- Duration: 37 min
- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01JWHABEBH8X460XS916Q9QFH0 (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JWHABEBH8X460XS916Q9QFH0)
Transcript
[John Humenik]: Hey, how’s it going? [John Humenik]: Hey, John, how you doing, man? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Sorry, I’m a few minutes late. [John Humenik]: I was finishing up another call. [Michael Houck]: No, all good. I actually, I don’t know if you saw my emails. I was, I thought I would need to move this, but I was able to squeeze a bit, so. Well, thanks for, thanks for taking the time to hop on and chat with me after, you know, randomly reaching out. So yeah, I guess would love to, I can tell you more about us, but would also love to learn about where you’re at content journey wise and sort of what your, what your main goals would be right now. And then I can kind of tailor. What’s, what’s most valuable here. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah, absolutely. [John Humenik]: Um, yeah. So let me give you a little bit background of like who I am and what we’re doing and where we’re at. So, um, I started a, an online ministry a few years back, uh, you know, dynamic ministries and ran into an individual by the name of, uh, name of evangelist, Taylor Michael, who created a university for Christians to preach the gospel online. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: Do you know Taylor? [Michael Houck]: Actually, wait, yeah, I do. I didn’t know that he was a Christian, but I do know him. Michael. [John Humenik]: Oh, no, different, different Taylor. Okay. Yeah. Sorry. There’s not many tailings, but yeah, he’s the only one I know, but, um, he, he, he was a Christian YouTuber at 3 million subs and, uh, the online university, uh, I was struggling to grow my social media at that time and joined it since then we grew to, 1.3 million followers and we have over 90 million views. So just huge presence doing exceptionally well in the middle of that growth. Last year I started spirit works, which is the company I work for now full time. And basically what we do is cause I have a big technology background too. So we do a lot of custom application development, a lot of work in that space. And then as my social media, started growing, I was like, man, I would really love to monetize this space and make some money. It’s not that easy. And, uh, cause you’re not getting paid unless you’re, unless you’re doing long form for YouTube, you’re not making any money. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Right. [John Humenik]: So, I mean, unless you’re bookmonger, you know, Mr. Beast, you’re just, you’re not, you’re not doing anything. And so we built the whole, uh, done for you service as a part of spirit works that sells that. And so we’ve onboarded, I think a half a dozen people already. To kind of help them through that journey. And so that’s kind of where we’re at, is like we’re growing the business, we’re trying to move it forward, taking like the principles I learned from social media, applying all the tech background and AI and just merging it forward. [Michael Houck]: So that’s kind of like our, that’s kind of our shtick. [Michael Houck]: I love it, man. Yeah, I took a look at the business and also, I mean, your Instagram is huge, so. Are you, yeah, I guess like specifically we help out with newsletters and with LinkedIn and X. So are those areas of focus for you right now at all? [John Humenik]: There are. So one of the things that we started, X isn’t as much because I’ve never had any traction, but I realize I’m not posted in a way that X people like X content. So I’m not as, what’s the word? I’m not as derisive as some of the people in the way they do their stuff. LinkedIn is becoming a potential for us because we do post on LinkedIn and we are looking to grow that space in a much bigger way. The bigger thing for us is we’re actually using it as a lead generation thing because we’re trying to tap into like the corporate space more and understand how that is. And so we’re moving more into that space, like my chief marketing officer and stuff like that. It’s been like starting to branch into that. We’ve got our social media manager and our editor and all those people working that. So we’re trying to continue to expand in that space. But what we think hopefully is, is that where we can mine a lot of our customers from [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I would totally agree. I think more people are using LinkedIn now than honestly at any time in the past, in my opinion. Like a few years ago, it was super easy to go viral with any half decent content you posted there because there just wasn’t that much good content being posted on platforms. It is more competitive today, but it’s also a lot more readership happening on there, too. What we’ve done, both with, and I can give you some context on me and on us. So I first was in big tech. I worked early Uber Eats team and then helped grow that business and then was a product manager at Airbnb for a little bit. I’ve been a founder since 2020 and have founded a few companies, a venture fund, a coalition living residency, and more recently, content business. And so I built my own personal brand up to not quite as big as yours, but on Twitter and LinkedIn in particular, combined for over 100,000 followers, my sub stack is at 215K or something like that. And I met a lot of creators through that kind of journey and, you know, having big creators in your niche engage with your content is a great way to get it seen by the right people. And so not everybody has those connections. And so I built a software platform that basically connects creators in a certain niche to posts from anybody who wants to and is able to pay for it, basically. And that’s grown really well. And a lot of people who are using that were like, well, my content could perform better, too, if it was just better. [John Humenik]: So do you want to just write my content for me, too? And work on that. No, they don’t they don’t understand the marketing side at all. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, and it’s like you can you can amplify content, but if the content underneath it isn’t high quality, you know, you need both sides. So for the last year, we built up a ghost writing agency. And now we work with everyone from early stage founders to billionaire VCs. And, you know, we have about 30 clients today. And it’s, you know, it grows every month. We have a small team who I work with for a long time. And, you I think unlike some other content agencies, I am the one who’s in the weeds with the clients and the writers as well. I go through and make sure everything is high quality before we send it to clients and things like that. It’s a labor of love. So yeah, we do a lot of newsletters, both on Substack and on Beehive. We do LinkedIn and X, as I said. So it sounds like you have a team in place for LinkedIn. So if that’s the case, I won’t waste your time trying to pitch you on it. But we definitely feel like we can help out anyone who’s looking to grow on any of those platforms or via email newsletter. [John Humenik]: Yeah, I guess the thing is, I’m trying to think of like, so what we, I guess given what you’re, because I’m not, this is the thing that I’m not super familiar with the newsletter side, not to say that it’s like an extension of a blog, but like, you know, or at least it’s kind of similar in the content. Like it’s long. Can you walk me through like, like, because I I’ll be honest with you. I just have not played in that space. Like, can you like walk me through, like, what’s the benefits of like, what, what’s it used for? Like, how is it used as a marketing tool? What’s the expectation of like readership? Like what’s the value? Is it, is it going to be like, would it be more for like me to talk about AI to boost me into like the AI expert, or like what would it, like, I’m just kind of curious what it would entail. [Michael Houck]: Totally, common, very common question. For the actual type of content and how we position you would depend on sort of what your goals are and sort of how that relates to your social presence and the funnel that we set up. But sort of the value is it’s a step in the funnel between sort of your social forward, you know, funnel type presence and converting folks to whatever you’re trying to get them to sign up for or use or do at the time. Obviously, that can change with creator-led businesses, so I’m trying to be general. We consider it a low-stakes way to build a one-to-one direct relationship with potential customers. You can shout into the void on social and go viral even on social time and time again. But you’re still at the whim of the algorithm every time you press post in terms of who’s going to see it and if your audience is even going to see it at all, right? The value of the newsletter is that you get unlimited shots on goal and you know exactly what people are going to see and how you’re going to build that relationship with them over time. So it’s great to build deeper levels of trust and sort of people are very willing to give their emails over for newsletter too. And so you can sort of build that higher level of and you get on social, but with a higher, a very large percentage of your audience. In some cases, like in my case, even a larger audience than I have on social. So it’s a good way to build trust and sort of take people one layer down the funnel. What I’ll say is that a lot of these newer platforms, in particular Beehive, and I’ve been recommending Beehive a lot recently, they let you do like email marketing style automations and segmentations and analytics and things like that too. We’d be able to set up real funnels, like click-based funnels, view-based funnels, whatever the case may be, when someone takes an action within one of the newsletters, and then send them some thank you or some offer or something like that in a dynamic way. So it’s sort of in between an email-based blog, like you said, and an email marketing platform, Yeah. [John Humenik]: Okay. I see what you’re saying. Okay. That’s kind of interesting. So let me, let me ask a question then too, from that perspective. So when we look at like, so, you know, obviously LinkedIn, LinkedIn in and of itself is an interesting play. Uh, I’m kind of curious. I didn’t even think of using X as a, um, platform, but it does make sense, right? Like, cause you could use it for that too. And technically threads too also. Yes. [Michael Houck]: We have, we have, have, I think a growing number of clients who’ve been asking us to just repost their ex content on threads and it’s been it’s been working for them. [John Humenik]: Yeah, it’s right. Every time I go to threads, it’s like, all I see is promotion for female, you know, stuff. It’s like, this is just terrible. One or the other. Yes, it is. I’m kind of curious. So I understand the the models behind social media and growth, like, but like, you know, from your perspective, like sub stack, I think I might I think one of our pastors posts on Substack. It was a platform that I just did not know about. Beehive I knew about, but I obviously never played with it. But how do you grow? Because obviously you’ve grown, you’ve got yourself a place. I get how social media works, but how do these other platforms work? [Michael Houck]: Yes, so they’re very different. Substack and Beehive have totally different growth strategies, which is weird because they both kind of do the same thing. The way I think about Substack is that But it’s really a social network, just with a long-form focus and an email-based distribution method. So what I mean by that is they have built this Twitter clone within Substack now, where you post little posts and everything, like you were saying you would on Twitter. And they also have a very strong internal organic recommendation engine. So they know what you’re reading, and therefore, they can recommend other substacks that you should follow and subscribe to. So we were pretty early to substack. And so we’ve had a lot of organic growth as a result of that recommendation engine. You can still get that today. Obviously, having some level of an email list to start with will make sure that you’re recommended to more people on your platform. But they have a really strong organic mechanism. Beehive, on the other hand, has no social components whatsoever. They are a newsletter tool. And so the way to grow that And the way that, you know, 90% of the big newsletters you see like Morning Brew and The Hustle and Milk Road and all these like really big established newsletters, 1440, the way they all grow is that they spend a ton of money on meta ads. And also like newsletter recommendation, like networks outside of the platform. So you can acquire subscribers that way for like, you know, under $2 if the ads are good. And other ways you can grow those lists are with, like, this is a newer method that I think some of the more forward-thinking newsletters have tried out, which is cold email-based growth. So, for example, you have a large Instagram following, so we can pull the followers of your Instagram, let’s say, or of a Twitter account that’s in a similar niche, and we can send them a free lead magnet that we Like some simple thing that they might be interested in. [John Humenik]: We have a bunch on our website. We have a ton of free ebooks. You go to the Learn tab, we have a ton of that stuff built. [Michael Houck]: That’s amazing. Okay, that makes the job a lot easier because then what we can do is we can leverage those, we can send them out, and if these folks engage with those emails, then we know they’ll be interested in the content, so we can add them to the newsletter. And they can unsubscribe at any time and things like that, but what we find is that cohort as long as we have strict criteria for unsubscribing them quickly if they’re not engaged. As long as we do that, the open rates and the engagement rates and all that stuff actually is on par, if not in some cases a little bit better than you get with paid ads, but we can obviously do it for cheaper. Those are the two strategies for Beehive that I would recommend and Substack. You can do those, but you can also sort of do this more organic method. [John Humenik]: Okay, that makes sense. Yeah, they’re not even remotely close. Okay. And then, and then so from the, so I’m trying to think of like from an engagement model, because, you know, I know we’re, I know we’re a little bit. Yeah, I have, I have until four. I’m definitely gonna want to have a follow up meeting with, with John, my CMO, because I want her to talk and possibly even my business development lead to focus there. So let me explain a couple of things that we’re doing. And then I’ll ask you some more questions. So what we’re doing today is we have, because I also have to understand like the time commitment too, and like who would be involved. Because I’m trying to like slice up mentally how things would work. You know, obviously, because I’m trying to envision what it would look like, and then figure out how it would play into our existing system. Today we have Apollo and Clay AI. I’m not sure if you’re familiar with those. So what we’re doing is we’re doing a ton of outreach organically using that. We’ve had almost next to nothing in that space. I believe it’s probably our messaging a little bit as well as our target audience, but we’re still working through like making that work. The area that we’ve had success is we have a tool called Waxworks. Yeah, it’s a smaller company that sits on top of LinkedIn Sales Navigator. And so what they do is they have this tool that basically based upon a LinkedIn Sales Navigator filter, they basically go out and do a bunch of workflow things like like posts, you know, comments and things, and eventually gets them to connect with you. And it has a very, very high success rate. Like we’ve been running it now for like three weeks, and we’re getting tons of legitimate leads through this mechanism. So we’re getting a bunch of people but then once you get connected, it’s up to the person or the AI to kind of further the conversation to have, you know, further talks and stuff like that. And so it’s like there’s work that’s involved, but we’re getting like legit, like legit leads and we’re having conversations with real humans. And so, and then, and then what happens is, is we could take part of that and it gets back into clay and we can get them into the system and enriches it further. And so this doesn’t have any overlap with what you’re talking about, but I’m kind of curious, like with these systems, it’s like an another lead generation tool for us. Cause we have people we can, you know, you know, into that, like, especially like for beehive and stuff. Right. I’m curious, like, what’s typically like that? How often do you put out a newsletter? Is it like a weekly thing? Like, what’s the time commitment? Who is it meant to be for? Is it meant to have my name on it? I’m just kind of curious of like, what’s the engagement look like, So a lot of that is up to you. [Michael Houck]: We can brand it around you personally, we can also brand it around the company, we can have a whole new brand around it, we have a designer on staff who can help out with that. Or if you have someone on on your team who you want to take it, that’s fine too. Frequency and cadence, that’s also up to you. We can do it weekly. We can do it daily if you want. That’s obviously a much larger commitment. So I usually recommend starting with weekly. That’s sort of the standard package we offer. But especially if the list is smaller, we could do weekly or even monthly to start. Although monthly, in my opinion, it’s a little tough because you’re not sort of staying top of mind for folks that often. So I’d recommend either weekly or bi-weekly to start, and we handle full service. We set up the automations, we write the emails, we’ll send you questions in a shared Slack channel each week, and all we ask of you is that you give us a one to five minute rambly voice note where we can capture your unique POV based on the questions that come up during our research. And if we get that, then the content has your unique voice and is super unique to you. So again, whether you want to be yourself or the company brand, either one is fine. And then we do reporting as well in Slack and handle all the sort of operations around setup and things like that. Yeah, so that’s what I’d say. Okay, cool. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: One other thing I should note, the platform that I mentioned at the very beginning of this, our Creator Network platform, right? [Michael Houck]: We actually are adding similar type of functionality to that in the next couple of weeks. It’s currently being built by our engineers where we have hundreds of users on the platform And what we are our strategy is to have them engage with your content automatically and vice versa So that everybody sort of gets amplified out We’ve run some tests with it and we’ve seen really great results in terms of impressions engagement and inbound DMS So it might pair well with sort of the outbound DM strategy and liking strategy and comedy strategy from this other tool yeah, it probably is because it is a realm that we haven’t played with yet and it it has, it’s one of those nice, it’s almost like a lock piece in a puzzle, where it’s like, it’s not, there’s not a lot of overlap. [John Humenik]: Like we have a lot of talent on the team. So there’s things like, like we could do, but it’s like, that’s kind of why it’s almost like, I would rather have a second conversation. So you guys can understand like, because, because we socialize AI is designed to be almost like, we’re really branding it as a social media agency. So you think of like all the people you need, plus the, technology team plus the operational team like we’ve got we have we could have like eight people work on a client Because there’s so many touch points as a part of that process You know, we’ve got literally software engineers that are programmers. We’ve got you know help desk people We’ve got you know marketing design brand graphics UI UX. We have social media editors managers script editors AI engineers like we have all those people at any point in time can touch that part of that workflow. But even still, it’s kind of like, okay, how do I then layer this onto what we’re doing and then kind of augment with what you’re doing to kind of see how it fits in the grand scheme of things. [Michael Houck]: The interesting thing is that as you’re describing that, how your business is set up and the different types of people and how everyone’s touching different things, it sounds a lot like my creative business too. Yeah, it does. [John Humenik]: Yeah, and I think that’s, like I said, similar, but you’re doing something different, right, different, different niche. [Michael Houck]: And I think sort of what what we focused on has been sort of the other side of the coin. So definitely feels like there’s some natural ways that we can we can help out. [John Humenik]: So I mean, the other side too, is like, that we could potentially resell your stuff. And I mean, that might be an opportunity for you to do that, too. Like, because you’re, you’re what you’re doing is so different than us, but yet so the same. And there are people that there’s a couple of customers, even on top of mine that I can think of like, Oh, they could really, because they’re in the coaching business. And they’re, they’re like, yeah, this would be like a perfect thing for them to, you know, hook into their thing. So they’ve got the social media piece built, and then they have the newsletter piece built. So it’s like there’s a lot of other cool things going on there, too. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, we should totally chat more about that. I have some folks on our side who maybe I could send your way to, we could set up We do pretty generous referral fees and things like that. So we could set something like that up for sure, easily. And also I should note, it’s nice to meet another Christian entrepreneur. There’s not that many of us, I feel like, at least in tech. [John Humenik]: No, there’s not. And it’s hard to even, I mean, it’s a lot of people like to hide their faith or they’re closet Christians. And it’s just like, well, if you’ve been reading my Instagram, Instagram recently like go go look at some of the things I’m posting like this is more of like in your face You know kind of stuff or like and I have a lot of haters now and I’m like, oh, you know what? I’m getting some traction. So I’m hitting the nerve. It’s like, you know you guys You know People don’t understand and and if you understand the spiritual warfare aspect and a lot of the other things and there’s something they might I mean I’ve seen it in my church like I can’t unsee those things like Demonic possession like those things are real, you know people a little lady stronger than you know Stronger than ten men, you know, we were that she was possessed and you know, God kicked her out, but it was like Wow couldn’t hold her down She was super strong like, you know sons of Scylla style like you were like, this is incredible Like women aren’t made to be that strong yet this one woman was and it was it was an hour and a half deliverance session but like those are the kinds of things like it’s hard to like explain to someone who’s not in the Christian space because until you’ve seen it with your own eyes and they’re like you correlate it with the scriptures. Yeah, you don’t realize like like, wow, this is, there’s a whole other realm that sits on top of our realm that’s going on. And it’s like, it’s really real. [Michael Houck]: Well, the crazy thing is, if you look at, I mean, I don’t want to get too deep into this, we can, I mean, I can talk about this stuff for hours. But, um, you know, just based on time, if you look at, I mean, sort of the spiritual warfare stuff you’re talking about, if you look at what sort of the powers in this world, right, to convince us subtly of basically in everything that they do, the number one thing, the most common thing that people don’t talk about is that the supernatural is not real. That’s one thing they want you to believe. And if you believe that, then you believe this is your reality and that’s it. And that’s where you get into some serious trouble. Yeah. Well, and you look at COVID as a clear, dry run for the mark of the beast. [John Humenik]: You know, a lot of people were saying it was the mark. I said, no, it’s not the mark. I mean, an injection is not the mark. And then they were talking about how it reprograms your DNA. And like, I don’t know if that’s true or not, but you know, the fallout, I mean, my brother, took the COVID shot and I told him not to do it. And I threatened him with his job. He’s had tremendous physical issues since then. I mean, it’s like, and you know, and he only had one, he didn’t get the boosters. And so he’s kind of, he’s kind of been healed, but the, you know, when you talk about like the prophetic nature, like I have a prophetic mentor and you just take notes and you know, God’s telling you something and he just did this the other, he did this, I think yesterday, the day before he goes, go back and read your notes. From two years ago and he’s and they were just subtle conversations just listening to the holy spirit you know the rima word right like just the spoken word and and then I he’s like and it’s literally describing what I’m going through today and it was a nuanced just conversation but here it is two years later almost like a two years and like a month it’s exactly the same situation and and he pointed me to the day like he said go pull up this day in this section And it was like so I did I’d have to go look for it I just had to find it and it gets to a point where you’re like, okay as a Christian There’s no way you could convince me that the devil’s not real. Like I’ve heard the voices I’ve seen that I’ve seen the attacks I’ve seen the demonic, you know things and then then the spirit supernatural healing that follows and you just get to a point you’re like, oh, it’s like man, you’re like that’s why the gospel is so important because When you do stand on the word, and that’s all you stand on, you literally can’t be moved. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, 100%. And look, I’m going to pray for your brother. I hope that he’s able to make a full recovery from that. Because I know some people, literally a 25-year-old kid, a good friend of mine, he had a heart attack because of it. And thankfully, he survived. But as your brother looked into, I think his name is Dr. Peter McCullough’s protocol for managing the spike protein and getting it out of your body? No, no. [John Humenik]: If you want to send it over to me, feel free. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: I’ll send it over. Yeah, for sure. [John Humenik]: Yeah. It’s it he’s, he hasn’t had any issues like in about like the last year or so. Um, because I did tell him to repent and pray for healing. Um, but you’re right. Like this stuff is still the stuff. It still could be in there lingering. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. You never know. So just, uh, every precaution I feel like, You know, but I will send over more info and would love to have, have another chat next week with, uh, with other folks from the team. Um, so is there a time that works, uh, best for that on your end? [John Humenik]: Um, so Jake is my business development lead. He’s he’s full time and he’s, uh, he’s available at any time. Okay. Um, John is currently, even though she’s our CMO, she’s part time, um, she, I I think she’s good in the evenings, but if you could do me a favor, just send me a band of like, here’s a couple of days, here’s some windows. I’ll share it with them and then have a conversation about like, okay, which one can, cause probably John’s the one that’s gotta be, she’s generally the tighter schedule. And then hopefully one of those windows will open up and we can get it in. Okay, great. [Michael Houck]: I’ll send that over after I wrap up calls this afternoon and we’ll find something for next week. Sounds great. I appreciate it. It was good talk. Great to meet, man. Looking forward to it. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah, thanks. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Bye bye. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Bye.