- Duration: 21 min
- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01JWEX4KKFZCJPN38HAW03YCWC (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JWEX4KKFZCJPN38HAW03YCWC)
Transcript
[Olena Petrosyuk]: I’m just going into baby number three and it’s been a little bit crazy around the household. [Michael Houck]: So yeah, I feel like you, you probably got bigger priorities than a random calls right now. I didn’t want to speak. [Olena Petrosyuk]: I honestly think you’re, you’re building like a super cool destination, probably the best that I’ve seen for startups. So keep sending people along your way. Thank you. And I’ve never, I’m yet to find someone who said, Oh, this is crap thing. People This is amazing. And it’s kind of free. So this is awesome. I don’t know more people. So I think that kind of suggested that we can act and speak. I do work with loads of, so I think in a nutshell, we’re basically like running advisory that helps around fundraising, primarily storytelling. So help to tell the story in pitch decks, financial modeling, and then often like help a little bit around growth. I’ve done the consulting bit of it. I’ve done the investment banking. I’ve just done the startup, which we sold to private equities that kind of have all the different angles and hence, I mean, went through the whole finding product market fit raising. Everything is amazing. This is like, it’s good. We managed to sell in time when we managed to sell that was still, still fairly decent. So because I work with a lot of founders, I kind of softly already suggest them that, you know, there is this amazing Avenue where they can do do advertising but I’d love to hear a little bit more from you because you know your audience best like who is it truly fit for it is loads of I think most of the companies we work with are that kind of vertical AI enterprise space building something for a very large yada yada like I don’t think that’s probably a fit in terms of the audience because it’s probably more startups but obviously you tell me because you know more yeah I mean for for Megaphone in particular, you know, we have the two sides of the business, right? [Michael Houck]: So we have this sort of content creation side, and then we have the network distribution amplification side, two sides of the same coin, but can also be sort of engaged with differently by folks. So on the content side, I mean, you know, we have writers who have expertise in tons of different niches, and everything is edited before it gets sent to our clients personally by me or by my partner, Blake mall. He hasn’t even seen his content. He’s even bigger audience than I do. We’re in the trenches with the writers on literally everything. So I think we’re the only if not the only then maybe one of two agencies that are actually operated day to day by people who have actually built big audiences themselves. A lot of these content agencies, it’s like, Oh, you know, my investor built an audience. Now I’m running a business for him, right? That’s not us. We’re actually the ones in the weeds in the trenches with folks. So when it comes to that, I mean, we work with primarily, I’d say seed stage through series B startups. We also work with some VCs. And it’s usually for like the founders, like founder brand, or sometimes the founder brand plus the company account. In one or two cases, we do like the whole exec team as well. Folks who see success with us early on want to have us do the whole team. Those are the folks who I think are really big on using social to not just build awareness, but to generate meaningful leads and have it be a meaningful channel for them. So yeah, any niche there we can work with. And then on the distribution side, we have hundreds of creators in our network. I think it’s over 500 creators today who are in the network. So they span niches pretty considerably as well. You know, if it’s like something crazy niche, like, you know, lawyers who are familiar with, like, I don’t know, the local Toronto law, seniors are like, we’ll be able to get that specific. But, you know, we, we cover basically every niche point. So it’s, it’s pretty flexible there too. [Olena Petrosyuk]: I think honestly, like the biggest problem is not like, I’ve introduced people to Megafonic a couple of times and everyone is like, this is great. The biggest issue is not a solution because I haven’t actually seen anyone who’s been doing anything similar. I think the biggest issue is a lot of the founders that we work somehow are just like deeply uncomfortable with the whole social thing. Like they kind of know they have good, but, and I kind of tell them look guys you actually have like someone else is gonna do it for you that’s fine they’re literally like uncomfortable even thinking that they aren’t social even if that’s not them they’re just like this is this is just like way too out there and I’d rather just build my stuff and it’s just yeah I like it’s too much yada yada so I think that’s probably the biggest barrier but you to know I think the point when I made so the point when I kind of made about vertical SaaS AI, et cetera, was not for the megaphone, but more so more for the newsletter. Cause obviously, yeah, Ben mentioned that there is that opportunity. It kind of seems like it’s a very tight knit audience that for the right tool can land probably pretty well in terms of the value that they get out of it. But can you tell me just a little bit more like what that, like, is that audience fully founders? [Michael Houck]: Are there anyone who’s kind of you know a little bit further advanced um yeah so that probably would be helpful yeah so I break it down into three three different like parts of our audience right so there’s on the on the one hand they’re the folks who are more aspirational right these are folks who maybe they’re working in big tech maybe they’re working in consulting or banking or something they plan to be a founder they want to be a founder right so there’s that component to the audience they’re trying to learn the ropes of of what it’s like to start something then there’s the folks who are founders actively but they’re either bootstrapped or and they plan to do that indefinitely or they haven’t yet uh raised money right excuse me one second I’m so no no worries so sorry about that um so yeah so the second component is like these bootstrap founders who either are planning to bootstrap indefinitely or they just haven’t been able to be successful in fundraising yet, right? And then the third component is venture-backed founders. And that ranges from, you know, pre-seed, seed stage all the way up. You know, we have people who’ve IPO’d before who are reading the newsletter and they email me back like this one. I’ve actually become friends with this one guy through the newsletter. He sold his company for a billion dollars. Now he’s a ranch in Montana and runs founder retreats there. And it’s crazy. [Olena Petrosyuk]: Um, so, um, this is like, take me there. It’s totally beautiful. I went out last year. [Michael Houck]: Um, but, um, yeah, so I’d say the exact percentage these days, I’m not totally sure, but there’s a very, very strong contingent of folks who are like active venture-backed founders. I engage with them in conversations when they reply to the thought pieces and things like that. Um, So yeah, I don’t know the exact percentage when we ran the numbers earlier in the newsletter’s history, it was like 60, 40 active founders versus like early stage folks slash aspirational folks. But I don’t know if that’s increased one way or the other or stayed around there. [Olena Petrosyuk]: Okay. Who do you not work with? So also like, you know, I don’t, I’m not wasting time asking someone like, Oh, this is great. And then you’re like, Oh, we absolutely don’t work with this. So, um, Yeah, so I can imagine you try to keep it curated to a certain extent. So who would you not work with? As in, do you take both agencies and products? Do you only take products? Do you only take products that kind of make sense for founders? [Michael Houck]: Like, how do you look at it? Yeah, so it’s primarily things that we think founders would buy, right? So that can be a service provider, that can be a SaaS pool, that can be something in the middle that’s AI, that’s like service, but also software-based service, We have a lot of those. So I would say that as long as they’re trying to speak to and like the buyer persona that they’re going for is founders or like early stage folks who are actively building something, then they’re gonna have a decent shot at having a good result, right? If it’s more like, hey, here’s a tool to help your marketing team do this, like that’s probably not gonna hit as hard as like a founder, help a founder do his or her job more effectively. Okay, cool. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Noted. [Olena Petrosyuk]: I have a couple of people that might be interesting. So again, just keep pushing it out. I use Megafon, I find that it’s super cool. And you’ve been in a very intuitive way. So good job, guys. Obviously, like, the more coverage, there is the better and everyone is probably like, you know, more and more and more and more. But I think like at the at the core of it, it’s a very very cool, very intuitive solution. [Michael Houck]: So kudos to John. We’ve got, I should mention, in the next, I’d say four weeks or so, we’re going to be launching some pretty exciting new stuff within Megaphone, which is anyone who engages with your content, you’ll be able to pull their email address into your CRM as leads. [Olena Petrosyuk]: Interesting. Nice. Okay. That is very cool. Just need to do a CRM. [Michael Houck]: If we get into trying to build a CRM too, we’ll never, we’ll never get out of it. [Olena Petrosyuk]: I feel like, I don’t know, whichever thing people are building, somehow they always get to CRMs in the end, right? It’s always like, okay, okay, okay. And then we’re going to be a CRM. It’s either that way. If you are like in marketing sales space or in your space of anything else, you always need to get to financial product eventually. Like, We’ll start by selling this and it’s gonna be chairs, but eventually we’re gonna get into credit cards The new one with the AI software tools is that eventually it’s gonna be a data play, right It’s already a data play there is already a lot of valuable data, but in the future Oh, just wait and see what you can do is that data? I love it It’s a fun time to live in. So it’s very interesting. [Michael Houck]: If you have anybody who you think could be good for ghostwriting or could be interested in that, whether it’s for social and they want to put themselves out there top of funnel, or if they’re like, hey, maybe that’s not my thing and they want to just sort of build a deeper relationship with folks through a newsletter, you know, send over a meaningful referral fee for anybody that you send us who converts like, you know, four figures depending on what package they pick. So, yeah. [Olena Petrosyuk]: I mean, in all honesty, I’m just kind of mostly interested in people actually being successful because we end up working with folks that end up being successful, can raise funding again, or it doesn’t work. And I think like GTM is a massive problem for everyone right now. [Michael Houck]: Especially because like, you know, you can build investor relationships if they see how you think on social, right? [Olena Petrosyuk]: So, so many. So, A, massive. So basically like asked, we have like a VC network as well. And we asked like over 50 VCs just around how they fundraise. And right now, like 90% of those VCs said they want to know the founder for at least six to nine months before they end up investing, which obviously kind of change in times of COVID. And now it’s back. And now suddenly, like, how do you keep the relationship? Everyone sends investor updates, like good. But I mean, not everyone has stuff to actually yet send around and then they get loads of those. So like people who are super active on social, people who are building in public do I think still kind of win attention and get investor interest that’s inbound, which inherently is much stronger than you kind of knocking on all doors. I try to tell people about this. I try to let them know that like, if you do that now, eight months later, the round is going to be so much easier. And I think people just think they and winning it. And then like eight months later, they’re like, Oh crap. Like I wish we have listened, but now we haven’t. And it’s really difficult and it’s really tough. And then I just generally like go to market and leads is another one. Like I feel a lot of companies are struggling because AI has like ruined everything. Like people used to do this outbound and other, like now outbound is practically dead. Cause like everything is just spammed. Paid is super expensive. Like trying to build this like community that grows. No one understands. It’s kind of gray with like everyone does it and like virality is difficult. So yeah, I think I mean like a channel There is a good fit having a channel that really kind of commands attention because people read stuff like that’s pretty powerful So yes, we’ll be sending stuff your way if I find anyone relevant keep doing the good work very excited about seeing that Update yeah with me and I’ll uh, I’ll get them to to be excited about posting. Good to meet. Talk more soon.