, their open rates, so if you want to like create segments. What it does is it takes the pain out of segmentation and personalization at scale. If you want to get like really, really targeted at scale in your communication, right now we’re focused just on email, but we’ll go into other channels soon. Okay. That’s where simulate lets you kind of speak to that individual at scale based on the data you have on them. Okay. [Michael Houck]: So like walk me through an example, like let’s say somebody subscribed to the newsletter, they filled out like our sort of welcome form or like, okay, are you a active founder or want to be a founder in the future? Or you’re an exit founder now, what stage did your company reach? How many employees did you hire? How much funding did you raise? We bootstrapped, All that sort of stuff, assume we have that information about this person. A, what would they receive that’s different? What would be different about it? And B, does this integrate with me sending them emails through Beehive, or is this like a separate experience that I would set up? [Dave Schools]: It would be separate outside of what we’ve seen with other newsletters, like Stacked Marketer is using us. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: I’m over there. [Dave Schools]: But you know them over there? [Michael Houck]: Yeah. Good guys. Yeah. [Dave Schools]: Um, they have their newsletter on campaign monitor and that’s like their main daily media company business. I forgot about that. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, they do. [Dave Schools]: But then they use singulate for targeted outreach for sponsored, like whenever conversion is the priority. So sponsorships, uh, upsells upgrades. So to, to your point about, uh, to answer your question about the first part, they felt that you get that great data. The communication that you send with singulate allows you to you branch like that first sentence or first paragraph or second or third, any part, any component of the email. You can say like early stage value. I didn’t quite capture all the things you said, but like early stage at this like single, single founder company looking to do this, you hit enter and tells you what percentage of your list is that category. And then you write something for them, maybe a different CTA, maybe different content. And then that’s one feature. There’s also data cleanup on the fly that we have. So like, you know, merge tags where you drop in like the personalization token. Yeah. Sometimes that data is not clean or it’s messy. That’s for sure. You want to transform it. We have a feature where you just describe a natural language and it transforms that data to be usable in your copy. So it doesn’t stick out like a sore thumb. And then the last, the last one is generative personalization and probably the most powerful one where you, based on the data points that you have, you use prompt engineering to take a larger amount of data that you could dump in, like scrape your whole website or a Wikipedia page or like, um, a deep research, 30,000 word report. Like you can dump in something. And then from that prompt engineering to say, highlight the two most relevant takeaways from this content for this person based on these data points that they’ve answered. So you kind of knit that all together. And then the output, there’s a unique output for every single person. Based on that prompt at scale. Okay, that’s cool. The combination of those three features creates a template that you then can set to an automation in HubSpot. You’re probably not using HubSpot yet. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: No. [Dave Schools]: That’s our first… We found just most companies. We target more mid-market to enterprise-sized companies because they tend to have more data. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, makes sense. [Dave Schools]: And that’s where HubSpot’s the main integration. Singulate as a standalone tool like Beehive. But Beehive has a lot of other benefits that we’re not focused on for creators and SMBs. [Michael Houck]: Do you guys think that you’d get to a point where you would integrate with Beehive? And so either there’s some native experience within Beehive, or I can do something in Singulate, and then it sort of automatically updates my segments or tags in Beehive? Yeah, potentially. [Dave Schools]: We could do like a webhook into Beehive that would just be that content piece within Beehive? We’d have to build it out. It doesn’t exist today. Yeah, I mean, no need to change the roadmap. [Michael Houck]: Sounds like the HubSpot later stage folks are the bread and butter initially, which makes sense. But it could make sense for us in the meantime just to use the features within Singulate and sort of do some manual ops within Beehive. And if we end up doing that, I could tell you sort of what we’re doing. And so as more people come to you guys, maybe you could say that that’s something that you guys would build in the future or something like that. [Dave Schools]: Yeah. I mean, Beehive’s great. And I do not want to compete against Beehive. So I’d much rather integrate. And they’re just different use cases. I mean, like the complementary, it’s like Beehive for your objective content that doesn’t really regardless of who receives it, and then singulate for your hyper-personalized conversion comms. That’s kind of how we see them working together. [Michael Houck]: It’s interesting, too, because through our content agency, we have a bunch of newsletter clients, and we’re adding a ton more. It’s like the niche that we’re sort of doubling down on for this year. And a lot of those companies are a little later stage. Like, we have a good relationship with YC, So we get a lot of YC companies who come through and they’re well-funded and growing and all that stuff. So they’re willing to spend on this kind of stuff. And it might be, we’ve had a few people ask us if we’ll set up like full email marketing funnels for them as well. There could be some way to use you guys for that, I guess. I don’t know how many are using HubSpot versus like customer IO or some other tool because we haven’t taken those on. Because we just don’t have the capacity right now. But if we had a way to do it that was scalable and differentiated, like with you guys, it could make sense to bring an email marketer on to set that stuff up for our clients, too. [Dave Schools]: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. The way we pitch Singulate is like it’s having a marketing ops person run growth on your team. So instead of paying $125,000 a year salary, you have Singulate that takes care of the segmentation and personalization, the targeting part that really moves the needle in comms. That sounds great. And on the partnership side, we have clients using us. And Singulate still requires you got to write the content and know how to use the tools. So there's even a little bit of skill building and training on the platform to think. When you take segmentation and personalization out of the equation, how then do you write? And it's this whole new approach Copywriting that's really which is like very prompt and data like data and prompt engineering based Just because like I should really show you show you how it works. You can like yeah Let me share my screen and jump into one Here's So you have campaigns contacts attributes integrations so you sync your HubSpot data and And then we want to be delivery agnostic, so like deliver to, you know, like through HubSpot or Zapier. And this is where like Beehive, it's like webhook into Beehive could be an interesting export option. You sync your lists over, we'll have rich templates and then automations and then campaigns. So campaign, I'll jump into one here, very simple. We're about to release a new email builder, um, to handle more like, yeah, rich HTML branded comms. Um, so here it's like a wow tag would be take an attribute that we had. We'll first list insights. So this is key. It's like, who am I writing for? Like who, and it shows you like 98% of my list has job title. I've got some other interesting data to look at. So I know if I use these, it will have like a material change in who receives the content. And then jumping around to different profiles, the whole purpose of this is inspiration for segments to create. [Michael Houck]: Like you see some commonalities here, and you're like, I should just segment by that. [Dave Schools]: Because then you can come over here really easily Start using the data. I'll show you a wow tag first. This is like today's date. I know is one and then we say like Just the month Only And I will take an ugly timestamp and it uses an LLM to Trent like like take this ugly timestamp and make it something you could use in your copy. Oh, that is pretty cool. [Michael Houck]: I see the value of that immediately, because a lot of times that data is super formatted terribly, and also differently, and just sometimes it's totally unstructured. And that could be really helpful, actually, because then you'd have more things to personalize. I totally see the value there. Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. [Dave Schools]: You could do like job title, lowercase, case and pluralize and see if it takes that. Yeah, it takes a second for the generative AI piece to work. Let's see if it wants to play ball. Yeah. That's OK, like decent. So that's that's wow tags, which is kind of the smallest feature of the of the three branching is like You just start saying like works in marketing You can do like Located in the u.s. So then like if you have data on like the this like survey data you were talking about before Yeah, like serious a founders or something. Yeah, exactly basically signals includes HubSpot. And then Singulate will calculate, name those groups for you, calculate them, and show you example contacts within them. So you can again, like see, oh, like I'm writing. They pulled in the right people too. [Michael Houck]: Exactly. [Dave Schools]: That's the thing with Singulate that's different from other AI platforms is like always validate, always verify. Always give the user control. And then you write something for this group, write something for this group. [Michael Houck]: That's cool. [Dave Schools]: And then there's always a fallback or an ability to skip. So you just only say something thoughtful to those you have data on. Everybody else receives a shorter email. Then that drops it. And the last one is Singulated Snippets. This is where you could drop in a big amount of data. The example here, I should jump into a different one sec. We're working with SAS stock on some of their comms. And there's one here, just to show you an example of a singulated snippet, where you can summarize. I just copied and pasted from a spreadsheet of past attempts. These. Sure. And then said, right, I wrote these writing instructions. And then for anyone, any contacts without enough data, there's always a safe fallback. And then you go to fine tuning. And this is that verification step. And you see unique outputs for Narendra. And based on her profile, it's like, wow, this works are like, this looks good. And so if you like you to prove it trains the model If you don't like it, you would hit reject and you just edit it. [Michael Houck]: How are you guys balancing making the AI performance as good as possible and devoting internal resources to that versus building out features so you can get to feature parity with the existing options that people are using? Because if you're going after mid-market enterprise, those teams rely on a bunch of features. It's harder to break it down. Of those than smaller companies. So obviously you have this sort of choice of like, do we wow them with the AI or do we reach feature parity faster, basically? [Dave Schools]: Yeah, that's a great, great question. Beehive obviously did the feature parity thing. We went with AI first and are going integration horizontal. So like HubSpot is the main way that we're kind of wedging into the market and events. By having a deep integration with HubSpot. So to answer your question, we focused on AI first, and now we're catching up on the feature parity side. We have a more robust email editor, and then more integrations. But the differentiation here, the moat, and what we've built are these three features. And now it's just getting it to integrate into a very competitive space. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, look, I think it's really cool. I think the features could definitely be valuable for us and also for our clients, too. [Dave Schools]: So I see the value. Cool. As far as working together, we would, I've got like five or six copywriters that I assign to clients just to create the initial template so they can see how the tool works and test it out. I see that three to seven times increase in performance on automations or like webinar invites. The four main use cases are ABM, bottom of funnel nurtures, event and webinar invites and followups, and then marketing automation. So like somebody fills out your, tell us about you survey. It's like using all that data in the automated workflow to send comms that leverage that data to be hyper like super personalized. [Michael Houck]: We're doing some webinars pretty soon. So I'm working with a friend on them through his company. But I'll share Singulate with him and kind of encourage him to use it for those. Because obviously, we want attendance to be as high as possible. [Dave Schools]: So yeah. Cool. We're doing that for Zoom, for SassDoc. And there was another company that we do webinar invites for. And whoever comes in, what we could do is, hey, you should work with Michael. Work with your agency. [Michael Houck]: What's your agency called, Megaphone? Yeah, so Megaphone is our creator partnership platform. Megaphone Studio is our content agency. [Dave Schools]: Cool. So it'd be like, Megaphone Studio is a certified Singulate partner. Work with us. And then for services, ongoing services, work with Megaphone, that's kind of the model that we see going. It's kind of like clay. Yep. With like the community of Clayton sees like we instead of Rev Ops top of funnel, it's like mark growth marketers mid funnel, you know, like lifecycle comms. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I mean, look, we love it right now. Our, our focus is email newsletters, and we do social media for people to because some people are interested in that too. But we want to focus on newsletters as much as possible because there's tend to be sick your clients. But Yeah, expanding into into sort of the email marketing side of things is high on my list of what we want to do. We have a couple candidates in the funnel who I'm actually talking to to bring on for that. So I wasn't sure how serious we would be about it in Q1 versus like Q2 or Q3. But if we're partnering with you guys, which sounds great, I think the tool is a no brainer for folks based on what I've seen. Yeah, I mean, we could bring somebody on sooner to be able to service them. So not opposed to that. [Dave Schools]: That's great. The, our pricing is because we're more mid market enterprise and our clients are, they tend to spend like 60,000 to 200,000, like they're larger companies on their CRM, like their HubSpot or Salesforce. So then Singulate, because we three to seven X growth pays for itself. Yeah, of course. [Michael Houck]: So like we'll charge like $20,000. [Dave Schools]: 20% of what they’re paying for HubSpot. It’s a killer offer. So like $18,000 and that's $12,000 a year for platforms, $6,000 in services, like data strategy, personalization strategy, implementation, HubSpot, like a little bit of consulting, high handholding. That way you’re not just kind of throwing them off into the wild west and you probably retain people a lot better that way. Yeah, product is, it’s still like, again, we’re still kind of early, like product that we have a, a roadmap that we want to execute on. [Michael Houck]: But like there’s a little bit of a loop. It’s a new mental model for people of how to do these things. And so you throw them in there without any guidance, and they’re going to be little dogs in the wind. [Dave Schools]: Yeah, they’ll get lost. So I’m putting together a knowledge base and resources for how to do the segmentation personalization strategy with the data you have. Whoever you bring on and works with clients, like with Singulate, we’d train them. They’d come to our webinars. I’m doing a weekly copywriter training session next week that they could jump in on. And they’d be in Slack with that. We’d be in Slack together. I’ll pitch this to some folks. [Michael Houck]: If you want to send me any one pager or something like that, I can share with them too. That’d be great. And then we’ll bring somebody on to start doing this sort of more email marketing, mid-funnel stuff more formally. So as you find folks who you want to send our way, please do. We’ll toss you a referral bonus, obviously, as well for that. So thanks both of us. [Dave Schools]: Yeah, I think we’re doing like 20% referral bonus. So if you bring a client to us, you work with them, and they’ll pay you. Then they give us the fee, and we’ll split that with you. [Michael Houck]: We both get to double dip a little bit, which Nice. [Dave Schools]: The one-pager, we’re putting that together this week. So no super rush on this, I suppose. But let’s keep chatting about it. Sounds like a good fit. Oh, man. I’ll check in with you if I don’t hear from you by mid-next week. [Michael Houck]: I’m going to be at a conference for part of next week anyway. So I probably won’t be able to kick too much off till the beginning of March. But yeah, I’m excited. The value was clear as soon as you started playing around with the tool. I was like, okay, I see what we could do here. So yeah, whether it’s fit for the newsletter or not, I can talk with our team, but I definitely think it’ll be a fit for some of our clients. [Dave Schools]: So I will go from there. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Sounds great. [Michael Houck]: Which conference? Just curious. It’s Matt McGarry’s Newsletter Operator Conference in Austin. [Dave Schools]: Yeah, yeah, nice, nice, cool. It’s gonna be fun. Are you in Austin? [Michael Houck]: No, I was in New York, but I’ve spent the winter down here in Brazil and Argentina. I’m in Florianopolis right now. But I’ve finally come back to the States for the conference and don’t have anywhere to live. So I got to figure out what I’m going to do there too. Oh, sick. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Digital nomad. [Dave Schools]: I’m in Maryland. So if you’re over East Coast, Baltimore, I get up to New York quite a bit. Oh, cool. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, no, let me know when you’re in New York. Maybe I’ll be there. I was living there for like four years, but just needed something new. So on to the next one. [Dave Schools]: Go ahead. All right, man. I’ll be in touch. Good to see you. [Michael Houck]: Good to meet you. Good to chat. See you soon, man. Cheers. Bye.