- Duration: 34 min
- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01JNKPXXXXR3HQ56DBE7MBKY47 (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JNKPXXXXR3HQ56DBE7MBKY47)
Transcript
[Michael Houck]: I’m all in there. Yeah, I don’t know. That’s crazy. Well, look, man, I’d like to chat and, I guess, learn some more about content side from your perspective, how we can help. And I can share some details of how we work and all that. But yeah, I want to turn it over to you, kind of get to know where you’re at and your goals a little bit more. [Santi Jaramillo]: Yeah, that sounds good. Yeah, thanks for making the time. I had a chance to check out your, I think, Notion page or something. So I got a good, good amount of information there I wanted to ask you about. Goals are building my audience on LinkedIn. And, you know, from that driving signups to CEO, executives, of coaching that I do and AI education, training, and consulting. And those are kind of the two things that I do. I’m a three-time exited B2B SaaS founder, you know, raised venture capital. Thanks. Sold, yeah, three businesses the last month of 15, five out in San Francisco. That was in 2021 to be a year off. I didn’t really have like another, you know, startup to brace, you know, VC and run after. So I decided to take some time off and then become an executive coach. And then I’m sort of using AI for my own executive coaching, you know, like notes and then started to run like analysis of the coaching and transcripts through AI and have AI play executive coach and performance therapists and all these things. And sort of started to, and then, you know, create guides for my clients around one-on-ones or fundraising whatever from like conversations and so just sort of started to blow my mind as what I could do personally and saw that most executives out there especially like non-tech non-software executives in their 40s and 50s are really not like playing around with AI very much or leveraging it at all and so it’s all and they’re not gonna like go on YouTube and sign up for like an MIT course on their own they need you know somebody to hold their hand and and then they’re like I’ll teach my So we started to do, so we have like public workshops that are like 300 bucks each for one seat for like an hour and a half. But we many times give away free discount codes. For those, it’s really to sell like three to four grand trainings for senior exec teams. And then from there, try to sell $10,000 AI blueprints, which are like AI strategy proposals of like how they should use it. And then from there, it's actually like five-figure implementation of AI automation, et cetera, for their business. So that's like the AI side. And then on the CEO's executive coaching side, it's one-on-one monthly retainers with CEOs, like 2,000, 3,000 bucks a month for two sessions and in-between support. And then also business operating system facilitation, so like EOS, but for startups, or EOS, but better, kind of like mission value, annual OKRs, quarterly OKRs, just the facilitation of the whole kind of business operating system that aligns their teams and creates accountability for them. So randomly do 360s every once in a while, like 360 feedback for CEOs that don't get enough feedback. So yeah, that's kind of what I do. I probably post once or twice a week on LinkedIn now. I have I have a ghostwriter who's actually my partner. Who does it? Her name is Kate. I think her website is down right now, but she does this for other people as well. Yeah, I think just trying to maybe not work with her as much, just because sometimes it can get in the way of the relationship, I guess. I mean, it's not causing problems, but just want to like, um, exactly. And, um, and then just up my game a little bit. Right. Um, I see, you know, more frequent posts, um, better posts, um, that sort of thing. Cool. Makes sense. [Michael Houck]: Um, I saw that you already have like a, you know, decent size audience thing. It's like 5k on LinkedIn. So it seems like there's, there's an initial kind of group that we'd be able to work with, get some feedback from quickly on some initial stuff. Way easier to kind of dial in the voice with a client who has a few thousand followers than somebody who's starting out with zero or something like that. So we like that. Yeah, I guess, would it help if I give some context sort of on how we work or did you have specific questions from the Ocean Doc that we should dive into? [Santi Jaramillo]: It would be great to hear from you. I mean, from what I understand, do you kind of do like an account review of historical stuff you do? Like research on what other people are saying in the space. And then via Slack, you'd Slack me some ideas and questions, and I respond in voice notes, and you draft posts from that. Yeah, I mean, that's the high-level TLDR. [Michael Houck]: I would say that we work with busy people, so we're not interested in putting a ton of meetings on your calendar or anything like that. If you want to do content interviews instead instead of voice note with the writer, we are able to do that for sure. We just find that most of our clients prefer not to, but that's 100% an option if you'd rather go that route. Just included. And that can be weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, whatever fits into your schedule. But yeah, basically, I would do sort of an initial audit of the account and of your profile, give you some tips on optimizing the profile, and you'd fill out an onboarding form. And then we would look at that information, compare it with my own qualitative notes, and we'd match you up with a writer on the team. These are folks who we've worked with for a while in one capacity or another, Blake and myself. Blake is my partner in the agency. He has an even bigger audience than I do. He's great with this stuff. And the way we split up responsibilities is that I handle the client relationships. And take the lead there. And he's in the weeds with the writers on a day-to-day basis. No content will get sent to you without first being at least reviewed by him, potentially also me in some cases as well. And then on Mondays, we'll send you ideas in a Slack channel along with specific questions that came up during our research that we want your POV on. You can respond to those via voice note, like you said. And then if we get the voice notes back from you in a reasonable amount of time, then that'll be included the batch of content for that week. And we'll work early on to get a few weeks ahead so that we're not scrambling from a week-to-week basis just to make your life easier and ours. And then that's it. Yeah, we handle all ops around the account. We do scheduling. We reply to the replies and the comments to drive conversations. We look up thought leaders in your niche. Also, it'd be great if you had a list of people who you like their content and want the audience that they have. And we'll engage with their posts as well to sort of get free impressions on their content, free profile views that way. So yeah, I mean, it sounds like you have a good funnel set up for, you know, your sort of front end offer and then working through your various backend offers. [Santi Jaramillo]: So we just see ourselves kind of sitting right on top of that. Awesome. How does, is frequency like daily or like how does that, yeah. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, so it'll depend on what you want go with and also what kind of posts we see success with. So I don't like to be explicit about this up front. We can do, say, three long form posts per week and go that route. We can do daily or more than daily shorter posts per week as well. But we'll want to get some data points to see what resonates with the audience. And you already have some that we can look at, but we'll want to test out a few options before we narrow it on something, but also your preference. If you're like, hey, you know, I'm focused on, you know, building trust or I'm focused on growing impressions as my number one, or all I care about is leads, right? Depending on what your goals are, we'll craft a strategy based on that. [Santi Jaramillo]: Got it. Okay. Do you do like, like images or like, you know, sometimes people are starting to do a lot of those like slide slides or whatever? How does that work? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, we can do carousels, infographics, charts. We can do screenshot essays, which I really like, There's a new trend right now where people are taking a video transcript from a famous person in a niche. So in our case, it would be a famous executive or a famous founder or something like that. We take a transcript of a YouTube video, put it into an AI system. Spit out some insights from that. And then we'd sort of format that and write that up in a way where it's a one pager of just like, here are the best insights from Sam Altman on how to build a startup or something, right? We take a screenshot of that. We post that with a little commentary from you above it. Those types of posts are doing really well right now. [Santi Jaramillo]: So we might experiment with some of those early on as well. Cool. And it's all kind of included. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. No, no charges. [Santi Jaramillo]: So editing, how does editing work in terms of my review before it goes live? Yeah. [Michael Houck]: So we'll always send content to you first for approval, unless we get to a point where you're like, yeah, I trust you guys. Just go and do your thing. And we'll share it in Slack. Basically, if we get those voice notes from you, then after that, we'll get to work on the content, incorporating them. We'll share them in a Notion link within the Slack channel, and then It's there for your review. Obviously, the quicker you review, the quicker we get it out. And we're not sticklers for like, oh, you can only put this many comments on a post or something like that. Our goal is to download your brain and make it so you don't need to leave a ton of comments. But early on, it's actually helpful if you're more critical. So yeah, that's what I would say. There's no necessary limitation unless it gets to a point where we're at a loss. In that case, you and I just need to have about where to go from there. [Santi Jaramillo]: Awesome. Do I need to use Notion or Google Docs OK? Or do you standardize on Notion? [Michael Houck]: We have internally sort of a global Notion board for Blake, for our editor. So we will be writing the content in Notion. If you'd prefer to receive and comment on it in a Google Doc, we can copy paste it. That's fine. Just let us know. [Santi Jaramillo]: OK, cool. Yeah. Don't know commenting on the Andy suggestion mode on Google Docs and really helpful for editing but yeah what else if you do the full takeover like can I still you know I don't know like you've got post scheduled Monday Wednesday Friday and I come up with an idea on Tuesday can I like hop on there and and do that or are you like now go to through us, like how, you know what I mean? [Michael Houck]: Like how. No, it's, it's, it's your account. Do what you want with it. You can totally post obviously whenever you want. I'd recommend not posting like right after we make a post because then the algorithm won't like push either one really in full. Um, but also if you find something that's like a trending topic that you want to make a comment on, um, you can share that in the Slack channel as well. And, you know, we try to get to those within 24 hours so we can make a, and make a post about it. So we do have that sort of internal process for handling sort of of the moment current events type requests. [Santi Jaramillo]: Got it. Cool. Oh, you mentioned you have an engagement network thing of other people. What can I expect in terms of a normal post? Is it like every once in a while, like every post has multiple people? I'm sure it's not formulaic like that, but just kind of get a sense of the magnitude and I think the actual engagement of that engagement. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yes. [Michael Houck]: So technically, this is a separate part of our business. So we have our content agency, which is for content, and we have our creator network, which is for distribution. The website for the creator network, you can see when I send it in the chat here. This is where you can see details on that. Basically, this is a la carte. So you as a content client of ours would get a free subscription to the platform, so you wouldn't need to worry about that. But if you want to add on engagement, you would just determine how much budget you want to put behind each post, and we can handle the ops for you. But that's a separate thing. We sort of give the free subscription to clients. [Michael Houck]: about the impact though would be for every 100,000 followers that a creator has, every creator sets their own prices, but they'll roughly charge about $10 more for a comment. So someone with 300K followers might charge between $25 and $35 for a comment, probably a little bit more than that for a repost or a quote post. And that’s pretty consistent kind of up and down the the follower count, audience size spectrum. We have an algorithm that we built that will match your content with the best fit and best value creators who are currently online when you share the post. So we handle all that sort of work. [Santi Jaramillo]: It’s just how much budget you want to allocate towards the posts is the thing. Got it. OK. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Cool. [Santi Jaramillo]: Do you ever do like a smaller paid thing for like the audit and the recommendations and then I can gather that data and then make a decision from there? [Michael Houck]: We haven’t done that before. I’m happy to just record a loom for you just walking through some stuff and giving some thoughts. No need to pay me for that. Okay, cool. That’s generous of you. [Santi Jaramillo]: This is going to be an awesome next step. I can’t think of any But I can definitely follow up with anything that comes up. [Michael Houck]: Cool. Sounds good. Timeline-wise, when would you be looking to move forward? [Santi Jaramillo]: Probably the next 30 days. [Michael Houck]: OK. Cool. [Santi Jaramillo]: Just to confirm, it’s like $2,000 a month for the light takeover and $3,000 for the full, right? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, and so the difference is The difference is with the lighter option, content volume is obviously going to be less, but also this sort of operational support of engaging with thought leaders, managing the comments that come in on the account and things like that, that’s not included in that. That’s only included in the full takeover. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Got it. [Santi Jaramillo]: How would you, like, I don’t know, I’m just trying to, this is an impossible question, but I’m curious, like, how would you think about So, you know, kind of three grand spend and I don’t know, like if you would be, if I wanted to also do the, um, the engagement network boosting thing, uh, on top of that, uh, it’s like, assume like a few hundred per month or like, what would you say? And then like, what would you expect? Like, I guess, result wise, would it be like, I don’t know, you know, like, I don’t know what the, what the, how you’d answer this, but kind of like how many, how, you know, how many, how many new followers might I get, you know, per month for, obviously unknown, right. It could go crazy or it could struggle, but just kind of getting a general sense of like what you, obviously this is like an incremental investment for me of what I’m currently spending of like, I don’t know, 500 bucks a month, you know, right now. And so just trying to, you know, and I know my trajectory of followers roughly. So I’m just kind of curious, more spend should increase followers and engagement, but yeah, just any sense of what I might be able to expect or what a good range might be. Don’t hold you to specific promises. Have you said I’d have this many followers by this date? Yeah, sure. No, it makes sense. [Michael Houck]: I totally get that you want to sort of understand if you’re increasing spend, what the ROI on that is going to be. It makes total sense. What I would say is that, you know, we, I’d actually recommend that for the first couple of weeks as we’re sort of getting initial data points from your audience, I recommend we don’t spend in the first couple of weeks. And then once we sort of dial in, you know, here are the posts that are doing best, here’s the formats that we’re seeing doing well, here’s the topics that are resonating from you and in your voice. Once we have that, then I would recommend a strategy where we basically put the majority, if not all, of our amplification budget are starting to do well in the first 30 minutes or so that we post them. That way we’re maximizing the ROI. Because you can put $100 or $200 to spend behind a single post, but if it’s not resonating, it’s not hitting, then it’ll do better than it would have otherwise. But the amount of impact, like how much the fire grows from the gasoline, won’t be as great. So I recommend a more targeted approach once we some data points. What I can say is that 90% of your followers are going to come from 10% of your posts. The ones that hit are the ones that are going to drive basically everything in terms of the big results that we see. We’ve had clients go from 400 followers to 20k in three months. We’ve had clients go from a more normal sort of growth rate So until we sort of get in there, it’ll be hard to know for sure. And I know that’s not super helpful, but I think if we take sort of the right approach and don’t put a bunch of spend behind it right away, we’ll be able to make the right decisions as we go. [Santi Jaramillo]: I was super curious on the, you’re saying that in the, in the first 30 minutes, you know, if something is getting kind of good engagement and so then that’s when you do the amplification or, or do you mean like, we know what kind of posts are doing well, meaning like, about this topic and so then you pre-schedule boosts, paid boosts on that topic? Or do you mean just like on the fly, like as soon as it starts to prove that it’s getting good engagement with the algorithm, then that’s when I couldn’t quite tell? Yeah, so the answer is both. [Michael Houck]: The answer is that initially we will be observing, you know, how is this post doing in the first 30 minutes, first hour, etc. Because, you know, you can usually tell if something is seeing a lot of impressions and the ratio of engagements to impressions is good or striving on the comments and the replies. Um, you know, the algorithm is showing the post to the people who thinks are most likely to engage with it, who are online right away. And so we get those signals right away and we need to act on those signals. But once we sort of have some formats down, we have some confidence. Oh, if we post a screenshot essay about this topic, that’s written in this style from Santi’s account, then we know it’s going to do at least some amount of numbers. At that point, then we can say, OK, well, we’re going to allocate $30 of budget or $50 of budget for this post to boost it right away. Because it doesn’t make sense to wait, because we already know it’ll do well. [Santi Jaramillo]: Yeah, got it. If I do a one or two, I just recently did a 90-minute AI workshop for executives on slide sharing. I’ve got a video of that, and I’ve got a transcript of that. What’s the best way to feed that? Because there’s probably quite a few posts and carousels and things that could come from that one thing that’s splitting long form into, yeah, do I send you the video link? Do you watch that? Or do you just grab the transcript in AI? Or do I need to provide the filter of more smaller chunk guidance for the right on Slack with a voice note? Does that make sense? Can I just send a direct? [Michael Houck]: Yeah. Just send us a link to the video. We can download it or watch it, and we’ll handle it from there. Obviously, we don’t have a video editor on staff, so we’re not going to be creating short-form TikToks or something like that for you. But we can take the insights from that recording and come up with a bunch of posts from it, most likely. [Santi Jaramillo]: Cool. Awesome. Sweet. Well, thanks again. For the time it’s great to meet you it seems like a great business on the dual sided front of both the content and the boost seems like that’s super complimentary and differentiated on either end to be able to offer both so congrats on what you built sounds really compelling um and thanks for being willing to do that loom video um any just general timing of that um I’m I have a little bit of a crazy schedule for the [Michael Houck]: next two days so probably won’t be till either the weekend or monday but I will I We’ll get it to you in the next couple of days. [Santi Jaramillo]: Early next week. [Michael Houck]: Awesome. Sounds good. Well, Santi, great to meet. If any other questions come up, just shoot me an email. Happy to chat more. But otherwise, keep an eye out for that email next week. And I’ll just send a recap of what we talked about as well. [Santi Jaramillo]: Awesome. Thanks, Dan. Good to meet you. Good to meet you, too. Talk soon. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Bye. You