- Duration: 22 min
- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01JQC44V9V4M29MFXP4M42K6XJ (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JQC44V9V4M29MFXP4M42K6XJ)
Transcript
[UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Sorry, this screen keeps changing sides. Okay. [Grace Lemire]: I’m like resetting. Hold on. Okay. What are the three to five content topics that you feel like matter most to you? They always say that like a good litmus test or like these are the topics that are at the intersection of what your business expertise is and what you really love to talk about. [Lee Schmidt]: So I would, I mean, um, my, so quick mini background for myself, like my background doesn’t stem from like, I never, I never worked in like career finance or anything like that. So like my, my experience, my particular background comes from like product and engineering. So like my personal passion is really like building, building, um, things and solutions for people, which just happens to be, I’ve been in software for so long. That’s like how I attempt to solve something. It’s like, how do I make software to like fix this? Um, but you know, as far as like, um, more like subject matter things, um, I would say I’m going to use another newsletter as an example. There’s one I subscribed to called failery. I don’t know if you guys have ever heard of that. I know Nico. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. Okay. [Lee Schmidt]: So I like in that one how there’s like, I don’t know if this is like what a content pillar is, but, and I guess your newsletter also like does this, um, you know, at the, at the start of the newsletter, right. There’s like, you know, a handful of things like, you know, here’s one thing you can take away. Here’s like one new thing or whatever. And it kind of like splits it up that way. Um, I like, I like that aspect of it, but as far as like the stuff, that are covered, I mean, I could talk a lot about budgeting and discipline and the psychology side of it. I’ve seen that resonate a lot with other people who seem to do pretty well on X. Their audience is kind of drawing comparisons or pointing out, say, hey, you see someone driving the Range Rover, but you don’t see the depth. And you know kind of stuff like that where it’s like living within your means you know right it’s not like a you know things things like that where it gets into like the money mindset and philosophy and and that sort of thing you know I think people I think like talking about like the market like you know there’s yeah I don’t know I would have to to, I guess, think about it a little more to come up with what I think would be really good content pillars. [Grace Lemire]: But yeah, I don’t know. I don’t have all the answers at this moment in time either. I think when we go through our process, the way that I work is I’ll usually send questions to you and have you give voice notes with your answers. And one thing that I pay attention to when I’m listening to those is like, how, how excited do you sound talking about this? Right. Or like, if I send you five questions, I will tell you, if you hate all of them, tell me, be like, I don’t like any of those. And I don’t want to talk about any of, you know what I mean? Like, I don’t want to talk about investing. Like that doesn’t excite me. Okay, great. Well, guess what? If we try to create a post around that, it’s probably going to sound really forced and it’s probably not going to perform as well. Right. Versus if you’re like really passionate about something, and you’re interested in it, it’s going to create far better content. And so I’ll start to pick up on patterns, too, as well, in terms of what’s interesting, what’s exciting, and also what is performing well. And we can always shift the content pillars and make little tweaks to the topics that we’re doing. This is just to get an idea of, OK, initially, what excites you and what can we do from there? And it can always evolve. It doesn’t have to be the same. Same things. [Lee Schmidt]: Yeah, I mean, I would say, yeah, maybe one way to put it would be like, if I were to break down like the different phases of a person’s like, financial life, you know, it kind of covers say, like, when you’re really early in your career, you just graduated from college, for example, you know, you want to build up an emergency fund, you know, and then after that, you’re looking at like building up retirement savings, and then you start looking in like investing and then you start thinking about you know maybe you have kids or something then you’re like saving for other people and kind of like everything that like spans your whole like life if you were to [Grace Lemire]: like break that down into like chunks to like kind of provide complete coverage there mm-hmm yeah definitely there’s levels and layers to it and I think we can definitely experiment with what the most with people on socials. And I think, I mean, this in itself is a post, right? Like here are the eight phases of, you know, like whatever, and how you should be thinking about this. And at what age do people think about it? And, or what are their regrets in all of these phases? And you’re pulling from experience, like there’s so much there. And I also love what you said about kind of like the psychology and discipline stuff. I’m very fascinated by the psychology behind courage and the psychology of behavior change. And I think that’s really where a lot of the financial stuff, like people know they should have a budget, right? But it’s like, there has to be some sort of motivator. And I think in the financial space, we see a lot of shame and fear used as motivators when that’s been proven that shame and fear are really not the best motivators for long-term change. And all of us find ourselves long-term, right? Investing is long-term. Budgeting for one month isn’t going to change your life. On a consistent basis. So I think that that will be a really interesting conversation. I think something that a lot of other brands really are not doing. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Lee Schmidt]: And I would love your, yeah, you have a really good input on this too, by the way. So I’m all ears to your ideas and thoughts as well. [Grace Lemire]: Amazing. Yeah. I’ll definitely, I mean, I’ll be brainstorming, you know, now later as we’re working together, but it’s good to know that that’s that’s important to you and not just creating kind of like the average stale finance content, because that gets old fast. Yeah. Okay. And then which formats are most on brand for you? I know you shared a little bit about this in your forum, but I think I would love to talk about it a little bit more in terms of like long form posts, threads, memes, like, and then we’ll, let’s start with for your social content and then we’ll talk from there. [Lee Schmidt]: Yeah. So, So really right now, there’s nothing that’s on brand for us, given that we have a fresh slate to work with, right? But if you ask me what seems to resonate with me and what I think we want to project and present things as, on X, for example, I would say I probably see a lot of long form posts Um, which seemed to be more like opinion based ones. And then I’ll see, um, kind of like the mold, I guess I don’t have to call it threads, like the multi, the multi tweet threads, um, where it’s sort of like kind of walking you through something to like a conclusion of some sort. I personally love when I come across X posts where it’s got like this great hook and it’s like, Hey, like this crazy thing happened or, and then let’s break it down. And then you read these six or seven bite-sized chunks of information that are just really direct. One of the questions in the form was, do you prefer direct or nuanced? I think I chose five in the middle. But it kind of depends, I guess, on what is. I think sometimes both work really well. In a long-form post, it’s probably more nuanced, maybe more opinionated. Base or something but like in those like threads it’s sort of like direct bite-sized chunks of information where you can just like tell someone something and they can take it take something away from it without having to like sit and like really digest it yeah I would say an X in finance I don’t know that I see a ton of memes or I don’t it doesn’t seem like those work too well you know at some point like we want to really like hone our social on Instagram and you know that’s like totally different topic but like yeah I think memes and tend to work like a little bit better there and connecting with like a younger audience of course. But yeah for newsletter the format that I guess you have a format that I really like for newsletters is kind of like what I was saying before, basically how Coke kind of structures his and Failery kind of structured in a similar way. I don’t know if there’s a name for that. It’s sort of like where there’s always a format that’s reused so people know what they’re going to get every time. And it’s really nice, too, because maybe not every single thing in the newsletter issue is going to be interesting to me. It’s always since it’s in a familiar format. I can like just laser I can like look at the top I can see all these two things are interesting. Let me just like scroll down to those two things and And that’s why it’s really nice to like look forward to each one because there’s gonna be like five different Topics and I know like probably at least a couple of them are gonna be interesting to me and I can easily Skim to them. Yeah, and so I think I like that format But yeah X I would say a long long form, um, threads and just, and also I guess it was like mini posts. I don’t know if it’s a thing. [Grace Lemire]: Cool. I think, um, two thoughts and we’ll move on to like posting schedule stuff. One is I think with a lot of memes in the financial space, I mean, I’m, I’m technically Gen Z. So I find that sometimes when these brands are trying to do memes, it’s like forced. Ability and they don’t land like they’re not funny It’s like you’re making this like Gen Z slang into this meme That’s just like it didn’t it’s it just didn’t hit right if there’s something that’s like relevant that’s going on we’re like you can chime in with like a real experience because I Think what’s also different is that you’re posting from like from your brand It’s your face right on on X versus these brands like rocket money. It’s like you don’t you don’t know who that is So when there’s an opportunity to combine something that you know a trending meme or whatever with a relatable experience I think it can really work and create and be like, okay Yeah, this person who’s behind this product is right there with me But I think a lot of times it comes off so forced where I’m just so hard to connect with Gen Z. It’s so bad We can experiment with that and I think also with um, I know on the form there was a lot of like you know five out of ten like middle of of the road um in terms of tone and I think with that um it’ll just be feedback feedback will just be a lot more important right so if I’m if I’m writing something and you’re like yeah this feels too serious this feels too um you know too long too short too whatever just let me know um I’m not going to take offense to the feedback that the point is to give you content that you really enjoy so if you don’t really enjoy it then let me know I don’t want to keep making content that you don’t like, So whenever there’s feedback, just let me know. And then we’ll start to figure out as we go, OK, Lee really likes a lot of content that’s 6 out of 10 seriousness and 8 out of 10 relatable and whatever. And then we’ll find what that happy medium is. But I think it’s really fair to be like, there’s a lot of 5 out of 10s. It’s like, I don’t really know exactly what I want that to look like, And we’ll figure it out as we go. And then in terms of newsletter, I’m So yeah, every newsletter that we do, we’ll kind of, we’ll pick a format for it that we feel like it’s really strong based on what competitors are doing based on the target audience. And we’ll figure out like, what is that going to look like for refresh or whatever the new name ends up being. And in that way, people will always know what’s coming. So we’ll have like the specific sections that we’ll align on. So every week, same thing, like with Hawks newsletter, people will be like, okay, you know, I opened this up. I know what I’m going to get. And I think, especially with the finance space, not everything’s going to apply. If you’ve already nailed your credit and you’ve got a good understanding of it, all that, well, then this section might not apply to you this week. But there will be other opportunities for learning because it’s going to be jam-packed with value regardless. And that’s what we want, is for people to get something out of it. Not every topic is going to be relatable to people every single week, but they should be able to extract something. So we’ll align on what that format is before we start putting them out. [Lee Schmidt]: And we can also always tweak it I’m definitely open to your sort of like thoughts there because Looking at the kind of from the sample of content that I’ve seen that like you’ve created like on Instagram for example And specifically like how it’s just like in this like straightforward relatable way. I think there are a couple of them where you shared some screenshots of a spreadsheet where you’re like, here’s what I spent. There was one of you talking about rent or something like that. And then you’re like, oh, but hey, I didn’t actually spend that much because I got a discount. So I came down to this. And it was just so straightforward where it’s like, I felt like if I were having a conversation with a friend about money, it would just come across that way. And I feel like that is appealing. I guess appealing to me. I’m a millennial. I’m 38. And that style appeals to me. I think it appeals to, like you said, your Gen Z. I guess it appeals to that age range as well. And I think it would also appeal to older people. So basically, if you have an intuition, on like how you would kind of like write something there’s probably a good chance it’s also kind of coincides with like what we’re looking for. [Grace Lemire]: Yeah, I think there’s a lot of overlap and I appreciate you saying that because that’s really what I want my content to come across as is like I want people to feel like they are just having a conversation with a friend. It’s a no judgment thing and we’re just talking about like the real life stuff like yeah my rent is this much but then I have this special and and you know you’re kind of like just explaining it the same way that you would to a friend. I think that’s way more relatable to people they want to be lectured about money they want to be like just have a conversation about it um so yeah absolutely I I think um I’ll use like my own intuition and thoughts and perspectives of course when we’re coming up with the tone and everything and then there will just be this continuous feedback loop between the two of us to where if anything ever feels like you know it’s too much of one thing versus another then we can always kind of like reset and realign um but my general writing style which is why I think how thought this would be good, you know, a good fit is kind of that like relatable, authentic voice. Okay, we have a couple minutes left, so I want to make sure we cover the last bit before we have to hop, but posting schedule. So we recommend posting social content around 8 30 a.m. And newsletter issues a bit earlier, usually like 7 a.m. Pacific earlier. Which days do you want to set to schedule? Post for do not have any preference and we can work that out. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Lee Schmidt]: I don’t think that I have a preference. I would just kind of default to whatever seems to work. If there’s any like, you know, days of the week that are just proven to have more readership or something. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: People often wonder if there is, there’s really not like, you know, even if you look across the billions of emails that be hype sends across all their newsletters, the difference in open rates between the days is like very minimal. And I would even say that it’s not like that’s not the guide we should go on. So for example, Saturday is the day that has the quote unquote lowest open rates. But I send my deep dives on Saturdays because my audience founders are in their email on Saturday anyway, and they finally have time to read something long form. [Lee Schmidt]: So yeah, I don’t like that. I don’t have too much to do right now. Right, exactly. [Michael Houck]: But like common knowledge would tell you that that’s a quote a bad decision to do that. So I think, you know, we can, we can just pick a day and try. And if we see that metrics aren’t where we want, we can change it up. But lead, I mean, do you have any intuition around like for the newsletter? Is the beginning of the week going to be best? Is it going to be weekend things similar to our deep dives or what? [Lee Schmidt]: I’m actually kind of thinking the way you said that with the weekend, I’m kind of thinking that because if a person is going to like sit down and think about their money, like if it’s, you know, If they’re gonna be going to work the rest of the day all of a sudden they have to like shift into a different mindset But on the weekend, you know, they have like a little bit time to like, you know I don’t [Grace Lemire]: know go grab some coffee think about their how much money they spend and stuff like that So I would I would kind of say like let’s maybe try weekend If you need to jump go for it I can take it from here I’ve got a doctor’s appointment at noon. I’ll stay on for two, um, two minutes. [Michael Houck]: So basically from here, uh, we just get started, right? So grace will be, uh, doing research over the next few days, um, in, in the niche. Um, and based on sort of your, your answers coming up with some initial, uh, initial thoughts, and then we’ll get you the first batch of content for review. Um, sort of in tandem with that, um, Ben from my team and myself will be going in and getting the ops for the newsletter set up. There will be some launch checklist type tasks that we need you to do for that too. So I’ll send you a Notion doc that has that all laid out, and I’ll explain it. The biggest one is the DNS settings. So we’re going to probably need a custom domain for the newsletter, and we’ll need to have the DNS record set up for sending the emails and things like that. So we’ll work together on that just or if we need to hop on a call, we can. But in most cases, we don’t. And then, yeah, Grace will send you ideas in Slack each week. Those voice notes are super helpful. That’s really what’s going to make the content unique, because we get the emotion and intonation. And yeah, then we’ll just get rolling from there. So I’m sure more things will come up. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: More questions will come up. [Lee Schmidt]: But that’s sort of the TLDR version. OK, cool. And Grace, before you hop real quick, If you’re coming, if you’re planning to go to Intermezzo at some point today and you see me here, feel free to come and say hi. That’s the craziest coincidence. I’m here like almost every day of the week. You’re in my office, yeah. [Grace Lemire]: Yeah, and I just joined this group called the St. Pete Girls Who Walk. They do like a walk every Wednesday, I guess. Oh, cool, cool. Yesterday, but one of the girls, I think she just moved from Massachusetts and she works in marketing and she, like, she messaged me because we’re, practically like the same person. So using our lunch break hour to go for a walk. I think we’re meeting at Intermezzo and then going for a walk. So if we end up walking in to grab coffee there, I’ll definitely come say hi. [Lee Schmidt]: Yeah, cool. Crazy coincidence. But yeah, great meeting you. And Hulk, is there anything we need to go over to stand for? I don’t think so. [Michael Houck]: I’ll have Ben or myself follow up with sort of the launch checklist, next steps on the newsletter side. And he’ll also follow up with access to socials and things like that. But yeah, I think we’re pretty good. Okay, cool. [Lee Schmidt]: And yeah, if you need anything else from me, normally I’m much more prompt. I know, yeah, apologies for filling out the form at 11 p.m. The night before, but I’ve just been back to back doing a million different things in the last couple of weeks. But so normally, if you send me something, you need something from me, I should generally be pretty prompt with it. [Michael Houck]: All right, man. Well, appreciate it. We’re pumped for this. I think it’s a good audience. And obviously, the pitch is strong because you have the product already. So yeah, I think it’s going to be a successful one. [Lee Schmidt]: So let’s do it. Awesome. Well, thanks, guys. Bye. All right, see you.