- Duration: 26 min
- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01JT4AYVAAEWQDKWDRTDCEY4X4 (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JT4AYVAAEWQDKWDRTDCEY4X4)
Transcript
[Michael Houck]: We got 1 30 eastern yesterday, so I would have been calling you from the plane No, no, no worries at all. [Earth Koedsakul]: Yeah. Um, I mean, I appreciate you kind of just letting me know and didn’t just ghost me so Yeah, of course not. [Michael Houck]: Um Well, yeah, you’re you’re in atlanta, right? [Earth Koedsakul]: Uh, yeah, so usually I’m in atlanta. Um right now I’m actually in palo alto. It’s just oh nice. [Michael Houck]: That’s yeah It for some reason it does look like palo alto behind you Yeah, a lot of trees and stuff. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. Well, that’s cool, man. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, so I guess excited to chat and sort of see how we can help. I guess would love, I looked you up and everything, obviously. So I have some context, but I want to get more context on what you’re looking for specifically, and also maybe how we can help. And then I can tell you more about who we are, what we do, and all that stuff too. [Earth Koedsakul]: Yeah. Kind of more info about me. I obviously kind of already know I’m the head of growth here at Context. Essentially I joined late January, early February, give or take. We are a seed stage company. We raised 10 million dollars, we just haven’t announced that. [Michael Houck]: Congrats, that’s awesome. [Earth Koedsakul]: Thank you. We are currently pre-launched but we are actually launching in June 2nd. Okay. So that’s kind of why I’ve been and kind of setting meetings up, essentially, because we kind of need help with that, PR-wise. But yeah, I mean, do you know what context is? Or I can kind of give you a brief overview of what that is. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I mean, I have some context, but would love to also hear from you, just so I’m making sure I have my kind of mental framing right. [Earth Koedsakul]: So think of us as like the AI Microsoft Office. Yep. So instead of, like, separating, like, your Excel, your Word, and your PowerPoint into three different tools. We’re just combining all that on one platform and with AI. And then we can also integrate it with existing tools that you might be working with, like your Slack, your Gmail, et cetera. So essentially, the worker doesn’t have to leave the platform at all to do anything they would need. So no more going to Chachapati and researching, and then copying and pasting into a document. So you just do that. Into the platform and then like the prompt that I like to kind of give an example of is like let’s say you want to create a presentation all you would have to do is just say hey create a presentation about this topic but use the images from my google drive but also take feedback from the slack message and then pull info from this email that I received so we we the platform essentially connects all the tools but also talks and reads all the data, so it can learn, you know, how you work, your tone, and then, yeah, anything like that. So it combines all the tools together, essentially. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I mean, I think that the value prop is sort of a no-brainer, because I think one of the biggest roadblocks that I’ve seen, and we work with, you know, some AI tools, and I have some founders who I do some advising with who also are building AI companies, and one of the most common roadblocks blocks they run into is that early on, there’s this big setup work. There’s this big hump that new users have to get over. And the reason for that is because the tools don’t have that context about who the person is, what they want, where they’re at, what their writing style is like, or how they think about things. And you guys integrating, especially with Slack, I think, is really smart for that. But also, it just doesn’t really make sense for these tools to be separated anymore. Like Excel and Word. I’ve seen companies like Gamma, for example. They built the slide deck version of an AI-powered PowerPoint, basically. And they do some more stuff, too. But it just doesn’t really make sense. There’s just different form factors, like a spreadsheet versus a presentation versus a document. Why not bring them all together? [Earth Koedsakul]: Exactly. And then because a lot of these tools, you have to seed the information with data. So using chatGBT, yes, you can make it do a lot of things, but you have to still give it data in order for it to do that. This, you just connect your existing tools that already has the data. So there’s no seeding needed, essentially. So you kind of start from 100, essentially. Yeah, and I see so many people drop off because they have to go through that process. [Michael Houck]: Like, I don’t have time to do this. I’m not sure if the value is going to be there even, so it’s a big time bet that I’m making. So if you can get around that, that’s huge. [Earth Koedsakul]: Yeah, then another value prop is just merging all the tools into one. Essentially, just not switching tools. Let’s say you wanted to edit this document, but you want to use the feedback that you got on Figma or on your email or on Dropbox or whatever, you can just call it straight to the tool. Or you can have the AI do it just all you would do is just select the correct feedback, and then the AI will edit for you based on the feedback. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I’m sure you saw that interview, I mean, that Sam Alton did a few months ago, where he was like, you know, there’s two ways to build AI products right now. One is to assume that the foundation models are not gonna continue to get better at the same rate. And that’s what a lot of people are doing. And then the other way is to assume that GPT-5, for example, will be as big of an increase on June 24 as four was on three. And I feel like what you guys are doing sort of falls into that second category, because you’re basically assuming that as the models get better, it will be able to process all of this additional context, all this additional information in like more intelligent ways. So yeah, that’s exciting, man. [Earth Koedsakul]: Very cool. Yeah. So, um, yeah, so we’re pre launch, we’re launching on June 2, for launch, we’re gonna spend close to a million and a half to 2 million on launch alone. Okay, so that will be spread out across paid ads, influencers, creators, you know, etc. One of the areas that we’re lacking is PR because we don’t have any media relationships. And then that’s kind of, that’s kind of what we need help with. Essentially, we have three stories in the pipeline that we could kind of, you know, the PR agencies can pitch is like, our fundraising, we just signed a enterprise deal with Qualcomm. And then they’re also investing in us. So it’s like a investment slash enterprise deal combo thing. And then our product launch itself. Cool. Okay. [Michael Houck]: Um, so I can give you some context on who we are, so how we operate, what we do and sort of what we potentially help out with. Um, so, okay. So I’ve been a founder for a while. I’ve raised venture. We, we raised, um, 23 million in total for my last company from, Andreessen and a bunch of other folks to turn that into a fund, as weird as that sounds. And so I have the fund, and then I have a bootstrapped sort of holding company that I’ve built now over the past couple of years. You know, I built my audience up to 100k across LinkedIn and Twitter. And from that was able to build a lot of relationships with other creators. And so I built a platform called megaphone, where basically what you can do is take the URL of a social social post and we match it with creators in your niche who will amplify that post to their audiences or write new posts about whatever you sort of want them to as well. So it’s like a creator partnership platform but with the intention of sort of going viral and getting a lot of reach on social. And we have hundreds of creators with tens of millions of followers on there now and that’s sort of the the software side of things and the distribution side of things is what we offer. And then we have a, sort of from that, people were like, oh, you know, my post would probably do better if you were writing them instead of me. You’ve built this audience yourself. I’m like, yeah, but you know, I don’t have time to do that for everybody. So we sort of organically built this little ghost rating agency, content agency. And so now we work with, you know, over 30, you know, everyone from billionaire VCs to early stage founders to do LinkedIn content, X content, newsletters to sort of build that full funnel from awareness on social to trust via the newsletter to conversion to the product. So we do that for a bunch of clients now. We have a team of writers who I’ve worked with for a long time in various capacities there. So those are really the two main things we offer, content side and distribution side. Is not our specialization. I do know some folks who have great PR agencies who I’d recommend who I’ve worked with before. But if that’s the sole thing you guys are looking for, we probably wouldn’t be the best fit. But if you’re like, hey, should we build an audience around our founder’s personal brand or create a funnel from social in or partner with a bunch of creators for this launch and maybe beyond that too? [Earth Koedsakul]: Those are the things we can easily help with. Yeah, so the reason I reached out is because we’re working with the agency for our LinkedIn creators, essentially. And then we also want to target Twitter, but that’s kind of separate. For those agencies, they’re going to be targeting around 20 creators. So we would love to kind of help boost those posts if possible. So I figured maybe that would be a good way to kind of utilize the platform. And I was just wondering if that was possible or like how the platform works for distribution-wise. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, for sure. [Michael Houck]: So we would be able to set something custom up, I think, for you guys if you’re having all these different accounts posting. Basically, normally what we do is we have somebody has a set number of accounts. Maybe they have one account or two accounts or three or something. And they’re paying per account on a monthly basis to use the platform. And then some of that budget goes towards the creators to amplify content as well. But in this case, we just want to do one really big launch and or have a bunch of URLs from different accounts, things like that, we can easily set something up that that lets that happen for you guys. We do also do it from the agency side to both for LinkedIn and for Twitter. So if you want to sort of expand the number of creators that you’re working with, you know, I basically know, you know, I can’t I’m not gonna say everyone, because there’s there’s a lot of creators out there. But I know a lot of creators, and we have them on our roster, who’d be happy to Yeah, loop into this if you’d like, [Earth Koedsakul]: Got it. Okay. Um, but how does the, uh, how does that distribution work essentially? So like I give you an URL and then how, how does it get bigger? Yeah. [Michael Houck]: So basically you would, uh, you know, we set you up with an account on the platform. You would drop the URL and you’d say, here’s, uh, today the product is you set a budget per post. We’re actually moving to a model where you wouldn’t need to do that. It’s all automated, uh, based on your, your, your subscription. But right now, Now you set a budget for a post and you say, I want comments, I want reposts, I want quote posts, I want some combination of those. And I want careers from the US only or from these countries and whose audiences speak these languages. And then you can give them some context. You can say, hey, this is a big announcement or a launch. Here’s the product TLDR. Be excited about this. Right? And then what we do is we take that in, we run a matching algorithm on it to see what creators are the best fits within your budget. And then we send them the URL and that context via WhatsApp, Telegram, or SMS, whatever they’ve chosen on their end. And then they have one hour to go and engage with the post. And if they don’t engage in one hour, then we choose someone else and send it along to the next creator in that way. So it’s timely. Engagement. So the sooner you send that URL after the post is made on social, the more impact you have. [Earth Koedsakul]: Okay, got it. That makes sense. I think it would probably be beneficial if we do our like our announcement post from our CEO. So yeah, that sounds perfect. And then you said on that’s for LinkedIn, but we can also also do that as for Twitter as well. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, we have the exact same functionality on X. Yeah. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Perfect. [Earth Koedsakul]: Yeah, I mean, that’s all I need. I guess, how much would it cost us? I mean, it’s sort of up to you. [Michael Houck]: It’s like ad spend, right? It’s how much budget do you want to allocate towards creator amplification in this way? I will say that a good way to think about it, it’s actually cheaper than you’d probably think. For every 100,000 followers that a creator has, they’re roughly going increase the cost of a comment by about $10. And then for things like reposts and quotes, they can vary a lot, and in some cases be substantially more expensive because they show up on people’s individual feeds and things like that. But I’d say it would range realistically anywhere from 2 to 5x what a comment costs. So overall, if you guys are deploying a bunch of budget and want to make a big splash with this launch, there’s a lot of room here. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. [Earth Koedsakul]: What do you think if we allocated 20,000, would that be a good, like a good amount of like, or for like for one post? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: I mean, I think 20,000 would be, I don’t even know if we could spend the full 20,000 on just comments. If you also wanted us to have those creators then create posts and do it’s in their newsletters and things like that. Then yeah, 20,000 would be a great budget for that. And we’d be able to have some like meaningful placements there too. If it’s just, say, I just want engagements on the post, a couple thousand is probably all you would need, just being candid with you. But again, if we wanted to really make a splash and sort of have these creators be really behind the launch across their platforms, we could do that too. [Earth Koedsakul]: Perfect. Yeah, I mean, that sounds great. That’s kind of, we would love to do it, I guess, kind of, I guess, what are our next steps? [Michael Houck]: So you said June 2nd, so we’ve got a little bit of time. What I would say is that I will Talk with our engineers today to get a sense. Okay, if we’re gonna do this just from the sea I mean if we’re gonna do this just from the CEO’s account There’s nothing custom that needs to be done. But if you’re like, I want to pump all the post miss influencers through here, too Then you know, we would chat and set something up custom for you guys So I guess that’s that’s sort of the first question on my side is what? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: I think we’ll just do the CEO Okay, cool. [Michael Houck]: So in that case then there’s nothing custom. The software’s already set up the platforms already set up So what I would say is, in the next few days, sign up for an account on the site. And then if you guys want to do like a small test run, just like with like 100 bucks or something like that, before then, go that way. But yeah, other than that, the platform’s all set up. If you want to do sort of a larger blowout where we’re having dedicated posts, sponsored Newsletter ads did anything like that? We’d want to get started on that ASAP. So we’ll need more lead time there But if it’s just as simple as amplifying the post then yeah, feel free to just sign up and let it rip Okay, awesome. [Earth Koedsakul]: Um, if we would be interested in like the more more than just get I guess kind of how would you guys go about getting the creators or I guess since you already have them is there like that you can give me so that way we can look through them and see if they fit with the audience? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, so we’d want to lock in that we’re working together before we share our roster of creators, as you can imagine. There’s a lot like, you know, they don’t like, they care about not being flagged too much for doing paid engagement on social. So we’d want to lock that in. So I’d send over a Panda doc or something like that that just says it’s confidential and, you know, blah, blah, back and forth. Not locking into any price or anything like that, just saying that you’re not going to share the list, basically. Once we have that, then we’d want to narrow it down, like, hey, who are these creators that you want? What niches are they in? Is there a minimum follower size, et cetera, et cetera? And then at that point, we’d put together the people we’d propose, and we’d send it your way. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: OK. [Earth Koedsakul]: I guess, can we just go ahead and get started on that, then? [Michael Houck]: Cool. I will work with our ops team this afternoon to get that rolling. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Awesome. All right. Thank you, Michael. Great to meet, man. Talk to you soon. You too. Bye bye.