- Duration: 38 min
- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01JV5G1MB69SSVG7P6YMFY7FWZ (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JV5G1MB69SSVG7P6YMFY7FWZ)
Transcript
[Blake Stewart]: the messages that you sent or something? [Blake Stewart]: It was getting most of them. They’re like messaging tabs, kind of annoying, like the inbox for sent. It’s not all in one place. It’s like once you send something, it kind of disappears. You have to search for the name somewhere else. I messaged them because there’s a guy’s name, Raul, who had an accent on the U and said the AI like Scrambled all the English with the accents and I was like this isn’t that’s not good. I Think that’s all set and then I yeah, I mentioned the feature requests to add another filter on top of LinkedIn post So they should be working on that too, but yeah Other than that good. It’s got some interest for you want to hop on a call to discuss future placements and And for a deep dive. Oh, sweet. Nice little lead there. That’s cool. Yeah. So we’ll see how that goes. And just doing some more outreach on that. [Michael Houck]: But yeah. That’d be good either way. We get a little package together for him. [Blake Stewart]: Yeah. Yeah. I kind of came up with two. I don’t know. We could talk about more later. It’s probably just more of me riffing on it. Destructuring our packages differently. So like obviously we have the one-off packages. I don’t know if we should be just more up front about like quarterly and annual packages It’s less likely for people to jump into but I’m actually saw it in that McKinney’s email Recently, but it’s just you know more likely to sell bigger packages if you have you know, hey, let’s let’s focus on selling Four placements over the course of, you know, a quarter compared to just, you know, foreign placements as soon as possible. [Michael Houck]: I don’t know. Yeah. I guess also it’s like, it’s just fewer, fewer closes that need to happen. Right. Yeah. Yeah. [Blake Stewart]: Might be better for the partners if it’s, you know, spread out over the course of the year. [Michael Houck]: Um, If you want to propose some options, I can update the card page with the text or whatever to be focused on that. Yeah. [Blake Stewart]: I’ll think about it a little bit more. I think it would be better. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Cool. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Blake Stewart]: What’s going on on your end? Yeah. [Michael Houck]: I mean, I sent over the voice note. Uh yesterday, I think you responded to that. So that’s really top of mind for me is like you know and we can we should before we get too deep into this we should talk about other stuff, but um high level I see two paths for for studio one is quick cash out now with the business that we’ve built and then we build A new business sort of in the same area. Um with this new Paradigm if the ai stuff could be good enough If the AI stuff can’t be good enough, then we keep running with what we have and we try to integrate little bits of AI to save hours here or there within the company. But I don’t like the idea as much of trying to retrofit Studio as it exists today to be an AI agency. I think that’s what Alto Studios is doing. Is trying to do, I don’t think that’s going to work very well. Because one, it’s disruptive. You’re going to piss off all the writers that you fire. Two, clients are going to try to push down on cost. I think it’s just a hard road. And so my mindset is basically dependent on how good the AI stuff can be. Either take a stance based on that, that if it be good enough. Cool. We have a business that can keep growing and keep doing its thing. If it can’t be good enough, we’re going to get disrupted and we should sell out now before everyone else realized. [Blake Stewart]: Yeah. Yeah. And then the point of the last one too, is that’s, that’s kind of the selling tagline is, you know, Hey, it’s a, it’s a great business right now. Ready to be optimized with AI. Yes. That’s what people are going to look for. That’s exactly what people are looking for. Yeah. Right. [Michael Houck]: And so then on our side, we would just, you know, build a new, because we’d have the AI thing. And so we just build a new star crash. I think the existing one with x, that’s not our, that’s not our bread and butter. [Blake Stewart]: I think you’re thinking about the right way. That makes sense. [Michael Houck]: Cool. So yeah, so big, big priority then is like over the next one to two, like this week and next week, basically to make the call on, you know, I need to finish writing these docs is taking forever, because there’s a lot of information I’m trying to get in there for writer personas and things like that. But once that’s done, running some tests with my voice to see how good we can get it. And we should know by the end of next week if that’s going to be a viable path or not. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: OK. Wow. Great. That’s huge. [Michael Houck]: So with that in mind, obviously, my mind goes to, well, especially if we’re going to look to sell, we’ve got to juice growth. As much as possible right away, basically. And so we’re talking about other channels, but we’re also talking about Valley. So we can dig into that. But before we go too deep, I think we want to close the loop on next steps for… You brought up the commission on studio clients. And also, we’ve been working together for three months now. It’s just time to sort of check in and see next steps. So any thoughts on your end on that? I have a couple thoughts and options we can run through, but curious where your head’s up. [Blake Stewart]: Yeah. I mean, I love it. Love what we’re doing. Definitely think this is a good fit. Yeah, I think I just, you know, I came on part time to help with ads. I feel like I’ve got that under my belt pretty well. I just feel my focus being pulled into another studio, which is great. I enjoy it. I’m glad it’s going there. It’s obviously more value for YouTube, but it’s just not part of the contract. And so I feel like I’m working for free a bit on that. So I just kind of wanted just a level set there just so it makes more sense. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Totally. [Blake Stewart]: But yeah, I mean, I didn’t really have much in mind. Uh, I mean, same structure would be interesting. Uh, you know, a little more increase of cash and then some commission I think is what’s preferred. Just, um, I think it’s probably fair on both sides. If I’m, you know, performing, I should get paid and it’s obviously not going to hurt your budget as much. So I don’t know what you have set aside or like what, uh, what makes sense for you. So I don’t really have too many numbers, um, to pull from, but [Michael Houck]: Yeah, give me give me a sense of like, you know, time wise, like, yeah, yeah, through that somewhere. [Blake Stewart]: Yeah, so I mean, with ads, I was kind of doing like two hours of outreach. I guess this would just be like, and what it is daily now is like, reaching out for two hours kind of following up with sequences on HubSpot. Like checking in for another hour. Reporting doesn’t really take any time. So it was kind of like three hours part-time just, you know, trying to sell some ads. Now with megaphone kind of focus, Valley’s kind of taking, you know, between two and three hours a day as well, responding to people, creating new campaigns and like approving messages. And then there’s this, you know, random ops in there, tweet scraper, Thoughts on events, maybe reading some fundraising pitches. And then obviously, my mind’s going to your exit checklist and other stuff, founders, library. I don’t know. There’s a bunch of random stuff. But I don’t know. It’s kind of gone from three hours to kind of full six to eight hours a day kind of deal. [Michael Houck]: OK. So OK. Got it. Cool. Well, look, I think we should keep the commission on ads. 15% works for me as long as it works for you. And then we should just bump up the the monthly retainer. I think if you’re if you’re doubling your hours, let’s just double it to 5k if that works. [Blake Stewart]: I had written down but yeah. Okay, easy. [Michael Houck]: And then if we want to do I think like, it’s a little weird with Valley because like, in theory, I could have like someone else just operate that tool, we probably write your mission on that, right. But yeah, you did send like Michael and Draper. And so if there are other folks from your network, or who you’re finding through like other methods, then I’m happy to do like a referral fee on those as well. Okay, I would think about Valley as like, just like part of the role if we’re going to be expanding. [Blake Stewart]: Yeah, that’s fair. Yeah, especially because I’m using essentially your name and Blake them all his name to send But anyway, yeah, that makes sense. OK. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Does that work? [Blake Stewart]: Yeah, yeah, that’s fine. [Blake Stewart]: I mean, that’s part of, yeah, that’s good. [Michael Houck]: OK, so maybe like if you’re doing like direct referrals, though, or like other things, we can do the normal commission that we do for referrals from Studio, which is like 1k if they’re doing the standard package. And then if they do like an expanded package, that would go up. So if they’re like doing multiple accounts or a social and a newsletter, you know, it could be, it could be a couple of K depending on how big the package is. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay, cool. [Michael Houck]: That works. Um, what I will do then is I’ll update, uh, Sarah starting with, I guess, uh, today. Um, and we’ll just get it, we’ll get it rolling. Sweet. [Blake Stewart]: Thanks. Yeah. It makes me feel a lot better. [Michael Houck]: I definitely don’t want you to feel like you’re putting in more than you’re getting out or you’re working for free or anything like that. So yeah, we’re, we’re in a good place because of how much studio has grown. So I feel like we can, we can support it. [Blake Stewart]: Awesome. Right. Yeah. I feel like I’m adding a lot of value at levels. [Michael Houck]: So you definitely are, especially now that we’re actually getting some meetings scheduled from Valley. Like, I feel like this is like, you’re becoming like the growth guy, which is great. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Love that label. [Blake Stewart]: We’ll take it. Yeah, and that makes me feel better, too, about thinking about growth. I’ve already got notes on how we want to talk about that today, but yeah. [Michael Houck]: Okay, cool. I’ll update that today then and we’ll get things rolling. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Sounds good. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Thanks. [Michael Houck]: Anything else on that or should we move on to growth stuff in general? [Blake Stewart]: I think we’re good. Yeah, definitely happy. [Michael Houck]: I do love the idea of whatever is coming next building next having a little bit of equity so that if you do end up selling again I’m a little bit more advised to put in the extra extra hours on the weekends or whatever to be fair I’ll be up front about this um when we do sell studio I’m going to be giving out cash bonuses to folks so you you know you’ve been with you’ve been working on studio for a bit now so you’d be included in that uh you know obviously the amount will depend on the sale but Since we’re all LLC up and down, it’s easier to just do it as cash bonuses. But if we start anything that would be like C-Corp or potentially C-Corp, we’d include equity for anybody who’s working on that. Awesome. [Blake Stewart]: Thanks. Yeah, of course, man. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Absolutely. [Blake Stewart]: It’s going to be hard working for you and not asking for any, you know. [Michael Houck]: No, no, no. Don’t worry. It’s a little weird. You actually can’t offer like RSUs or like, I mean, you probably already know this, but it’s just different structures. So yeah. So yeah, there’ll be something depending on what we sell it for. [Blake Stewart]: Yeah. Awesome. Love to hear it. Nice. Thank you. Yeah. You’re managing your team really well and respectfully. [Michael Houck]: So that’s cool. I’m trying, man. It’s, you know, I’m juggling. [Blake Stewart]: Yeah, I’ll sit on that. That’s exciting. Yeah, happy to be here. So I’m not planning on leaving anytime soon if you need to hear that, but yeah. Sweet. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, no, I think we’ve got a good crew coming together. I mean, you and Ben, both great. And the new guy, Andrew, he’s going to be totally focused on studio. So I don’t know if he sells studio, if he’s going to part of that sale or not, I don’t know. But I need to talk about that with the eventual acquirer. But he’s really good too. You guys should connect. He’s really sharp. [Blake Stewart]: Sweet. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah, I’ll send him a message. [Blake Stewart]: And yeah, what’s his main focus, I guess? His sole focus is content ops. [Michael Houck]: So he’s the guy who’s going to be going into people’s accounts and leaving comments on their behalf, their content, setting up their newsletter accounts, and probably eventually, depending on time frame, taking on the account management side for the clients too. So I’m trying to outsource that so that I can spend more of my time focused on growth. [Blake Stewart]: Sweet. Okay, cool. Yeah, I’ll grab some time with that. Nice. Ready for takeoff, man. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, dude. I’m very, I’m very pumped. I feel like we’re, we’re in a good spot. So, um, we just gotta, gotta land, land the plane one way or the other. Either we go with this longterm and integrate or we say, you know, let’s, uh, let’s get a win under the belt. [Blake Stewart]: Okay. Is there any data around time of selling? Like you’re about to hit the summer, like I guess VCs traditionally slower. I don’t know about like, Yeah, I mean, it’s pretty much the same. [Michael Houck]: Everyone’s in the South of France, right? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: So we’re not there yet. [Michael Houck]: We’ve got, I’d say, realistically, a month or two months at the most. Really, really a month. But I don’t think that should be the driver. We should be more focused on macro factors of how likely is this business to be as valuable if it’s at the same revenue, let’s say, not counting growth, in six months. So my goal is making sure that multiple that we get is as good as possible. [Blake Stewart]: Okay, cool. Great. Okay. So growth. I’m going to save the event for last, just because I feel like that’s, right now, the most likely place we can go and easiest to pick up. [Michael Houck]: And there’s a lot to talk about there. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, let’s see. Let me get my laptop charging, too, because my laptop’s dying. [Blake Stewart]: Go ahead. I guess going back to the landing page and those metrics and how you want to present this, I don’t know if it makes sense to lean more into a niche and kind of market it that way. It might be easier to a target outreach, but also be just kind of like, I don’t know if it’s more valuable just to have, you know, ghostwriting for VC firms or like something more specific. [Michael Houck]: Um, yeah, pretty general. Um, let’s see. So out there studios is basically just focused on financial folks. Now it’s here. I’m going to drop the, okay. You’ll see that they use language like, um, and they’re, they’re one of their co-founders on their LinkedIn also talks about this, but they talk about like assets under management and things like that. Um, their website’s kind of slick actually. Um, but you know, they’re, they’re is high. They start at $5,000 a month, basically. And they’re also, a big differentiator between us and them is that our business is actually operated by creators, like Blake and I, right? Whereas their business is operated by an ops guy, is a CEO, basically. And they get pressed because, or they get leads because Saho Bloom is like one of the owners of the business, but he doesn’t do anything. He just like gets a cash. They’re just funneling cash out of the business every month basically. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: Like they were an early megaphone user and they were spending a ton of money with us. And it got to the point where they were like, yeah, like our, our, they have like four different creators who like own the business and they’re like, they just want us to distribute more cash to them so we can’t spend on growth things. And I’m like, that seems like a short term decision. But to answer your question in terms of messaging, yeah, I think that some level of confidence outside of just like, hey, we can make you grow is important. So maybe we’ll AB test some different things and see what leads to more calls. Yeah. [Blake Stewart]: And I see their co-pilot AI content co-pilot there as well. Probably just a little upsell opportunity. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: They’re doing this basically where they build like AI system for the company, which I think is smart, but they’re pricing it in like a really weird way, I think. Um, and also like, you know, they’re just not product people. So I, I, Right. OK. Interesting. Yeah, that was just kind of one thought. [Blake Stewart]: If you get more specific around niche, obviously finance, you’re going to be able to charge more. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, VC is good. [Michael Houck]: One of the things I plan to do in the next, again, week or two while I’m setting up this AI stuff outside of that is just reach out to all the VCs that I know and basically, hey, we work with billionaire VCs, like let us help you because we have Tim now. [Blake Stewart]: Will you send me some copy? Um, and maybe that’s what I’ll do in Valley, set up a more specific campaign towards VCs, um, and kind of brand it as kind of VC branding, um, and kind of do some outreach around that. [Michael Houck]: Um, yeah, I think that’s really smart either like traditional VCs for them and then eventually their portcos or, Yeah, exactly. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Accelerators, too, are another one. [Michael Houck]: I have a really good relationship with Antler in New York. And to a lesser degree, I don’t know if it probably wouldn’t do something like this, but I don’t know if YC has some level of referrals they would give us. I know Gary, so I don’t know. Cool, OK. [Blake Stewart]: Yeah, I had that on my notes, too. It’s just like Venture Studio partnerships and Accelerator partnerships. And yeah, if we write for them and then get it in to those companies, that’s huge, too. OK. [Michael Houck]: The thing is, those types of leads, I think, will push us to their portcodes a lot more with the new offer of an AI system for them, rather than traditional ghost writing. [Blake Stewart]: But it’s still worth pursuing. OK. Cool, yeah. I’ll test some more. Yeah, I’ll send some copy. [Michael Houck]: Great. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Another question too. [Michael Houck]: Sorry, go ahead. No, no, go for it. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Go for it. [Blake Stewart]: I’m just looking back at the clients that you already have. I mean, what can you kind of like walk me through quickly how you got them? Yes. In the past. [Michael Houck]: So I actually have this written in my, in my, in my blog. In our little financial tracker, what the channel we got them from So let me actually do like a little summary chart here. One second. Okay, so when I look at active clients, then the breakdown is, there we go. Okay. Personal relationship, nine, just cold, either outreach or I think most of them were, yeah, cold outreach. This should be personal relationship actually. Okay, so four, personal relationship, eight, cold outreach, eight, referral, and six, inbound. That’s active. And then inactive, what do we have here? Let’s see. And some of these are like paused, others are turned. You know, paused secretly equals turned. So seven are personal relationships, which I think makes sense. You know, the ones people who I basically was like, Hey, give this a try. You know me, I’m good at it. They’re not actually looking to do this. They turn at a higher rate. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: Only one referral has churned and that was sort of like a mutual decision. And then one inbound has churned, which is actually a really crazy ratio for inbound, six to one. And then cold outreach four have churned. [Blake Stewart]: So eight to four. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Interesting. [Blake Stewart]: Okay. Yeah, I don’t. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: What do those numbers mean? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Let’s see. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I mean, I would just interpret it as like, you know, the cold outreach has been successful with like, less personal, less personalized messages in the past. What we were doing before was we were using a segment, a segment of the newsletter list. And we were doing cold email drips to them specifically for ghostwriting, but like not written in like the founding journey branded stuff, just like me people basically. Yeah. Um, that worked. And then, um, I mean, referrals, that’s the biggest thing. The fact that we have eight referrals and that’s like our largest tide for our largest channel, that’s going to look really good when we go to go to sell. Yeah. Um, And then inbound, we can’t really do much with that because in theory, you tie that to the newsletter. And so acquirers will be like, well, that’s key person risk. Once we lose you, we lose that channel. [Blake Stewart]: OK. A small counter would be that new SEO blog test situation. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: I don’t think that we’re going to just timeline I don’t think we’re going to see a big impact on that. So we could talk about that. We have it. Um, okay. Once we set it up, but I don’t think it’s going to be a big driver. [Blake Stewart]: Okay. And how, what does the referrals look like, Are you talking to your current clients? Like, is there a pretty obvious upfront? [Michael Houck]: Uh, so I have like a, again, like a to-do list item for, um, you know, this month to just, you know, like, you know, have conversations with all of our clients and be like, hey, give me one referral. Depending on your success, give me a couple referrals. I don’t have a recurring process to do that. Some of them have just proactively offered them because they’ve liked what they’ve gotten from us. And others, I’ve just reached out to our longer term clients. I’ve just asked at one point or another. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Cool. [Blake Stewart]: All right. I think there’s some room there. Okay, awesome. Yeah, I’ll try and bump up this code outreach numbers. But that’s good to have this data. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. [Blake Stewart]: And then what about megaphone? The SAS product? Is there any kind of like triggers in there? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, we we have a we currently have a page in the dashboard that just talks about studio and says, hey, need help writing your content? Come here. I would imagine that some of the inbound folks have come from there. I don’t know for a fact. So yeah, we would just include that as part of it. [Blake Stewart]: OK. I feel like there could be more in there, too. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, it’s tricky because the dashboard is overcrowded right now. So we’re actually doing an exercise to simplify it as part of the new version of the product that we’ll be rolling out soon. So I want to keep some reference to it in there. But I don’t want it to, the goal is to make it as simple as possible. So I don’t want to be too overt with it right now. [Blake Stewart]: OK. OK. Sounds good. And then have you tested any pricing reactions? Could you just increase price? [Michael Houck]: Yeah. So we’ve been testing on calls. And I updated the Notion page to be this as its default, to go from 3K to 4K as the default price. And we’ve included in that some megaphone credits to people. I like that idea. And the response has been good. Two people have, when I said that, they’ve been like, oh, I don’t know if I need all that. Do you have anything lower? And I’ve been like, yeah, we could do 3K. But it makes the 3K price point feel a lot cheaper to them. [Blake Stewart]: So it works. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Nice. [Blake Stewart]: I love the anchoring. I was a biology major, and so I think whenever pricing comes up, I’m always like, oh, yeah. [Michael Houck]: I could nerd out on pricing psychology with you for like a whole afternoon, I swear. [Blake Stewart]: Have you ever had pushback to like, people wanting to decrease it or like, what does decreasing look like, [Michael Houck]: Decreasing the lowest will go is 1995. And for that, we just lower the content volume and we don’t have been doing like ops on the account. [Blake Stewart]: Yeah. I wonder, like, Like everyone wants some sort of like content to be, like everyone knows content’s important. Like they want to increase their brand presence, whether they’re a founder or not. I wonder if there’s like a light package that we could tease for like founding journey readers that’s less about like their startup and more about just like their personal branding. Um, whether it’s like people looking for founder, like for jobs or like looking I don’t know, this is as early as possible, like almost outside of the startup journey, but still just content focused. I don’t know. I don’t know. It’s tricky because when you are that early, like what do you write about? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: Well, one, we have one, what do you write about? [Michael Houck]: But, but two, it’s like, what should you really be focused on? Like, honestly, it’s not content at that stage. So it’s, Okay. [Blake Stewart]: How high have you thought about going for price? [Michael Houck]: So I think 4k makes sense as the new like default, but what we’re also going to start offering is a higher tier, actually two higher tiers. One will be 6k default and kind of go up from there. And that’ll include a more explicit like strategy calls with either Blake or myself. And then a third a third tier above that will be like a team like we will literally Hire like dedicated folks for you. Like oh you need a content strategist. We got you. You need a writer We got you a video guy, whatever. [Blake Stewart]: Well, we’ll do that and we’ll manage it and do the strategy work do well and price This is great very helpful I Guess the last little bullet point I Was this around the landing page and where that’s at for you right now? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, so design team is finishing up like the little charts and a new logo because we can’t use like cartoony Megaphone logo for a studio the branding is like, you know gonna be a little more high-end than that So they’re finishing up that this week and then next week we’re gonna get started on Implementation so they also do like web flow work and stuff like that. So it’s great to do it for us. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Cool. [Michael Houck]: Once I finish the copy, I will send it to you. So you can you can take a look. I’d love your take. Yeah. I think next next week, let’s let’s jam on other channels. So like, like, how can we juice our referrals? Aside from what we’re doing? If we do a workshop or webinar? What does that look like, [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Are you frozen? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: You there? [Blake Stewart]: I think I lost you. Oh, we’re back. OK, cool. I got to run anyway. [Michael Houck]: I got a call with Ben. Yeah, I think just like different like I’ll send you the list of channels I’m thinking about and let’s just jam on that for most of the time next week well, I’ll reorganize the event box and Catch it up