- Duration: 61 min
- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01JMZE416310296542GN06GEM6 (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JMZE416310296542GN06GEM6)
Transcript
[Austin Schlessinger]: How are you? That was the caption. The first time I went to Austin was Austin and Austin on my Instagram. [Michael Houck]: As one does. [Austin Schlessinger]: Of course you have to. [Michael Houck]: I’m going to. Add some stuff in here, but yeah, how are you doing? [Austin Schlessinger]: What’s new? What’s going on? Things are good. What is new? My wife is pregnant. Oh my god. Congratulations, man. [Michael Houck]: What the heck? Thank you. Yeah. When is she due? She’s due in September. [Austin Schlessinger]: So we have our first ultrasound on Friday. So knock on wood, everything’s OK. But I’m sure it is. [Michael Houck]: I’m sure it is. Wow, that’s so exciting, man. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Congrats. [Michael Houck]: Thank you. I just made the move down there and everything too. It’s like life probably feels like it’s changing so much in such a short period of time. [Austin Schlessinger]: I feel like I’m just getting settled in Florida. We’re finding our people and it’s really good. But throw this on top of it. It’s just another thing. [Michael Houck]: But we’re super excited though. Dang. Yeah, I bet. Well, cool. That’s amazing. I’m so happy for you. I can’t wait to have some kids of my own someday. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: We’ll see. Shoot. [Michael Houck]: Well, OK, so for point one, you feel like you’re good, everything sort of ready to go. Any questions about them as a client or anything like that? No, I think I’m all good. [Austin Schlessinger]: I’m curious what kind of content they’re looking to create, if it’s more of like a curation news style or if it’s more educational. I read like the onboarding stuff, but [Michael Houck]: Yeah, we’ll see what he says. Well, cool. I’m still, by the way, I’m still trying to make it down to probably more than like the Tampa area. At some point this year, I don’t know when yet, probably in the second half of the year, because I’m scoping out where to set up AMP for the next few years. And it’s still on the list. So I got to make it down and check it out, maybe not during the summer, probably, but maybe during the fall. [Austin Schlessinger]: Yeah. I haven’t experienced the Florida summer yet, but apparently it’s not very fun. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: I did when I was in college. I went to University of Miami. And it was a little crazy. We always made the joke that there were only two seasons. There’s hurricane season and there was tourist season That was it. [Austin Schlessinger]: No spring summer fall winter anything Yeah, man, if you’re whenever you make a way down here let me know Funny because grace just moved to st. [Michael Houck]: Petersburg. Oh wow, so now we have we have two folks on the team and sort of The because you’re also on the the western side of like southern, Florida Yep, I’m like 30 minutes from Sarasota, 45 from Tampa. I’m in a community called Lakewood Ranch. Lakewood Ranch, that’s cool. Yeah, she just moved down there pretty recently. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Wow. [Austin Schlessinger]: I don’t think I’ve actually ever spoken with Grace. I’ve just seen her in Slack. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I’ve worked with her on various things couple of years now. But she kind of took a few months off from doing any content writing because she got the worst luck of the draw in terms of the clients that she got matched up with. And she had some very tough clients. And so she took a couple months off. But we’re starting a new client with her, I think, as soon as maybe this week. [Austin Schlessinger]: So back in the game. That’s great. Yeah, it’s hard sometimes. You have one client that just sucks up all your time, and it’s not fun. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, but we’re in a better position now. We have more scalable systems. This was even before Blake was on the team. So this is a long time ago. Oh, wow. But yeah, we’ll see, man. One thing I want to toss your way is we can revisit this if he pops on. So we think we’re going to grow the agency quite a bit this year. You know, we’re at like, I think 22 or 23 clients right now. Um, and we think we can get that to like 50 by some point over the summer and then, you know, greater than that, obviously by the end of the year, um, there’s sort of two things we’re doing. One is, you know, unlocking new growth channels through partnerships and other things. Another is, um, We’re going to start going after more high ticket clients too. So higher volume of clients and also like more full service. And we help out with email marketing and all inclusive social media for their brand and personal accounts and like a whole bunch of services like that all packaged into one price point for them. Enterprise clients, stickier, all that kind of stuff, right? Good benefits to it. But as we have to do that on both sides, the higher volume and the higher complexity clients, you know, the business will evolve, right? Internal stuff that’s going to need to happen process-wise. And so just want to toss it, I really enjoyed working with you on everything so far. I think you handle your shit very well. You understand the client side and the internal quality side that we have very well. So just want to toss the feeler out there for when it comes time for us to start thinking about growing the team and structuring things more. It would be cool to loop you in more deeply into the business outside of just ad hoc client work, of interest to you. And if not, there’ll be no shortage of clients to kind of send your way. [Austin Schlessinger]: But yeah, just wanted to toss that to you. Yeah. I would definitely be interested in at least having a conversation about it. I’ve definitely enjoyed working with you as well. And it’s been fun seeing, it’s almost been a year now, just seeing things change and the growth channels. So yeah, it’s definitely something I would consider. [Michael Houck]: When the time comes, we can chat more about it and everything and see how we’re looking to structure the team and what could make the most sense for your interests and make sure you’re kind of excited about what you’re doing and all that stuff. But yeah, I think it’d be great. So we’ll chat more about it down the road. Cool. I’m going to ping him because we’re seven minutes over now. He should be here by now. There it is. I’m not going crazy, right? This is 0.1, it’s supposed to be? Yeah, it’s 0.1. OK. I was like, am I going nuts? That’s, I don’t even know. Oh man. How have things been with you? When did you get to Austin? [Austin Schlessinger]: I got to Austin yesterday. [Michael Houck]: I had a really long red eye from Florianopolis in Southern Brazil. So I got in at like 1 p.m. And it’s great, man. Things have been good. Argentina was kind of disappointing, if I’m being honest. Expensive, rundown, not a lot to do. But it was beautiful. And the people were really nice. Brazil was great. I love Brazil. Every time I go down there, I just have a blast. So Brazil was fun. But after being in South America for two months, I kind of got what I needed spiritually, mentally from that trip. And so now I’m excited to be back. Back in the US and just feel like it’s a new chapter post-divorce. And the goal for the next, I guess, like three, four months is probably longer than that. But just find the place where I want to sort of set down roots for a little bit. So Tampa’s on that list, some other places as well. So just hopping around and trying places out, meeting people, integrating myself with different communities and seeing where it’s going. So business is crushing it, and personal side, I feel like, is onto a new chapter, which is exciting. [Austin Schlessinger]: That’s awesome. Have you spent much time in Austin? [Michael Houck]: Maybe once before, just for like, I don’t even know why I was here, just for like four or five days. It was incredibly hot and muggy. It was like September or so. It’s also not very fun. But this time, yeah, it should be better. I’m here for a conference. And just a lot of old friends have moved here. So it’ll be good to catch up with a bunch of them. Are you going to be there for South By? No, I’m intentionally leaving next Tuesday. Tomorrow. Yeah, I’m not a big conference guy, especially big conferences. It’s just not my vibe. [Austin Schlessinger]: I don’t blame you. [Michael Houck]: So yeah, the next stop is Dallas, where my dad’s from originally. Never been, actually, because most of his family moved away before I was a kid. But be good to check that out. And then Nashville. And then going to fit Tampa in, Charleston, and then I’ll probably check out Bentonville, Arkansas, and the Provo Salt Lake City area, too. [Austin Schlessinger]: Nice. Yeah, going to be a good year. [Michael Houck]: OK, look, we’re 11 minutes over. He hasn’t responded. Maybe we give him another minute or two. But I don’t know. What do you think? We can call it in two, three minutes. Yeah, I’ll probably just reschedule. I think this is the first time we’ve ever had a kickoff. Oh, there we go. [Adrian Parlow]: Hey, guys. [Michael Houck]: Sorry we’re late. All good, man. What’s going on? How you doing? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Good. [Adrian Parlow]: Big firm demo that had a lot of questions. So a good problem to have. Yeah. No sweat, man. Yeah, what’s going on? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Not much. [Michael Houck]: Meet Austin. Hey, Austin. [Austin Schlessinger]: What’s going on, Adrian? Nice to meet you. I’m excited for you to write for me. [Adrian Parlow]: I’m excited to write for you. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Well, cool. [Michael Houck]: Look, Adrian, I want to make sure we, I mean, I think we have more than enough time to get to everything, so it shouldn’t be a huge deal. But I want to make sure you have enough time to ask any questions and stuff, too. So just the nature of that. Anything initially just based on sort of talk with Matt so far or about us that we haven’t covered on the sales call or anything like that, just anything lingering before we kind of dive into process next steps and getting [Adrian Parlow]: started. The exact timeline here, when do we actually like launch the first one? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, so after this call, we will be able to get started with like setting up the beehive account and also have all all the info he needs beyond just what’s in the form. So our goal is that basically two weeks from today, we’ll be able to begin publishing. And so that means content, that means apps. There will be some inputs required from you on the sort of newsletter setup side. Ben from our team will follow up with specifics about what those are. And then the big thing is design. So whether you guys will want to handle design internally or have our design loop. And I think we maybe briefly talked about that, but just getting clarity on that would be helpful. [Adrian Parlow]: Is that part of the package, the design work? Yeah. OK, cool. [Michael Houck]: But what we find is that most clients end up being like, oh, well, we already have our brand identity for the main company. Probably easier to just do it internally with our designer. But if you need design resources either from a bandwidth perspective or what have you, we have that available so we’re actually just going through a brand redesign effort with like a real design firm right now we’re at like the [Adrian Parlow]: mood board stage so some of the things are ironed out like I think we know what the fonts will be and stuff and colors but some of it is still a good chunk of it is still in process um and we’ll probably be done I don’t know four to six weeks so I kind of we’re you think in terms of timing there? Yeah. [Michael Houck]: I mean, if you have some guidance around fonts and colors, that is probably enough. And we can just spin something up. And then once you guys wrap that process up, you can make any changes at that point that you want to. We’ll have a Figma file that we can just share with you and go from there. [Adrian Parlow]: Cool. The other thing, too, I guess, is is this under the name of the company or is this independent? I think we decided independent. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, it’s a strategic choice for you guys. Some clients say, hey, I want to build a media brand that’s like powered by the company. Others have no association between them at all. Others want it to be company name newsletter, right? It’s just like, you know, I think since it’s so closely tied to the company, one of the first two probably makes the most sense here while still differentiating it from the actual company name, but up to you. Let me get your let me get your take on it. [Adrian Parlow]: So I’ll just explain what we’re trying to do. We’re mainly using this as a biz dev channel for the company. So I’m going to basically use a monthly webinar, trying to get a lot of people from the newsletter routed to the webinar, and then from the webinars back into the newsletter, kind of stack those two things. We also do a lot of live and person events, conferences, stuff like that. So we’ll kind of tie all these things together. That said, I’m a little bit nervous about lawyers getting auto-added to a newsletter. You know how lawyers are. People are probably going to be like, oh, GDPR, why did you add me to this? Based on Matt’s growth techniques. And so for that reason, I feel a little distance might be good. Yeah, I don’t know. [Michael Houck]: What do you think? Yeah, I mean, I always personally prefer sort of the newsletter having its own brand and identity. I think that that builds a stronger affinity with readers. It also makes it feel less like an ad or like marketing. So I think you end up getting better metrics that way in the long run. It also lets you have more flexibility with how you position the actual company itself within the newsletter. So that’s my bias. I think in your specific situation with lawyers, you know, I mean, everything that Matt does is above board, but just to, if there are any headaches that would come up, that will obviously make it easier to, to, to not have to deal with that. Yeah. [Adrian Parlow]: Sounds good. It sounds like the move. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Cool. [Michael Houck]: So what we can do then is after this call, as part of like this first kind of week, we will come up with some like name ideas for you to, I know, I think You guys already have one on the Beehive account that’s set up, but we’ll come up with some alternatives. If you have any others that you guys were considering as well, feel free to send them to us. [Adrian Parlow]: But that’ll just be part of the setup work that we do. Yeah, I think we had come up with one a while back, but I feel so-so about it. [Michael Houck]: So if you guys can think of anything better. Cool. Sounds good. OK. Well, with that, I will turn it over to Austin. To walk you through the majority of stuff on this call, basically just going deeper on the kind of ideas you shared some info with in the onboarding form. And then once we get what we need there, I’ll come back in. We’ll talk about process, immediate next steps, and we’re off to the races from there. [Austin Schlessinger]: Cool. Sounds good. Awesome. Let me share my screen. Adrian, I pulled some of the info over from the form you filled out, but I did have some follow-up questions on some of the things that you’d thrown in there. Can you see my screen? Yep. Okay, awesome. So just a little bit about me. I have four years of ghostwriting experience. I’ve written for over 15 CEOs and founders at this point across various formats, newsletters, social content. I also built a so-so audience on a while back. I don’t really post that much anymore, but I do have experience building an audience on my own. I periodically write my own newsletter as well. Okay, so primary outcomes of this meeting. Define your primary and secondary goal. Identify the exact audience that you’re looking to target. Identify some of the content pillars. Align on our posting schedule when the first edition is going to go out and then every subsequent edition. Then we can talk about any process stuff. We’ll also follow up with the process after the call. So first thing, I guess I’ll pause there. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Anything else that you want to call out on this call? [Adrian Parlow]: No, I think that makes sense. Awesome. [Austin Schlessinger]: All right. So you talked about this before, but what is the number one reason that you’re looking to build a newsletter? You mentioned like attracting customers, business development. [Adrian Parlow]: Is there anything else you want to call out here? Leadership. We kind of have two concurrent goals. We’re trying to, so you can think of our market roughly in two segments there’s the large firms which are you can think of like fortune 500 companies but in the legal space so these are giant law firms with like a thousand lawyers um and then there are fmbs which are basically small firms think like 100 attorneys and less um there’s also kind of this like mid-market space but let’s keep things clean let’s not worry too much about that and so for the large firms we’re not really trying to sell to them directly but we’re trying to position ourselves as thought leaders Basically how you sell these big firms is you just like look smart and make them remember who you are. And then when they decide that they want to buy your thing, then like they know to call you. That’s pretty much like the only way that we can actually sell to them. And you just like show up in their face at events. And so for them, for that segment of the market, the newsletter, the goal here is like, have them remember who I am. See the company every week, think that we’re doing things and basically stay top of mind. For the SMBs, we’re actually directly trying to sell to them. And so for the SMBs, what we’re going to do is run webinars. We’re going to try and do the webinars once a month. You can do this thing in legal where you get credits, CLE credits, which stands for Continuing Legal Education. You have to get these to get your bar or to hold your our license. And so when you do these credits, then it encourages people to show up to these things. So you can boost the numbers. And we’ll do something like how to use AI for your legal practice or some kind of generic stuff, and then kind of like plug 0.1 in there as well. And so the primary goal for SMBs is going to be drive them, I mean, either just get demos directly if we can, but also drive them to the webinar so that the hardest thing about a webinar people to show up to it and so if I have this like megaphone where I can get 500 signups every time we run one of these things that’ll be super powerful and then of course that’ll feed back in right so we’ll promote it on socials and whatnot anybody who’s not already on the list will get enrolled when they go to the webinar got it so I guess similarly for events like we run happy hours and stuff at different conferences throughout the year so we’ll do the same kind of thing uh there Got it. [Austin Schlessinger]: So I imagine there’s probably like, is the, there’d have to be some sort of segmentation in that the messaging to go out these two audience in terms of like, or are you comfortable, would you be comfortable pushing out like the monthly webinar to the large firms? Or do you think they would just like not sign up for it? Like, what are your thoughts there? I don’t, I just, yeah, I don’t think they’re gonna sign up for it. [Adrian Parlow]: I mean, I’m cool if they join. That is a question I guess is like who’s the webinar really for? The thing with large firms is like you can’t just like show up to a webinar and then be like that’s cool I’m gonna buy it and then buy it. It has to come from the top down. Someone in the c-suite has to decide that this is like a strategic priority and then they go through a whole like buying cycle and so someone can come to a webinar just to like learn what our thing is and maybe Maybe that helps they’re like an influencer in the firm or something, but it’s probably not going to like directly drive sales at large firms. So I would think the webinars are more SMB oriented. Cool. [Austin Schlessinger]: But I mean, at the end of the day, like time tracking is time tracking. [Adrian Parlow]: It’s not that different from large firms to small firms. Yep. [Austin Schlessinger]: What we can do is at the bottom, I’m sure you’ve seen this in other newsletters, but at the bottom call out something where it’s like, when you’re ready, here’s three ways I can help. And one of them can be sign up for a webinar. Another can be give away some sort of free resource, book a demo, something like that. Another thing I’m curious is, is this primarily going to be coming from you, or is it going to be your company? [Adrian Parlow]: Point one. Who’s the author, the stated author? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yes. [Adrian Parlow]: Well, what do you guys, my first gut reaction is me, because I’m kind of the face of the company. I post on LinkedIn, I talk at conferences, that kind of thing. But I don’t know if that’s best practice or, yeah. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, Adrian, I’d strongly recommend we do this from your POV. I think it will help build trust put a face to the brand you’re gonna be in these people’s faces in other places as well like you just mentioned. It’s gonna go from you being some guy who talks at a conference to you being the guy who’s emails they read every week who’s now at the conference as well. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Adrian Parlow]: We can talk about content. I guess, when you’re ready. But I wouldn’t mind contributing a little bit of content, either that I write directly or that I orchestrate for you around what I’m finding interesting this week. That would be directly from me. And then maybe the rest of it is more like news or other things. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: OK. [Austin Schlessinger]: That makes sense. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I mean adrian for context that’s a very similar thing to what I do with my own newsletter. So very much in our wheels we have like the Section we call like aux picks which are like interesting things I find per week and then you know The rest of the format whether it’s a long form or kind [Adrian Parlow]: of a roundup of news and things like that underneath. So yeah, definitely good Secondary goals. Um, yeah, I mean building up a lot of subscribers. I think will just be valuable over time Matt made the point to me that this is a very unsaturated market. There’s maybe five relevant newsletters in this space, which I was like, there’s already five newsletters. He’s like, there’s only five newsletters in this space. So I think soaking up a lot of the eyeballs here will be really valuable. [Adrian Parlow]: Opportunities, I didn’t even think about that. I guess that’s like, yeah, just thought leadership generally, which I guess leads to PR or whatever. So yeah, I guess grow more subscribers and be a thought leader. [Austin Schlessinger]: Are you aware of those, I guess, five other newsletters? [Adrian Parlow]: I can give you a couple of them. I’ll see. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Awesome. [Michael Houck]: Matt has the list. We can just ask him. [Adrian Parlow]: Yeah, I don’t know if I put newsletters in that list. But yeah, if you want to just ping me afterwards, I can send you some. [Austin Schlessinger]: Sounds good. [Adrian Parlow]: I will follow up. For it to be a success, so I built an ROI model for like basically what do I need to see here to get positive ROI. We have a pretty reasonably high ACV. And so it’s primarily, essentially, if I can get a reasonable number of people to attend the webinars from this, then it probably pays for itself pretty easily. So I think I’m trying to see if I have the actual numbers. By the way, like, do you guys have any sense for what percentage of people might click through from a newsletter? To sign up for a webinar? [Michael Houck]: You’re our first client who specifically wants the webinar funnel to be the focus. I know Matt has started offering that for some folks that we’re going to partner with him on too. So this is new for us, but I’ve had a lot of people sign up for my events, whether it’s fireside chats with people digitally or in-person meetups and things like that for my newsletter in the past. The honest truth it’s going to vary significantly, and we’re not going to know with this niche how it performs until we sort of get some data. So my honest thing would be, hey, let’s run the first one, let’s see how it goes, and then we can set some goals based on that. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Sounds good. [Adrian Parlow]: Yeah, so I’ve got this model kind of built out, and we’ll just basically adjust all the rates as things go along, and we’ll figure out if it’s tracking well or not. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Cool. All right. So we talked about goals. [Austin Schlessinger]: Next thing is audience. I pulled this from the form. So basically, lawyers and other professionals at law firms. Anything else you want to call out here? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Not really. [Adrian Parlow]: Small firms, it’s going to be primarily Primarily lawyers, they don’t have a lot of admin staff. At large firms, it’s going to be more like people in your innovation department, your IT department, your finance department. But lawyers are great, too, because they’re influencers, they’re end users. So pretty much anybody who works at a law firm is cool. And then I guess maybe secondarily would be lawyers in-house. So that’s like lawyers at companies, not at law firms. We don’t actually have a product for in-house today. But we most likely will in the future. And also, they all kind of talk to each other in the same circles. So that would be worse, but also still viable. [Austin Schlessinger]: Awesome. Apartments, IT, innovation, et cetera. [Adrian Parlow]: Yeah. I wouldn’t even worry too much about departments. I mean, if they’re in a law firm and they’re signing up to a newsletter about AI, that’s cool. [Austin Schlessinger]: Cool. All right. I guess we already answered this. We want to target in-house lawyers, because eventually there might be a product there. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: But is there anything else? [Austin Schlessinger]: Any other? Or nuance you want to add here? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: No. [Adrian Parlow]: I mean, maybe just to give you as, like, I assume the targeting really has to do with what content you’re writing. Is that it? Like, what effect did the targeting have? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, just in terms of, like, how we’re positioning the company and, I guess, like, what type of content they’d be interested in, right? Like, maybe some people are even more news-related content because they don’t have a great source for that that’s in their inbox already. Others might be more interested in sort of long-form essays depending on who they are. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: So that’s just information. [Adrian Parlow]: I think with legal tech, you kind of have to do both law firms and in-house together. They’re kind of two sides of the legal tech coin, if that makes sense. And law firms are the audience that we care about today. But it’s probably not enough. Like you probably want to go broader and include in-house as well with the assumption that someday we’ll have a product to sell to them. [Austin Schlessinger]: All right. So good audience. Now content pillars. I pulled these from the form. I’m kind of curious about your vision for this. I know we’ve talked about kind of like AI news, legal tech news. What’s kind of your vision for the type of content that we’re going to be covering? [Adrian Parlow]: Where I think there’s maybe a gap in the market right now is in people who are doing a good job at Taking what’s happening in the broader ai news. So like, you know clod releases or anthropic releases new clod model And then translating that in a way that is relevant for lawyers So what impact does this have on legal tech? How will this affect law firms? So I think yeah ai news with some like commentary that helps it be relevant I think is good Commentary on what’s happening in legal tech generally Like I don’t know if you guys saw harvey raised a massive round recently like 300 million And I just like wrote a post on linkedin with some commentary on what I thought about Them raising the round and that popped off to like 70k impressions or something so I think just like general commentary on like what’s happening in the industry right now. There’s another company called yudia that just raised a hundred something million dollar round for some weird purposes that I don’t fully understand. So like, that’s going to be my next LinkedIn post. I think they’re trying to buy a law firm is what’s happening. They’re spending like 70 mil on like buying a law firm. Cause nobody needs 105 million in a Series A [Michael Houck]: Isn’t that the Atrium playbook? You just build, build or buy a law firm internally? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Adrian Parlow]: Atrium tried to build one internally. Yeah, I don’t know. I need to figure out what exactly their play is. By the way, there’s a bunch of people trying to do like AI Atrium. I’m very interested to see if any of them succeed or not. [Michael Houck]: I can see if I know anyone who’s close to the UDA guys and kind of see what the goal is there. I don’t know if I do, but I can ask around. [Adrian Parlow]: I heard through the grapevine that they’re trying to buy a law firm. I don’t know if that’s public information. So yeah. Anyways, then I think like the future of legal services is interesting. There’s a bunch of kind of hot topics here. One that’s really relevant for us is what’s going to happen to the business model of law firms. The business model today is billable hours, the degree to which that persists or shifts to a fixed fee world or some combination of all the above. I don’t know how much you guys are familiar with this, but the basic concept is something today takes 100 hours. If you apply AI, it only takes 10 hours. If you bill by the hour, you make one-tenth the money. And so, like, what do you do about that? Historically, it’s been a major disincentive to innovation. But now the industry is kind of being forced into innovation because AI is taking over. And so then it’s like, okay, what do you do about that? Do you switch to fixed fees when they don’t really want to or know how to? So this is kind of like an open question. And so generally I would frame this as like the future of the business model for legal services. So that’s kind of interesting. And I think that the future of like the staffing model for legal services services is interesting. So when AI automates away all the stuff that junior associates do, what do you do? Do you keep hiring more junior associates, but you train them differently? Do you stop hiring junior associates? I don’t think anyone really knows the answer to this yet. So that’ll be interesting. I don’t know. I’m just kind of rambling at this point. [Austin Schlessinger]: I don’t know if this is helpful. No, it’s definitely helpful. In terms of like the learning about some I can follow up with this but off the top of your head Where is a lot of like the discussion about these things happening? [Adrian Parlow]: Around business model future of law Probably LinkedIn LinkedIn and a handful of newsletters and like in person at conferences Cool. [Austin Schlessinger]: All right. So I think we have a good list here. So legal funding news, legal tech news, AI news with kind of a spin on how it would be interesting for legal professionals, and then talking about the future of business model and staffing models of legal space. [Adrian Parlow]: Yeah, I think even just even just basic ai news to the extent that it’s important like uh, you know, like if open ai releases like gpt5, you know, we’re going to talk about that obviously it doesn’t need to be tied directly into legal Because a lot of lawyers will just use these tools directly but then also they’re obviously underpinning all the all the actual like Cool. [Austin Schlessinger]: All right. Then newsletter formats. The spin on this question is, are there any newsletters that you can think of that you kind of look at and you’re like, oh, OK, I kind of like that format. I imagine that this would probably work. If not, we can talk about that a little bit. But if there’s anything that comes to mind, we can start there. [Adrian Parlow]: This is purely like a personal taste thing, but I like some commentary up top and then maybe some news, like quick hit news, like bullet points further down below. The ones that are just like purely news don’t really do much for me, but I think if you can say something interesting about what’s been happening over the last week or so, that’s good. But to be honest, I also don’t really read any newsletters anymore because I’m too busy. If you guys have any thoughts on this market or best practices here, we’d like to hear that. [Michael Houck]: As far as structure? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I mean, I think The tried and true formats are pretty close to what we’re talking about here, like quick hit news, links of the week. What are we finding interesting that other people should be aware of but don’t have enough time to go sourcing through social media themselves? We want to be the guy who’s finding all those things on social media, putting them together for this person, curating them. But then we also want to show our own level of expertise, not just that we’re curators and adding commentary either on news or in a longer form essay style. So the one thing I always like to say here is that even for my own newsletter, when I was just starting it, it’s natural for us to experiment with different formats early on, first couple months, and just see what resonates with folks. We’ll have a poll in the bottom so they can tell us how much they enjoyed the issue. That’ll help us understand both topically and in terms of format What resonates and what doesn’t cool Sounds good Cool um And the last thing is oh, yeah, go ahead I was gonna say last thing is um posting schedule do [Austin Schlessinger]: you have an idea of like Any preferences on a particular day? [Adrian Parlow]: I don’t know. I haven’t thought about this at all. Lawyers are extremely busy. And so if there’s anything we can do to optimize for like, I don’t know, if somebody is like exceedingly busy, when would you want to post it so that they have a few minutes to read it? Yeah. So I have two thoughts on this. [Michael Houck]: One is if it’s going to be during the week, it should be early, right? Like people who they’re going to wake up, they can just check this before they go into the office and start having the chaos of their day. Alternatively, what I do is I post my long form stuff on Saturdays, which historically has the lowest open rates of any day. But for my target, which is founders, they’re in their email every day. I don’t know lawyers like you do, so I don’t know if they’re checking their email Saturday mornings or Sunday mornings, too. But if they are, that could be an option. [Adrian Parlow]: It’s interesting. Let me pull some people and see what they think. I’m going to guess a weekday morning probably is best. Probably not Monday, because Monday they’re all slammed, but maybe like a Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. But let me ask some lawyers if they checked their email on the weekends. Let us know. [Michael Houck]: Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday tend to be the best for performing days. So that’s fine. We can even try out different ones if we want to mess around with it. But yeah, I think the weekend for this demographic is interesting. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: So let us know what you hear. Cool. [Austin Schlessinger]: And then, yeah, if you guys could send it out, that’d be great. [Adrian Parlow]: Yeah, so that’s kind of a legacy question in this form. [Michael Houck]: We’ve started offering kind of all ops now. So we’ll schedule it. We’ll report metrics. We’ll set up automations as well, like a welcome sequence that we’ll want to get your approval on, an auto churn slash re-engagement sequence if they don’t open a bunch of issues in a row. If they rate an issue really highly, we have the opportunity to trigger an email based on that. So if you want to give them an offer or just get them into a webinar and get that in front of their face again, we can send some email based on that. There’s other ones we can set up too, but those are kind of the core three that we like to get from day one. So yeah, we handle all ops. Again, as I mentioned, there will be some initial setup work where we need your input on, but we’ll flag what that is in the next couple of days. Great. OK, so as far as next steps go, Austin, unless you have anything else you want Nope. Okay. So yeah, next steps. Austin’s going to get started on, I mean, we’ve already gotten started on the research side, but on the content side, we’ll get started on that and we’ll get started taking over the Beehive account. I’ll let you know what the sort of ops we require are, as I mentioned. And other than that, I mean, we’re just, we’re in it now. So we’re off to the races. Our target will be, you know, two weeks from today is Tuesday. We can set that as our, as our target for go live. All we ask is that we’ll tag you in Slack when issues are ready, and the quicker you can get back to us with feedback on that, the better. And then Matt will begin adding leads to the Beehive account as well, once we get access to sort of our catch-all email that will get added to the account. [Adrian Parlow]: Sounds good. How does the process generally go for creating the content on a weekly basis? Basis. I’m sure you guys will do your research and come up with the news and whatnot. But as far as that like commentary section, how are we doing that? [Michael Houck]: Yes, our standard process is that we’ll come to you with some ideas for it on the beginning of each week. And we’ll have like a couple topic ideas, maybe specific questions about each topic where it came up during our research, we want your unique POV. If you can reply to that, by say, you know, Tuesday, Wednesday, at the latest with a two to three minute, two to four minute rambly voice note in Slack. That’s going to be the best way for us to capture the little intonation and your feelings about it. And then we’ll get it to you with that incorporated by the end of the week for your review. Our goal will be to get a few weeks ahead and batch things, obviously, so that we’re not scrambling from week to week. But it’ll take a few weeks for us to get to that point. [Adrian Parlow]: Got it. And then if I have my own ideas for like things that pop up on my radar, obviously you can, yeah, drop those topics as well. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. I’m interested in this. Go ahead, sorry. Sorry, both topics for the newsletter and also like trending news items that you want us to include. Please drop all those in Slack. And actually what would be even more helpful too is if you’re like, oh, my information diet consists of these things. Yeah. Can subscribe to and consume that same information diet. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Sounds good. [Adrian Parlow]: Yeah, there’s like a handful of industry newsletters that have kind of all the relevant news. But I don’t know, if you’re using other people’s newsletters, then you’d be getting it after the fact, right? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, it’s usually better to find the primary source material, either from, you know, whether it’s like a PR release, or whether it’s a tweet that’s just interesting, or LinkedIn post, or something. Yeah, we don’t want to be curating other newsletters. We want to be curating primary material as much as possible. [Adrian Parlow]: Yeah. But I guess if you look at the other newsletters, you’ll be able to see what their primary sources are. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. In some cases, yeah. And you’ll also be able to also get a sense of what are other people seeing in the sector, how we can differentiate our POV compared to theirs. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Adrian Parlow]: I have some kind of experiments that I may want to run. Like one thing I’m kind of curious about is like how much do lawyers care about general AI stuff that’s not legal specific. Like I find this whole like triple scaling law thing going on really fascinating. The whole infrastructure build out all this stuff is stuff that my brain is in all the time. But I feel that may be a little too far removed for the average consumer of this content, but maybe not. So maybe we can experiment with some of that stuff and see how it resonates. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. We’ll have a poll in there. [Michael Houck]: It’s a quick hit. Did they like this issue or not? And we should experiment with very drastic different types of issues so we get that data. And we can also always include a survey or something like that, where we ask for more qualitative information as well. [Adrian Parlow]: Do a lot of people tend to click that little rate, the newsletter thing, the poll? [Michael Houck]: It depends on the newsletter. Newer newsletters, people tend to be either really engaged with it if they like the content or they really hate the content. Or, you know, if we’re not seeing strong engagement there, maybe it means that, you know, this lawyer cohort just isn’t as engage with that type of stuff. But we do generally see good engaging rates with it. [Adrian Parlow]: Sounds good. Okay. [Michael Houck]: Another thing is, since you have existing customers and a strong network in the legal space, you can always just say, hey, how did you enjoy the issue this week? And if this topic felt like it was too technical or not relevant to me, that’s as valuable as anything we’re going to to get from a survey, honestly. [Adrian Parlow]: You mean if I just reach out to people I know who are subscribers and just DM them? [Michael Houck]: Yeah. Just add your existing email list to the newsletter and then follow up with a few of them and see. Yeah, that’s a good idea. Oh, OK. Sorry, go ahead. [Adrian Parlow]: This might be a dumb question, but I was going to ask if there’s any interplay between the newsletter and people visiting the website? We have those tracking pixels on the website. I don’t know if we probably don’t want to just auto subscribe someone who visits the website, but is there any way to tie those two things together? [Michael Houck]: Yes. So if you guys have an engineer who wants to set up a webhook into Beehive, you can set that up pretty easily if you want people to just pass over. Whether to include people who visit the website in the newsletter not is kind of a strategic decision for you guys. There are services that can make that happen. Like I think retention.com has one and there’s a couple others. But as far as like, taking the list out of beehive, we can do that via CSV anytime if you don’t want to set up a webhook. And vice versa. If you guys have people who put in the information on the site you want to add to the newsletter, we can do that too. [Adrian Parlow]: Yeah. Probably I’m gonna guess That’s one of those things where you will add them if they visit a certain page, like if they click on a lead magnet or go to your demo page or something, but maybe not just hit [Michael Houck]: the homepage. Maybe I’ll ask Matt about this. Yeah. I mean, it’s, you know, a lot of people have done it. I think we haven’t done it for my newsletter personally, but there’s really not any like legal reason not to do it as far as I know. If you’re comfortable with it, then I’d say go for it. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: The more we can grow it, the better. OK. [Adrian Parlow]: I think that’s it from my end. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Sweet. [Michael Houck]: OK. We have what we need. So we will follow up with next steps, ops stuff required for setup in the next couple of days. I’ll probably be Ben for my team. And then I’ll give Matt a heads up that we’re good to go on the growth side as well. We’ll get him added to the newsletter too. And Austin will get started. On content, so keep an eye out. Lots gonna be happening in Slack over the next week or so. [Adrian Parlow]: Sorry, one thing I forgot to ask about, how do you guys deal with the sender accounts and deliverability? [Michael Houck]: Does Beehive do that for you or you have to set up? Okay. Yeah, Beehive has really strong systems for this. So they have a process called Smart Warming, where we’ll add like custom domain, custom sender, all that stuff. But the issues initially initially will be sent from a mix of your custom domain email and you at mail.beehive.com. And then over the course of the first couple weeks to months, that percentage will gradually shift towards being 100% on our custom. [Adrian Parlow]: And the custom domain is something that you’re going to buy once we pick the name? Or what is it? [Michael Houck]: I recommend you buy it just so you own it. We don’t own the content. You own the content. We want that to be super, super clear, clean lines. But yeah, we can brainstorm ideas for what that domain should be with you, but I’d recommend that you guys actually be the ones to buy it. [Adrian Parlow]: Okay, well, we should probably decide for sure on a name before we do that, right? Yeah, exactly. But if we’re gonna buy that domain, like this week, is that gonna be ready to go? Don’t you don’t need to warm it up for a while? [Michael Houck]: No, this isn’t this isn’t like cold email software, because because we have beehives underlying structure that we use, their smart warming process makes it so that, again, it only intelligently will use a small percentage from our custom domain. It’ll warm it up in the background at the same time. I see. OK. Sounds good. All right. Well, I’m excited. I think this is actually going to be a pretty fun one. So we’ll follow up, and let’s get some people into these webinars. [Adrian Parlow]: Sounds good. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Thanks, guys. Thanks, Andrew. Thanks.