- Duration: 45 min
- Platform: zoom
- Source: Read.ai 01JQA0CMEJ2V15B0CTKQN430V5 (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JQA0CMEJ2V15B0CTKQN430V5)
Transcript
[Brett Goldstein]: There he is, look at that. What’s up, man? How you doing? How’s it going? [Michael Houck]: Long time no see. Yeah, I know. [Brett Goldstein]: Is that a Zoom background or are you in some like Victorian? I’m in an airport. Yeah, it’s a Zoom background. Got it, got it. [Michael Houck]: Where are you? [Brett Goldstein]: I’m in Nashville right now. [Michael Houck]: What’s in Nashville? Potential move, we’ll see. [Brett Goldstein]: To Nashville? [Michael Houck]: I’m looking at Dallas, Nashville and Charleston. What’s the what’s the occasion? [Brett Goldstein]: Why did you want to bring me there? [Michael Houck]: Just different communities, different types of people. You know. Got married, didn’t work out, want something different, want some kids. Yeah. You know, New Yorkers don’t want kids, it seems like, Well, they either they want to freeze their eggs and then, you know, have kids and take a gamble that it’ll work out 10 years down the road. So, uh, yeah, yeah. It’s when a nice, nice Christian girl, um, have a couple of kids and, and do that. Yeah. [Brett Goldstein]: Not a lot of Asian girls in those places, but yeah. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: No, that’s fine, man. [Michael Houck]: I think I’m, I think I’m sticking, uh, I think I’m sticking with, uh, with white girls for the, for the next one. [Brett Goldstein]: Nice. All right. Yeah. I guess, uh, you, you gotta, you gotta pivot. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: I gotta pivot. Gotta, to change the game up a little bit. [Brett Goldstein]: Nice. That’s cool. Yeah, it’s funny. I moved back and I’m half moved to New York to find a wife and I’m like, doing the classic like New York thing where you’re in three month long, four month long situationships with people who are like, almost amazing. Like, like great minus one thing. And then you’re like, Oh, maybe I’ll find somebody better. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I feel like it’s like, I don’t know, man, like when you, you need people who are focused on the thing that you need them to be focused on in order for it to make sense. And so like, I know my business matters a lot to me. I know family matters a lot to me. I need a wife who is focused on family first and not like career as part of that. And so. Yeah. Makes sense. That’s the vibe. That’s dope. [Brett Goldstein]: How’s everything else going? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, it’s good, man. Our agency’s doing well, Megafon’s doing well. We just had our first huge bump, or huge markup on an investment, which is good, because that was one of the first outside checks into figure, and they’re raising a 40 bill right now, so that’s great. [Brett Goldstein]: That’s cool. Nice. [Michael Houck]: No, that’s, that’s a, that’s a hell of a markup. [Brett Goldstein]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: I mean, I didn’t get in at like 1 million. Like he, he put a hundred million of his own capital in the company first, but, um, it’s still good. Not bad. Cool. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Good job. [Brett Goldstein]: How are you? Pretty good. Just, uh, slogging away building in a enterprise productivity land. It’s pretty funny how each of us are doing like what each of us are like exceptional at. You know what I mean? Like Jacob’s superpower is like a totally like vibes and hype driven kind of thing. And it like taps into his like, you know, sales energy and like, you know, his interests and stuff. Like you’re doing the creator kind of like holding company. Kind of thing, cause you’re always like doing a million things and able to do a million things. You know what I mean? And then I’m just like so focused on like productivity products, you know, software, you know, shit. So it’s fun. It’s like, cool. I’m not gonna lie. [Michael Houck]: When I read the, I don’t know if it’s like the official manifesto or whatever, but when I read the website and also when I’ve seen your like investor update emails, of whenever you’re talking about how like, like the, the, the piece about like, Oh, like, um, this handles like your, it keeps your inbox up for people who aren’t keeping their inboxes. I’m like, Brett is saying that because I used to guilt him about that all the time. [Brett Goldstein]: You would love this. Um, I meant I talk about you in our, uh, in my pitch, my VC pitch. Okay. Because it’s all positive. I’m basically like it basically starts out with like it comes down to like my experience with my last co-founder we were total opposites in terms of how we did manage stuff like he was he was the poster child for what you would What society says you should be doing which is inbox zero like, Responding to notion comments quickly like managing all this stuff setting up all the Zapier air table stuff and I was like he’s like at this and I was the opposite. I couldn’t do any of it. Like didn’t do any of it. And the whole thesis for this company is that actually, you know, most people are more like me than they are like you. Most people are lazy, busy, dumb, you know what I mean? I wouldn’t call you dumb. I may not be dumb, but I’m maybe lazy. So, but like most people are like that and they don’t want to like, have to set up all these intricate things. And a lot of the productivity tools are designed for that type of stuff. So for sure. Yeah, let me show you the product. I can’t onboard you today because we’re literally in you’ll see we have like totally overhauled the whole thing. It looks amazing now. But we’re like hammering out some final little things and we are doing our launch in Tuesday or something. So, yeah, this is the bike. Let me check it out. Yeah. Can you see this? Yep. Okay. [Michael Houck]: So, this is micro. [Brett Goldstein]: So, it starts with this kind of like dashboard view. These are actually what we call these micros. They’re little micro apps or whatever. Okay. So, this is this is like an AI generated daily summary of like here’s everything everything going on in your inbox and your meetings and all this stuff here. Pretty helpful, we just added this in the last few days. These are like important emails, just like all the emails that are marked as important, but you can really set this to be anything. These are upcoming meetings, these are tasks that are due, this is just like a little note thing. Newsletter highlights, new connections, so people who you haven’t interacted with before, who just you interacted with first time. And then we just added this, like, uh, you know, email sends, which is kind of cool. Yeah. So, so this is the homepage and it’s really like, it’s meant to be super configurable in the future, but what’s cool is, you know, it’s, it’s a fully functional email client. So you can hop over here and you can see like, this is kind of what emails look like, You can, Yeah, create like a bunch of filters. You could see, this is kind of what the email kind of form factor, it looks nicer in dark mode sometimes, but you have like a thread summary here, you have like properties. So like all of the objects in micro have these properties. That’s cool. Have these properties and you can update these properties to be whatever you want. And this, the star basically shows like AI generated. So like if an email comes in, it’ll basically flag it as needing response or update the topics or something. And then this kind of just shows who’s in the email and this is like AI generated tasks. But the main thing is like the main use case right now is like CRM. So the CRM has a dashboard view as well. So this is cool. This is a summary, like an AI summary of all of the email and calendar activity as it relates to people in the pipeline. So if you’re doing hiring or you’re doing advertising sales, it’ll literally just read everything for you and then tell you what’s going on in there. It also highlights emails that you need to respond to, funnel overview, tasks relating to this stuff, connections relating to it, meetings relating to it. You see what I’m getting at? It’s basically for this. Yeah, exactly. So it’s like, it’s like your fundraisers, you know, this is what a normal thing looks like, This is what Notion looks like, You got your fundraise stuff. You’ve got all these cool little, you know, all the data is actually automatically updated here, so we have like a ton of data enrichment here. So you can see check size, rounds you lead, rounds they invest in, sectors, there’s connection intelligence, so like when was your first calendar meeting, when was your last email, and you can sort your contacts by that. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Brett Goldstein]: Yeah. And then, yeah, what’s cool is you can go to these profiles and see Let me just show you a better profile. All of them have these really, really rich profiles. So here’s my investor list. And we go to A16Z, and you can see this is what the investor profile looks like, So you can see this relationship summary, activity, emails that you need to respond to. We’re about to add investors. Assessments, work history, and education history. And then these are like tasks and meetings that are connected to this person or company. And of course, you can see like all of the emails that you’ve had with a given company across your accounts, across the email accounts that you have. And then all the people that you know at the company. You see that? Yep. And then you can add documents. Like, we have this cool… I’m just kind of, like, rambling here, but we have, like, full-on… Oh, so I built this. So we have, like, full-on Notion-style documents. Right? And yeah, you can use it for, like… So there’s, like, Command-K. You can search for people. But you can also use it for anything. So if you want to create a new app, you can do it for partnerships. These are just templates. But what’s cool is this isn’t ready yet, but let me like advertising. This is fake, but let me show you before you get started. Track ads for mining. So basically, it creates an app for whatever you’re doing and sets all the properties, sets all the views, sets the object type. And then you would click this button, and then you’d be thrust into this app with all the dashboard and everything set up for you. [Michael Houck]: That’s cool. Yeah. And I guess that the, the way that the dashboard thing shows up here in the future could be like pretty configurable and like maybe even intelligent based on what type of app I’m creating. A hundred percent. [Brett Goldstein]: Yeah. These are like, I almost think about these as like Apple widgets. You know how Apple widgets are super configurable. Yep. Like there’s a million different ones. Yeah. That’s that. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: That’s cool. [Brett Goldstein]: But it’s, I mean, I, I thought about you today cause I was like, Dan, how are we going to, advertising, ad sales in here. And we’re going to, we’ll have like a deal, like, I’d love to hear, see your workflow at some point, at some point, but like, we’ll have like a deal stuff. Oh, I didn’t say the most interesting part of that, the product. So, or maybe I did. So all these properties with stars on them will automatically update when there’s new emails and found directly. So, basically, Sousa Ventures emails me and said, I have a meeting with Sousa tomorrow. And they literally, the AI literally said, prepare for the meeting as the next steps. Right? Isn’t that cool? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Or? [Michael Houck]: Does it know to, like, prompt you to prepare for that meeting today rather than tomorrow? Oh, no. [Brett Goldstein]: I mean, this is just like, whenever there’s an email that comes in from anything in the in this pipeline, it’ll basically try to update the record for you. [Michael Houck]: And does it know that something should be in this pipeline? Like if you talk to, you know, random VC firm X, does it show up here automatically or do you need to like tag it to be in here? [Brett Goldstein]: So we have, so we have auto ad as a, as a feature in it where basically the AI reads the email and it tries to figure out if it should be in each of these pipelines. It does exactly exactly what you say. It’s pretty bad right now. It’s like the AI is not really ready. It thinks like a million things are like irrelevant here. [Michael Houck]: Got it. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: If there’s easy like superhuman style, like easy key commands that I can hit to target this versus that, that’s fine. Yeah. [Brett Goldstein]: This is a cool basically is all of the messages that are from people in your pipeline. So if you’re doing like a hiring pipeline, for example, it’s just all the messages from the people you’re hiring or all the people you’re, you know what I mean? Or if you have a deal flow pipeline or a portfolio founders pipeline, it’s in there. Oh, and then one nice thing is, this is cool. So these are all the attachments you’ve exchanged with any person or company. Is that cool? That is cool. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: It’s like you’re, you’re, you’re at a, by sort of doing this at the email level, you are taking away a lot of the annoying work that folks do in their existing systems and existing tools. Cause it’s like, you’re at the linch point where all that stuff kind of comes in. And if you can do this across users within a company that gets very exciting. Stop needing to even share. It’s just in the micro. [Brett Goldstein]: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, totally. Yeah, that was the observation. It’s like, you know, email’s the largest document storage system. People search email more than anything else, so why wouldn’t we just organize the documents that are inside of email? Yeah. [Michael Houck]: Not just for that, too. You have the tasks, you have the docs you can add, you have the Notion docs you can write yourself. Like, as you guys build this up more, you’re doing this at the highest leverage point in sort of the information flow that’s possible. [Brett Goldstein]: This is smart. Yep, exactly. Yeah, we have tasks in here. Which is kinda nice. Yeah. Yeah, it’s, I mean, truthfully, we’ve built a lot of shit. There’s not a ton of users right now, just because it’s been, You’ve been doing the, the notion air table figma playbook, right? [Michael Houck]: Like that’s, yeah. [Brett Goldstein]: That’s what, that’s what I’m telling people. Um, but that’s really what that’s, I mean, that’s really what it is. Like you can’t, you can’t just wake up and build an email client, just an email client in like six months, you know, it takes a long time. [Michael Houck]: And I do the superhuman thing where like I hit E and it’s away. So I never have to look at this email again. Okay. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Brett Goldstein]: Yeah, exactly, exactly. We copied all the superhuman hotkeys. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, they keep trying to do these like little weird AI things in superhuman. And I just, I know that it’s just this classic thing of like not enough, like just like shoehorned in. And so you guys definitely have an opportunity to eat their lunch there. [Brett Goldstein]: Yeah. I mean, what’s cool is it’s like, it’s really designed for AI. Like you can, you can create an unlimited number of properties that have AI automations and stuff set up for you. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, look, when it’s ready for launch or whatever, I’d love to use it and try to wean myself off of superhuman and see if I can, I’d share some feedback, obviously. [Brett Goldstein]: Yeah, so the hardest part about this is we have a ton of competitors at the same time, perceived competitors, The main use case is really the pipelines, is like the CRM stuff. This is really what we’re focused on because the reality is it takes a lot of effort to get people out of their email, but we’ll get there. [Michael Houck]: Is that the main use case that you guys are seeing for micro, or is it the main use case you guys are seeing in this space with just the competitors also? [Brett Goldstein]: Yeah. I mean you probably are familiar with the competitors it’s like Adio and Folk basically are the only real players in the um yeah they both advertise with us sometimes but they do yeah how do they do they convert pretty [Michael Houck]: well yeah I mean Adio has probably paid us like 40-50k over the last year and a half um nice they did a deep dive with us and they do a bunch of like featured placements Folk you know we didn’t lean into folk too much because we have the audio relationship, we prioritize that. But yeah, yeah, they perform well. [Brett Goldstein]: Yeah. Well, we got to figure out how to get micro in the newsletter. Since you’re an investor and stakeholder. I guess I am. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, it’s like, I still have my, my financial interests. So yeah, I mean, obviously, significant. Yeah. [Brett Goldstein]: Yeah, I’m, I’m very very bullish on this. I think… [Michael Houck]: I’ve mentioned you guys in the newsletter like two or three times too. Oh, really? Yeah, because… Oh, maybe that’s… [Brett Goldstein]: I’ll like wake up one day and there’s just like random people following me. I’m like, what’s going on over here? [Michael Houck]: If it was a Tuesday or Wednesday, then yeah, it was probably us. Okay. Because like we do the sort of startup opportunity of the week in our Tuesday newsletter. And there’ve been a couple times where it’s like adjacent to email stuff. And I’ve plugged you guys in. [Brett Goldstein]: Yeah, we’re doing we’re doing the big launch on Tuesday, which is like the anniversary of Gmail launching 21st anniversary. I hope notion mail doesn’t launch the same day. But um, we have a fancy video fancy website, going to do all the posting and I’ll send it to you when we do. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, please do. We’d love to plug it to folks. [Brett Goldstein]: I can definitely onboard you next week or something like that. But yeah, any feedback or thoughts? I guess since you’ve done the deep dive on Adio and Folk, you should… [Michael Houck]: I honestly don’t think Adio and Folk are gonna be able to stand up to this in the long run if you guys nail it execution-wise, because again, they are a CRM first that is sort of gonna try to back into some of this functionality that you guys have around like where the data is coming from Maybe that gives them an advantage because they can plug into different data sources than just email. But I think that because so much happens in email and people communicate through there, it’s actually gonna be simpler workflow wise for the end user for what you guys are doing versus what they’re doing. Yeah, I mean, I honestly, I was surprised that you just named them as competitors because I see them as sort of trying to be a little bit different. [Brett Goldstein]: You know, you’re not limited to just the CRM. Yeah, yeah. I mean, so the challenge we face is like CRM is our wedge use case because the observation is that like most early stage founders are using, not HubSpot, they’re using Sheets, Notion or Airtable. Like that’s what we did. That’s what Jacob does. It’s what everyone kind of does, even for fundraising and stuff. And obviously everyone hates it because it’s super manual and annoying to do. And then when they look around and are like, OK, cool, what should I use? They basically have Adio and Folk if they do a lot of research and find them. And then they have HubSpot. And there’s basically nothing else. And so our goal is to basically be as easy to use and beautiful and all that stuff as like a notion. So that, you know, people will be like, well, I want to use this because it’s, it’s nice, but have all of the fancy functionality of like email integration and all that stuff of a classic CRM, like Adio or Folk or something. [Michael Houck]: I think marketing wise, it’s, I think the, I think going after the, I mean, my, my instinct, obviously you’re way deeper in this than I am. But my instincts is going after it from an email angle on the marketing side is probably easier to differentiate than the CRM angle because Atio is very well funded. Everyone knows Airtable, Google sheets is super easy. Like I feel like there’s, it’s less clear to me how this would differentiate just in the quick, like split second, you get to see it on the marketing side. Um, yeah. Rather than if you’re like, hey, what if you could do everything with your email and never leave your email? Or never even have to get in touch with your email? [Brett Goldstein]: That to me sounds clearer, but I’m not super deep into it, so I don’t know. Yeah, I mean, our marketing messaging on Tuesday is really, is super aligned with that, so it’s spot on. It’s basically like, you know, we’re building a micro-application platform on top of email as a database. And the main applications that we focused on initially are the biggest pain points founders have, which are fundraising, sales, and hiring. But it just means we have to prioritize a bunch of CRM features now. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: And I think from a product perspective, that makes total sense. And I do think that the product even today looks It has a lot of what I would hope that it does. Um, so I think, I mean, it seems like you guys are prioritizing the right things on the product side, but yeah, in terms of marketing it, like I think it’s just, it’s, it’s the next superhuman. Right. And that’s like, there’s cause you don’t really have that many competitors directly there that I’m aware of Like there’s flood from like Sarah from launch house, but like, it’s not the same thing. Um, like I’ve used the product, it’s not, um, This is clearly a step up from that. [Brett Goldstein]: What’s cool is I basically look around and see all these AI email client related things. We built our system to be so flexible that we can just rip out a lot of the features that we see out there. Fixer has this awesome email labeling feature where it says needs response, waiting for reply, whatever. That’s their whole thing. Or pay us because we’re gonna label your emails. Our system is like, all that is is a multi-select property with an AI automation on it. You know what I mean? So, yeah, definitely. And what CRM do you guys use? You use HubSpot, right? We just moved over to HubSpot for ad sales outreach. [Michael Houck]: I don’t even have an account. It’s just my partnerships guy who has it. So I’m happy to have him sort of walk through what he’s setting up there. Until then, we used Airtable and we would like get leads from various places, VA would go in, enrich that data manually with the right people, the contacts you found through like Apollo or whatever. And then, yeah, it was, you know, it’s VA, it’s like four or $5 an hour, it’s fine. And so, then we would send emails out via, we were using Instantly for a while, we moved over to Salesforce. But yeah. [Brett Goldstein]: I’m using Instantly. Email marketing is a mess. Dude, it’s gonna get worse. Yeah, yeah. [Michael Houck]: Remember, I don’t know if you ever met him actually, there was this guy Matt, who’s like a Teal Fellow, he almost joined Launch House at one point, us to do them like in different, like global membership style. I don’t know if you ever met him, but, um, he’s has this like crazy data set for cold email and he’s just like a wizard with like, I don’t know. He helped grow, um, pump, you know, pump the AWS company. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: You probably know them. Um, yeah. He helped grow them to like hundreds of thousands in revenue just with his like crazy email shit. [Brett Goldstein]: Yeah, he’s really good at it. [Michael Houck]: Have you worked with him? [Brett Goldstein]: Yeah, we’ve built newsletters for people together just through cold email. Oh really? Yeah, how is it? So he’s really good. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, we partner on a bunch of stuff. He’s kind of a weird guy, but he’s a good guy. [Brett Goldstein]: Yeah, and yeah, should I mean? So in terms of marketing with this stuff like or going to market. I kind of have this like story that’s basically like top of funnel is not going to be a challenge with this because we’re going to have, you know, it’s a unique product. We have a flashy brand and website and all that stuff. We know a lot of people, a lot of startup founders and stuff like that. We’re going to do a bunch of LinkedIn and Twitter and all that stuff. I have the newsletter, but it’s, you know, it’s shrinking and, and subscribers. Oh yeah. Yeah, sure. But, um, I don’t know, like, what do you, what channels do you think would be best for this for targeting startup founders? [Michael Houck]: I mean, the tough thing is your market is pretty broad at the end of the day, right? Like there’s no, like, like startup founders is, is it like early stage folks or is it like later stage folks with teams who can see the benefit of sharing stuff among their, like, how do you define the ICP? [Brett Goldstein]: Right now, I mean, so far, I’ve basically been going off after early stage founders who are at the seed stage or something like that. I found that the super early folks basically have a problem where for fundraising, they just don’t know anybody and they want me to connect them to people. So this product works, like the product’s really amazing if you have a network, like I’d be curious to see you plug in your stuff. Because you could basically be like, I connected all my accounts, my personal, my launch house and all that stuff. And I could see all of these investors that I’ve spoken to over the years, which is insanely helpful. Because if I’m like, okay, what was my communications with craft? I literally just pop this open and I can see, okay, all this information about them. Right. Who, who do I know there? So it works better for people who have networks. [Michael Houck]: Look, I think that the easiest thing you can do and probably the most, like when you show me the product, I get it right away. It’s super obvious to me how this can be valuable. And there’s probably a lot of little actions within that experience that would trigger people to have that sort of magic moment. So what I would recommend is I can’t remember what the name this person was, um, but I can try to find their account. There’s someone who does this really well, basically just make little gifs of Like yourself doing something in the app. That’s like magical or that feels like the future compared to superhuman short, short shifts, like, you know, like, uh, or even, even short videos, I guess, but gifs are probably better. Um, cause they play, they autoplay, um, and then just make posts that are like, you know, on social that are like, wow, like amazing or whatever, like crazy, like really hype it up and be like, I found this amazing tool that lets me do all this crazy stuff. No, no, no, don’t, don’t even say that. Just, just say you found, or you can say you built it. I built this crazy email tool or whatever. Uh, and then say like, you know, leave a comment, um, saying email and I’ll DM it to you and then have it, you just tap or TweetHunter to automate those DMs and make people give you their emails in order to get it. Like DM them a link where they drop their email and then they get redirected to the tool. You’ll build a big email list that way. The posts will go viral if the GIFs are good. And you can probably do that time and time again because there are probably so many different actions within the product. You can even just not do it yourself. You can even have like, you know, your investors do it. It’s probably too cringe for the investors. But other employees at the company or your users, all that kind of stuff. [Brett Goldstein]: Yeah, that’s a good idea. Just constantly posting these little things. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, because it’s actionable and it actually is probably the highest likelihood type of post that I can think of for you guys that would go viral consistently. Yeah. [Brett Goldstein]: My thought is, I don’t know if you know the history but my thought is that like so we have like a few thousand people on the waitlist and I imagine it’ll keep going up a little bit as we launch and all that stuff and so my thought is like if I can get like I think we need like 2,000 or 3,000 kind of users to hit like a series a metric let me see 30 Yeah, like 3000 users at the at the medium tier, but we’re gonna have a higher tier. But we kind of unlock more fun if we do get to like 100. [Michael Houck]: In terms of like the, I guess technically the first round that you’ll be raising for micro. [Brett Goldstein]: Yeah, I mean, we’re, what we’re gonna do is just do like some safes and stuff right Yeah. And then the first round would probably be the series A Got it. I don’t know. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: I mean, cause I saw, I think in the last investor update, you guys are like at what, like, like burn is pretty high, right? It’s like a hundred K or something. [Brett Goldstein]: A hundred K we have like eight months or something like that. [Michael Houck]: Is that AI stuff or is that just team cost for the most part? [Brett Goldstein]: It’s this, it’s this agency, just like design agency that’s doing our website. It was a huge mistake working with them and they are earning it. And then, yeah, that’s basically it. I mean, if you guys are in a spot where you can just grab some safes, then I’d say just do it. [Michael Houck]: I really think those types of posts would do really well for you. I’m going to try to find the account that did it. There’s an account that did this like extension that could have AI generated LinkedIn comments for you. And it went viral with them. So it’s a desist because obviously they don’t want people doing that. But they had like, they did the same exact post basically like four or five times each spaced out by like a couple of weeks and did thousands and thousands of like likes and comments and stuff. Every single time and probably a lot of users for them. [Brett Goldstein]: Yeah, I could see it. I could see doing something like, oh, look, I created this dashboard for myself. Who wants it? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: Your dashboard for yourself? Like, I could see it. [Brett Goldstein]: I could see the content. You definitely see the content. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: And then like, I mean, you always do like a cold email blast too. [Brett Goldstein]: Yeah, I’ve been doing, I’ve been doing cold emails, but I find that like, are pretty low intent. You know what I mean? [Michael Houck]: Well, with cold email, you have to lead with value. You gotta just give them something. And I don’t know what you’re doing exactly in the emails, but there’s way more nuance to cold email copy than even I thought. Matt has taught me a ton about that stuff. [Brett Goldstein]: Yeah, it’s way more nuanced than I thought. Dope. This is helpful, man. I’ll keep you in the loop with the launch, and then I’ll send you a link for another actual onboarding. I want to make sure the product’s ready for you. Yeah, please do, man. [Michael Houck]: I’d love to check it out and help support the launch. I think I’m on the free Zoom right now, so we might lose time. The design agency. So we’ve realized that the best way to monetize the newsletter is through services. That’s what people want from us and they trust the brand. So grocery agency doing really well. We want to launch like two, three more agencies before the end of this year, probably financial services, maybe design and maybe legal. We’ll see. But curious your thoughts on like what makes a good design agency as somebody who A, is a strong designer B has strong opinion. He has this experience with the design. [Brett Goldstein]: Yeah, I think, I think the, the, the problem with this agency is that they don’t listen to the, to me, the customer. And they are not the best designers themselves. They think they are. So what I would do is like, yeah, what I would do is probably something like the, the, the Brett design joy guy is doing like all these people with this like subscription thing because founders like you can pull together like a fine brand and all that stuff for pretty cheap. And you can, you can, you can pitch it as like your first design agency or your first designs or your life just to get you off the ground. Um, it’s hard to find amazing designers. Um, Like I haven’t found any that are super, super crazy good that don’t work at perplexity or something. [Michael Houck]: But, um, I have, I have one, one that I like who is like thinking about shutting down their startup and jumping on this. So, um, but like, I mean, what, what would make the ideal design agency partner for you? [Brett Goldstein]: Cheap, good, fast, like that’s it. Cheap, good, fast. There’s a, there’s a girl who has an agency. It’s called cheap, good, fast. That’s the number one thing. And then also just being, I don’t know, so much trauma with this agency, but just being receptive. You hated every design agency. I’ve hated all of them. By the way, these are the guys who did runway.com. Oh, that site is cool. Yes. So I got catfished, basically. [Michael Houck]: Wait, so they did that site and they’re not good? That’s crazy to me. That’s nuts. [Brett Goldstein]: They did, well, this is actually the dirty secret with design agencies is that just because they did one good site doesn’t mean they’re gonna do another awesome site. And so the team is different. Every team that they put together is different. Oh, sure, sure. And then the other thing is like, the way they worked with Siki over two years where he just dumped money, burned tons and tons and tons of money. And they basically would work for a week, send him something, and he’d be like, start over. Work for a week, send him something, start over. [Michael Houck]: That’s impossible to do for a normal startup. That’s crazy. And then, other question, how’s the fund doing? What’s the… It’s good. [Brett Goldstein]: Big winner so far. Big winner is Solace Health, raised at 300 million. Paraform is 200. Paraform raised 200 million? At 200. [Michael Houck]: Oh, still? Wow, I’m surprised. [Brett Goldstein]: Okay. Yeah, and then Jacob, obviously, Superpower. Yeah. So, yeah. Cool. I got to run. I’m getting picked up by this VC at the airport. [Michael Houck]: Oh, go for it. One last thing. I’m working with this HVAC startup out of Atlanta. I shouldn’t show you to them because they’re raising right now, but very cool company, strong founders, and I think very strong value prop. They are looking for connections in commercial real estate to fill out their cap table. I know your uncle is super deep in that space. Yeah. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. [Brett Goldstein]: Cool. And I know a lot of those entrepreneurs in New York too. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Sweet. [Michael Houck]: All right, man.