- Duration: 52 min
- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01JPNESFC6HPVMPPXH3JNA98XT (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JPNESFC6HPVMPPXH3JNA98XT)
Transcript
[Akshay Rustagi]: Hey, how are you doing, man? Good. [Michael Houck]: Good to meet that we were able to find some time. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: How are things on your end? [Michael Houck]: You want me to let your AI notetaker guy in here? [Akshay Rustagi]: They’re good. Just been cranking on product. I have two things to catch up with you guys on. So we are Rolling out product this week slash this month. We’re testing We call it like the perplexity for real estate search, so we’ll be testing that primarily with agents Real estate agents and then we have a full full-fledged mobile app And then also like a chat bot that you can message. So we’ll be testing that out. We have a partner, design partner, so we’re rolling it out with them. They’ve got about 5,000, 6,000 agents. And then the goal would be to create a content strategy around cold approach. So we have lists and stuff, but the thought process is start cold. Um, activate them, give them a couple of things to play with. So, um, we’re setting it up where they can use the agent inside the email. They can text it. And then we convert them from that to the app. Um, and then the thought processes. So we have the design partner, we have a couple of warm relationships and intros into bigger brokerages, but we need a strategy to where we can interact with people. And so my other sentiment is on the product side, I think we have six to eight months agents to champion whatever our solution is and our feature set. But then I think the biggest companies with distribution are just going to copy it or mimic it. I think we’ll pivot to a growth hacking platform. So I, this is something we wanted to do for a while, but essentially what it means is we go out and, you know, high level, there’s 2 million agents from the 2 million agents, half of them don’t really do any business. So there’s about 1 million agents that do business and that 1 million, there’s probably like 100,000 that matter, meaning they make enough revenue to justify paying for a subscription or something additional or automation is valuable to them. So our target user base is probably the top, what is that? The top 5% of agents. So 2 million total, top 5%. So a hundred thousand. And then those are the people that would have a discretionary income to spend anywhere on the low end for 60, which some of our competitors charge up to a couple hundred dollars a month. High level would be like virtual assistant package that they buy from the Philippines, which is like a thousand, two thousand bucks a month. So that’s the upper tier. But essentially that’s what we’re thinking about. We have sort of two ICPs we’re going after. Top agents slash brokerages, but mostly agents. And then in addition to that, we have vendors that want to sell to agents. So we’re also trying to build simultaneously a double-sided marketplace. So the idea is you need to get the agents on board. So you have like a demand side and then you attract the supply side. So initially you make a product where it’s like search and a couple features for them on auto information, you create content to bring them into the funnel and to activate them. Um, and then you over time start teasing premium content. So what I’m getting at is in six months, we’ll start putting out, assuming we have a subscriber base case studies and case studies would be applied marketing. So like we went and we spend 10 grand on Facebook ads. Here’s what we learned. And so can you replicate this as an agent? So the idea would be in the beginning we would start with whatever interviews and anecdotes and stuff like that but there’s you know, those are relatively easy to replicate what’s expensive to replicate is like There’s this new platform. We tried it for 30 days and we spent five grand on it. Here’s what we learned or You know, we took the top agent and we created a Facebook funnel for him here’s what you know, here’s what the results he got. So the idea is you give them playbooks then over time that they can replicate. And the value is, is it’s not just a product or, you know, fuzzy content. It’s like, Oh, this is an insight I can actually implement in my business. And, you know, it would be like, okay, can you find me a vendor in my neighborhood or I’m comfortable with to replicate the results or the case study. So you’re ultimately, Ultimately, you’re soft-selling ideas and strategies to them, and then having the supply side to back it up. So that’s where I see the business going in the next year, where I could see competitive advantages and stuff developing. But right now, we’re at the feature state where we give you cooler products to play with cutting-edge AI. You incorporate your workflow. We’re trying to onboard these people. We’re aiming for $100 to $300 a month subscriptions. Um, so, you know, that’s why we’re targeting ultimately the top 5% of agents. Um, but you know, long story short, the feedback we’ve gotten is that’s all fine and dandy. If you guys can generate more sales for me, so it pays for itself. If you don’t, then it’s like a luxury and you know, uh, if the economy is soft, luxuries are going to go. So that’s where we’re at. So now we’re wrapping our head around, okay, what would I kind of do? Strategy look like, There’s a Fermi-like in terms of cold emailing that we’re probably going to go with. And then need to have a content strategy to roll out once you activated them. And then the idea would be use the content strategy, convert them to the product. Realistically, we probably have 60 days left at least of product refinement. So put it out there, get feedback, tweak it, put it out there, feedback, whatever. So I think I would imagine we’re practically 45 to 60 days from being in a position to monetize. We’ll pay wallet now, but I think it’s too, I don’t expect there to be like a real conversion rate. Um, but yeah, that’s basically where we’re at. So that’s the first initiative. Then I have a second initiative I was going to chat with you about, um, and then get an idea. I think you mentioned there was some metric about how much you should expect a subscriber to cost you. Um, I think you said it’s like a dollar subscriber. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Um, okay. [Michael Houck]: So just to make sure that we’re on the same page here, I think that all sounds incredibly interesting. And the product sounds super, uh, super, uh, interesting for this demographic, but, uh, just to be sure we’re talking about ghostwriting, correct. Cause I think that’s where, okay. So subscribers that are generated through ghostwriting in terms of like content on social media, or in terms of the sort of email growth, um, option that we do with, we partner with another, with a friend of mine on, on [Akshay Rustagi]: that. I guess, I guess probably email growth, like growing your list. [Michael Houck]: So yeah, so I guess his baseline, would the idea be that we would come in and we would help spin up a newsletter for you or for the brand? Or would it be that we would do social media, either LinkedIn or X and the newsletter? Like, what do you envision? What do you envision there? Yeah, both. [Akshay Rustagi]: I mean, I guess, I guess my point is, is we have an email list. And so we’re going we’re going to need a strategy to go from cold to hot. Um, that’s, well, I guess they’re both inorganic. That’s email centric. Then we could also look at a social media strategy, whereas like, how do we, so bottom line, um, as we pursue this, okay, this is basically a Trojan horse for us to what we really want to do. What we really want to do is we have a full fledged AI platform that gives you all the AIs and everything. However, um, we have some natural, you know, uh, relationships in the real estate space. We’ve been talking to those agents and what product they want. And it’s a good way to dog food the more mass features because if we go mass market, I can’t really wrap my head around what an ICP looks like, And so, you know, I think on the mass market side, you’re going to lose to whoever can get the biggest PR release. Um, and so, you know, obviously there’s like things we could do to gamify that, but the problem is, um, so that’s what we’re thinking. We’re thinking like, okay, focus on an ICP, an ICP that can spend, you know, 10 X what the average consumer would spend, get them on board. And then the way our product has been, built, it’s more or less two modes into one app. So there’s real estate mode and then consumer mode. So real estate mode has less features. You start with real estate mode and then you also give them consumer mode, which is like, you know, 10 times more features. Um, but because they’re bought into real estate mode, you have more time to fix consumer mode. Um, cause real estate mode is basically the features that that can actually drive value to them, meaning money, consumer mode is, these are cool things that you can incorporate in your workflow and your business. Right. But you know, it’s, it’s like, it’s not top of the mind of like, yeah, I, I, you know, I need this every day. Um, but anyway, that’s, that’s sort of what we’re thinking, given, you know, we have this relationship and we’re like, okay, we can approach it more like enterprise salesy, where we go to this, this brokerage, a couple of brokerages we navigated. And I tend to like this idea of like saturate the brokerage, get to 50% 80% penetration there and then go to the next one, which is sort of like what Facebook did back in the day. Um, so anyway, that’s what we’re thinking of So with our content strategy, it would be like, okay, even if you start small, like we have a 5,000 person company, the question would be, what do we implement in that 5,000 person company to eventually activate 80% of them? So, you know, sending them money to download the application is not going You’re gonna have to have like probably 10 to 30 touch points with the people that don’t know you And so, you know, you’ll have to have a strategy over time And so that’s what we’re trying to wrap our heads around is like, okay so that’s the ghost rating piece and then that would be like get the reps in on our content strategy and Figure out what it does in a closed environment. So let’s say it’s like a five to ten thousand whatever user environment once you get good at that then I would say let’s graduate it to the external environments and have those people on board because now you have a process of like we’re producing content here’s here’s the flow and I think the cadence we’re thinking of is like three times a week uh one recent indication piece one probably like one custom piece or whatever you know or like three custom articles a week whether they be in one piece or spread across three pieces, meaning one custom per piece or three custom in one piece, re-syndicating one piece. And then a third would be like updates or highlights or whatever, maybe a mock case study. But basically, you create those touch points. You get good at creating those touch points. And then you have a system where you can say, OK, now outside people can come in. So the thought process would be newsletter would probably be around using AI to drive impact into your business. So more sales, faster closing, stuff like that. At face value, it will be sponsored by us, but the content is around, oh, here’s things I could do and try in my business, whether it be cost savings or accelerating things and tools. You grow the funnel from there. So, you know, in theory, every agent should be caring about how they can incorporate these tools. So then you would grow that there. So that’s sort of what we’re thinking there. So we would say, so I guess high level, we have a user base, we can bird dog or whatever dog food, get good at the content piece there, then open it up to cold emails and social media stuff, and then nurture those people into ultimately doing it. And on the product side, to give you an idea, so two things. On the product side, we have four pillars we’re executing. First is MLS search. So we’re geographically based on the data that we pay for. So we would focus on those hubs. So right now we’re limited to 10 hubs. So we would focus on attracting users from those 10 hubs. That’s the first piece. Second piece is we have generic features, like anybody can use, AI dialing, virtual staging, and AIs for real estate. So technically, even if you’re not in those hubs, you could use our product. On the web or in the mobile but those products are low weekly retention so you’re not going to use it like three four times a week. Search if you’re you know if you’re busy you’re going to be using it every day. So that anyway that’s just to give you a highlight of like okay it doesn’t matter in terms of creating content we can add as many people as we want to the funnel but in terms of rollout it would be like okay you can use these features in your neighborhood this feature isn’t enabled but in a perfect world, we’re able to use this as a survey to be like, oh, if we’re picking up steam in this market, then we would add that to the roadmap faster. So yeah, that’s sort of high level we’re thinking. So I would like to dive into specifics on that. You know, cadence, what do you think like, and then the things that we have to coordinate is on cold emailing, the company that we like is offering us 300,000 emails a month. Um, so we need to split that up amongst the list and, and how much we want to apply for this strategy versus that strategy. But the point is, is if there’s 2 million agents in total and you know, you need to convert it from 2 million down to, you know, the, whatever the a hundred thousand you’re targeting, you do need time to run that campaign. Of course. And so just high level, if you’re doing, you know, 200,000 a month of emails and you’re doing it at a cadence of three emails per week, it’ll give you an idea of like how many unique people are you targeting. And so it will still take you, you know, six months to pump through that list, depending on how many 200,000. So we have to just think ahead of like, okay, you know, how do we do that? And then also how do we figure out if the strategy is working or not? Not. And then go from there. But yeah, that’s, that’s basically what we’re thinking on one end. And then I have another niche I wanted to talk to you about. Got it. [Michael Houck]: Okay, so we do this for, we do this for a fair amount of startups this point, like new AI forward startups that are looking to sort of use content to explain the value of AI to their ICP, and sort of bring them deeper into the funnel, get them using the product, things like that. It’s very much in our wheelhouse. I have writers who both who work on the real estate side and have done some content for real estate folks and also have done some AI stuff too. So I think there’s a natural fit there. As far as our process, would it help if I sort of give some context on how we work just to share that with you? [Akshay Rustagi]: Yeah. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: OK. [Michael Houck]: So basically, we work with founders. We’re not looking to put a ton of meetings on your calendar or anything like that. We’ll do one kickoff call at the beginning, which will be you, me, and our writer. And we’ll just go deep on what’s the voice? Who are these people? What do they care about? How do we want to speak to them? What do we want to highlight? What do we want to avoid? All just basic content pillar type stuff. And also then the structure of the newsletter we’ll go through as well. And then after that, we’ll go through a process where we set up. We recommend Beehive for sending newsletters. So we’ll go through a process where we’ll help you set up an account there if you want to use Beehive. If not, we can adapt to other platforms. But beehive is just best on the market. [Akshay Rustagi]: Yeah, it would either be beehive or ghost, one of those two. Cool. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: OK. [Michael Houck]: Well, we will walk through the process of setting that up. We have a designer on staff who can help with branding and assets and things like that if you’d like to. Some clients prefer to have their own in-house designer take that stuff on. But then on a weekly basis, we would just send you in a Slack Connect channel a few topic ideas each week and specific questions that came up in our research about those topics that we want your POV on to sort of make the newsletter more unique to you and stand out in people’s inboxes. And so all we ask from you is a couple-minute sort of voice note where you just talk about the topic, answer the questions, give us your POV. If we get that by midweek, we incorporate it into the issue that we write that week. And we’ll work to get a couple weeks ahead, too, so we’re not scrambling on a week-to-week basis, usually batch a few in the early days. But yeah, so I would expect first one to two to be kind of set up time. We’re setting up the account, getting the design right, getting all the DNS settings set up and things like that, writing the first couple issues. And then it’ll just be a weekly cadence from that point on. We get an issue scheduled and everything handled for you. So pretty hands-off on your end except for those voice notes. [Akshay Rustagi]: That’s all we require. Got it. OK. And in general, what we’re going to do is we’re going to loop in on our side some of the top agents we know. OK. So it’s not really like obviously I’ll I’ll chime in and like you want to talk about this you want to talk about that, but it’ll be more their their perspective So we’re thinking about breaking it into three meals a week one email is gonna be re syndicating To the extent we can find stuff like interesting posts articles, you know stuff that other people are sharing So we become a distribution mechanism for people. We can either do it as the same newsletter three times a week where you’re doing one-third this, one-third that, one-third this. Or you could do one newsletter where there’s three newsletters a week. One where it’s all proprietary content, one where it’s all re-syndicated content, and the third where it’s whatever, some exploratory thing like in the future this would be cool. But the point The question I had is, how would you all handle if we wanted to incorporate interviews? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, so interviews with agents for example? [Akshay Rustagi]: Yeah, so it’ll be like, an example is one of my closest friends is a top agent in D.C. And he has a name here and in terms of what he’s known for, it’s his expertise on Zillow and his position on Zillow. Him doing a huge transaction recently for 27 million bucks. So those are the types of like juicy stories that. So, so my, my strategy was leverage him. So he’s the face of the strategy. Um, he’s going to send the initial cold emails out or his voice. He’s going to be like, I’m going to talk about how I, you know, the ins and outs of how I sold my largest piece of real estate. So it’s like, they don’t want to hear from me. From us, they want to hear from him, like, how the hell did you, how the hell did you sell that 27 million? I know the story, but that’s the juicy thing, right? So he’s like, so it’ll be like, because this is so I’m also thinking about conversion rate. So the first email will be like, he’s sending it to you. Okay, I know who he is. And I’m going to be talking about every week, you know, an insider story, what I’m doing with my strategy? How am I adjusting in this bizarre market in DC? Cause they’re going through a bunch of layoffs. Um, you know, what am I doing on my ad spend? What am I adjusting? And the point is, is he’s sharing this because a, it’s not detrimental to him, but B, you know, he’s, he becomes a subject matter expert and people pay him for his opinion on it. So that’s one of our approaches, you know, extract value from him and then, build off of it, but where it goes is, um, okay. So like when I, when we mock this up internally, yeah, there’s stuff that chat GBD can pump out, like, you know, lists and things you should care about and shit like that. But you know, in terms of like conversion rate and juiciness, it would be individual stories or individual interviews. So my point with you is the question was like, you know, like he would be an interview. Another interview would be like the selling person. [Michael Houck]: I think I initially misunderstood. I thought that was going to be the strategy, the three different types of content for social, not necessarily the newsletter. Now I understand that that’s sort of the newsletter strategy where I’d want to do either three emails per week or break them up into three separate brands and things like that. We can talk about the trade-offs of both of those as we get deeper into it, but at a high level, yes, 100%. The reason that we don’t lead with interviews normally is because most of our clients are founders and they’re super busy and they don’t want calls, but we do content interviews very very regularly with the clients who want to go that route. And that’s totally fine. Our writers are used to it. Basically, it would be them and the agent who up on a call. We’d record the call. And they’d also take notes during it, too. So we’d have sort of two sources of data to go back from and pull from for the interviews. So you guys can handle interviews. [Akshay Rustagi]: Easy. Easy. OK, got it. OK, cool. So yeah, so then what we would probably do is I want to dive into the costs again. But what we’d probably do is then put together a content schedule. With you and say, all right, you know, here’s the people that we want to interview. Here’s, here’s what we want to produce, whatever, over the next month. Um, and then you guys would just line that up. And then what I would do is I would loop those people in and say, you know, whatever it is, inviting them to our Slack or whatever, blah, blah, blah. Um, and it would be like, okay, like we need to, you know, do an interview with this person. Let’s, let’s get them or get the questions in front of them. Let them, um, because what will also be doing is playing around with some ideas that we’re trying to get to go viral within the content so an example would be like with my buddy we would do like an AI avatar of him and so it would be like asking so now you could use on our site are you talking to him so he could be telling you the story but the point is is like it’s one so what I’m and this is a side comment but what I’m learning is there’s a new way to learn in AI thanks to prompting, which is you watch something and then you start asking questions, and then you learn by asking, why can’t this work? Why can’t that work? Why can’t I do it this way? So it’s more interactive and instructive versus, you know, just reading documentation and not being able to do it. So similarly, I would imagine like, if I hear a story, what’s gonna engage me more is gonna be like, well, did you think about this? Did you try that? You know, whatever, how would you recommend And the point is when he has his first interview, he’s going to tell a story of like how he got his biggest sale. Well, that sale took him, you know, five years of a relationship curation. And so then somebody is going to say, well, okay, great. I don’t, I don’t have a billionaire in my Rolodex. What can I do? And then he’ll say, well, you know, he could prompt it like, okay, you got to start with who do you know? And who do you know? Who do they know? And you start adding value incrementally. And you know, that would be something where like he could say that, but But what would be interesting is because underlying we’re thinking about what is the business of selling avatars to this demographic, right? And so we’re like, okay, let’s get them to interact with an avatar and get them comfortable. And then, you know, we could upsell them saying, Hey, for a hundred bucks a month, you get your own avatar. So, you know, anyway, so, okay. But, um, that makes a lot of sense actually. So how, so yeah, walk me through the pricing again. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: So I can send over an email with everything laid out kind of after we hop off the call. But TLDR, if we’re going to do three emails per week, I probably need to come up with custom pricing because right now we normally just do a weekly newsletter for folks or a daily newsletter for folks or something in the middle, I’d come up with something custom weekly in the daily. The weekly is 3500. And the daily sort of depends on the length. We do custom quotes for the for the daily too. But some people want like super long morning brew style, some People just want little like vignettes every day. So it varies a lot on the daily, but also over an email that summarizes everything. [Akshay Rustagi]: And if you could send me some examples or some stuff that you guys have done, that’d be helpful. Sure. [Michael Houck]: I mean, one thing I just always want to caveat this because when people ask for examples, one is, you know, we’ll make them anonymous examples. We do the same for you. We never tell anyone that we’re sort of writing for you. But the other thing is that every example that I send is in the style that that client asked for. So if you’re like, Hey, I hate this style. This isn’t what we’d want to do. That’s the expected reaction because they’re asking for something different than what you’re asking for So just flagging that in advance. [Akshay Rustagi]: I don’t want you I just want to see what you know, what what are the end product could look like or whatnot? Because then it’ll lead me. [Michael Houck]: Well, go ahead finish what you were gonna say. [Akshay Rustagi]: No, I was pretty much done My next question is is we’re doing this on The product side and the goal is to activate these people into a subscription or upsell them on you know whatever a la carte offerings that we facilitate yeah so we’re ultimately currying um you know whatever it is like comfort and and authoritativeness um so they should come to trust us as like oh this is where I’ll find you know breaking edge or cutting edge applications of ai and you know just simply put you’ll have early adopters late adopters and blah blah so That’s for this audience. Separately, I had a question of what do you do on the investment side? Have you worked with people that are like their funds and they want to create cadence for that? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, we have a few VC funds who are clients and want to do newsletters or want to do social media for their GPs, or in some cases, their Portco founders too. But yeah, so we work with funds. We have a couple of fintech companies and financial services folks too. Very familiar with sort of that world, not real estate funds in particular, but, um, you know, not outside the scope of, of what we can do. [Akshay Rustagi]: So what would you recommend as a strategy for, um, for basically, ultimately you’re marketing SPVs, uh, but you’re developing a cadence to where, you know, it’s not just a blast. Like, do you want to invest in this, invest in this? Um, because those don’t tend to work. Um, so how would you, what have you done or what would you recommend to develop that? So ultimately like same idea, I want a newsletter as big as possible because I know on any given opportunity I’ll need a hundred people up to a hundred people that can fill it. And so, you know, you just, you need to think of it in the sense of like, uh, you know, that way. [Michael Houck]: We, we, we run a newsletter for, for me, personally, one of my newsletters is actually a deal flow newsletter for VCs. So from my founder newsletter, we curate deal flow, our team and I go through and sort of evaluate the best ones. And we surface those in emails to a list of at this point, I think it’s like five or 6k investors, VCs and angels. And it leads to deals, we structure it in a way where we sort of do little write ups on the ones we’re most excited about. And we also have a database that we list of like all the ones that we got in that month in case people want to click and see more opportunities, too. So I want to go deeper with you and our writers on exactly what that looks like for the voice that we want to go with for you guys and the audience that we’re talking to. But at a high level, I wouldn’t imagine it’d be too crazily different from that, where we’re highlighting opportunities, but not in a spammy way, in a way that also is building trust, delivering value right away. And since we’re going to be sending more emails just those I think that the other emails would service to sort of build that level of trust with them so that when we do send them something they have some you [Akshay Rustagi]: know there’s they know there’s some curation that goes into it okay cool um yeah because I I’d want to think through that as well because the question boils down to is so in that case I need to think through it but The real estate thing is easier to understand. The harder thing about this is if you’re doing cold, then it automatically comes off as spammy if you have to grow the newsletter. [Michael Houck]: Let me ask you that. We wouldn’t want to lead with cold with the SPV opportunities or SPV equivalent opportunities, I guess it would be. What we would do is when we’re reaching out cold to people, and again, We have folks who we work with on cold. If you’d like, if you already have a partner, you’re like, that’s totally fine. [Akshay Rustagi]: We can work with them, but either way. Um, and when I say work, they’re just giving us the system that gives us more throughput. [Michael Houck]: They’re not actually like writing emails. Got it. Okay. Um, well we can, we can work with that. Uh, but basically the, what I would recommend for cold is lead magnets, lead magnet strategy, where we’re very concise emails, just talking about a specific lead magnet that we think will be exciting to the for this campaign and getting opt-ins and getting opens and things like that that way. The criteria that you want to use to have people opt into the newsletter, there’s different philosophies there. Some people are like, oh, we want them to explicitly ask us for the lead magnet or put their email in or something like that. Other people are like, hey, as long as they’re opening these emails and we know they’re interested in the topic, we’re fine uploading them to the newsletter. So we don’t talk about exactly where you fall within that spectrum. There’s a couple other options that would be in the middle. But yeah, the email strategy for cold should definitely be definitely be lead magnets leading with value, super concise, etc. [Akshay Rustagi]: Costs or something like that on the daily side, on the daily side. [Michael Houck]: So, so the way we structure pricing is there’s content for the newsletter, and then there’s like growth, right? So the growth is like, campaign design for cold, even infrastructure setup, we also do lead if that’s of interest to. We have a database of about 200 million people’s emails that have been tagged, not only with their Apollo-esque job title, company, et cetera, but also with their social media activity, who they follow, what topics they talk about, what’s in their bio, sort of more granular than you can get from most traditional lead databases. So that’s proprietary. We’ve set that up. And we can pull leads from that targeted for you guys, even in specific markets. If you’re interested, but that’s kind of two separate things. So the growth side, we would do per subscriber pricing that you’d want to add. If you just want us to write the cold emails for that and you’re like, Hey, we already have the leads coming from somewhere else. That’s fine. We’d set something custom up for you there. [Akshay Rustagi]: What does it look like on the per subscriber basis? [Michael Houck]: Depends on the niche a little bit. And also depends on the scale at high scale. It can be under a dollar at lower scale. Like I’m talking like, you know, know, one K is the minimum per month that we would do at that point. [Akshay Rustagi]: If I say, um, not to cut you off, but if I say, all right, simple math, I want a 10,000 person newsletter of networks and basically people that could invest, you know, thousand, a hundred K. And then my idea is you get the newsletter, 10,000 at any given opportunity. I’m looking for like a hundred people max. You’re saying the cost for that would be something like 10,000? Yeah, for the for the lead generation. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: And they would go through sort of a vetting process on our side that’s multi step. So basically, first, we would hold email them just to kind of pen test the inbox, make sure that they’re active. And then if they’re opening our emails, then they get opted in to an actual sequence where we’re leading with lead magnets, we’re asking them if they if they’re interested in this topic, etc. And they pass through that they get added to the actual newsletter and start getting like the weekly or multi time a week newsletter content. Got it. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. [Akshay Rustagi]: So let’s maybe, however you want to set it up, if you want to do it as a separate call or strategy, but what I’m trying to wrap my head around is, um, for that strategy, it just boils down to, you know, what is it going to cost me to develop the leads and then to keep them engaged. And then the idea would be we would syndicate something maybe on a once to twice a month max basis. So then you would keep them, you know, you would keep them entertained until you syndicate it. The other thing I wanted to think about is, and this is probably better for a separate call. So the business that I’m running is more or less like a product incubator. And we’re building these prototypes really quickly and spinning them out. And you know, the, the idea is we want to play around with a new type of offer, which is, we call it like founder’s edition. So what that means is if you’re the first 2000 committed subscribers to the product and you sign like a one or two year annual contract, you have the opportunity to earn warrants or first right to invest and stuff like that. That’s cool. So the idea here, and this is like, Part of a bigger thesis I think I has no loyalty and by design if you’re looking for an advantage you won’t be loyal to a solution you always do you be looking for the next advantage right. If you think of it that way and you think of the reality that all these people are gonna have feature parity across the board in a year. Then you start to think about like what will matter in a year and other than scale it’ll probably be branding and something else. Branding, data, partnerships. [Michael Houck]: That’s it. Right. [Akshay Rustagi]: And so my point is, you know, if you look at the volume and we think about this from the product side, it’s like, okay, you know, you’re not going to adopt 20 products. You’re going to eventually want one to just figure it out for you. And then where is your loyalty going to come? It’s not going to come from the fact that it’s just what you like to use, even though there’s some value to that. So we’re experimenting with this idea, but we want to figure out how to make it work across products because then the idea would be your growth hacking your way to the first couple million dollars of ARR where they’re incentivized to make the product better and market it for you. You could give them effectively. So like in my mind, and let’s talk about the real estate as an example, because in real estate I have no, like it’s purely numbers based. If it doesn’t work, I’d have no problem cutting it off. Um, there’s no, like I really, you know, an emotional attachment to it. Um, okay. So what I’m trying to architect is I want two to 3000 subscribers that pay and I want them to pay two to $300 a month. So if you can do that with however you do it, you get to five, $6 million run rate, right? Five, $6 million run rate is more than enough for you to sustain that audience going with the strategy, even if you don’t grow it because you’re reinvesting into whatever it is, growth hacking and shit like that, or you can grow go beyond that audience, but to grow beyond that audience, you’re going to lower your price point or you’re going to go consumer. So at the highest level, you know, the biggest real estate company is arguably Zillow. Um, and so, you know, they’re fully consumer pretty much. Um, even though, you know, they’re a lead gen magnet. And so anyway, that’s what I’m trying to think about. How do you architect a strategy? Because what I’ll come back to you and I’ll say is, you know, across all these products and things. Um, we need the biggest user base. We need a user base where there’s a call to action. Like the first 2000 get this opportunity. So there’s, there’s a reason of why you’re constantly like, you know, looking at stuff. Just, you know, why do you care about Angelus? Cause like you want to be the first, whatever people to get into something. Um, and so anyway, something to think about because this is where it all boils down to. So the reason I would do the SPV list is because, because we have these projects and outside projects, but what we’re really trying to do is get good at these projects because we control them. And so we control the timing, we control the flow, whereas if it’s an outside project, you know, it’s like we got one week to put together the demand. If it comes together great, if it doesn’t, it’s gone. But anyway, something to think about because now the next question would be pulling it all together. We do want a generalist approach. We do want, you know, people that are interested in this space. Um, we didn’t choose that for real estate because of, you know, inherently it’s a different industry, but it’s the same idea of, well, we want to do it in real estate and then we want to do it over here. Um, but to that point, you know, you need to keep that, those people engaged. So you can’t just send them an email, you know, every three months. Uh, so you have to think about like, you know, how do you keep them engaged and whatever. But anyway that that’s the direction we want to go with stuff And then the idea would be like, you know, we get to the point where so I guess just reverse engineering the numbers it would probably look like something like we want a user base of The email list to be 20,000 ish the 20,000 ish people means on any given opportunity We could try to activate 10% of them to the founders list subscriber and then the idea idea would be like, rather, you know, not only are you committing to the product, but then you’re, you’re also getting some upside. So you’re now a prosumer or whatever you want to call yourself. Um, and so then the idea is you get a focus group naturally from that. Um, but that’s what we’re thinking of Okay. Well, how do we engineer that? How much does it cost? How many subscribers do we need? Um, you know, and so that’s anyway, that’s something to consider because what I’ll probably say is I’ll do it as two initiatives. One is real estate and one is investing. The investing stuff can have an AI centric component to it. Okay. So on that question, how much would it cost for, how much do you charge for the daily stuff? So separate from the growth. So basically growth, you’re like around a buck per subscriber. And then how much would it cost on the content side? Right. [Michael Houck]: So again, I’ll send you a custom quote kind of later. I need to run the numbers, based on sort of what you’re saying in terms of, hey, here’s the industry, okay, we have this many people in the industry, that means this is how we think about that. The content, if we want to do a daily newsletter, this is an email newsletter, we’re sending them per day. It’s, as I said, going to depend on sort of the length. So I have something I’ll send over, it’ll have a couple options, like, hey, if we do short vignettes, if we do these interviews, if we do XYZ, here’s what it’ll be, it’ll all be laid out for you really easy to sort of parse through. I don’t have those numbers off the top of my head. Easier for me to send the email to you. But yeah, we’ll lay everything out in there. OK, sounds good. [Akshay Rustagi]: And then let me know if you have any other ideas or suggestions for this, because what I’m trying to figure out is, how much is it going to cost for this initiative? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, you’ll have clarity. Don’t worry. I’ll send everything over, and it’ll be clear. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: OK, cool. [Akshay Rustagi]: Yeah, and then any other bits of feedback or something we should think about. One last question. How do you, where does the social media stuff come into play? Right. [Michael Houck]: So that’s, that’ll also be included sort of if you add on social media, or if you do this many accounts on social media versus main newsletters, we include a discount if you package them together, because it’d be the same writer who’s who’s handling both for you. So there’ll probably be some stuff we could repurpose across them, but also obviously make specific for the format. So for example, on X, we’ll something slightly different than we would on LinkedIn and obviously very differently than we would in a newsletter. So all the calls will be laid out. You’ll see everything in front of you. If you want to do like a full social media takeover where we do ops on the account, we’re engaging with thought leaders in the niche, we’re replying to the comments, we’re optimizing your profile, we’re replying to DMs, all that stuff can be included as well. So it’ll all be laid out in the email. Okay, sounds good. [Akshay Rustagi]: So we’ll go from there. Yeah, we’ll go from there. [Michael Houck]: So I’ll I’ll shoot that over today, probably in the next hour or so. And then we can hop back on and chat either later this week or early next. [Akshay Rustagi]: OK, cool. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Sounds good. Cool. [Michael Houck]: Dude, good to meet you. And excited to help out here. [Akshay Rustagi]: Appreciate it. Talk soon. [Michael Houck]: Bye.