- Duration: 25 min
- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01JP5QYG3W8VRRVW1T7XC7XF5H (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JP5QYG3W8VRRVW1T7XC7XF5H)
Transcript
[UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Charles, you doing man? [Charles Nduka]: Sorry, Microsoft decided to do a verification of my ID before. [Michael Houck]: You gotta love that. I feel like I’m the only person who’s ever logged into anything on this computer, and yet Google’s always telling me that I need to re-enter my password. [Charles Nduka]: It’s maddening, it’s maddening, but anyway, here you go. Yeah, good to speak to you. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, man. Excited to chat and see how we can help. I guess, if you want to start, I can talk about what we do and how we can help after that, but I’m curious to hear sort of where things are at on your end. [Charles Nduka]: Yeah, so I came across you via an interview you did with the founder of Levels, which I found really, really interesting. You know, I think that hopefully they will be a potential partner of ours in future. You don’t get a full sense of what we do from our website just now, but basically we build wearable devices to sense the wearer, and it has a number of medical but we’re going to be focusing on particularly dietary health and wellness. And we’re getting some quite good traction right now in the press and the media. Quite good article yesterday appeared. I’m a surgeon by background, a plastic surgeon specializing in the face, and that’s what led me to this idea about what we could do to measure expressions. Initially, it was about trying to measure how people were between appointments, but then realized, oh, my God, we can now take this and look at mental health monitoring. We can look at self-management. We can look at, because we can detect eating, we can look at dietary behaviors. So our product that basically is going to be coming out next year, basically, you start eating, sense that you’re eating, take a picture of your food, analyze it by AI, because it’s a sense of your eating rate. And then you can imagine how that links in with levels, because obviously, you have blood glucose and stuff, and looking at your own spikes, et cetera. So when you see dietary habits, health and emotions as being the two pillars that aren’t being covered. Aura covers sleep. Whoop, Apple Watch covers fitness. But there’s nothing covering emotional health and dietary health. And our technology will cover the two. As a platform play, we’re going to integrate into other people’s glasses. Our CEO, Steve Strand, was ex-head of hardware at Snapchat. Snapchat, you may know, they pioneered smart glasses back in 2016, well before Meta had thought about it. That we’re looking at how company day investors snap into our business. And then Steen switch sides and joins our CEO because he can see the potential for this. And yeah, so we’re moving fast to try and get the technology out there. It’s costing a lot of time and effort and money to miniaturize the technology. [Michael Houck]: Always takes longer than you think. [Charles Nduka]: Technology is difficult, especially in the UK because they don’t really have a history of doing this kind of work. But yeah, We managed to raise 7 million in equity funding and about 4 million in grants, R&D grants to get to this point. We now have 34 patents, 32 of them are issued. We have a strong team distributed between here, US, and North Macedonia. And yeah, I’m really excited about the future going forward. [Michael Houck]: Man, that sounds like a killer idea, first of all, killer space, because I agree there’s As far as I know, there’s nothing sort of filling that gap already, and it is a meaningful part of people’s health and a picture that they’d want information on. And also, you guys are strong from an IP perspective. I think most times when companies have raised a few million from venture or grants or what have you, IP is not necessarily the first thing that they go after, and it ends up biting them in the butt further down the line. And so I think if you guys have the capital and time to do so, it’s a smart play. [Charles Nduka]: Yeah, it’s been expensive. [Charles Nduka]: against the likes of Apple and Google and things. These aren’t just applications, they are issued. [Michael Houck]: It’s something that you guys can monetize through your own products, obviously, as you want to, but also if you want to license them out as you want to. It’s smart, flexible. Yeah, yeah, yeah. [Charles Nduka]: So, yeah, so I was interested in your proposition and, yeah, I just wanted to learn more about it. We’re in that phase where we’re now having to be more outward looking, because we’re getting to a point where the form factor is small enough. I think I’ve got a pair of them here. The form factor is small enough that it’s still quite thick in the arm. But it’s a mistake. [Michael Houck]: It doesn’t stand out as some crazy thing. No, exactly. [Charles Nduka]: We kind of modeled it a bit on the mess ray that I’m wearing now. And we know the pathways to making it even stricter. Most in line is there we know what to do. It’s just a question of engineering and money. So Yeah, but you know, it’s not a it’s not some crazy Google Glass or some giant pro or something like that We want to look normal looking and we’ve done some studies with artisans with users. It’s really positive feedback, but yeah Cool, man. So, okay. [Michael Houck]: So you’re looking to sort of get the word out more start building like a brand around either yourself or the CEO or the company. [Charles Nduka]: Yeah, exactly. I mean, we’ve talked about this, and so I’ve done a couple of podcasts, and the last one actually came out yesterday and seemed to go well. I hate listening to myself. [Michael Houck]: You do. You can’t stand it. I can’t do it. [Charles Nduka]: I haven’t gotten around to listening to it, but the teams say that it works pretty well. But yeah, so yeah, we need to now do some kind of content strategy around what we’re doing, because that only has applications in wellness, in longevity, in dietary health, in mental health, in autism, in gaming, in content analytics. It’s got so many different use cases. We want to focus on the wellness space, health and wellness space. And of course, of course, my job, I have access to people, but yeah, we just, and also we are thinking about doing a crowdfunding campaign via one of these companies, DealMaker, which- A DealMaker advertised in our newsletter a while [Michael Houck]: ago. I know them very well. [Charles Nduka]: They’re good. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, we’re thinking about using them. Tell me about that. What’s the experience with them? [Michael Houck]: Does it work for them? Yeah, I mean, we did a medical product with them. They had a company they were working with. They were sort of shopping around to a bunch of newsletters. And we featured the deal as our primary sort of featured placement for two issues, I think. It was like a year ago, so I don’t have a missed memory of it. But yeah, I mean, they came back for a second one. So by all accounts, it went pretty well. So yeah. Yeah, it’s interesting. [Charles Nduka]: I mean, I didn’t know you could raise those kinds of amounts. Of money from crowdfunding, and they seem to be able to, they’ve got a system, and obviously not everyone succeeds, but some companies have managed to raise tens of millions of dollars via that route, which is interesting. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, it seems, from how they pitched the one in the copy that they sent us to use, it seemed to be a much more legitimate sort of, because you hear crowdfunding, you think like Kickstarter or GoFundMe or something like that, right? This is like, it just came off much differently. They were like, oh, this is actually a company that is doing this in a pre-IPO spot for themselves. And it’s like, they are going to IPO, and they are legit, and their tech is legit. And we were able to communicate that to our audience, I guess, effectively enough for them to like it. So yeah, they came off very professional and very good to me. So on the content side, I can just tell you what we do. Let me know where it would fit in. So basically, for some background, I’ve built up my social audience across all platforms combined. We have 200,000 on Substack. We have 100K between other platforms like LinkedIn and X and some others as well. And our newsletter, obviously, goes out as well. So we’ve done all this. I have my partner in the agency, Blake Imahl. He has a similar as audience I do, bigger audience on social, smaller newsletter. We are, as far as I know, the only content agency that works with startups that is actually operated by real creators. There’s other ones that have a creator on the advisory board, or invests some money in the company, or puts the brand behind it for an affiliate, or something like that. But we’re actually operating on a day-to-day basis by Blake and I. And so we have a small team of writers who we’ve worked with various capacities at a time, most of them quite a while. And Blake manages the writing team on a day-to-day basis. I manage sort of the sales and growth and client management, account management side of things. Basically, I’d be your primary POC. And no content would get sent to you that’s not first reviewed, at least by Blake, maybe by both of us in some cases too. So we built a pretty lean system, as you can imagine, pull that off. But what we do is, you know, we’re not trying to put a bunch of meetings on your calendar, we know you’re super busy building the company. And so we’ll do one kickoff call at the beginning. And we’ll sort of ask for you to fill out a form before that, that gives us some context going into the call. And on that call, we’ll go super deep on sort of like content voice, who the audience is, what they care about, how you want to present yourself, and the company, and sort of what goals are and things like that, too. So that will tailor a strategy how to achieve those goals. And then everything else happens through Slack and Notion from there. We’ll set up a Slack Connect channel if you use that. And every Monday, we’ll send in some ideas with specific questions that came up during our research about those ideas. All we ask from you is if you want to send a couple-minute long rambly voice note. The more rambling, the better, because we get the emotion, the intonation, all those little nuances that help us build the voice. If you want to do and prefer to do content interviews where you and the writer hop on a call, that’s totally fine. That’s for you and the writer, but we find that most founders tend to prefer the voice, so that’s why we lead with that. The writer will be somebody who is matched specifically with you. I will do that matching myself, and they are your partner, basically. This isn’t something where you’re going to send us some content or send us some ideas and we’re going to put it into a pool, and whoever’s available is going to take it. No. This person’s job is to download your brain and find your voice and put it out there, week-to-week basis. And so, yeah. So if we get those voice notes from you by middle of the week, they’ll be incorporated in that week’s batch of content that we’ll deliver by end of week. If you want to request edits, of course, you can do that. And we’ll work to get a couple of weeks ahead pretty early on so that we’re not sort of scrambling on a week-to-week basis to meet some deadline. So it depends on which package you go with. So we have a couple options. If we wanted to do social media, 3K or 2K, those are the two tiers. The difference is at the 3K tier, we’ll sort of do a full account takeover. So we’ll be posting, depending on whether you prefer long form or short form content, it will depend on the exact number of posts that we send, but let’s say at least three long form posts per week. So those would be like screenshot essays, detailed threads, long form, long form written posts, and maybe with a few short form mixed in as well. If you just want to do short form, it’ll probably be, you know, 10 plus per week, where these are shorter posts that we’re putting up, you know, maybe one to two per day on the account. And on top of that, we also take over all the ops of the account. So we’ll go through, I’ll do an audit to optimize your profile, record a loom video that sort of lays out what changes I would make, and we’d help you make those changes. We’d also have our ops team go into the account and engage with all the people who reply to your content. We handle scheduling, obviously, and all that. But they’d also be in there engaging with replies to drive impressions and conversations. And then the last thing is that we’d identify some thought leaders in the niche who already have the audience that you want. And this person would be in your account engaging with their post, leaving thoughtful or insightful or funny comments on them to get some attention and get free profile views for you and help grow the follower count that way. So that’s all included in the 3K tier. At the 2K tier, we drop the ops. Of that sort of account management side of things. And we just deliver sort of smaller batches of content. So you can think like, if we do a long form, it would be like, you know, one to two long form per week, as well as a couple short form versus three long form per week, plus more short form. [Charles Nduka]: Okay, and you say three long form essays a week. Yes, a lot of content. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: I mean, look, when I was posting super actively on X, like every week when I was like, that was like the primary way we were going to business at that time. Yeah. I would post three Twitter threads a week. I do Tuesday, Thursday, and Sunday every single week. And, um, it worked great. It grew, it grew my credibility really quickly. It got me in front of people enough without being like too much. Um, but still enough where they sort of remembered who I was. So it really comes down to, uh, just like, how committed you are to the account. On the other side of things, the newsletter side of things, if you want to do a weekly newsletter, that’d be $3,500. And we would set up, again, all the ops, all the segmentation, the automation, the analytics, and all the sort of Beehive settings. We even help design the brand in Beehive if you want. [Charles Nduka]: And then there's also a biweekly option that would be $2,000. OK. [Michael Houck]: A biweekly? Sorry, bi-weekly newsletter. So basically one send every two weeks. If you were to combine either multiple social accounts or a social account plus the newsletter, we’d give you a 10% discount across the board. OK. [Charles Nduka]: And then which social media platform? We don’t have that much. I mean, we’ve got LinkedIn. Probably my LinkedIn is probably the biggest of all our different accounts. But which platforms would you be recommending for a company like ours. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: I mean, I think that it’s interesting because, well, let me ask you this. What, what is your goal for this content? Is it to build awareness? Is it to, you know, build a wait list? Like what’s the, what’s the main goal? [Charles Nduka]: Raise our profile amongst investors when we get series a sort of next year, um, later on this year or next year. So that’s, that’s one important. And also amongst influencers so that we can get on their radar in terms of getting on their podcasts or getting on their, yeah, getting engaged with them. [Michael Houck]: If investors is a meaningful part of the goal, I would definitely recommend Twitter, X. That’s where they spend their time. That’s where they’re looking for the next hot startup. You know, there are some investors who will troll on LinkedIn too and spend time there for sure. But most of the best investors that I know and also the highest volume of investors They spend the majority of their time on on X interesting Okay Okay So basically as part of this As part of this thinking right [Charles Nduka]: now is around this still make a deal with closing with that. There’s a lot of it. There’s a big campaign And it goes along with it, which you have to do in placing content and music. But in addition to that, we don’t have an awful lot of material anyway. So we’re just kind of working out, how do we make the whole thing kind of fit cohesively? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: And that’s the content piece. [Charles Nduka]: Was there another piece to your business as well as that? Is that right? Yes. [Michael Houck]: So we also have a creator network. So we have a network of 400 to 500 creators in various niches across X and LinkedIn. And they monetize on our platform through engagements. So if you say, I have a post that I really want to get in front of the right people, you basically put ad budget behind it is the way that I would think about it. And we’ll match that with the right creators who are available on our platform, both in terms of best value and most aligned to the niche. And we’ll send it to them. They’ll go engage with it, either comment And you’ll get some impressions that way. The strategy there will differ based on sort of how big the account that we’re working with is. If we’re just starting out, I probably only recommend putting budget behind that for like big announcements rather than like everyday posts. But it’s definitely something that we can work into the strategy. [Charles Nduka]: Okay, okay. Fine. OK. Let me take that away and have a chat with Steve, our CEO, about that. I mean, there’s a few kind of bits of jigsaw that we’re having to work through, just about. We’re a UK company, but we have a US subsidiary. But it’s kind of dawned, haven’t we done anything with it? So we have some stuff to negotiate around that and how we kind of, if we do that, then obviously the question is, what brand are we going to use for that launch? So we have both things to work out. But I think what you’re doing is great. It sounds like a really, really good model for, because there’s so much, it’s not my strength, and it sucks my energy and my time to do. It’s a full-time job. [Michael Houck]: It really is, if you want to do it right. And it’s also a skill set, you know? So we’d love to take it off your plate. What I can do is I’ll shoot over an email later today with just a Notion doc that sort of summarizes everything we talked about and any more kind of questions you might have. If after you talk to Steve, if you guys want to hop back on and chat more, I’m happy to do that. If any questions come up. But yeah, I mean, we’d love to work with you and make this grow. [Charles Nduka]: Yeah, wonderful, wonderful. Cool, yeah. That’s all my questions, I think. It’s great. Great. All right, Charles. [Michael Houck]: Well, look, I appreciate the time. I know it’s probably a little late in the day for you, so I appreciate it. No, it’s fine. [Charles Nduka]: It’s fine. Thanks a lot. Cool man. Good to meet. Talk soon. Thank you. Bye. Bye.