- Duration: 36 min
- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01JT498SRBVGD7H4BTAE7SEMWE (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JT498SRBVGD7H4BTAE7SEMWE)
Transcript
[Sara Belcher]: we go. [Sara Belcher]: How’s it going? Good. How are you? Good. [Michael Houck]: I’m jet lagged, but good. I just got to Hawaii yesterday and I’m like 11 in the morning for me. So I’m still early. [Sara Belcher]: It’s the end of my day. [Michael Houck]: How are you? You’re in Brooklyn, right? [Sara Belcher]: Yes, I’m in Brooklyn. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: What part? [Sara Belcher]: Bedside. Oh, nice. I lived in I used to live in Williamsburg. Can’t afford that anymore. [Michael Houck]: It’s gotten pretty insane. I was like, I don’t know where I’m going to go next, but I left in December and I’m just like, I’m done with this. [Sara Belcher]: I used to live with two different couples, another person and a cat in one apartment. And the cat loved to like use the mat outside of the downstairs bathroom, which was my bathroom as its litter box. [Michael Houck]: Oh no. [Sara Belcher]: I was like, if this isn’t New York living, I don’t really know what is. [Michael Houck]: It wasn’t your cat, I imagine. You just were like saddled with the responsibility of this cat. [Sara Belcher]: No, I was like, cool, cool, thanks. But I mean, it was a, it was a great first experience in New York. And then I was like, let’s see, we’ll move a little bit further out from Manhattan, lower my rent. Yeah, no, I don’t blame you. [Michael Houck]: I don’t blame you. I think, um, I got lucky cause my place in Williamsburg, I got it at like COVID. And so we had like a rent controlled COVID deal for a couple years. But if I were to try to rent that same place now, it would be like, it would have like 1.5 x or more than that, maybe even in rent. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: Well, good to meet. [Sara Belcher]: Yeah, good to meet you too. Emily told me a lot about you. [Michael Houck]: Oh, well, hopefully good things. Yeah, no, similarly. So excited to meet and kind of learn. I guess like what your, I mean, obviously I saw the resume, I saw your background, looked at your LinkedIn, all that stuff, but I want to learn more about sort of your journey, your story, and also like what you like to do and maybe see if there’s a place that we can help out. [Sara Belcher]: Yeah. So a lot of my work is, a lot of the work that I share professionally is editorial. I have a big background in journalism. I went to college, started as a journalism major at the Roy Park School of Communications at Ithaca. Transferred out of that because it was too broadcast heavy. I knew I didn’t want to do broadcast. I was like, you really don’t want to be in front of the camera. And video editing is, I can edit video. Okay. Don’t ask me how to do the fine details, but you know, if you need something spliced together, I can do it. Um, but I was like, it’s just really not like my cup of tea. Um, so I transferred to writing. So my official degree is I have a bachelor of arts in writing with a concentration in feature writing and minors in journalism and graphic design, which is really just a big roundabout way to say I wanted to write features. I wanted to work in journalism. Um, and I’ve done a lot of that. I spent five years at distractify where I bounced around a bunch of different verticals. They are a primarily SEO focused application. And so a lot of my background there is SEO heavy. I know how to optimize for best reader experience and also playing that Google algorithm game. I have written across a variety of articles. I like to say that if I don’t know it, Google is free. If you’ve ever read something I’ve written for Distractify about a television show. No, I probably did not watch that show. For honesty, did not watch it, but I did do all of my research to make sure that the fans could read it and understand what I was saying. [Michael Houck]: You got the writing degree and the master’s in Googling, basically. [Sara Belcher]: Yeah, no, exactly. And that’s kind of what I’ve carried through all of this. I briefly did a lot of video games work. I was the gaming editor for a while I really built that from the ground up. I did a lot of analytics and I had a very small team of writers for a hot second. And, you know, I was, I was putting out content to, I used to say that Distractify’s gaming vertical was for the girls, the gays, and the sometimes stupid. You know, I wanted it to be friendly to all levels gamer, not just like your stereotypical gamer. But I also wanted to break things down in a way that like, maybe you were playing Fortnite for the first time ever, and you don’t know what an area of effect attack is. And so I’m just not throwing acronyms at you, assuming you know it, I’m giving it to you in a way that is broken down and understood. And a lot of those things I actually learned while building that vertical. And I actually doubled the page views for the gaming vertical within my first year of spearheading. [Sara Belcher]: That’s cool. [Sara Belcher]: Yeah, I was really proud of that. And then the March 2020 Google algorithm change happened and Distractify across the board got hit, my vertical as well. And so I had to pivot. I did more pop culture influencers. That’s kind of what I do now at People. I work on their society and culture team where I do a lot of coverage for influencers, astrology and nostalgia. And then pre-viral, which is just like viral videos. Pre-viral, that’s interesting. [Michael Houck]: Tell me about pre-viral. [Sara Belcher]: It’s like, you know, you see a video of someone, I’m trying to think of like, do you remember that Who the F Did I Marry story that went around the internet? Where it was like this woman where she told this like eight part series. It was like four hours or something about how she realized that the person that she married is not who he says he is. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: That sounds dramatic. Dramatic. [Sara Belcher]: That would be something that falls under pre-viral. Got it. Or it’s also just I edited one today about a guy who his cat started giving birth in his lap. Anything that gets people talking on social media falls under pre-viral. Got it. [Michael Houck]: So you’re trying to catch that before it it goes crazy and is everywhere, basically. [Sara Belcher]: We always catch it before it goes crazy, but we don’t know. Obviously, social media moves at the speed of light and faster than my fingers. And so, if we don’t, we also try to get that exclusive angle of like, let me talk to that person and give not just a rehash of what happens in the video, but also let’s talk a little bit about what your reaction is to it going viral. Has this opened other avenues for you? Has this helped you in a positive or negative way? Exactly. I also currently write for Yahoo Finance, which feels so left field with everything else that I’ve done. But as I’ve said, I’m a firm believer that Google is free. And that is exactly what I said in my interview for that job. He asked me, he was like, do you have any finance experience? And I said, no, but I’m a firm believer that Google is free. And if I don’t know, I’m not afraid to ask. So I work for their podcast. Where they show me the podcast ahead of time, I listen to them, I pick a topic that I think will get people clicking, and then I kind of go into it from like an SEO angle. And I try to bring viewership to the podcast in ways that, you know, just posting the podcast doesn’t always do. Cool. That makes a lot of sense. [Michael Houck]: And I think it’s clear that you can pick up new stuff super quickly. Like, whatever the vertical is, you’re just like, let me just dive into it. And I mean, I love that because our work is super varied. We have, you know, 30 ish clients from everything from a billionaire VCs down to like, early stage founders who are building crazy AI tools that are gonna change know some niche forever, right? So it’s, it’s a high variety type of situation. [Sara Belcher]: So it’s just know that you’re like that you just jump into things and can sort of take a you need that yeah that’s that’s where a lot of my experience lies and well I I boast my editorial experience um I have also written for brands there was a very brief period where I was doing um sort of feo explainer articles for a hemp uh thc I’m not thc a cbd hemp brand um based in courtland it was like right outside ithaca I was living in ithaca post grad So I got involved in the local community there. I worked as a marketing intern for a local bookstore in Ithaca. So I use my writing skills in a variety of ways. A lot of my professional experience has been in editorial, but I find that they’re very transferable to different needs. [Michael Houck]: I think so too. I think on our side, the biggest things that we do are social media. So like LinkedIn and X. Sometimes People ask for like transfer to substack or Instagram threads or something like that, but then also like email newsletters. So, um, beehive newsletters, also newsletters on substack. Um, sometimes the clients sort of pair those together and they’re like, we want to build a funnel from, you know, get some awareness on social, collect emails, drive those through the newsletter, convert people to become our customers with the newsletter, things like that. Other times they just want us to do one or the other for building an audience or, or, you know, whatever the case may be. Platform of choice. So, um, it’s interesting you mentioned SEO because we’ve had a lot of people ask actually about, you know, can we also do SEO for them? And I haven’t had a great answer for them, uh, because we don’t have anyone on staff who is an expert at SEO and sort of knows what they’re doing. Like, I don’t, I don’t know what I’m doing with SEO. So there could be some options there for me to go back to even just some existing clients and be like, Hey, you know, we talked about SEO, like, let’s, let’s have that conversation again. [Sara Belcher]: You know, I wouldn’t say I’m an expert at like optimizing a website, like the nitty gritty of it for SEO, but I would be great if they want like a blog on their website with some SEO related articles, um, doing the, the, um, the head and heel, the CBD company, they, uh, actually this wasn’t in my original contract, but I wrote them and then they were like, well, well, we’re going to put them under the founder’s name. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. [Sara Belcher]: Okay, cool. You gotta tell me about that beforehand But that’s fine, you know, like I get it because the names Have the pull That will help google like direct google to them and I’m not I don’t feel the need to have additional bylines at this point in my career You know, I feel like it’s got the bylines to back me up. You google my name. It comes up with me But I would love to diversify my like current professional experience to include other forms of, uh, of writing that are not just editorial journalism based. Cool. I mean, so is social content and email newsletters like, are those interesting? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I did that briefly. Um, I think it’s on my LinkedIn. [Sara Belcher]: Uh, I did nomster chef, which was a very small company, uh, run by an Ithaca college grad. Um, when I did my semester in New York in college, I had two internships. One was at nylon, and the other was with a very small company and I was doing email newsletters and I was helping to like do social media campaigns for them. Yeah, I mean, that’s the biggest thing. [Michael Houck]: We work with folks and they’re just like, yeah, I just wanna grow on social. That’s my number one thing. That’s where my audience is. That’s where I feel like I can get the best ROI. So that’s probably what we get the most. I actually, I try to push people towards the email newsletters as much as possible because the clients who do the newsletters, I feel like, tend to be… It’s an easier process on a week-to-week basis, but social, it’s different topics. You’ve got to be in the niche versus with a newsletter, you’re writing one issue per week. I guess I would also love to know bandwidth on your side. We have strong growth channels coming in, new people signing up every week to be new clients. Just curious, what is your bandwidth moving forward? [Sara Belcher]: At People, I currently do work a 40-hour work week. I’m not available for things between the hours of 9-5 most days. We do in the office about once a week, not required, but it shows things. It also gets me out of my apartment. That said, if there’s anything that can be done, Like I do Yahoo, Yahoo Finance takes me maybe four hours a week. I would say I’m down to contribute to like one, maybe two clients at about like that similar four hours a week. I don’t know that I could do too much more than that at this time just because of my situation. But as I am a contract employee, like my time at People is not guaranteed long-term. Contract is renewed through July, whether or not they extend that, I won’t know until July, kind of thing. Yeah, that’s tough. [Michael Houck]: That’s a tough situation. [Sara Belcher]: So I’m like, why would I restrict myself? Yeah, I agree. [Michael Houck]: You gotta do what’s in your best interest, for sure. Exactly. I mean, even when you’re not on contract, even when you are on W-2, it’s still not guaranteed. I got laid off at Airbnb on spur of the moment because of COVID, right? [Sara Belcher]: I got laid off at Distractify right before five years. [Michael Houck]: It’s rough. It’s a crazy, crazy world out there with that stuff. But okay, this is helpful. Should I tell you a little bit about us? Not sure. Okay. So let’s see. So I’ve been a founder for a long time. I have a couple companies, both that have raised venture and that have bootstrapped and do a bunch like angel investing and startups as well. But my main focus over the last couple of years has been a holding company that we’ve built up bootstrapped from zero, just basically from nothing. And it’s for primarily startup founders is our target customer. And so we have a newsletter that’s sort of our main top of funnel. And that’s goes out to about 75,000 founders every week. I write that myself. And And we have services and products that we sort of offer off of that. So the main things are we built this platform where we match social media content with big creators in that niche. And the creators go and comment and repost and amplify it to their audience so that the founder can get exposure for their content in their specific ICP. And so that’s going really well. And people who had good content were performing really well. Growing really fast, but there were a lot of people who were using it who sort of like, weren’t very good at creating content. And so a few of them were like, well, I think I’d do better if you just wrote my content, like, you know what you’re doing, you’ve built up this audience for yourself. And I’m like, well, you know, I don’t have time to do that, but maybe we can help. And so I put together a little team and basically over the last, at this point it’s basically, Maybe a little less than a year, but basically a year We built an incredible agency off of this just like it’s now the biggest part of our business, which is crazy to me Because it started out just sort of as like a yeah, we’ll try it. We’ll do it for you, you know and so we have a team of writers and then we have Myself and my partner on the agency is this guy Blake Blake email. He might have seen his content on social He has an even bigger audience than I do. And he is like the editor-in-chief. So he manages the writers. He makes sure that the content always meets our quality bar. He’s in the trenches with you on a day-to-day basis. Whereas my role is primarily sales, growth, and team stuff. So I’ll be the bad guy to the client. And anything operational on the main point of contact. There. And then, yeah, so that’s grown like crazy. And we’re really excited about where it can go this year. And we have a couple other sort of smaller things that we own too, but those are the main parts of the company. And so, yeah, just really continuing to double down on this over the course of this year and see where we can get it to. [Sara Belcher]: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: Any any like questions for for me? [Sara Belcher]: Um, what’s your like when if if I were to Sign on and join your your team of writers Uh, what would that look like in terms of like which clients I would work with would it be? I am assigned a client to work to Or would it be a discussion about like, okay, like these are what we need. This is what’s available. [Michael Houck]: Is there one you’re More inclined to work on Yeah, so basically when we have clients come in like when when I do the sales pitch with them and they they pay and they sign up. We have a team slack and there’s like a notification in there that shows like, hey, here’s how they answered questions on our onboarding form for like, what they’re looking for, what type of voice they want, who their target customer is, you know, and also just like how they talk about that, right. And so anyone can kind of take a look through there. I’ll generally be like, I think that this person could be a good fit for this person on the team. And so I might reach out and be like, hey, Sara, what do you think about this client? And you’re free to say no. I’m not here telling you you’ve got to do the clients that I first send your way. But I feel like I generally have a pretty good sense of it. But we have enough folks on the team where if that client’s not a fit or you want to save your bandwidth, maybe someone else who would be a better fit, that’s totally fine. [Sara Belcher]: And then if I agree to work with a client, would that be I am the person who is regularly assigned to work with that client, and we develop that working relationship together? Or is it like I would be jumping around week to week or month to month? [Michael Houck]: No, absolutely not. You are the partner for that client. You’re downloading their brain. You’re building a relationship with them. You’re building trust with them. Again, I’m in sort of the Slack channel we’d set up between you and the client. And so is a few other people on our team, not writers, like my assistant and my chief of staff. And Blake is also in there. So, yeah, no, but you’d be building the relationship. You’d be the one who’s sort of on the kickoff call with me and the client, asking them questions and sort of building that trust. And then we don’t require calls from our clients because our clients are sort of super busy startup founders, right? But some clients, you know, you and them can kind of figure out, oh, do we want to do a content interview on some cadence or do we want to just go async through like Slack voice notes back and forth. We have clients who kind of run the full spectrum of options there. [Sara Belcher]: And that’s just between you and them for whatever process works best for you. Okay, fantastic. What would you say is like the average output you would expect from someone on your team? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, so we have the standard thing I would say is that most clients are going to want to do either three sort of long form social posts per week, or like a of short form that are roughly equivalent to three long form per week. Some might go smaller, some might say I only want two or equivalent, but the standard offer that we sort of put out there is we’ll do three posts and we’ll also do like we have an ops team who sort of does like engagements and comments and replies and things like that. So the responsibility on your side would just be, you know, generally speaking, three long form or the short form equivalents. And if they do a newsletter, it would just be, you know, usually one newsletter issue per week. And the length of that will vary from client to client. Like we have clients who, you know, want to do like full morning brew style, really long newsletters. And we have clients who are like, I just want a little vignette that shows people I’m still alive and has like my offer at the bottom of it. [Sara Belcher]: So it’ll vary. Yeah, that makes sense. What would you say is like your average compensation for your writers based on the client based on what you’re expecting them to put out. And what kind of payment model do you do? Do you do 1099s? Do you do via PayPal? [Michael Houck]: No, we do 1099s. We have a platform called Thera that we use. That’s my friend’s startup. They’re great for working with large distributed teams and things like that. So we do that. We generally are able to match whatever rate the writer normally does for social work. So a rough way to think about it is that whatever package, and again, the client packages will vary, but whatever package the client chooses, we give basically the majority of that with some cut for us to the writer. It depends, again, on what that package is. But yeah, if you have specific levels where you’re like, hey, I need it to be at this for it to make sense for me to do, just let me know, and we’ll make it work. [Sara Belcher]: Yeah, absolutely. [Sara Belcher]: Oh, if I begin to work with a client, and let’s say, heaven forbid, I don’t think it works out. If I’m not vibing with them, I feel like I’m struggling to understand their content. This guy sucks. Actually, I really would rather not listen to another thought that comes out of this person’s brain. Sure. What is your process? If I’m like, I would like to be off this project. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: I mean, that’s where I sort of am the bad guy. Right. And I get involved. Um, so we’ll obviously first want to sort of exhaust our options and be like, you know, before we put this transition on the client, let’s make sure that we are making the best effort to sort of accommodate whatever the issue is, uh, with, with either, you know, if it’s something serious, like the way that they’re speaking to you, then obviously we’ll hire them as a client. We don’t want something like that. But if it’s just like, oh, they’re not responsive, or they’re overly detailed in the comments that they’re sharing, and maybe they’re being too perfectionist or nitpicky or something like that, just let me know. That’s a place to tag me in and be like, hey, I think I’m seeing it this way. Can you take a look? And then if you also agree, go talk to client X about this, I’ll do that. And I’ll just, again, I’ll call with them and I’ll be like, hey, like, you know, I won’t throw you under the bus. I’ll just be like, hey, like I was taking a look at some of the feedback you gave on the work that Sara did. I think it works pretty good. And so I just wanna make sure that like, are we missing some big picture thing about what you’re going for here? And so, you know, I’ve done this a few times, thankfully not too many times, but just a few. So yeah, that’s not on your plate. Be in a confrontational situation with the client. Yeah, I’m, I’m very comfortable being the bad cop when I need to be. [Sara Belcher]: That’s great. I don’t like confrontation at all. [Michael Houck]: If it gets to a point with any client, we’re like, we go through that sort of resolution process. And there’s just no sort of middle ground, common ground, or they don’t understand the feedback we’re giving them, you know, then we will transition. And we have done that twice over the course of the year, we’ve moved from one writer to another. And it’s been fine. You know, we sort of know how to handle that and frame it in a way where it’s not disruptive. Yeah. [Sara Belcher]: And is it, like, would, if I sign on, would it be a contract I do with your agency or would it be individual contracts to work on individual clients? [Michael Houck]: No, it would be a contract with the agency to work on a specific client. So, like, if you have three different clients with us, it’d be three contracts. But they’d all be through us directly. Okay, cool. [Sara Belcher]: And what kind of, say, you actually really don’t like my work, say, because we did it part way through, and you’re like, actually, I think Sara sucks. What is your process of like, how would you address that with me? And what kind of feedback should I expect from you? Yeah, sure. [Michael Houck]: I mean, let’s hope and pray that that doesn’t happen and all that stuff. I think I’m great. [Sara Belcher]: So I’m not worried about it. But you know, You might, otherwise. We’ll do a process. [Michael Houck]: I mean, I think you’re great so far. So we’ll do a process up front. Basically, after this call, I’m going to loop in Blake to an email with you. And he’ll either want to chat, or he might send over like we have an assessment now that we’ve been doing with writers more recently. So if you’re cool with that, he’ll send that over. It shouldn’t be too much work. But if it is, just let me know, and we can kind of figure out what parts make sense to focus on. But I don’t think it’s too much. And so yeah, so he’ll go through that with you, and he’ll be like, yeah, I think that Sara’s writing seems great. We think she could take on clients today. And then we would move forward at that point or not. If we somehow make it through that process and then later sort of decide, hey, this isn’t working out, this isn’t a fit, I’m not going to just cut and dry you. We’d talk about it. I’d probably have you set up time with Blake just to jam and chat on, hey, here’s what we should be doing. Our goal here is to basically make sure that you’re successful with our clients and have them become your clients, basically. We want to invest in the team and we see this as anyone we bring onto the team, we see as somebody who could be high potential long term. So we’d work with you. Blake would get in the trenches and do coaching sessions with you if needed and things like that. Me too, if needed. Cool. [Sara Belcher]: I think that answers all my questions. [Michael Houck]: I think I’m a great person. [Sara Belcher]: I think I’m a great writer. So I don’t think you’re going to have that last issue, but you know, I had to ask just in case. [Michael Houck]: Good to bring up up front to kind of know for sure, but no, I don’t anticipate that either. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: So, okay, cool. [Michael Houck]: So here’s what I’ll do then. I will let Blake know that we chatted. I’ll start an email thread between the three of us in a bit. A couple back-to-back calls for random stuff, but later today, and then you guys can figure out next steps there, and we’ll go from there. Awesome, thank you so much. Well, Sara, thanks for the time, great to meet, talk soon. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah, bye. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Bye.