- Duration: 25 min
- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01JVT34X87M3HYSP2ZDSA6WFJW (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JVT34X87M3HYSP2ZDSA6WFJW)
Transcript
[Michael Houck]: Thank you. Derek, how you doing, man? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Hey, Michael. [Derek Flanzraich]: How are you? [Derek Flanzraich]: Yeah, I’m good. Good to meet. [Michael Houck]: Thanks for grabbing some time. [Derek Flanzraich]: Yeah, you got it. You got it. All right, here’s the spiel. I’m the current Chief Marketing Officer for a company called Council Health. We are building, basically, an AI doctor. And it’s funded by all these fancy people. And currently, the offering is basically asynchronous chat with doctors. But what’s been being built is the AI piece, in which you can get answers within seconds. It remembers your whole history. It is always patient. It can answer things big and small. And then you can hit a button and talk to a doctor. The business is moving more into direct-to-consumer, but their primary go-to-market is B2B, and they’re looking to do some LinkedIn thought leadership. That is the story. They have a couple of very impressive people. They have their CEO, Muthu Alagappan, who is like a genius and an MD and was an early like AI engineer and like is also an amazing CEO. Definitely one of the most impressive people I’ve ever met in my life. And they have an awesome, very engaging chief marketing, chief medical officer, chief marketing officer, me, no, marketing officer, Rishi, who ran the telehealth program at Mount Sinai and was an ER physician and decided to go into the space because the healthcare system wasn’t working. So he’s got a great story as well. And they mostly sell to enterprise. Basically, imagine you can bolt on this experience onto existing products. So if you’re an employer, you can add this as a way to basically, from the convenience of your address 90% of health issues. If you’re a health plan, you can reduce usage of the space of healthcare. If you’re a consumer product, you can add this once you get your labs or whatever, and actually have a doctor that people can talk to, and an AI to go through your results. Honestly, I think it’s a pretty easy sell, but they’re not doing any selling and looking to increase their lead gen. And I recommended, I’m fractional. One of my recommendations has been that they like invest in LinkedIn followership. They agree. And so here I am. Cool. Okay. That’s a lot of helpful context. [Michael Houck]: I appreciate it. Product sounds great. Sounds like a no brainer. And it sounds like they have sort of the right pedigree to actually take it to market and all that, too. So that’s great. I just took a look at Muthu’s LinkedIn. He’s not doing a ton on there. But he does have a couple thousand followers. So that’s at least a nice place to start. Give me a sense of what they’re looking for or what you guys are looking for from content. Is it, hey, this is how we’re going to do the consumer go to market. And that’s how we should think about it. Or is this let’s find employers and people on the b2b side who can we who we can then sell into from there? [Derek Flanzraich]: What’s the you’re asking who like the target customer is basically who the target Yeah, for this channel in particular. Yeah. Yeah, the goal is basically to like reach decision makers, you know, benefits or partner decision makers at enterprises and health systems, basically. It’s like employers, payers, providers, anybody who’s buying shit. Cool. OK. Yeah, sounds good. [Michael Houck]: Would it help if I talked a little bit about how we work and all that? Definitely think that this is our bread and butter. So OK, so we’re pretty lightweight because we work with founders. Just for some context, I don’t know if you took a look at my background, but I spent first four or five years in big early at Uber Eats and then at Airbnb for a bit as a product manager. Then founded a company called Lunch House. We raised both a Series A for our C Corp and also we raised a Venture Fund, ended up combining them into the Venture Fund. And that’s still ongoing. But my main focus for the past two years has been kind of a bootstrapped holding company. And our content agency is a big part of that. I built my audience up to 100,000 across Twitter and LinkedIn, and over 200,000 on Substack. And then my partner on the agency is Blake Emael, who has an even bigger Twitter and, or X, I keep doing that, X and LinkedIn audience than I do. And yeah, we work with founders and some big VCs who I can’t name, but we know the space and we know how founders like to operate. So it’s super lightweight. We’ll do one kickoff call, where we would need Muthu on that at the start. But other than that, everything can happen async. Of course, if he wants to do content interviews, we can accommodate that. But most of our clients prefer async through Slack, where every Monday, we’ll send over some questions that came up during our research that we sort of want Muthu’s unique POV on. And our only ask is that he responds with like a two to five minute rambly voice note, where he just gives us all the raw thoughts that come to his mind about that topic. And that lets us take that and turn that into posts every week. And we get a few weeks ahead, so we’re not scrambling and worried about deadlines and things like that. So it’s pretty lightweight. We handle all scheduling. We’ll do proactive and reactive engagements from his account as well. So we’ll be seeking out other thought leaders in the niche who already have the audience that he wants and engaging with their high-quality posts and things We’ll do profile optimization when we first get started. And we also have a network of about 450 creators in various niches who we can engage to amplify the posts to sort of get them off the ground and get them seen by more folks and send signals to the LinkedIn algo. So that’s sort of the very high level of who we are and how we work. In building this agency for about a year and yeah, continues to grow. So happy to talk about anything in more detail. [Derek Flanzraich]: Sweet. That all makes sense. Have you guys done B2B healthcare? [Michael Houck]: Yes, we have two other clients in B2B healthcare actually, neither of whom would be competing in terms of what this product is or who they’re going after. But we are familiar with the space and we have a writer on staff who I know would be able to crush this. [Derek Flanzraich]: And are those like examples you could share theoretically or not? [Michael Houck]: No, that’s the hardest part about this business. I get it, I get it. Confidentiality. [Derek Flanzraich]: Yeah, yeah. OK, and then I’ve talked to a few people and they’re doing all kinds of cool stuff. I did your newsletter by the way. It’s really good. They’re doing cool things like Dripify and they’ll like warm up leads and like help like create more of a lead gen like engine and sort of like rigging it. So it’s a little bit more successful than just like followership. Is that something y’all do or have like dug into? I, you know, also they do paid stuff. You can layer on top, but [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: A few different ways we could do that. Um, we could do outbound DMS through Muthu’s LinkedIn account and sort of build relationships that way. Uh, if they also wanted to do a newsletter and sort of build up a full funnel from, I mean, you have this for yourself, so I’m sure you sort of know how this works, but like from LinkedIn to the newsletter to the product. [Derek Flanzraich]: Um, I’m not very good at LinkedIn. I probably need help there. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, but I like, yeah, I’m going to have a hundred thousand people on my newsletter. [Derek Flanzraich]: So like, um, that’s pretty legit. And like, but it’s not like a lot of them come from LinkedIn. [Michael Houck]: Well, uh, so yeah, so we could set that up for him and we actually have a database of about 220 million, um, people’s emails that are tagged, not just by, um, like their job title, like you would get on zoom info or something like that, but also by things like who they follow on social media and therefore like what niche they’re actually in, what they actually care about. Um, and if we wanted to go newsletter route too, we could leverage that. Uh, we have like a, you know, a good cleaning process to make sure it’s all high quality emails and they’re active in boxes and things like that. Um, and we could grow that, you know, newsletter for them at a pretty attractive rate. Usually this, we can do it depending on scale around a dollar per sub. [Derek Flanzraich]: Okay. That’s pretty good. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: And the sort of engagement rates you get from that are comparable, uh, like honestly pretty equal to, uh, what you get from like paid ads through meta. And, you know, I mean, you get like, even if you’re running lead magnet ads, you’re going to get like one 50 per sub for newsletters in most cases. So it’s, um, it tends to do better. Shifted for even my newsletter, the majority of our growth towards this process, rather than paid on meta, because it’s just more efficient. [Derek Flanzraich]: Yeah. Okay. I mean, that all tracks. Okay, sweet. Tell me about pricing, post volume, all that stuff. [Michael Houck]: So standard is and this is if they want everything I mentioned, so including credits to engage our creator network, content ops on the account, and then full weekly batches of content, and DM campaigns, and all that stuff. That’s 4K, so $39.95 a month. How much is that? $39.95. [Derek Flanzraich]: Very specific per month for how much, again? That gets them everything. [Michael Houck]: So they get the creator. Network credits, they get full content operations support on the account, they get DM campaigns going out from Muthu’s account, and they get four weekly batches of content, which would be three long form per week or seven short form per week. So either daily posts or more impactful longer form. And if they wanted to reduce that volume and or not engage some of the additional things that are included in the package, that price could come down. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: We start at $19.95 per month. [Michael Houck]: That’s cheap, man. We have US-based writers. [Michael Houck]: We don’t use AI. They just really like working for us and give me attractive rates. [Derek Flanzraich]: Well, they might use AI. No, I’m just teasing. Yeah, it’s very obvious. I mean, everyone’s using AI a little bit now on LinkedIn, it feels like, but I also run an agency. We do SEO content, like very long form. It’s kind of the opposite. It’s like 4,000 word, you know, like science, health science stuff. And so, yeah, we were like, every word is written by a person. Every word is edited by a person. Every word, every word is, is approved by a person, but everything else is AI, basically. [Michael Houck]: Because, you know, like, you know, we found that, you know, a lot of these folks who are, you know, reducing costs by putting AI into their content process for social media, it’s like, it’s getting closer for sure. But the if you want to capture someone’s unique voice and speak to their audience, it’s still, in my opinion, not quite there. So Every piece of content that we send to you guys for review will first have been edited and reviewed by either Blake or myself. [Derek Flanzraich]: Reviews by him or Blake, OK, cool. How many people do you got? Y’all have like, [Michael Houck]: My clients or it’s like 100 or like No, no, not, not, not that big. We’re at, we’re at like 30, like 29, 30. Um, so still small enough where I can be in the weeds on everybody and available for calls if needed and things like that. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Cool. [Derek Flanzraich]: I don’t know. It sounds like, it sounds like I should be doing this. Um, happy to talk about it, man. I like the, I really liked the credits, um, to the creator network. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, we’ve, you know, when I was building my audience, it happened because I happened to have good relationships with big creators who would engage with my stuff and expose me to their audiences. And I thought, you know, not everyone has those relationships. How can I sort of make that possible for folks? And so we built this platform called megaphone and people were putting their posts in there to get amplified and paying these creators. And then a lot of them were like, well, my content’s not doing so well, but it’s because my content sucks. And so We just started writing for them as well. Their content improved. And that’s how the agency sort of got born. [Derek Flanzraich]: Really cool. All right, sweet. Can you send me some follow-ups I can share with the team? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I’ll send over a Notion doc with everything laid out. And yeah, we’ll go from there. [Derek Flanzraich]: OK, awesome. Thanks, man. Nice to meet you. Congrats on everything. And if it’s not with counsel, I mean, let’s try to do it with counsel. But if it’s not with counsel, maybe Let’s do it. [Michael Houck]: I’m happy to if you bring other clients in happy to, you know, toss a referral fee your way or something like that. Anything that we didn’t cover that they might ask that we should talk through? [Derek Flanzraich]: The big one is going to be around like examples, you know, so let’s see how we handle that. And let me look at the notion doc and I can provide some I can provide like anonymized examples of a few clients, like recent clients who’ve had, you know, good success. [Michael Houck]: And yeah, we’ll go from there. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah, that’d be great. [Michael Houck]: Okay, sweet. [Michael Houck]: Thank you.