- Duration: 41 min
- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01JV5HGPAJER1N4SRKPH6BWRDS (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JV5HGPAJER1N4SRKPH6BWRDS)
Transcript
[Michael Houck]: two weeks. [Michael Houck]: Well, um, I mean, yeah, once Andrew’s on boarded, that’ll change for you and you’ll, you’ll be able to chill. But, um, sounds like, sounds like things are going good with him. [Ben Ornstein]: Yeah, no, we, he’s been, you know, he’s catching up. He’s asking a ton of questions. Um, and he’s been good questions too. And, and he’s been, um, yeah, no, he’s been, he’s been catching up and just watching There’s a lot of specifics for each client. So we finally created like a master sheet, which is super helpful. We’ve never had a sheet of all the posting times and all of the different clients with like notes for each. It’s actually really helpful to have that all in one spot. That makes a ton of sense. Because you guys are switching back and forth between accounts. [Michael Houck]: You don’t want to have to go back in Notion and switch back and forth between places. Yeah. [Ben Ornstein]: So we have this master Excel sheet that has a ton of information. So I spent a lot of time finalizing that yesterday. It would have been more helpful if I had done that beforehand, but it’s very complete now. And so it’ll be really helpful for him to start off with. [Michael Houck]: So anything I should keep in mind, I set up a weekly with him starting in 30 minutes. [Ben Ornstein]: Cool. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Ben Ornstein]: I mean, I guess, I don’t know if we want to bring this up now, but the account manager thing, um, maybe, maybe that would be the only thing. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. [Michael Houck]: Um, I mean, that, that, if that’s the only thing and he’s just starting, you already feel like he’s, he’s, you know, he’s catching up and he’s, he’s learning and everything. That’s good. I’ll mention it to him. I don’t want to push it on him this week. I don’t think, cause you know, we had a call yesterday and he mentioned that like, you know, he’s digesting a lot of information, which is totally fair. So, um, I don’t want to overwhelm him, but Yeah, I think that conversation we had on the thread, it totally makes sense to just have him be the guy, at least as long as he can, until we would need to specialize because we have more clients or something like that. [Ben Ornstein]: Right, exactly. No, and he had asked me, he was like, yeah, so what do you do after? And I was like, bro, I can’t answer that question, because there’s a million things. But I know he was asking in the context of himself. And I’m like, there’s going to be but I couldn’t figure out what it was. And then when you said that, I go, perfect. [Michael Houck]: That’s exactly what he’s going to do. Love it. OK, cool. The stars are aligning. The planets are aligning. This is going to be great. And I think having him being able to do both of these things will free up more of my time to work on growth. And yeah, should we talk about the AI stuff too, like plans? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I love it. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Let’s do it. [Michael Houck]: OK, so I mean, you got my thoughts from the note, the voice note. But the more I think about it, like I, the more I thought about it last night, more than this morning, too. I do think the choice is clear. Like if, if the AI stuff can be good enough, the move is to sell and to build something new with it. If AI stuff cannot be good enough, then the move is to basically just use it to improve our workflows and stuff like that. Maybe inspiration, ideation and researching on the internet, stuff like that. But not meaningfully to retrofit the business. I think that that’s going to create a lot of headaches and might not even work. So that’s my thought. I was thinking the same thing. [Ben Ornstein]: As I was listening to your message, I’m like, I’ve been thinking about this because I’m like, OK, saying all the writers, hey, by the way, you’re going to have to take five times the clients to get just the same amount. I don’t think it would work. [Michael Houck]: I really don’t think it would yeah either and like we’d probably end up deciding to fire everybody except for Jacob and maybe Austin would stick around and Then them and Blake would just like Blakey mall would just do all the content. Basically. Yeah. Yeah, it would be Changed the entire business. Yeah, I don’t know if they’d want to do it right like would Jacob want to Because he has a full-time job outside of this too, right? So like what he want to do I don’t think he would more sounds more chaotic exactly. [Ben Ornstein]: Yeah, so I think so, too So yeah, I mean look if we can get this thing to work and it can become a new business I’m totally on board and I’m still I think I said this in the message. I was I really think That the threat of AI in general to a content agency. I think it’s high so I’m like the earlier sell is becoming even more of an opportunity, I think. Right. [Michael Houck]: And so, I mean, the calculus that we need to do and that we, I think, have been, you know, doing and figuring out is, like, when is that horizon coming, right? Because we know AI is going to disrupt this type of business. The question is, can, like, you know, six months ago, the answer was no. You used chat GPT or cloud and it wasn’t good enough. Now, because of these a system and like a naive agent, right, to go out and actually, maybe be good enough. And so that’s what we need to figure out over the next week or two. And if the answer is yes, then fuck, we’re going to get disrupted. And we just know it before other people do. So let’s cash out. If it can’t be good enough, then okay, let’s keep monitoring these types of tools and see how good they get. [Ben Ornstein]: But in the meantime, let’s keep growing this thing right and then the downside of like yes losing the Draper relationship in the short term sucks, but I Still think it’s worth it in terms of like the risk of with the risk of the entire business Being disrupted because then that we can eventually you know on board them again, and that’ll be worth it, right? [Michael Houck]: I mean we won’t be able to sell into any clients for like 6 to 12 months depending on the terms of the the contract when we sell when we when we sell it, but But there’s other VCs that we know and can talk to as well. So what I would like to have happen is for the Draper contract to expand before then so that we can say, hey, we signed this VC, and they expanded so quickly. [Ben Ornstein]: They really love working with us, et cetera. That would be great. So yeah, when you sent that audio message, I totally agreed. I am fully on board with the plan if the AI is going enough. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, that’s like the that’s like the barometer. Like if we’ve reached that barometer, then then the business is, it would need to be restructured to grow to a five to $10 million business. Anyway, right. And so the smarter thing to do is just take the cash and use that to, you know, explore a new content type business with this AI stuff. And the funny thing is, if we do that, that naturally spawns another business which is an AI workflow agency, right? [Ben Ornstein]: Which is the one of the ones we talked about anyway. [Michael Houck]: Right. So it all sort of works out if, I mean, either way, because if it’s not good enough, then we have a great business so we can keep growing it until that changes. But yeah, it’s always good to make moves when you have information that most people don’t, so. [Ben Ornstein]: Yes. I would rather be too early than too late, obviously. Like in your case, I would rather sell for three, three and a half, four than, you know. [Michael Houck]: I think if we, if we sold today, um, with megaphone, like the software platform included, which we, which we would do, you know, I would say the realistic, um, gross would probably be, you know, it depends on the multiple, a really low multiple would be like 1.6, 1.7. Okay. A expected multiple would be like 2.5 to 2.7. Then a really aggressive multiple because we pitched the creator network value would be like four. Hey, that would be good. [Ben Ornstein]: I mean, any of them would be good, right? [Michael Houck]: Like even if we even if we only get the low end of that post tax, that’s still over a million. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, that’s awesome. [Michael Houck]: Um, so we’ll see where it goes. Um, but yeah, I’d rather, yeah, I don’t want to be in a case where a year from now, the business is doing more revenue and sells for the same amount because it’s worth less. [Ben Ornstein]: Right. Exactly. Exactly. Um, yeah, it’s, it’s an interesting place to be, but I like that we’re thinking way ahead. That is, that is the place to be. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, and then if we have that working capital, we can do a lot with that. So that’ll be fun. Okay, what else do we have today? I think there were a couple of things. Did you send me? [Ben Ornstein]: Oh yeah, you sent me. I sent it like just before. So the Google Sheet TLDR, I could definitely tell that you and I structure things differently. And I gotta say, when I create these things, I’m not going for crazy structure. I’m optimizing for quick information for you to then kind of alter in your format. Obviously we want that to be the same. So it’s just one less step for you. But because there’s so much going on, I always optimize for speed, obviously completeness, but speed over prettiness. That makes sense. [Michael Houck]: And I’m not looking for like crazy detailed charts or anything like that. I think that like even like even formatting with colors or whatever. I think that the big thing for me is that if we open up the Augment Tracker, for example, we can go to the Goals tab, for example. I set this up at the top, and maybe I set the whole thing up. I don’t know if I did. Or did you set up the bottom part there? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Sorry. [Ben Ornstein]: I got to pull this up. [Michael Houck]: I can share my screen. Hold on. I got it. I got it. I got it. So yeah, so I added those goals at the top. Do you remember what we did for this row 8 through 23? Was that you or was that me? That was me. That was me. OK. So it’s a good example then. Basically, in something like this, what I would want, or any type of summary chart, I would want it to be formula-based as much as possible. So there’s a couple other sheets that I don’t have on top head right now, but we’re like, you’ve put together like tables, right. And the data in those tables has been like hard coded, but then there’s also like rows of data in other, other tabs in the sheet that are informing what’s in those tables. But if I edit, or if I add things to the rows, the tables won’t, won’t change. So it like, it creates like extra, extra things and two sources of truth basically. Yeah. Um, And so, yeah, I would just say that that’s the big thing, just making them more flexible. Like the less you have to hard code, the better. And so if you want me to like, you know, I can do a loom where I go crazy for 10, 15 minutes on just like, hey, here’s how to fucking use all these formulas and Google Sheets to do all these things and all that stuff. I’m happy to do that. I don’t know like if that would be helpful or a waste of time. [Ben Ornstein]: I used to be really, really good with all these formulas in my Morgan Stanley days. And then I just, I stopped using it. And so I know like, I know VLOOKUPs and pivot tables and like very basic if statements. I think I just need to, I don’t think it’s worth your time to spend doing that. I will just make sure that these are more formula based. My formulas will be in general, probably more basic than your capabilities for sure. But I understand the concept of what you want. Formula-based, flexible, yeah, I get it. Yeah, everything feeds into itself. I can always trace back where the information came from, right? [Michael Houck]: Because if there’s something that looks off to me and I can’t go back and find out how that was calculated, that makes it harder to debug, right? [Ben Ornstein]: No, that makes sense. For these ones on the null sheet, I threw these into Chachabitty. Because I wanted them to just throw, give me like the correct data in terms of like percentages and it wasn’t the best approach. I should have just used the real data, like not the real data, it was the real data. I know what you mean, I know what you mean. That was not polite verbiage. Yes, I should have just used it myself and created it myself, so. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, and then like the other example, I just remember it would be like the process we did with the invisible campaign, right? So like, I think in general, like less color coding is, that’s just my personal preference. It’s like, it just, it gives me anxiety when I go in there and I see like all these different colors. I would prefer like a column, like a status column that then like, Hey, if they got this stage or if they’re this type of account or whatever, because then what we can do is we can add a filter to the table and we can filter by one rather than me having that if someone changes their color, I have to drag and drop them. [Ben Ornstein]: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, that makes sense. And then the last thing, okay, two more little things. One would be multiple numbers in a cell. [Ben Ornstein]: So for example, if Chase Diamond has- That was the one that came to my head. [Michael Houck]: That was the exact one that came to my head. Right, just throw the aggregate number in there so that, Again, if we’re using formulas, we’re going to be doing math on those numbers. And so if everything in a column is a number, but then one cell is like text because it’s number and sign number, it fucks up the formula. So, um, and then the last thing would just be like, we talked about this already, but like the sort of, um, no repeating information to like one sheet is like, think about it like a database, right? One sheet is a database. So one row per thing, one column per data point, and no need to pick a second thing over on somewhere else. Because this is my engineering background, coming back and being annoying. [Ben Ornstein]: But all of those make sense. Those are all more than reasonable. So yeah, no, I should be better at formatting these. So yeah, I’ll do that going forward. Cool. Yeah, not a big deal. [Michael Houck]: Just felt like it was worth going through. No, I agree. [Ben Ornstein]: I agree. Flexible, formula-based, no repeating data, can trace back, basically. Yeah, basically. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, basically. Okay, so let’s see. All right, let’s do the Brindis thing. [Michael Houck]: So monthly reporting. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, so I think in the spirit of the Google Sheets conversation and in the spirit of sort of me updating the performance tracker, for myself that I’m going to do. I want us to update the performance tracker for clients as well. So there’s going to be a couple extra metrics I want to throw in there. And also, basically, when I saw Sammy be like, oh, we can get all these metrics from fucking bullshit sprout or whatever, I’m like, well, there’s actually metrics that those things don’t cover that I’ve historically tracked for myself, but we’re not tracking right now, but are easy to get. I want to start doing that so I’m gonna have I’m gonna create that for myself and then I’ll record a loom for For I guess for Venus, but I’ll share it with you sue you see it, too And then as part of that we’ll have like a monthly reporting thing for longer-term clients we won’t need that for like people who are only like a month or two in or something, but We can like introduce that to the longer-term clients. [Ben Ornstein]: Sounds good the the one remaining thing that’s really difficult to track or for Venus to track is the engagements in terms of our proactive engagements. She can’t tell by looking at just an engagement on LinkedIn or X whether it was me or the client. And there’s no good process. The only thing I could think of to I thought about this today. Yeah. Was right when we do an engagement, we got to put it in the sheet. I can’t think of anything else. No, I agree. [Michael Houck]: There’s nothing else if we do it. But here’s the thing. I don’t think that like on Andrew, for example, I don’t think we should ask him to like fill out a bunch of data about it. What he should probably do is have a separate sheet that is for all clients. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: And there’s two columns in there. Yeah, there’s there’s three columns in there. One is date. One is client. Three is URL and that’s it. And then Venus goes in and handles everything else. [Ben Ornstein]: Yeah, that’ll work. That’ll work. Um, I, I think that’s easily the, the, the only method that will work for this because the biggest part of my reporting, um, my, the reason it took so long yesterday is I was going through all the engagements on the sheet and I was like, Hmm, did I do this one or is this the client? And there’s, there’s no way around it other than doing that. So yeah, I think you have to do it and at the moment of I don’t think it’s any other way Okay, I will let Venus know about that here. [Michael Houck]: I’m gonna make a note right now. [Ben Ornstein]: I just make a note because I’ll do I’ll make the note to do loon for new metrics Because the engagement the the reporting sheets are pretty good if I added the engagement rate to all the clients that one’s It’s looking good. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, there’s a couple more of those. There’s a way to calculate what share of your engagements that you get on something are quality. Because in theory, we should be calculating other types of engagements, like clicking into the thread, or video views, or profile views, or whatever. You can get those on Twitter. On LinkedIn, you really can’t. And so if we start tracking those, we can basically get a holistic engagement rate, which will be higher and look good, but then also within that a quality engagement rate and a quality share rate. So I’ve always used those as like the three main indicators of like, what, like why my posts performed well, like, oh, this post got a million impressions, but they were all like, but they were because of, but because, because engagements were high quality, it implied that the post was like something people wanted to talk about or resonated with them, or got a lot of impressions because, but it had low quality engagements. That means that people were just very interested in the topic and it took a while to consume the information, the view time was high, basically. [Ben Ornstein]: Ways to think about it like that. Interesting. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. [Ben Ornstein]: So the engagement sheet will have the date, the name and the URL? That’s it. [Michael Houck]: That’s basically every, that way every time it’s minimal information for Andrew to go in there and add. [Ben Ornstein]: Sounds good. Okay. That’s easy. I’ll let them both know about that. Now I’m thinking about the engagement sheet. So yeah, that when Venus did the 39, 1, 39, 1, the only way to get on X, you can get the data per post, How many followers gain from one post you can’t you can’t you can’t do it on linkedin? [Michael Houck]: So no, no, you can’t do it on x that number is not real Oh It’s it’s widely known as not a real number a buggy number It’s basically that number calculates how many people see the post Hover over the person’s profile and click the follow button in the modal that pops up It’s not a holistic representation of how many people drive to the profile who then convert to followers Oh, so we should delete that column then. Um, if I thought you said we’re calculating it based on like 24 hour cycle. [Ben Ornstein]: No, that, that number was that number is followers from post. Okay. Followers from post is way understated always. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. I really think we should just delete that column then. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Right. [Michael Houck]: But see, the problem is we can’t delete it because clients want to know how many followers they’re That’s like very important to them, right? [Ben Ornstein]: Here, so here, let me just share the screen. Maybe just so I can explain it, yeah. Okay, so on Noel’s poll. So this one is followers, but this is followers gained. We say per post from X, it actually gives that number like, yes, that’s the number that’s wrong. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: That’s the number that’s wrong. [Ben Ornstein]: And then on LinkedIn, this just showed this number since they don’t actually have that specific metric. This number is the followers gained on that specific day, right? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: The 24 hour period, basically, I guess it is. [Ben Ornstein]: But so how would that work if we have a client that has two LinkedIn posts in the same day? [Ben Ornstein]: Would we split that number in half? [Ben Ornstein]: Yeah, just split it in half. OK, that’s been my process. So then how should we handle this for X? [Michael Houck]: I guess we should just. Same process, same exact way on X. [Ben Ornstein]: OK, so I might have to have Venus go back. [Michael Houck]: Well, in typefully, it might actually show you how many followers of the account gained per day. So you might be able to just pull it all from there. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: I think it does. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah, there is down, it’s further down. [Michael Houck]: It’s yeah, that chart right there. [Michael Houck]: It shows you how many, it shows you how many they have, which from which you can back into, oh, they gained one this day, they lost one, whatever. [Ben Ornstein]: Yeah. You can also do it this way. Yeah. Easy, easy. Yeah. Okay. I’ll have her log in to typefully to do this. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Oh, sounds good. [Ben Ornstein]: Make sure she doesn’t post anything. Yes. Yeah, yeah. Okay, I’ll do that. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: So that’s, I’ll have her change that number. [Ben Ornstein]: Yeah, sorry, I probably should have flagged that sooner. [Michael Houck]: I thought we were doing the day over day for both platforms. So that’s my bad for missing the difference. [Ben Ornstein]: No, sorry, there’s probably just miscommunication. [Michael Houck]: Okay, I want to make sure we get to the two other things, if there’s nothing else on performance tracking or reporting. That’s it, on those. [Ben Ornstein]: Okay, so yeah, Earth’s reply was fucking useless. [Michael Houck]: I was like, did I say something wrong? No, I think you said it exactly how I would have said it, and he interpreted it in a way that I wouldn’t have expected someone to interpret it. Yeah, so their company is called Context. The website is context.inc. Basically what they do is they’re an all-in-one AI-powered G Suite. So like, you know, like, you know how like Gamma, for example, does like AI PowerPoint, right? They’re trying to do that all in one place, like PowerPoint, spreadsheets, like Word, like, like the new Microsoft suite, basically, right cloud based Microsoft suite, but powered by AI and with context across your entire business. So instead of using Google Sheets, or instead of using Google Suite, or whatever, you use context for everyone on your team. And therefore everyone on your team can use AI to get context from each other’s work. Interesting. Yeah, it’s actually cool. Like I would, I think for bigger companies, it will be actually very And so they raise a lot of money and they’re doing this big launch next month. And they want to, I think it’s on June 2nd. So it’s kind of soon actually. And they want to just blow it up. And so he’s like, I have thousands of dollars to spend on this, like whatever you can get me in terms of creators, we will do. So obviously they’re focused on like the founder, startup, entrepreneurship, big tech. Tech, business, AI, and productivity niches, like all of the above. So it gives us a wide berth to loop in a lot of creators, and they definitely have budget to spend. So I would just say be very generous with the Google Sheet that you put together in terms of whether someone’s a fit or not. And then, yeah, we’ll just present him a sheet. He’ll tell us who he wants to go with. We’ll quote him. He’ll pay. And then we’ll engage the creator. [Ben Ornstein]: It’s the same thing we did for Invisible, basically, except without John being insane about it. [Michael Houck]: OK, so business, productivity, AI. Startups, business, tech. He probably wants to get in the VC world too, so you could loop in whatever her name is, Alana. But yeah, I think let’s put together the list of creators we already have, like ASAP, by tomorrow. And then simultaneously, you should direct Venus to do the same thing, ASAP, that she did for Invisible, and look for a bunch of new creators too. And again, just very, generous and you can commandeer rena for that too if you want to have them both tag team that’s totally fine yeah I might I might have them both do that well yeah no rena’s good at this stuff so I think I think it’s a good idea right I’ll mess with them separately right so they’re not yeah yeah well I mean I guess you could message them together and just create one sheet that way they don’t overlap and put the same people in their sheets but I don’t know it might not be worth it I think yeah I was gonna say I because if it’s duplicate Okay, then I’ll just filter them out or whatever, so. [Ben Ornstein]: Yeah, it takes you two seconds on the backend, so it’s fine. [Ben Ornstein]: Right, okay. Message Rina and Venus, okay. [Michael Houck]: So I’d love to get that back to him this week with like what the full list of folks is, and then that way he can let us know ASAP and we can start the back and forth process next week. Sounds good. [Ben Ornstein]: I know you have a call, so I’m just gonna see if there’s anything The last thing is Taka, I think. [Michael Houck]: I’ll handle a hundred of those payments later today. Sounds good. [Ben Ornstein]: I have them marked in that sheet that I linked. I have them as, they’re red and they’re megaphones. So most of them are creators that are just on the platform already. There’s one guy, Kirk, who is not a creator, who’s going to send an invoice. It might be PayPal. It might be bank transfer. Either way, I’ll get that to you. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay, that’s fine. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, we’re in the middle of changing our bank account right now. Mercury is doing this really annoying thing where they are switching from one partner bank to another. And so I’m updating like so many fucking like connections and ACHs and wire stuff right now. So I prefer to do PayPal, but it’s fine if they want to do a wire, it’s no big deal. [Ben Ornstein]: Sounds good. He said potentially PayPal. So I think we’re good. Cool. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: All right, man. I’ll talk to you. [Ben Ornstein]: Sounds good. [Ben Ornstein]: See you. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: you