- Duration: 19 min
- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01JNENRT4QEN2RB6P7GE52SMSX (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JNENRT4QEN2RB6P7GE52SMSX)
Transcript
[Michael Houck]: Lots of interesting people to meet around the newsletter world. And just fun time. Yeah, I love it. [Tanyo Goshev]: The Matt McGarry one, right? Yeah. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. Awesome. Awesome. Yeah. [Tanyo Goshev]: So the post from it looked awesome. Yeah. So yeah, man, it was cool. [Michael Houck]: How are you? Where are you? Where are you calling from I’m in Bulgaria. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Nice. [Tanyo Goshev]: Very cool. [Michael Houck]: Is it is it late for you? I don’t know what time it is over there right now. [Tanyo Goshev]: It’s 9pm. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Oh, wow. [Michael Houck]: I’m sorry. [Tanyo Goshev]: Well, thanks for that. No problem. No problem. All good. [Michael Houck]: Cool, man. Well, look, just wanted to kind of say, hey, get to know each other a little bit. I know you’ve been talking with Blake. And so, yeah, he just thought it’d be good for us to meet. So maybe I can start by just giving some context on who I am and sort of how we work and sort of what we do and all that stuff. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Would that be helpful? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, for sure. Cool. So yeah, so I’m how worked in big tech for a while, Uber and Airbnb, then founded some companies since then done the venture back route, and now have bootstrapped a couple in the last couple years. And basically, you know, Blake and I work hand in hand, he sort of leads the content team. He’s sort of our editor, and all of that. And he sort of is the, the the person you’d be working most closely with. I’m the founder, and my role is basically to go out and do sales and client management and grow the business. So that’s sort of how we break up the responsibility between the two of us. I mean, you and I would definitely still interact quite a bit, but just mostly over Slack and things like that, like sort of more hands-on with the writing team. Yeah, I mean, I have a newsletter that goes out to about 75-ish thousand founders per week right now. And so we have a lot of clients coming in through there who want to build either a newsletter or a personal brand around their startup. And so, yeah, that’s it. That’s pretty much me. And that’s how we split things up. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah, awesome. [Tanyo Goshev]: Thanks for sharing that. I’m actually familiar with the newsletter. Like two weeks ago, I think, I did like one post for LinkedIn curating like sign up pages and I tagged you in it. Yeah, so I’m familiar with your story. Yeah, I’m curious how, what’s the exact process working in the agency? Do you have calls? What’s like from a writer’s perspective, the working process? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I mean, we’re pretty lightweight. Neither Blake nor I are sort of big on too many meetings or anything like that. So yeah, you know, we work, you know, basically, you’d be matched up with certain clients that we have. And whether you meet with those clients, do content interviews, or whether you do it async through Slack is you sort of leave that up to the client. Most clients are founders. So they’re super busy. They just want to, you know, do voice notes through Slack and that’s enough for them. So won’t need to get on too many calls. But yeah, process-wise, it’s you and the client, and you sort of have a lot of free reign to set that up as you wish. We have a Notion, like, template that you use. But in terms of, like, you know, how you interact with the client, that’s up to you. The only thing we ask is that every Monday you have new ideas and like specific questions about those ideas that came up during your research, prepared to send over to the client. And then regardless of whether the client gets back to us with sort of their subject matter expertise or not, you know, they do 90% of the time, but sometimes clients are busy and they don’t, regardless of whether that happens, we get the weekly content batch completed by the end of the week. And so that involves like Blake taking a look, that involves, you know, the client taking a look and, And that’s pretty much it. We want to work a couple of weeks ahead so we’re not scrambling. Yeah, yeah, of course, of course. You’d be surprised. Some people are like, oh, that’s interesting. I’m like, yeah. [Tanyo Goshev]: Yeah, I worked with a few agencies and all of them work that way. It’s the best way to operate because doing last minute edits, it’s not fun. [Michael Houck]: No, not fun. Not fun at all. And we have playbooks and processes for different things. Like, for example, sometimes a client there’ll be a trending topic in their niche and they’ll want us to come up with something quickly for it. We have a process so they can do that where it’s not totally disruptive to you as well. And yeah, we agree sort of upfront to what the rate is for the contract and then paid out monthly at the end of the month, just through a, we use a platform called Thera, which is like a Y Combinator [Tanyo Goshev]: backed startup that a friend of mine- Yeah, he’s awesome. Two things I want to share just to be transparent. The first thing is I have like a company set up here, an LTD to issue invoices. So all of that stuff, like logistically would work. And the other thing I want to clarify is that right now I work with clients doing like email marketing and I’m mostly doing email marketing. So I have a company set up here, an LTD to issue invoices. Focused on B2B, B2B SaaS companies. And I’m curious, like, I don’t want to be like a conflict of interest and stuff like that. Obviously, I’m a ghostwriter in both cases, working for you and for the client. So yeah, do you have like any processes and stuff like that to make sure like there’s no like misunderstanding in that regard? [Michael Houck]: In what regard specifically, I want to Make sure I understand the question. [Tanyo Goshev]: Yeah, yeah. So obviously, because I’m a ghostwriter, I probably couldn’t use the logos and the companies I work with with you, and testimonials and stuff like that. [Michael Houck]: Oh. No, no. I mean, if you have a client that we source and then that you’re servicing, and we don’t we don’t, okay, for context, we don’t proactively like push clients to give us, um, unanonymized testimonials. If they want to give us a testimonial, that’s great. But we sort of value client anonymity highly because we work with, you know, some pretty legit founders who don’t want it out there that they’re a straighter. Um, so we don’t push them on that. Um, but if they, if they give you something that you’re like, yeah, I’d love to use this for my own, um, You know other clients and side business that I that I take on that a hundred percent like we’re not gonna hold that A hostage that’s uh, that that’s yours. You earned it by doing the work. So, you know, we’ll use it But you can also use it if you want. [Tanyo Goshev]: That’s totally fine Yeah, thank you. Thanks for uh clarifying that so, uh, I’m curious like what would be the next steps going from here? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, so I’m gonna well I’m gonna chat with blake a bit more and then we have a bunch of clients sort of in the phone funnel right now, some of whom I’m expecting to convert in the next week to two weeks at the most. We should have some new ones coming in. So probably what we do is we just test it out. We have a trial with a client and kind of see how it goes. And if it goes well, then they become your permanent client and we can throw some more your way too. [Tanyo Goshev]: Awesome. So what would be like the tests? Would it be like one week worth of content or how does that work? [Michael Houck]: the content. So someone who’s in the funnel, who’s sort of like, Oh, I’d love to see an example, you know, and normally, we won’t do like too many examples, because we don’t want people to have to, like, do work before the client signs or anything like that. I think when we’re bringing new people onto the team, it’s helpful to do that. So we’d find one who’s in a niche that you’re sort of interested in have experience with and are aligned to. And we do it’d be a paid test, like we’d pay you for the work. Um, but, um, yeah, we, we just do a test week and kind of see, uh, see how it goes. Um, and, um, yeah, I guess in that note, like what are the, you mentioned B2B SaaS, what are the sort of niches that you like to write about and are sort of most comfortable writing about? [Tanyo Goshev]: Oh, there are a lot, like I have been writing for like the past seven years and I have covered like all the different niches. So you can imagine I could do B2B. I can do SAS, I can do finance. I can theoretically do crypto because I have a lot of experience there, but I’m a little bit skeptical of the space. So I’m not really sure. [Michael Houck]: We have a guy who’s like, all he does is the crypto stuff. So it’s very much a polarizing space. So I figured better to get a specialist Yeah, yeah, for sure. [Tanyo Goshev]: For sure. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Tanyo Goshev]: Uh, it can do also health and fitness, uh, because like, uh, I’m very passionate about bodybuilding and powerlifting. Can I like, uh, yeah, I have been, I’m watching videos. So on my own, like about that. So, so I’m pretty curious. So yeah, I can cover a wide spectrum. So, uh, I’m curious. Do you have like a limit on how many clients someone can take? Is there like a cap, a capacity or? [Michael Houck]: No, I mean, it’s, it’s on an ad hoc basis. You know, some clients, some of our writers, they, uh, they have like, you know, their, their main focus is their own business and they just want to work with us on, you know, one or two clients spend their bandwidth is, uh, lets it be possible, uh, versus others are sort of pseudo full time with us and are taking on a bunch of clients. So it really varies. What’s, what’s your like bandwidth and capacity look like, [Tanyo Goshev]: I’m open to start with one, see how we work together and we can scale pretty quickly depending on how that goes. I’m just curious about the process, let’s say there is a Monday and I finish some work for a client, I send it to Blake and how quickly do I get feedback from him to implement and stuff like that, so. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: Blake, depending on what time of day you send it, Blake is either going to get it back to you the same day or the next day. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: OK. [Michael Houck]: Love it. Love it. We run a pretty solid operation. We’re not a lot of roadblocks. Just let’s get shit done. That’s our advice. [Tanyo Goshev]: Yeah. That’s awesome. I love it. And I have been following Blake for a while, so I would love to work with him and learn from him. [Michael Houck]: So that would be awesome. Cool, man. So he and I will chat. Any other questions from your end right now that we should cover while we’re on the call? [Tanyo Goshev]: I don’t think so. I think we covered most of them. So just excited to move forward and see how we work together. Cool, man. OK, I’ll chat with Blake. [Michael Houck]: And then I’ll add you to our Slack. And then when we have someone come through the funnel and is ready to convert, who I think could be a good fit, we’ll test it out. And see how it goes. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Awesome. [Tanyo Goshev]: So we keep in touch in Slack. Is that the best channel? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah, probably. [Michael Houck]: I mean, do you use Slack regularly already? [Tanyo Goshev]: Yeah, I use it all the time. [Michael Houck]: Okay, great. Then yeah, let’s just do that. [Tanyo Goshev]: That’ll be, that’ll be easier for me to keep track of Yeah, for sure. Yeah. Okay. [Michael Houck]: Let’s do that. All right, man. Talk more soon. [Tanyo Goshev]: Good to meet. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: Nice chatting to you.