- Duration: 22 min
- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01JVR3EE7D1ZNNHTQQQ8VFJA9G (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JVR3EE7D1ZNNHTQQQ8VFJA9G)
Transcript
[Michael Houck]: on the West Coast? [Michael Houck]: I’m not really based anywhere right now. I’m actually currently in Utah, so mountain time. [Maurizio Barbieri]: But I’m all over the place. Well, but 6.30, right, for you. So it’s not too late. [Michael Houck]: So thank you for accommodating that. [Maurizio Barbieri]: I see you’re using the old Twitter there. Yeah. I don’t know, 50 t-shirts. There’s no point working from home. There’s no point in wearing anything else. And I’m actually proud of this one because it’s really one of the few that they made. And I don’t even know how I ended up with one of this. I was at an event. It was the only one that fit, and I’m like, okay. And there was all this, I mean, the environment at Twitter was toxic, and people were really trying to upstage each other with different swag. Oh, I have this, I have this sticker that no one else has. That cares the least and I ended up with this and all of a sudden people were hating me. I was like, how the fuck did this guy got it? It was embarrassing. I mean, guys, come on. We are adults, so let’s try to behave better than fifth graders. Yeah, all right. Look, I don’t want to keep you up, I mean, away from whatever you want to do in the future at this time. So I looked at what you said. So first of all, thank you so much for reaching out. I would like to have a better understanding of how you guys manage this. I don’t want to to harm or cause problems in a conversation. But yeah, I would like to better understand this so that I have a feeling of what I can afford doing. This is a completely bootstrapped startup. So for bootstrap, I’m talking about my own money. That’s it. Totally. [Michael Houck]: I understand. Every when you’re bootstrapping up, I do the same right now. When you bootstrapping every dollar is a carry dollar matters, right? More than more than any other at any other time. So totally makes sense. So we work with, you know, variety of founders, some VCs too, but mostly mostly founders mix of venture backed and bootstrapped. And just for some background on me, you know, my last company, we raised 23 million, including a Series A from Andreessen Horowitz, I was at Uber and Airbnb before that, building products, and then have been doing this now for the last year. And the agency has grown quite a lot in that time. So the way we work is pretty lightweight because I’m a founder, we work with founders, we know everyone’s super busy. We’re not trying to add a bunch of meetings to your calendar or a bunch of work for you to do or anything like that. So what we do is we have a team of folks in-house who either I’ve worked with for a long time or who my partner on the agency, Blake Emal, who already, he’s an even bigger audience than I do, has worked with for a long time. So it’s people we know, people we trust. And basically, we’ll do one kickoff call at the beginning, and that’ll be you, me, and a writer. And then from there, we’ll go into a weekly cadence where every Monday, our writer is sending questions in a Slack channel that we set up. And basically, it’s things that came up during our research that maybe we could write about, but we want your unique POV in there to make the content. And you already have like 10,000 followers on LinkedIn. So there’s some built-in content that we could probably pull from there too. But questions that we come up with, we want your POV, the best way to get back to us there is just rambly voice notes in Slack. Just record them right in Slack. Just pick up your phone, talk into it for a few minutes. The more rambly you get, the more detail you give us, the more we can hear your intonation, the better. That’s how we get the unique tone. And so if we get that back from you by the middle of the week, then it gets included in that week’s batch of content. And we’ll work early on to get a few weeks ahead so that we’re not scrambling from from week to week. Once that’s done, then we have a content operations team as well. And so they’ll handle scheduling, they’ll actually log into your account and reply to people who comment on your posts, to drive conversations and impressions that way. They’ll also identify some thought leaders in your niche who we think that, you know, maybe they have the audience that we want to bring over to follow you. And, you know, they’ll be actively engaging with that, those people’s posts as well to get some free profile views that way, and hopefully some follows. Everything happens in Slack and Notion. We’ll have a Notion content board set up for you. If you want to leave comments directly on that, that’s fine. If you want to send us stuff in Slack, that’s fine, too. And if you prefer content interviews, we can accommodate that. That’s just most of our clients, because of who they are, they prefer the sort of async approach. But we’re totally fine doing interviews as well. [Maurizio Barbieri]: OK. So a couple of things. Hold on, now I lost the tab. Give me one second because I have the tab open and I don’t have it turned on. Where did it go? One second. Just out of curiosity, so you are pricing, I would assume that if I were to do a full account takeover, I would pay less than half of the fractional chief contract officer, right? But it’s not the case. So is that, and also the bi-weekly and weekly, shouldn’t there be some sort of discounts on that? I mean, if I use you, there should be some economy of scale, right? [Michael Houck]: So you’re talking about a newsletter or social? [Maurizio Barbieri]: I’m talking about newsletter and also for LinkedIn. [Michael Houck]: Got it. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. Package together, there’ll be discounts that we can offer for sure. So if we did a newsletter and LinkedIn content, then we’d be able to put together a discount based on that for sure. We can also bring down the price of the full account takeover if you want us to leave off some of the other things. So for example, I mentioned the operational stuff that we do, the content ops. We can include that. We don’t need to include that if you’d Another thing we can take off is that we have a network of about 450 creators in various niches with a minimum of 20,000 followers. Some of them are well into the hundreds of thousands of followers. And so what we include in that full account takeover is some credits to basically use a platform we’ve built to incentivize those creators to leave comments on or repost your content to amplify it to their audiences. So if you wanted to leave that out and either do that a la carte or just sort of, or just not engage with the network, that’s fine too. [Maurizio Barbieri]: And we could bring that, bring that price down as well. All right. Um, so do you, uh, I noticed that, uh, it’s month on month. Uh, do you do some sort of, uh, um, prior period, like No, I’m not asking for for free, but like, I don’t know, a two weeks trial period at a certain price. It’s not something that you do. Yes. [Michael Houck]: I mean, the thing is, with with content and with with taking on a new account, you know, we’re going to need that first one to two period just to do research in the niche. So right. What we what we do is basically say 30 days notice for cancellation. So if you’re signing up, it’s effectively two months because, you know, we say, let’s give it a month, right, before we make any decisions. So that’s essentially what we do. [Maurizio Barbieri]: So it’s month to month, but with a 30-day notice. All right. And one more thing. So this is, of course, so this can be done for an individual, me, but also for an organization. [Michael Houck]: So let’s say that, okay, we could do this for your LinkedIn. We could do this for Tifo. We could do this for both together. [Maurizio Barbieri]: And again, there’d be some discount for packaging things together. So we do it all. Yeah. All right. Fantastic. Look, I’m interested in this. I need to figure out the financials of it. Sure. I’m in the middle of hopefully signing a couple of deals for T4 that might change the outlook of the situation for the better, meaning that these people, these organizations, these athletes will support the game, so this should give me a little bit more More resources to use. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Thank you so much. [Maurizio Barbieri]: I really appreciate you taking time. It is something that I am interested in considering, but I cannot give you an answer right now. Sure, of course. But I will definitely keep you posted on how things are going, OK? Here’s what I’ll do. [Michael Houck]: I’ll send over an email before I to bed tonight that just outlines like a couple of different price points of packages we could put together. And then as things solidify on your end, just keep me in the loop and let me know what makes the most sense. [Maurizio Barbieri]: We do. We do. Well, Michael, thank you so much. I really appreciate it. And we’ll definitely stay in touch. [Michael Houck]: Okay. Cool. Great to meet, man. [Maurizio Barbieri]: Talk more soon. Fantastic. Ciao. Take care. Bye-bye. Ciao.