- Duration: 36 min
- Platform: zoom
- Source: Read.ai 01JS2E5X378P524YJG43BPX70M (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JS2E5X378P524YJG43BPX70M)
Transcript
[Michael Houck]: Oh, I’m sorry. [Michael Houck]: you Hi. [Michael Houck]: Hey, Dini had, sorry about that. I didn’t notify me. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: How’s it going? I’m there for a second. [Michael Houck]: Good. How are you? I’m good. [Nandini Mullaji]: I’m excited for us to chat. Yeah. Good to meet. [Michael Houck]: Great to meet you. [Nandini Mullaji]: Any friend of wallet is a friend of mine and I really trust his recommendations. I was telling him yesterday how he, well, he actually asked me if like we were on Twitter and I said, I don’t spend much time on Twitter. So we just, as a team have not really spent much time on Twitter. And I think that’s actually where a lot of our target users for Sitch are. Like a lot of guys are on X, a lot of like tech forward guys and a lot of single men are on X. So we’ve just been thinking a lot about like what’s a good strategy to follow. And to be honest, like I don’t think, you know, like I saw that you guys do LinkedIn as well. LinkedIn wise, like I’m good at doing like the founder LinkedIn stuff, but when it comes to like Twitter, I literally have no clue. So I’m really excited for us to have this conversation. Yeah, for sure. [Michael Houck]: And happy to help. While it’s great knowing each other for a while now. So actually, when you guys launched, I think I saw I saw the the launch and I went on the website and I was like, that is a brilliant idea. Because I don’t want some dating app having to swipe a bunch of times I’d much rather have an AI sort of get to know me and then a human sort of curate matches within like a It’s like, it’s brilliant. It makes a lot of sense. [Nandini Mullaji]: I appreciate that. Now we’re just trying to like get the word out as much as possible because it’s like working pretty well. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. Um, I might, I might become a customer at, uh, at some point actually. Uh, so, um, where are you located? Well, that’s the thing I’m located nowhere right now. So there’s not really, uh, yeah. So when I settled in somewhere later this year, then, uh, then I’ll be, I’ll be a customer. [Nandini Mullaji]: Okay. Amazing. Obviously very happy to have you. Well, cool. [Michael Houck]: I can give a little background on me and us and sort of how we work and then want to dive more into what your goals are on X. Sounds like it’s just user growth and awareness and things like that. So we can do it deeper though. So yeah, so I’m Michael, been a founder for a while, started a company called Launch House. We raised a bunch of money and, you know, brought a big community of founders together, ended up turning it into a venture fund after a couple years. And then since then, I’ve I’ve been building up a holding company, and we have a newsletter that goes out to 80,000 founders. I have my own audience, which is like 100K across platforms. And then we have an agency, which is the Ghostwriting Agency, and a SaaS product, which is Megaphone, which Walid, I think, shared with you too. That’s like our creator network, where you can get creators in your niche to amplify your posts, basically. So we can talk about how that fits in. But the agency is me and Blake. Who you might’ve seen on social media. He has a bigger audience than I do. He and I are in the weeds with the writers every day. I think that we’re the only agency that I know of that works directly with founders that is actually led by creators. Like, it’s not like, oh, I’m an advisor to some team. Like, no, like I’m the one in Slack with you. I’m the one on calls with you. Like, that’s how it works. So we think that’s pretty, pretty compelling and we work with founders pretty much exclusively. So we’re not trying to put a bunch of meetings on your calendar. We do one kickoff call at the beginning and then sort of any ad hoc things you wanna do from there, we’re happy to, but we’re able to get to a unique voice for you just through Slack voice notes and Notion docs and things like that back and forth. So flexible to the way that you would wanna work without taking up a bunch of your time. And basically the way it works is that we’d match you with a writer on the team And then we would have them send you ideas and questions that come up during their research every Monday in a Slack Connect channel. You would respond with a couple minute rambly voice notes where we get sort of the emotion and intonation and all that good stuff. And then we turned around and turned in batches of content by the end of the week. And yeah, we’ll work to get a couple weeks ahead, so we’re not always sort of scrambling from week to week. And then we handle all scheduling and content operations as well. We’ll be replying to the people who reply to you. We’ll be commenting on sort of thought leaders in the niche with like, you know, funny or insightful comments to drive profile views for you. And then we also have the creator network that we can, we can plug into. So it’s a pretty done for you sort of all in one type offer. And yeah, that’s what we do. [Nandini Mullaji]: That’s so helpful to understand. I actually have a question. So you said about like the voice node and like the intonation, I don’t I think my voice and my tone and my responses are actually the right tone for us to be hitting. So I’m curious if you guys, whether we can spend some time actually crafting what the correct tone on Twitter is, because I could technically provide you tons of, I have a pretty active sub stack. I’m pretty active on Instagram. The problem with Stitch is that we know how to market towards hot girls because that’s my target demographic, right? We do, we cannot, I don’t think, but I’m open to having my mind changed on this, obviously. I don’t know if my voice is the real voice of Sitch on Twitter. So that’s actually where I’m hoping for a little more expertise and a little more help in crafting what is going to appeal to your 29-year-old tech bro who is like, I’m actually kind of tired of what you said. I don’t have time to swipe. I’m building a company. I am trying to crush this thing. Like help, like I want to, we want to help you help yourself. [Michael Houck]: Okay. Well, we can definitely help with that. Cause that’s like my life. So that’s easy enough to do. Um, we can set up more time sort of in the first couple of weeks where we are hopping on calls and we are sort of writing things out, uh, showing you examples and getting your feedback on this voice versus that voice and sort of honing in on something before we’re actually going out there and posting right away. Um, I think that’s a smart strategy. If you do want to use X specifically to go after sort of a different target demographic than on other platforms. So happy to do that. We can just include that as part of it. If it becomes like a sort of a, you know, a more intense, I would say like ongoing fractional chief content officer type thing, we wouldn’t need to charge extra for that. But as sort of an initial, like, let’s get it set up. Of course, it’s just included. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Nandini Mullaji]: Yeah. Because I think it’s more just like, I think it’s pointing in on what is that voice that you know. You know what that voice needs to be. I can give you the content. I can give you the weekly, oh, this is what’s happening. This is what’s new. For instance, we’re doing a big launch on Wednesday. So I’m like, I can tell you all about the launch. I can tell you, oh, we’re launching an SF. This is what’s happening. This is the lowdown of the business. But then have you guys translate it in a way that makes more sense versus, of course, I think if we were doing this and I’m also curious if there’s you know, like to understand maybe there’s like you run the Sitch account, but maybe there’s also like someone who’s running my personal Twitter. If we want me to like build that kind of like founder Twitter thing, I’m not a hundred percent convinced I need to be on yet another platform, but again, could do that if need be. [Michael Houck]: The one thing I would say there is that the interesting way we could do that is actually not the traditional like founder led Twitter, like build the network with the investors there or something. We could do that But what we could also do, and I think we get more notoriety, is sort of lean into you as sort of the voice of the female side of this, who’s like speaking to the men who are cultivating through the Sitch account. And you would actually get a lot of male followers, I think, that way. We’d have to work on the voice and the tone. It’d probably be different than your personal voice and tone on other platforms. Maybe a little, like, provocative, I would say. But there’s definitely an angle there where like, you know, you are sort of very much embedded in that world, but sort of from a different perspective. So we can talk about that as, as we go. Yeah. [Nandini Mullaji]: I think definitely want to at least start with like sitch and like, Oh, or it’s like, I guess to you, it’s like, do, does a brand account do better or is it, should we be using like my personal account? Like, how would you think about this? Because like the outcome that I want is I basically I just want a bunch of dudes from that exact profile to join snitch. Like that is actually, I don’t care whether it’s like, and we joke because it’s like my access to my Instagram, my TikTok, everything, everyone at this point has it. And I keep telling my friends, don’t send anything weird because too many other people have access. Please text me personally. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: I mean, look, I think we could do it from either account. There is sort of the overarching like meta thing. Like people follow people before they follow brands. Generally true, right, you know. I do think on X you can build a brand account though to be pretty good. Like Beehive has done a really good job of this. And there’s, you know, acquire.com has done a really good job of this with both the founder led and the brand account content too. So there’s a bunch of these with like different voices. So I think we could take either route. I’d want to get sort of deeper into the weeds with you over the first like couple of weeks that we’re doing it. My instinct would be that it’s not sort of a blocker either way. So if you have a preference for one or the other, that’s probably where we should start. [Nandini Mullaji]: I have a preference for whatever works better. Okay, sounds good. [Michael Houck]: Well, we can experiment and test and, and we’ll dive into it. Yeah, sounds good. [Nandini Mullaji]: And can you tell me a little more on like the commercial side and like the outcomes and then maybe just like any like clients you’ve worked with that, you know, you’re comfortable sharing? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, so I can’t share specific clients. We’re pretty strict on the confidentiality thing. We do the same for you. [Michael Houck]: Okay, perfect. [Michael Houck]: But I can say we’re working with everyone from literal billionaire VCs to early stage founders and the full gamut of funded folks in between. We’ve taken one account, just an example off the top of my head. They started with us in December, I think, maybe late November, and they had 1.5K followers at the time. They’re now at 15K and they added 5K literally two weeks ago. So that’s, I’d say that’s like a big result. That’s not something I’d necessarily say we should expect, but we have seen performance like that pretty recently. So overall, I think we’d want to spend the first month sort of getting content out there. And then we’d say, all right, here’s the data points that we’re seeing. Here’s sort of how we can project goals out for three, six, 12 months from there. Before we have some data points on the voice versus the audience, it’s going to be hard for me to give you like an accurate thing there. So I’m just be making it up. Basically, and I don’t want to do that. But yeah, I think it’s safe to say that with this perspective, like, if we do this content, well, this audience of like, chronically single Twitter guys is going to absolutely love this voice. I feel like we can do something pretty fun here. Yeah. [Nandini Mullaji]: Yeah, I’m like, super open to like, a lot of like, experimental stuff, like whatnot. I think one thing that I’m really excited about is really thinking about, look, we, you know, we want to bring in the partners we think we can scale with and keep growing. We did our almost PMF when I proved our market fit in the last couple of months, and we’re doing our big outside of New York launch and whatnot. So I just think this is now becoming much more of a… It’s very top of mind for me. So yeah, so we’d love to also Einstein a little on the commercial side. Sorry, when you say the commercial It’s like, just how much, like how do you charge? Like what the, is it- Oh, like pricing. [Michael Houck]: Oh yeah, sure. Yeah, for sure. So depending on the frequency of content, like the cadence of content, our standard package is 4K per month. And that would be basically full batches of content. We’re taking over all the ops, like I mentioned, we’re doing all the profile optimization, networking through the account and things like that. You could start out with smaller batches of content if you want at either three or 2K. And if we’re at the 4K tier, I should mention that also includes some credits to use in the creator network as well. So we get some creators engaging with the content too. As you guys are growing, as your needs sort of expand, we have like strategy and fractional chief content officer packages, like I mentioned, those vary dramatically based on sort of what the scope of work is. I would say generally would expect to add a couple extra K per month, depending on what that package is. [Nandini Mullaji]: Got it. Okay. I think 4K is definitely on the higher side for us just because we’re obviously starting out right now. But would love to see maybe something on the lower side of things or what we can do that can really, I think, give us the conviction that this is the right thing. And also, I think where we’re at right now as we scale up versus where we are three, six months from now will be different in terms of what our needs are and I think what we can do. So we’d love like, you know, but I don’t I’m at the same time, I’m like nervous about being like, Okay, well, if we do less content, are we not going to be as effective? [Michael Houck]: Like, you know, how to think through this? You know, we can do I think, because the need is primarily content side, like some people like, oh, I just need a lot of operational help, or a ton of ongoing strategy help or things like that. What we can do is, if we remove sort of some of the additional parts of the package, we could bring that down to three k a month and still still have basically the full batch of content that we would deliver just without some of the extras included in that. And then if we wanted to go down to 2K a month, it would be smaller batches of content, but still enough where you’re seeing meaningful results. We have other clients at the 2K level and they’re growing. [Nandini Mullaji]: Actually, the account I mentioned is on a 2K a month plan. OK, amazing. So I think, honestly, we’re quite, like, I would I’m quite keen to try this out and see if this is, like, a good strategy for us to, like, use. So, maybe, like, next steps-wise, if you could just if you could send over, like, the proposal stuff or chat with my co-founder and then sort of get back to you on that. Yeah, sounds good. [Michael Houck]: I’ll write up a Notion doc tonight. I’ll send over all the info that you would need. Is there anything that we have not talked about that we should? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Honestly, not really. [Nandini Mullaji]: I think just whose account we’re using it from, I would leave that to you guys. I can give you a lot of content dump each week. We have a lot of documentation because we’re on so many different platforms. We have tons of information for you guys. We have tons of good content. We could streamline, like, you know, we could make your life easier by also giving you a lot of like batch stuff, like upfront each week or each month or whatnot. But no, I’m honestly just, I guess, do you guys do anything with ads? [Michael Houck]: Like running ads on various platforms? Yeah, have you done? Yeah. [Nandini Mullaji]: And how does that, like, and do you recommend that? Like if we were to like try and, if we were trying to drive like, more than followers, like I’m more interested in like, can you can I send people to my waitlist site? Can I send people to like my website? Can I send people to my app? Right? Because it’s like, I’m not so concerned if I don’t get like, okay, if we don’t go viral on Twitter, and have like 10,000 followers, like in three months, like, I’m actually okay with that. [Michael Houck]: Because if you got me 10,000 signups, that’s actually more valuable. Yep, totally. 100%. Yeah, we do we do ads across like metas platforms. We’ve run them on Twitter before as well, though, I think that’s less common for folks in general. But But yeah, we’re sort of full service. We can help with growth across the board. So if you decide budget might be better spent on ads than content, we can help with that too. We do that for my own newsletter and we’ve built an 80,000 subscriber newsletter that way. We’ve done that for clients like products and things like that. We built this for them as well. [Nandini Mullaji]: So happy to do that. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Nandini Mullaji]: No, I guess I’m I guess I’m more curious about like if you were and this is how little I know about X, but it’s like can we drive people to like sign up to a website? Can we drive them to, can we do all of that? Cause I would say those are the outcomes I’m trying to push for more than like building a following. Yeah, totally. [Michael Houck]: So what I would say is if that’s the route we wanted to go, then the answer is yes. What we would do is we’d set up like dedicated landing pages for probably a couple like lead magnets or like a quiz or something like that. When we, you know, we’d work with your team would have to provide a lot of the stuff for that like the background content for it. But we turn that into like a funnel where we run the ad, they see the ad, they fill out the quiz or they get the PDF or the lead magnet or what have you. And then when they hit the next page, that email automatically gets sent into the wait list for you guys. And you can build a newsletter on top of that or which is what a lot of people do or anything else. [Nandini Mullaji]: Okay, very interesting. And then with your just like regular, like, I guess, have you seen it with it’s like, if you know, tweets that you’re doing in the content batching, when you put links there or links to apps, like, does that, do you see traffic being driven there? Yeah. [Michael Houck]: If we’re, I wouldn’t put the links in the actual like tweets, because that’s going to depress impressions that you get on the tweets. But if you’re, if you have a tweet that’s doing well, and that’s getting some, some traction, we throw the link in a, in a reply to the tweet from the account. Um, and we say like, Hey, you know, you know, the example would be like, you know, follow here for more or something like that, or something simple. And they go to click on the page, like, you know, go here to fill out the quiz to see if you, you know, qualify for our bar for our metric service, right? Like, if you’re, if you’re, I don’t know what it would be, but no, we do, we literally say like, it’s like 5% get accepted. [Nandini Mullaji]: So it’s like, yeah, like, like, it’s like put in the link, and we’ll tell you like, if you’re like a good fit, or whatnot. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I mean, and if you advertise that with like, hey, we’re really good at marketing to like attractive women, and we have a lot of attractive women on this app, then like, that’s gonna work really well. Yeah, so 100%. My gut says either strategy could work well for you. It depends on what the budget level is that you’re comfortable with, because with ads, you know, it can get up there pretty quickly, because you’re spending, you know, if we were, if we were to spin up a campaign around something like that, like a quiz or a lead magnet, and idea would be that they get added to the wait list afterwards. Could probably acquire subscribers for, or not subscribers, but, but emails for roughly like anywhere from like low end, very low end, one 50 high end, like two 53 dollars. Um, more like $2 is the average I would say. Um, so if we say $2 per, like, just think about that, like that’s how many you would get per month based on whatever your budget is versus on the content side, you would probably convert. Fewer folks, unless we have like post go really viral, which of course is possible, but you’d also get the sort of like brand awareness, brand cache in the, in the, in the culture of Twitter, which could drive a lot of organic folks too. So it’s hard to do like attribution one way or the other against the two and compare them. If I were you, I would value the brand building a little bit because you’re also going to get some waitlist signups that way. But if the goal is, Hey, we just want to do the waitlist as much as possible right now, then I’d say let’s probably go the ad route in the short term and focus on the brand later. But my gut would lean more towards the branding stuff. Okay. [Michael Houck]: That’s, that’s good to know. [Nandini Mullaji]: And then would you, I guess, like, there’s also a part of me that’s like, do you do, do we do both? Like, do we do a little bit of brand building? And then like, cause I think it’s like, you don’t have like an empty page or you want to have it where it like feels a little bit that, but then you do the, um, you do some degree of ads. The other thing with ads is how does this change if I’m asking for phone numbers rather than emails? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Hmm. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. [Michael Houck]: So the first part of the question is, um, doing both. Yeah. I would say, you know, we’re obviously going to be spreading the budget thin at that point, right? Unless you’re saying, Hey, let’s just throw a bunch of money at this, which, okay, fine. But, um, it is good to have some pages that people can go back to and see, content on there for sure. But most people are not going to click into your profile before they click into the ad and do the action of the ad. It’s like a small percentage. So I don’t see that as a huge blocker for something like this. For the second part of the question, which was, sorry, my brain is blanking right now. [Nandini Mullaji]: If we switch, instead of getting emails, if we were getting phone numbers, the reason I’m saying that is because we are really good at comms. Like if you gave me an empty, like a database of core leads, of phone numbers, we usually get an 11% conversion rate. [Michael Houck]: 11% is good for text. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. Cool. Yeah. So if we wanted to do phone numbers, we don’t have, I don’t think we have any active clients who are running phone numbers. I have run them before for my old company, but it’s been a little while. We could do it. I don’t know exactly what the difference in terms of like opt-in would be, but if we’re focusing on ads, my suggestion would be that We run some budget towards both and see what performs better and then just double down after a month or two on what’s performing best. [Nandini Mullaji]: OK, that is very like, yeah, I think with like emails, it’s just been hard. Like even when we have emails like just like people clicking and then being like, oh, I’m going to download an app like whatever else. The other thing is we’re going to have a phone number that you can call it. Like you should totally do the [Michael Houck]: You should totally do it like focus on phone numbers and assuming that we don’t see. A huge better performance for emails. I think also just with the brand you guys are building and with it being a matchmaking service, phone numbers just makes more sense. So intuitively, that’s where my mind would go, but I would want to test it for a couple of weeks just to see if we do see much better performance for email first. [Nandini Mullaji]: We also, I guess, we have a literal phone number that users can call. Which is like an AI voice. But it’s fine. [Michael Houck]: Okay, so I’d be speaking to you, but you as an AI, and the idea would be your AI. [Nandini Mullaji]: You do the full onboarding through that. [Michael Houck]: It learns about me and then sort of collects. Wow, that’s really smart. That’s great. I love that. [Nandini Mullaji]: So I feel like there’s just a lot we can do, and I just know that Twitter’s the right, like, I just am like, I know we need to spend time and money on this. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, look, I mean, I love I like the idea of driving people to text the number or call the number. Can they text it too, or is it just calling? [Nandini Mullaji]: If they text it, it’ll just say, hey, give us a call. But we can also build whatever flow we want. If you text the number, and then it’s like, hey, here’s a whatever. We can do it. There’s a million things we can do. [Michael Houck]: I feel like the best option would be just putting myself in the shoes of seeing post or an ad that mentions this, I would want the ability to text it first. And then like it’s sort of subtly as we’re talking, be like, Hey, why don’t we just hop on a call? Or when are you free for a call? We can go deeper on this, right? Like that, that to me would be a good flow. Cause then you’d get a lot of people in sort of the top of that funnel texting it. And then some percentage convert to my, my guess is you get a higher number of people who talk to it on the phone. If you have that intermediary step where they’re texting it. Yeah. [Nandini Mullaji]: Because the minute you’re like, Oh, tell us about your dream person. It’s like, people are like, give me the phone. Like, I’m just going to call you right now. This is irritating. Right. [Michael Houck]: But at the same time, if I see that in like a post or like an ad and it’s like, hey, call me and we’ll talk about this. Like, I’m going to be like, I’m working right now. Like, I don’t have time to call you right now. Maybe I’ll call you later, but I’m not going to remember to save the number from this ad, you know? So yeah. Yeah. I think texting to calling makes a lot of sense. And then I really think that we could hit it from either angle ads or content. So I don’t feel super strongly about that. If you’re like, let’s just get, let’s just do an initial test where we get a certain amount of people using this system, then okay, let’s throw some ad budget behind it and just get some data for you guys. But if it’s like, where are we going to see the most results over the course of like a six to 12 month period? [Michael Houck]: It’s hard to say. [Michael Houck]: Um, I would lean towards the content just because I think you could build a very interesting brand that would get a lot of organic attention in the tech space this way. But that’s just my take. [Nandini Mullaji]: When you’re writing up the proposal, if you could tell me what a split or a heavier split or maybe an earlier like, hey, we’re going to run ads at first and then we’re going to do a little more like a 75-25% split, what that might look like, Because I have also this gut somewhere that says that We can build a pretty good brand, but it’s just a question of time. And if I have to focus on one, at least right now, signups is more exciting to me because we have a crazy word of mouth loop. We get 40% of our users come through friends. So people are really liking the experience. So that’s really that. [Michael Houck]: Let’s just get as many people into that process as possible. So yeah, I think that’s fair. I’ll write up a couple different sort of options and paths that we could take. I’ll send that over either tonight or at the very latest tomorrow. And we can touch base next week and sort of see where you guys are thinking. Is there like a range of budget that I should keep in mind or like a max cap that I should do everything under just so I know how to sort of write it up? [Nandini Mullaji]: So honestly, we’re probably looking like assuming if you’re going with like the $2 per phone number ish. Right. Like I would say if you can get me to like a thousand thousand five hundred per month on that. So like kind of looking at a budget around like two to three. [Michael Houck]: Cool. That works. We can have a lot of different options within there. So I will get to work on that. I’ll send that over. Let’s say within the next 24 hours or so. [Nandini Mullaji]: And then face next week. Yeah. Well definitely touch base next week. I’m really like I’ll just preemptively say I’m really excited about this. I would love us to figure out the proposal and get started sooner rather than later. Especially because we actually have a launch on Wednesday. So if we can somehow miraculously get stuff ducks in a row before that, that would be amazing. Because I know that you guys are the right people to help us amplify that launch on Twitter. And I actually like, fortunately, unfortunately, work 24 seven. So feel like, like, you may or may not get an email from me at like 3am tonight. [Michael Houck]: Perfect. [Nandini Mullaji]: And then you will get a response from me at 545. So okay, cool. I’ll send that over tonight. [Michael Houck]: And we’ll try to lock this in tomorrow. And then we can get started. [Nandini Mullaji]: Next week. [Nandini Mullaji]: Amazing. Talk soon.