- Duration: 25 min
- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01JMMT68866073FQ2VDN3NKJE6 (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JMMT68866073FQ2VDN3NKJE6)
Transcript
[Michelle Kwok]: I know we only have a bit of time. So maybe I’ll just get into what I’m I Don’t think I really know what you guys are doing somebody. I was just texting my friend Who used to write run a ghostwriting? I just texted a couple of my friends one who used to do social media auditing and when you did ghostwriting agency and then he was just like I’m just gonna connect you with Blake. So I actually don’t really have a lot of context my only thing is I work at Draper Associates right now. I was talking to Tim a couple days ago. Like, I really believe in LinkedIn branding, like personal branding on LinkedIn, on Twitter. I personally kind of like do that for myself when I have time on LinkedIn. All of my opportunities have only come from LinkedIn and a part of the deals that I’ve gotten are also because people know what I’m up to because I post on LinkedIn. And so I was talking to this it’s about this with him and a lot of people know who he is, but they don’t know what we do. Like they, they know who he is. They know that he’s an investor. They know he has a lot of money, you know, like, um, so people will just like hit me up to be like, will you fund this? And I’m like, not really. Like I, you don’t get, so I rewrote our investment thesis and everything, but it’s not about just an investment thesis, it’s about like, you gotta like hound me, not hound you, but like be out there and be like, I [Michael Houck]: am the guy who invests in like, you gotta remind them that you exist and you gotta remind them what you stand for and what you’re interested in. It’s, you know, you show up in their feed once, they have no idea who you are five minutes after. [Michelle Kwok]: So he has like 30,000 followers on LinkedIn, maybe like 100K on Twitter or something like that. But they’re not activated ever. It’s like he Like, uh, he like posts videos every now and then but I don’t think they’re they’re not like actively engaged and stuff Like I’m envisioning kind of not like to the degree of alex paul Like I feel like his ghostwriter is going crazy. Whoever that is But I mean, it’s awesome. It’s good. Um, but Just looking to see what is possible with like a social media audit because we had talked about LinkedIn, Twitter, and he talked about Instagram. He was like, he doesn’t know what to do. He’s not sure what to do with his Instagram. He like has a lot of followers on there and doesn’t always want to post his family on there now. Kind of wants to make it more of a professional thing, but it’s a different vibe even to go professional Instagram than it is on LinkedIn and Twitter. I obviously want to focus a lot more on LinkedIn and Twitter for now. Yeah, but just wanted to see what like social media auditing kind of looks like, just what you guys have done. And case studies, what the feedback is like, when you kind of just, let’s say you’re like guaranteed, I don’t know, like, what is it? [Michael Houck]: What do you guys do? What are you up to? Yeah, 100%. I’ll give some context. So quick, very quick context on me first. So spent four or five years in big tech, early Uber Eats, helped scale that business, then product manager at Airbnb, built Airbnb Plus. Got laid off during COVID, started a company called Launch House. We raised our Series A from Andreessen and raised a venture fund as well. Invested in like 50 companies that came through our community. Funded pretty well. I remember. So yeah, we folded the company into the fund and that’s sort of the ongoing entity there. But for the past two years, my focus has been building up a bootstrap personal holding company. So I have my media assets. I built my personal brand across platforms to 100K. That it goes out to 70,000 founders every week. It’s sort of an advice column. And built a platform to connect founders to creators called Megaphone for engagement on social media to amplify content to their audiences in like certain niches. And from that, people were like, well, why don’t you just write the content for us too? And I was like, oh, okay, that’s interesting. So I started building a ghost writing agency about a year ago. It’s myself and Blake Imahl, who you also might know from Twitter or from from LinkedIn, he has an even bigger audience than I do. We have a team of writers we’ve worked with for a long time, mostly US-based, some international folks, but they all meet our quality bar. And we work with about 22, 21, 22 startups at this point. We do newsletters, we do the Founders X, we do the Founders LinkedIn, we do other execs, social medias too, and basically build out that whole kind of content funnel for them. So we’re pretty lightweight. We work with busy people. Everything happens through Slack and Notion async, unless you guys would want to do kind of content interviews. Otherwise, we can do it all through voice notes and ideas back and forth in Slack. And yeah, I mean, we work with some YC companies. We work with a bunch of venture-backed companies. So definitely know the space, definitely have writers who are familiar. And they all get, you know, no content would get sent to you guys without either myself or Blake editing and reviewing it first. So there’s that level of a kind of quality assurance there. [Michelle Kwok]: Are you allowed to say like where your kind of clients are or no? Okay. We’ll do the same thing for you guys. [Michael Houck]: You know, we’re not in the business of name dropping and trying to get clients that way. It’s more so just our process. [Michelle Kwok]: and our proof points with our own accounts. I think the concern is that like Tim is definitely a public figure. And so obviously there has to be a lot of trust involved and assurance, like working with someone that we know will get his voice or get what we want the voice to be. Um, so not that I want to know every one of your clients or anything like that. It’s just like, I don’t know how to get there. What is your, what is your process typically? Yeah. [Michael Houck]: So when you guys would first join, we would do one kickoff call and that’s the only time where we’re like require anyone to hop on a call. Again, if you guys want to do sort of content interviews, either weekly, bi-weekly or monthly, that’s totally fine as well. Um, but most, most of our clients are, we can get there with Slack. And basically on that call, someone on the team will have already filled out an onboarding form, which is like pretty detailed about voice accounts who have the voice that we want already, content pillars, who our audience is, things like that. We’ll go deeper on that on the kickoff. And then each week on Monday in a shared Slack channel, we’ll send a few ideas and like specific questions about those topics that came up during our research that we sort of want either Tim or your or someone else on the team’s expertise And all we require is like a two to three minute kind of rambly voice note in Slack in response to that. That lets the emotion, the intonation, the nuances, just like we would on a call, but without requiring a bunch of anyone’s time. So we’re month to month, 30 day cancellation, but we’re not interested in some kind of long-term lock-in. We prove ourselves with our work. And again, happy to share my account, Blake’s account. We work with, I won’t say exactly the startup, but we work with a company in the offshore hiring space that’s gone to tens of millions of revenue in the last year. We do their newsletter. You might know who they are. They’re on a bunch of podcasts and things like that. But yeah, that’s just one example that I can share without sort of blowing the lid off. But yeah, I mean, we’re the only agency that I’m aware of that’s actually run and operated by two creators this themselves who also have worked in the startup world. Like Blake was the first CMO at Copy AI, I’ve raised venture, I’ve worked at Big Tech. So we get the space and we have a really high quality bar for our content. [Michelle Kwok]: You’re talking like deal, remote, Athena, one of those types of deadlines. [Michael Houck]: I’ll say one of those. Yes, correct. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. [Michelle Kwok]: That’s helpful. And what is the pricing, what’s the pricing looking like, [Michael Houck]: Yeah, so for a weekly, if you wanted to do newsletter, weekly newsletter is 3500. And we handle kind of all ops around that we’ll set up the beehive account, we have a designer on staff, if you guys want us to do designs, clients like to do their own brand design, which is fine. We’ll set up automation, segmentation, reporting, all that kind of stuff. And if you want to do bi weekly, it’s 2k on social, the message was primarily about Uh, it’s, if we’re gonna do a full account takeover, we’re sort of, we’re posting daily content, bunch of long form pieces per week with a few short form mixed in, uh, you know, we’re replying to other thought leaders in the niche from the account. Uh, we’re engaging with the comments on our posts. Um, we’re optimizing the profile for conversion to, you know, get them people to send in deals or whatever the goal is. It’s three K for an account. If we want to do. Like just some content per week probably smaller batches of content and without the ops then it’s 2k per month. Um If we combine multiple accounts, obviously we can offer a discount there, uh, depending on depending on the volume standard discount is about 10 Nice nice. [Michelle Kwok]: Okay, because I was thinking For tim’s account it would like we don’t want to be doing like daily content We don’t want it to seem like there’s a ghost writer, you know um We want maybe like Weekly type of thing and also like a weekly on our on our LinkedIn account For the company for the venture fund and then so what would that maybe look like, [Michael Houck]: Let’s I mean be totally honest It’s not the structure we normally work on but we’d be happy to do it for you guys We were super excited about the idea of working with you guys. So be happy to do it If we’re doing one post from Tim’s account that’s like longer form, I would guess, not like some like two little posts. One post per week from that and one post per week from the corporate account. I mean, it would be on the lower end for sure. [Michelle Kwok]: It would be like the 2K, maybe depending on the type of post, even a bit lower. Okay, cool. Let me see. Do you guys do kind of like a social audience of all the accounts and kind of give sort of a con strategy? Yeah. [Michael Houck]: So that’s, I do that myself actually for every new client the first week. Um, so I’ll record a loom video or if it’s a couple of accounts, I can do a couple kind of short loom videos of just like what we would change about the way the profiles are set up and we go through some content and see like, okay, here’s the, you know, the, the categories of content that we see performing best for you. Here’s what we would want to double down on or here’s what we would suggest doubling down on. And here’s what we’d sort of suggest moving away from [Michelle Kwok]: So yeah, that’s part of the deal. Sweet. That’s part of the 2K a month piece, or whatever you said. Yeah, me included. Oh, cool, cool, cool. Is that like a, it’s just a Loon video, or you do like a written document as well? We can do a written document if you’d prefer. That’s fine, too. OK. OK, great. I think those are all of my questions now. I’m just going to bring this back to Tim and see what he thinks over the next couple weeks. We’re still trying to make some decisions about socials and websites. You guys don’t do website stuff, right? [Michael Houck]: We well, Blake is like, one of the best kind of conversion landing page copywriters that I know. So it’s not something that we typically offer. But if that’s sort of we want to create like a package situation, we could we could definitely discuss adding that in. Okay, awesome. [Michelle Kwok]: Is there anything else that I need to know that I have missed? No, we covered pricing, we covered 30 day cancellation. [Michael Houck]: I don’t think there’s anything else. No, I don’t think so. We’ll be in Slack, as I said, so just be assured Slack channel and you guys could add whoever you want from your team to sort of manage that. [Michelle Kwok]: Okay, perfect. And the Slack, how does it work with the posting? You’re like once a month, you like drop every single post in the Slack or something, or it’s like every week? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, we do weekly batches. And we’ll always be like a few weeks ahead after the first couple weeks as well. So we’re not always like, scrambling, waiting for you guys to review something, having things blocked to be scheduled. It’s always like, all right, we have a couple of weeks scheduled out. Here’s the next batch for after that. And if you had like trending topics that you wanted to comment on, just drop it in Slack and we can write something up, you know, same day for it. [Michelle Kwok]: Great. That’s, that’s interesting. You’ll write something up same day. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I mean, assuming it’s in the morning, if you get it to us at like 6pm, you know, it’s not gonna be the same day. [Michelle Kwok]: Where are you based? You’re west or east? [Michael Houck]: I’m not based anywhere right now. I’m currently in Florianopolis, Brazil. I just gave up in Williamsburg and just sort of traveling around for a bit. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: True. [Michelle Kwok]: Sounds fun. Sounds ideal for what you’re doing. My last website designer that I worked with was living in Portugal and I was like, that’s so ideal. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. I love being a couple hours ahead of Eastern time. Cause like you can wake up early and actually have some. [Michelle Kwok]: Yeah, exactly. [Michael Houck]: I feel that. [Michelle Kwok]: Okay. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Awesome. [Michelle Kwok]: Um, I appreciate your time. That was super helpful. And hopefully I’ll connect with Tim early next week and see what he thinks. Cool. [Michael Houck]: I’ll send over an email later today after I’m done some calls with like a TLDR of what we talked about, um, one pager notion doc. And, um, yeah, I guess any before, before I let you go, anything else lingering that we haven’t talked about that could be a concern or a blocker either from yourself from Tim that we should cover? [Michelle Kwok]: Do we get to meet whoever is writing the content specifically? Yeah, I should have clarified that. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: You will be in a Slack channel with the writer. If you guys want to chat directly, feel free. That’s totally fine. They’ll be your content partner. Their whole job is to download Tim’s brain and get it on paper. So we want them to be as engaged with you guys as possible and vice versa. [Michelle Kwok]: And what is confidentiality look like with you guys? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I mean, we’re happy to sign anything that you guys want. We have a standard kind of contract that we can send over. But if you guys have specific clauses you want in there, that’s fine, too. And that extends not only to me and the company, but also to anyone employed by the company. [Michelle Kwok]: Okay. Okay, great. I think that’s just the main concern, right? It’s just to make sure that things are private or people aren’t like, randomly saying, Oh, he said this. No, yeah, absolutely not. [Michael Houck]: I mean, I think you can already tell from the beginning of this conversation, we’re pretty committed to client confidentiality. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, that’s great. [Michelle Kwok]: That was a test, actually. Yeah, people never say that. [Michael Houck]: But then later, they’re like, well, maybe, you know, so yeah, we always we always keep people confidential. Okay. Okay, great. Perfect. [Michelle Kwok]: I think that’s all I need for now. But yeah, send me over that email. And then if I have any other questions, questions, I’ll just email you back. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Cool. [Michael Houck]: If I don’t hear from you by like mid next week, I’ll reach out. Okay. Thanks. Cool. Chad Sims, y’all good to meet. [Michelle Kwok]: Yep.