- Duration: 40 min
- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01JSCV3QQ2MJSPSF9RA95AWJWC (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JSCV3QQ2MJSPSF9RA95AWJWC)
Transcript
[Michael Houck]: Yeah, it looks like they changed all of our passwords, too. So I got to do that, too. Let me open that up. You can definitely tell that they are early, let’s say. [Michael Houck]: What email did I use? [Michael Houck]: Did I use Megafone Studio? No, I used Foundry Journey. OK. Yeah. We’ll see. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Hopefully, it’s not too late. [Michael Houck]: because that could be a weird problem. Yeah. Emailing everyone or LinkedIn messaging everyone. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: It goes rogue and sends like, hey, I saw that you have three arms. Why? Yeah, it’s scary. [Blake Stewart]: Should be good though. [Michael Houck]: All right, I’m back in. Oh, my link does not connect either. OK, well, that’s a problem. Yeah. All right. Ben will be joining us as well. I’m sure you saw on the invite. Basically, he has some stuff that he’s starting on the ad side, and we have this outreach stuff starting. So I figured, let’s just combine everything, and everything growth-related, at least. [Ben Ornstein]: Perfect. Hey, Ben. [Ben Ornstein]: Hey, what’s up, guys? Sorry, I was listening to some audio messages from from Matt. [Michael Houck]: Oh, what’s he saying? Oh, he is. God. Yes. So I know what that’s about. I will reach out to you about that later today. It’s not a priority. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Sounds good. [Michael Houck]: Okay, so what is a priority is growth. So I set up set this up. I think we can do this weekly as kind of needed, whether it needs 30 minutes or 60 minutes, we’ll find out. But there’s a lot of new growth stuff we’re doing. We want to lean into it over the course of at least this quarter and sort of set up processes for going forward. So I actually do think it will make sense. I know it sounds blasphemous coming from me, but to meet regularly about this for now and how long we need to do it, TBD. But the sort of three buckets that I see being part of this are ads, so subscriber for a founding journey, Ben, which you’re working on. Outreach for the agency, which Blake is working on through Valley. And then content. So Jacob won’t be joining us for these calls, but I’ll sort of play the voice of the content person here. And then we’ll work on sort of scheduling out things in the future. And Blake will work on this from like a content calendar perspective for sponsor matching and things like that. So the idea is to sort of launch all three of these things and have these just be new processes that we run. Okay, so let’s do ads first. So Ben, what, yeah, I guess last week you put together, and Blake just for your context, last week Ben put together I think 10 different different AI-created video ads that we’re going to try running some budget behind through Meta. These are ads that are basically in line with what we did before that worked really well. So these are oriented around our pitch deck database and our investor database, and also just some general ones for the newsletter. They’re all videos. Some of them have AI-generated human creators talking to the person watching it, and others are cityscapes with text and nice music and stuff like that. So I don’t know how those formats are going to perform and how our Lead Magnets will resonate with people now like they did a year plus ago, but they worked before, so I figure it’s a good place for us to get started and give it a shot. So I guess, Ben, the question for you is, are we ready? I know we have to go into Ads Manager and add them to the right ad sets and do all the logistical stuff, but aside from that, are we ready to take these live at some point today? [Ben Ornstein]: Yeah. I mean, they’re sitting here ready to be imported. I think they are pretty high quality, given the minimal amount of cost that we put into this and time. It didn’t take that much time, which is just awesome. And yeah, I mean, I guess really the last step there is putting them into meta. But just a side note, I did have Venus, I gave her for the process of like the ad, the ad libraries in the air table. So now she’s gonna be running that on a weekly basis, so. [Michael Houck]: Okay, so we’ll always sort of see new ones kind of coming in that we can use from good accounts. Yep, exactly. Cool, okay, so I think as she does that, we’ll set up a process where basically you’re just taking the best ones that come through there, coming up with some concepts quickly with these AI tool, showing them to me, on this call and pick which ones we’re going to go with that week, basically. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Cool. [Michael Houck]: Okay, so for the ones that aren’t done for this week’s batch, then let’s plan to take those live later this afternoon. And I will help write the copy that goes alongside them, and I’ll show you how to take it and spill from what we did before to make that high-performing and stuff, so you can take it over. But yeah, okay, sounds like we’re in a good place there. We don’t have last week’s performance to evaluate because we’re just starting. The other thing here is choosing this week’s new creative. So what’s on your mind initially for formats we should be testing? And feel free to share your screen if you want to show anything. [Ben Ornstein]: I don’t have anything in terms of like things to show, but based on our prior conversation, Some of those could look like static images. The ones that we have here aren’t even static. So we could try maybe one static image. In terms of an actual idea with that, nothing yet. But I feel like just as basic as it gets with a static image with text, I don’t know what that’ll look like, this the second, but I think we should also test it like on like, in addition to the videos. Yeah. And there’s the ones that you sent me previously, it was like an Apple Notes screenshot, a Slack screenshot, a Read.AI screenshot, you said, I definitely want to test those. I don’t know how I’m going to create those, but I’ll figure that out. [Michael Houck]: So yeah, if you need design support there, like Those are the kind of ones we need custom graphics for that you can try to have AI generate something like that. It might be tricky. If it is tricky, just have Celine do it. It’s no big deal. But if you do have Celine do it, that means at least a few days of head start that she needs. So if we want to review a batch of these static images and meme templates and things like that and fake message templates next Monday, just keep that in mind for time. It sounds good. [Ben Ornstein]: And then, yeah, those are the new ideas I was thinking of But I want to also try different AI model, different AI people, rather than the first two that we had. And then in terms of content, this week template, I also want to do the the other database that we have the investor database, the investor database. So in terms of content, I’ll be doing ones on that as well. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: So fully fledged out thoughts here clearly. [Ben Ornstein]: So I’ll get there. But that’s that’s generally what I’m thinking. Okay, cool. [Michael Houck]: So then basically, we can talk back and forth throughout the week about that. [Michael Houck]: But by next Monday, we want to have another batch ready to pick and choose on this call. And the three of us can jam on which ones are better and why and stuff like that. So let’s have that ready by then. And then also, we’ll want to, on this call, evaluate performance. So just make sure on Monday morning, you’re going into Ads Manager, taking a look at how things performed over the last week, and having some perspective as to why. I still don’t have access to Ad Manager, by the way. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Oh, right. [Michael Houck]: OK, well, that would be an issue then. So let me make sure that you have access Let me write that down. [Michael Houck]: OK, cool. [Michael Houck]: So then we’ll chat more later about going live this week. And we’ll write some copy and get those out today. We’re going to start with, what did I say, $100 budget per day to start? Yeah. OK. And if we see CPAs under $200, then we’ll probably quickly increase that to $150, and then $200, and et cetera. Okay, Blake, let’s talk Valley and outreach. We obviously don’t have any campaigns to evaluate yet or adjustments to make, but just give me an update, sort of where we’re at, what the plan is this week, all that stuff. [Blake Stewart]: Yeah, so still setting some stuff up. You’ve got one or you got two products listed in there. I need to copy them over. I guess, to my accounts if they’re not transferring appropriately or connect with Catherine to make sure that we could get those in everyone’s profile. And then, yeah, the campaigns will do one list from LinkedIn Sales Navigator, what we were kind of going through. So we got a list to start there. And I’ve got a list of posts as well that I want to run a couple of campaigns with. So I’ll start with this one. LinkedIn sales list, and then one post, maybe two posts, depending on how well they look. And then, yeah, we’ll see how that goes. And then, yeah, the goal there is to get on to autopilot. So I’ll be kind of tracking all the inbound messages and make sure, you know, the copy looks good. Our responses aren’t too machine-like. And yeah, just get a feel for it and then keep going. [Michael Houck]: Okay, cool. Voice and project stuff by tomorrow. And hopefully those will automatically transfer over to everyone. If not, we can ping Catherine. One question is when we are creating the list, like not for the ones we’re having from posts, but for the sales nav searches, do we need everyone on the team individually to create that search and to based on their connections? [Blake Stewart]: That’s a good question. [Blake Stewart]: I think so. But I’m not positive. [Blake Stewart]: I have a follow up question. [Ben Ornstein]: I quickly went into Valley to update my password because of Catherine’s message this morning. And I noticed my LinkedIn was disconnected again. Is that happening to you guys? Yeah, happened to us. I wanted to know if it was because I’m logging in and of all these different clients, LinkedIn’s and stuff. But okay, so that’s not the reason. [Blake Stewart]: When we all upgraded to sales navigator, and then I think it failed again, when she reset her passwords. That’s my best guess. [Michael Houck]: But yeah, it seems like the first time it was because we did things in the wrong order, what they normally have happen. And then this time was because they did something to their system. And yeah, whatever. So hopefully, that’s the end of it. [Ben Ornstein]: But we’ll see Okay, I think I have to still reconnect. [Blake Stewart]: So I’ll I’ll do that Yeah, and I’ve tried and that hasn’t worked for me yet either oh you have so you haven’t even been able to reconnect Right. [Michael Houck]: Oh, man. Okay It’s really the core function of their product. [Blake Stewart]: So it’s no big deal, you know I mean last time I had to Reset the connection or disconnect you can both are an option Um, so I’ll keep playing around with it and see what works best and let you know, but, um, I’ll ask Catherine as well. [Michael Houck]: Did you want to talk about tweet scraper? [Blake Stewart]: Yeah, let’s do that. [Michael Houck]: But one last thing on Valley would be, I think we should, uh, have like a clear goal to have campaigns live. By the end of this week. I think that’s pretty achievable. But I know I’m the blocker on some of that stuff. So I will get that taken care of ASAP. [Blake Stewart]: But let’s take things live this week. [Michael Houck]: And then we can use this time next week in this call to evaluate what’s going on. And also, if you want to flag any process quirks or bottlenecks that you’re experiencing, we can solve those problems together on this call too. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. [Ben Ornstein]: Is there anything I need to do on the, on the Valley side right now? [Michael Houck]: You’re good. You got enough on your plate. Okay. So let’s talk to each scraper. [Blake Stewart]: Cool. Okay. So there’s a couple of different tiers. So I don’t know how much you want to lean into this first, but it’s essentially a thousand emails, 5,000 emails or 10,000 emails, 20,000 emails. So 50 bucks, a hundred bucks or 250 a month. And from there, essentially you just put in a Twitter profile and it scrapes all the emails of the followers and kind of gets you kind of the bio of that follower and whatnot. You could also throw in keywords like what you’re looking for. So we could put early stage founder or something for it to look for in their bio. And it’s pretty simple. Pretty quick. So I guess, um, I sent them a list of some accounts that would make sense for both founding journey and viral examples. Um, so we could kind of refine that list and then refine other keywords to search within those follower profiles. Um, okay. Um, sounds like a no brainer. [Michael Houck]: I’ll take a look at the list of accounts you sent over. One thing I wanted to flag, and you should look into this too. So we’re also looking into this tool for the engineering side of things, because as part of Megaphone, like the platform, we are building in lead generation and auto send to people’s CRMs, whatever they might be. Anyone who engages with their social content, we run them through something like TweetScraper, and we get their email, and yada, yada, yada. Found that there’s a competitor to tweet scraper called tweet scrape calm and He says that they seem better I don’t know I’m skeptical because tweet scraper is like I see them everywhere at least like I get like 10 ads for them per day right now actually keep going to their site I’m a bias like weird bias there, but tweet scrapes Okay their top tier plan has unlimited emails. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Holy crap. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah, and it’s cheaper. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Wow. [Michael Houck]: So maybe let me know if there’s any big discrepancies between the two. For engineering’s purposes, Rafael’s Tweetscraper seems better. But if there’s a strong case to make for Tweetscraper for this, then maybe we do that. So just let me know if you find anything there that’s materially different. [Blake Stewart]: Yeah, I’ll dig into this. I mean, yeah, at first glance, it’s definitely cheaper for email. [Michael Houck]: The other difference that Rafael flagged was that I’m probably going to get this mixed up and wrong in some way. But one of them only has personal emails or something, and the other one has work and personal email, or at least lets you differentiate which one you want. But I haven’t played around with it, so I’m not sure. Yeah, that’s interesting. [Ben Ornstein]: Yeah, that’s interesting. [Ben Ornstein]: Would it even make that big a difference for getting a work email? I mean, I guess kind of I guess it would. As long as the work email is current. [Michael Houck]: The risk we run with work emails is that they’re not current. I guess we’re in the same risk with personal emails, though, to be honest. That’s true. [Blake Stewart]: Let’s say it’s got a verification process. Tweet scrape. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, but they all they all say that they all do some level of verification. [Ben Ornstein]: I guess the other thing is with work email, like, I know it like Morgan Stanley, for example, I couldn’t access my Morgan Stanley email unless I was at work on that email. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Oh, wow. Okay. Yeah. [Ben Ornstein]: I just didn’t I didn’t log into it anywhere. [Michael Houck]: So interesting. [Michael Houck]: Oh, it’s not like a security thing that they did. [Ben Ornstein]: You just you No, I I’m trying to remember now if I was physically unable to It’s possible, but that’s what that was my just my argument on my head of okay personal emails might be more valuable And of course running the risk of them being you know, someone leaving the company, of course, so yeah Yeah, it’s great does say personal and business but it’s kind of funny because it’s you know, most people don’t sign up for Twitter with their business email. [Blake Stewart]: So I don’t know why both emails would be in the database in the first place. [Michael Houck]: Well, they so the way these type of services work, they don’t actually like they can’t get the email that you have on your Twitter account. What they’re doing is they’re scraping personally identifiable information from your Twitter account. And then they’re cross referencing it with other like email databases and also using like email inference to get your work email and then sending cold email to that email to verify that it’s an active inbox. It’s a little black magic. But yeah, the work email could very well be correct. OK. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: I’ll look into both a little bit more. [Blake Stewart]: But yeah, I’m assuming tweet scrape would be better. We can pay for the highest tier then of one of them. [Michael Houck]: Because if we’re going to use it for both engineering For this, we’ll need a lot of emails. Okay. Okay. And so then we’ll test that with founding journey and with viral examples this week. We’re going to want to do like some cleaning. So when we’re importing lists like this, there is a risk that the accounts can get suspended, that like newsletters their accounts can get suspended. And so basically what we need to do, I mean, I can just reach out to Tyler if anything happens and he would unban it, but yeah, let’s be careful. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Let’s be careful. [Michael Houck]: And so there’s like, you know, basically what we should do is we should pull a few different lists and then like randomly cross sample them to create a new list that we’re creating. So there’s no like similarity with if somebody else scrapes this person followers and imports them to their, to their list. Okay. Okay. So just some, just some Google sheets, uh, you know, wizardry. Okay. [Blake Stewart]: Is it worth having some sort of separate welcome series for these people in a way? [Michael Houck]: Uh, so I actually don’t think we should have any welcome series or if we do give them a lead magnet, like lead with value. Um, so yeah, probably, probably would make sense to do that so that the first thing they get is just us giving them a gift. So yeah, that’s a good call out. [Ben Ornstein]: We should do that. [Michael Houck]: And obviously, a separate tag, too, so we can track them, right? Yes. Yep. Whenever we do the import, we’ll add some tag. But the key is that tag, we shouldn’t make it identifiable. Shouldn’t be like, scraped from Twitter. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. Cool. Okay. [Michael Houck]: So let’s, um, let me know which one you want to go with Blake and we’ll, we’ll then pay for it and then we can start doing this. [Blake Stewart]: Okay. Um, yeah, give me another couple hours and I’ll find some more views. [Michael Houck]: Cool. Yeah, no rush. Okay. Last piece, um, content. So last week I started posting on LinkedIn again, um, and I will continue that indefinitely. So it started with some memes. Two out of the three hit and did pretty well, got like low 20,000 impressions. One did not. It was more negative, so I think the lesson is if we’re gonna be meme-y from my account, we shouldn’t be negative. But then today I posted like a carousel just of like Twitter screenshots But when I first posted this a couple of years ago, it got like 1,000 likes. It’s not going to do that today because what performs well has changed. But just try to warm up the account so that we can start doing more stuff from it. So I’ll try to do. But yeah, performance, I’ve been pretty pleased. I was worried that we were going to get nothing. So the fact that we’re getting 50-ish likes on a couple And the one today looks like it’ll trend around the same. I feel like that’s a that’s a good sign It’s now like keep that up and while that’s going start creating content based on like the new formats. They’re doing well today, so I’ll be doing that Bit this weekend and also working with Jacob on it If you want Venus and I can make a reporting sheet and then if you give us access to the account we can start tracking performance Yeah, we should do that. [Ben Ornstein]: Yeah, just like we’re doing for everyone else. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. Yeah. [Blake Stewart]: If there’s any, like, mentions of other companies, like how you did Doola and Hoop in the first couple of those back, then you can kind of make a note of that as well, just so I have some more, like, a reference for any packages to sell. Like, hey, we did this for this company. That’s awesome. [Ben Ornstein]: In terms of what content in his posts? [Blake Stewart]: Yeah, if he if he just like happened to like, call out a different company. Not gonna be sponsored yet. But just so like, if we do go down the road of like, hey, I can sell the sponsored package on LinkedIn. This is what the post would look like, [Ben Ornstein]: Oh, I see what you’re saying. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, I’ll add like in that sheet. I’ll add like a column for companies mentioned or something. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. Yeah, that’d be good. I You can build that up over time. Good thinking, Blake. Okay, so then. Going to House X. [Blake Stewart]: Any luck with Twitter? I don’t think we’re gonna get it back. [Michael Houck]: I really don’t. I just don’t, I don’t understand. [Ben Ornstein]: I don’t get it. You made a one-time offense a long time ago, and then you’ve served, what, like a year suspension or something? [Michael Houck]: It’s been about nine months. Actually, less than that. Months. But yeah, so I talked with Shriram Krishnan, who’s a friend of mine. He wasn’t our partner at Andreessen, but he’s a homie. And he’s also good friends with Elon. And so he reached out to their team, or at least he told me he did, and I assume he actually did. And you know, let me see what he said He asked me do you know why they might have suspended you and I said, yeah two things I can think of one In context about the DMS and two was maybe they just don’t like that. We were building megaphone. I don’t know and so Then he said, yeah, sadly, they can’t fix this. And I said, do they give any reason why? And he said, I said, it sounds extreme. And he said, yeah, it does seem extreme, but no, they don’t ever give me context. But I’ve historically found that they only do this if they think they have cause. So basically it means that they think we were intentionally doing something to flout their rules. [Michael Houck]: That’s so weird. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yes. [Michael Houck]: It’s shitty, man. But it just means that we need to go harder on LinkedIn. We need to go harder on YouTube. We need to get back to our videos. And one platform is not going to make or break the success of our company. Obviously, it’s a high leverage one for our niche. And we had a large following there with a lot of credibility, which sucks to lose. But at this point, I think that the only way that we likely be to get it back is if one of us either personally befriends or is hired at X, and then knows people there who are willing to make changes on our behalf. So. [Ben Ornstein]: All right, Mark, I’m about to pull up a deal, spy, spying. I start tweeting at Elon every day. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: So if you guys know somebody who wants to go get a job, I will personally coach them on how to get through the interview process. And, and yeah, so that’s the only chance at this point. So I think we just move on. [Blake Stewart]: It’s not worth, you don’t want to start fresh. I know you had tens of thousands of followers, but I can’t really, so it’s, it’s banning. [Michael Houck]: I can’t get my account verified if I start a new one, because then like without being verified, we’re not going to get a lot of views. Anyway, right? My ID is tied to my first account and they’re just banning me. And right now I can’t even start an account from this computer unless I’m in like an incognito window because it’s also a device ban. [Blake Stewart]: Oh my God. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Wow. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Don’t fuck with Twitter, man. [Michael Houck]: They don’t give any fucks. That’s extreme. You don’t even know what you did. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: That’s the best part. [Michael Houck]: I have to assume it’s one of those two things. I have to assume it’s the DM thing. And then maybe they like look more into it and we’re like, Oh, like we don’t like this megaphone thing, but who knows, man, I don’t know. [Blake Stewart]: Okay. Well, the founding journey handles taken anyway, anyway, but I’ve got one follower and I haven’t posted since 2021. [Michael Houck]: During a good use, at least, um, Yeah, founding J team. That’s our that’s our team handle for typefully. So that’ll work for now. YouTube it is guys, I’m gonna be YouTube. Actually, it’s funny. I got back when LinkedIn was like actively first courting me to spend more time on LinkedIn as a linked influencer. They sent me a hoodie, which is like, it’s like a very light cream color. And it has like the LinkedIn logo on it. And then like, it’s so cringe on the arm, like like jacket style. [Blake Stewart]: It says like a link influence. [Michael Houck]: So bad is the worst thing I’ve ever seen. I think I threw it out actually. [Ben Ornstein]: But maybe that’s Yeah. I saw a tweet last week where they said like, I’d rather die than log into linkedin.com. Jesus Christ that that’s aggressive. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, people hate LinkedIn. But it’s fine. There’s opportunity there. For sure. Okay, so I don’t yet have like a plan for content going live this week, which I normally will have on this call. But we’ll we’ll start that next week. So this week, I’m going to keep posting every day. I’m also going to write and plan out content for next week and schedule it. I’m going to try to get ahead of the newsletter, too. We’ll see. That might be a week two or week three project. But yeah, I mean, we’re back. We’re back to doing content. We’ll use this meeting to keep me honest and keep me accountable for that. Yeah, that’s it. Cool. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Nice. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Good job adding more to both of y’all’s plates. [Blake Stewart]: This is neat. Just what we need, always. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: That’s what we do. [Michael Houck]: That’s what we do. Blake, I know I also owe you the checklist thing. I’ll get that to you, because there’s a lot of stuff there where I could probably use your help, too. [Michael Houck]: So I’ll leave it on that. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Sweet. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: Anything else we want to talk through today? I have not finished HALC’s picks yet. [Ben Ornstein]: I will finish that at some point today. [Ben Ornstein]: Cool. That’s one thing. I mean, I started a one-on-one list to see if there’s anything relevant to bring up right now, but there may not be. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, no worries. If not, we can, uh, we’ll talk more later. Yeah. [Ben Ornstein]: I mean, I still have like bring the podcast back the two, the two dads, YouTube strategy, the thing that we discussed last week. Um, we didn’t fully discuss that though, in terms of like an action plan to, to bring the podcast back. [Michael Houck]: I don’t think there’s any action plan right now, higher priority stuff, but, um, just wanted to flag that as like future thing that we all should be thinking about. I did message Amjad. He hasn’t responded yet, or maybe he just won’t at all. I don’t know. [Ben Ornstein]: But we’ll see. Cool. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Hey, why not? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: OK. [Michael Houck]: Cool, guys. Well, I’ll talk to you on Slack, and we’ll go from there. And I guess, Ben, let’s jam a little bit more later about the ads to actually walk through taking those live together. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Sounds good. [Ben Ornstein]: OK. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: See you guys. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: See you.