- Duration: 22 min
- Platform: zoom
- Source: Read.ai 01JN4FKP230VKCJHDMA5F02BXS (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JN4FKP230VKCJHDMA5F02BXS)
Transcript
[Bryndis Henrikson]: Hey, how’s it going? [Michael Houck]: Hey, Bryndis. How are you? [Bryndis Henrikson]: What’s going on? [Michael Houck]: How are you? Yeah, I’m good. I’m in Austin for a newsletter conference right now. [Bryndis Henrikson]: Oh, nice. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: That’s pretty niche. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: It’s very niche, but it’s fun. We got Sam Parr here, Nathan from ConvertKit, Alex Lieberman. It’s a good group. Oh, nice. [Bryndis Henrikson]: Very cool. How’d the launch go? [Michael Houck]: It looked like it went pretty well. Yeah. Yeah, it did go well. [Bryndis Henrikson]: Well, so I had told Andrew last week, like, I’m going to launch on Tuesday. That’s the day. And then literally, like, I think over the weekend, he makes this, like, post. I was like, that wasn’t part of the plan. I think I saw him post it on, like, Saturday at, like, dinnertime. Right. It was so weird. And the post was also, like, very interesting. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: A little political angle in there, which I thought was interesting. [Bryndis Henrikson]: Yeah. Yeah. And also like some racism element like it was just very wild um yeah so yeah it’s gone really well yeah we’ve had a bunch of calls this week with potential uh clients who funny enough they’re like yeah we worked [Michael Houck]: with athena we worked with somewhere and we’re not happy and so we’re kind of like taking those people yeah i’ve heard that um i’ve heard they’ve had some issues with with a keeping up with demand and also kind of retaining the folks who um who they do have so it’s sort of a a very weird weird bucket for them uh right now yeah yeah so yeah things are going well um but on that front that post that andrew [Bryndis Henrikson]: did on twitter I guess kind of kicked off some other conversations on like on we work remotely we have 50 000 followers on that account but on yeah linkedin it’s significantly higher and so he’s like it should be way higher what’s going on here? And so, yeah, he had introduced me, I don’t know if you’re familiar with this guy, Chris Bakke. [Michael Houck]: Oh, yeah, I know Chris. Yeah. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Bryndis Henrikson]: So similar model to you guys. And so I had a chat with Chris actually earlier today, but I really like working with you guys. And so. Oh, great. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. Well, that’s good. We don’t want to lose you for sure. Yeah, I mean, Chris is great. But yeah, would be happy to happy to sort of bring everything together here. I took a look at the account. I think there’s some like pretty clear things we can do to improve performance and you know, hopefully then growth as well. You want me to sort of dive in and give you some initial thoughts on like, yeah, he when I talked to him, he was like, I honestly think your account has a shadow ban on it right now. [Bryndis Henrikson]: He’s like, the amount of engagement you’re getting, it’s like 100 people, but you have 50,000 followers. He’s like, upgrade to the verified org. He’s like, just do it. The best thing about that is you’re going to get premium support. Then you ask the agent, hey, do we have a shadow ban? What’s going on? And then they can potentially lift it for you. He’s like, try that first and see if that actually works. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I definitely think that that’s That’s probably a good idea, but I also think there’s some pretty clear like content things that are likely keeping impressions low and therefore engagement low too. That you know could probably improve things even if there is or isn’t a shadow ban on the account. You never really know, but I mean, look just looking at the account like I think the main problem is that the ratio of high value content to just sort content that’s not going to be stuff that resonates is, is, is not great. Like it’s, it’s very, I guess it would be a low ratio. Cause there’s like a lot of individual job posts, a lot of posts with hashtags or like big paragraphs of text, you know, the questions and sort of memes can be good, but they don’t really work when you’ve diluted the likelihood of the algorithm thinking poster high value from this account with the other stuff in the first place. So, um, I think that that’s probably the main driver is just like, there’s a lot of content going out. Like I’m looking back only just a couple of days right now. And there’s like many, many posts, but the majority of those are, you know, like not stuff that I think would, would perform very well. And so what that does is that trains the algorithm to think that this account is not one that’s putting out valuable content. And so. Going to share it with like a very small percentage of your existing audience in the first place no matter what you do um so there’d need to be some sort of initial like almost warming period where we stop doing that and start doing more like authentic um sort of I would even go with sort of like a beehive-esque brand voice where it’s like sort of engaging funny relatable um something like that I think that’s gonna over the course of you know you know, initially warming it up, will make the algorithm realize, oh, you know, this content is actually higher quality coming from this account now. So we’re gonna start showing it to a larger percentage of their audience. So, you know, I can’t speak to shadow ban versus no shadow ban. I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad idea to explore that. But I do think that there’s some underlying stuff here that’s probably the primary cause of performance. Yeah, I agree. [Bryndis Henrikson]: Yeah, I mean, every kind of week on week when we’re looking at it, Maybe we grow like two people, but we’re losing like 15 at a time. And I think it’s just too much content. So yeah, we’re going to kill the job post. Yeah, get rid of the hashtags. Yeah, that would be kind of like to start. He also recommended with this new, I don’t know, the gold badge or whatever, you can have affiliates. And so we could even link Andrew as an affiliate in there, and maybe like my account or other people as well. And so that’ll also help kind of boost it as well. I don’t know if you’ve heard of that. [Michael Houck]: I know they do do that. Um, I don’t know how big of an impact that has, I think, you know, maybe they’re testing it out. Maybe it will have a big impact, but I think the primary thing that stood out to me was just like, if we get the content going in the right direction, that’s going to be the 80, 20 that gets us the results we want. [Bryndis Henrikson]: Okay, cool. Okay. Yeah. I mean, a lot of our traffic, it’s not really coming from Twitter. It’s mainly coming from LinkedIn right now. It’s our third biggest place. And so what we’re doing on LinkedIn is working and it’s like, we’re growing quickly there. And so I think Andrew just has this attachment to Twitter that he, he thinks we should be like a lot higher. [Michael Houck]: I think the thing is like how I think about the platforms is like LinkedIn is obviously more sort of the preferred So being job focused can actually work there, but on Twitter. It’s really more. It’s become more, especially in the last like one to two years of like a lifestyle platform, creator platform, influencer platform, and so. It’s more so it’s like you know how like Ryanair and Duolingo are so great on Tick Tock because they’re always posting like, you know, relevant, funny content about their businesses. That’s the type of stuff that’s doing best on Twitter right now that we’re seeing. So I don’t know if we need to go all the way in that direction necessarily, but just moving a little bit more towards the lifestyle brand of we work remotely rather than just like, hey, do you guys want to sign up for this job or check out this job? I would say that that’s the 80-20. [Bryndis Henrikson]: Right. And on Twitter, it’s being quick to jump in these threads or conversations. Like have to be managing it all the time where LinkedIn, you can just put something up and then someone might see it like in a couple of days from then. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. Yeah. Cause there’s, there’s a higher density of high quality content on X versus LinkedIn. And so LinkedIn stuff just lingers longer in people’s feeds. Um, and you know, we, we do that too. So, I mean, I assume it would be Jacob. Um, but we have a process where if there’s like trending topics in the niche, we’ll look to identify those ourselves. But also if you flag something to us in Slack, we’ll try to spin up something, you know, pretty quick for that. [Bryndis Henrikson]: Yeah. Okay. Um, yeah. So just wanted to, I guess, yeah, talk about kind of Twitter and if it was something that you guys would do, um, and then also like Walter as well. And, and what that looks like potentially, cause there’s like synergy between the two businesses, but, um, yeah, just a little bit different. Um, Chris also mentioned this I don’t know if you’re familiar with like a meme account. Those are doing quite well right now where you have like a fake account basically, right? And kind of setting up one of those that’s kind of related to the main account. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, we could do that. I don’t necessarily think that we should be trying to grow an account from zero if we have a 50K audience to play with. So my recommendation would probably be, we should throw in the like Mimi. Again, the reason he’s, he’s talking about that is because it’s lifestyle content. It’s relatable content. Right. So my thought is let’s see if we can make that work with the audience that we have. If for whatever reason, this audience is, is dead and we can’t revive it. You know, I think that’s unlikely, but if that is true, then okay. Next approach would be let’s start something from scratch. Let’s get big creators to amplify it. So it gets some initial gravity and take here from there, but I think that’s sort of pulling the ripcord before we know if the plane’s going down. Yeah, yeah, I think that’s all I all I had. [Bryndis Henrikson]: Okay. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: I mean, look, Jacob does have bandwidth to help out whether it’s with newsletter x for we work remotely x for Walter, or, you know, LinkedIn accounts as well. Sounds like you guys already have a good system there, though. So We’ll give a discount, obviously, if we’re packaging multiple things together. I always need to get a sense from you of what is the volume we want to be doing, and then we could put a package together and price it out. [Bryndis Henrikson]: Yeah. Do you think there is value in Twitter still right now for the two businesses that we have, or more like double down on LinkedIn? [Michael Houck]: I think for Walter, there definitely is value on Twitter because a lot of, like the people who are trolling on Twitter all day, like that’s where founders are spending their time more than LinkedIn, right? For WeWork remotely, I’m less sure. I wanna say yes, but I’m not as 100% confident as I am for Walter. [Bryndis Henrikson]: Right, because that’s kind of where the somewhere guys and, kind of grew their audience, right? Like from Twitter. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, they came up on Twitter. And then like Oceans had Austin Reef promoting them on Twitter all the time. Yeah, those type of like offshore hiring businesses like Athena’s founder, what’s his name? Jonathan Swanson. He posts these like, you know, viral threads as well from his personal account. They probably do a lot of business for them about like, how Elon manages so many companies or how Jensen Wang has 50 direct reports and things like that. So yeah, I would say for Walter, obvious sort of like platform fit with X, for WeWorkRemotely, I think probably yes, too. But I also think that those people, as you guys are already seeing, are also on LinkedIn to a larger degree than probably the founder people for Walter. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Right. [Bryndis Henrikson]: Okay. Okay, cool. Well, um, yeah, what do you what do you need for me? [Michael Houck]: I just like clarity on, you know, if we were going to do this account versus this account, what the volume would be. And then I can put together a couple options with like, Alright, well, if you guys decide we want to do that, we work remotely x, or we want to focus on Walter on x, or, you know, we want to do the newsletter, whatever it would be, I can put a couple and send it over. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay, cool. [Bryndis Henrikson]: Let me, yeah, I’ll reach out to you before the end of the weekend, or the end of the week, and let you know. [Michael Houck]: Cool, sounds good. Anything else on your mind, question-wise? How’s it going with your account with Jacob? Happy with performance and everything? [Bryndis Henrikson]: Yeah, Jacob’s a whiz. He’s always coming up with really catchy things. It’s interesting to see kind of what lands out there, doesn’t, it’s very wild, right, how that is. Yeah, it’s quite interesting. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, the interesting thing is that sometimes you’ll have the same topic hit versus not hit with different formats, but then you’ll try the format that worked with one topic, and it won’t work with the other one, and the other one will. It’s a little bit of Tetris, but yeah. [Bryndis Henrikson]: You guys have so much data as well that you’re a whole thing that you can be like, this is like the golden ticket for any person that we’re gonna work with or something. Yeah, we’ve started to compile that. [Michael Houck]: We probably need to do a better job of reporting in general. That’s sort of on my to-do list right now is like ramping that up for all clients. But I mean, for context, we’ve gone from, I think it was like, I don’t know exactly where it was. It was like under 15 clients in December to now being at like 25, 26 clients two months later. We’re growing really fast. And yeah, just hiring writers. So maybe I’ll go on WeWork remotely and grab some writers on there. [Bryndis Henrikson]: I can give you a coupon. Now when I’m reading content, I’m like, is this the real person writing this? I can kind of feel like even Alex from TreeWalk. I’m like, I feel like he’s a client of yours now. It’s going to be like a guessing game. [Michael Houck]: I feel like most people just when you’re super busy and you’re running, you know, one company that’s going well or multiple companies, it’s just, you just don’t have time, you know, um, to learn a whole new discipline and have [Bryndis Henrikson]: a whole new job, basically. I agree. Like I have people are saying to me, like, I love your content on LinkedIn that you’re pushing out there. [Michael Houck]: I’m like, oh yeah, thanks. I’m just sitting down Sunday, Sunday evenings and batching it out for the week. [Bryndis Henrikson]: Yeah, no, it’s really amazing. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, well, happy to keep doing it. And just let me know sort of volume of content on each account, and we’ll give you some options and go from there. [Bryndis Henrikson]: Okay, sounds good. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Cool. [Michael Houck]: Good to talk, Bryndis.