- Duration: 65 min
- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01JN1YRARKAQK72CXZRECREQCD (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JN1YRARKAQK72CXZRECREQCD)
Transcript
[Michael Houck]: Dave, how you doing? [David Kline]: My brain wants to say how, but I’m like, Michael, Mike, like, just kind of hanging around the internet hoop together for a few years. Thanks. Thanks. It’s good to finally meet. [Michael Houck]: How you doing? You too. I’m doing well. [David Kline]: How about you? UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Yeah, good. [Michael Houck]: I mean, I’m in Austin for Matt at McGarry’s newsletter conference. Oh, that’s awesome. [David Kline]: Awesome. That’s a good place to be. How’s it going so far? Yeah, it’s good. [Michael Houck]: Just had lunch with Nathan from ConvertKit. It was good to see him and catch up. Oh, that’s awesome. [David Kline]: I feel like I’m perpetually a week away from needing to switch over to ConvertKit. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I actually had to catch myself because I called it ConvertKit once, and I know they made the big deal about rebranding it to Kit. I hate my hat on that one. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: I love it. I love it. [David Kline]: Well, I’m so glad we could connect. I was going to send you a note separately, but I was like, I’ll just follow his machine. No, good to good to chat, man. [Michael Houck]: I read the little like blurb that you added. Thanks for doing that. So yeah. Yeah, I guess like, give me the broader context, right? Like where are you at? Is this for you? Is this for like other accounts that you operate? Like, how are you thinking about this? [David Kline]: No, this is me. So, um, I would say the quick version is if you rewind, I sort of grew zero to a hundred thousand on X. Elon got crazy. I feel like I’ve been, I’ve probably grown 20,000 in the last year, but it’s like much more treading water. Um, the, the educational content is not what it once was. Uh, and I know I’m not starting wars or anything, and then, so I put attention on LinkedIn. LinkedIn, I’ve now got up around 110,000 as well. So I might have almost equal accounts on both. [Michael Houck]: So we have two cohort programs. [David Kline]: We have an accelerator for experienced managers. We have one called Fundamentals for new managers. I do a bunch of CEO coaching. We’re about to turn on a membership product that is… I’m hesitant to call it a community. I want to call it a membership because I don’t want to sign up for being paid. I’ll call it a community. Exactly. But basically, at least the starting point behind the scenes is going to be a bunch of my curated writing, a handful of small bite-sized recorded courses, some regular live interactions with me for coaching, and the ability to apply the membership fee to any of our live programs. So if you were ever going to take one of my live programs, we’ll give you a credit for the full fee of the membership for a year to that. So it would be at least a no-brainer for those people. Hopefully a lot of others will join. The reality is like, you know the drill on these platforms, right? It’s like, I’ve got to create great content. And then I’ve got to get people to engage on it in the first half hour to hour, which I get by getting 50 or 60 other accounts and reciprocate, you know, and reciprocate. So it’s like an hour to an hour and a half of like engagement plus good content. Plus then if I’m really doing it well, like nurturing DMs, right? And so like, and the nurturing DM sequence should then lead to the newsletter sequence that should lead to the membership that should lead to the courses. So like the whole thing should work. The whole business right now is my wife and I. [Michael Houck]: And so, yeah. You guys have managed to build something pretty, pretty interesting with just the two of you. [David Kline]: Congrats, pretty wild. No, it’s been awesome. But we’re like, OK, if we want to get to multi-millions, I think we need some help. And so the first place was, can I recoup some time back on social? The other reason is I’ve got three years of content. Do you know what I mean? A, I don’t need to invest time training somebody how to do this. There’s people who know how to do it, yourself included. I would love to have some new content. But I’m not, like, I am totally fine if there’s a team that’s like, we’re gonna mine your three years of Twitter, we’re gonna mine your two years of LinkedIn, we’re gonna generate, you know, we’re gonna, like, reuse some of it wholesale, we’re gonna use it to train AI to generate some adjacent content. Like, I am not precious. I do not need it to be, like, perfectly trained copywriters in America. I need it to be excellent. Like, I need it to be good. But I’m totally cool if it’s tools and a little bit of human that get us there. Or if it’s great humans, like… Anyways, I think it’s gonna be harder and harder to be just humans as I’m learning. [Michael Houck]: Are you seeing that? What we found is that… Okay, so we built, as part of Megaphone, we built an AI reply generator in the person’s voice responding to a specific post. And what we found was that it’s still pretty hard to get that to not obviously AI. Yeah. I think for people who have a unique voice and care about that on social, there is still some like human level moat there, but it is for sure. And I think some people just don’t even care about that. They just want the content to be out there and have good value in it. [David Kline]: So yeah, that’s my take. Yeah, I’ve gotten, I feel like I’ve gotten Claude to be an excellent sort of like 80% drafter for me now. And I’ve sort of learned the trade. Make the 80% draft come out pretty strong, you know, like just being like, give me this thing. It’s like, so, so even when it’s trained on my stuff, but if you say like, here’s my headline, here are three of what I hope are seven, you know, seven sections, give me the other four sections and write them. Right. It gets pretty far. And then I’m just copywriting. Um, the, so anyways, the, um, that’s sort of the open, I would say. My, my, I’ve, uh, you can hear me. I have been hesitant to let go of this stuff for a long time. Yeah. So, so, you know, like my, my opening bid would be like, is there, can I find a partner where we can sort of run fast on a meaningful piece of the work, prove it out and then extend it? You know? And so I’m like, you know, could we start with Twitter or start with LinkedIn? You know, you guys, you know, again, obviously like the writing, the engagement, I’d still to be involved in the writing, like not necessarily. But again, if I were waving a wand, it’d be like, here are like 10 topics or 20 topics we’re thinking about before you do any work. And I could be like, you know what? I never want to talk about something that political. Just skip that one. Hey, that one, I love the idea, but I would go this angle on it, whatever else. Then you guys do it. I approve it. Out it goes. They do the engagement, all that stuff. That would sort of be at least, and then that could extend into LinkedIn, you know, Twitter and LinkedIn or LinkedIn and Twitter. I have a two day a week newsletter would be totally game. Again, as long as we can like match the writing style and whatever, like totally game. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: First of all, we don’t need to jump into the whole, the whole thing right away. Let’s prove it out. Um, I mean, look, that’s pretty much what we do. So I have about, I think like 25 clients that we do this for now. Some of them are creator led businesses. Some of them are startups. Um, We do newsletters, we do LinkedIn, we do X. I think you would be an easier client to work with in some ways, which are that you have this large repository of content that we know resonates with your audience. We know how to talk to them. There’s proof. There’s proof points out. I would be harder in other ways, I imagine. At the same time, you have a style and a quality bar that you probably really care about. And so that’s just a different type of client. We have clients on both sides of that spectrum. Some have no content and don’t really care about the voice. Others care a lot about the voice and have a ton of content. So it’s in our wheelhouse. I don’t know how much you know about the actual agency side of our business. So it’s me and it’s Blake, right? UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: So he’s in the trenches with the writers. The writers are people who he and I have worked with in various capacities for a long time, for the most part. There’s a couple people we’ve added in because the agency has grown so quickly, but the core team, is people that we’ve worked with for a while. So process is lightweight, because we work with founders and builders and people like that. Basically, we’d set up a Slack connect channel. I don’t know if you use paid Slack or anything, but if you do, that would be what we would use. If not, we can do email. That’s fine. Basically, each Monday, we would send over some ideas and some specific questions that came up during our research about those. Ideally, you can say, and back just a rambly voice note. Two, three minutes, no more time needed than that. We get the emotion, the intonation, the inflection, all that stuff. We turn that, we leverage that in the content. If we get that from you by midweek, it’ll be incorporated into the batch of content we create by the end of the week. And we’ll work to get a couple of weeks ahead so you’re not stressed from week to week and all trying to hit that. We’ll do that pretty early on. And yeah, it sounds like we have a large library of stuff to pull from, obviously, that we know perform. So yeah, that’s pretty much it. The process is very lightweight. We’ll have a Notion workspace set up. We can leave comments on stuff if you want. And you get to ask for revisions, obviously, until you’re happy with it, basically. And for context, nothing will get sent to you that hasn’t first been reviewed by either Blake or myself, in some cases, both of us. [David Kline]: What, do you think, are you guys better off on X or on LinkedIn, you think? If I was saying like, I want you guys to show me you can win the first one, which one rigs the game for you? [Michael Houck]: I think, well, I mean, look, if I’m playing the numbers, LinkedIn is more stable platform right now. Twitter is more of a capture right now. So just from that perspective, I would say, I would say LinkedIn, but we’re comfortable on both. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Gotcha. [David Kline]: Just like full transparency, putting it all on the table. I’m happy to show you the data. You’ll find the same thing. The carousels on LinkedIn right now are like it for me. I’ve tried the billboards. I’ve tried the glass statements. I’ve tried the unreadable cheat sheets. And I get probably like 20 to 30 000 impressions and like no followers my bad carousels do like 200 000 to 250 the good ones do a million to two million impressions like we’ll do five to a 500 to a thousand followers in a day off a good carousel like it’s it’s like old school twitter with threads right now um I just say that is like uh you would be signed if you do linkedin for me you’re signing up for probably mostly carousels like totally reuse them we can repurpose, like again, it doesn’t have to be, there’s ways I think we can get around that, but I just, I don’t know, I’m game to experiment a little bit, [Michael Houck]: but I’ve got plenty of data to know what’s working right now. So we do have a designer on staff. She’s very comfortable with all types of visual content, carousels included for social and for LinkedIn. So, and look, if you think it’s going to be lighter touch to do X display, I’m fine with that. Again, we’re sort of very comfortable on both platforms. [David Kline]: I just don’t even know what works on X anymore. Like I, I don’t know. [Michael Houck]: Um, I mean, we’ve seen what we’ve seen perform well. Sometimes threads will still hit. We have had some threads go and do pretty well for even small accounts recently, but, um, it’s more sort of a long form posts, but like really well written, like they have to be like very like those long form posts. Um, but what I’ve seen, like, obviously my, Yeah, it sucks, man. I gotta get it back. I was I was deeming deeming a lot of people about our newsletter and our agency and I hit some threshold and you know, now I’m in purgatory. But as long as they keep you in the doghouse, it’s TBD. [David Kline]: It’s I mean, they they skeleton staff over there. [Michael Houck]: So it’s hard to get a human to like, but it’s been it’s been a couple months now. So I hopefully she didn’t come back. I mean, I don’t know. I don’t know. A couple of months. I know. I know. Don’t use a drippy AI. That’s all I’ll say. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Don’t use drippy AI. Noted. [Michael Houck]: So what we’ve seen work well is those long form posts, still some threads if the topic hits right, and visual threads are really the ones that will do well. And then we’re still seeing clips do well, like video clips from leaders in the niche, recognizable people with some commentary on top, we’re still perform well too. Those have been performing well for like a year. So look, I mean, we can do either one. We can do the carousels. If you want to go LinkedIn, that’s fine. If you want to say, hey, let’s go into more of the Wild West environment and kind of see if we can figure out more growth on X for the account. That’s fine too. I don’t have a strong preference. It’s more of a strategic thing. [David Kline]: Which one do you want to offload? Gotcha. And how do you think about, let’s go helping pick. How do you think about outcomes in terms of, like obviously if I’m handing, like my wishlist is like I’m handing the baton to someone who’s better at it than I am, or at a minimum as good. [Michael Houck]: It might be tough to be better, you’re pretty good. You’re pretty good. [David Kline]: I know, I’m sorry. It is like a long road to get decent. As you know. But just in terms of like, are there other things you guys do in terms of sort of like assessing like what’s working, what’s not, because since you have 20 or 30 clients, sort of like bringing those insights, you know, like, I guess I’m in a world of like, if you’ve got people who are sort of more like me, where it’s like high standards content, maybe more like B2B or like whatever, coaching, management, leadership, you’re like, hey, if I look across those seven clients, they’re growing at 1500 a month. We should set a baseline target, but we should be getting, by month three, you should be growing at 1,500, 2,000 a month. I find I’m better if I know like we’re targeting something and then we can use that as like a, how do we know if we’re being successful or not? [Michael Houck]: For your account, I’m trying to make this kind of specific to your situation, because again, you’ve already sort of built up a large audience yourself here. There’s two things I would look at. One is sort of what is the baseline? If you’re posting this many times yourself right now, what are you seeing? We want to make sure that we’re not causing growth to slow or anything like that. So we want to meet that bar. But then the second thing is, the first month is going to be, the first two weeks are going to be research heavy. We’re going to be doing a kickoff call with you. We’re going to get in the weeds on the niche and on the content. We’ll research your past stuff, see what performed, pull out some insights from that. And then we’ll start publishing. So by week three, we’ll be publishing And then by the end of the first month, we’ll sort of have some initial data points about what’s resonating right now. And we’ll be learning on the account. What I like to do is basically at the end of the first month, come back, you and I sync up doesn’t need to be a meeting to be a sync. But just we chat, and we say, okay, here’s what we’re seeing. Here’s sort of what I’m seeing from my vantage point across multiple people. And then specifically for you, here’s what we think our goal should be for the next three months, right? And then we set that goal, and we just execute against it. So It’s hard for me to say right now what that goal should be, but when we get to the point after being a month in, we’ll be able to say, here’s what we’ve seen for you. Here’s what we’re seeing more broadly. [David Kline]: Let’s use that to set a goal. Got it. Um, what else? Uh, I mean, just the, the, the brief answer to your question, I’m probably one to two posts a day right now. Yep. I’m kind of all over the map with like, try, I’m like, let me try a thread. Let me try a visual and then supported by a thread. Let me just try. Visual on its own. Let me try it for a while. The screenshots of my drafted playbooks were doing great, which is crazy. I was like, it’s behind the curtain, you know, dude, it’s so weird. I think in last, what was it last, like late summer, early fall, I would literally just take like a one page Google doc and take a screenshot of the Google doc borderline unreadable without clicking and opening it. And I was doing like half a million to a million impressions on those things. And I was like, they weren’t driving tons of followers, maybe a little bit, but like it was crazy. And then I’ll have other things like old threads that used to just go crazy. Cause they’re like super nutrient dense. [Michael Houck]: I’ll get like 48 likes now. Would you, would you say that the primary goal will be like the percentage of posts that perform over some threshold? Would you say that it’s follower Would you say that it’s like people who sign up for this membership? [David Kline]: Like what’s, what’s, what’s going to be, um, I I’m not chasing, um, I’m not chasing growth for gross sake. Like I, it would be much more, um, a thing that always surprises me, like we, with our live programs still, even though my engagement is probably like a 10th of what it used to be, still 30, 40% of the people will say like, Oh, I follow you on, on Twitter. And I’m like, Have you ever liked anything? No, no, no. I see those notifications. [Michael Houck]: I’ve never heard of you before. Yeah. [David Kline]: It’s like, no, no, no. I just have notifications on for you. I make sure I can see everything you write. And I’m like, OK, so people are watching. They’re just not engaging. So it would be much more of the conversion side. Do you guys do anything in terms of helping? I could totally imagine tracking links off of, you know, we do a thread and then there’s a, you know, a link out and then we can start to have some data on like what actually convert, at least what actually drives people to be interested, even if it doesn’t track their conversion. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, we can set up like, we use this platform short IO, I don’t know if you’ve seen it’s like a better bit, basically. We’d set up a, you know, your domain on there and some like go dot the domain, whatever one you’d want to use. And we just have a bunch of links And that’s what we’d use and we’d set different ones for each kind of post and we can use it Yeah, yeah be a pretty custom with it Cool. [David Kline]: I think it’s the main other thing would be driving people to the newsletter. So we’ve got the newsletters 42 43 000 people Okay Cool. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I mean look what we do then is while we’re sort of onboarding We’ll get more clear about where you want to be with those things six months from now And then at the end of that first month we’ll chat I don’t be like, okay, here’s what we think is realistic for the rest of this period. And that’ll just be sort of our initial initial goal to go after. Because I’m the same way as you. If I’m working on something and the sort of desired outcome is very vague, it’s like, why am I working? Remind me why I’m doing this? [David Kline]: I just feel like if we if you and I share a like, I’m making it up. It’s like, oh, it’s it’s 10 memberships a month, or it’s two I don’t, um, I just feel like it’s like a clear destination, loosely held, you know, versus if we don’t have that, then you’re like, it’s super successful. I drove 10 memberships and I’m like, I’ve lost 200 followers. You know what I mean? [Michael Houck]: And like, we’re just, as long as we’re aligned. [David Kline]: Yeah, no, I feel you. Okay. How do, um, what I recognize is that. You’re a ghostwriter and you can’t tell me the people. Is there a way to get a sense for just like the quality of the writing? Like, is that just your newsletter? Is that the easiest way to think about it or? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I mean, we get this question a lot. What people want is like, get on the phone with someone who’s a client and see how they like it. I know you’re not asking for that, but that’s like the optimal situation. [David Kline]: We obviously can’t deliver that. [Michael Houck]: Yep. The best example that I can give is my newsletter and Blake’s content as well. I think we’re the only agency that is actually operated on a day-to-day basis by real creators themselves. The other ones, they have a creator on the advisory board or who founded it but isn’t operationally involved. And we’re actually in the weeds with the writers making sure the content’s great. So if you wanna see the quality of the content, my newsletter, Blake’s social media content, his newsletter too, that’s the best thing I can say. You know, I’m happy to share like anonymized screenshots of some client work too, but it’s just, I always hesitate to do that because every client’s work is based on their preferences. And so if I share something and you’re like, content sucks, you know, it’s like, well, that’s what they asked for, you know, it’s not your style. [David Kline]: No, the, um, got it. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: All right. [David Kline]: So, so if I’m being skeptical, if I’m being sort of the appropriate pessimist, I’m turning my Twitter account over to I suspended and the guy who’s getting 10 likes a post. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, pretty much. I’m crazy. I’m saying you’re 100% crazy. [David Kline]: No, no, we’ll, we’ll, we’ll take care of it. [Michael Houck]: We won’t use drippy AI. Don’t worry. Um, do you guys use any third party tools or not really? No, we, we just, uh, you know, we use typefully to schedule, but, and then we’ll just need access to the account to like engage with the replies and, to engage on other people’s posts and stuff. [David Kline]: I also have Hype Fury, so alternatively, if you guys like… Oh, whatever. Yeah, any of those tools. What about the engagement side? How do you guys think about that? So I would say one thing I am not doing well is… Anyways, I don’t think I’m… You’re a creator, too. You know the game. So when I was thriving on Twitter, I had my post Saul Hill Bloom group of 20 of us who were all writing and like, I like your stuff and you’d like my stuff. And then like slowly people petered out. And then I would say I have three or four people who I’m like, yeah, I’ll get your stuff. You get my stuff. Like the Matt Gray’s, the Eric Partaker’s, Chris Donnelly’s. A, I don’t know if you guys are sort of using your crew to sort of like help each other. And then just B, like, how does it, like, do I just give you a list of like, these are my relationships and you make sure you hit them and vice versa. Versa. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, so on the on the second part, yes, give us a list of people who you have these agreements with. And our ops team will go in, you know, drop the engagements and like their comments on your stuff and things like that. [David Kline]: On their content, too, right? Yes, 100%. [Michael Houck]: We have the the megaphone network, right? We have like a couple under I think it’s like four or 500 creators on there now, maybe maybe a 450. I don’t know exactly where it is. But We have that kind of as a separate thing, where as a client on the writing side, you get access to the platform for free. There’s no subscription or anything like that. If you want to add budget to get like other people who aren’t already sort of on your whitelist to go and engage with your content, you can set that up. But we found that clients prefer that pricing to be decoupled. So we can offer the writing at a lower price, and then they can sort of go a la carte on the engagement side. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Got it. Sorry. I just want to say it. [David Kline]: So separating the megaphone thing for a second, if we say go on Twitter, what is in that sort of like what you’re doing for? Yes. So we’ll obviously write the content. [Michael Houck]: We’ll research, write, deliver the content, work with you on revising. And then on the op side, we will have somebody in the account on the for your account, I guess, scheduling the content. And then also every day, they will be logging in as you at a specific time on X, and they will be responding to the people who engage with your posts to drive conversations and impressions and things like that. And they’ll also be engaging with these other people in your niche. And this can be the list that you give us, or it can be the list that you give us and some other kind of leaders in the niche who we think could be good to engage with too. [David Kline]: We’ll do that restriction and then you’re saying there’s a if you want to juice it even more There’s this other part you can go outside of sort of our core um do you um Am I thinking about am I thinking about the writing and the engagement at sort of like an outcomes level like uh, what I mean by that is like I’ve I see different people experimenting with different things like I’m gonna do with I’m gonna do a thread in that one post a day and I see other people being like they’re actually mimicking Elon and they’re like, I’m going to do 55 posts a day. To be fair, I don’t want to do 55 posts, but I’m like, is it like one post a day no matter what? Or is it like, we’re playing around? [Michael Houck]: It depends on what package you pick. We have options, right? So if you want to do sort of like a full account takeover where we’re posting multiple long form per week, whether they’re threads or screenshot essays or long form posts or what have you, That’s 3k and that includes all the operational support. If you say, Hey, I actually want, you know, two long form a week and short form a few short form a week every way as well. So we’re getting stuff out there every day. That’s also same price point. But if you decrease the sort of content volume to where you’re just saying, Oh, I just want one or two long form a week and maybe a couple short form tops. And I don’t care about the op support. If that’s the case, then we drop the price to 2k. [David Kline]: Got it. No, I think it would be more of the full takeover of like pretty consistent long form, maybe even like some playing around like, oh, here’s the one liner at night or whatever. Maybe we don’t put engagement on that. Maybe that’s me doing it in Hype Fury as well. And then the, again, trying to put back the engagement that I have dropped off on, you know, that’s where I can rebuild that network of people I’m supporting and they’re supporting me. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, we want to take all the ops headache off your plate. The only thing that you should have to do is basically, you can always provide your own ideas too. We love that. Clients come with their own ideas, but it’s just say, hey, I like this idea. Here’s my kind of subject matter expertise on it. And then a couple of days later, cool, this content is approved or hey, here’s some changes I want you to make. [David Kline]: That’s all you should need to do. Got it. And then if I like sleep on it and say, not Twitter, but LinkedIn, it’s 3k to do that one. Just the full account takeover is like 3k an account. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, correct. We probably wouldn’t be able to do daily carousels at 3K. We might need some custom pricing there because the designer is more expensive than just the normal written content. But if that’s where you want to go, I can come back to you with something custom. [David Kline]: So just let me know. OK, cool. Awesome. I’m sure you’ve had amazing clients. I’m sure you’ve had a few go sideways. One of the things I’m not asking on the ones who go sideways. [Michael Houck]: Who are the people you don’t wanna bring in? I mean, really, we’re just growing so quickly right now that the clients we wanna bring in are people who are either on one side of that spectrum or the other. The people who are in the middle who don’t know their voice but have really strong opinions on what their voice should be, those are the hard clients to work with. The people who are like, I don’t care about the voice, I just want X, Y, Z out there, great. People who are like, I know exactly exactly what I want. Can you deliver that? Great. So it seems like you probably fall more on that second side of things that know exactly what you want. So I feel pretty good about it. I don’t think there’s like any questions you’re not asking right now that I can think of But yeah, I’ll let you know if anything comes to mind, but I don’t think so. [David Kline]: Cool. I guess the one other Oh, sorry. [Michael Houck]: There’s, there’s one thing, um, just in terms of like how we work. So we’re month to month, we have 30 day cancellation. So, um, it’s effectively two months minimum to, to sign up, but, uh, there’s no like longterm lock in beyond that or anything. So if you hate it, I don’t think you will hate it, but if you do hate it, we’re, we’re flexible and we can work with you. [David Kline]: Okay. Awesome. Uh, the other place I was going is, um, The it’s a thing that seems to be working. That I have just not really had enough capacity to spend the time on. So I wonder, and I’m not imagining this every day, but more as an experiment, it’s like most of my threads are like how to do something as a manager or a leader. How to delegate, how to give feedback, how to, I don’t know, it’s like a, I just like being very like practical and very educational. The thing that I have wanted to do and just haven’t invested the time has been more, there’s lots of leaders there’s to learn lessons from And so it does seem like a lot of things going well on Twitter right now are like, here’s Dr. Huberman and exactly his thing. And here’s this other person, but I think it’s the equivalent in sort of the leadership management space. Like, oh, a thread. One of the things that did well for me recently was Elon has this like five-step process for like solving any problem. Yes, I’ve seen this. [Michael Houck]: I’ve seen this exact video and process. I love it. [David Kline]: And so I was like, okay. And I just, I like took the, I took the, I wrote a topper, then I put the video in, then I put another, it’s a pretty jumbled thread, but it did really well. And I was like, oh, I bet there’s like 10 more of these in the world where there’s like, Simon Sinek has like a 90 second post, and then we break it down with an example. Then we’re like, here’s how you can apply it and whatever. As you think about the writers, the only thing for me is like that, at least for me personally, that takes a little more research versus just writing. In the bookends of the types of things they would create. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, that’s totally in scope. Um, the the one thing I think could also do really well for you Are you do you know ben lang? [David Kline]: You’ve probably seen his stuff on on x before I don’t know why that name doesn’t totally ring a bell, but he’s like a notion. [Michael Houck]: He started as like a notion guy. Um, but basically what he’s been doing for a while is He’ll find like a transcript or an interview or video with um, like a really interesting person in his niche or whatever. And he’ll run that through Claude. And he’ll have Claude pull out the best insights from it or whatever. And then he manually will format that and write that as a Google Doc one pager. And then he’ll screenshot that and post his takeaways from it. And so it’s like how Sam Altman says you should build a startup. And those posts have been crushing for a while. And I think with the type of stuff if you do, that same format could perform really well. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Yep. [David Kline]: Duolingo handbook one pager. Right. Combinator, how to get AI startup ideas. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: And he’s just churning those out. And I think it’s a format that could work well for you. Another guy who, obviously, I can’t say why I know that his content is good. But this guy, he’s the founder of Athena. Used to found Thumbtack before that, Jonathan Swanson. He’s posted some threads that have gone insanely viral over the past few months with that same sort of framing that you’re talking about, where here’s how Jensen Yuan at NVIDIA manages 50 direct reports. It’s a big thread with images and stuff like that. Yeah, that stuff is in scope for sure. [David Kline]: Which Athena is this? [Michael Houck]: The, uh, the offshore hiring, uh, company. They’re both offshore hiring companies. I fired Athena like two years ago. It was pretty funny. Oh, no way. [David Kline]: That’s crazy. I mean, um, I really liked what they were doing. They just, um, I think I was, I was too early in my maturity and they were too early in their maturity and They totally screwed this woman with me. It was so bad. What’d they do? Well, I was like, look, to believe it or not, it was like not dissimilar. It was like half EA, half just sort of like content research, content writing. But I was like, look, at a minimum, this person has to like know how to operate Notion. Like I have boards of content and we have a lot, like we just use Notion a lot. Like I just need them, like Notion, proficient, not excellent. And so they’re like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s standard for us. They’re excellent at email. This woman didn’t know how to use Gmail. And they were like, the one thing we could always do is manage an inbox. And I was like, cool. So the first time we’re meeting, I’m like, it’d be great. Maybe you could just come up with a couple of rules and tags. And I sort of gave a high level. And she was like, what? What’s a tag? Or what do you mean by a rule? And I was like, holy heck. And I was like, do you? I’m like, just before we get like, and so it was this long drawn out. Really trying to invest in her for like a week. And then I was like, guys, you said, no matter who I said yesterday, they could do these three things. And like, this person cannot. And then part of their model was you don’t really get to interview people. Like they vet them. And so it’s like, you see a video of like two minutes and you’re like, like see their resume. And I was like, sorry, we just couldn’t quite, they were willing to give me somebody else, but I was just like, I can’t. They’re crushing it, but they do mark it up a lot. [Michael Houck]: So like, for example, when I hired, um, do you know, Rena, my assistant, she might’ve emailed you or something. Oh, yeah. Yeah. So you’ve got a couple of WhatsApps every now and then from, yeah, she’s a, she’s great. [David Kline]: And the way I hired her was I went on online jobs.ph, which is like a job board for Filipinos. [Michael Houck]: And I was like, Hey, I want to hire you. And she was like, no, no, no. Remote workers or whatever. And I hired nine people for a couple bucks an hour each. And I basically just gave them all similar projects of building lead magnets for me. And I just evaluated them based on that. And it was sort of like strongest survive type scenario. And a few of them were amazing and have now been sort of instrumental parts of our team for the last two years. Oh, that’s awesome. If you take the time to give them a shot, or find them yourselves, you can save at least 50%, more like 60, 70% of the cost. [David Kline]: That’s crazy. Yeah. OK. Noted. That sounds like a worthy experiment. It was. [Michael Houck]: It was. But OK. So yeah, I guess you should get back to your conference. [David Kline]: Let me just sort of come back to you, X, LinkedIn, any other questions. I feel like I’ve got enough of them. Of a sense of the things you do and don’t write now. And yeah, I think we’re good. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Anything else? [David Kline]: What is your, like, what’s your capacity? I have run into this, like, what’s your capacity look like, If I said go tomorrow, can we start the research process soon? Or is it like, do you need more time? [Michael Houck]: We’d be able to start, I mean, we could assign a writer and get started researching this week. A kickoff call until next week, just because I’m sort of having a crazy couple of days here in Austin. But yeah, we can do a kickoff as soon as next week and get rolling from there. So we do have capacity with folks on the team who are great. [David Kline]: So yeah. OK. Awesome. I’ll hit you up tomorrow. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: All right, man. [Michael Houck]: Sounds good. Let me know if anything else comes up. But I’m excited to help out here, whether it’s LinkedIn or X whatever you want to send our way. [David Kline]: I do have lots of questions on newsletter, but that could be a whole separate. [Michael Houck]: Actually like 20 seconds on the newsletter. [David Kline]: Are you guys just doing newsletter writing or is there a world where like, if I diagnosed my own business, I would say it is like a side hobby and I should be running it like a business and I am not running it like a business from like the right Sequences for you know for converting people for getting them in for like then channeling them into my products to like sponsorships and monetization It’s like I’ll take low-hanging fruit occasionally out of the high platform Everything to like our email sequences for our live courses are on maybe and they really should be on convert kit And should I just move everything over? So open-ended I’m just sort of like what’s the sort of the perimeter of what you guys will do for a newsletter Yes. [Michael Houck]: So traditionally, we have just done the newsletter writing, the kind of beehive ops around it. So segments, automations, things like that. We have a designer, as I mentioned, on staff. So you already have a strong brand. Maybe you have someone who you outsource design to already, but we’d be happy to take that on and add infographics and things like that. Maybe you’re the designer yourself. Maybe it’s your wife. I don’t know. [David Kline]: It’s all us, man. [Michael Houck]: Dude, you’re a beast. I got to give respect. I really do. Thank you. Yeah, so traditionally, that’s been what we do. However, because we’ve had such crazy growth the first two months of the year, we are starting to expand into doing full email marketing funnels. We also already have two strong partnerships with agencies to grow newsletters. One is Matt McGarry’s paid ads newsletter growth agency. And the other one is It’s actually a crazy business. My friend is a Teal fellow, super legit guy. And he’s like the best like data guy and cold emailer that I know. What’s that? Yeah, tell me the name. [David Kline]: I’m pretty sure I know what it is. Oh, no, there’s no name. [Michael Houck]: The business is called email. This is this is totally under the radar. It’s just his thing. He’s getting it started. It’s like a side project for him, but it’s sort of becoming a big business now for basically, what we do is we partner with him, and he will send like lead magnets, or if you have lead magnets, we can we can use them to, to two people via cold email. If they’re interested in those lead magnets, they’ll get added to the newsletter. And he can be incredibly targeted because he’s built a database of 200 million people’s emails. And it’s not just like the Apollo or Zoom info with like job title and seniority and stuff like that. He also has scraped all of those people’s social media activity. And so he has a structured data set of who they follow, what they talk about, what’s in their bio, what topics they engage with, like all this crazy stuff. And so what we see is that when we start working with clients to do this and we partner with them on people, the open rates are nuts. Like these people are like, it’s like 80% open rates from this channel. Like 80 and that’s not like an outlier. That’s like at least half of the clients that do this. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: I’m. [David Kline]: Yeah, I mean, I’m like trying to find it. We like I feel like we talked to him like a month and a half ago based on an intro. My wife was in Chris Donnelly’s Creator Accelerator. OK. And somebody in there knew him. And I feel like we I’m like trying to find his name. [Michael Houck]: His name is Matt. [David Kline]: Matt, what’s the last name? [Michael Houck]: DeMarc Antonio. Maybe it’s different. [David Kline]: I was going to try to find the name for you just so you can. [Michael Houck]: There’s another guy who has an agency called FWD forward. And what they do is they buy email lists from people and then just upload them to people’s beehive newsletters. That is pretty sketchy. In my opinion, he’s built his own database and he like will email the people first, basically to make sure that they’re actually interested. [David Kline]: And that’s why I like the way you’re saying that. Oh, PR. All right. Well, if I find it, I’ll dig it out for you. My wife, I can’t do the name because it was like her intro, but it sounded so similar. He’s like, because the 200 million number stuck with me. And then he was like, no, we send them the lead magnet. And these are people who have said yes to being marketed to by partners. So you’re not breaking spam laws. And then if they say yes, they get put in. If not, like, so be it. And so I It just sounded so similar that I’m like, I really feel like it might’ve been him. And again, I don’t remember even like really being a company name. It felt very like just getting started, but like he was having some pretty good early success with people. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. There’s a, I don’t know, it could be the same guy, but Matt himself is like not a newsletter guy. So I’d be surprised if it was, he’s like a YC Teal fellow guy who’s just like interested in this space for like lead gen for people basically. So maybe, maybe not. Maybe someone different, I’m not sure. [David Kline]: Cool, okay, so basically, sort of like full Beehive Ops writing sequences has been sort of to date with now the extension out to like broader email marketing. That’s how I would think about. [Michael Houck]: Exactly, and I’d be interested also to hear like where you could see us also adding value there because we’re actively looking to sort of expand services around newsletters. So I’m very open to ideas on that, too, in terms of what we could take off your plate and what would be valuable. [David Kline]: Do you need to hop, or do you have two minutes to do it? I got two minutes. Yeah. OK. I feel like we are in a embarrassing, but I imagine relatively common place with our newsletter for creators who are trying to do everything themselves. OK. I think if you said, what are the two ways you wanna monetize a newsletter? Or like, I know there’s more flavors, but if you just said, drive people to your own products or get a bunch of sponsorships, we’ve mostly been in this bucket. Occasionally, honestly, the sponsorships I’ve taken is because it’s like a cool logo. I’m like, oh, Nike wants to sponsor me? Great, Nike on my newsletter. But for the most part, it’s not like it hasn’t, we have not leaned into it to turn it into a money-making endeavor. I think with 42,000 leaders and a 48% open rate, I should be able to make better than a couple hundred bucks on a beehive sponsor. So. Everyone’s killing me, man. [Michael Houck]: They’re so bad. They’re so bad. [David Kline]: And because there’s such little money, I don’t bother. You know what I mean? I’m like, I don’t want to give away my brand equity for like a hundred bucks. Yep. [Michael Houck]: A hundred percent. We don’t use any of their, their ads for our newsletter. [David Kline]: So, so I’ve got whatever, 110 additions were two years old. My it’s really bad. Like it’s just bad. Like my sequence, like I don’t have, I have no lead magnets. Okay. I have no sequences. Okay. So I’m double opt in. My double opt in is bad. Okay. So I have 48. 8,000 pending subscribers. [Michael Houck]: Because of the double opt-in, they’re just sitting there. So you could have double the size of the newsletter basically. Correct. Oh my God. That’s nuts, man. Why not disable the double opt-in? [David Kline]: Well, part of it was like, I went for, I went, I was on the booth. So I do pay for boosts. Yeah. I then was getting like, hi, like the rates were dropping fast, the boost people. So I was like, oh, double opt-in, I can at least make sure they’re real. [Michael Houck]: Oh, I see. [David Kline]: Then I don’t have to pay, like, I don’t pay for them unless they actually convert. They were like converting and then never opening again. And like, there was other people scamming it. So the double opt-in got rid of the people scamming it. [Michael Houck]: Makes sense. One of these newsletters from like, who knows what country who was sending us like tons of subscribers, and then they’d wait the 14 days to get verified. And then they just turn them out. [David Kline]: It’s like, well, So I was having that, and so that’s why the double opt didn’t seem to get rid of that. To your point, I had this potential energy of like, I mean, I’m not going to convert huge swaths of that because some of them are now so stale, but I’m like, okay, we can optimize that. There’s a world where I basically have two ICPs. I have CEO, founders, experienced leaders, and I have new managers. I could probably figure out relatively easy which one they are, and I could have two different sequences to start them into my newsletter. These are the basics ones. And just like one question, like, here’s experience. Answer that question. Cool. Here’s your sequence A, here’s sequence B. I haven’t built that. You know, just anyways, so there’s a, again, I think there’s like probably reasonable 80, 20 things we’ve done, but I’m like, man, people who actually know what they’re doing and have like the right capabilities, time and focus could probably double, like, I don’t know, in six to 12 months, double my email list. Make us a bunch of money, et cetera. So, um, there’s the writing piece. There’s there’s. Should we do spot? Like, should we actually lean hard into sponsorships or not? I just, I know it would take more work than I’ve been doing and I don’t know how to do it. So I have to be making it up and leaning into it. That’s why I haven’t done it. Yeah. There’s better analytics around converting the people I have into my existing products. There’s like the role there’s adding lead magnets to convert more people faster, et cetera. Um, And then there’s the, honestly, the other pieces for me, the reason I said beehive early on is because, um, the, or sorry, I said convert, I said kit. The problem I have with beehives, I cannot do email marketing from beehive. You have to, do you have to say their newsletter subscribers to email them? So in my, so maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I’m being too binary about it. [Michael Houck]: I guess my question would be, what is the restriction there? Would you not want someone who you’re sending email marketing campaigns to, to also get your newsletter? [David Kline]: I mean, not that I don’t want it. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, sure. Of course. [David Kline]: You’re talking about email marketing to people So I’ve got lists for the courses that are like two or 3,000 people deep. Oh, okay. Okay. That are on Maven. So for them, I’m like, okay, we’re T minus two months from the next version of this program. You’ve raised your hand and said, I want to, I want to know more about this program. I can’t use be high for them. [Michael Houck]: Unless you also come into the newsletter and then you’re worried that they’ll just unsubscribe from all your stuff because they never signed up for the newsletter and therefore less likely to buy the courses. [David Kline]: Got it, yeah, got it, okay. And I just don’t quite have the, like, my ideal would be, like, almost having, like, better, I think I could do most of the tagging in Beehive. But again, this is another version where I’m like, I have literal, like, I don’t know where everyone comes from Then I have, like, people who’ve been to some of my free programs, which are probably the only, the only lead magnets I do have are, like, these free workshops. Okay. So I have people who’ve been to one, I have people who’ve been to 10. I have people who’ve been in one program, not the other. I have people who’ve been in both programs. I have CEOs I coach. Subsets of all those get the newsletter, don’t get the newsletter. Do you know what I mean? But right now they’re in two or three systems. [Michael Houck]: You have a very, I’d say relative to other people who I’ve seen and also relative to how we operate founding journey, you have a very conservative approach to the newsletter itself. I think most people will just import everyone to the newsletter and say, fuck it and whatever. But your approach I think prioritizes the sales more than like the list growth. And I actually think that, you know, if you are mostly selling those high ticket programs, and if those are what you want to be pushing, it actually makes sense. [David Kline]: It’s just more complex. Okay. So anyways, that just gives you a lay of the land of like, look over my shoulder, you probably could see 10 things you could fix within that. You know, and that doesn’t even contemplate now introducing the membership. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: Okay, look, it would be a fun business to kind of dig into. I think high level, the things you mentioned, sponsorships, you know, we’ve started to do that for some clients where we have like an in-house sponsor guy who does all my sponsor for founding journey. You know, we’ve, we’ve done, I think over 500 K in sponsor revenue over the last two years, if that’s memory serves. But yeah, so we started offering that with some clients help out with that with you if you’d like, And then the email marketing kind of funnel design and lead magnet side of things too. We have someone who could do that, although I’m looking to hire sort of a dedicated person for it in the next month or two. [David Kline]: But to be fair, I’m joking, but at the same time, it’s like such a great win-win. If I can give you a component and you’re like, oh, I can monetize that in a way that you’re not current, like on brand that In such a way that it pays for everything we do for you. And then some it’s like, it is in the Alex Formosi, like offers too good to too good to say no type offer. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. [David Kline]: Um, so that’d be, I mean, honestly, like if we, if we start with one of the accounts, get to the newsletter, other accounts, and we’re like, I’m again, I’m, I’m happy to figure out situations where everybody makes money. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Cool man. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, me too. All right, let me chat with Blake, and I’ll chat with a couple writers on the team who I think could be a fit for this. And then you get back to me with sort of platform-wise how you’re thinking about it, and also like content volume that you want. Because again, if we’re going to be doing like daily threads or daily carousels, it would need to be custom pricing. But just let me know kind of where you land on those two things, and we can get something started as soon as next week. [David Kline]: Do you want to just, like, let’s assume yes. Let’s assume yes on x. And what, I guess, like, how do you think about, can you just sort of give me some parameters on the, like, threads every day versus threads in your normal, like, you gave me the 3k number, like, what’s in there, and then what’s a custom version? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, so normal package is, is 3K for, again, all of the ops, we’ll take all that off your plate, and three threads or like long form posts per week. Maybe you rip in a couple short form in there as well, but that the base package is three per week. If we wanted to do like short to medium length posts, we could have, you know, one to two per day at that level instead, or you can do a mix, one or two long form and a good amount of short to medium form as well. So that’s how I think about it. If we wanted to go to daily carousels or daily threads, I’d probably need to price it based on, again, carousels we price differently than threads is. So I need to talk with the team on that one. But that’s sort of the base level that it would be at. [David Kline]: If you do this sort of three long form, are there also just basic posts the other days with engagement, or you’re just doing in the three, like you’re doing every other day posting? [Michael Houck]: The primary offer is every other day, basically, threads are long form to some degree. Again, if you wanted us to sprinkle in a couple short form posts, we’re not opposed to doing that. But they’d be pretty concise, like short, just one line or two liner type posts. That’s the base package that we offer. [David Kline]: Got it. So what if you just give me the price on this? If we’re going to do it, I want to do it every day. I think all these platforms punish us for not doing it every day. They just do. And so both on the engagement side and on the, so it’s like, what is the package for every day? I don’t think we need to assume threads every day. I think that can get a little heavy. But what if we said, keep the three threads, purpose one to two of things I’ve already written, like literally, I’m just like, bring them in, you know, that way, you don’t have to do like a full lift. It’s just sort of like repurposing. And then one to two of like the small form image post or whatever else the other couple of days with engage with like sort of the daily engagement for the outside. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, so the daily engagement would happen even at the 3k level. I just want to be clear about that. Even if we’re not posting content, you’re still slotted in for us to do the daily engagement side. What that’s that’s I would, again, need to sort of take a step back. Yeah, I’m sorry. [David Kline]: Why don’t you check that out? You’d marinate it on the price, shoot that to me, and then we can sort of decide, like, do that or not do that. [Michael Houck]: Cool. All right, man. [David Kline]: Sounds good. All right. We’ll talk soon. [Michael Houck]: Good to chat. Talk soon.