- Duration: 37 min
- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01JVQAJ8CV978SW4S2V06V5X69 (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JVQAJ8CV978SW4S2V06V5X69)
Transcript
[Michael Houck]: I feel like I could call him the founder and CEO of the company. [Doug Freeman]: Yeah, awesome. Great. Thanks, man. [Michael Houck]: Appreciate you jumping on. No, of course, man. Excited to chat and, yeah, I guess hear more about your kind of content goals and sort of how we can help. So any background you want to give and then I can give some background on us and we can go from there. [Doug Freeman]: All right, cool. Sorry, I’m scarping down some food. I’ve got a camera in between meetings on a hotel conference here in Orlando. [Michael Houck]: I can go first if you’d rather, then I can use the background on us first. [Doug Freeman]: Yeah, if you could, then I can finish up here and I can jump on. [Michael Houck]: That’d be great. No problem at all. We’ve both been there. Yeah, so I’m Michael. I have been a founder for a while. I was in big tech before Uber and Airbnb back in the early days of Uber Eats. And then I founded a company called Lunch House. We raised $23 million from Andreessen and a couple other investors. And ended up kind of folding that into a venture fund that we founded. And so we made a lot of investments in other startups from that. And then for the past two years, we've been focused on a bootstrapped holding company that I've built. And so we have media brand, we have some agency offerings, and we have a software platform. And sort of the thing that's been growing the fastest for us for the first half of this year has been our content agency. That's what we're focused on at the moment. Basically, the way it works is to grow on social, you really need two things. You need content and you need distribution. And I've built my own audience to over 100,000 across Twitter and LinkedIn and over 200,000 on Substack, basically, with that principle. And so the content side, you need to write good content. The distribution side, you need relationships with creators who can engage with your content at the right time who are in your niche and have the audience that you want so that their audience sees your content, those people follow you. So we started off by building a platform called Megaphone where you can basically put a budget behind any social media posts that you make and our algorithm will match it from our network of hundreds of creators with folks who will then go comment on it, repost it, and just engage with it and amplify it to their audiences. So we started with that, but then along a lot of our users are like, well, my content isn't very good in the first place. So can you just write that for me too? And so we've started to do that in the last year and it's gone really well. So now we work with about 30 founders and even some billionaire VCs and we're writing their social content. We're doing newsletters to sort of build trust and convert people into customers. And we've even started to expand more recently and like AI avatar videos, and things like that. So it's sort of a full service content agency, very low lift for you, because you're, you know, you're a busy guy. And most of our clients are founders and super busy. So we don't put a ton of meetings on your calendar or anything like that. So high level, that's, that's who we are. [Doug Freeman]: That's what we do. [Doug Freeman]: Cool. Yeah. Yeah, no, that's how I got connected. I followed that, you know, subscribe to your newsletter. And thank you. Of got through that process. You do a very great job. I read it. I read the most recent one. I think it was this morning. There was one that went out. So, uh, you know, you, you spoke on some of that. So, yeah, I mean, I, I, it was impressive. I've kind of followed some of the newsletter journeys and like how that has, whether you look at like beehive or you look at some of these different prices and that process. So a little bit about me. I, uh, I started my life in sports. I played collegiately low level professional baseball. That was my first plan in life. [Michael Houck]: Actually, I was on the AAU circuit as a kid and I was throwing 85 at 16 and then I broke my wrist and it didn't heal right and so I was like, well, I guess I gotta figure something else out. You know, well, then you're going to relate with my journey quite a bit. [Doug Freeman]: I might, you know, I was, uh, you know, a top hunter player in the country in high school and, uh, was, you know, has scholarships at Clemson, Florida state, all of them. And I, I ended up, uh, you know, dislocated my shoulder, played junior college baseball, still thinking, I'm like, I'm a hundred percent going to play in the big leagues, get drafted. I don't get drafted out of junior college. I go to a smaller D2 because I'm like, I'm still a cocky young kid who's not thinking about life after baseball. I just go to a random school and, uh, and you know, whoever's going to pay me the most to show up on campus. And, uh, then I still don't get drafted and end up playing independent professional baseball for a little year, hurt my back. And then I Like, all right, I'm, I'm dying. This is the, you know, I was coaching, uh, at my former college at the time and dove in there and then ended up with my own, you know, baseball camp company. And then ultimately a large national franchise kind of bought me out of my own and, and I ran and started, and then ultimately owned the state of Florida for a company called prep baseball court. And, uh, that was where I really like got into like some of the content. So I built a Twitter follow. Like, we're the strongest sports world of that. And I did that for, you know, eight years or so. In doing that, we ran those youth tournaments that you talked about. And a big revenue driver in running those youth tournaments is the hotels and being able to prove the economic impacts to the city. And the process was garbage. And I hated our agency that did it. So I started my own travel agency. And then when I realized it was less about the agency, and there's really two technologies in the entire country that control $11 billion in new sports group travel, and they are terrible. So I’m not technical, but I hired out, I made some decent money, and over the last three or four years, I went from my own travel agency to building our own tech for our travel agency, to last year realizing, when raising a little bit of money, the venture play of this is really taking a step even further down and being that marketplace, that flywheel, not only only for youth sports, but being able to help planners organize and monetize accommodations and help venues and facilities be able to more accurately, you know, target and create leads and generate that. And so it started in the sports space. And then last year, the first marketplace play was a large wedding website that was white labeling our service. And then, you know, then it’s working with planners and then it was working with venues that didn’t have accommodations. And we’re like, Oh, we started seeing this, this kind of flywheel approach. So, uh, tomorrow night we actually launched, we have a hundred some odd wedding planners, um, signed up for our first kind of, uh, what tech partners with this company called longevity, which is the largest certified wedding and event planner in the country. They have over a thousand certified wedding and event planners. And as of the semester, so spring, so we’re going into summer. So spring semester, uh, every student that takes a, Certified wedding event planner and over 2,500 colleges will be required to sign up So Yeah, so so that’s an exciting piece of it and we’re launching with some planners and launching with venues And uh, you know, i’ve i’ve tried to raise some money. I recently had a cto That I recruited for four months and he was on for 30 days and his wife had some health issues. I believe that and it’s been Uh, yeah, so it’s been it’s been a crazy journey And, you know, ultimately I’m at the point where, okay, we might be able to get some capital, do some stuff, but like, we have a product, you know, that’s decent enough to go out and kind of get some people on. And like, you know, I’ve kind of held back in terms of really leaning into like pushing it out there because. Frankly, the product just wasn’t, it just wasn’t like, you know, people like, Oh, no, it was just not like it needed to be held together with spit and duct tape. And we’re like, now we’re like, all right, it’s just duct tape. So we can, you know, remove. And we can put it out there because I could sell anything. So it’s just a matter of, we can service it. So that’s where, you know, we’re like, all right, you know, with that strategy, if we do want to raise, if we do, when I do get a CTO back on, the other piece of that puzzle is, and why I’m at this conference. Cause I partnered with a developer in the city of Ocoee and our tech will help connect to over a thousand rooms to all the registrations for a project called the dynasty here at Ocoee. It’s a billion dollar project. In dollar development, and I’m running all the hotel conversations. So I’m the official partner, basically a partner in the entire project. And then our tech has got a seven-figure license agreement with the hotel piece of that. Once it goes, basically, in a year, that contract takes it. So it’s like, I’m just going to survive for a year, as long as the funding and everything gets whatever. We all know shit happens. So the best way to avoid it one one pile of you know something ruining the whole day I’d like to kind of create a you know better better communities right because these planners whether we’re here at the hotels and they’re looking for ways to generate leads and guest experience and planners are looking for ways to to uh monetize you know additional pieces of their events you can only run so many events a year so you got to really be able to provide better services and all those and use sports as a trillion dollar industry and private equity is coming in and they’re looking for better ways to make the business more efficient and make it all these stakes. So just positioning ourselves there. And I like what you’ve done. And I was like, I’m not exactly sure what the avenue is. I have some kind of crazy ideas, one of which I think I’m gonna go live with next week on that just a little, just some like stuff that I’m like, all right, I’m just gonna let some things rip and figure it out. But yeah, I just like what you did. And I’m not exactly sure in terms of content and strategy. It’s a little bit not very well-baked, frankly, right now. As much as I’d like to be like, I have this great vision in mind, I’m like, I’ll just normally let it rip and figure it out as we go. And that’s really about where I am. [Michael Houck]: Cool. OK, that’s really helpful context and sort of gives me all the full picture there that I would need. Are you thinking that these planners, do they spend time on LinkedIn? Do they spend time on Twitter? Or is this more like, let’s collect a huge email list and then sell the product to them, unlimited shots on goal type deal? Both. [Doug Freeman]: Cold email had been my bread and butter for a decade. I’ve never had a real job. I haven’t been able to do cold email for a while, but it’s becoming less and less effective. Because of this niche, there’s a lot of turnover. People become a wedding planner. Planner for a year and then they aren’t planning anymore. So you can collect a bunch of stuff that’s not, it might be verified and it might be a real contact, but that person is just not doing that thing. Uh, so it’s, it’s a combination of that and venues. I think LinkedIn is probably a good, you know, kind of starting point of that. There’s a lot of it on, on Instagram as well. And, um, I’ll just share you with the crazy idea. I came up with this idea this week. I, you might be like, you’re insane for this, but This is what it is. My thought process is because I’m at this conference, I’ve gone to a lot of these conferences where the entire point of these is that I’m a buyer. We’re buying different stuff for this project and so they host me for free. They put me up and we do one-on-one meetings with sellers that this 30-minute meetings and I have 20 meetings I’m required to go to back-to-back-to-back-to-back. You’re not really sure if the meeting is beneficial or not. But ultimately, the ability to connect with that many people in a quick time period is a pretty cool thought process of what the value is. So my idea was, my goal right now is just to connect with better people. I don’t know exactly who we need on our team to help us grow. I don’t know exactly who we want for the tech. I don’t know exactly who the roles are or what. What I do know is if I talk to enough people, I’m going to find the right people to take the next step in this team. So I wanted to make a video stating that and then laying it out and then say, so my crazy idea is here’s my calendar. And for the next week, my entire week is going to be dedicated to taking calls from anyone and everyone that wants to connect with me for 30 minutes. And the one caveat being is like, maybe I’ll record the conversations. And if it’s a comfortable conversation and you don’t, you don’t feel like you’re interviewing for a job and we post it as part of a journey of like how we are connecting with different people and how we’re potentially onboarding talent and how we’re doing that and utilizing. The ability to one, connect with new people as a way for me to expand my network and learn from new people, and two, a way for me to turn these calls that can be really entertaining or at least take clips or something, you learn from it and kind of feed the beast of being able to continue to have people do that. So when I open up my calendar in three weeks and I want to do it again, it gets jam-packed. Maybe I open it up for next week and only five or six people book, and it just kind of builds on itself. So I don’t know, it was an idea that I had been kind of cooking on and I’m like, I just think it’s something that I haven’t seen. And it’s everyone’s like, Oh, I want to, I want to guard my time. I want to guard my time. Like fuck my time. Right? Like my time is valuable only if I have any value to provide. And the only way that that becomes more valuable is with better people, right? Like AI and all these other things have allowed you to, to help streamline things, but you’re never going to be able to maximize human connection. If you don’t expose yourself to the ability to waste your time a little bit. And I, uh, I totally agree. [Michael Houck]: You have to be unstructured to find the structure. That’s sort of how I’ve always operated. I think it’s a cool idea. I think you’d probably want to clip some pieces out of that and write about them. But I also think, really, what you just said, if you recorded yourself as a voice note, just rambling on that topic even further of why I’m doing this, I think that’s a pretty compelling long-form text post or a few text posts that you could put in sequence of each other throughout the week. Here’s how it’s going. Update people. Take them on a journey throughout the week. I think there’s definitely something there. [Doug Freeman]: But that’s all tactical stuff that we can get into the weeds with. I don’t want to waste your time on that. [Michael Houck]: I think what we can do is I can send over an email with a full summary of our services, pricing, everything like that. Let me know what fits into your schedule, your plan, your goals most effectively. How I think about social is that it’s great for awareness, building trust at top of the funnel. And then if you’re like, hey, how can I convert these people into group book users, group book customers, then OK, let’s use that email list. And instead of cold emailing these people, let’s basically build a relationship with them through that. Through a newsletter. And we’ve done that time and time again. We fed cold emails into a newsletter and you lead with value and give them a lead magnet right away. I mean, you probably know this as a cold email, right? You lead with value, they get interested, and then you take them to the next step. With a newsletter, it totally supercharges that. And so, yeah, I mean, we can build out a full funnel for you. We can work with you on one of those two pieces or both, obviously. So lots of options. Options. But if yeah, if you see content marketing as a big part of this for you, then we can, we can definitely help. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Doug Freeman]: Yeah. Well, I think that there’s an interesting play there, right? I just, I think that there’s not much of that in the hospitality tech space, like this piece of the industry. I think there, there is some corporate event conversation or So, you know, you look at that and use sports and my background in both of those, my challenge has been kind of, you know, being able to, to take that to the next level of like, you know, really trying to figure out the curation of the content. I, you know, I’ve, I’ve, uh, I’ve just struggled with the transition of like how to get that out there, do certain things, just maybe my own mental block. So it’s like, all right, let’s just take a leap, figure something out and make, make it, you know, That’s that, that’s what we can help with this sort of understanding the content formats and all the management around that stuff. [Michael Houck]: That’s what we do. So we’re happy to take that off your hands. And obviously, we’ll work with you and make sure that it’s what you want. Our process is to give you a TLDR. I know we’re a couple minutes over, so I want to be conscious of your time while you’re at the conference. But just a very quick TLDR. Basically, we would do a kickoff call. It would be you, me, and a writer from our team who I’ve worked with for a long time, the three of us. Us would jam on who the person is that we’re speaking to, what they care about, how we want to talk to them in terms of like your voice, right? And just the content pillars that we want to hit on our current basis. And then from there, we would basically go to work. And every week, we would deliver some questions to you on Monday. And that could be through a Slack channel that we share, or it could be through email if you prefer. And if we get to sort of like rambly voice notes back from you by the middle of the week, then it’ll be incorporated into that week’s batch of content. We’ll get a couple weeks ahead, so we’re not always scrambling from week to week. And then we’ll schedule it out. We’ll do engagements on the content once it gets posted. And so we’ll have our ops team go in there and have conversations with folks in the comments, if it’s on social, or if it’s through newsletter, we’ll just handle all the ops. And we can do design. We have a designer on staff, too. So it’s full service shop. Um, and then we’ll report back to you and yeah. No, no, I’m sorry. [Doug Freeman]: I didn’t mean to cut you off. I just the newsletter piece of this, like, is there. Have you turned that newsletter into even from like, you know, your newsletter, I imagine as a, as a top of line revenue driver, right? You’ve got some sponsors, you’ve got some things there. Like, it seems like, cause I followed like the beehive guys and like the whole process that they have of like, really fantasizing that again, that’s not the initial focus, but my natural ability, like I can ramble, I can get on calls, I can do a podcast, but like, it’s kind of this like, all right. One, you know, limited funds, limited, you know, resources right now. Like how do we, how do we best utilize what we have to start, you know, kind of feeding that engine? Cause I’ll put it right back in there. Right. If I can, if I can find, you know, these ways I will put it back. Yeah. I’ve put it, I’ve put everything in already. Right. I’ve every asset I’ve owned, every house I have, everything I have is into this project. So. It’s like, all right, like, you know, now there’s shit or get off the pot and just got to start making some money. So, so that’s really where I’m like, all right, we’ve got some decent connections, relationships. So I think that there’s a ways that we can maximize those values, but I wasn’t, I wasn’t sure, like the newsletter piece had gone so far as like assisting in monetization of it because. Yeah, absolutely. [Michael Houck]: I mean, when you’re just getting started, like, I don’t, how big is your email list today? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: 10,000. [Michael Houck]: Okay, great. [Michael Houck]: So at 10,000, it will make sense to do some monetization, I would say that these days, like, when you really want to get if you want to be like, Hey, this is a major revenue driver for a business, we would need to grow the list a bit beyond that. I started monetizing my newsletter when we hit 10,000. And we started seeing real serious like inbound and agencies who wanted to work with us actually sent us good sponsors and things like that. That happened more in like the 20 to 30 k range. Yeah. But we can set up outbound campaigns and work with partners, uh, independently, uh, at the 10. That should work. Yeah. [Doug Freeman]: And again, the 10,000 is not super like, we’re not, we’re not, we’re not utilizing as much as like just kind of sending out. So they’re probably a month long effort of like cleaning that up, like getting the right engagements, like making sure that you have the open rate, you know, cause you can say 10,000, but if the open rates at 10%, then, you know, the engagement’s garbage, it doesn’t really matter how many you have. So. I think that that would be my first effort is let’s create some engaging content that would make sense And that was also kind of my thought of something that’s a little bit different of like the book of time I guess, you know, you know, you know, it’s just something I’m just I’m always open to do something crazy a little bit different that you’re just like, oh, that’s kind of weird. So I just You know that and that’s why it resonated like the type of newsletters and stuff, you know I the Tyler Dink guy from there like you there’s a couple that I follow the same and I’m like, okay There’s just the genuineness that comes through there and the consistency and the openness. I have kind of a wild story. I understand the problem that is being solved from this perspective and I don’t do a great job articulating it. I think that’s also a big part of fundraising, right? It’s articulating the story as much more than anything else. And I’m really learning that over the last year. So it’s like, all right, let’s fuck it. The story, we’ll get some users, and maybe I raise, maybe I don’t, right? If I connect my traction, they can kick rocks. You can come, you know, whatever. I mean, so it’s an interesting place to be in because we have something that I know that we’re going to, I mean, just like I said, the first launch with this longevity on tomorrow is almost over 100 planners signed up for the web tech talk at 7.30. So like there’s some real And yeah, I just, I want to have the right people around me that have done it, that not like, oh, you know, bullshit. Right. So like, it’s, it’s a, I’m obviously, I mean, in any business, like you’re willing to pay if you feel like you’re going to get a significant return or time savings or whatever it is, or a combination of those is obviously, you know, which I feel like the right content partner with the right strategy, you know, working with my other right hand, who’s doing our cold email, like he’s kind of taken that we’re using list kit just because my own process is like, you know, a psychopath. So it’s really hard for me to be like, Oh, here, he’s this crazy person’s ramblings to create this. [Michael Houck]: What’s wrong with this kid? That’s fine. [Doug Freeman]: I was like, this is the closest thing to what I do myself without me trying to figure out how to explain what I’m doing. Yeah, exactly. So yeah, just kind of a whole list. I only mentioned that because I’m really looking at put together a holistic approach and bring some people on to be like, Hey, this is a focus and like, we’ll put stuff out and if it doesn’t work, then the dApp will change. I don’t want to move fast, but just be strategic with throwing money around. [Michael Houck]: Well, look, man, I love your vibe and definitely I know we can help. So I think would love to be part of it. I think any questions that you would have for me that we should talk through and then I can obviously send over materials with sort of more details I mean, I’ll see the details, but again, the point of the point for me has all the reason to sign up is like the materials you put out, right? [Doug Freeman]: Like it kind of speaks and that’s how I want to go about doing this more. So I, you know, you’ve done all the selling on the front end, right? Like that’s the whole idea of doing it with you. Cause you’ve kind of done that through transparency and what you’ve done. And this is how I’m building it. This is what I’ve changed. I went from megaphone to this one and then we It’s similar to how I would like to operate. I think that you’ve got some experience that I haven’t had. I haven’t raised an official around. I think I’m like, hey, if I’m going to get this type of service anyways, I might as well try that. Also, connect with a person that I have a lot of respect for based on just solely content. That’s more so. If I can afford it, Like, I’m going to do it, right? Like, I’m going to figure out what the scenario is because I think it’s the right time to do it. [Michael Houck]: Oh, okay. Well, I’ll send over, I’ll send over full details. So you can see everything kind of laid out the options that we have, but, um, let’s, let’s touch base later in the week. I’ll shoot you an email and we can, we can see what works, um, and, and just sort of go from there. [Doug Freeman]: Yeah. Friday would be great. I’m here until Thursday. I’m like, I don’t know, I’m not even sure how I’ve had so many meetings. I’m not really sure. Looks like I have something you live in the you live in the conference conference circuit life. It’s always it’s always crazy Chaoses I wouldn’t be able to live any other way So the more chaos I can have outside of the house once I get home my wife’s like Jesus, you know, I work from home. [Michael Houck]: So she comes home from the hospital and I’m like like a Tasmanian devil Get the fuck out of the house So yeah, I’m in I’m in like rural, Utah right now and it’s not where I normally have but it’s it’s kind of nice But then at the same time like I gotta do stuff I love Park City and Park City is like one of my favorite spots ever Yeah, Brexit is great. It’s there for Sundance a couple years ago, too, but If you don’t get to it till Friday no pressure no worries at all but we’ll touch base then and we can go from there. [Doug Freeman]: Awesome. Well, thanks, Michael. I appreciate it, man. I’m glad you were able to jump on and bear with my incoherent ramblings or somewhat coherent ramblings. Totally good. Awesome. It was great to meet and looking forward to helping out. [Michael Houck]: So we’ll talk more soon. Thanks. I’ll see you. Have a great one. All right.