- Duration: 24 min
- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01JVWZQQ9WJ13VXJTARGG97QES (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JVWZQQ9WJ13VXJTARGG97QES)
Transcript
[Michael Houck]: Hello. Hey, Ishwar. How are you, man? Hey, Michael. [Ishwar Dhanuka]: I’m good. I’m sorry. I’m taking this call between meetings, so I’ve got to be outdoors. And yeah, I’ll just head over to the next meeting. And sorry I had to take this outdoors. Hope you can hear me OK, though. Yeah, I can hear you. [Michael Houck]: You’re breaking up a little bit, but I can hear you pretty well. If you want, we can also do this tomorrow or some other time whenever you prefer. [Ishwar Dhanuka]: I think this is the only slot that I found on your calendar that was semi-okay. [Michael Houck]: Okay, well, let’s do it then, man. Cool, thank you. Yeah, I guess I had sent over the Loom video. Was that helpful? Yeah, I liked that a lot. [Ishwar Dhanuka]: I think you made a couple of points that resonated pretty well. I think especially around hitting the key points keeping the messages short, thinking a little bit about what shows up, where, adding links to the profile. Yeah, I think all of those made a ton of sense. And that’s the main reason I reached out, because I was like, okay, maybe there’s something interesting here. Let’s have a chat. Yeah, sure, man. [Michael Houck]: Well, happy to, I mean, I can tell you more about sort of what we do, also who I am and like how we work and everything like that, if that’s helpful. [Ishwar Dhanuka]: Yeah, I think what I’m, Honestly, I think what I’m super interested in is basically understand a little bit about how you work, what kind of results you’ve seen so far when you work with clients. And yeah, like, given what you’ve seen so far, I mean, I guess you haven’t spent too much time on understanding what we do and stuff. But yeah, like, where do you think you can add the most value? Right? Yeah. Okay. [Michael Houck]: So I guess first I could talk about just like our So we work with founders and VCs. That’s everybody that we work with basically. And so as a result, we’re super lightweight. We set up a shared Slack connect channel with you. So it’s native in your workspace, native in ours. And basically every Monday we would send over ideas in there. Like they came up during our research and we could write posts based on them for you if you wanted, but getting sort of voice notes back from you in Slack, two to five minute rambling as much as possible. So we get sort of the intonation in your unique POV. That’s what turns the content into, you know, content that’s okay and gonna do fine, or content that has the potential to break out and be unique and sort of, you know, be you, right? So we have one kickoff call at the beginning, but that’s the only call we ever do, unless of course you want to do content interviews. Some clients do, but we find that most of our, you know, founders and VCs, the fewer meetings, the better, right? So we’ve built the process to be able to work fully async if needed. And then, yeah, I mean, our team is small. I’m in the weeds with every client myself. My partner is Blake Imahl. He has an even bigger audience than I do. And he’s also in the weeds with every client himself. No content gets sent to you that hasn’t been personally reviewed by either him or myself. And the writer you’d be working with would be a partner for you. This isn’t like we put it into a pool, and whoever is free comes and takes it. No. This person gets paired with you. They’re learning week by week what you like, what speaks to your audience, all that stuff. And you can access the content that we write in Notion. And you can request edits on anything. That’s totally fine. And we handle all scheduling. And we’ll do proactive and reactive engagements, so on other people’s posts to get you free profile views, and also having conversations with folks in the comments of the stuff that we post from your account. So it’s all super lightweight, hands-off. We have a creator network, as I mentioned, as well, with, I think, like 450, at this point, creators who we can loop in to sort of amplify posts that we think are high potential. And yeah, I mean, that’s pretty much how we work. [Ishwar Dhanuka]: And you guys also use graphics, like you also use photos and videos, illustrations and all of that, or is it mostly text-based? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, so we have a designer on staff who can create everything from, you know, branded carousels to infographics, you know, to a new banner if you want to use a new banner on your page. And we also have a meme lord on staff. He’s very good. He’s driven billions of impressions for folks over the years. Not just with us, but just in general for him. And his stuff is genuinely hilarious. So he’ll occasionally, you’ll occasionally get meme drops. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Everyone loves memes. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: You’ll get some meme drops at random too. [Ishwar Dhanuka]: Okay. So typically what’s the rough cadence that you guys work with? Like how many posts and how much engagement per month? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: So a couple options, it depends on sort of what you’d want to include. Our standard, Our standard package is $39.95 per month, so $4K a month. And that includes credits for the Creator Network. It includes full operational support on the account. And it also includes weekly full batches of content. And full batch means basically three to sometimes four long-form posts per week or seven shorter-form posts per week. So you’re either posting every day or having a healthy dose of longer longer form stuff. If you wanted to take off the creator network credits and sort of use that ad hoc, or if you wanted to lower the amount of content that we’re delivering per week, we can work with that too. That would drop the price down to $29.95 a month. [Ishwar Dhanuka]: Sorry, can you help me understand a little bit about the creative network credits? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, so basically we have a platform that we built called Megaphone. It’s actually how we started the this company. I have a bunch of creator relationships from sort of my own career and network and everything. And they help people grow, right? When you get engagements from big creators, you get exposed to their audiences. If those people like the content, they follow you. That’s basically how it works. But not everyone has those relationships. So we made a platform where anyone can sign up and pay creators to engage with their content. And it’s been pretty successful over the past like two years or so. So what we do is basically we loop those folks in to Megaphone Studio, because a lot of people who were using that were like, well, I don’t know how to write good content. You just do that. So then we started the agency. And so if our standard package, you get credits basically for every month where we can loop in creators on your behalf, but you can actually leave those off and sort of use it ad hoc. [Ishwar Dhanuka]: Okay, um, And each credit, what does that represent? Yeah. So I mean, it’s dollars, right? [Michael Houck]: So we put a certain amount of dollars into your, into your, uh, balance on the platform. And then when we have a post that we want to share with creators, we set a budget for that. And you know, the creators that engage, they get paid out. [Ishwar Dhanuka]: And what kind of [Ishwar Dhanuka]: audiences do these creators have? [Michael Houck]: We have 450 folks on the platform. It varies a lot. There’s big AI creators on there. There’s people in shipping. There’s all sorts of different niches, all sorts of different audience sizes. We have an algorithm that obviously will match you with them and your post specifically with the right people who are online at that moment. [Ishwar Dhanuka]: Yeah, so there has to be some commonality between the prospects that we are trying to reach and obviously the creators that are being, yeah, like what kind of following they have basically, right? Because otherwise it’s not really useful for us to have random people who are not our prospects following the content and engaging with them. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, it’s actually the platforms treat it like a negative if that’s the case. Like if you get some person in a totally separate niche from you, no relation at all, then the algorithm is going to get confused as to like what this content is saying to people. So we’ve, you know, we have a system that is built to match you with the right people in our network, basically. [Ishwar Dhanuka]: Okay. And what kind of, uh, can you talk a little bit about like what kind of success you’ve success and challenges that you’ve seen with other clients? [Michael Houck]: Yeah. So, um, let me just ask one question first, which is, um, are you most interested in LinkedIn? I imagine because of the profile audit or, or, okay. Um, yeah, so we, we have a client started with us, um, I’ll just use one example. Started with us in January, I think, so about four or five months now. They started with 1.5 thousand followers on LinkedIn. So what is that? That’s about half of what you have. And they have grown to I don’t know the exact number, but like sixteen thousand, maybe sixteen five in those four or five months. And they’re just doing, you know, three long post per week, that’s it every week, pretty standard. So I would say that’s a great result. I’m not going to say we can guarantee that type of result. The clients who generally are the best for us to work with and who see the best success are the ones who sort of have unique things to say and are engaging with us in these voice notes. But also, you know, our writers, they know what they’re doing. And so I think there’s some level of like, well, if we get two to in the weeds on making sure every word is perfect. It slows things down to the degree where we’re not gonna be able to get posts out fast enough. [Ishwar Dhanuka]: So it’s really about shots on goal and having a unique POV. That’s what I would say. Oh, Paul. Do you know how that impacted their bottom line? The client that had increased in followership? What kind of business impact did that have on their clients? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, so the reason that they up with us was actually because they were starting a new company. So they were the CEO of a different company. And that company was like part of a holding company. And so they were starting a new business where they were also going to be leading but also sort of underneath the holding company is kind of confusing. But it was brand new business. And they’re already at I think 400k ARR in that time. So maybe maybe a little bit more than I’d be an outdated number. I talked to them like about this a month ago or so. But yeah, I mean, if we optimize your profile to get it in front of people’s faces, if we’re putting CTAs on the post to drive people to follow you and check out Thrive, then the funnel is there. And if we want to add another layer, we could always add a newsletter in the middle, too, where we sort of capture people’s emails in a low-friction way. You build trust to the newsletter. You get them to use from there. [Ishwar Dhanuka]: So that’s another option. OK. Got it, um Okay, so kickoff call, um weekly voice notes um three to five Long form posts or seven to ten short form posts. Um including graphic and um Uh graphics and creatives and um What was the other thing? The last thing was amplification using the created network. I don’t fully understand the whole amplification and credits thing, but it’s fine. [Michael Houck]: And that is 4k of mines. [Ishwar Dhanuka]: Yes, correct. Right. Okay. And how does, like, You know, like, what’s the minimum file period that we can start with? Yeah, so we have 30 days notice for any cancellation. [Michael Houck]: We are month-to-month, but effectively, when you would sign up, it would be a two-month commitment minimum. We’d ask for three, because I think that gives us time to really test a lot of things in like a situation where we know we’re gonna be able to have time to do so. So I recommend three month minimum. If you were to do longer, like six or 12, we could give a discount of 10 to 15%. But yeah, standard would be minimum two, ideal three, discount at six plus. [Ishwar Dhanuka]: Okay. So basically we’re looking at a minimum of eight I think I have plenty of information. Let me think about this and I guess I’ll get back to you. Yeah, I’ll shoot over an email just summarizing what we talked about and we’ll talk from there. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Cool, brilliant. [Ishwar Dhanuka]: And is there any, I mean, I know confidentiality and all of that, but is there any way I can take look at some of the work that you guys have done? [Michael Houck]: I can send over some anonymized examples with engagement statistics on them. That’s probably the easiest way to do it. Okay. [Ishwar Dhanuka]: Yeah, I think that will certainly be helpful. Cool. All right, man. Brilliant. Thank you so much for your time, Michael. I’ve got to run now, and I’ll catch you later. Good to chat. [Michael Houck]: Glad we got this in, and we’ll talk soon. Okay. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Take care. Bye. Bye.