- Duration: 40 min
- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01JWEQVFCGVYRGJ4Z6E5VDP8HH (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JWEQVFCGVYRGJ4Z6E5VDP8HH)
Transcript
[Michael Houck]: I had two more calls today. I’ve got two more. I have another one this afternoon, and then two more tomorrow. So we’ll see how many convert, but we have a new growth channel that seems to be really working in terms of getting meetings. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: So definitely expecting more to come through. [Michael Houck]: Nice. What’s the channel? We use a tool called Valley. Basically, it’s like an AI messaging tool for LinkedIn. So we message people from my LinkedIn, from a few other people on the team, and hyper-personalized messages. It’s so good, it knows what conference they went to last month. Really? Yeah, it’s crazy detailed. And so the messages get a really high response rate. And so we’re starting to get some good volume of meetings from it. [Tanyo Goshev]: How does it get the data? [Michael Houck]: It has AI research agents that before it sends the message, It like spends time like researching the person and like a whole like across their whole online profile And then damn the best most relevant information Yeah, that’s crazy yeah, so More folks for you in in a week or two my guess awesome. [Andrew Cheng]: Perfect How’s it going Andrew it’s going well said lunch so I am feeling How are you guys doing? [Michael Houck]: We’re all in different time zones. [Michael Houck]: Tanyo was like ready to go to bed after this. [Andrew Cheng]: And I’m back on the East Coast now in Philly with my parents. [Michael Houck]: Okay, nice. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. How’s Arkansas? [Michael Houck]: Good. I’d never been before. And it’s beautiful there, man. Like really, really nice. So, Devan, what’s up, brother? How you doing? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Hey, everybody. [Devan Sood]: How’s it going? [Tanyo Goshev]: Hey, Devan. [Tanyo Goshev]: Hey. [Michael Houck]: We got a full crew in the house here, pumped to kick this off. Yeah. Full party. [Devan Sood]: All right. [Michael Houck]: I’m excited. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: I know. [Michael Houck]: Before we dive in, I know I owe you stuff as well, not related to this, but related to the avatar stuff. So I’ve had multiple flying days this week. I will get it to you this weekend. I promise. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: I’ll ping you again this weekend, remind you. [Michael Houck]: If I don’t get it to you by Sunday afternoon, I might need to ping. But yeah, no, wait, I’m pumped to kick this off. Yeah, likewise. So Tanyo is our writer, and Andrew is our content operations manager. So they’ve taken a look at what you’ve sent in in the onboarding form. Thanks for filling that out. But we’d like to use these conversations. It’d probably only take like a half hour, as my guess, rather than the full hour. But we like to use these just to go one level deeper, hear it from you, ramble as much as you want in your responses, and Tanyo will take the lead for most of the call, and then I’ll circle back at the end and we’ll talk about next steps and getting things started. Okay, cool. [Devan Sood]: I think in my responses, I might have been a little bit too vague in some sections, so wherever you want to dive deep, let’s go ahead and do that. Cool. [Michael Houck]: Tanyo, if you want to share your screen and take us away. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, sure. [Tanyo Goshev]: Just a second. Okay, can you guys see my screen? Yeah. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay, yeah. [Tanyo Goshev]: So, nice to meet you. I’m Tanyo, and I ghostwrite newsletters and LinkedIn content and X content. And over the past 12 months, I have got over 100,000 impressions on LinkedIn. And my goal for this should just figure out obviously the deliverables and also the primary secondary calls, the audience who speak, who write content for, and maybe some content viewers and stuff like that. So the first thing is, what’s your goal with creating content on the internet? Is it leads, is it audience or anything like that? [Devan Sood]: Yeah, so I think it’s going to change over time. At this very moment I don’t have a product live out there. I’m not advertising anything specifically. So it’s really more of like audience building, education, maybe some entertainment, but I think I lean more just generally towards the educational side of things. Insights, that kind of thing. I think eventually it will become more and more specific towards what I’m working which is an AI marketing platform. So, you know, we’ll start building a lot more marketing content, a lot more AI related content, a lot more kind of, you know, how you can use AI as a marketer kind of content to try and attract the business owners and the founders and the marketers that are already trying to do AI related marketing stuff. And my background lends a good hand to that. Like I’ve got good experience at like an AI video startup, which kind of is AI marketing right now. And so people will listen to me if I say something. I just rarely say anything right now. And so I’m trying to find like, well, let me also kind of give you this upfront. I don’t know what works with my audience. So I have not experimented enough to be able to tell you this isn’t the strategy that we should double down on. Throw spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks. It’s gonna be a finite amount of spaghetti that I consider to be high quality spaghetti. But you know, I think like, yeah, I’m down to just throw things around and see what happens. Okay. Yeah, so yeah, the answer to your question is basically like right now it’s more generic, educational and over time it’ll become more pointed and specific. [Tanyo Goshev]: Okay, and do you have any tangible number you’re going after, like number of impressions, followers, people that reach out to your DMs and say, hey, this is great stuff, I would love to check out your projects and stuff, or you just want to see the numbers go up from week to week? [Devan Sood]: That’s a good question. How many impressions have you gotten in the last 12 months? [Michael Houck]: I mean It depends on across all of our all of our clients Yeah, yeah a bit. [Devan Sood]: So I I wouldn’t say we should use one client as a benchmark for okay I’d say like I I think that if we’re doing really well and We figured out what works we should be able to accomplish hundreds of thousands of impressions pretty easily Yeah over the course of a year Yeah, I would agree. [Tanyo Goshev]: Yeah. Okay. Okay. And what would, would that make it a success? I would call it a million per year. [Michael Houck]: Let’s set an aggressive goal. [Michael Houck]: Let’s set an aggressive goal. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. Okay. [Michael Houck]: If we get to June 1st, 2026, that’s our, that’s our, our big goal. Right. [Tanyo Goshev]: Okay, perfect. And I’m curious, because it wasn’t really clear in the form, what are the deliverables? Are we only doing LinkedIn or X as well? How many pieces of content would you add? [Devan Sood]: That’s another thing I do not know. I’ll defer to your expertise on this, actually. Right now, I think… You know, you tell me what works better, actually, because if your content just works better on X, then let’s just do X. And if your content works better on LinkedIn, let’s just do LinkedIn. If you think that I can cross posts with some sort of expectation of success, I’m down to try that as well. I don’t think, in my experience, that the X audience and the LinkedIn audience are looking for the same thing, or they’re trying to appreciate the same thing. So, you know, I’m also flexible on this. I think that they should be whatever the highest quality output could be. [Michael Houck]: Okay, I think, I mean, my POV here would be then, like, let’s take an experimental lens for the first month or two and sort of try out different things, whether that’s different formats, different frequencies, like whether we do more short form or less long form. And we can even try across across two platforms, just with like, you know, we do. [Devan Sood]: Yeah, I’ll tell you another kind of anecdote that I’ve experienced. I have gone viral on x, where you can get like hundreds of thousands of impressions in one tweet, right? That seems to be really difficult to do on LinkedIn. But people on LinkedIn are seemingly much more engaged and much more like paying attention. So I I think, again, it depends on the type of content that you’re talking about. The content that I post organically just tends to do better on LinkedIn because it’s more educational and relevant and work-related usually. That said, the post I’ve had the highest views on ever was on X. [Michael Houck]: I think if the goal is eventually going to move towards like the influencer marketing of the AI influencer marketing platform, we should build now, yes, we should experiment, but we should also build now with that kind of in the back of our minds, right? So if we think that the people on LinkedIn will be higher intent and more likely to become users, then I would recommend probably investing 60, 40, at least right now of our time into continuing to do what’s working for you there and sort of just doing it more consistently, more frequently. [Devan Sood]: Okay, I think that’s actually the right lens. Written content, I think we’ll do better on LinkedIn, just overall. So actually, I think maybe let’s focus there. The content specifically for the AI marketing stuff that I’m planning on, that is going to do well on, let’s say X, is going to be the kind of more flashy hype video or something like that. So yeah, let me, I’ll save the demo videos and all that for X. And we can focus on written content for LinkedIn. [Tanyo Goshev]: Cool. And if we do want to cross post anything, Andrew can take care of that as well easily. [Tanyo Goshev]: So no problem. Okay. And you mentioned in the form that your target audience are early-stage founders and marketers of early-stage companies. Could you maybe expand on that a little bit? Yeah. Many details as you can. [Devan Sood]: So I’ll focus on LinkedIn for the context here. A lot of my network on LinkedIn is already early stage founders and marketers like that is like between those two. That’s probably the majority of my LinkedIn. And so I already have a strong base of this type of audience. They already like the type of content that I put out and I Know how to catch their eye in some ways as well, you know so because I resonate strongly with them and I am an early stage founder and marketer a lot of times like I just know what they want to see and know what they want to what they will engage with um The marketers and early stage founders that I’m Most interested in targeting with this content are the ones who are already exploring with ai who are trying to figure out what are the ways to maximize their productivity, their gains, their ROI, whatever it might be the way they’re thinking about it. So there are creators who, you know, I can give you some creators who probably have good lookalike audiences and something like that, but tell me what’s helpful for me to describe about this audience. [Tanyo Goshev]: Creators are good. And also, maybe what type of founders? I know you mentioned 30-stage, but are these tech founders, SaaS founders, or tech-oriented? OK. That’s a good question. [Devan Sood]: I don’t know that either yet. [Devan Sood]: I will know that in the next week or two. My suspicion is that because I am filtering for those who have explored with AI already, that I am talking about technical founders, doing some sort of software and just by the nature of success in numbers it’s probably some sort of b2b sass like we can like kind of average these out to certain you know expected results either that or vibe coders who are now looking to expand beyond vibe coding into vibe marketing to basically totally yeah or you know individual indie hackers who have built their who aren’t marketing experts, that type of person as well. As far as like lookalike audiences go, I think, you know, you want to look at indie hackers like Levels, Peter Levels. You want to look at like the more formal educators like Greg Eisenberg. You probably want to look at the like, top of the top marketers. My good friend Nick Tran has a lot of really good content. Gary Vee has a lot of really good content actually on marketing. It’s the people that are attracting these kind of like hustling entrepreneurs with small teams. I guess that’s an important distinction here is that I’m not looking for solo people. I think solo people are not ready to make the type of investment that I’m trying to have them make, at least from the get-go. So I’m looking for small teams. [Tanyo Goshev]: That’s the specificity that we should get after. [Tanyo Goshev]: Small teams, under 50 people? [Devan Sood]: Is that what you mean? Yeah, I’d say probably under 50, somewhere around there. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Definitely under 100. [Devan Sood]: I think if they have less than five or ten marketers on the team, which 50, 100 people is somewhere probably around there. That’s probably where we want to want to live. We either want to reach one of those marketers or the founder of the company. [Tanyo Goshev]: And that’s how I kind of think about this. OK, perfect. And so. Right now, you’re obviously posting some stuff on LinkedIn, and on social. I’m curious like what does this audience come for you for? Is it the insights on how AI will affect marketing or are any other types of posts and content that works well? [Devan Sood]: Yes, I think a lot of my audience is kind of following for my journey. My path has been extraordinarily strange and I think a lot of the people that have met me along that path kind of excited to see me in whatever the next thing is. And so there’s like a personal journey in this. I think the people that I’ve worked with know me as like a very high-end marketer. You know they’re gonna know me for my marketing chops and my experimentation skills and the things that I’ve done on a professional level. There’s gonna be people that know me from my last startup. So like I have a actually a pretty big LinkedIn audience from my last startup which has absolutely nothing to do with my current startup, but they will be there There’s also gonna be a lot of people from like the AI video angle expecting like hey Jen kind of content I should also at some point in this conversation give you Where my timeline is because I’ve got multiple things coming up in the next couple of months um and so I’ll give you a sense for that as well but yeah let’s see what else let’s say like between startup marketing stuff and personal that’s like the overwhelming majority um and then you know kind of the the rest of them are you know I don’t think you have to pay attention to them those will follow the 80 20 rule got it got it yeah but Now would be a good time to share your personal timeline, if that makes sense, so we can get a sense of your audience. So I’m not planning on launching this startup until sometime in July, maybe even August. So I’ve got at least a month, if not a couple of months before that happens. In the meantime, I’m planning on formally launching this AI video agency. Um That will probably happen, you know mid-june um I’m also gonna be putting out a bunch of the apps that i’ve already made Like that i’ve just personally developed Uh, really just for fun and shits and gigs and I think it makes really good content uh, but uh Gonna be launched. I think there’s like four or five of those as well Uh, and I could I could we could plan those like week over week. So we have like multiple weeks just of like high quality entrepreneurship related content Um, what else? Um And then I’m also I guess this is kind of another part of it I’m also nsf Uh, and I just moved here two weeks ago. So there’s a lot of like SF related content that I could also create while I’m here Okay Yeah, there’s a lot of like Maybe you shouldn’t call it this but there’s a lot of like startup porn that like You know what? I mean? And so there’s like I think a good amount of that that I can also take advantage of while in SF Like living out of a bunkhead right now. I’m just like waiting to post a photo That kind of thing, you know, yeah That’s awesome. [Tanyo Goshev]: Yeah Memes will explode on social if you do that. Uh, yeah, I think like Actually memes is a really good one. [Devan Sood]: Also, like I think that like If we can create a relevant meme, that is really powerful. But uh, yeah for sure it is Not just like attaching some random meme to a post that we have to like create it a relevant meme could be really powerful. [Tanyo Goshev]: Yeah, I agree. And like, obviously, these like the startup, the AI view agency in the AI apps. Would you say that there is like an overlap in the audience between those three things? Because yes. [Devan Sood]: So a lot of the customers who are going to be great for the ad video agency are actually also going to be great for the AI marketing thing down the road. That thing hasn’t launched yet, but as I acquire new customers for that, that’s also going to be me asking them if they want to self-launch or beta test the platform or whatever it is. So they’re going to lead one into the other for sure. The apps are a little bit more unrelated. I think it just makes good entrepreneurship-related Like the apps themselves have nothing to do with what I’m doing, but I’m not an engineer. I completely vibe coded a hundred percent of all lines of every single technology that I’ve ever written. There’s a lot of like good stories and personal stories in these apps. Like I turned my grandma into a DAU of a quiz app that I made her. Dick, such a good story. Yeah, again, just like need to, need to write their narrative and all that. So there’s a lot of this stuff that has overlap in terms of the audience that would be interested in the narrative, but not necessarily in the app itself. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Got it. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Got it. [Tanyo Goshev]: Yeah. So would you say like the AI apps themselves are more like a narrative play in terms of your entrepreneurial journey? OK, perfect. OK. [Devan Sood]: And that’s the reason I’m releasing them, by the way. That they will make really, really good stories and help me build an audience because of the stories. [Tanyo Goshev]: Yeah, yeah, that’s smart. And what would you say are the different types of topics you would like to discuss? Obviously, we have how AI will affect marketing, but anything else related to that, feel free to expand that. [Devan Sood]: Yeah. You know, I think if we could like triple down on how AI will affect marketing, that is something that it’s a niche that nobody’s really figured out yet. Like, I can’t think of a single creator who is like the AI marketing guy. You know, and if you can turn me into the AI marketing guy, I think that would be fire. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I can’t think of anyone either. Like, the closest would be Geisenberg, but he does more than that. [Devan Sood]: So he’s not like that guy who talks about it sometimes. Yeah. Either Geisenberg or like Andrew Cheng might be that guy, but like, that’s it. [Michael Houck]: And he’s not even a marketer anymore. Yeah. Andrew stuff is more like anything about growth. [Devan Sood]: He knows what to do with it. [Michael Houck]: Even more of the professor in this instance. You want the operator in the weeds. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Here’s how you do it. [Devan Sood]: Right, right, right. Okay. A lot of good stuff that I can say. I’ve got, I am a one of a handful of people in the world. I think that is ready to answer a lot of questions on that front. So, um, I’ve got a lot of good things to say. [Tanyo Goshev]: Awesome. Awesome. So that’s the main topic and, and I just think, yeah, let’s like triple down on that outside of that. [Devan Sood]: Like maybe there’s going to be some stuff here or there that will be interesting for us to post, you know, if there’s a, huge movement on something in AI that’s happening right now, we should probably talk about it just to be in the conversation. You know what I mean? For example, something I regretted not posting the other day was when everybody was talking about Jake Paul. There was like a day on Twitter where every single human was talking about Jake Paul in tech. And actually, I hired Jake Paul to be basically a co-founder when I was 18. And so I have this great story from back then. That again, just gone to waste but I could have hopped on that moment and and I think cleaned up with a story like that So things like that that we should kind of be paying attention to as they happen in real time Okay. [Tanyo Goshev]: Yeah, uh and just on the topic for AI marketer, I feel like the boarding marketer, which is uh Like an ex account. He runs an agency. He does that really well on next. [Michael Houck]: Um Yeah, this it’s it’s a synonymous account. It’s the boring marketer. It’s actually Greg Eisenberg. Oh, yeah, I’ve seen this guy. I was talking to Greg, like a week or two ago, and he told me that him and this guy have entirely automated the agency so that all they do is the sales calls like Greg doesn’t do them. The boring marketer guy does them. And then literally everything else. It’s SEO. [Tanyo Goshev]: So it’s different than You’re doing uh, yeah, but you could do something similar similar type of content influencer marketing totally totally Okay, uh and about your content voice you shared like digestible dense educational friendly super kind uh conversational approach was story driven a narrative I feel like that’s the main thing like story driven and just Follow the ar marketing The narrative anything else would you like to add to the content voice and stuff? [Devan Sood]: Um I can’t really have to say this in 2025, but I think like thoughtful Also, like I think there’s a certain level of people who will say something without thinking about the other side of that thing And I I don’t want to be that guy So that’s something I’m I’m pretty aware of pretty wary of um I think it’s also pretty important for what we’re posting to be cutting edge to say something that maybe isn’t controversial But something that they haven’t heard before Um, maybe something contrarian you know And I have a very pain tolerance. So I have no problem being contrarian. We can say anything that I will stand behind. If I stand behind it, I’ll post it. You know what I mean? [Michael Houck]: You don’t just want to throw the pasta at the wall. You want the pasta with the spicy Calabrian chilies in there against the wall. [Devan Sood]: Exactly. Once we throw the pasta and step back, it’s like a Picasso. You know what I mean? Beautiful. Perfect, perfect. [Tanyo Goshev]: Yeah, I don’t have any more questions. We covered a lot of ground here, so that gives me a good idea on what you’re looking for. [Devan Sood]: Well, Devan, anything else that we didn’t talk about that you want to share before Tanyo gets to work? Yeah, I will say a couple of format things. I generally write lowercase. Just I am that guy. I prefer shorter than longer just generally. So like 20 tweet threads is like a hard no. But like I’m down for like five or six really dense ones. You know what I mean? Like that would be great. Three is a magic number. I don’t care what anybody says. So like anything in threes, I think just makes humans feel better. [Michael Houck]: That’s why I have three of us on the call. [Devan Sood]: I feel so much better. How about like exclamation marks or? Yeah, generally, if I’m writing in thoughts, which I do very often, I don’t put a period. If I have something exclamatory, I will put a punctuation mark. I use em dashes, and I don’t care what GPT says about that. [Michael Houck]: We got to fight back against AI taking our em dashes. [Devan Sood]: Mine is space, m-space. So it’s not like… The only way to do it. Okay, great. Now I’m glad we’re on the same page about that. Yeah, I think other than that, I’m pretty flexible and excited to see what you guys come up with. Cool. [Michael Houck]: Okay, so we’ll start things out on our side. Tanyo will get deeper in the weeds on the first batch and on the research. Did we set up a Slack channel? I actually forgot if we did set up a Slack channel already. Not yet, no. Okay, I’ll set one up. I’ll invite you to it. And that’s where we’ll share weekly questions that we have that we want your POV on. The best way to engage with those is just send us back a rambly voice note. One minute, two minutes, five minutes, whatever you can spare, ramble as long as you want. That’ll help us capture the unique voice faster. So we’ll get started on that. And then Andrew will reach out about getting your login credentials so we can set up typefully and schedule everything for you. And we’ll also do reporting through Slack as well, so you can keep an eye on performance and things like that. But yeah, I think that’s it. We’ll send over a first batch in the next week or so, and you let us know what you think. [Michael Houck]: You can edit them and go from there. [Devan Sood]: Oh, yeah. Excited, guys. Cool. All right, man. Awesome. All right. See you in Slack. Yeah. Let me send you the email for my Slack. [Michael Houck]: Cause it’s not my, please do drop it in here. Cool. Okay. [Devan Sood]: I’ll send you an invite in a little bit. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: All right. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Later, man.