- Duration: 56 min
- Platform: zoom
- Source: Read.ai 01JS55J5YD99F189266QQEM59N (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JS55J5YD99F189266QQEM59N)
Transcript
[Blake Stewart]: How’s it going. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: How are you going on. [Blake Stewart]: I’m going to take a guess and say I’m better than you. Guys not having any calls today. So yeah I’m doing well. I love that man. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: No it’s it’s honestly been like a brutal week. Like I got here. I think it was last Friday. And when I got here like all my all my stuff was I was like on track with everything. And then I literally have like had like the worst week in terms of like so many little things piling up that I can’t like offload and it’s just it sucks because. I don’t know. There’s a lot like special case stuff going on like one of our clients has expanded and they brought in another team to like help with something and it’s all chaotic and then another client is doing like a creator campaign with us. And then another client is like, I don’t know, they’re like, it’s this billionaire VC, Tim Draper. And so he’s like, there’s just a lot of special considerations we’re giving to them, because we think they could be a very valuable client to have. So yeah, that on top of like normal things breaking is just I, and me being in this city trying to like, at least spend a little bit of time exploring here. Yeah, it was rough. I went to bed at four and woke up at eight, so. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yikes. [Blake Stewart]: Geez. [Blake Stewart]: What’s the weekend look like, Are you resting or you still working? Yeah. [Michael Houck]: So, yeah, I mean, I’m going to explore a little bit. There’s a couple areas I want to, like, go see, you know, have a meal there or whatever. But most of the stuff I’m doing that’s like exploratory is going to be next week. Although I did see some houses this morning, which is why I had to wake up. So, um, well, yeah, I mean, I did that in Nashville too. And, and, and Dallas too. So it’s not like, uh, it’s not like a signal, but at the same time, Charleston does seem like the best of the three. [Blake Stewart]: So, you know, yeah, I hear good things about Charleston. [Michael Houck]: That’s great. [Michael Houck]: Um, I didn’t think I’d find a place that was like walkable, like a European city, but it’d have, San Diego weather and like a great food scene and culture scene and all that stuff, too. So it’s yeah, it’s been pretty great. [Blake Stewart]: That’s awesome. Yeah. I haven’t been down there in a while. I got a buddy who lives there. He loves it. Did so Draper thing worked out? Was that through Michael or. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. [Michael Houck]: I’ve completely forgot. Yes, it did work out. We have been working with them for a couple of weeks now. And yeah, thank you for that. I need to chart better how people get in touch with us. But yeah, she’s great. Michael’s fantastic. Very on top of stuff. And we think, so we just started with like 2K a month, just like get our foot in the door type deal, make it a no brainer for them. The scope is very clearly larger than that. Like they want us to coordinate all their social media across all different properties and stuff. Up this video team and they want us to do strategy. And so I think this could turn it into our first like 10 K a month client. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: Minimum. Yeah. Minimum, minimum for sure. Yeah. But, um, yeah, I mean, it’s great. [Blake Stewart]: Um, I mean, and then they, they have a whole portfolio too, that I’m sure you could expand into. That’d be great. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: So trying to go above and beyond for them. Um, but Yeah, I totally forgot that. I feel like an idiot right now. [Blake Stewart]: No, you’re busy. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I’m good. How did you guys meet again? Remind me. I don’t know. [Blake Stewart]: I think maybe actually Joel sent over an intro to me. Joel Hansen, I introduced you a while back to be a writer, but yeah, she’s my network. And yeah, worked out. Love it. [Michael Houck]: I think that the VC angle, once we sort of establish ourselves more deeply in with Tim’s world, I think it’ll be really smart for us to reach out to more VCs and be like, Hey, we, you know, we do this for one VC. Like let’s do it. [Blake Stewart]: There’s a, yeah, it kind of went down this rabbit hole a couple months ago, just about just like VC branding. And just like that whole field is huge now. There’s so much like, I mean, VCs have to put so much effort into, you know, staying relevant and whatnot. And so I don’t know how many people actually offer that service, but [Michael Houck]: There’s probably not a lot of ghostwriters who have raised a venture fund before. [Blake Stewart]: Right. Right. That’s you can’t really pass that off. [Michael Houck]: Can’t really fake that one. All right. So yeah. But let’s let’s dive into this. Yeah. Have you, I guess, I want to do the Valley stuff primarily. That’s like the most immediate high leverage thing we can do. [Blake Stewart]: So yeah. [Blake Stewart]: Um, I have been playing around in LinkedIn sales navigator trying to create a list. Um, it’s doesn’t have as much filters as I want. So it’s like kind of hard to get down to under 2,500 like she recommended. Um, I just threw in company headquarters as a good filter. Like New York and San Francisco kind of goes down. I think this is a good angle. And so I’m down to 1K right now. I feel decent about this. [Michael Houck]: Do you want to share your screen so I can see the search? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Sure. [Blake Stewart]: I think this might be kind of the hardest part going forward is creating separate lists. [Michael Houck]: I think what’s not clear to me and like regardless regardless of how far we get with something on this call, I think the number one thing I want to take away from this call is like, we understand what are the pieces exactly that we need to do. And therefore we can plan out Okay, well, if we set this up as a weekly process that we as a team are running, what parts does it make sense for you to own? What parts does it make sense to delegate to Angelica? What parts do I need to do? And just have that sort of like clearly mapped out? Because right now, it’s not clear, because there’s so much going on in Right, yeah, I already had a couple questions too. [Blake Stewart]: Close that, but a the campaign. So it looks like I’m going to have to set up. Looks like that that didn’t transfer over from what you set up here. So like the product I would have to go in and kind of replicate as well. [Michael Houck]: Let me make sure I might have deleted it, OK? Oh no, it’s still I see called temp and writing style called help temp. [Blake Stewart]: You don’t see that? Oh, right here? [Michael Houck]: Yeah. Yeah, there we go. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. [Blake Stewart]: Okay, cool. So that’s good. Another thing was the round Robin situation. So as replies come back, it looks like they’re all gonna go to you. [Michael Houck]: I think this is Valley intent, which I don’t think is something we’re gonna be able to set up right away. Let me take a look at this again. Okay. Yeah, it’s okay. It’s weird. Settings on this page look like they’re sort of broader settings, but basically what valley intent is, is like a script that you install on your website and it tracks your visitors and pulls them in as leads for you. Our website right now is a notion doc. We can’t do that. Um, so that should change next month. But, uh, for now I don’t think any of the stuff on this page is relevant. Okay, cool. [Blake Stewart]: That works. I did connect to HubSpot. I don’t know if we want that or not, but just, I mean, just to kind of have it. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, might as well have it. Man, I would love if we could integrate directly with Beehive too, or Zapier at least. [Blake Stewart]: That would be interesting. Yeah, I’m sure they’re planning some of that one. [Michael Houck]: Let me make a note here, this is one thing. So we’ll want to send weekly batches of emails from HubSpot.in3valley to Beehive, and I can have Rina probably do that. Can you hear me? Yeah. Okay, cool. Um, yeah, so that’s, that’s probably the first little like task there. [Blake Stewart]: Okay. [Michael Houck]: Because if we’re, if you’re importing the emails automatically into HubSpot, that’s probably smart. And then, you know, we can decide what to do with those in HubSpot, but I probably also want Rena to import them into, into Beehive. So, um, cause these are our sort of target folks. So I’ll, I’ll work with her on that, just setting up a small, small process. But yeah, as we go, I’m just going to write down sort of like little, little things like that. [Blake Stewart]: I thought, yeah, no, I’ve got a long list of notes as well, especially from the first call. Um, but yeah, so here’s the list. I started to play around with, um, learn to what she had. The only difference, I guess, is a couple of these cities. [Michael Houck]: And then I excluded some function roles. [Blake Stewart]: We could probably go further, but the posting on LinkedIn is interesting. You could argue the other way around as well, that you kind of want founders who aren’t active on LinkedIn just because then it’s more of a need. It’s like, hey, you’re not being active on LinkedIn. That’s one of the biggest channels for you to grow your company. Let us kind of help you with the newsletter and LinkedIn. But obviously we want the replies. So we want to know that they’re there. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I worry that the cohort that we would be including is too heavily skewed towards people who are just like never going to check their inbox. Yeah. Plus, like folks who are on LinkedIn but aren’t seeing results, like that’s our sweet spot because we can go in and be like, you can clearly see the value, but we can’t, you know? Yeah. [Blake Stewart]: Yeah, that makes sense. I don’t really touch any of this. Yeah. Yeah. The other thing, too, is like year and company and kind of like changing job, like past role founder, like maybe a two time founder is more likely to understand the value. Why not? [Michael Houck]: But yeah, I think multi time founder might be more likely to not just see the value, but like be a lasting customer. I feel like first time founders, you know, they have ego, they have vanity, they want to build a personal brand, but they might be less committed to it as a channel, like making less of a conscious decision to commit to it as a channel. You know? Yeah. Well, one other thing I would fly, and I was thinking this when Catherine was going through all Like, we can set up so many of these different searches, like we can set up different messaging for multi-time founders versus first-time founders. So like, it’s not, and like founders that have only been in their current company for a year or so, like that can be totally different campaign and messaging if we want to get that granular. I don’t necessarily know that we’ll need to, because it seems like Valley’s AI can pull in stuff from a lot of sources and drive up response. [Blake Stewart]: Yeah, all those research agents. That just seems like a whole nother, yeah, conversation on those. [Michael Houck]: So we might be over-optimizing by like thinking we can do all these different campaigns, but I don’t know, it could also be worth a shot. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. [Blake Stewart]: Well, yeah, that’s mainly it. I guess going back to industry. Yeah. The most fitting just across like any YC founder, other, you know, tech founder, but Do they have, do they have education? [Michael Houck]: Like, like what, like school someone went to or something? Yeah. [Blake Stewart]: Down here, but you’d have to kind of type it in. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: I mean, it might be good for us to build a list of schools to target because I would imagine, I mean, Y Combinator obviously is like good to target. And that’s probably a special case that we should maybe create a separate campaign for. But yeah, it’s, you know, it’s the Harvard folks, it’s the Stanford folks. These are the ones who, you know, I feel like are going to be most, we’ve, we’ve, we’ve seen this to some degree, but I think that there are going to be folks who are more conscious of their personal brand right away. And therefore, want to build it out as part of their company. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah, I agree. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Blake Stewart]: Okay. Yeah, that’s a good idea. [Blake Stewart]: That’s great. [Blake Stewart]: Let’s talk to that. [Blake Stewart]: Um, I don’t really know what groups are. [Michael Houck]: Groups like LinkedIn has like, like, Okay. Okay. [Blake Stewart]: So process-wise, you go in, you build that search, you get the URL of Yeah, I’m trying to figure out how to save. I saved the search, but do I just like copy that or do I need to get somewhere else? [Michael Houck]: I’m not sure. I’m new to sales and app too, but I think it’s just once you like run that search, then you go. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. [Blake Stewart]: Cool. [Michael Houck]: Oh, it says my LinkedIn isn’t connected. [Blake Stewart]: That’s weird. [Blake Stewart]: Yeah. Disconnected mine as well. After I upgraded. [Blake Stewart]: Oh, that’s really weird. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. [Blake Stewart]: I, it kind of took me, it was kind of a painful process, but just like disconnecting to going back here. Yeah. [Blake Stewart]: I don’t make it hard to do that. [Michael Houck]: I do. [Blake Stewart]: reset the connection. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. [Michael Houck]: Um, okay, but let’s just, let’s run through the product. [Michael Houck]: really quick just to make sure that we both are on the same page about it because I I feel like I need to do that for for myself too. Okay so there’s the and I’ll go on the I mean you and I both have the admin view so we can just do it from the admin view but um there’s the studio which is where we create products and writing styles right and writing style is like you versus me like presumably we’d want. I mean, okay, first question. Do you think it’s worth having a unique voice for each individual person? [Blake Stewart]: I mean, not really. I mean, yes and no, like we’re reaching out to these people for the first time. So like, they’re not going to know the difference. I think we would just want to optimize for just the most. [Blake Stewart]: That’s going to convert the best. [Blake Stewart]: Apparently, I don’t really I care what my voice comes across as. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I mean, it’s like, do we write it? Like, yeah, maybe it doesn’t make sense to tie voice to sender. Maybe it’s a tie voice to ICP. Yeah. Right. OK. So I’m going to make that right. Voices per ICP. That makes sense. Rather than per sender. Okay. And then it looks like we just fill out these questions in here, like she was showing us prompts and stuff. Okay. [Blake Stewart]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: And there’s the product, which I probably just need to go in there and fill, fill it up for, do you think it’s worth having a different product for newsletters versus social media, like LinkedIn ghostwriting? Or what? What do you think? I would say so. [Blake Stewart]: Yeah, I think. Yeah. Some people are. Yeah, that’s I think that’s a big difference. Some people are going to want LinkedIn content. [Michael Houck]: Like, do you do you think we can target like because I imagine that a campaign is tied to a product. Right. So like, can we target the actual based on product? Is there an easy way to do that? [Blake Stewart]: Um, I think it’s also the the copy that’s generated. So like, if this is just if we just generate this for just the newsletter, it’s going to spit out different copy. Right. And that’s my point. Like, do we need to do that? [Michael Houck]: Does it really matter to the end user? Because we can’t like, I don’t. Okay. Is there a way for us to go on LinkedIn and say, we’re gonna run a search and find all the people who want newsletters specifically versus just like content marketing in general? [Blake Stewart]: Yeah, no, I doubt we could segment it that well, but once we get to it, yeah. [Michael Houck]: Oh, you know what? [Michael Houck]: She showed us that thing, the posts, not the searches, the alternate to pull in a list. [Blake Stewart]: Yeah, the posts. [Blake Stewart]: Yeah. I think another thought too is going back to the research agents. I wonder if we could research that they have a newsletter or like research their last LinkedIn post as well. [Michael Houck]: Like, hey, how active are they? Yep. And we use research agents to differentiate between products for messaging. My worry is that the research agents happen after we’ve already pulled in the list and set up the campaign for a specific product. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: But maybe that’s not true. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: I don’t know. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah, that’s tough. [Blake Stewart]: Okay. I think maybe what we do… [Michael Houck]: we create like a general ghost writing product. And then we also create, you know, a newsletter product and a LinkedIn product or something. Okay. We can just experiment and see how response rates are. [Blake Stewart]: I wonder if that’s something too, that we could adjust as the copy starts firing off to like start with general. Yeah. Ask some qualifying questions. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: More into it. Okay. Okay. So that’s the, studio section. Obviously the prospect section is where we add folks. We need to add the DNC list. I got to make a note for that. That’ll be, I mean, what do you think we should include in the DNC list? [Blake Stewart]: Is that like- I saw something about competitors as well. We don’t want to be contacting any other ghostwriting agencies. Oh, that’s a good point. Yeah. [Blake Stewart]: the current customers and then top competitors. [Michael Houck]: But like, should we, should we throw the whole founding journey list in there? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: I don’t know. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Maybe not. [Blake Stewart]: Maybe, maybe they do convert because they are more familiar with your brand. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, that’s probably true. That’s probably true. Okay, so existing or past customers, competitors, who else should we include on this? [Blake Stewart]: I do wonder about people I’m selling to, like past advertisers, because there is some overlap. Yep. Yep. Okay. [Michael Houck]: Plus, yeah, we probably wouldn’t be selling to the same people too. I mean, I guess we have a mix of sponsors, but I was going to say most of the sponsors are like not necessarily the founder of the company, but in some cases, I guess it actually probably is. [Blake Stewart]: I don’t know. Yeah, I would say they’re kind of different stages too, but there might be a couple overlapping. I don’t think it’s that big of a deal though. I also wonder if that’s something that would auto generate as well. Like as people say, like, no thanks or like, you know, don’t contact me. What do you mean? Like if we’re reaching out to somebody and just in the LinkedIn message, they say like, no, or like if they get annoyed that we’re messaging them all the time, that’d be nice. If the do not contact list would recognize that and populate. Oh yeah. [Michael Houck]: You have to figure that they, have that feature. I feel like that’s pretty table stakes, is it not? [Blake Stewart]: I don’t know, because they also had the, something that I am worried about that we need to take note of, is when they book a meeting. If we have this running and they book a meeting, and I don’t see that, and I can’t trigger the campaign to stop. Oh. She said there’s four ways to stop the campaign, and one of the biggest. [Michael Houck]: Right, she went into a lot of detail about that, and it seemed very arduous. [Blake Stewart]: Yeah, so like I’m gonna have to actively update that. Well, that shouldn’t be, that shouldn’t be you. [Michael Houck]: That’s something you can probably delegate to Angelica, right? Right, well, I guess the issue is this visibility. [Blake Stewart]: Like if they’re booking on your calendar, we’d have to see that to be able to stop the campaign. [Michael Houck]: Right, maybe what we can do is I can set up a- A black notification? Yeah, I can set up like a Zapier thing where every time I get a meeting book, it logs it in some Slack channel and Angelica is in that channel or something. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. [Blake Stewart]: Yeah, that’ll be good. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Stop campaign in Valley. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, that’s like a pretty annoying piece of it, actually, the fact that they can’t do that automatically. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Blake Stewart]: Okay. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Well, we’ll, we’ll try that. [Michael Houck]: I’ll try to set up a zap. [Michael Houck]: Um, I don’t, I think I can do it just from Google calendar. I don’t think it has to be through a Calendly, although it would be through a Calendly. So I guess I could just use the, the Calendly link. Okay. So here’s what we’ll do. I’ll use that Calendly link and that Calendly link will be for Megafon studios and therefore, which it already is. And so therefore when that Calendly link gets booked, it logs in the Slack channel. Angelica goes in and stops the campaign going to that person. [Blake Stewart]: Okay, perfect. [Michael Houck]: Yep Okay, and then the campaigns section If we want to set up a campaign, oh, I need to connect my linkedin account. So let me do this. Can you set up a campaign? [Blake Stewart]: It didn’t say I have any products oh, yeah doesn’t make sense because I see him here. I don’t know. Share across workspace maybe? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, maybe. There we go. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah, it doesn’t work. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay, I’ll make a note. [Michael Houck]: Maybe like I, as the person who started the account, needs to connect their LinkedIn before it’ll work or something. I don’t know. But let me make a note to do that. Okay. [Michael Houck]: So we’ll come back to that. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: And then the messages section. [Michael Houck]: So this is obviously like a meaty thing to, if we’re going to be sending a lot of these messages from what, five different people. So what do you propose is the best way to manage this? [Blake Stewart]: Um, yeah, I don’t know. She said the goal is to get to autopilot. And so we’re not going to be there for a while because I want to see how well the messages are. I mean, I could check it daily, a couple times a day. I wonder if there’s notification I don’t know where that is actually, but maybe that’s just like another Slack message, another zap for like anytime we get an inbound response in the inbox. I don’t think, well, I don’t know. Does Valley have a Zapier connection? [Michael Houck]: Because the only reason it’ll work for the other thing is because they book through account. Which has a secure connection. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah, I don’t know. [Blake Stewart]: I’m sure they have some sort of, I thought I saw it already. Once again, I guess, Valley Intent. So is this different? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Is what different? [Blake Stewart]: Your lands on your site receive slack from visitors. [Blake Stewart]: So that’s just for… [Michael Houck]: Oh, yeah. I think that’s just for Valiant 10, it says when a visitor arrives. Or I guess let’s just connect our Slack, that’s fine. Yeah, I’m not sure. Go ahead, sorry. I was just gonna, I mean, I can manage this. [Blake Stewart]: I could just have it open. And check for inbound. [Michael Houck]: I think the big thing here will be like if that’s the case, like, [Blake Stewart]: You know, I don’t want your entire day to get sucked up in this inbox, so it’s like, yeah, with 100 messages a day, potentially just be like upfront with me. [Michael Houck]: Like if you’re like, hey, this is like a ridiculous amount of time. We need to find something else and OK, let’s train Angelica or Rena or probably probably Rena because she’s in the tool already training to do it. But obviously the goal should be that we can turn on autopilot within the first, I’d say, month at the worst, hopefully. Yeah. [Blake Stewart]: I mean, yeah, once there’s some FAQs it can reference from us, and then we just tell it to book a meeting. Like, hey, do you have any more questions? Let’s just hop on a call. And then we turn that into a service call. [Michael Houck]: And then what is have you seen templates down there? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: I don’t know. [Blake Stewart]: I don’t know what this is. [Blake Stewart]: I guess this. [Blake Stewart]: Is yeah, I don’t know. [Blake Stewart]: Waiting for messages, this could just be like, you know, general responses. So like as. [Michael Houck]: Or maybe like the first outreach is the template that it always goes off of No, there’s no way that would, that would defeat the whole purpose of the tool. [Blake Stewart]: Well then maybe, yeah, I don’t know. All right. [Michael Houck]: I’ll, I’ll check in with them in Slack with like lists of questions and that’ll be on there. [Blake Stewart]: Okay. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: And inbox notifications is my main question. [Michael Houck]: Oh, we can, we can, I keep forgetting that I, I think I set my zoom to not renew. I keep forgetting to switch everything over to Google meet. So if this runs out of time, we can just hop over to a Google meet or something. Okay. Um, but okay. I guess so structurally the way we’re going to set this up is we will have, um, uh, different voices per ICP. And to start off, it’ll all be one product. And that product is ghostwriting. And then eventually maybe we add like more specific granular products for newsletter versus social media. Okay. And those will be tied to campaigns and we can’t set up a campaign at the moment, but we will. Um, And those campaigns will be tied to either sales and app searches, which we sort of know how to do now, or specific post URLs that like go viral and get a ton of people on there that we think are high intent folks. Like to go back through posts by Alex Lieberman or Clifton, whatever’s the Clifton sellers and just take the people who engage with their posts about Ghostwriting and StoryArb or LegacyBuilder respectively. [Blake Stewart]: Yeah, I had, I asked Angelica to track a few. So I’m gonna go back through these as well. [Michael Houck]: Get a list of those that we could use. All right. I guess, assuming that these blockers get taken care of with the, set up and a couple other questions that we have. Um, do you feel like we’ll be able to get something live, like, I don’t know, next week? [Blake Stewart]: Definitely. Yeah. I mean, if this campaign was picking up the product from your right age, no, you can get it live today. I mean, I don’t know why. [Blake Stewart]: Okay, cool. [Michael Houck]: Let’s do that. Then I’ll send over this list of questions to them and hopefully they get back to us I mean, it’s four, so there’s a chance they don’t, but worst case then, hopefully we can get live on Monday and just run through this next week and blow up my calendar. [Blake Stewart]: Yeah, that’d be great. I know, part of me, I want to get into the event and talk about that and get those going, obviously, but like, let’s do it. There is a chance that this just crushes it and like books you out. And then like, you don’t even want to do the events I don’t want more clients. [Michael Houck]: I mean, that is a very real, like good to have that we could have. Um, yeah, let me, let me pull this up really quick. Basically what I did is, I mean, I’ve told you the plan for the agency, right? We want to, we want to grow it, we want to build it. And then we want to sell it and have that cash to, you know, start a venture fund and seed seed the fund with it. And to be, it’s a lot easier to raise a venture fund when you yourself are putting in a few hundred K. [Blake Stewart]: Right. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. Because the investors like, Oh, this guy’s not just trying to scam me out of some money. Like that’s the end of the game. Yeah. Um, that, that, that’s what I want to do. And so I made like a checklist, like an exit checklist for, for the, for the agency. Um, I think that there’s a couple like things we need to hire, like part-time folks need to hire like a, like a meme Lord. Um, Yeah. And a content ops person so that they, the acquirer doesn’t like steal Ben from us when, when that happens. And obviously get the website up. But I think that the, there’s like a lot of stuff on this list. Like I can, I can share it with you too. I’d love your thoughts on it too. But the, the sort of highest leverage things that I think we need to prove out before we can sell, And I think I’d be ideally looking to sell like second half of this year, but the big things that maximize the multiple that I think we can sell out are creating and proving out at least one like upsell that gets high opt-in from existing clients. So that can be like, I don’t know, strategy calls that can be like megaphone platform credits. There’s multiple things that about there, but that’s one. Two is AI. So our margins are actually really good for an agency. Like we make like, I ran the numbers a couple of days ago, I think we ran like 45, 46% margin on the business right now. Which is, yeah, I mean, it’s really good. It gives us a lot of room and flexibility to do a lot. [Michael Houck]: And that’s actually without even raising prices. [Michael Houck]: We’re raising prices right now because we have some kind of case studies. But the big thing is, can we push those margins up to like, this is going to sound crazy, but like 70%, right? 80%. Can we get there? I don’t know. But if we can, the multiple we can sell at will be really, really nice. And I was talking to Greg Eisenberg yesterday and he told me that boring marketer agency. You’ve probably seen this. Yeah. You might know, I don’t know if he’s posted about this or not, but he told me it is a hundred percent automated. Wow. So he sent me some tools that I’m going to play around with this weekend. Um, but basically all of their ops work and even because it’s, it, because it’s SEO, um, and like ads he’s made, he’s built these like little like agents that do the entire thing for him. Yeah. So that’s impressive. That’s very cool. Yeah. So with content, I don’t think we can get there because I think humans need to write the content to some degree, but yeah, I do think, I mean, your writers should be able to write more, you know, they should be able to take on more clients with some, but we try to, an AI tool that was created by a different ghost writing agency that like charges very little because they’re like, Oh yeah, like we use international writers and we optimize them with AI and all this stuff. Our writers didn’t like the tool. They didn’t think it was viable. But if we can actually automate research entirely, then the amount of time they spend per post goes way down. And therefore there’s no justification to charge the same thing. So I think there’s something to that, I need to play around with it this weekend. But yeah, we have all these tools that Greg Eisenberg kind of shared now. And I’m going to see where we can get with it. So that’s number two is AI. Number three, we’ve been doing recently already, which is like doing a better job of documenting, documenting internal processes. [Blake Stewart]: You should see our megaphone studio notion, you’d be, you’d be proud of me for actually doing it. [Michael Houck]: I’ll share it right there. Yeah. Yeah, there you go. Let me drop it in. I’ll drop it in our Zoom chat here so you can. Yeah, there you go. And then number four is like, as we have these like a couple extra hires, we need to maintain margins. Raise prices on the back of like these case studies that we’re building. Um, and then the last one, and in my opinion, the most important one is, uh, creating and strengthening like resilient growth channels that are not dependent on me specifically, no key person risk in the deal. Um, and so like webinars might be one of those. Even if this value thing works. But I agree that the value thing sort of seems like potential to just blow it up in the short term. [Blake Stewart]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I do too. So that’s cool. [Blake Stewart]: I think that’s a great checklist. The margin thing’s interesting too, because like from the buyer’s point of view, they probably I want to see, like 45 seems attractive. Cause then they’re probably thinking to themselves so they could come in with AI and bump that up. They’re like, Oh, that’s, you know, that’s something I want to buy this for is cause then I could optimize it. [Michael Houck]: But yeah, that’s like, that’s like the, if we sold like a PE firm, that’s what they’d want to do. [Blake Stewart]: Yeah. Sure. Yeah. Just give them a playbook that got everything and optimize. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. Yeah. And also we’re, we’re going to fold megaphone, into the agency and combine them into one thing. Cause that’ll, that’ll give us like some like software upside in the, in the multiple too. And at this point, the agency is a much bigger business. So it’s like, we might as well, you know? [Blake Stewart]: Yeah. Nice. Okay. That makes sense. Speaking of meme Lords and P guys, this guy could pop it up. My Instagram, I gotta share it with you. It’s hilarious. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: I’ll send it to you later this weekend. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: It’s hilarious.