- Duration: 38 min
- Platform: zoom
- Source: Read.ai 01JNM85ZGVAPMYDC2WNXZKMJME (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JNM85ZGVAPMYDC2WNXZKMJME)
Transcript
[Blake Stewart]: Hey, Alec. [Michael Houck]: Yo, what’s up, man? How you doing? I’m good. [Blake Stewart]: How are you doing? Doing okay. [Michael Houck]: I’m settled here in Dallas now. Got a little loft action going on, so yeah, going to a Mavs game on Friday. Oh, awesome. There you go. [Blake Stewart]: They’re falling apart after that Lakers trade, but I mean, that’ll be a good time. [Michael Houck]: I feel like I should have paid half price for the tickets. [Blake Stewart]: Yeah, I mean, I think Kyrie just got hurt. [Michael Houck]: So for the year, he’s done. It happens. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: It happens. [Blake Stewart]: Uh, how’s the drive? It seemed, seemed long. It wasn’t that big. [Michael Houck]: Cause I stopped in Waco, which is like midway for lunch. Um, but the second half from Waco to Dallas was a literal dust storm. So like 50 mile an hour winds, car going back and forth on the highway. Like it was wild, man. [Blake Stewart]: That’s insane. Wow. Yeah. Welcome to Taiwan. [Michael Houck]: was totally blocked out. It was like, it was like orange, you know, like how when you’re watching like a, like a TV show or a movie and they’re in Mexico, like it was like that. [Blake Stewart]: Wow. Wow. [Michael Houck]: Cool. Yeah. [Blake Stewart]: How long are you in Dallas for? [Michael Houck]: About two weeks. I’m here just to check the place out really. And also see some, some family that I’ve never met. Oh, that’s cool. [Blake Stewart]: Very cool. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Nice. [Blake Stewart]: Good for you. How are you? What’s going on? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: I’m good. [Blake Stewart]: Not much is going on. Pretty casual March. I am going to be out. I’m going to be in Jackson Hole the last week of March. Oh, nice. Yeah, we got lucky. My wife’s family, friends, her parents just finished the house. And so free place to stay is nice. And then my birthday is at the end of the month. So we’re going to spend some time out there with some, some friends, but, uh, I’ll be working a little bit, but, um, yeah, I’ll, I’ll let you know what days I’m officially off. [Michael Houck]: Cool. Yeah. Just let me know. [Blake Stewart]: Um, catching the end of a ski season or what’s the Yeah. Yeah. I haven’t been skiing in a long time. [Michael Houck]: So I’m itching to get up there. Nice. [Blake Stewart]: Every time I go, I worry I’m going to like tear my ACL or something. We’re getting older and older. Right. Hopefully. [Michael Houck]: Hopefully not, yeah, fingers crossed. That’s just me, because I’m a terrible skier, so you’re probably much better than I am. [Blake Stewart]: No, no, it’s been too long. But yeah, I know you’re busy, so we can kind of hop into this. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, so, I mean, first thing, let’s just quickly touch base on Bamboo. [Blake Stewart]: Okay, yeah, thanks for hopping in there, and sorry. [Michael Houck]: Thanks for the feedback, sorry. No, you’re good. I think just because they’re sort of an inherited account for you, But yeah, I don’t know. I think that their founder is probably pretty checked out at this point. I think we can probably tell that based on how the company operates. Let’s see what he says. We’ll work with what they can give us, I guess. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. [Blake Stewart]: I was going to bring up this guy, their chief product officer. It could be an interesting interview, trying to design like a, Service-based product could be interesting conversation. But, um, yeah, once again, it’s probably hard to get in front of anyone. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: We haven’t done an interview with somebody who’s not a founder. So like, I’m not sure how it would hit, but if we, if there are genuine insights that could be useful for founders is probably fine. Like it’s probably better to do the interview than do a webinar, like just watch a recording of a webinar. But we’ll see what they can give us. And if they can’t meet the timeline of the 14th, then we can just push the 22nd date out till sometime next month and try to resell that spot, I guess. [Blake Stewart]: Okay. Yeah, that works. Cool. Do you have any tips on how to sell the Founder Deep Dives? I keep pushing on, I mean, yeah, great for- It’s slow. [Michael Houck]: I mean, it’s a big expense. Um, it’s easier to do with, and it also, it’s like, it’s like a brand awareness expense more so than like a conversion direct response type expense. So, um, yeah, I was really surprised, for example, that the mural group did one with us, cause they’re a small agency. It’s just like two or three people and they, you know, their revenue is under a million a year. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: So that was really surprising to me. [Michael Houck]: Um, but, um, In general, it’s bigger companies who can afford to do them as usually part of a package. And yeah, I think early, honestly, just for early stage startups, it’s hard for them to get the ROI versus other channels they could deploy those dollars to. [Blake Stewart]: So yeah, I would say people kind of like pre-investment to like, hey, let’s get your story out there, kind of answer all those first first time questions an investor is going to have, you know, essentially push you to a [Michael Houck]: second interview with a founder or with an investor. Yeah. That’s a good angle to take. We should, we should do that. Um, and I think that, I think that folks who raised a pre-seed, but not a seed or a seed, but not an A, um, could be, could be down for that. [Blake Stewart]: Okay. All right. I’ll keep pushing on knocking on those doors. [Michael Houck]: Um, how’s everything else going? HubSpot stuff, just every step of the way, there’s another issue with this thing. [Blake Stewart]: It’s driving me nuts. Sorry. Yeah, I don’t know why that is so difficult. But yeah, once that’s up, though, that’ll be good for me. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I don’t need the onboarding, so, you know, saved you. Yeah, good that we could save that. Yeah, look, I’m gonna try to get to it tomorrow. [Blake Stewart]: No, I mean, yeah, no worries, no rush. I’m still, what I’m doing now is working fine. And I mean, I can take another day or two to kind of plot out how I’m going to transfer everything over anyway. And yeah, it’s not hurting me. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. [Michael Houck]: I’ll let you know if I have some spare time tomorrow, I’m going to be, I have a normal work day on Friday. I’m like normal. So I’m done at, I’m done at like four 30 on, on Friday. So I might not be able to, if I don’t get to it tomorrow, I probably won’t get to it until Monday, basically. [Blake Stewart]: All good, all good, that works. I’ll get the contents out in the Slack channel and I got your note about full URLs there. Cool. Any other changes? [Michael Houck]: I don’t think so. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. All right. All right. [Michael Houck]: I think that’s it for my side. You want to jump into the three things that you had to? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Blake Stewart]: I’ll leave fundraising for last just because that’s going to be the most difficult. Founders library resources, I put some together. I don’t know. I mean, I haven’t done this. I don’t really know what you’re looking for. I’ve got a couple of links. I’ll throw here in Slack, just kind of a notion page. I’m assuming you don’t want Twitter threads either, but if I’m like a lot of good, I have like an ongoing tab of Twitter threads, so. [Michael Houck]: You know, it would be, we’ve always done like articles, blog posts, things like that, but it actually might be even better to do like a library of really great social posts. Yeah. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. [Michael Houck]: So yeah, I’m not opposed at all to that. I will keep them somewhere else for now. [Blake Stewart]: I’ll keep tracking them somewhere. But then like once we’re ready to do that. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Cool. [Michael Houck]: And then yeah, when you however you want to track them, and like log them before we add them into the main database is fine. What Max had was he would send me, here, I’ll send you like a version of it. So let me find it from his, my DM with, oh, other Max, my DM with him. Oh, I think we deleted him from Slack. So I don’t think I can get to it anymore or something. Anyway, he would send me a message that was like this. Then he was like, make one, two, et cetera. And then I would basically like reply to that with like, you know, number three and four look good, whatever. And it would just be like that and then he would add them in. So. Yeah. Yeah, I think that’s probably easiest or at least will be easiest for me to keep up with. But I really like the idea of doing the truth. I can’t believe I never thought of that before. I feel like it’s an obvious thing we should be doing. So yeah. [Blake Stewart]: And there’s so many tools out there, you know, like, save thread or whatever they’re called. So yeah, I’ll keep this separate for now and we’ll figure that out. Do you want like categories tied to the resources I send or are you fine with links? I mean, it depends how many you’re sending. [Michael Houck]: Like if you’re sending, you know, five or six, then yeah, just send me the links and it’s fine. If you’re sending me like something like that, then yeah. Okay. [Blake Stewart]: I’ll just put a kind of note on my calendar to say, Send over, yeah, a couple a week or something. We’ll keep it simple. Yeah, sounds good. Unless you want to revise that. All right. Enough. I’ll resend those in a little bit too. You don’t have to go back to that. Yeah, Flippa Invest, they’re launching their investment platform pretty soon. And they want a little discount, so $1,100 for a total of the week and a link of the week. [Michael Houck]: That’s fine, let’s do it. [Blake Stewart]: Yeah, cool. Yeah, I’ve been kinda talking with them a bunch. They wanna get back into, or they wanna start doing like a pitch event as well, so that could be something we could promote down the road. All right, cool. I’ll get that going. And then someone reached out to me about a podcast sponsor. For a form to be filled out. I’m going to forward this to you. But essentially it’s just a form, a bunch of questions they had. I don’t know A, any of these answers, but B, if I should kind of be working on podcast stuff right now. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I mean, we’re not we have ironically, I just recorded an episode today, and I’m recording. [Blake Stewart]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: Next week, but I responded to them. [Blake Stewart]: It was like, hey, we’re not focused on podcasts right now. I check out our newsletter opportunities. But then you said that. [Michael Houck]: And I was like, oh, I mean, if they want to do one, we could do it. Um, but we, we have, we have these two episodes, one recorded one next week. That’s on the schedule. And other than that, we’re focusing on long form YouTube. Um, so yeah, I, if we can push them to the newsletter, great. If they really want the podcast, we can include something in one of these two episodes. Actually. Yeah, I guess we could include it in either episode. Yeah. It’s fine. Yeah. [Blake Stewart]: When are those relations? [Michael Houck]: Um, goal is to get the first one done by next Saturday. Um, but that might be overly optimistic. Um, and then the second one actually did have a specific date. [Blake Stewart]: He wanted it to go live. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Let me see what that was. [Michael Houck]: April 2nd. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: OK. [Michael Houck]: Which I know is not a normal day that we have something going live on. Funny. OK. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Cool. [Blake Stewart]: I’ll try and fill out what they asked to the best of my ability, but I might come back to you with some questions. [Michael Houck]: That’s fine. Yeah. All right. [Blake Stewart]: I’ll swing something there. Make it happen. All right. Just a note, I don’t know if you’ve ever played around with more community-based responses from your audience. This kind of plays into our conversation about promoting Matt’s services, his growth services. So I don’t know if there’s an angle of having your readers respond to you and share their newsletter with you or what they’re working on. I don’t know. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I mean, we can ask people to respond, but we need sort of a clear… What we saw in the first, I’d say, definitely the first year at some point, you know, if we want our founders to be engaging with us in that kind of way, and like sort of a bi-directional way, we need to be able to bring them something up front. So if I’m just like, hey, what are you working on? [Blake Stewart]: You know, it’d be low. Yeah, the idea would be like a kind of a growth assessment for their newsletter. I don’t know, like, is there, do you have any community out there? Like, is there a Slack, old Slack channel or something that? Yes, we have a telegram. [Michael Houck]: I should add you to that. Let me make a note to do that. It’s not super active because we’ve sort of deprioritized it, but there’s a few hundred founders in there. [Blake Stewart]: Oh, wow. Okay, cool. Perfect. Yeah. I was just wondering if we had a channel that they can like contact us. Okay. Yeah. I mean, that’s, I don’t really know. A, I don’t really know Matt’s service that well, but B, kind of promoting him, like within this partnership. I don’t know, that’s kind of the only thing I could come up with is like a, you know, lead magnet for like a free growth assessment if you run a newsletter. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I think it’s actually a really good idea. And it’s not necessarily just newsletters, like he can do his thing for just like lead gen startups too, if they want to, or cold email services as well. So I think the idea of offering some sort of growth assessment and maybe a quiz that they go through and the answers to the quiz all lead to the same thing eventually, which is you should do this growth assessment, [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: whatever. [Michael Houck]: I think that something like that could actually be really good and could drive a bunch of business for him. So yeah, I think we should probably do that when we have a free featured slot in the newsletter actually. You wanna put something on the calendar for that actually? [Blake Stewart]: Because I do like the idea. Yeah, like tools of the week, free. [Michael Houck]: No, I think it should be featured just because, yeah, we’ll wanna maximize throughput for him. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. [Blake Stewart]: Probably earn more from it anyway. [Michael Houck]: All right. [Blake Stewart]: Yeah, I’ll do some time in May just cause I’m trying to sell three in a row right now. [Michael Houck]: Oh, got it. Yeah. Let’s do, let’s do whenever we have availability. Um, that’s not like you’re not in the progress process of, of selling. Well, okay. And I’ll, I’ll, he’ll probably be able to help out with like setting up that funnel. Like he’s very savvy of just like and been proactive of just like setting up ops. So if we tell him we want to do this, he’ll probably invest the time to actually do most of the work. [Blake Stewart]: Oh, sweet. Okay. Yeah. I don’t know how much we could kind of squeeze into like into the survey of, you know, figuring out more about our audience of like, I don’t know what, what kind of product they have is like SAS based as a product service or like, Yeah. [Michael Houck]: He’ll, he’ll have ideas of what data is helpful for him to make a decision about the work with someone or not. So we, Okay, we can lean on him for a lot of that stuff. [Blake Stewart]: Okay. Cool, I’ll slack and ask, get some help there. Okay. All right, we’ll start with that. I think that’s all I really had. [Michael Houck]: So fundraising. Fundraising, yeah. Okay, let me open things up on my end. Type form open. And I’ll get the fundraising air table and the behalf. Okay, let me share my screen here. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay, that should be fine. There we go. [Michael Houck]: Okay, so I showed you, I think the form, I showed you the air table. The form is this one. And basically when people fill this out, it automatically adds them to the Airtable. This link, by the way, is in every newsletter, it’s in our footer. So yeah, so they go in here, they go into the submitted view, and normally Reno will go in and add in some more data that for one reason or another can’t easily get transferred from Typeform table without me building like a pretty complicated zap and I just haven’t prioritized that. So normally she goes in and does that and then once she’s done, she moves the status to pending and they show up here. And then, you know, normally I’d say when we get into like the 40-ish plus or minus 10 that are waiting, we’ll go through and we’ll do an issue and like a batch. And so what happened then is, uh, basically you would go through and you would pick out your top, like anyone who meets the bar, it doesn’t need to be a certain number. We’re not aiming for 10 or 15 or whatever. It’s just however many you think could actually like, or actually like VC worthy. Right. Right. Okay. And so you do that. And then I also do that. And then we come together and we chat about it and I look at the ones you picked and I give you feedback on the ones that like, in my opinion, either should or shouldn’t have been on that list. And we decide together sort of which ones to finalize and move forward with. And then once that’s done, then we create a new, let me make this wider. We create a new public section here. So I’ll just duplicate like the most recent one. So this would be March, 2025. And there is this, field called batch we just change the batch to be that one which we need to create and so when we’re going through pending what we’ll do is we’ll change to approved and they show up here and Then we just go down here in the batch and add like, you know, which batch they go into And then they show up in the right one here and we grab that link and we change the link setting not allow people to copy data. And then we grab the link and we go into Beehive. And there’s this deal flow, Beehive. And for context, you’re gonna have access to Beehive soon. We’re wrapping up the design thing with that designer. So we’ll finally be able to add you to the newsletters account. But anyway, so yeah, so then we have this and the simplest thing to do We might have a template set up. I don’t know if we have templates set up. Oh yeah, we do, I think. No, this is not the brand that we use. That must be an old thing. [Blake Stewart]: Anyway, the easiest thing to do is probably just to… [Michael Houck]: Yeah, and then you’ll go in here and this will all be you. You’ll go in here, edit it. And there’s a few things to do. So one obviously is the title and the… Update the air table link in all the buttons. So there’s one at the top, one in the middle and one at the bottom. And then add the links to their deck here and sort them by round. Also add the air table link here too. I’ve forgotten that one a few times. And then we pick a top three or like top two if it’s a smaller batch. And we do a little write up on them. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Nice. [Michael Houck]: So you would do that right up and then I would just go in and edit it. [Blake Stewart]: Cool. Okay. Nice. Yeah. That’s, that’s what I like, [Michael Houck]: And then what happens from there is the reply to address on these emails goes to Rena’s email. And so we need to probably change that while she’s out. But, Then if someone responds, she goes back into the error table and she goes to this intro request tab and she will create a new row. She’ll put the status as requested. She’ll add the investor because we have an investor database in here too. She’ll add the company and I think the batch is automatically filled out. So then she just sort of keeps the status updated with like whether that leads to a deal or not. And sometimes, you know, we, we’ll reach back out to the founder a month later or two months later, and they never follow up. [Blake Stewart]: So we just have to leave it as unknown. Yeah. Okay. Sweet. [Michael Houck]: Um, so yeah, I think we should run one. And, uh, for context, we have a new VA, we have a couple of new VAs who were testing one of which I think seems pretty good. Uh, at least one. So, um, she’ll probably be able to help out with some of these, ops-related tasks by the time that we’re actually at this stage of doing the intros. [Blake Stewart]: Cool. Sounds like I saw a couple people get added into Slack. Oh, yeah. [Michael Houck]: Venus, Micah, and Angelica. We’ve worked with them all before, like two years ago, and they were all pretty good. So I just brought them back, and we’ll see who’s the best now, basically. Basically. [Blake Stewart]: Nice survivor. Hunger Games, man. [Michael Houck]: Cool. Okay. [Blake Stewart]: And so going back to this, you’ve got no, there’s no like monetization here, right? [Michael Houck]: This is kind of, it’s just a service that we do for our readers today. Goal is to maximize throughput, basically. Okay. Okay. And like, this is an area where, obviously we are incredibly under leveraging. And so if you’re like, hey, there are some easy ways we could improve this without it being a huge, becoming a huge time suck or anything like that, then I’m down. We should do it. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. [Blake Stewart]: Yeah. I’ll, I’ll keep thinking about that. Yeah. No, no easy answer for you there, but yeah. Yeah. No, I’m not expecting anything right now. [Michael Houck]: Just as you go through it, you’re like, Oh yeah. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. Yeah. Cool. Okay. [Blake Stewart]: Um, I mean, yeah, I mean, going back to that too, I think that’s a good opportunity for me to upsell founder deep dives. Um, like, Hey, yeah. [Michael Houck]: And then you can link it out in that newsletter too. [Blake Stewart]: Okay. [Michael Houck]: Um, I’ll, um, what I’ll do is I will add you to, I think I already added you to this air table, but if I didn’t, I will. And then, um, by the time, the final step of like actually writing the newsletter and sending it out, you’ll probably be able to have normal beehive access by then anyway. So that will be solved. And then for the intros, we’ll loop in one of the VAs to be the reply to and to take that on. And unless you want the reply to’s to come to you so you can upsell. [Blake Stewart]: Yeah, I kind of do. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Blake Stewart]: I wouldn’t mind being in the middle of that. [Michael Houck]: Okay. You’ll get the intros, you’ll get the requests from the investors, and then you’ll have to obviously message with the founders from there. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah, that’s good. [Michael Houck]: I like that. Okay, cool. So let’s aim to get this out at some point this month. And I will also put a, let me write this down. I’ll put a CTA in the newsletter, maybe on Saturday this week or next week. To just like gather more submissions. Just like, hey, we’re doing a blast. [Blake Stewart]: You shouldn’t submit now if you’re gonna submit soon. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. Yeah, perfect. [Michael Houck]: Okay. Sweet. Okay, so actions for me, obviously push the design team to finish quickly so that you have access, add you to Telegram. Then I’m also gonna text Matt about the sort of idea to feature what he does in the newsletter and like, and for context, he might not want to do it because he’s very sort of, like, I don’t know. He’s just a very interesting guy. He doesn’t like to market himself. He likes everything to happen through like referrals and like intros and stuff. But I think that’s why this is in my life. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Right? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I think that this probably is on the right side of that line for him. But he’s, he’s a lot more sensitive to that stuff than basically anyone else I’ve ever worked with. [Blake Stewart]: So we’ll see. [Michael Houck]: And then I’ll prep the CTA for the newsletter. If you want to start going through these deal submissions so far that we’re waiting on, or that we’re vetting, feel free to start approving some, or I guess leave them pending and feel free to start making a list of the top ones. Okay, so let me do that separately. [Blake Stewart]: and there’s nowhere in their Airtable, there’s like a notes tab or? [Michael Houck]: Oh, well, what we were doing before was that we intentionally didn’t wanna see what each other were thinking about the top ones. So, yeah, I think it’s more fun that way. [Blake Stewart]: I agree. Okay, yeah, I’ll do that. [Michael Houck]: I’ll provide you with a Google Sheet with some of the other info from Typeform for the one that are in submitted but not pending yet. Maybe we can outsource that to, or delegate it to one of the VAs. Maybe we give that as like a test project to see if they can take this whole process on. [Blake Stewart]: So I’ll send that to you and I’ll start a group chat with one of them. Okay, great. [Michael Houck]: And then, yeah, Telegram. Yes, Telegram. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Nice. [Blake Stewart]: All right. Cool. Well, yeah, I’m good to go. Cool. [Michael Houck]: All right, man. I’m trying to think if there’s anything else, but I think we, I think we covered everything. Yeah. Okay. I’ll be offline this weekend. So if anything comes up, you know, I’ll check it, but hopefully nothing comes up. Yeah. [Blake Stewart]: Sorry that you’re getting bombarded on Slack, but, Hey, no, that’s the we’re gonna do right. [Michael Houck]: It’s a good problem to have it means because we’re growing so, you know, we’ll One day, we’ll have a little bit of bigger team. But for now, it’s it’s kind of fun. [Blake Stewart]: So yeah. No, I love this crappiness. It’s great Cool. All right. Well go enjoy Dallas get some rest and yeah, I’ll talk to you later. Thanks, man. Talk soon. See you