- Duration: 48 min
- Platform: zoom
- Source: Read.ai 01JMZAPJK4GJ8XTHAACYXZBGWT (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JMZAPJK4GJ8XTHAACYXZBGWT)
Transcript
[UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Hey, Hawk. [Michael Houck]: Yo, yo. Saw the news. [Blake Stewart]: Told the week. There we go. [Michael Houck]: Nice. Yeah. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Invoice paid. Dope. [Blake Stewart]: Who? Vellum AI. [Michael Houck]: Oh, I’ve heard of them, actually. [Blake Stewart]: I don’t know why, though, or where from Me either. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Let’s see where I found them. [Blake Stewart]: I have. So many tabs and sources and everything up right now. [Michael Houck]: It’s been great. Yeah, I bet. Do you use arc or Chrome? I use Chrome. [Blake Stewart]: I’ve got arc downloaded, but I haven’t fully adjusted to it yet. So do you like arc? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, it’s a little buggy because they’re not building it anymore. They’re like building some new AI from first principles browser, which could be cool. We’ll see. It gets a little buggy, but it’s way better. It’s way easier to manage. You have the little like favorites thing on the side. You can go between different workspaces really easily. It’s a huge step up from Chrome, in my opinion. [Blake Stewart]: Okay, cool. Yeah, I’ll, I’ll play around more. Yeah, I feel like I finally got superhuman down. Well, that took that was pretty quick. But I got the desktop app for that too. Yeah, I probably should move off Chrome. Yeah, cool. All right. [Michael Houck]: Okay, so let’s jump into stuff. I guess first, just how are things going in general? What’s the vibe? Yeah, anything unexpected? Give me the update. No, it’s good. It’s great. Yeah. [Blake Stewart]: I sent my first report over to that first sale I had. They were kind of happy. I mean, they weren’t like ecstatic. Results were pretty low, but they had a good positive positive response, and they’re open to more in the future, so that’s good. Yeah, I mean, I love it. I love all the different things you got going on, so that’s kind of what excites me. You’re doing a lot of cool stuff, so it’s not just a simple sales job. I know that’s the main focus, and I’m trying to stay kind of, that’s my drive. [Michael Houck]: I’ve been trying to hold you back from getting looped into anything else, because I’m like, let’s just get the ad stuff set up and then grow more stuff out of I wanna stick to that, but yeah, there’s no shortage of stuff that we’ll be able to work on. So. Okay, yeah. I even, I joked with Ben about that too. [Blake Stewart]: I was like, what’s linear? Or like I asked him a couple other things. I was like, you know what? I actually don’t wanna know. I’m like, I’m fine with what I got going on right now. It’s already kinda, but it’s good. I feel like I’ve got a good system. Yeah, managing well. And then yeah, I’ll be ready to ramp up, you know, shortly. But yeah, feeling good. [Michael Houck]: Feeling great. [Blake Stewart]: Thanks. You you brought up one question there. [Michael Houck]: One point there that I want to I want to dig a little deeper on which is performance. So we obviously have not seen great performance for I think a higher percentage of sponsors than I like in like recent recent months. And so a big part of that is because we haven’t been running social media ads to get new people in and seeing the newsletter for the first time and all that stuff. I also think there’s some like macro newsletter fatigue, sponsor fatigue happening in the space right now. That could be my own imagination, but that’s my read. I’m curious what your read is on that. And also, you know, assuming that we are going to be starting social media ads again and growth again, in the next couple of weeks. What are your thoughts on anything else we can do internally with the content or anything else to increase performance and clicks for sponsors? Yeah, cool. Yeah, this is a big topic. [Blake Stewart]: I sent you those numbers of kind of like what the average results are and what we’re seeing. And I want to kind of track that over the next couple of months to see like what we could do to push those higher. I mean, obviously, growing the newsletter, having more people open would help. I think, you know, this comes back to the content calendar. If we’re able to kind of frame out what you’re writing about, you know, make it a little bit more relevant. I don’t want to change up any of your formatting, but like even just like positioning an ad, you know, like, like, hey, you find a cool tweet about, you know, VA and like how much time that could save you and then like right under that, you know, drop in the link to, you know, whatever, whatever ad we’re pushing. So I mean, yeah, content calendar could help me a lot. You know, I match better and that would have better performance if everything’s kind of more aligned on that side. Another thing, you kind of mentioned running ads and stuff too, is like if we do go back to Twitter and LinkedIn and even like posting from Foundry Journey on those channels, it could be another kind of upselling opportunity for me. So we could position the ads in the newsletters, but also kind of on the social media channels, you know, like maybe once a week you just say, oh, like, hey, check out this cool tool I just found. And so it’s essentially just a native ad. But the thing, like the biggest blocker I’m going to run into is having conversations with, that’s what happened with Startup Tycoon was, was like, hey, I could run a Facebook ad for, you know, $2 a click. And then he comes back to our numbers. And he kind of like, you know, It doesn't really make sense to run an ad on your newsletter when it's half the price on Facebook and it's more targeted and all that good stuff. So that's what I'm gonna be battling is just promising a little bit more content. Our ads are essentially gonna be better, hopefully, and I gotta figure out how I can promise that. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I mean, one thing you can do there is, this is more, I guess, for deep dives and for featured placements, sometimes for tools as well. It's not really relevant for Linux of the Week at least in my opinion. But this is like, yes, we want to perform, we want to send you guys as many customers or readers or whatever the metric is that they're going for, leads or whatever. But it's also brand marketing, right? It's like, this is one of the premier startup newsletters, one of if not the premier founder focused founder advice column newsletters out there that publishes weekly. Like, it's a good place to be if you're trying to get of founders. So sponsors will push for performance and we should obviously talk about that. But also there is sort of the brand cachet play here, too. Definitely. Yeah. I think that associations, yeah, part of the sale. [Blake Stewart]: I guess one question on that is not including the ads on your website and just in the email. Well, what was kind of your strategy there? Like the backlinks could be. I don't. [Michael Houck]: It wasn't really about the backlinks, it was just like, if I'm not a subscriber to a newsletter and I stumble on some page and I see a bunch of ads, I would imagine that my, I'm less likely to subscribe to that newsletter. Cause I feel like I'm just going to get fed ads, but honestly, like maybe that concern is overblown. Maybe it's better to just have more value there for the sponsors and include that. So I don't feel as strongly about that as I did two years ago when we OK. [Blake Stewart]: Yeah, I don't know either. I think it would help me to sell because I can say, you know, like once we write about you, you're kind of on the Web and kind of forever tied, a bigger reach, essentially more lasting impression. That's easier to sell. So, yeah, I mean, I hear you, though, I don't I don't want to. [Michael Houck]: Make it too adsy, especially if people are reviewing, but I mean, we can't do We can't do it for the tool of the week, because we already have a tool of the week that we put on the website, which is the one that we have for the, well, or actually, maybe we do do it for the tool of the week. Yeah, let me take that back. I think we actually do put the ad up for tool of the week. I think it's just the featured placement that gets removed on web. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: OK. Hmm. All right. Well then nevermind on that. [Blake Stewart]: But no, but for, for featured, maybe we should put it on there. [Michael Houck]: I, again, I don't feel as strongly about it as I used to. So if it's something that will help you close deals or get more renewals and things like that, then I'm down to just sort of try it out and see how it goes. [Blake Stewart]: Okay. Um, It wasn't the deep dive. I'm trying to find. It was just kind of a blank section. So yeah, no, you have you've got the link there, OK? I don't know which one it wasn't. OK, well, that's fine. Yeah, so I mean, overall increasing performance, I think that's enough that would drive the needle there. [Michael Houck]: So just so I have this down, so three takeaways. One is. Content and calendar so we can be more targeted. Two is just me being more on social media again. I sort of haven't been for quite a long time, but now Jacob and I are spinning that up again, so we will be. And then three is the web version. Those are kind of the three things that we think will make sense. [Blake Stewart]: Yeah, and the social media one, like I think that a good way to start with that is just like if people are unhappy with the newsletter performance, then we could say like, all right, we'll give you a tweet shout out next week or something. And that way that we don't like give up a free spot in a following newsletter. Cause I know it's kind of talking a bit about that, like offering discounts. Yeah. Andrew Young does this really well. [Michael Houck]: He talks about partners in like a way that I think comes off. It's obviously an ad, but it's also like, it's fine. Like you don't hate it, you know? Yeah. Yeah. So maybe we take a page from his book. I think if you're going to promise a social media post, just like run it by me first, because if it's not someone I'd want to put on social media. [Blake Stewart]: Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I yeah, definitely. Yeah, and that's I'm not going to promise that really either until. Yeah, we'll see. I mean, that's going to be like a last resort, like first result is going to be like, hey, I'll sell you another discounted ad in a future newsletter and then you're not happy. Then we'll see. But I do think that's just another channel. I guess on that note, too, speaking of channels like podcast, YouTubing ads, what do you where's your head out there? What do I need to be kind of pushing any of that yet? Or is there a timeline? [Michael Houck]: I mean, look, we sold a couple of podcast ads early on and we ran them and they were fine. You know, we charge like a little bit less than for the newsletter, I think. But our sort of priors were wrong. Our hypothesis was that newsletter audience will convert to podcast guest audience and it just didn't happen. Um, so, um, we stopped offering it. We also have paused the podcast except for like one off episodes that we'll do here and there with certain people. Um, and the strategy is long form. YouTube is a better chance of building a YouTube audience first. And then we revisit the podcast once we have that YouTube audience sort of built in. So maybe it was a naive approach on my end originally, but, um, Either way, we've sort of course corrected now. So yeah, so on YouTube, don't worry about anything. No need to push anything there. We're not gonna do featured placements unless there's like a perfect opportunity. Like for example, in the first video, we could have talked to Mercury about doing something, right? But not a big deal because the views are still, you know, we're just getting our feet wet. So, yeah. [Blake Stewart]: Yeah, and I'm sure you want stronger brands on that connection too and kind of go upstream. Yeah, Mercury sounds good. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: Just not a, we've talked to Mercury a bunch. They, their newsletter budget, they've like, I actually just emailed them today. [Blake Stewart]: Cause they, they sponsor Sean Perry's like five tweets or whatever it is. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, they, Mad Rev had tried to sell them, but then they like pulled back from doing anything at the time and said they'd revisit it this year. So it's actually a good time to maybe reach back out to them and see. You can just reach out direct and see how it goes. [Blake Stewart]: Yeah, I'm trying to avoid some of those agencies. Ad Astra is already just kind of annoying me. Nate, the subject lines are like, immediate action. And then I go in and respond to him immediately. And then he doesn't give back to me in a couple of days. And then I'm like, well, we pulled that spot. Yeah, I don't know. Whatever, they're good to have. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: better. Yeah. [Blake Stewart]: Okay. [Michael Houck]: No, no action on YouTube or podcast ad strategy for now can push that to, you know, probably second half of the year. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Cool. [Blake Stewart]: That sounds good. [Michael Houck]: Um, yeah, I know I kind of hijacked that with the, um, the increasing clicks question, but, uh, feel free to take it wherever you want to go next. [Blake Stewart]: Well, that's good. Um, yeah, Celine sent me, yeah, from the top of the list, she sent some Figma mockups. I don't, yeah, you're in there. Not that big of a difference. I don't know if we should have the 400 to 1,000. Definitely should not. No, no. [Michael Houck]: That was the number we were seeing, I think, at one point. Back again, when all these subscribers were like brand new and clicking on everything. But just with the audience right now, it doesn't make sense to have that on. [Blake Stewart]: Okay. It looks good. I would put all my notes there. I don't know if you had other thoughts or how you want me to move forward with this. No, same thing about the monthly growth. [Michael Houck]: I think we leave that off until we have that firmed up, which should be, again, that again in March, and so we'll have clear numbers by April about where we'll net out month over month, but leave it off for now. Also, we can leave the podcast section off. Probably wanna get the testimonials higher on the page, so I'll probably move those up in Figma here, but yeah, look, I mean, the next step here is I'll probably go through and just update the copy I think you already had some good call-outs on the Google Doc, but I'll go through and update all this. And then what we should do is just have Celine do this in Card and just set up the new page in Card. I'll let you know when I've gone through the copy and made updates, but then you can manage that. She already has access to the Card page, so it's sort of ready to go there for her. [Blake Stewart]: Founding journey partners or yeah, it'll just be partner.foundingjourney.com. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. All right. [Blake Stewart]: I can set that in my signature or something too. Okay, cool. Yeah, that's nice. That page is super helpful. So sweet. Yeah, fundraising support. You had Rena kind of Action items in the channel. I know that's definitely back of mine and not as important, but If you want me to hop in there, we should get one out in March. [Michael Houck]: We should do like a Q1 wrap up fundraising support email. So maybe what we do is either during one on one or after our normal chat next week. We grab an extra 15 or something and just the process for this. So there's, I mean, it's really simple. There's two main steps. It's just making sure all the data is in Airtable and then vetting the deals. And then once that's done is including the batch in an email to people. So the vetting the deals part is where we'll need to kind of go back and forth. And I think it'd be cool to just sort of toss that to you, see which ones you think are the best fits, I sort of see which ones I think are the best fits, we compare notes, and then we set up an email from there. Okay, what all is submitted? Ah, yes, let me open up the, what is it, the air table here. Okay, so we have a lot of info. These are like past batches where we set them in like a gallery style. We include this in the helper folks. So this is what the investors will see. They'll see the name, they'll see the one-liner, what round it is, sector and the existing investors. And then like other info that people fill out. We get even more info than this. So like a pending one, for example. So we get like founder name, founders, LinkedIn, deck URL, you know, and there's like some more info that's not in here too that Reena will add, like the logo for the gallery. But yeah, it's great. I mean, I'm curious to see what you gravitate towards, so I don't wanna kind of talk about my process too much here, but yeah, this is definitely something that we wanna do regularly. What I could say is that, the percentage, like the hit rate of good companies that come in this way is pretty low. Yeah. Right. But we've done we've done deals through it, so it does work. [Blake Stewart]: OK, cool. Yeah, we. We had one set up on Kernel and I still get inbound and it's yeah, it's I mean. So that was my question to you, you know what you're actually seeing, but that's cool. It's very interesting. I mean, investors you're going to want to see it eventually. So the fact that you have it going out quarterly, I think is good. Nice. Okay. Yeah. I mean, there's, there's a lot we could do there, but yeah, I don't want to get too unfocused. [Michael Houck]: No, but it's, it's a good long-term sort of project because we do have some proof points, both from the launch house fund and from my angel investing that, you know, we can identify good companies early on and that we have access to those deals. So This will be something that I think takes more precedence in, again, the second half of the year, or even like Q4 into early next year, as we start to think about, okay, what does a founding journey fund look like, What is founding journey ventures or founding journey capital? Like, what does that look like, [Blake Stewart]: Yeah, that's exactly kind of where we had just left off with Kernel. So we were running those demo days, I had a lot of good partner set up with Accelerator, so they would send me their best founders. We'd host the demo days and bring four big-name VCs to the table. We didn't really monetize it. The idea was that if it works, if we're able to get you $100,000 in funding, you would just give us $5,000 as just an appearance fee. We didn't have a broker-dealer license, so we couldn't charge percentage, but all the founders were happy with that fee either. That's low. We will happily give you more. And so it worked a couple times, and then we were like, this just isn't going to be good enough for us right now. So we kind of shut down. And then the other idea was to raise a fund around it. So Ryan was thinking about that, and essentially just winner of an event of a demo day would take whatever cash prize, and then We kind of even took it further with like option agreements. So like if you come on to an event, we would give you, you know, you sign a agreement that would let us invest, you know, 12 months from now at their current terms. Founders were kind of interested in that too, like, you know, which surprising to me kind of seems a little illegal. It's never been done before, but I don't know. Around with a lot of different things. I mean, founders need, they would always have to bring in their legal teams to actually agree on stuff, but they were really open to just about anything. So, I don't know, I was excited about a fund just because I was seeing a lot of cool deal flow from all the accelerators I was working with. But, yeah. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I think the best way for us to structure this will be as we head into the second half of the year, we'll probably want to reserve some of your bandwidth to sort of make those same sort of partnerships, relationships. Like we have a really good relationship with Antler and some other ones as well. But probably want to spend some of your time on that. And then that way, as we get into Q4, we start thinking about, okay, how do we add value to these people as well? Not just like get deal flow from them. And then at that point, it'll probably also make sense to start talking about, okay, well, let's start raising a fund. Let's start having exploratory conversations with potential champions and LPs and kind of seeing what the appetite would be to go out and do this. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: So. [Blake Stewart]: Yeah, there's a lot there. I'm here for it. [Michael Houck]: So we'll keep it in mind. [Blake Stewart]: Cool. Sounds good. I think that also kind of leads into the kernel subscribers and that one, the newsletter I had had really good open rates. I mean, it was pretty high numbers there. So it could be another opportunity to spin off like a separate newsletter and keep that one going. If you wanted to do your kind of Q1 wrap up of all these incoming deals. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: I don't know. [Blake Stewart]: I don't know what your kind of overall plans were there and how it really went this week. [Michael Houck]: It's tough right now for me to do too much like news outside of the agency, just because of how fast it's growing right now. But, and also I'm like, I'm like in a new city every week right now and I'm like trying to actually devote time to scoping them out, because like, for context, the goal is find a new place to live where I'm going to be in my next life, basically. That's the plan. And so I need to actually spend time socially and community-wise in these places and see if it makes sense. So I have a hard time doing other new things, especially when one thing's working so well right now, but Yeah, no, for sure. I do think we should include at least some portion of those people on the Q1, like end of Q1 deal flow email that we send out next month. [Blake Stewart]: Okay, and so did you add both of those lists to founding journey or just one? [Michael Houck]: No, so for founding journey, I just added the kernel newsletter. Excuse me, the EBITDA one, I had uploaded to our deal flow, Beehive, but because it was so big, I didn't realize how big it was, because it was so big, we hit the 100,000 subscriber mark, and so Beehive wanted us to pay for the enterprise tier, and I was like, well, they're just sitting there most of the time, probably better to add more people to founding journey, so I took them back out, but we can add them again in like some smaller increment, basically. Okay, okay. [Blake Stewart]: And then with all those additions, have you ever really thought about audience surveys or like how have you kind of registered that demographic before? For the investors specifically? Just for the total list. Oh, for Foundry Journey? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, yep, yep, yep. Yeah, we've done a decent amount of surveys early on. Some like old Airtable data that I can share with you. It's the stuff that informs those couple charts on the partner page, for example. You know, opt-in for surveys through newsletters at this point is like super low because you're asking a lot, you're not offering anything, and people get a lot of newsletters these days, so. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Blake Stewart]: I just don't know how much it dilutes. I mean, the kernel one was good. But it's probably more, I would say the majority of that list was aspiring founders. Yeah. Yeah. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Enthusiasts. [Michael Houck]: We have a lot of those on, on founding journey already. Like we, you know, we've 60 plus thousand subscribers before this was added. [Blake Stewart]: Yeah. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: I don't know what that percentage is anymore, but when we run ads, for example, we do target it towards like people we think would be actual founders as much as possible, but there just aren't as many actual founders as [Blake Stewart]: there are just interest people. Yeah, yeah, okay. Makes sense. Sorry, I'm kind of jumping around here. You mentioned meeting people and jumping around cities. Have you thought about tech week at all, and like in-person events, and maybe hosting something fun? [Michael Houck]: So, I haven't thought about it. I don't know when they are. I hate conferences in general. [Blake Stewart]: Are you at one now? [Michael Houck]: I'm at one now, but it's fine. Look, I'm not opposed to doing something depending on how much of like bandwidth it would take up and also costs and if we could get sponsors involved and things like that. So my take on it is that if you want to take the initiative and just see if we can get something set up, feel free. And loop me in and I'll do whatever you need. But it's not something that I put a lot of time with, especially because like the cities I'm considering and the people I want to meet are not going to be either at tech week or doing tech week things. [Blake Stewart]: Yeah, that makes sense. Okay, cool. Good to know. All right, there. I think everything's set up in there. Do you still don't need me to send an invoice every month or is that, that's all taken care of [Michael Houck]: Yeah. No. Yeah. [Blake Stewart]: You're, you're in the system with that or they handle everything. All right. Checkbox. Um, you met Dave schools from simulate. [Michael Houck]: Yes. We had a great chat. Um, he's a very interesting guy. I think the tool he's building is early, but it could be very cool if he nails it. Yeah. Um, so we're not a customer for him. Uh, you know, he, He was like, we're going after more enterprise folks. And I was like, good. I was hoping you would say that. But as far as partnering, yeah, look, he said that this week he will be following up with like what they can do referral wise. But he said, yeah, we'll refer people your way who need help with this stuff. So it's another partnership channel for us. Thanks for the intro. Nice. [Blake Stewart]: Yeah, I figured you guys would hit it off. He's interesting. Yeah, I don't know how, practical it will be, but it's, yeah, it's got potential. Did you meet with Joel about writing? [Michael Houck]: I think today, I think we have time today, or no, I'm sorry, it's tomorrow. Yeah, and we've met before, so I'm excited to kind of reconnect with him. Cool, yeah, let me know how it goes. [Blake Stewart]: I mean, he's a great writer, he knows what he's doing, so. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, writing is like the major stress that I have right now because we have a ton of clients coming in and I just need more writers. So I'm checking in with like those writing courses. I'm checking in with like the Beehive Slack community, other places. If you have anywhere that you think would be good to source writers from, you know, I'm definitely open to ideas. [Blake Stewart]: Gotcha. Yeah. I forgot about one guy. I've got a guy who teaches She teaches a course, I'll reach back out to her. And then yeah, Sonia, I keep saying Sonia, but I think she prefers Sonia. She's gonna get back to me, she said she's driving, but she'll consider it. She'd be good for the content. [Michael Houck]: And yeah, I'll keep that. Does she do writing too, or is she just like content ops? [Blake Stewart]: She does both. Yeah, I think she preferred, she's, like social media that much, like content creation that much. She doesn't really like creating. She doesn't like writing a lot, but she gets the whole, you know, she's good with it. So I don't know. [Michael Houck]: If she, if she wanted to specialize in just doing the ops, that's totally fine because that's what we're going to need eventually anyways, like a dedicated person for it. So it's, it's a chaotic job. Like you can talk to Ben about it. He's been doing it for a while. It's, you know, switching back and forth between accounts every half hour, you know, having a personality disorder. [Blake Stewart]: Yeah. Yeah. 100%. [Michael Houck]: Like you got like 20 people living in your head. It's very, very. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Blake Stewart]: Yeah. I get it. And stuff. That's a lot. [Michael Houck]: But we need it because we ran the numbers. And like if we're offering this as a service to our existing ghostwriting clients, basically included in their package It's not a huge hit to our margin to do that, but I'd much rather be able to also sell it to earlier stage companies who aren't ready for full ghostwriting yet, form that relationship with them early, get our hooks in and at some lower price point where they just don't have the bandwidth to manage all the scheduling and ops and [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: stuff. [Blake Stewart]: They want that. Yeah. No, that makes complete sense. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: That's interesting. [Blake Stewart]: Okay, cool. Yeah, I think, yeah, I mean, it all ties in so well. Okay, awesome. The last thing was the HubSpot for leads thing you sent. [Michael Houck]: Yes. Yes. So the goal with that is this enables us to start running paid growth again. Because basically, you know, we spend say $2 per subscriber that we acquire just roughly, right? If we can make back a good portion of that automatically, through the welcome email sequence and also through like a beehive booster sparkly program, the combination will get us close enough to break even or ideally over break even where. It’s just a no brainer for us to start running, you know, 10 K a month and add budget. And, uh, again, right. Um, so that’s where I want to get to. I need to set up the welcome email with this HubSpot thing, um, and then see how well it can converts first, so on my to-do list for this week, and then we’ll run some budget and see how well it [Blake Stewart]: converts. Okay, cool. Good to know. That sounds great. All right, well, that’s my list covered. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I feel like it’s weird because in some ways I feel like you’re obviously mostly focused on just the partnership stuff, I can already tell you’re jumping into other stuff too, which is great. And also you’re helping out sort of as needed, which is awesome. Any thoughts on your side about process optimization? Because again, if we wanted to get into Q2 and you’re gonna be taking on more stuff, I want as much of this set and kind of off your plate, not off your plate, but automated or delegated as possible. [Blake Stewart]: I hear you. I mean, I keep going back to HubSpot. I know HubSpot well. I could automate like half of HubSpot for like everything we’re doing now. The reporting’s great. I’d be able to track everything. Right now you’ve got multiple, you know, you got like a couple of spreadsheets in there that’s also kind of overlapped in Airtable. And then like your Salesforce, like we could condense your two spreadsheets, your Airtable and Salesforce. All into HubSpot pretty easily. And I could optimize the whole process. So I keep going back there. I’m just a little hesitant, because what you have now is working. It’s not working amazingly, but it works. I don’t want to break anything. [Michael Houck]: But I think we should pull the trigger soon. Cool, yeah, let’s break it. Let’s break things. I will reach out to Christine, who Honestly, I wish at some point we have a role that we can hire her for because she’s like the best like employee that I’ve ever had. And she was. She’s so good, but she’s she’s wasting her talents in big tech right now. But yeah, so she’s our contact over there. So she’ll give us their best discount or whatever. And yeah, we can go with that. [Blake Stewart]: OK, cool. Yeah, I mean that. That would make me happy. [Michael Houck]: Cool, I will shoot her a note today and hopefully then we’ll get access this week and you can get started setting stuff up. There was one other thing that I wanted to mention kind of in that same vein. It’s eluding me at the moment. Just like a first month type thing. Let me pull up our, the welcome doc that I wrote, maybe I don’t remember. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Max’s doc. [Blake Stewart]: Oh yeah, founders library and member perks. I’m gonna start sending. It was simpler than that. We’re heading into March. [Michael Houck]: This will be your first full month with us. So when I look at the revenue goal that we should have for sponsorships for the month of March based on leads that are in the funnel, as well as new outreach that we’re going to be doing. What do you think is realistic for this month in particular? It doesn’t need to be the same as our sort of steady state that we get to in Q2, but just curious for this month what you think. [Blake Stewart]: Good question. I don’t know. I mean, yeah, I was looking at your average. You’re averaging 20,000, but you got some kind of outliers in there in January and whatnot. When you hit 13 for February, and it seems like you guys are pretty ecstatic about 13, so I don’t wanna like… [Michael Houck]: Well, to be fair, 13 is good, but this is not what Ben does, and he sort of got into it, so I’m just sort of incredibly encouraging to him because he’s… So I’m excited about any deal that comes in is good, but yeah. [Blake Stewart]: Yeah, I hear ya. Yeah, I don’t know. Part of me wants to say 20, because that’s what you’re averaging. But I mean, I don’t know if it’s going to hurt us that we’re so kind of filled up. Like March is basically all but four spots, including two deep dives. So like, it’s kind of hard to sell two months out when people want their marketing campaigns to hit now. Yeah, I was worried about Tool of the Week. I didn’t really like, Link of the Week is much easier to sell, but I got my first one today. So maybe I could hit, you know, a couple more of those coming up, but I don’t know. I mean, 15, we’ll say 15 for 20 land at somewhere. I don’t know. [Michael Houck]: Let’s let’s set 15. I’m comfortable with that. We’ll set 15 for the goal. I mean, do you feel good about that? Or do you think I don’t know if I do? [Blake Stewart]: I mean, the pipeline, like I don’t have much in the pipeline. I’ve got a lot of outreach going on, but I don’t have too many people pumped up about big partnerships. The Boxable one was a big one, but that was through an ad agency and it didn’t turn out too well. I guess I just need to hit more multi-placement deals. We could say 13 and then, or 15. [Michael Houck]: Let’s say 10. We can be conservative. We’re gonna get some systems set up this month too. I’m comfortable saying 10. [Blake Stewart]: All right, yeah, if you’re fine with 10, we’ll say 10. But I mean, yeah, I’ll push for a lot more than that. I’m incentivizing you. I’m working hard on it, but yeah, I don’t have a clear answer for you. I don’t know. [Michael Houck]: Okay, well, we’ll see what we get this month. And then as we head into Q2, I wanna hit steady state there, like, you know, obviously there will be fluctuations because, you know, we’ve historically seen that some months, you know, people don’t have their budget set for the next quarter yet versus other months they get unlocked and everyone’s looking to spend right away. So that sort of cyclical nature of this is real. And so goal will change from month to month. I mean, you can look back, back to June, like we, we update the goal from month to month too. So, so normal. That’s what I was wondering. [Blake Stewart]: You don’t have any data past June, I’m assuming. And the brand change as well? [Michael Houck]: We do in, I think there’s a spot in Airtable, in the partnerships Airtable, where we see who paid for which issue and maybe how much they paid for that issue too. But it’s not structured easily by month like this. [Blake Stewart]: Okay. Okay. Okay, yeah, let’s say 10, and then I’ll, I mean, we can adjust for April. Cool. 10 for March, we’ll hope April’s 20. [Michael Houck]: How about that? Sounds good. I like it. And we’ll also hopefully be able to start selling viral examples at some point in Q2 as well. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, that’s great. All right. [Blake Stewart]: Cool, man.