- Duration: 33 min
- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01JTP8D9ZHSA4PJXH0S1ESWHFD (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JTP8D9ZHSA4PJXH0S1ESWHFD)
Transcript
[Blake Stewart]: Yeah, I definitely feel like I’ve got it down. For outreach, it’s easy to just import some contacts that Angelina is finding and throw those into a sequence. And then I’ve got it at the end of each sequence. So if they don’t reply or anything, I could just go back and re-evaluate if it’s a good fit or find a new contact. So outreach is great. I don’t need Salesforce at all, so that’s nice. Got some data tracking in there for deals. It’s fine. I don’t really know what the goal would be kind of taking over one of those other Google Sheets, but it’s kind of cool to see more stats on that. But yeah, that’s That’s good. Cool. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: I mean, it’s, it seems like we had a great April, so it seems like we’re, um, you know, I go, I look back a month from where we were right now. Right. I think back to when I was in, I was in Nashville and we had our one-on-one when I was like walking around or whatever. And I remember like, we were both concerned about like, are we finding the right leads? You know, are we finding enough good people? It seems like at least that issue kind of resolved itself, which is great. [Blake Stewart]: Yeah, yeah, definitely helps with that. I’ve got a better just like general feel for it. So I feel really good about that. Yeah, this month will be good too. We’ll have pipe drive with another three grand coming in the next five days. Yeah, I mean, June, I don’t know, like without those big feature placements, that’s when I get a little scared, you know? UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Yeah. [Blake Stewart]: So, I mean, yeah, it’s it’s cool to not really you didn’t really miss a beat on any of the sponsors from February to now. I mean, you’ve hit the target every time. So it’s that’s great. But Yeah, I mean, it’s not an easy job selling selling ads, but I think I’ve got a good handle on the systems that Pat, I mean, it seems to be working, so. [Michael Houck]: One thing we should think about is as we ramp back up on social, like how does that impact our offerings, especially if we’re going to be doing stuff on Substack too, like is that separate? Is that something else we can offer? I don’t know what the answer to that is yet, but maybe we chat about that once we get things going, like this week. Cause yeah, I mean, I want to make this as easy on you as possible. And I think me not being as big of a presence publicly outside of our, our actual business and outside of the newsletter has probably made that a lot harder. So I want to fix that because I think it’ll make the sale and the close a lot easier. [Blake Stewart]: Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: Plus with the ads going live, we’ll actually have like a good influx. New people who we can sell into. So I would say that this summer, it’ll probably make sense to circle back with some older sponsors and just be like, Hey, you know, here’s how many new subscribers we’ve added since you last did a thing with us. Like not necessarily hold like the number of like total sub difference, but just like, here’s how many people have signed up for the newsletter since then who are still active today. Um, so I can set up like a segment in that can pull that and we can, we can use that number for any particular sponsor. Okay, cool. [Blake Stewart]: Yeah, that’s good to know. Um, yeah, I don’t have any automated re-engagement in place other than just like a task reminder on HubSpot to, you know, reach back out to them after a month or two. Um, and so, yeah, that’ll be good. I’ve used that line a few times already. When we did the kernel subscribers, kind of went back and like, Hey, we have 20,000 new subs. Yeah. [Blake Stewart]: So, okay. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. I mean, it’s, it’s always good to do every few months or whatever we can circle back and be like, Hey, we were sliding more people. Like there’s a lot more people in total since you’ve last run with us. So, uh, but yeah, I want to make, I think that being more, being more visible, uh, will make it easier to, uh, for the sale. Cause that’s, that’s what we’ve historically seen is that the brand association is a big part of this for folks. [Blake Stewart]: So I actually had someone reach out on passion fruits yesterday. Um, there were, where’d it go? They’re talking about the time tracking, uh, the newsletter. It was track your time, like a VA would, um, You kind of just talked about using a spreadsheet or toggle. And this is from Time Century. He’s like, hey, this is what we do. Let me know next time you’re going to do this. I’ll pay for the spot. So instead of giving toggle a free placement. So yeah, I mean, the more we can do that, I mean, looking back at the clicks today, like Doola and Hoop, like, yeah, the more we talk about companies, the more people are going to. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, okay. That sounds good. [Michael Houck]: I just want to be like one thing, just more clarity on like social posts. [Blake Stewart]: Obviously you want it to be more organic content. That’s not just advertising, but like what, like how would you want that ratio to be? Like one ad a week or like just kind of ad hoc or like, [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I think like we get a maximum of one a week, ideally a little bit less frequent, at least in the start for that. Maximum one per week. And I probably want to have pretty strict control over the copy, like, give us something, but I might entirely rewrite it and they need to be okay with that. Yeah. Because I want it to be kind of super organic on on social particular. Yeah. [Blake Stewart]: Okay, I’m trying to think of how we like link of the week is one set I think Ben has my rates for social stuff from, from megaphone. I forget exactly what number we said, but he has whatever we agreed to. Okay. But, um, I don’t know. [Michael Houck]: I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. [Blake Stewart]: I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. [Michael Houck]: I don’t know. I don’t know. Yeah, I don’t know like It just needs to be super organic Like I just need to be like talking about something that they’re doing or like they can tell us like what they want to highlight like oh highlight this feature or highlight this event that we’re doing or this bleed bang it that we have or whatever, but um Yeah, I’m I’m gonna need to spend some time with the first few and just make it super organic so They should have no expectations of what the copy should be just that we will feature them and talk about the thing that they want to have talked about. [Blake Stewart]: Okay, cool. That works. And then I’m assuming A, they can track it with like a UTM link, but does like LinkedIn give us that data too? I’m sure you can find that. I don’t know how to pull that. That’s a later problem. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I mean, in some cases, we would put the link in the replies, like not in the main post. Because if we put in the main post, it’s going to depress the impressions that the post would get, which defeats the purpose for them. And in some cases, they might not even want a link. They might just want me talking about it and linking to their LinkedIn page or just highlighting how I’m using the product or something like that. So if they do have a link, it would have to go in the replies, not in the main post. OK. [Blake Stewart]: Yeah, I might get more aggressive I’m just finding matches for that All right Sweet okay Yeah, I mean I think advertising I’ve kind of got it a good wrap around the whole thing Really been focusing more on Valley and just kind of megaphone studios outreach. It’s kind of hard not to I mean, I know it’s a bigger price tag for you. And so I guess that maybe that’s something I want to talk about is like either commission there or just more alignment on like an incentive to push that. Yeah. Because I mean, there is a lot of overlap with like the people I’m talking to and like, [Michael Houck]: Yeah, from your perspective, you’re like, I could sell them on an ad and get a commission or I could sell a studio and not get a commission, basically. Exactly. That’s fair. [Blake Stewart]: It’s more interesting for me to sell. Yeah. Studio and kind of ghostwriting, kind of like learn more about their business and like their content strategy. And, um, I find that more interesting than just like a, an ad placement. Um, but yeah, once again, I’m not incentivized to do that. So I don’t know where that’s, that’s a good call out. [Michael Houck]: I haven’t thought about it too much, but it does make logical sense. So let me something more formal and we can we can lock it in okay make a note of that for myself okay cool yeah I’ll put some thoughts together and um I think we’ll chat on tuesday and uh can finalize something sounds good thanks um and we can also talk then about like I don’t know of just broader stuff too. Like I think we’re at the about three months in. And so I think it makes sense to bring that conversation back up about like, what does the next three, six, nine plus months look like, Um, so, um, I’ll put together some thoughts on that. [Blake Stewart]: And if you want to as well, we can, we can jam on that. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Cool. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Okay. [Michael Houck]: Great. Um, sweet. [Blake Stewart]: I mean, I’m enjoying it all. I think you got a lot of different directions to take and I like kind of, you know, I like them all. [Michael Houck]: It’s fun. [Michael Houck]: That’s the problem, man. Cause I like them all too. Shiny object syndrome. Yeah. We have to, I mean, I think having this person, we just hired someone for content ops to take over that stuff from Ben. He’s going to start next Monday and that’ll free up Ben and hopefully it’ll free me up a little bit too. Um, cause I got, I got pulled into some of that stuff, but, um, yeah, I think, especially as I’ve been sort of traveling around finding out where I want to live, I’ve realized that I just need to have as I need, especially with the agency, I need to have fewer things run through me as possible. Um, and I need to devote more of my time back towards like the brand, the top of funnel. And founding journey too. So now that that’s the agency is operational and we’re getting some of these growth channels going more consistently, just be easier to jump out of that and back into, I think the stuff that I uniquely am able to do. [Blake Stewart]: That makes sense. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Yeah. [Blake Stewart]: So that’s good to hear. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: Awesome. Yeah. I think it’ll be good for us. We’re building some AI stuff for the agency right now to hopefully automate some of the writing work. Maybe not all of it, but maybe some of it. And if we can pull that off, then it becomes really easy to just sort of let that be its thing. And I just do the growth and most of my time gets spent on the top of funnel stuff. Because I was talking to I was talking to Sahil the other day. He’s the best at this. All he does is the social stuff. He’s actually in there doing the social stuff all the time, and networking, and talking to people. And his team basically runs everything else for his business. And I think I have done not as good a job of that, especially as we’ve caught in the agency really ramped up over the past four to six months or so, but even before that too. So I’m optimistic that I can shift back and sort of do the stuff that’s needed to build the brand a little bit more. [Blake Stewart]: Okay. Cool. And what does the AI stuff look like for the agency? Like links to an email address and then and AI agent, like the research agent in Valley is cool. Like I think that itself could be a whole separate product that would be useful for this of like, hey, this is what people are talking about. This is what you should talk about. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, so we see three areas that we can potentially automate. One is in ideation. And this is something that everyone on the team is excited about. Like the writers and Blake all think it’s a good idea. Like doing a research agent type thing where it’s like looking up viral posts in a niche or looking up like news articles. And it’s curating that in some way for the writers to then create content based off of on like a weekly basis. It’s coming through like, you know, like for a startup founders be like coming through like Paul Graham essays and coming up with like interesting insights that the average person might not pick up from it. And we’re using that to create some like idea bank, right? So that’s area number one. That’s something that we’re going to do, uh, but is not the highest leverage. Um, I mean, it is high leverage, but the higher leverage thing is the second piece, which is content creation, because right now, you know, if we’re, if we’re charging three K a month for a client, roughly half of that goes out the door to the writer. Right. Right. And you know, that’s good. But what I find is that, like, if I were the writer for any of our clients, like, you know, this sounds, this sounds bad. But I would say that in general, with the exception of maybe Jacob, because he’s, he’s very good. I would probably do a better job than the writer if I was doing it myself, just, you know, what I want to try to do is take my brain, put it into an agent and then say, okay, every week from the ideas in this idea bank with the style guide that’s in this Google doc for this specific client and the best practices that’s in like the, my brain Google doc, right? Take all that in and spit out posts with format X, Y, or Z for this client for this week. Yeah. And it sounds like pie in the sky, And I have resisted even jumping into this forever because it hasn’t seemed like it’s there to me. But I talked to a couple people in the second half of April, and they walked me through how they do it. And they’re like, I fired my ghostwriter, and now I’ll just do this. And I’m like, well, hey, if people can do that, and if we’re not doing it to ourselves, then we’re going to get disrupted. That doesn’t need humans in the loop and can underprice us and can get the same output, right? So my thinking is, let’s explore it this month. And so I have Rafael building some stuff with Lindy. And I’m sort of giving the guidance on the content side. And so is Blake with like his editing side. And basically, if we can get it to work for my account, then we roll it out to clients, like one or two clients without mentioning it to them and see if they notice. And then if they, if they, if they don’t, then we roll it out to the whole team and, um, you know, we save a good amount of margin. Maybe we keep a couple of writers on staff and it’s like a larger number of clients. Um, but something like this could, if it works, could 1.5x the price we end up selling for. So, um, maybe even more than that, because people might pay a higher multiple as well, since it’s like AI powered. Um, so that’s, that’s bucket two. And then bucket three is just like internal workflow automation, like making sure things are in place and you know, all that stuff. But those first two I think are together very powerful, but the second one in general can, can save us a lot of money and potentially not have any negative impact on clients. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Yeah. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Interesting. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Yeah. [Blake Stewart]: Is Lindy the main tool there? What are their tools are? We’re trying out Lindy. [Michael Houck]: They offered to like Lindy’s team offered to build one for us. But like, I didn’t have a Just trying to get me to sign something, you know, you’re locked into. Yeah. Yeah. And also it’s like, you’re paying a 12 month commitment. When all the work is done up front, like it’s a model just doesn’t make sense. So, um, yeah, we’re just going to have Raphael give it a shot for the next like week or so. And if he can’t work, then we’ll figure out what to do. That’s awesome. [Blake Stewart]: Yeah. Very cool. [Michael Houck]: So yeah, we’ll see how it goes. Like it might not work and it might be, Hey, we have to use these writers and the tech isn’t there yet. And this one guy did it, but you know, he’s making some trade offs that we’re not comfortable with for our clients or something like that. Um, but I would love to get it to work because it would just be, it would be killer. Um, and also, I mean, then we could, we could go to, we could go to, And we could be like, Hey, we’ve done this for ourselves. [Blake Stewart]: Pay us to do it for you. You know, that’d be an interesting just yeah. Newsletter or whatever. Just a whole kind of step by step. [Michael Houck]: Right. And we time it before the announcement of like, Hey, we’re building this out as a service for others as well. You know? So we’ll see. But that’s my main workflow on studios right now, that and ramping up social so that we can use that as a growth channel. I might loop you into some other stuff too, because there’s that checklist that I said I put together that I wanna, there’s a couple items on there that I think could make sense for you to help too. So I gotta share that with you. And you’re gonna have to do that too. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Okay. [Michael Houck]: It’s like a list of things that we want to do before we sell. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Yeah. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Gotcha. [Michael Houck]: So I’ll share that with you tonight. Sounds good. Anything else on your end? [Blake Stewart]: Not really. Um, yeah, it’s still just main focus is kind of Valley figuring that out. [Blake Stewart]: Um, yeah. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. It seems like it’s, you know, it’s close. It’s almost there. Like, yeah. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Yeah. [Blake Stewart]: I don’t know. This is kind of like, you gotta let go of your ego and just, there’s going to be some I don’t know. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: The, the initial results, uh, the initial like month or so that we’ve been, I guess, three weeks or so that we’ve been working with it, um, have not met, I think the expectations that they with us, right. And what could be possible, but I’m not, I still feel optimistic about it. It’s just like, it’s a new type of thing and we just need to spend time kind of on it. So I’m not, I don’t know. [Blake Stewart]: We’ll see. [Blake Stewart]: I did too. I’m going to send them a message and see if they can just like hop on a call for 30 minutes and maybe help optimize anything. Uh, yeah, no, it’s, it’s definitely a lot of potential. So that’s cool. Um, yeah. [Michael Houck]: And if we get to the point, you know, in like two months or so where we’re just like, it’s not going to work, but even sooner, if you, if you then yeah, we can always pull the plug because as I said, Zaid will, you know, I know we’re in a three month contract, but he’ll, I know he’ll work with us on, on whatever. [Blake Stewart]: So. Okay, cool. Yeah. I mean, it’s like, it’s kind of hard to make that decision because I don’t know what the alternative is. Like if you want me to test just like direct outreach with a couple of different domains, I could probably get similar results. Like if I sent 300, I feel like I feel like the ratio is like unsustainably low right now. [Michael Houck]: Uh, and there are, there would be better channels for us, but like, for example, the channels that we realistically have are outreach referrals, partnerships, content, like we have a lot of content. My socials, viral examples, newsletter, founding journey, newsletter, and like, I don’t know, like those are really the big, and then like workshops, if we wanted to run workshops and webinars. Yeah. Yeah. So what you could do is once you have this in a place where you’re like, you know, it’s getting some results and you have some extra bandwidth from there, we can, we can go back and test out one of the webinars and just run that and see if that’s a more effective kind of use of our time. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. [Blake Stewart]: I guess one thing I can change now is like the prospects is pulling from the LinkedIn sales navigator filters. Like kind of just thinking about the two kind of things now. Like I’ve got the list of startups that have gone through an accelerator that we had pulled, which like seem high value and like the one we want to invite to the event, um, which would probably convert well compared to just like this broadcast on LinkedIn of like, you know, early stage founder. [Michael Houck]: Um, Yeah. Yeah. So the accelerator folks, if they have gotten funding from it, rather than just like mentorship, right? Like if they’ve gotten like more tech stars gives you like, what, like 20 K or something crazy low like that. Um, like those are not going to be, unless they’ve received other funding as like, you know, top, you know, They’re not gonna, they’re not going to spend that funding on on ghost writing. But the ones who are in there who’ve actually gotten funding, yeah, probably be really, really good fits. [Blake Stewart]: Okay. Okay. Oh, yeah, I might explore that. For that, just direct outreach. [Michael Houck]: Cool. Okay. And we’ll do, yeah, we’ll do more stuff with that too. All right. But I’ll loop you into that stuff, the checklist stuff, and then we’ll next week about like broader next steps. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Cool. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: All right. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Sounds good. [Blake Stewart]: All right. Take it easy. Have fun on promo. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: I’m just going to be in this Airbnb for the most part, but it’s all good. I grind. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Oh, man. All right. Take care.