- Duration: 38 min
- Platform: zoom
- Source: Read.ai 01JRB8J6Y3V8VCS459SG77613H (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JRB8J6Y3V8VCS459SG77613H)
Transcript
[Blake Stewart]: Hey, Hauk. [Blake Stewart]: Yo, what’s up, man? [Michael Houck]: How you doing? [Michael Houck]: Doing well. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah, how are you doing? [Michael Houck]: Good. How was skiing? [Blake Stewart]: It was great. It was awesome. I mean, free place to stay in a beautiful house that was, you know, a hot tub, pool table, fireplaces. You know, hard to beat that, first of all. And then the weather was awesome. I mean, sunny, bluebird days. It was almost too hot. Without my gloves. I was sweating a bit, but, uh, yeah, it’s just an incredible place and even better when it was, you know, cheap and not spending thousands of dollars. So, um, yeah, great week. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: It sounds like the quintessential, like ski in the mountains type place to chill. And then yeah, you got in before the end of the season. So it was still, it’s still good powder out there. Yeah. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: It snowed. [Blake Stewart]: We were landing actually, and it was kind of pretty snowy. Um, I guess they got like a foot or so, a good amount of snow when we were landing. So it was kind of a sketchy landing, but yeah, good to get on the front end. And then, yeah, it was great. [Michael Houck]: It’s fine. I’m sure they put the, I’m sure they put the skis on the landing gear. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: It’s wild. [Blake Stewart]: That airport, it’s just unbelievable. You’re right at the base of the mountain. You’re basically in the national park. So you, I mean, it’s, you get off the plane and you get off on the tarmac too. There’s no like deck or anything. So you get off just in the snow and you look up and the mountains are just towering over you. But yeah, it was awesome. [Michael Houck]: I know I never been up there, but I got to make it. I was up in a little further north in Montana last fall, but want to make it down into into that area, too. [Michael Houck]: So, yeah. [Blake Stewart]: Nice. Yeah. We had gone for the summer and did some camping up there in the Tetons, which was unbelievable camping. [Michael Houck]: And then Yellowstone’s right to it so it’s nice and easy to hit both of those national parks which yeah if you get the chance you should definitely do it yeah man um well how’s everything going now that you’re getting settled in sorry for the false start with matt by the way he’s been super weird and they had like a teal fellowship uh reunion conference event over the last few days so um just been tough to kind of get a hold of him for for like a week or two honestly a little longer in some ways um so a little A little sketchy, a little flaky. So sorry for the kind of turbulence there. No, it’s fine. Yeah. [Blake Stewart]: How do you want me to handle it? Do you want me to keep pushing to take it? It seems like he doesn’t want me to. I want to do this. It’s kind of like what I’m good at. [Michael Houck]: I want you to do it too. Yeah. No. He had told me all I need is somebody to come in and help us set this up. And so I was like, all right. That should be something that we would Yeah, and then he sort of changed his tune and was like, oh it needs to be me or I need to hire someone or something like that So just not getting sort of clear messaging from him So what I would like to do is to have us basically just run one without needing to rely on him at all So, I don’t know what his sort of format is but I’m talking to Matt McGarry who runs these webinars for himself all the time. And he sent me a bunch of stuff. I need to review this later this week or this weekend. I’ll send it to you too so you can take a look at it also. But I think what we should do is plan to run one of these, I guess maybe in like roughly a month. So like sometime in early, mid May. And Yeah, I mean we’ll just source the people will communicate. Will send them comms will get them to sign up and then you and I will just need to collaborate really closely on like putting together the content for the webinar itself. So be like you know slide creation scripting like it’s heavily scripted this stuff so. We’ll just need to go through and do that process over a couple weeks, which I think is fine and we can do. But yeah, I think we should just run with it. And if you can grab those emails for like these accelerator venture backed people, I think that’s like a really clear target. Obviously, we’ll blast it out to the newsletter as well. But I think that these are people who haven’t necessarily seen our ghostwriting offer before. And so getting in front of them is the ideal way to do it. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Cool. [Blake Stewart]: Yeah, I want to have that feel of it almost be exclusive, just to kind of weed out, we want to, you know, nail that target. And so I already got have that list of YC founders. I’ll keep pulling some other ones. And yeah, I can start doing outreach to them. How do you feel about like a 10% off the first month ghost writing or something just like pull them in even more. It’s like, yes, learn about us get a discount. I think the funnel here is really important. [Michael Houck]: So actually, I would say don’t reach out to any of them yet. Yeah. What we’ll probably want to do is not offer them anything in the email, not even mention like sales or anything like that, but just say, Hey, want to learn how to build an audience or want to learn why an audience is valuable for you as a, as a founder now, now that you’ve raised money or whatever. Yeah. You know, I’ve built this big audience and here’s, um, here’s a free webinar I’m running for the next 20 people or for just 20 people. And, I felt like you could be one of those 20, basically, just make it feel really exclusive that way. And then, you know, we’ll just run this a couple times, we’ll have like a couple different versions of it. Okay. With groups of like, you know, 20 or 30 or whatever. And during the webinar, then we’ll be aggressively pitching the sales and the ghost writing. And we’ll give some some sort of exclusive discount if they sign up today or something like that. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: That works. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Blake Stewart]: 20 to 30 is a good target. Do you want, going back to the content, like obviously it’s going to be you presenting. Do you want to have any exercises in there? I think my, my framing and thought is about the platform. Like, do you want to use zoom? Do you want it to be interactive or is it just like you maybe a on the side. [Michael Houck]: I think it’d be good to have like again. I needed to dive more into math stuff to Matt McGarry stuff that he sent over, but I think it would be good to do like, Like maybe you’re interviewing me or you’re leading me through like some slides and I’m talking over them or something like that. You’re typing questions and then at the end of that or maybe maybe at some point during that we have an exercise where they go off and do something so it is interactive and then at the and we open it up for more of a Q&A. But again, I need to look through how Matt does it, because he has this down, he’s done like, he runs these like once a quarter at least, he does like six figures every time. [Blake Stewart]: Nice, wow, huge, okay. Yeah, all right. I think a little exercise would be nice, or something might be easier to pitch at the beginning as well, just to say like, hey, you’re going to walk away with four steps on how to go ahead and grow your audience. It’s not totally just in the background, them watching while answering emails. Cool line there. And then, yeah, so platform, I guess, yeah, Zoom. I mean, it’s easy to set up like an Eventbrite RSVP page. Yeah, I’m wondering if we should kind of keep it closed, more invite only, better feel for it. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I mean, even if we do do one for the broader newsletter, I think it would be good to not advertise it in the newsletter for the first one or first two even that we do, and just sort of make them literally just like we one-on-one invite, but we’re just doing like mass cold email outreach. Like a personalized invite. I’m also gonna send you some stuff from this guy, Nathan Lotka. He’s like a real scumbag who I know. And he just is, he is. It’s fine, he would say the same thing about himself. But he’s really good at webinars. And so he has a bunch of this stuff. And I can find some of his examples and send them over He’s like the best I’ve ever seen at it. [Blake Stewart]: Oh wow, okay. Yeah, perfect. Timing, you wanna like aim for an hour long event, but like have it basically, you know, 45 minutes, five minutes, five to 10 intros, your content and Q and A at the end. I think so, I think so. [Michael Houck]: As we dig into Matt’s, he said like, the whole slide deck that he uses for his. So we can always refine that, but I think that’s where my head goes to initially. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah, perfect. [Blake Stewart]: All right, yeah, exciting. [Michael Houck]: And we’ll record it and we’ll send the recording afterwards. I think one of the things Matt said is that the follow-up emails and being really aggressive with the follow-up emails is really important for conversion. So we’ll probably send one email a day for three days afterwards and another one a week after that. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Blake Stewart]: Okay. [Blake Stewart]: Yeah, so maybe we aim to get like 40 to 50 RCPs knowing that not everyone’s gonna show up 20 years later. [Blake Stewart]: Yeah. Okay. [Michael Houck]: And then just trying to think ahead, do we need, we probably do since we canceled a lot of those inboxes We need new email inboxes for this to send the invite emails because we want them to come from me. Although the volume might not be super high, so we might be able to do it from like, You know one of my main actual emails. [Blake Stewart]: I need I need to think on that, but yeah, I wonder if that could be something from the platform to like if we use eventbrite. Or whatever we use to capture RSVPs. I wonder if we could get that from there. It’s a little message. [Michael Houck]: It’s a good point. Yeah, I think, I’d probably wanna use Luma as the platform. We’ve used them before. I know their UI is pretty intuitive. We could use that for the follow-up messages, but for the outreach messages is what I’m thinking about too, because I don’t know how much volume and we want the email that people get before and after to be from the same email address, so we gotta line that up. [Blake Stewart]: Okay. I did have them reset my forwarding to my email, so I am getting those now, and if I fill out a product review on G2, they’ll give us a free domain. [Michael Houck]: This is Salesforce? Man, if I fill out an interview on G2, they’re not gonna be happy with me. But no, that’s fine. Yeah, I guess we can do that. That’s no big deal. I don’t know how expensive the domains are. They’re like 12 bucks, it’s like nothing. [Blake Stewart]: All right, so maybe not. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: Okay, so let’s, in order to do, I’m gonna start a little Notion workspace for this, I think this is going to be a lot of moving parts, so. [Blake Stewart]: OK, yeah, send that over. I’ve already got a couple. Like description, I like trying to work on some content for the description and how you want to phrase it so cool. Feedback from you on that. [Michael Houck]: OK, and I’ll dump Matt stuff in there too and whatever I can get from Nathan in there as well and then. Yeah, I guess let’s just go back and forth on that. And I think like, what’s the date today? It’s the 8th. I don’t know, let’s set like a, we’re gonna have to send emails like a week or two before this, so that people have availability. And we probably would need two weeks to warm up the emails, plus there’s time to like create the content. It could probably be overlapped with that, but let’s say two weeks, plus two weeks. So the earliest we could probably realistically do this like I don’t know the week of the 5th, but that’s actually tough week for me because I have a wedding. Early that week, so. Let’s do it. I guess that 4th week is Memorial Day. Let’s do it the week before Memorial Day. [Michael Houck]: Or is it? [Michael Houck]: Is it Labor Day or Memorial Day? [Blake Stewart]: I never, I never know Memorial Day. Yeah, OK, good. Yeah. And then what day of the week I feel like We would aim for Thursday’s Like Monday to Wednesday people are kind of head down Thursday. They start to like Lighten up, but I guess I don’t know. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, that’s what I was thinking too Like they’re starting to look ahead to the weekend might might hop on a call like this So either we could do it the 15th or the 22nd 22nd people might already be going out of the office a little bit, which actually might be good for us because the other people be going out but not the founders. So either the 15th or the 22nd is when we should aim for. [Blake Stewart]: Okay. I’ve got no preference. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay, I’ll make a note of that. [Michael Houck]: We can iron it out in like the next two weeks as we sort of get things in motion. And everything. Okay. [Blake Stewart]: Yeah, I guess the only thought is that week after the follow ups are pretty important. Oh, good point. Good point. Good point gap for Memorial Day is probably going to be less engaging. Okay, so let’s let’s aim for the 15th. [Michael Houck]: And then if we for whatever reason, get behind and can’t launch, then we can make a decision about if we want to do the 22nd or delay it into until like the end of the month or June. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Sweet, okay. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay, so it’s five weeks. [Michael Houck]: There’s gonna be a little bit of a sprint, because there’s materials to create, we gotta rehearse. But we can do it, we can do it. [Blake Stewart]: That’s fine. [Michael Houck]: And I think for the first one, I’d like to do it with not the YC Foundation, but rather like the Antler founders or the 500 startups or some other accelerator because the YC folks are probably gonna be better long-term clients and so we want to have a few reps under our belt before we go further. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: works. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Oh, I think you’re muted. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: But you’re like you’re not muted. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: I just can’t hear you or something. [Michael Houck]: Maybe you’re better now. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, there we go. Sorry typing. [Blake Stewart]: I’ve got some Accelerator contacts, I’ll reach out to him. [Michael Houck]: Well, don’t reach out yet. [Blake Stewart]: Not yet, but yeah, I’ll get a list going. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Cool. [Blake Stewart]: Yeah. Cool, all right. That feels good. Yeah, just send that Notion page when we have it, and I’ll start filling in everything to the list, and I’ll manage that. Cool. [Michael Houck]: I know it doesn’t seem like it, but I’ve gotten more serious Notion because I’ve spent the last two weeks really making our megaphone studio Notion very robust. So now, by the end of this week, I’ll be at a point where I’m like, all right, I can launch that to the team. Now let’s do the rest of our company Notion from there. So I’m working on it. [Michael Houck]: I’m working on it. [Blake Stewart]: Yeah, no worries. I love Notion. I’ve got my whole little space set up. You do a lot. It’s just how much you actually want to handle. But cool. Yeah, and then megaphone. I don’t know how much you want me involved there. It keeps coming up with other people. I had that call yesterday, and he just wanted to amplify his reach. And so I was kind of pitch megaphone, but didn’t know it too well. And so I brought it in. A couple of weeks ago, I got one, another person signed up for mega phone, but, um, Yeah, I think it’ll, it’ll probably make sense to the people who were there. [Michael Houck]: Um, so we’re launching like V3 of the product in a few weeks. Cause basically until now the product has been positioned as like a way to, you know, go viral on social media. Right. And I think what we’ve seen is that people get really excited about that conversion is really high. But because their content isn’t very good in some cases, retention can be an issue. And also, it’s not really directly tied back to business value. And so what we’re doing right now is building integrations with various CRMs. And so we’re gonna start scraping the people who engage with your content and basically make it a lead funnel into your CRM. So when we do that, I think it’ll probably make sense to loop you in more on the sort of sales side for that, the intro calls and all that stuff. So we’ll probably launch that in May, depending on how quickly the team can move this month. Okay, cool. [Blake Stewart]: Yeah, it’s interesting. Did you check out tweet scraper? Is that who you’ve been? No. [Michael Houck]: So we have a scraping engineer on the team. I’m seeing if he can do it first. If not, then we’ll probably just pay for TweetScraper and do it that way. But we also need a solution for LinkedIn, too. Right, okay. [Blake Stewart]: They might be moving that way. He just released an Instagram scraper. Oh. So, and he said more products to come, so I’m sure. Cool. [Michael Houck]: Okay, I just made a note of that because, yeah, I think with this new framing for the product. I like that. Yeah, it’s a lot easier for us to go to other platforms because we’re less dependent on. Creators, it’s more so about what you get from social more broadly. So yeah, well. Yeah, nice. [Blake Stewart]: Alright Hubspot, are you good there? This pitch Bob thing? Yeah, I think we’re just waiting on them to. [Michael Houck]: I sent them another email last night to Kelsey. I think we’re just waiting on them to give us a landing page. And then let’s plug the PitchBob thing in the newsletter. And if it does well, I’m not opposed to doing it as a dedicated blast because if it’s actually valuable for people, why not? [Blake Stewart]: Yeah, it’s definitely an interesting product. And yeah, I was talking with him directly and he seems like he’s white labeling this for other communities and accelerators. So I don’t know if I mean, we could keep running with it outside of HubSpot if needed, but [Michael Houck]: Yeah, there’s, there’s sort of, I mean, you and I should chat about this too, because, um, since we’re going to start running these social ads again for the newsletter around like our lead magnets and everything. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Right. [Michael Houck]: Um, we need to make that capital back as quickly as possible on the backend. [Michael Houck]: Right. And so when we launched like a design agency and a financial services agency, we’ll sort of have this, agency options, we’ll probably be fine then. But I was also, I was talking to Matt McGarry about this too, it would probably be in our best interest to improve the conversion of our primary like membership offering, because right now it doesn’t convert very well. And so his hypothesis was that is because there’s too much going on, and it’s not priced as thing. And so I thought that was interesting. He recommended we do a webinar funnel for that too. And basically say, when you sign up for the newsletter, you get redirected to that membership page. And the membership page is basically inviting you to join this webinar where you’re going to learn about a system that we create that helps you get your first fundraising check or get your first customers or you know, one of those two basically. And then on that we pitch the value of the membership and they sign up for like a four figure type thing. So that’s sort of a bigger and maybe a little bit lower priority shift. I think that the ghost writing thing is the highest priority because if we nail this and we can run like a monthly one of these and get five clients even every single time. We just went from being able to sell this for 1.5 to 2.5 to being able to sell it for 5 to 10 in six months. [Blake Stewart]: Yeah. Huge. Okay. Yeah. Let’s double down on what’s working. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. So I think Order of Operations is probably studio webinar number one. And then I’ll probably just loop you into the megaphones and stuff as the engineering team gets their handle on that. And then you, Ben, and I will probably all collaborate on different parts of the sort of founding journey membership update and rebrand that we do at some point later this quarter. Okay. Cool, noted. [Blake Stewart]: Landing page looks great, new one. Some of those buttons don’t work. I know you were playing around with it. [Blake Stewart]: Buttons under the pricing. [Blake Stewart]: I might just need to clear my cache too. [Michael Houck]: Under the pricing? Oh yeah, so Celine unfortunately made that an image. So I just need to update the link the image is linked to. Do you want this to go to your account only or do you want it to go to your email? [Blake Stewart]: Probably just email. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. [Blake Stewart]: Just based off of the past few months, I haven’t really been taking too many calls. Cool. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Sounds good. [Michael Houck]: All right, here, I’m going to now. Okay. Can you refresh now and let me know if it works for you? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yep. [Blake Stewart]: Perfect. Okay. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Cool. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Great. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yep. [Blake Stewart]: Thank you, nice. [Michael Houck]: Oh, I’m sure you’ve noticed this, but because we imported all those subs, our open rate has gone down because we’re gonna put in a lot of people’s promotions folder and everything, which is fine, but we just need to, actually our click rate has gone up. That’s funny, right? Yeah, it’s super funny. But they’re gonna all start getting churned out, I think this week or at the latest next week. So we’ll see a big drop in subs as a result, probably like, I don’t know, somewhere between five and 10K. But then we will see OpenRate sort of recover over the next few weeks, I would imagine. [Blake Stewart]: Okay, cool. Yeah, I didn’t know if we wanted to go ahead and adjust. [Michael Houck]: that page to say 80k so that we didn’t have to come back later, but yeah, I think we can leave it for now, but You know, yeah, we’ll be reading ads and adding for spending like what is it? What did I say? We’re gonna start at a hundred a day So we’ll be adding like 50 subscribers a day and pretty soon ramping that up to you know, like 150 200 a day. [Blake Stewart]: So Yeah, where’d you get those numbers for? [Blake Stewart]: Converting back. [Blake Stewart]: Sorry, converting what? [Michael Houck]: Like your cost for sending subscribers. [Blake Stewart]: So you’re spending money on taking people in and then you had like a projected. Oh. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I just sort of, I went into our SparkLoop account and our Beehive Boost account. I looked at like historical performance. And then I also just made some assumptions around what conversion would be like for the welcome sequence folks. The welcome sequence folks, unless they convert a lot better than I think they’re gonna convert, just my sort of math, it’s not actually gonna move the needle that much. So we might find that it’s not even worth it to do those. But we’ll see. [Blake Stewart]: It could be wrong. Okay. That’s interesting. Okay. Yeah, keep me posted there. I know Ben’s handling that, but happy to jump in. [Michael Houck]: Cool, yeah, I will. [Michael Houck]: We’ll see. We’re gonna be launching the ads probably next week. I sort of outlined the process to Ben, and then there’s probably gonna be some more stuff on the funnel optimization side that we could chat through there too. Especially if we’re gonna be doing these multiple kinds of webinars and this is gonna become like a meaningful tool on our toolkit. [Blake Stewart]: Yeah, we could advertise for that too if they start working, but I guess. Yeah, we get the email either way, so might as well, you know? Yeah, awesome. Bamboo HR, I don’t wanna push them too hard. So I’m kinda like just sending the reports and using their same copy. And like asking like, I mean, hey, you guys paid a ton of money and you just don’t care. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. Like, never have I ever seen a company spend $43,000. I’m trying to help you here. Like, let’s look, we’re making, we’re making an honest effort and we’re on a schedule with them and they’re not engaging. So that’s all we can do at the end of the day. Okay. [Michael Houck]: All right. [Blake Stewart]: We’ll keep it going. [Michael Houck]: Oh, we got to do the deep dive at some point. [Blake Stewart]: That’s the one time. And that’s like what I’m asking for. I’m like, we gave you a couple options. Just like, can you tell us what you want? What could work? [Michael Houck]: It was like this, the entire sales process, like Max, it took him a year to sell them and they had, they had committed six months into that year. And then it was just back and forth like, Oh, this person’s out. Oh, we need another approval. Oh, you know, don’t hear from him for four weeks. Then he replies like it’s, it’s the same shit for, so along with this guy. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah, whatever, okay. [Michael Houck]: So look, they paid, they signed the contract. Yeah, I mean, I guess I don’t really have to worry about much. [Blake Stewart]: Right, exactly. Their fault. Okay. Yeah, the last big thing was investor newsletter. Oh, yeah. Much. I like started to go format a new newsletter but I didn’t really do much because we don’t have enough startups in there but Andrew Young posted his recap recently here and so I don’t know if we want to just like pull a few. Have you sent this on Slack? Yeah. [Blake Stewart]: It’s in the Zoom chat but I’ll put it in Slack. [Michael Houck]: Oh the Zoom chat sorry I can grab it from there or no it looks I think you sent it to the read AI bot, not to me. It does that sometimes by default, I don’t know why. [Blake Stewart]: All right, it’s in Slack. Nez was on there, number 13, which I think. [Michael Houck]: I can’t read it, I’m not a subscriber, it’s gated. [Blake Stewart]: Oh, weird. Okay. [Michael Houck]: Either way. There are ones on there that you can hear are worth. [Blake Stewart]: Well, yeah, I trust him. [Blake Stewart]: Oh, shoot. [Michael Houck]: I’m sorry, I have to pop to a sales call. But let’s let’s have a space on this next week. I don’t think it’s it’s super urgent for the Yeah, sounds good.