- Duration: 23 min
- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01JWEMG2YSQ4JPR94NTFRDEKV7 (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JWEMG2YSQ4JPR94NTFRDEKV7)
Transcript
[Jesse Lindsley]: and then each one of them has one to two note takers. So I spend the first five minutes letting them all in. It needs to just let them all in because it would be easier for me, but anyways. [Michael Houck]: I feel like they should all merge and they should just show up as one thing and then that should be enough. [Jesse Lindsley]: Yeah. And the worst is they show up as a tile that you can’t really minimize. The person you’re meeting with is small. Well, Michael, it’s great to meet you. I reached out and had you audit my LinkedIn profile and made all the changes. I thought it was brilliant. Oh yeah, what a great way to just add value and I was thoroughly impressed. So well done on that technique. That was super useful and super engaging and balloon video was great. So well done. [Michael Houck]: I’m glad you liked it. Glad it was valuable. Um, just something fun that we like to do Um, I think a lot of people just sort of you know There’s little things you can do on whether it’s your x or your linkedin or or wherever to to turn it into uh more of a conversion, uh system So happy to help and we always make it way more complicated than it needs to be with those messages. Thank you Um, well, yeah, look, I mean how how else can we help? I mean, yeah We do the content writing we do the amplification and engagement. That’s really the two main services that we offer? [Jesse Lindsley]: Yeah, so I’ve run an agency for 20 years. I started in a dot-com space. I went into the gaming gambling space and then pivoted when the laws changed in 06 to run an agency and have for 20 years. So for the last year, I’ve just closed down the agency. I’m still working on one app that hopefully gets out the door this week, but I’ve been doing an EIR for one day, which is the fastest growing MBA program, venture-backed. They’re signing on a a hundred new founders a month at $30,000. So anyways, it's been great. It's been fun to see kind of, they're taking the quantity approach. So there's not a lot of, if you can pay 30,000, you're in. If you can fog up a mirror, you're in. So it's a mixed bag, but I come out of Flashpoint, which is, it's called the Libert Innovation Program at Georgia Tech. I went through that Accelerator, Venture Back to Accelerator 14. And I'm bringing a lot of those lessons into this program. And I've enjoyed it. It's just sort of rolling out here in the US in October. So eight months ago, and I've been leading the US charge. But so I reason I kind of stopped the agency is I wanted to launch a startup. And I've tried over the years had five of them, but always while running an agency. It just was didn't have the focus that it needed. And whatever. So um, so I've been doing any IR thing, I hopefully I'll find something worth doing. And one of the problems that I have uncovered meeting with 100 founders a day is a just a difficulty in managing relationships, different difficulty and finding people to talk to for customer discovery interviews. And so I started, I started down that path. I did 100 customer discovery interviews. And the thing I kept hearing from founders was a sentence or sentence or two that didn't make sense, which is, I want more meetings. And at the same time, I want less meetings. Ideally, I'd have no meetings. And so started tired as a look at that and how could we help and I, my calendar fills up every day. So I, it gets filled by people who are interested in the one day program, mentors that are in, I mean, founders that are in the program, and then administrators that want to meet with me. And so I'm kind of not in control of my calendar, which is which is interesting, but I get paid for every meeting I take but but it's I don't think That's the point. And so nobody ever shows up prepared despite all of our AI note takers and everything like that. So I have a technical co-founder that I've worked with before. I pitched him on a lightweight AI co-pilot. We implemented it over a weekend. We've been running it for about 100 founders, myself and about 100 founders. And it's just an email ad that you invite to a meeting, and it loops you in your inbox and starts to collaborate using AI. And you can decide if we even need to meet or we could move the meeting. And just kind of gives me back a little bit control of my calendar. And so we're playing with it. And I think it's interesting. It's the easiest thing I've ever implemented as far as people seeing immediate value, the flywheel as far as everybody I know meets, like, hey, could I could I use this? Could I start inviting this to my meetings? And I'll probably start rolling that out this week. So yeah, so so one of the things that I have kind of become enamored with, as I've been meeting with founders, is this whole newsletter community thing, monetize that, that's the most important thing in the customer problem solution is your customer. And so, you know, figure out what they'll tell you what they want. I love the beehive stuff. I love, uh, I've just been a big fan. So, um, so anyways, I've been preaching that and I was like, all right, well maybe I should look into that for this initiative. So, uh, my, my idea is to launch a newsletter all about networking, um, all about making connections, all about what's changing, right? As LinkedIn becomes this almost unusable wall, the content garden, I was an early adopter for lunch club. But it's it's going away. And you know, it's I thought it was going to be a LinkedIn killer. Obviously, it is not even though it gets about $100 million unicorn valuation, but but they didn’t go anywhere. So I think we’re moving into this more intent bait space agent to agent stuff that helped hopefully makes in person meetings better. There’s a new tool that I started using called boarding just raised $8 million. Okay, I think super cool and and uh love what they're doing and love that energy and so it's it's similar but different uh what we're talking about ours is much more lightweight and and um building a uh yeah hopefully eventually make connections and and learn about what moves the needle for you and who in your network moves the needle for you and do more of that and look alike audiences and things like that so um so the the that's what I want to create is a a community of of folks you know I'm starting with founders because that's who I know that's who I have an unfair their advantage to reach. That's obviously who you reach to the tune of 80,000. I am not a writer. I love being, I've had lots of creative directors that have worked for me over the years. So I love to, I know enough to say this is what I like and don't like, but I'm not the creative type. And so even in getting my landing page out and things like that, I'm working with, I think I'm going to work with Untold. I really like what they're doing is building a story. But I just need some collaborators to help kind of get this thing going. I obviously wanna be involved. I wouldn't mind taking over a newsletter, but it doesn't make sense for me. Well, maybe it makes sense for me to try it and figure it out, or maybe it makes better sense to with somebody like you who understands my audience, this is the service you provide. And I'd like to grow the community and if the tool is a fit for the community, great, but I'll use the tool to show people about boarding. Right. I mean, I just I want to find tools that work uh for these founders who are um Yeah doing something very brave and I'm just trying to support them Cool. [Michael Houck]: Okay, that's very helpful context. I appreciate um, I appreciate that and makes a ton of sense I think this type of Persona this type of audience in particular I think is moving off of social and into more um, you know Direct communication channels that aren't just relying algorithm and hoping that you win. So I definitely think that this approach will resonate with the audience that you're going for. I do know the folks over at Untold. [Michael Houck]: What's the scope of what you're working on with them so that I can make sure that we're not overlapping or anything like that? [Jesse Lindsley]: Yeah, we haven't decided. I met with Amiya, and it was around the pitch deck. So it was a $4,500 pitch deck, which is the story and the creation I have, you know, I have been working on this for about a month. I love the story that I put together. I hate all the pitch decks I’ve been able to put together with all the AI tools. I’ve built lots of landing pages. I hate all of them. And so I love my messaging and the crafting has gotten really, really tight. And so I don’t feel like I need that much of an uplift. I just need a partner to help me kind of just fine tune it. And it’ll probably end up being very simple. Your LinkedIn thing, which was just remove stuff. And it’s all there, just remove stuff, right? So I need to get back with her, but I loved at least my meeting with her. And that’s the kind of support I need. I have a lot of relationships with investors and things like that. I just need, and this is my voice. I’ve been doing this. I’ve been networking like it’s my job for 20 years. I have grown. I have a love-hate relationship with LinkedIn. I’ve been on LinkedIn for more than any tool and they own my contacts and they could kick me out at any point and all that work would be for nothing. I’m very frustrated by what it’s become and so I want to address that. I don’t care if I’m the one that comes up with it or other people or just trying to support founders that do that. [Michael Houck]: We’d be happy to put a newsletter together with you for you however much you want to engage with it and basically take that story that we’re talking about that you’re shaping and turn it into sort of recurring broadcasts, recurring communications out to this target audience. So we can help on the content side, and we can also help growing the email list if you’re interested in that as well. Yes, for sure. We can do that in two ways. We know how to run paid meta ads at good CPAs. We also have proprietary processes around cold email-based growth, so a lot of people will tell you, oh, the only way to grow a newsletter is through meta ads. And I think to some degree, that’s true-ish. 90% of the growth from the big newsletters, like in the past, Morning Brew, and the Hustle, and the Milk Road, and all those big ones, 90% of their growth in the early days came from paid ads. That’s just how you scale up. There’s whole companies like 1440 that have multiple newsletters. Is paid ads, basically. But more recently, you can also use cold email as a way to validate whether inboxes are active and pair that with social media level targeting. So for example, if you say, I want to add folks to my list who follow Y Combinator on Twitter, or who have like YC in their Twitter bio or LinkedIn bio or something like that, right? We can then go and get that list for you, get their emails. And basically, we’d put together some sort of light lead magnet that we can send to them. And if they show interest in that, then they can get added to the newsletter. So we see very comparable open rates, click rates, and engagement from that channel that we do from paid ads. But you can do it for cheaper. So it tends to be pretty good value. So on the Girth side, we could help out with that. And then obviously, on the content whether you’d want it to be a weekly newsletter, bi-weekly newsletter. We’d have one of our writers who I’ve worked with for a long time in various capacities. We’d do a kickoff call, the three of us would, and then on a weekly basis, they would send you some questions in a shared Slack channel. And all we need from you is if you want to give us a rambly voice note, two to five minutes of answering our questions so that we can really get your unique POV and your intonation and all that and capture your voice. And we’ll have something in there that’ll direct them to, oh, if you like this content, here’s where you should go to check out or join the community or whatever it may be. [Jesse Lindsley]: So we can turn it into a funnel in that way for you too. And I saw that weekly or biweekly, starting cold from zero, you recommend, let’s say biweekly versus monthly? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I mean, we could do monthly to start if you’d like, Generally we don’t because the research time for our writers tends to be about the same so it just from our perspective it kind of crushes our margins a little bit but it’s totally fine if we want to start out that way especially if we’re going to be helping to grow the list as well and then as the list grows uh presumably we would increase the frequency at some point yeah sure but I think since we are starting cold and starting from zero happy to start it off monthly and kind of go from there all right well you answered my questions um and then I assume from a a pitch deck, apples to oranges with what Untold is talking to Untold about? [Jesse Lindsley]: Yeah. I mean, I’m happy to help out with your deck and with positioning to investors. [Michael Houck]: I can also help get it in front of some folks. We have a monthly deal flow email that I send out to about, geez, I think at this point it’s like 1200 investors, but angels and VCs. And if you have a hit list, I’m also happy to look through it and see who I know and can get it in front of and things like that. I’m happy to just do that. I don’t need to charge you for that. So yeah. [Jesse Lindsley]: We did submit to Speedrun. We’ll see if we can get you back. It was not a very pretty deck, but it was the best I could do. But I think, hopefully, it was compelling. But all right. Well, send me something over, and I’d love to get this started sooner rather than later. Cool. [Michael Houck]: I’ll get you something after my meetings are done today. And maybe we get started as soon as next week. I’ll also, I’ll shoot, I’ll shoot Andrew over at Andreessen. If you want to send me some context in an email, I’ll just tell him, hey, this guy submitted, check it out. I really appreciate it, Michael. All right, man. [Jesse Lindsley]: Well, great, great to meet you. Thanks for spending the time with me. I appreciate it. Excited for this, Jesse. Let’s do it. All right. Very good.