- Duration: 34 min
- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01JVMTZNQZF2A60JRQ04BN08Z0 (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JVMTZNQZF2A60JRQ04BN08Z0)
Transcript
[Michael Houck]: we can count on it’s that Ben drives far distances. [Ben Ornstein]: It’s funny because like it is every like three calls I’m taking like a minimum two and a half hour drive somewhere. [Michael Houck]: It’s it’s you have you have the triangle it’s like you’ve carved out the the New York to Delaware to Pittsburgh triangle that’s the yeah you roam. [Ben Ornstein]: I’m outside of there, something’s wrong. [Michael Houck]: How’s your weekend, Blake? It’s good. [Blake Stewart]: I went spearfishing off of Catalina Island, which was fun. That sounds sick. I’ve never done that before, but yeah, it sounds awesome. Five minutes, which freaked me out. [Blake Stewart]: You’re like in the water, right? [Blake Stewart]: Yeah, it’s essentially just snorkeling with a spear gun. And yeah, it was fun. It was beautiful. It was a lot of fun. [Michael Houck]: Did you spear any fish, or were you flailing it around? [Blake Stewart]: Yeah, no, I didn’t even take a shot, really. My buddy got a big sheephead fish. I don’t know what that is, but he got a good one. He came out of the water holding a fish, which was funny to see. Just essentially snorkeling around, you know, poke the fish or two. But, you know, yeah, it was cool. The kelp is a giant kelp forest that you’re kind of swimming through. And I look down and there’s like five foot shark just kind of like going on the bottom and I pop back up and I yell at my friend. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: I was like, whoa, watch out, there’s a shark. [Blake Stewart]: He’s like, oh, it’s just a leopard shark. Don’t worry. I was like, I’m gonna worry. [Ben Ornstein]: And I’m still gonna worry, right? [Michael Houck]: You should have speared the shark. [Blake Stewart]: I know, right? That would have been crazy. That would have been crazy. But yeah, it was a good weekend. [Michael Houck]: It sounds fun. I’ve never been to Catalina, even though I lived in Santa Monica for like two years. [Blake Stewart]: Yeah, it was super easy. I mean, 30 minute drive to Long Beach and then our ferry. So I mean, kind of easier than driving up to Malibu. Not really much traffic. [Michael Houck]: What did you do? I went to a Mormon church, which was surprisingly normal, like any other church. I was a little underdressed. They do dress pretty formal. The weird thing is, I think they do this everywhere. Within the Mormon church, your church is based on your marital status and your age. So for example, the congregation or the ward that I went to was only for people 26 to 35 years old who are single. All of the churches are like that. They have a married couples church. They have a college kid church. [Ben Ornstein]: Interesting, that’s kind of cool. It makes sense. [Ben Ornstein]: Yeah, the people that are most like you that’s cool Yeah, there’s there’s some like intentionality to it. [Michael Houck]: And also the the sort of they don’t call it a sermon, but the the sermon was It was about neural ink Like the the speaker who they had that time knew the third person who got the neural ink implant and They were like very emotional about the change and talked about it from a godly perspective. [Blake Stewart]: It was very interesting. How do Mormons view technology like that? They love it. [Michael Houck]: I mean, there’s a whole entrepreneurial hub here in between Provo and Salt Lake City called Lehigh. And there’s a bunch of startups here, and they’re very pro-technology. Very interesting. So that was what I did yesterday, and then I just watched some hockey. Other than that, just hitting the gym. There’s not a lot to do out here, so it’s easy to get in a good routine, and yeah, it’s been nice. How does it compare to Charleston? It’s the total opposite. Charleston, great food scene, very social, Here it’s, you know, you got the little downtown strip, like four or five blocks from me. And then it’s just like houses and churches and little, right. And BYU, of course, is right up the street. So yeah, we’ll see, but it’s very relaxing. The mountains are right outside all the time, very calming. In some ways I love it, but I’m not a Mormon, so. All right, let’s dive in. So let’s talk about ads. I’m going to share my screen. Start off there. OK, so this is the last two weeks. You don’t really need to look at this top section, because we don’t have anything in here for Upscribe yet, because these referrals take a few weeks to process. This will be sort of a lagging thing. Basically, the more referrals that get confirmed, the lower our net CPA goes. So this is how much we’re spending per subscriber, and then minus what we earn back, basically, from upscribing. So we can just look at this center section. Whoops. That’s all the old weeks from when I worked with Matt. We can just look here. So we see that we have 500 new subs last week, which is great. Our ads are not being shown to more than like 1.4x, which is also pretty good. And our CPA crept up, but not to like a dangerous level. I think if it gets above 250, then, you know, that’s bad. The random page conversion is the big issue that I see right now. When we were doing this before, as you’ll see, we were in the 55 to 60% range pretty consistently, sometimes even a little higher than that. So that most of those ads were running through the same landing pages. So I need to figure out what is changing there, what we need to update there. Um, but that’s the, that’s the big, uh, the big thing I see in terms of performance. Um, and this week I took some new ads live this morning, um, still for because we have that funnel kind of set up and it’s working. So I figured just double down on that. So what we did this morning was took a second campaign live or a second ad set live here. This is the social proof concept one for the pitch decks. Basically we have one ad that we run two versions of in here. It looks like, why is it not showing me the highlight? It looks like this. Basically, we were using the logos of the startups as the main draw to read this and click on it. So we can create more like this that, again, use the big logos. And in the past, it performed really well. If you look historically, 141, 182 with the same ads, so with considerable spend. So in theory, as it learns who to show these to again, um those numbers that we’re seeing today uh you know will come down pretty substantially so it’s good to do that and I think these two campaigns we should focus on for now then with new creation so they should be focused on either uh short videos about the pitch deck database or um like static images about the pitch deck database um and then later this month we can expand into the investor database. And there were also some ads historically that I saw that did well for our, what’s it, the evaluation calculator. So we might roll that back out again at some point. [Ben Ornstein]: Okay, I’ll focus on those two, the short videos and static images about Pitch Deck for this whole Sounds good. [Michael Houck]: Anyway, just send me the batch of ideas before you go in and create them. Yep, will do. OK, I think that’s it for ads. Oh, actually, no, one other thing to flag. So I had this annoying conversation with the SparkLoop team the other day, because basically, the way they integrate with Card and Beehive is a little wonky. So long story short, basically, we’re not going to get the acquisition source data here anymore. Basically, we had a trade off between can we use spark loop? Or are we going to be able to get the data of which campaign someone came in from And I think, in the short term at least, using SparkLoop is the higher value option. If we really end up running a bunch of campaigns and ad sets and things like that, and want to play them off each other in Beehive in terms of how long those people stick around and things like that, we’ll need to re-evaluate and there is no way around it, so we would have to switch to Beehive Boost at that point, and Beehive Boost is considerably worse in terms of payouts. Yeah, I just think it’s a it’s a trade off we need to make for now. Yeah, before it was like Facebook ads and like campaign name or ad set name or whatever, which was great, but we’re not going to get that for the for the time being. Um, let’s talk about, uh, outreach. So Valley stuff, uh, seems like it’s gone decently. Well, I have a few more than a few actually, I think calls this week from it. [Blake Stewart]: Nice. Yeah. Um, we’re at like a 1.3% message to meeting conversion, which I don’t know if that’s good or bad, but it feels, it feels low. Yeah. [Ben Ornstein]: One out of every a hundred basically. [Blake Stewart]: Right. Yeah. [Blake Stewart]: Um, a little more, but yeah. Right. Um, which is improving. So I, I kind of refiltered on the LinkedIn sales navigator search, um, and kind of ran, started some more campaigns, um, you know, same products invoice. Um, and those have been better so far. Um, And so just kind of ramping that up and so. Yeah, hopefully that that 1.3 gets gets higher, but do we? Do we remember? [Michael Houck]: Do we remember what Zaid had said the average was when we started with them? No. No. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: OK. [Michael Houck]: I’m going to I’ll text him today and I’ll see if I’ll see if I can get some context. Yeah, see what we should be. [Blake Stewart]: shooting for Yeah around over the weekend got a lot of messages to respond to Some are great. Some are bad. How can you just a pretty bad response? [Blake Stewart]: that I know the prompt was horrible, but Yeah, well the good news is we have what is this? [Michael Houck]: want no not Who’s this guy? We have 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 this week. So it’s working. Yeah. So part of this converts to feel like we’re breaking even, right? [Blake Stewart]: We’re going to see what the conversion from this channel is. [Michael Houck]: Because my conversion normally on inbound I don’t know pretty close to 50% probably fluctuates from month to month, but Somewhere around there. So if we can get this even to 20% I’ll feel good about it. [Blake Stewart]: Okay, that’s a good goal Okay, yeah keep me posted on how those go And if they’re going well, like if someone converts I’ll I don’t know like audit their profile who they are, why it worked, and try and filter down our search even more to go after more people. Yeah, I mean, wrapping up, I threw in a new product for founding journey ads as well. And so kind of testing different use cases. That one is definitely starting in early. The message sent out like, hey, I’ve got a list of pre-IPO founders, you want to see our database of startups you can invest in. And I was like, this is not what I’m going for. But, um, I mean, it’s, it’s a learning, it’s, it’s hard. Um, I’ve trained it. So my process is, you know, starting to campaign, I’ll train it on like 10 messages. Um, and I’ll keep training it until I see, you know, you know, five to 10 that look good. And there’s like no problem. And then I’m going to turn it on to autopilot and assume it’s good, and kind of train based off of other responses too. So it’s just kind of, you know, to ramp up to autopilot is kind of a gamble, training, training, and then. Yeah, I agree. [Michael Houck]: I definitely don’t think we’re at the point where we can trust autopilot yet. So we got to be a little judicious. And then we should also to talk about campaigns. So context there, I think you guys both have context here, but we want to ramp these up over the next six to eight weeks and try to run as many of them as operationally we can handle, basically. So I’m going to be sending out an email to all active and past Megafone influencers this week, and seeing if they will be interested in it. I’m also going to mention it in the newsletter tomorrow. So we’ll have a bunch of leads coming in for this. But I do think it makes sense to also do some outreach around it, like, you know, want to do influencer marketing, have any launches coming up, things like that. Because, you know, when you really think about it, these like creator agencies, they’re very common on Instagram and YouTube and TikTok. But there any of them for like the professional creators on LinkedIn and X and so we are offering a somewhat unique service here so yeah I think we should and Blake if you want me to send you over some like copy to train the valley message bot with I can do that probably tomorrow okay yeah that would be great okay Yeah. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: I’ll do that tomorrow. [Michael Houck]: I’ll keep you in the loop with how these meetings go this week, and then make sure my calendar’s up to date next week. Yes, it is. So I’m not going to take any calls on… No, just on Monday and Wednesday next week. I have flights both days. Okay. Okay. [Blake Stewart]: I’ll keep the kind of measure on that conversion right now. So 1.3 is where we’re at and hopefully we could double by next week. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Let’s see. [Michael Houck]: Cool. Okay. Um, what’s next? I guess content we should do. Um, so yeah, content is going well. I’ve consistently found time to post every day. Which is great. That’s the biggest hurdle. [Michael Houck]: So we’re out there. [Michael Houck]: I would say that we’re not structured yet in terms of scheduling things ahead and just being intentional about what days we’re posting what content on and how frequently we’re doing X format versus Y format and looping of the design team to create stuff. So that’s on my plate for this week. But results have been pretty decent. So we’ve gained followers on threads in a week in less than a week actually started I think on Tuesday so by the end of today it’ll be decently over a hundred and it’s basically exactly like Twitter so I feel very confident that just using the backlog of content that we have from Twitter for my account that never posted on threads that yeah we’ll be able to grow substantially in a short period of time there I’m not even engaging that much it’s mostly just my own content that’s doing well So yeah, we’ll see where we can get to. But I think that’s going to turn into a good channel for building the email list for us, which, in theory, then will also lead to some people becoming leads for Studio. And I’ll talk explicitly about Studio on there, too. LinkedIn, I think I’m still sort of figuring out what formats do best on LinkedIn right now. It’s been hit or miss so far. Had a big post yet. So I need to do some analysis this week and just be more intentional there. But the audience isn’t dead. They’re just like, we’ve grown by, I think, a couple hundred followers this week on LinkedIn, too. So it’s working. And then Sevastack, slower burn. But I am having posts that are getting a little bit of traction. I think I got something like 20 likes or something. Um, the tough part there is that because we have a big following, but that following is entirely unengaged on sub stack, they think the platform thinks that the content is low value because a low percentage people are engaging with it. So we just need to grind it out for a bit. And as they see who is engaging, they’ll prioritize showing the post to those people. And then the engagement statistics will increase, uh, in terms of ratio. And then, uh, it’ll grow from there. So there’s probably a couple month period where it’s gonna be slow going there, but it’ll work itself out. And then YouTube, I filmed a video on just like basically one of my threads over the weekend, but I don’t like it. So I’m going to redo it or do a different one tomorrow. So we will have a YouTube video this week as well, but I’m just too picky on that platform. It’s like, I don’t know. Then you know, you know. Yeah. [Ben Ornstein]: Now, as like, as you should be, right? I mean, if we’re going to repeat, if we’re going to put out high quality content, we, you know, we should spend the time to do it. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. I just need to just need to do better topic selection, but okay. So that’s it for content. Um, and Anything that I should know from you guys on there? [Ben Ornstein]: Any thoughts you guys have on content side? I was just thinking, I was brainstorming in my head quickly about format on LinkedIn. And I initially remembered one of the posts that Brindis, her account got like 500,000 impressions or something, was she shared external links Surprised about because I was like if you’re if you’re sharing links outside of LinkedIn shouldn’t the algo D prioritize those Yeah, it does. She shared like a bunch of I’ll find I’ll find the exact post but if you I Don’t know collate like a bunch of different Links that are relevant for founders that are about the same topic whether it’s you know, I um successful pitch decks if we can do like sub links to To those or and that’s just you know top of my head. [Michael Houck]: I first thing I’m thinking of um, but yeah No, no, no format is really going to be like a silver bullet. I think Right, like, you know, we don’t want to get too in the weeds and like brainstorm one post versus another post but um, if you have examples that you think have done well for other folks to send them to me I’ll take a look I’ll see how we can adapt them to to us Sounds good. [Ben Ornstein]: Um, on the campaigns front for just cause we were talking about it. Um, context dot Inc. I’ve done reached out to 150 people and we’ve got over 50 that are going to participate. So sick. That’s really good. [Michael Houck]: I think they’re willing to spend up to $20,000. So that's going to be fucking fantastic. Um, can you then send me that cleaned up list, uh, today and we'll get it back to earth, uh, this afternoon. Yep. [Ben Ornstein]: I can do that. [Michael Houck]: Cool. Okay. Awesome. Um, and then I guess last thing is, uh, sponsorships. So, um, I think Blake, you said we have two featured placements that are in the funnel. What's the status with those? [Blake Stewart]: So we've got a invoice out to delete me for three featured placements. Blaze AI was something Ben had been working on and we met with him last week and they said they were going to pay. For a total of the week. Air Campus reached out to us and they wanted to run something last week or ASAP. And so I sent out a proposal to them for future placements, waiting on that. And then I'm meeting with civic.com today. And we'll push a future placement on them as well. So we have four in the pipeline. And then, yeah, kind of I'm making sure Valley doesn't take over my phone. [Michael Houck]: I can imagine. OK, cool. It sounds like if we get some conversions out of that group, that we'll be in decent shape for the next couple of weeks. So that's good. It's also decent timing for us to not be totally booked up, because I do have some stuff I want to push, like the creator campaigns, and also just push Studio again, now that we're getting more people coming into the newsletter from ads. So I think in general, as we're running ads and just growing in general, I will probably want to reserve occasional feature placements for our own stuff. But we should still fill up the other ones for sure. [Blake Stewart]: Okay. And so I saw you reserve this Saturday. [Michael Houck]: Let me pull up the calendar here on my end. [Blake Stewart]: It was open anyway. And so I didn't know if we Yeah, so for tomorrow's issue, I'm going to do the campaigns. [Michael Houck]: And then for Saturday, I was thinking studio, but we can also run like an affiliate or something like that too. So we always have those to fall back on. Okay, cool. So I'm going to, And then I think bamboo is this Saturday, right? Or I know it's moveable, but we haven't decided. Yeah, I think we got moved around. OK. Yeah, I think when I reserved the Tuesday spot, I moved them from Tuesday to Saturday. OK, that works. Let's do bamboo. [Blake Stewart]: Yeah, so we both do that spot. [Michael Houck]: Maybe one day they will want to do a deep dive that they paid $5,000 for, but we’ll Let’s see. [Blake Stewart]: Can you hear the response from them? [Michael Houck]: It’s really incredible. [Michael Houck]: It’s so nuts. OK, cool. I think that’s everything for now. Anything that’s relevant to all three of us that we should talk through live? Not that I can think of [Blake Stewart]: I mean, just welcome sequence, I’m still waiting Deepview link, they approved us. I’ve emailed them three times for the next step. She even she emailed me once like after I emailed and said, Hey, did you see this? So like, I don’t I don’t know what’s going on. [Michael Houck]: But if we have this week, we’ll just move forward with the the ones we have. And that’ll be fine for now, I guess. [Blake Stewart]: Okay, I’m gonna hope for that one. It’s $2 to start and then there's opportunity to jump up to $3, so. [Michael Houck]: Well, OK. [Michael Houck]: It should do well. [Michael Houck]: I mean $2 if we get $2, then like even one out of every 10 people checking it out will be decent, so. OK, have a good while I have you both. I am probably going to be out on Friday afternoon. Drive down to Zion and stay down there. So I’ll probably be unreachable from like mid-afternoon, midday Friday until probably Sunday. Enjoy it, man. Zion’s sweet. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: I haven’t been since I was a kid, so it’ll be like a whole new experience. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Nice. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Blake Stewart]: Enjoy it. Be careful on Angel’s Landing. This is crazy. [Blake Stewart]: Yeah, it’s gonna be fun though Yeah, we’ll see yeah