- Duration: 62 min
- Platform: zoom
- Source: Read.ai 01JN6GXE4KZC8083CQJT8GHY0M (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JN6GXE4KZC8083CQJT8GHY0M)
Transcript
[Sarah Parr]: Good morning. Morning. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: How are you? Good. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: How are you doing? UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Good. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: Just rolled out of bed. Me too. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Did you get a chance to look at everything I sent over? [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: Sorry. It was late in the day. [Sarah Parr]: Yeah, no, I did it. I put in info about myself and I think I’m ready to get going. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 2]: Okay, cool. Sounds good. [Sarah Parr]: Every day I wake up and I get like I log into Slack and I just get like deluge. Yeah, I can’t even imagine. Do you ever like take time for yourself to like not? UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: No, no. [Sarah Parr]: How long have you like run this thing? [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: Well, the good training agency who started that like, like last April. So almost a year. Um, but we have a couple other businesses too. They’ve been running for a couple of years. And, um, before that I was in big tech for a while. So it’s like basically since, I don’t know, second half of 2016, I’ve been running pretty hard straight through. [Sarah Parr]: Oh, wow. Okay. Yeah. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: But obviously as a founder, you’re it’s, it’s more intense. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Of course. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: Yeah. Oh man. How’s your, how’s your day? Yesterday seemed like it was pretty chaotic. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Uh, yes. [Sarah Parr]: Today is also just a little chaotic, but, uh, less things, just more time with everything. Um, but no, just like you, I also rolled out of bed, so. Yeah. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: Um, Oh, I’ve got to find a way to make it over to that, to the conference today. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Are you not in the hotel that they’re holding it or like where is it? [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: What state are you in now? I’m in I’m in Austin, Texas right now. Oh, nice. Okay, but no, I’m in. I’m in an Airbnb. Technically, it’s a kindred, which is like a home swapping platform for free, basically. Oh, you get credits for hosting people, and then you use those to stay with other people. So there’s some pretty, pretty nice places here on this on this place. That’s the vibe. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Cool. [Sarah Parr]: Oh, we got 10 of you. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: Hello. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Morning. Hey, guys. Sorry, I’m a couple minutes behind. [Genevieve Bellaire]: No worries. Good morning. How are you? UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: I am good. [Genevieve Bellaire]: Michael, how was your trip? Trip was good and is good. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: Oh, good. Where are you now? I am in Austin, Texas. I just got back from Brazil. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Nice. [Genevieve Bellaire]: That’s great. Is Austin home or you’re now just continuing the path? [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: No. I like to stay homeless, but my friends and family get mad at me for that. So I say I’m in between homes at the moment, like a straight up. So I’m checking out new cities and seeing where I want to plant some roots. [Sarah Parr]: Nice. Great. How about you, Sarah? I’m currently in Cleveland, Ohio. That is where my base is, but I’m from New Jersey. And sometimes my work takes me different places as well. So it’s been very cool getting to travel past few years to just different areas. [Genevieve Bellaire]: Yeah, I agree. Traveling is best. Well, excited to work with you guys on this. Thanks for making time. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: Yeah, yeah, of course we’re pumped. So OK, I guess what we can do is just quick TLDR sort of on this call rehashing sort of the plan here and then basically I’m going to turn it over to Sarah to take most of the She’s going to go a little deeper, Genevieve, on some of the stuff that you shared in the onboarding form. Thanks for filling that out. And you guys just chat through things. And then at the end, I’ll sort of jump back in, talk about, okay, process, next steps, and sort of how we get the first issue out there and set up. So yeah, I mean, that’s pretty much it. So any questions before we get started? I know we want to talk about Customer IO and Beehive and anything else. [Genevieve Bellaire]: I think that is it as of now. The only other question I have is how you guys think about who this newsletter is for in the sense of top of funnel, getting new people into the pipeline, and how you, when it’s a company and not a person, how you essentially make that work from a user acquisition perspective and get them to the product versus engaging existing users through more of a kind of remember us, real world kind of thing and try and like activate people on the platform. And maybe it’s like the newsletter does both, but that’s kind of where my question around customer IO comes from, just because that’s where all of our users live right now and where most of our messaging happens. So I just want to better understand how does, how do these things like interplay with each other? UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Totally. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: Okay. So I would say that the newsletter does kind of serve both of those purposes. It can help reactivate or re-engage and just stay top of mind for people who are already in your guys’ ecosystem in one way or another. But in terms of the acquisition funnel, it sort of sits between where people would discover you on social media or if you’re doing ads on platform. I don’t know what acquisition strategies you guys are using, but whatever you’re using, it sits below that and before signup. It basically is like a new step in that funnel that didn’t exist before newsletters became this popular, where the goal is to build trust that you can’t get with just like seeing something one time on social media, basically. So rather than getting that one impression, one shot to try to force people to convert at that point, we say, hey, lower friction, just give us your email. We’ll tell you what we’re all about. Here’s why we think we can help you in a sort of not salesy way, like in a way where we’ll actually add value to you. And then if they trust the value we’re adding, then maybe they try the product. So that’s sort of where it sits. We’ve seen a lot of success for that, for our products and services, and also obviously for our clients too. So that’s how I would think about positioning it. And in terms of how that relates to the content, I would say that probably want to talk with you about like your goal. Is the goal, hey, we have some really big email list and we wanna reactivate or re-engage or convert some of those people, or is it, hey, we’re gonna be sending some people through to you guys, or do you guys have any ideas on how to grow it? And those will be the primary people who we want to speak to. So it’s sort of a strategic decision for you, but we can also thread that needle and put things in there that’ll help with both. [Genevieve Bellaire]: Yeah. That’s helpful. I can give you kind of the first thought there, which may be, like, you guys know more about this space. Our single metric we’re trying to move is activation, is conversion to premium accounts, essentially. Subscription there is a free part of our product you download real world and it’s currently only a mobile app it will be web shortly as well so that kind of changes a little bit of the funnel but right now we’re working on getting people to basically start a free trial of the product that they have for 14 days and then it converts to premium so that that’s like the single company metric we’re trying to move the levers we have to do that right now are we have had previous products in market that we have signed up like 150 plus thousand people that we still have their emails. Some of them converted, some of them didn’t convert, but like at some point they were interested in real world. And so we want to activate that group because it costs us nothing essentially to be able to get them in. And then also hopefully now we’re addressing whatever wasn’t exciting to them about the product previously that now we can do for them. So that’s kind of like a first goal for our secondary goal. And then the third is just like helping, exactly what you said, build trust around the product, build trust around real world as sort of the authority in this space and just grow that value so that new people are more likely to convert once they actually download the app. Got it. Okay. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: So with that good size of an initial list, I would say that we probably want to get some of that low hanging fruit as like our initial priority with the first, you know, I don’t know, a few weeks to months that we’re working on those, but focus on those more. Obviously we’ll set up funnels to get people sort of into the newsletter as well. And we should talk about the best strategies to do that. But if you guys already have a good size email list and your goal is to sort of reactivate or engage those folks, newsletter is a great way to do that. You’ll stay top of mind for them every two weeks. We’ll get something in their inbox. We’ll add value to their lives. It seems like a no brainer to me to work with that, with that cohort and whether it’s importing the whole list right away, whether it’s starting with like a certain segment of it that you guys are really excited about, whatever that strategy is, my recommendation would be that’s sort of how we start. And Sarah can keep that in mind in terms of how we’re crafting the content. One other thing you said I wanted to kind of go deeper on was since the newsletter is coming from a company, not a person, I think that’s an open question right now. And something we should get to the bottom of on this call is should this newsletter be Genevieve as the founder of real world, just talk about, you know, the things, the lifestyle around what real world is trying to help people do. Um, or should it be more of like a corporate newsletter? This is, I think where some of the difference between customer IO and Beehive can come in with Beehive since it’s kind of a separate comps and separate design and separate everything we can brand how we want. A lot of our clients will actually have it be branded around the founder. A lot of clients will have it be branded as an entirely separate brand. Like instead of real world, it’ll be some newsletter name, like powered by real world or from real world, right? So in my mind, that’s an open question we should talk about on this call. [Genevieve Bellaire]: And that’ll maybe help inform the decision a bit too. Okay. That’s interesting. That’s interesting. What do you see? Well, yeah, I’ll let you throw that in whenever the right time is on the call, but that is interesting to think about too. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: Yeah, let’s maybe keep that in the back of our mind throughout the main chat, and then we’ll circle back to that at the end when we’re about to get into like process and next steps. Great. Okay. Sarah, you wanna take us away? And then I just enabled screen sharing, so you should be good for the Notion Doc. [Sarah Parr]: Perfect. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: Benefit for context, we have a little Notion Doc. You’ve already answered some of the questions in there, So Sarah might jump around a little bit and sort of go off script. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 2]: Okay, you can see my screen? [Sarah Parr]: Yep. All right, great. So first I’m going to introduce myself. Hello, Genevieve. My name is Sarah. This is a link to my LinkedIn. If you want to connect, I’m always happy to connect with folks. I am primarily a writer and creator and editor, and I do that through a detail-oriented content marketing lens. And I’ve worked with founders in spaces ranging from beauty and banking to healthcare and education at all levels. So I’ve had a pretty interesting breadth of experience these past five years. And then when I’m not working in a marketing capacity, we mentioned that I like to travel, especially when it comes to road trips. I went on a whole Southern road trip excursion last year for a restaurant, but the journey was second to none. I’m also an actor. I’m always auditioning for theater, film, commercials, you name it. And I love taking dance classes. And one thing I’m doing tonight is actually dancing in a birthday party flash mob. So I’m very excited to do that. It’s a disco. That is crazy. Yeah, never a dull moment. I will say that. But most importantly, I would say, considering our target audiences, I’m a 20-something woman just trying to figure out the real world. So this newsletter that we’re going to create is something that I would very likely subscribe to. So I’m excited to see what we can make happen together. As was shared, the outcomes for this meeting is talk about primary and secondary goals, which you mentioned a little bit. So we’ll dig a little deeper into that. Identify the exact audience that we’ll write for. Pick three to five content pillars that we want to start with and make our process clear. Answer any questions, and then close out with next steps. That sound good? Yes. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: All right. [Sarah Parr]: So you mentioned a little bit. Oh, and some of these might echo the questions that you answered before. But since this is our first time meeting, I want to make sure that I’m hearing it from you and I’m getting everything straight from the source itself. So the number one reason you want to create more content, i.e. The newsletter, Revenue leads, credibility. This is attached to, you mentioned three of them. One of them is leading to a premium subscription, right? Yes. I can answer this. [Genevieve Bellaire]: Before I forget, just because it’s top of mind, is our brand, so you guys know, is one word, real world, with a little w, just so you have that for everything, not two separate words, real and world. People always make the mistakes, so always want to set that straight. OK, so I think there’s a couple of things here. And this gets to some of the stuff I think maybe mentioned to Michael on our first call, which is that we’ve been in business for a while. The company’s been around for almost seven years. It’s been through many different iterations. So it’s had an educational focus. We initially sold our product to colleges across the country and had kind of like a cottage business there, decided to then take venture and build more of a kind of like scalable company through a direct consumer lens, but really was still an education focused company. So think about us as like Duolingo for adulthood. Yeah, in the last, I made a lot of success with that. But in the last year, with all of the incredible year and a half, all the incredible advancements in AI, but also just like the world in which we play, it became very clear that we could also help people kind of organize and automate their lives as adults. So not just like teaching them about all this stuff, which frankly was always the goal. And if you watch that video I sent, like I talk a little bit about this, but in 2021, when we took in venture capital, like wrote this memo that basically talked about like the phases of the company we were planning to go through to be able to automate life, et cetera. So all that is to say is how it relates to content is like we’ve produced tons of content over the years. We’ve produced, we had a newsletter at one point, we had a podcast at one point, We’ve had Instagram. We’ve gone through just many different kind of like iterations as a company as we’ve been trying to get to like the true product market fit moment. And frankly, I don’t think we’re totally there yet. We’re really, really close. But it’s a brand new space. So when people hear about what we do, it’s not like, oh, like that other company, blank. It’s very much like a net new product. And the reason for that is that it covers so many things. Really this one-stop shop for adulthood. We’ve never just focused on finance or focused on insurance or focused on anything. It’s kind of this holistic journey. So all that is to say is I think we’re now at this moment where we almost kind of like, not wanna reintroduce ourselves, but sort of reintroduce ourselves, but still maintain the authority of like, hey, we’re the ones who’ve been doing this for like a long time. Like, and not in a way that feels like pathetic, but a way that feels like credentialed. Where it’s like we’ve spent years understanding this space, we’ve evolved with the market, with the technology that’s out there, and if you want to basically have the best in class place to try and get your life together, this is the product for you. So that’s the context I think around kind of wanting to have more of a voice here that’s not just like product marketing and getting people into different parts of the product. And then I think the second thing, the second piece of that in terms of strategy just getting people to sign up for the premium subscription. $100 a year, it's not a crazy price point, but it's, you know, it's a commitment. And right now we only have annual pricing because we want it to feel more of like you're a member of the company. Like you're a one medical member versus like you have another subscription on your phone. And that's where I feel like something like this could really come into play is like making it feel more like elevated as a brand a little bit, like something more aspirational, like you want to be part of the club kind of a thing versus, and it's not an exclusive club, but it is like a elevated club, I guess, versus just like, I want to learn about all of these things, or I want to do these things. So our branding has really changed over the last year and a half with the new product and sort of developments to be something that commiserates with you about adulthood. It's like, oh, everything sucks, we've been there too, which in some ways worked really well in humor and all of that, to being something that's much more around, like, let's inspire you to be your best self, essentially, and take away all the annoying life admin that you have to deal with, that no one really wants to deal with, and it's kind of anxiety-inducing and all of that, and like, let us handle that for you. So it's much more of a, like a, I don't know, aspirational versus commiserating kind of a tone, speak. But long winded way of saying this is ultimately a revenue goal, but it comes from like all of these other things there. So I'd rather have fewer people on this newsletter, but a larger percentage of them converting to paying members than be like, we need a million people following this thing. I think that could be helpful for long term. But for us, it's really about like, how do we tie this longing that people have of getting their life together to being like, this is the solution for you, and here's why you should trust us to get there with you. Does that answer your question, or how can I elaborate more? [Sarah Parr]: That was all fantastic. Yeah, just taking some notes here. And I think that's a great primary goal. Secondary goals you mentioned you had, one of them was, I guess, you said reintroducing, but you have a ton of emails and trying to get those people, you know, on board and not hit the unsubscribe button from a long time ago. Yeah. Yeah. [Genevieve Bellaire]: So I think there's, and this gets back to kind of like company history as I described. So we've had all these different iterations of the company of those emails. I'm sure like probably even like half of them are people never will respond again, which is fine, but there's that still would leave, you know, 75,000 people who we could get in front of And the idea here is more like reintroducing us. Remember when you downloaded this app and it taught you about how credit cards work and how a lease works? Hopefully that was helpful, but we understand if your needs are more expansive than that. We want to reintroduce ourselves as the people who have built upon all of that now to provide this true AI-driven life manager solution that will bring value to you And kind of, and this is where I was sort of thinking more on the customer IO side of just like drip campaign. Like we've built out a drip campaign that we're planning on launching next week actually. So it's something we should talk about to re-engage a lot of those cohorts, but specifically around downloading and introducing like the feature sets and things like that. So there could be, that could be like a secondary step potentially. Like I'm not sure just how we think about how this plays into it, but it would be to say we've got like all these people, if each of them paid us $100, we’d be in a great spot. So how can we figure out how to get them converting in there? I think underpinning both of these goals is something you said, Michael, which is just trust-building, because the thing with our product is it’s semi-expensive, $100 a year, but also it requires you to invest some time and energy in your data, essentially. Upload documents, you need to like sink in your financial accounts, and all of that to be able to really make it helpful for you. And so you want people to not be like, who's this random company, they're gonna steal my information, but instead, like, here's all of our security or so we think about, and I'm a lawyer by background. So I think about this stuff all the time. And we have designed the product specifically so that it is in a good place there. But I think building trust is very important here too. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: One question that I just had is to solve that problem of like, you know, it being there being some initial friction to get everything kind of set up once you get in there. How do you think about balancing what you just said of like building trust versus like with the content we'll be delivering, like exacerbating how painful these problems can be if you don't figure this these things out and aren't using real world to sort of get that, get that help. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. So you mean kind of like the stick versus the carrot kind of a hundred percent. Yes. [Genevieve Bellaire]: It's a good question because I think that we don't want to be like them. Womp womp, like email. You don't want to read. That's like, you already know it's really hard to be an adult, but like now we're just telling you again, I think the way that we've thought about it is life is overwhelming, but it doesn't have to be. Like our mentality here is like life is chaotic, adulthood is chaotic, but actually today it doesn't have to be because solutions like ours exist, but also other solutions we can direct you to exist that can streamline a lot of these different things. And so it's, it's almost like, it's almost like we don't have to prove to someone, we sort of still have to prove that there's a problem to someone in the sense of what you described in a specific lens. Like if you do not, set up a 401k at your job, you're leaving $50,000 on the table your first year, or whatever it is. But we don’t have to convince them it’s annoying and hard to set up that account. So it’s almost like we need to tell the story of you with real world, you without real world. Or you with taking proactive action here, you without doing that. And you can be this person who doesn’t do it, but it’s actually pretty easy to be the person who does get it together, and that’s maybe come into place. It’s a good question. I don’t know exactly how to draw that line. We don’t want to be negative, but I think we can be kind of like the older sibling who sort of figured it out and gives you like the playbook almost. I really love that framing. [Sarah Parr]: I think that’s great. Yeah, makes a lot of sense to me. Okay. Yeah. And I know you You mentioned there was a third tertiary goal that you had. Remind me of what that was. [Genevieve Bellaire]: Let me remind myself. So number one goal, revenue, which comes from subscriptions. Secondary goal is honestly, I guess you could call it like lowering our customer acquisition costs by activating our existing population of people. [Genevieve Bellaire]: The third goal would really be like, how do we maybe create some virality around that and like the trust building piece where people can send, like I’ve sent your newsletter, for example, to other people and I’m like, this is a good one to check out. You should, you should sign up for it. That’s just like, you know, it’s value in and of itself. So something that someone would maybe send to a friend and that they could introduce them and that also brings trust and all of that. And I think that you guys would know better than me, but for me, the reason why I would, send something would be if there was like a specific piece of content, a specific content or opinion or like pool or something that was referenced that I thought my friend, that was relevant. If it was about like getting married or something, I would send it to someone I knew who was engaged. Or if it was about someone buying a car and how that process like works or how you’ve designed stuff for that, it could be like, oh, it sounded like you were gonna get a car, like this could be helpful to you. So it might be more tip of the spear. Generally, this is an interesting like adulting oriented thing. Oh, by the way, I just said it, but we don’t like the word adulting. It’s like, yeah, no one really likes it. It’s like, you can’t really think of other, we talk about like life stuff, life admin, real world things. Adulting can come off patronizing if it’s sort of in the wrong context. So that makes sense. Yeah, we try and avoid that word. [Sarah Parr]: I’m right there with you. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Yeah. All right. Awesome. [Sarah Parr]: Well, thank you for all that background. That is super helpful. [Genevieve Bellaire]: Sure. [Sarah Parr]: And I think we can probably answer this question based on what we just talked about. But since it’s here, I’ll just ask it. Realistically, what needs to happen for you to consider your content a success? [Genevieve Bellaire]: Seeing email addresses that we have previously had in the product become paying members, sort of like being able to trade essentially that conversion. And then just generalized or organic, quote unquote, like user growth, which I would put this in that bucket versus like paid social growth, which is the majority of our focus right now on the paid side is just like social UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: media. All right, cool. [Sarah Parr]: All right, let’s get into the audience. What is the target audience of your business? This has evolved a lot as well. [Genevieve Bellaire]: So I say that because could be helpful in terms of the reactivation cohort of the people previously. When we started, very much focused on even students, but recent graduates. So the archetype, 22-year-old graduating from school, or 18-year-old graduating from high school, but starting their first job, figuring out health insurance really for the first time, a lot of the firsts. And we got a lot of downloads and stuff. But the problem we found with that cohort they didn’t actually, they didn’t even realize the problem was really real for them because they hadn’t kind of been bitten by the real world yet, like they hadn’t forgotten to sign up some account or they hadn’t opened five credit cards and then like realized that was a bad idea. Did you do that? Oh, I was just saying your eyes lit up. Yeah, or you know, they hadn’t, whatever it was, like they hadn’t figured, they hadn’t done some of these things yet. And so it was just not as a sticky cohort. And that some people it was an outlier, but we sort of bucketed them as like, you probably will be our users, but not yet. And so the focus that we have had to date in particular, this new product is more of like the quarter life crisis group, which could be something to think about from a thematic perspective to like how to talk about like quarter life crisis is like a overarching theme within this. But that’s really like 25 to let’s call it like 35. Men and women, certainly, but I’d say we skew slightly more female in terms of like the downloads and people who come to us. And mostly people who are, I would say, not necessarily working W-2 jobs. It could be like 10 and 9 or W-2 types of jobs, but people who are working and who are, you know, like trying to figure out all of the things. There is, sometimes we also to think about it as people who are already trying to get organized around this stuff, but they just don’t have a great system in place. So it’s not necessarily the person who’s OK with all their stuff being everywhere. It’s actually someone who maybe has a Dropbox that’s organized with materials or uses a budgeting tool already or things like that, but that this would centralize their life in one spot. The reason I bring up the past cohort, though, is those users could now in this cohort. It could be that they signed up for Real World at 22, that was three years ago, and now they’re 25. And so they could be more enticed by this new offering. But I think we should focus on that cohort for now. We’re also, just in background, we’re also stress testing this assumption more with a bunch of our messaging on social right now. So we should have continuous insights here in terms of if it needs to go or younger, anything more specific. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Great. [Sarah Parr]: So is this the same audience that you want to target in your newsletter, or is there more nuance that you want in that? Talk to me about this. How do you guys think about that question? What do people do? [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: Yeah, so for example, some clients will want to have a newsletter that is more broad than the audience for the product because they want to just use the newsletter more so for awareness than specifically driving conversions. And the anticipation is that really broad awareness will lead to a higher volume of conversions in the long run. And they care about building up that brand, the asset of the newsletter itself. It sounds like, Genevieve, in your case with real world, our main goal is just let’s prioritize these conversions. Let’s get paying customers. Let’s get members. If that’s the case, then I would probably recommend Let’s keep this 100% the same between business and newsletter. [Genevieve Bellaire]: But that’s the context for why it would be different. OK, I agree with that for now. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: We can always open it up, I think, more. But keeping it as narrow as possible, I think, is good. [Sarah Parr]: Cool. All right, content. So what are three to five topics that matter most to you and the business? Intersection of business expertise and what you could rant about for hours on end. [Genevieve Bellaire]: So I think one of one thing is like this kind of aha moment, aspirational messaging I described earlier, which is like everyone knows like life as an adult is hard, chaotic. There’s no playbook for adulthood, however you want to describe it. We’ve described it in a lot of ways. However, our position is that it doesn’t have to be that way. There is a path to life not feeling that way. So it’s kind of talking about, and this is what I can talk about for hours, my own personal experience of failing at a lot of these different things, and not enrolling in health insurance, and not rolling my 401k on time, and all the learnings, all the thousands of stories I’ve heard from people of their own fails, and it being a very relatable thing because everyone kind of goes through right of passage but then trying to flip that on the head and say well actually it does not like with pretty limited of your effort it doesn’t have to be that way anymore um and sort of talking about that whole vision concept etc um I think the second cohort or second group is more practical like bite-sized information or like a topic or things like that this gets to a little bit of the shareability or like relatability around did you know when you turn 26 like you get dropped by your parents health insurance so here’s how that whole process works or like if you get married here’s your options for health insurance or being able to take any one of these and we’ve got like hundreds of lessons and learnings and content about this in the app to which by the way make sure at some point and give you access to it so you can see actually you can download it for free right now it’s get all the content from Explorer, which is where like all of our expertise lives. That’s a free part of the product. But you’ll see the breadth of like the subject matter expertise that we have and the content there. But being able to like pick a topic and talk about it for a second and something that maybe is relatable to people and timely, maybe like it’s tax season right now. So how does all that stuff work? And that’s something where maybe someone would send it to someone else and say like, oh, this is actually helpful to know. Things like that. And then I think the piece that relates to that nicely is like, here’s how real world has streamlined that for you. Like, here’s how we’ve built a place in real world for all of your tax documents to live. And like told you here are the tax documents you need. Or within any of these topics, like whatever it is that you need. So kind of like topic specific. And then I think the other piece, and this is a bit more brandy, is right now we straddle, I would say, from a VC perspective, where consumer services, fintech, productivity even, in terms of what we do on the app store, we’re typically listed as a productivity-oriented app. A lot that we can lean into in terms of helping you be more productive and like kind of tapping into the type A, like, you know, girly who like has her life together, has a Pinterest board, like all of that kind of a thing. But the other piece here, I think, is more of a wellness piece where it’s kind of like getting your life together is like self-care, essentially. And not having to stress about these things is self-care. And being able to have all of your documents in one place, being reminded to go being reminded when your stuff renews just takes this huge mental load off of people so that they can focus on other things and just be happier individuals. So we’re starting to do more on the organic social media side of just painting this kind of aesthetic of calm, peace of mind. And that’s really the goal here, which I think at times feels very much in tension of life is hard, adulthood is hard. But that’s where this idea of adulthood is hard, but doesn’t have to be. Let’s get you to the carefree, happy state, where you don’t have to worry about these things. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Those are the big ones. [Genevieve Bellaire]: I can keep thinking, though. So to recap, it’s why we exist, the problems based on why we exist, and how we can help you with that, and why it’s not seems. Second is more topic by topic specific, like helpful information essentially. Third is more aspirational self-care, wellness, productivity person. Yeah. Yeah. [Sarah Parr]: I definitely, I love the self-care and I love the did you know sort of aspect, like here’s a tip. And then maybe, you know, talking about specific features and tools highlighting that, I think that could be cool for the newsletter. And do we want to make changes to the newsletter structure? I am not 100% sure. Yes, Sarah, this is kind of a legacy question here. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: We don’t have to worry about that since the newsletter is going to be brand new. But I would actually throw this to you, Genevieve, in terms of like, you said you had a newsletter before. Maybe what went well with that? What didn’t work well that we can download? [Genevieve Bellaire]: Yeah, I need to go back I find all of these, thanks for your email, Sarah, all of them. I will forward them to you whenever I go back into the ether, but I think they were very, you know, like cutesy, they had like gifts and stuff like that, like they were, but there was no real like call to action, I guess, with them that worked well. It would always be like, download RealWorld versus, okay, let’s talk about health insurance, and now it’s like, let’s set up your next doctor’s appointment, like being more specific or making it more like how we can really help you versus like just a marketing campaign. I think that was one. The capabilities of the product were also much, much lower, much less. And at that point, our audience was kind of that more, not inactive, but like disinterested cohort of like recent grads versus people who maybe are actively looking for something like this. So I don’t think it was necessarily a newsletter problem, is like a market, an audience problem, and really just missing a call to action that was like specific and helpful. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: OK. [Genevieve Bellaire]: So we’ll build out like a strong. Sorry, sorry, sorry. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: I cut you off there, Genevieve. [Genevieve Bellaire]: Go ahead. No, no. I was just going to say, but you can take a look and tell me what else you think when you’ve got it. Cool. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: We’ll build out like a strong, like a footer section that has a strong CTA at the end of each issue and we’ll probably mention it at various points throughout where it organically makes sense to do so as well. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Great. Oh, sorry. [Genevieve Bellaire]: One other content pillar that came to mind, and this again gets a little bit into like customer I.O. Versus newsletter, is over the next, certainly six months, but even the next three months, we have a ton of new functionality coming out. And it’s like, ideally it will be every two to three weeks, there’ll be some new feature set. To give you a little bit more context here, we’re building out this concept we call life moments, which is basically things like you could press a button and say like, I’m getting married, or I’m pregnant, or I’m buying a house. And then the workflow of what you need to do for that thing is what populates into real world. And so it’s something that is like, one, extremely helpful for people. But two is, I think, another tip of the spear moment to acquire totally different batch of people. In terms of again, if you’re getting married, perfect, here’s a company that will help you specifically do those things in addition to all the other stuff that we do. So there’s that, there’s also like a lot of AI stuff that we’re building in like autonomous agents that will book doctor’s appointments for you or fill out forms for you. We’re building a generative AI piece where you can like ask real-world questions around all these life things so that you could, you know, like can I go to this doctor on my health insurance plan or how much more can I contribute to my and stuff like that. There’s a lot of stuff coming out. So I’d love to be able to weave that in as well, where it’s not just content, but it’s also like, look at this sick new feature that is live and like something there. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 2]: Yeah, I think the challenge for us there is going to be like threading that needle between it feeling like marketing versus it feeling like, like value first content. I think we can do that. Mixing it in an organic way. [Genevieve Bellaire]: Yeah, well, that’s exactly, and that’s maybe where you have a strong perspective about it in terms of just the overall piece. Like that’s maybe just a place where it lives in customer IO. And that’s just like, that’s where that, the feature releases live in customer IO. And it’s kind of a separate thing, but we figure out how to separate it out. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 2]: Yeah, I think like, you know, you should be thinking about the newsletter in terms of a piece of your holistic content strategy, comp strategy for the business for sure. And so like, you know, we want to make sure that we’re sending the newsletter out on a day of the week where you’re not also having lifecycle comms go out to everybody who’s also going to receive the newsletter, right? We want to make sure that we don’t overlap. But yeah, I would say that the, we can definitely mention like the new things that you can do in real world. And we can say like, you know, in the newsletter we can talk like the value that that adds or the benefit or the transformation that people get as a result. But yeah, it’s just how we word it. I would hesitate for it to be like, hey, new feature live, go check it out. [Genevieve Bellaire]: You know, it’ll that’ll that’ll degrade trust in the in the newsletter. Yeah, that’s fair. Well, I think that’s all the questions I have. [Sarah Parr]: Is there anything else that you feel that I that you want to add before we talk about process? [Genevieve Bellaire]: I don’t think so. And we have open communication on Slack, so if that changes, just, yeah. It’s not like, and I’ll be gone. Yes, no, I don’t think so. Oh, actually, you know what? The only other thing that is maybe just helpful to think about, so again, positioning real world is like membership versus subscription. We already covered that. I think the other piece is the like the years of subject matter expertise versus like there’s tons of new companies that are like AI this AI that but around for like a year and like when it comes to trust like we were an education first company that’s always been the foundation of what we do and now we’re able to do a lot more but it’s built upon years of learnings and like all of that kind of thing so just having that be at the undertone. And then I think the last piece is balancing feeling like a human speaking with you and sort of like the, this maybe gets to the question around like, is it coming from me versus real world? And all of this new technology that is out there and like will be implemented in the product. And that’s where like security and all the other things come into place. So just balancing this idea of like human versus tech to do these things. Because the other thing, you may not know this, but we offer one-on-one onboarding sessions for every new member, where they can sit down with us for 15 minutes like this. And we literally were like, sit down, let’s upload your insurance card. What questions do you have? We walk through all the feature sets. We probably won’t be able to do it forever, but for now. And the people who do it end up actually converting at a higher level, as you would imagine. Not everybody does it, of course. It’s a very small population, but it’s kind of the superhuman model. Where it’s like, let’s walk you through all the things. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 2]: Yeah, I was thinking about you as you were talking about that, the bread and butter. One other thing I think we should get into that we should probably add a question to this doc for in the future is formats. So with the newsletter, there’s a couple of different types of formats that we can do. We can do evergreen content, editorial type essays. We can do news reactions, roundups, things like that. Make it more current events rather than evergreen. So I guess it’s high level, like what do you think will be more exciting and more beneficial to sort of build that trust with our target audience here and our target members? Is it sort of these evergreen pieces or is it more of like, hey, what’s going on that could be relevant to you? [Genevieve Bellaire]: I need to think about that. I think, like, people aren’t gonna read it. Our cohort is very, like, you know, give me the information, do the thing for me, so I think having the long form is probably not the right fit. I think it could be a combination of subject matter expertise over green-oriented content, but also maybe, like, a story that feels relatable or something, like, shorter that’s kind of… It could even be… It would probably be hard to source, like, user stories in a way that makes sense, but it could even be, like, personal stories, or it could be other people on our team’s stories, or I don’t know, if you have stories, it could be anything. We can even make up the name of the person, but kind of going through how this actually plays out in life, so it’s not just health insurance, but it’s like, this is kind of what happened to you. I don’t think the news reaction is the right thing for us, so I think it’s probably not that. However, I do think relevant tools So like linking out to, if we’re talking about marriage, being able to link out to like, or like let’s say divorce, for example, like hello divorce, or like link you to different tools that are doing things in that space that could be helpful. And some of these we’re actually even trying to build partnerships with, so that could be interesting, but kind of like giving, it’s almost like a product time, it’s like here’s the top 10 like things that are helpful for you, or here’s the top 10 like product things, and it’s like very brief. Could be something around, each of these topics, like here’s the top five tools that our team thinks are really helpful here, which again, we do all this stuff for you in product, so I’m not trying to cannibalize us, but if you’re looking specifically for tools or things that are relevant, it could be interesting. But I think evergreen more so than relevant to the day. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 2]: Cool, that makes sense. I think the tool roundups could be really interesting and sort of help build some of that trust too. We could do like, you know, different issues that are about different topics and therefore the stories are about those topics and we have the tools related to those topics. It could be totally like, Sarah, we have another client in a totally different space who also takes this sort of story narrative driven evergreen approach. So I can show you some of that as a, cause it could be good format inspo for this. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Cool. Sounds good. Um, okay, cool. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 2]: Well, I also expect that we’ll probably experiment a little bit with format with a new newsletter. We always do. So, um, totally fine, but that’s a good place to start. Um, okay. Genevieve, any questions on your side about, um, what we’ve sort of gone over so far, or should we sort of dive into next steps and sort of that decision between, uh, customer IO and, and beehive and process and all that. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Yeah, let’s do process. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 2]: Okay, cool, so after this, Sarah’s already been doing some research, but would love to get even more documentation from you, whatever you’re comfortable giving us access to, we’d love that, just drop it in Slack. Sarah will continue to do research on her side as well. And then our team will get started on the ops around the newsletter. So for example, if we do go with Beehive, we’ll need some inputs from you about what address we put at the bottom or just various things there. But most of that will fall on us. And then, yeah, then we’ll just be able to get started setting up and getting the first issues approved and things like that. What I like to do is basically from today’s date, from this call, goal is within two weeks to have an issue scheduled and ready to go out probably I guess the following Monday or Tuesday or whatever it would be. So internally that’s in my head how we should think about goal. Okay. OK, so yeah, I guess like let’s let’s talk about the be having customer. I think that’s sort of the biggest decision here. What are your thoughts right now? Like where’s your head at? [Genevieve Bellaire]: I have a couple of thoughts. One I didn’t even look this up. How expensive is it? Is it like just adding another description is always like OK, but is it? How expensive is it? I know you said there’s some discount you guys get too. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 2]: Yeah, it’s I think it’s like 39 bucks a month. But there’s a 30-day free trial plus 20% discount on three months as part of the deal that we have with them. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Okay. [Genevieve Bellaire]: All right. So that’s fine. That’s not a big deal. Like customary was super expensive, so I just didn’t know those types of things. It’s like thousands of dollars a month, which sucks. I know. I think it’s also the volume of how many people you have, but it’s whatever. Okay. But that’s not really relevant. The second is just user continuity, like getting emails from different places. So right now, just so you have the lay of land of messaging comms, anything that is related to you have created an account at RealWorld, and it’s about the product comes through Customer.io. So it’s like, when you create an account, you’ll get an email from Customer.io. It’s like, hi, welcome to RealWorld. And then we’re introducing, we’re rethinking this for the first seven days or so, but that will come from Customer.io as well. So you are getting emails on a predetermined cadence from there. Push notification, same thing, coming through either our back-end system, if it’s something specific that you’ve done, or if it’s more like if your passport’s expiring, we’ll send you a push notification, your passport is expiring, you should do something around it. And if it’s something that’s more of a high-level thing, you just released a new feature, you’ll get a push notification from customer IO. That’s kind of the like only ways that we communicate right now with our members. So my question is, how does BI fit into that communication? Yeah, and you know, I’m also thinking about sort of the size of the list, because you said you guys have like 100,000 person email lists. We do, let’s call it 75,000 just to be able to say like the people who actually maybe would be worth like responding We can always go after the larger cohort too. But let’s, sure, let’s call it like, let’s call it 100k. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 2]: Okay, if we call it 100k, then yeah, be highest price would actually be more, more expensive, be like $200 a month. So that's a considerable line item. So maybe that's a data point in favor of, of using what you guys already have set up with, with customer IO. [Genevieve Bellaire]: What if, what's the breaking point? So it's up to a thousand subscribers. Just looking at the site. So where does it become more? [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 2]: My mouse just died, of course. Oh, it jumps up every like, first 2500, then 5k, then 10k, 25, 50, 75, 100. So it's every like, different increments. But it's pretty affordable, I would say up till you're at the, you know, the, the 25 to 50k mark, then you're at $100 or more. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Okay. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 2]: So if we did go with customer IoT to answer your other question, obviously it would be easier to sort of integrate with that existing ecosystem you guys have. Yeah. The data point in favor of Beehive there is if we really want to brand the newsletter as something independent, um, that is just powered by real world, right? If we wanted to do that, it’d probably be easier to do that in Beehive versus if we wanted to sort of make it a cohesive part of the existing ecosystem. Then probably makes sense to student customer, given the size of the list. I think the question I would pose to you is, do you see this as coming from a different brand or from real world? And do you see this coming from your voice versus a more corporate brand type voice? [Genevieve Bellaire]: I like the idea, and I would have to sit on it a little bit and reflect, but I like the idea of it coming from a person, as opposed to a company, because I think your point is taken of, OK, well, then maybe it feels more trustworthy. It deals with some of these things, like making it feel more human, all of that. And it can also be more like stories, as opposed to like, oh, user stories. It can be like, I did this, or like, my friend Sarah did this, or whatever. So that’s interesting. I have a feeling that in customary, you can change who it comes from, because right now, it just comes from like real world team at sort of thing. But I’m feeling you could change. As long as that works, I think that could still work within Customer.IO. I don’t think it would be a good idea right now to brand it as a different entity and or like one thought I had if we were to do that was like life in the real world sort of a thing as like the kind of like name of it. But I think it could still be like life in the real world, but it’s coming from real world. So I don’t know, I think it might be confusing. We’re still just trying to build the brand of real world itself, so I kind of think it should be all interconnected. But again, could come from a person as opposed to the company. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 2]: Yeah, I really liked what you said earlier in the conversation when you were talking about like the sort of older sibling who hasn’t figured out if we we can create that older sibling and put a name to. I think that’s really exciting. So we can probably do that within in the context of either the real world brand or it’s sort of own brand. So if you have sort of an inclination that having it be related to the real world brand is sort of more in line with broader goals that you guys have, then I think we can work with that. And also will save us on some design time and get us up and running faster, which is nice. So yeah, I guess like I’m hearing a lot of data points that are in favor of, you know, maybe trying it out in customer IO and seeing if we can do everything that we normally would do. Have you used the system before? UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: I’ve used it once, literally one time ever. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 2]: So it’ll be new for me, but it’s an email platform. We could figure it out. [Genevieve Bellaire]: It’s pretty drag and drop, I will say. I’ve actually even done some of the work in there and it’s not terrible. I would just be curious in terms of the level of customization, if there are things that you feel like are missing from Why don’t we plan on that for now? We can reassess if it’s like a disaster that we can do for something else. But then you just let me know, I guess, if it’s the same email account to be a user in there, like how to figure out all of that stuff to get you set up in there. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 2]: Yeah. Okay. Sounds good. We’ll probably send you like the team at like newsletters at this other domain that we have set up specifically for this stuff. So you should probably add that. But I’ll see. I think I remember the customer IO was pretty aggressive with 2FA, and so might make sense to add a couple users instead of just the one team at team one. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: I need to do some research there, but I’ll let you know. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 2]: That’s fine, just let me know what you need. Cool. Okay, so yeah, so next steps would just be drop everything into Slack then that Sarah can review. We’ll get started on some more research, and then our goal will be basically the end of the second week to have the first issue ready to be scheduled. So that means all ops and setup is done, and also obviously content is approved. [Genevieve Bellaire]: Will you be communicating in between that with like, here’s the content we think we’re going with, and for approvals and stuff? [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 2]: Yeah, of course, of course. Sarah will be on top of that. We’ll send over some ideas in and then like some specific questions about things that have come up during research that we want, you know, either your specific or someone on your team’s unique POV and subject matter expertise on. All we need sort of in response to that is like a voice note in Slack, two to three minutes, super rambly, give us the intonation, the emotion, all that stuff. And then we’ll turn that into, we’ll incorporate that into the content. And yeah, so I would assume that at the least, by say, not this coming Monday, but the next Monday, at the latest by that Monday, you’ll receive the first like ideas, but maybe even sooner than that, depending on how quickly research goes next week. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Sounds good. [Genevieve Bellaire]: Sounds great. So will you share this with me or will you just send me VSLAC, whatever you need from me so I can have it all in one place? Yes, we will make sure you’re added to this notion. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 2]: I think I added you to last night, but I’ll double check. And then I’ll also drop the link and do a little summary of the call in Slack as well. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Cool. [Genevieve Bellaire]: Thanks guys. I appreciate it. I feel like this seems all very straightforward. I’ll let you know if there’s any issues or anything that come up, but otherwise, excited to get started. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Yeah, me too. [Genevieve Bellaire]: Yeah, me too. We’ll talk in Slack, Genevieve. Thanks for the time this morning. Thanks, you guys too. Have a great weekend. Thanks, you too.