- Duration: 21 min
- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01JQW7VRP3QV1KMC2N2960X9VJ (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JQW7VRP3QV1KMC2N2960X9VJ)
Transcript
[Michael Houck]: Hey, how’s it going? James, how you doing man? Beard is more intense than in your LinkedIn photo. The beard needs a trim. [James Clift]: More laziness than anything. I feel you, man. How you doing? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: What’s going on? Pretty good. [James Clift]: It’s been busy times, but exciting ones. So lots to do. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: I can imagine with what you guys are building that you probably have a ton of demand and it’s a lot going on. [James Clift]: Yeah. And we’re really like expanding scope pretty soon here. So like going from AI website builder to AI that builds your whole business. So we’ve got a few more like tools launching and agents and all that stuff. So definitely exciting, but full on for sure. That’s dope. Yeah. The mission. [Michael Houck]: I, when I read the mission on your page, I was like, okay, they’ve got to be doing something more than just the website eventually. I don’t know when that’s happening, but yeah, you could tell that there’s, there’s a bigger, bigger vision behind it. [James Clift]: Yeah. A hundred percent. I’m excited to try, I forget where I saw your, stuff. I mean, I’m a subscriber to your newsletter, which is cool. Um, and then I think, um, probably on Twitter or something, but yeah, I mean, I, that’s the only context I have. And I think from what I’m looking for is, yeah, we’ve, we’re kind of just doing a reset on our content strategy generally, but newsletter is a part of that. So really want to just level up, um, both like the company columns, but also internally, like, I mean, actually like, how do I build that founder profile? If that’s like a strategy that, that makes sense. As well to kind of more like the thought leadership, et cetera. Okay. I mean, that’s helpful. [Michael Houck]: I can give you some context on who we are, how we work, all that stuff. So yeah, I mean, I built my audience to a hundred K cross platforms over the years. My newsletter then is like 80 K. My partner in the agency is Blakey mall. He was first CMO at copy AI and his audience even bigger than mine is. And we partner up. Basically, we have a small team of writers that have worked with us for years on various projects. And yeah, we work with founders. So we’re not trying to put a ton of meetings on your calendar or anything like that. Our process is pretty lightweight. Basically, we do one kickoff call where we sort of decide, all right, here are our content pillars. Here’s who has our audience right now. Here’s our plan to get them. Here’s what they care about, all that kind of stuff. And it would be you, me, and one of our writers on that call. And that writer would sort of be your thought partner, right? You’re not putting ideas into a pool here. You have one person who’s sort of your main point of contact, aside from myself, who will also be obviously very involved. And every week in a shared Slack Connect channel, they’ll share some ideas with you on Monday and specific questions about those ideas that came up in their research. If you can just respond to those with rambly voice notes where we get the full emotion and intonation and all the little nuances, that’s the most effective way to share. If we get those from you by midweek, then they’ll be incorporated into that week’s batch of content. And we’ll work early on to get a few weeks ahead so we’re not scrambling on a week-to-week basis and things like that, though we can accommodate if there’s trending topics or launches or announcements you want to do, we want to get them in on a short time basis, we can totally do that too. What we do then is we’ll get the content to you by the end of the week, and then we have an ops team that goes in and actually manages the accounts for you on social, or on the newsletter side, we’ll handle scheduling and all that stuff too. So on social, that means engaging with people who reply to you, seeking out viral posts from thought leaders in your niche, and engaging with those. You get some free impressions and maybe followers from those as well. We do profile audits. That’s for social. And that’s me basically doing a five to 10 minute video on just tweaks we can make improvements we can make. And then on the newsletter side, we handle everything from, you know, automations that get triggered. So to pull people in to try the product with some offer, if they like rate an issue well, or turn them out if they’re not opening the emails, welcome sequence, all those sort of standard stuff a little bit more. We’ll throw in there. We do have a designer and staff if you want us to take on branding the newsletter as well. Although some clients, especially startup clients, they prefer to do that themselves if they have a designer and brand already. But we can do that too. And yeah, I mean, we can work in a bunch of different newsletter formats. So we can talk through that on the strategy side of things. But yeah, that’s pretty much it. Pricing is $3K a month for social or $4K a month for a newsletter. That’s a weekly newsletter. If you want to do a bi-weekly newsletters, it’s 2K. And yeah, we can also add on like strategy. If you want like chief content officer type partner with me or with Blake, we offer that as well. [James Clift]: Pretty cool. How, like, and this is like founder, not company, right? Like it’s the individual stuff, right? Yeah. [Michael Houck]: My personal like advice would be people follow people, so we should brand it all around you. But, you know, some people will want us to take on the company accounts either as well or instead, and we’re fine with that too. [James Clift]: Okay. Have you, like, in terms of the founders that you work with, what’s the usual, like, kind of goal, I guess, right? Like, cause there’s different ways of like, kind of, I mean, our audience isn’t really on LinkedIn, but there’s lots of, company value and being the AI small business, like, like, how typically have founders like, like, what is their goal for building out their profiles? I’m sure it varies, but like, what’s your sense of like, the, the value? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I mean, look, there’s, there’s really three main goals that people have that they come to us with. One is that they want leads for their business, right? And they see content marketing as a way to generate those leads in an authentic, organic type of way. The second is that they want to grow their accounts, like their followers, in order to create an asset either outside of the company, just for themselves, or obviously as a big thing for the company, like a megaphone, a bullhorn, if you will, for the company. And then the third thing is they just want to maximize impressions and their personal brand and how they’re seen in their niche. We have a bunch of people, for example, who, you know, they don’t use social media to generate business for themselves. They don’t use it for building an audience necessarily. But what they do use it for is making sure that their posts get seen by the right people in their feed. And, you know, it can help with things like hiring or like investor conversations and things like that. So it’s a mix between those three different types. And we’d sort of tailor both the strategy in terms of post formats, post frequency and all that stuff to what the goal is. Very cool. [James Clift]: Um, is there any, um, like kind of, I mean, I don’t know what you share publicly, like case study, I guess it’s ghostwriting, but like, do you have any like people that you do share, like, Hey, we work with this founders as examples or, um, yeah, we can, we ask people on an ad hoc basis if they’re comfortable, um, like being shared. [Michael Houck]: So, uh, by default we don’t share, but, uh, When we have someone who’s thinking about becoming a client, there’s people we can ask and say, hey, are you comfortable if we share with this person? And the answer is usually yes. So I can reach out to those folks. But I always like to caveat this because people do ask this. It’s what we do for one person is going to be very different than what we do for another person. Our team can adapt to different styles, different voices. So if someone’s like, hey, we’ve gotten good results with these guys. Here’s the type of content they do And you’re like, well, I wouldn’t want that type of content on my profile. Like, you know, not, it’s not Apple is what I’m saying. [James Clift]: Yeah, for sure. It makes sense. Cool. Um, and then like kind of, um, timeline, like, like, yeah, if we say like, yes, let’s hit go, like, is this like a next week thing or is this like a schedule it out for, I don’t know, next month thing or no, no, we’re, we’re, we’re ready to go. [Michael Houck]: Um, Our team is pretty lean. We move pretty fast. We know the importance of speed. So I would be able to send over a Stripe link and a contract to you. And the contract is month to month. There’s no long-term commitment. All we ask is 30-day cancellation. So it’s effectively two months at the start, but it’s just 30-day cancellation on a rolling basis going forward from there. One thing I’ll say, also in addition to seeing if I can get someone to be kind of cool with us on them for you is a high percentage of our clients end up expanding with us because we know startups so well. And we work with startups and founders. 90% of our clients fit that demographic. We have a good percentage who start with a founder brand or start with a newsletter, and then they expand. We take on the company accounts and things like that too. And these are legit folks, YC founders, places like that. So I’ll see what I can do on a case study front, but just while we’re on the call, I wanted to share that as well. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Awesome. Yeah. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Love to see it. [Michael Houck]: Um, cool. [Michael Houck]: Um, so yeah, just, uh, just so as I go in and talk to folks, are you, would you say more interested in newsletter, more interested in social, interested in both? Where are you falling right now? Probably both. Yeah. Cool. Sounds good. Sweet. Um, try to think of anything else I should flag. But I think we covered pretty much all the important stuff. So any more questions for me right now? [James Clift]: No, I think, yeah, just send over what you got. [Michael Houck]: And yeah, good to meet. [Michael Houck]: Very efficient. I’ll chat with folks. I’ll gather what I can and I’ll send it over and we’ll go from there. Perfect. All right. [Michael Houck]: Thanks, Michael. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Thanks, James. [Michael Houck]: Good to meet you. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Thank you.