- Duration: 32 min
- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01JWHH2B39AK4PK73Y65EAA43P (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JWHH2B39AK4PK73Y65EAA43P)
Transcript
[Michael Houck]: whatever, you know, so. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, it makes sense. Should we spend the majority of this time talking content or should we talk creators or what’s what’s up for you? [Brian Feister]: Yeah, good question. I think like I’m like, I’m not sure. Let’s talk about creators just because. So. You and I don’t know each other, so this isn’t like, how do I describe this? Um, it’s like an awkward conversation to come into cold, but part of it’s like, I really would like to find, uh, you know, find a co-founder. Right. And like what you guys are doing is contracting and that’s totally great. You know, it has its place. Um, and I’m not going to like pitch you right now. I’m like being a co-founder or something. Right. So that said, uh, I don’t know. If it comes up to you as interesting, I’ll leave it to you to bring it back. You know what I mean? So I won’t pitch it. But that said, the core idea involves being very geographic and IRL, which is very much the opposite of what a lot of growth is led by. The whole point of social media is that you can get a bunch of people that are tuned into your channel who don’t live in one place, right? You know what I mean? So I’m interested in your thoughts around that. You know what I mean? Like the idea is the concept of the platform is a little bit like, uh, it’s like Eventbrite and Meetup put together and both are like extremely intuitified at this point. [Michael Houck]: And I mean, I think Meetup in particular is just like, it’s it’s done, you know, it’s dead, it’s dead. [Brian Feister]: And, and meetup. Well, yeah, they started that slide, like four years ago, you know, they went from having paid free event listings to all of them being paid, and they lost, actually lost 90% of their events in one shot with that decision. And ever since then, they’re just kind of trying to survive, you know, and eventbrite is weird, because they’re like, their stock price is too and 15 cents a share, and they have 800 employees. And it’s like, from that perspective, leverage via AI and other things are a disrupting possibility for me, because I’m sure I could do with 20 people what they’re doing with 800. [Michael Houck]: You know what I mean? [Michael Houck]: So yeah. [Michael Houck]: Those big orgs, especially after going public, it’s like, they just get so bloated. You know, they need someone, honestly, they need someone from private equity to come in there and just slice them up. [Brian Feister]: Private equity is like the worst nightmare of me and many others. You know what I mean? [Michael Houck]: From where you’re at with the new venture, it sounds terrible, but from where they’re at, it would actually be an improvement. [Brian Feister]: It’s hilarious. We had a hostile takeover at Salesforce, as big as that is. That’s my day job, you know? And it was like, they just pumped and dumped. And it was like, it was good to say goodbye to those folks. But anyway, it’s all good. Cool. But anyway, yeah, so that’s kind of the thought. And so what it does right now is it does most of the things that are important that those two platforms do. And then one thing which is arguably not useful, which is like, I think it’s useful, but I’m like, selling it feels like it’s a hard sell. But the idea is like, I had a a former business partner, who he owns the competitive karaoke league, right, there’s in like, like five cities, you know, so and so I do like, you go into the app, you go into the platform onto the event page, you log in and you can vote for like the red team or the blue team and say who won, right, like real time voting, but I made sure to keep it general. So it can be used for poker tournaments, volleyball, pickleball, Magic the Gathering, you know what I mean, like anything, right? So it should be sellable, but maybe not, I don’t know. But at the core of it, right, we want to be a comprehensive index where the worst case scenario is we’re going to ingest all the data from Eventbrite and Meetup. So the worst scenario will be that it’s at least better than both of them, right? And then from there, we’re going to actually spiral out where we do user-driven curation and ingestion of events so that they can kind of like collect them, right? And essentially form an index that does like, it’s a whole scraping layer that uses a little bit of AI magic to allow people to set it and forget it. You ingest it once and then it’ll forever go. And as long as that website target doesn’t change, you know, to ingest the events, so. [Brian Feister]: That’s dope. [Michael Houck]: That’s that’s the idea. [Michael Houck]: Where are you at with it today? [Brian Feister]: Well, I’ve got paying customers, but my my thing with my business partner kind of skewed me toward being like more Flintstone, like B2B, you know, so I’m in the process of finishing the scraper because that will allow me to target. And so it should be done like within a month, you know, so that’s why it’s like we’re having this conversation as preemptive, because that has always been the thing. When I went and built out Eventbrite, like by myself for two months, you know, like, that was a side quest. But the original idea was the ingestion, right, the ability to create a comprehensive index with the scraping, right, you know, so when that launches, that will be the hope of network effects. And if it doesn’t work, then you know, maybe the whole thing doesn’t work, and it’s dead. But you see what happens. But anyway, that’s, that’s kind of where I’m at with it. And so for now, it’s like, seems likely pick a geography, and then, you know, suck in all the events from that geography and do some like manual research, right, like, old school Flintstones style, right, and then actually pull those in and set them to ingest and then we can do like targeted and that’s where the influencer thing comes in is like, unusual request I’m sure for you, but finding somebody that’s like city-based would be ideal here. You know what I mean? Yeah, like hyper-local influencers. [Michael Houck]: I think there’s probably some possibility that we can… I don’t think we have a ton of those folks on our platform today, but I do think that they would be just as excited about what we’re doing if we reach out to them. And so I think what Ben’s going to probably do with his team is basically just see who we can get in that space and come back to you with that. And then we’ll probably also have some more, some like, some, let’s say, wider folks as well. But we will definitely include some of those hyperlocal folks too. [Brian Feister]: Yeah, and I think like, I talked to a guy earlier who’s like, you know, maybe this guy would be a co founder. And so it’s a both thing where like, we could work with you guys. And he could also help in the sense of like, doing a little bit more of the grunt work part, you know what I mean? And so anyway, yeah, so he was talking about like digital nomad as a good target, because it’s like, if you create all these indexes of things that are happening, and you pick like, you know, a bunch of trouble is that if you pick too many cities, where digital nomads like to have a lot of options that that kind of becomes dilutive, because you just have a big amount of work in front of you. Right. But But that being said, You know, it’s a thought, you know what I mean? Or digital nomads, you know, in a city, you start by like keeping it in a city and then you expand to multiple cities or whatever, you know what I mean? [Michael Houck]: So yeah, like you could do it in like, I mean, I think you said Austin in the email, but you could do it in like in Bali or in, you know, what’s that city in Portugal that all the digital nomads are going to right now? [Michael Houck]: It’s one of the smaller ones. [Michael Houck]: It’s like a surf town. I forget what it’s called. Same idea. Yeah, I think that would make sense. And I think that it, I don’t know, these types of businesses in the past have been manual, but there’s a lot of automation that you can do now with LLMs that probably make it a lot easier. [Brian Feister]: So sounds like an opportunity. [Brian Feister]: Yeah, yeah, for sure. Yeah, and LLMs actually, it’s weird because one of the key factors in success here is cost to serve has to be very, very low. And LLMs are very bad at that. But the interesting part about that is when you plug a URL into the platform to set it for ingesting data from a target URL, when you do that, you interact with an LLM actually one of the least expensive because it works fine one time there. But the process is kind of technically complex in a, for a very specific purpose. Like in the end, we don’t use LLMs to scrape after that first ingestion. And that’s, that’s key because like if we have a million scrapes a day, right. It’s going to cost me a fortune and it’s going to, because it’s free. And the point is it wants to be very low cost per per user that’s being served because only, only a small subset then we’re going to buy tickets to the platform and actually make us money. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. So only a small portion of the events will be paid events in the first place. A lot of them will just be free gatherings and things like that. 100 percent. Yeah. You’ve got it. You’ve got to find a way to get that. [Brian Feister]: Keep that cost low because it’s a volume game, really. Exactly. Yeah, precisely. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. OK. Yeah. So, I mean, I guess with I mean, the other side is like, I don’t know. I mean, tell me a little bit with if you have four minutes, that’s fine. Don’t worry about it. But a little bit about like doing because I think founder led marketing is the thing right now. And I’m you know, I have 5000 followers on LinkedIn. And, you know, that seems to be going OK. You know, I had twelve hundred likes on a post that I did a couple months back or whatever. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: It’s good. Yeah, yeah. [Brian Feister]: It’s not bad. So, yeah, like somebody that’s got their, somebody that’s thinking of it from a metrics perspective rather than me thinking, you know, strategy rather than me just like ad hoc throwing whatever nonsense is on my mind out there. I mean, some of it, some of it is good because it feels authentic to feel random and like just like a shit poster or something like that. But then, so like keeping something of that, but also like think looking at like, well, what is doing well, like, look at the history of what I posted and like, think about what the strategy would be if you’re basically trying to ghost write as me or something like that, you know? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, 100%. I mean, that’s what we do. We partner with founders, and in some cases, VCs, and we write, we write content for them in their voice. And so our whole thing is to make it super lightweight for you, because you’re obviously super busy, both with, you know, the the job and also with getting the platform off the ground. So we want to make sure we’re not taking up a ton of your time. So we set up a Slack channel, like a Slack Connect type channel. And then we’ll share questions in there that come up in our research every week. And all we really need from you is a rambly voice note, where you send us a couple minutes of you adding your unique POV on the questions that we send. Voice notes are best because we get your intonation and can really get your voice and how you’re talking about it. Oh, nice. That’s cool. That’s right. And so then we turn that into content batches each week. And you know, we’ll get a couple weeks ahead. So we’re not sort of scrambling from week to week. But that’s it. And we can do that for LinkedIn. If you want to sort of have us take over that we can expand it and have it do x for you as well or threads if you’re if you’re interested in like Instagram threads. [Brian Feister]: And we also do email newsletters through beehive and substack where you can sort of collect people’s emails on social Then take them one step further down into that funnel and build trust with them through the news I think for in your case, I would I would say social probably makes the most sense for just a sage you’re at But as it grows it might make sense to layer on a newsletter as well I thought about going the other direction with it just in case it’s useful is I have this idea about Finding a way to link back a newsletter to the plow platform, but making it something that basically gives like, it’s like a tastemaker for people to, you know, get out of the house, right. And it’s like, it’s the idea of, like, authentic events. An example would be in North Philly, when I lived in that area, there used to be this bar called Natalie’s. The sign outside said like fried chicken, and they hadn’t sold that for 30 years. And you go inside and it’s like, the bar, it’s so small that the bar, you can barely squeeze by, right? But you make your way in, there’s no seats and you sit down. And the most amazing jazz musicians that I’ve ever seen in my life, these people had never practiced or played together, they just show up. And these people have like, it looks like you stepped into a time machine and these people look like they’re straight out of, they have leopard, unironically wearing leopard print suits and stuff like that. Right. And but these guys were amazing musicians. And so those kinds of like underground things that are experiential is a really, really big thing now. So if there were a way, I don’t know how you get people in the funnel and how exactly you make all of this like work properly. But, you know, anyway, if and I know Beehive does cross selling and marketing, like so maybe there’s a little research project Like are there complimentary beehive lists that actually we could boost to for that kind of thing? [Michael Houck]: So there are three, there are actually, there are four ways to grow newsletters. One is getting people off of social audiences based on content marketing, right? There’s paid ads through meta, which is how 90% of the big newsletters in the last generation grew. Like Morning Brew, The Hustle. Came from Facebook ads. Then there’s the sort of beehive recommendation network spark loop tool type world, right, where newsletters recommend each other. They’re generally cheaper than paid ads to do that. But the engagement is much lower because people are really signing up for a different newsletter, and they’re just sort of attacking you on right, so you get lower open rates, lower engagement rates, higher churn is is what we’ve seen kind of time and time again. The fourth way that not a lot of people are yet sort of queued in on and what some of the quickest growing newsletters right now are doing is cold email-based growth. So basically, you create some lead magnet, and you pull a list of folks who are in the niche. So maybe you go on social media, and you pull the tens of thousands of people who follow what’s happening in Austin or something, right? You pull that list. You get their emails. And then you send them this lead magnet. And if they engage with the lead magnet, or if they open the email, or if they don’t respond and say that, you know, fuck you, you try giving him the normal newsletter. And if you have like pretty aggressive criteria for whether to keep them subscribed or unsubscribe them, you can actually get a pretty good list out of it for cheaper than you can through paid ads, or through the recommendation networks. [Brian Feister]: So yeah, That’s exactly what I was talking about like one of the things I had in mind was like, uh, I want to do social listening where I actually like do I might I might I might write my own like back end that will take a subset of of uh Of tweets and that kind of thing that say like I’m bored this weekend. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: What’s happening? [Brian Feister]: right Scrape the account like scrape the the user account page to not everybody puts it in their Twitter bio that they’re in Austin. You can basically say, we only want Austin for now, and basically eliminate 99% of these tweets and start to get focused and stuff like that. So that’s another thought. Very similar to what you’re saying there. So yeah. [Michael Houck]: If you have the capability to do that custom, obviously, it could be better than some kind of off-the-shelf system to pull them. But yeah, 100%. That’s sort of what a lot of the faster growing We’ve done it for my newsletter and it’s worked well. We see, you know, 50 to 60, sometimes even 70% open range from the cohorts that we add that way. It can be pretty good. [Brian Feister]: Okay. Well, I, I’ll let you go in the sense I want to respect your time, but yeah, there’s, there’s so much more that we, you know, could talk about, but yeah, I mean, let me know. I mean, you, you now know, like, you know, I’m, I’m kind of open and, oh, and just so that you know, Like, I don’t know what what change might be introduced if I do find a co-founder. I actually put out a hiring ad. I was like, man, fuck this. I’m just going to put it. And like it was it was tough because it is a grind and it is a lot of time. And I had two people out of 100 that were a yes. And like both of them wanted to like they were these kind of precious like marketing folks are like, oh, I don’t want to give away my magic. I’m like, here’s the deal. And it said this right up. Front. So I don’t know what the fuck is wrong with these people. It’s like $3,000 a month, you can either spend that or I’ll just pay it to you. I don’t give a shit. Like, that’s, that’s the budget, right? So, so anyway, I put that to you in the same way, right? It’s like, optimize for that. And I don’t know what this other person that comes in if I, if I do fine, I just talked to him earlier. So I don’t know, maybe that’ll work out. And that could introduce a different variable, but gives you a sense of what I’m looking to do. So I’m open recommendations and obviously you get it from this conversation so like what we’re looking for is the more spend that I give to you and it’s like the more we drive revenue the more we drive growth the more money I have to spend and you get it so you can feel free to suggest what you think is is going to be the most impactful you know what I mean so. [Michael Houck]: Okay here’s what I’ll do then because I think I like the idea of the project I think it sounds pretty cool and I think it could work so So I will, I’ll put together a couple options of like what we can do, price points and things like that. And you let me know just sort of what resonates the most. [Brian Feister]: We can, we can start there. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Sounds good. Cool. Yeah. And so sorry for the confusion with the double thing, but, but you know, whatever, it could be newsletter and the influencer thing. Like maybe that could go well together. I think that, yeah. And the only question for you is like, I am trying to be strict on this budget, right? So I know you had said like 4k for like the takeover of like my LinkedIn profile. So if that’s out, that’s fine. I’m also fine if you want to reduce the frequency and the amount of work, you know what I mean? By 25% to make it 3k like that’s fine too. So you know, whatever. [Michael Houck]: We have some flexible options. I mean, what’s on that that notion doc is like our standard packages, but that includes like, you know, credits to our creator network and things like that. So there’s pieces to play with that we can bring it down. [Brian Feister]: Yeah, I wasn’t sure if it did, because that wasn’t mentioned on the notion doc. So anyway, so yeah, you’re or at least I missed it. So, so great, because, you know, maybe that’s a good fit, too. So I’m open, you know what I mean? So, yeah, take a look at what I have posted, what’s done well, and take a look at, you know what I mean? Like, exploring opportunities for influence in this area. You know what I mean? Like you get it. [Michael Houck]: So cool. [Michael Houck]: I’ll dig in tonight. [Michael Houck]: I’ll probably shoot you a note, say Saturday, Sunday, and we can we can check in next week. Yeah, cool. [Brian Feister]: Sounds good, man. [Brian Feister]: All right. I appreciate it. Have a good week. Yeah, you too.