- Duration: 29 min
- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01JWHC0P1YBFEXW4M7D27RS8CF (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JWHC0P1YBFEXW4M7D27RS8CF)
Transcript
[Mahdi Farra]: I think they should do something about that. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. You’re in the corner of the screen now instead of taking up the whole thing, you know, but anyway. Yeah. Blake gave me some context. Yeah. Excited to chat and kind of see how we can, we can help. Would it help if I give some context on, on me and on us first and then kind of goals. Okay. So yeah, so I’m an, I’m an entrepreneur. I’ve been doing this for a while. I started my career in big tech, early Uber Eats. Helped build that business, and then jumped over to Airbnb for a bit as a PM. After that, I founded a co-living residency, I founded a venture fund, I founded a software platform, media business, and now an agency as well. So we’ve got a whole bunch of things we do. Basically, I built my audience up to, you know, I had 100k between Twitter and LinkedIn, and then I have 200k on Substack. And basically met a lot of creators through that process. And so what I realized is that the creators engaging with my content makes it more visible and therefore helps me grow faster. But not everyone has those connections. So we built a platform that lets big creators engage with anyone’s content for a fee. So people pay for the creators to go make sponsored posts or engage with their content and things like that. And that goes really well. But a lot of the People who were using it were like, well, my content’s not that good in the first place. And so they’re like, can you just write it for me? And I’m like, well, I can’t, but I can build a business to help you. And so now we have it going straight to HTC as well. And that’s been for the last year or so. And you’ve got like 35 clients now, and it’s growing every month. Small team of writers who I have worked with for a long time And I and my partner, Blakey Mall, who has a bigger audience than I do on social, we are actually in the weeds every single day with the clients, with the writers. It’s not like we’re the advisors or we’re the owners or something like that. Unlike other agencies, I’m your primary POC. And Blake is in the weeds with the writers, editing everything that gets sent to you every single day. So our quality bar is pretty high. And we’re basically taking everything that we know it to our clients. So we’ve seen some pretty good results as I think Blake mentioned over the message. But yeah, so that’s us. We’re pretty lightweight because we work with busy people. Everyone from early stage founders to billionaire VCs are clients at this point. And what we do is we set up a shared Slack channel and every week we’ll do research. We’ll send you some questions and then all we need from you is like a nice rambly voice note where you give us your unique POV and we hear your sort of intonation and the way you talk about it and we turn that into a unique content for you. [Mahdi Farra]: So what does that mean? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Oh POV, point of view. [Michael Houck]: Okay, POV, got it, got it. [Michael Houck]: Too many little, yeah. [Michael Houck]: But yeah, so we do that for LinkedIn, we do it for X, we do it for, you know, newsletters on either Beehive or sub-stack. And that’s what we do. Okay. [Mahdi Farra]: And how much do you charge for that? [Michael Houck]: Depends on frequency and amount that you want. We have a couple of different packages. [Mahdi Farra]: What are you primarily interested in? Social, newsletter, both? Everything, I would say. Because I’m trying to grow my audience as fast as I can. And yeah. Everything I would say. [Michael Houck]: Okay, so if we package social and newsletter together, we’d give you a 10% discount on the combined package. So every number I’m quoting, just chop it down a little bit. But our standard offer for social is 4k a month. And that’s all inclusive. So that’s, you get full batches of content. So three to four long form posts per week, or five to seven shorter posts per week, depending on what you want, or some mixture of the two that’s equivalent. You get proactive and reactive engagements by our team, so we’ll have a content operations manager from our team actually log in as you, leave comments on thought leaders’ posts, get some free profile views, free impressions, things like that, and also engage in conversations and the replies to your own content so the algorithm treats it better. We’ll fully do a profile audit initially to make sure your profile is optimized to convert people to both follower and to offers and things like that. And we will also help out with proactive DM campaigns to people who you want to get in touch with as well. We manage that all for you. We do reporting in Slack, as I said. And we also have a creator network, like I mentioned. And with that 4K package, you get credits for that as well. So it would come and amplify your posts when we make them. If you wanted to do smaller batches of content and or do the creator network more ad hoc, rather than have it just be included, that price can drop. 3K or the lowest we go is 2K. So there’s different amounts there. On the newsletter side, it’s $3,500 a month for a weekly newsletter. And again, we set up the account. We set up email segmentation, automations, analytics, things like that. And we manage the whole thing. All we need is those unique voice notes from you. If we want to do that biweekly, it drops to 2K or monthly, it drops to 1K, but generally would recommend not doing monthly. [Mahdi Farra]: It’s just at that point, you’re not staying top of mind enough for your email list. Gotcha. Cool. [Michael Houck]: I don’t think I can afford you. It’s all good. [Mahdi Farra]: You guys seem to be doing awesome work. But I checked you both online and I found out that, yeah, you guys are both like celebrities and people with high budgets. And I’m just a little guy just starting out. Let’s see. [Michael Houck]: One other thing we could do is like, if you’re planning to sort of go this route and build this up for yourself. I’m happy to just be a sounding board and just keep the conversation open, not about necessarily our services or anything like that, but just to help out and share sort of what I’ve learned doing it myself and see how that can help you. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: So happy to do that. Really? Is that a real offer? [Michael Houck]: Because I would really appreciate it. It’s a real offer. Shoot me an email anytime. I respond quickly. [Mahdi Farra]: So yeah, absolutely. If you have still the five minutes left, Yeah, by the way, share a few ideas, a few things on my mind about my existing strategy. And I would love to hear your thoughts on it. Go for it. So I’m currently posting every day of the week, five days a week on LinkedIn. And most of my posts are medium form posts. With each post, I add an image, a custom image. And I have a set of prompts that I follow, like LLM prompts. That I use to help me generate the content in a specific form and a specific tone of voice and all of that. And the same goes for the image. And yeah. The one thing I’m a little struggling with is generating a list of ideas of things to write about. But yeah, I have a few thoughts on that. Or I have a few ideas for how I can generate ideas, which is a weird thing to say. One of those ideas is to do a search on social media every day, like daily search, to pick up the most interesting topics that are related to what I do. And then put the results in a spreadsheet and use these results to help me come up with ideas. But so in a way I found like a solution to the, to like to idea generation. There’s also the transcripts from my conversation, my sales goals, but like getting all that information or all these ideas in a, like in a, in a pipeline or like I’m trying to create like a system that I can like either automate or follow like in a, in a, smart way without me spending hours and hours, like cleaning the drafts, putting all things in the right order, scheduling, and all of that. So thoughts on that? I’ve looked up online, found a lot of people using NN8, and some people are using other tools for creating their own automations. But I want to hear your thoughts on that. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I mean, I love this new world of tools that have launched, like Gumloop, and Lindy, and Saint-Minuit, and all those. I think they’re all really good. I think you can build a good system that way. I don’t know that you can get it to the point yet where you yourself don’t need to edit it and spend some time making sure that the voice is right and things like that. We’ve experimented with this internally, and it’s been, let’s say, hit or miss for different clients. I, myself, I don’t use those tools for my at all. What I do is I have a VA, you know, in the Philippines, go out and spend a lot of time after I’ve, you know, educated her on sort of what I want and what I want to find and who to follow and things like that. And she finds other creators, not in my niche at all, who have successful posts. She logs those in an Airtable database for me. And then I can click into them. And I’m like, Oh, So I see this format that this person is using for his post, but at a totally unrelated topic. And then I just say, OK, let me Mad Libs templatize that in my brain and turn that into a post about startup founders, which is my niche. So I still get it to be unique and sound like me, but it’s a proven format that we know works well on social recently. And it takes the guesswork out of it. Not everything’s gonna be a hit for you that was a hit for somebody else for sure in one niche versus another niche, but I think it optimizes your chances of having successful content. Sometimes I’ll come up with my own formats and maybe other people steal those, but I’d say it’s at least 70% like that, where we’re just taking proven formats and writing insightful content then about my niche, but in a format that we know has a good chance of performing well. [Mahdi Farra]: And do you have any tips that are at the top of your mind for transforming LinkedIn content to tweets or to threads? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, so threads, you kind of have to treat like their own beast. Not threads of the platform, threads like on, you know, I got to You can’t really easily take a long form LinkedIn post and turn it into a thread, in my opinion. I actually like to start with threads in most cases, because I think it’s a unique format. [Mahdi Farra]: It’s more intimidating, man. People there are ruthless. They’re brutal. I know. There’s one thread I posted. [Michael Houck]: This is a couple of years ago at this point, but I still remember it. I posted it about Mark Andreessen. And I was like, you know, this is Marc Andreessen blah, blah, blah. Here’s his playbook for startups or whatever. And I used a photo of him from his like New Yorker bio or something. And his head, like, you know, he kind of has like an egg-shaped head, right? It was like really prominently egg-shaped. And there were, I’m not even kidding, there were hundreds of comments on this thread that were the pictures of the cone heads, that old movie, you know, the cone heads. Well, it was great, except he was my investor in my last startup. [Mahdi Farra]: So it’s not so great. Read went big. [Michael Houck]: And yeah, I don’t know if it was good that it went big. So yeah, they’re ruthless. But personally, I find that it’s it’s the best exercise for for ideas, in my opinion. [Mahdi Farra]: Okay, got it. Got it. Okay. Well, we’re at time I want to be respectful of your time. Yeah, of course, man. But if you have a few extra minutes, I would appreciate it. But if not, that’s fine. [Michael Houck]: If you have another meeting. No, I’m good. I got a couple minutes. [Mahdi Farra]: I have some stuff I need to do before 4.30, but I got like five. Yeah. So my other question is, do you recommend that I stay away from any automation tools or just try and use them until I have a draft and then edit the draft manually? [Michael Houck]: Look, I mean, I don’t think there’s a right or wrong way to do it. My recommendation would be since you’re starting out and you’re sort of earlier in this journey, I would do it yourself as I can early on to see you sort of build your intuition. But also, I think that, you know, it’s it’s the classic thing where like, when you’re when you’re building in a new space, when you’re doing something new, there’s this desire to like, spend your time building the way to do it rather than spending your time doing it. Feel that whenever I try something new, and I need to actively fight that for myself. So I would say the more time you’re spending building the perfect automation system that links these tools together and does that, the less time you’re spending writing content, getting it out there, and getting feedback from people. So my recommendation would be, for the first couple of months, just don’t even worry about that, and just do it yourself, and learn from that, and then build the system on top of it. [Mahdi Farra]: I’ve been doing that for maybe five months now. [Michael Houck]: Oh, okay, so maybe this system can be good then. [Mahdi Farra]: Got it, got it, okay. And I’m starting to consider the system seriously now because I have a very specific process in mind of how things should go or how I find interesting stuff to write about. And I just need to put it in, I don’t know, things that go do things on their own. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, it’s the look. I mean, we’re actually we’re actively looking into the right type of system like that to build for our clients. So if we stumble on something that I’m really excited about, and I think can work, I’m happy to share it with you. [Mahdi Farra]: And you can set it up for yourself. I would be really appreciated. And one last ask, if I may, can I did you did you had a chance to take a look at my LinkedIn profile? Briefly, briefly, I did. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. [Michael Houck]: What is the one thing that you remember about me? [Michael Houck]: Well, I remember that you’re in the design space. And so that’s why I made my little joke about design at the beginning. I’m smart. [Mahdi Farra]: You’re really good at what you do, by the way. What’s that? You’re really good at what you do. [Michael Houck]: Oh, thanks, Ben. Yeah, no, I also remember that you are actually a very experienced designer. You’re not just some rando. You’ve been like a very legit designer. I’m going to get the company wrong if I try to say it, but a big SF tech company. [Mahdi Farra]: Am I right? What is a big SF company? [Michael Houck]: I didn’t. Oh, sorry. A big tech company. I want to say, I think this is wrong. [Mahdi Farra]: I want to say Roblox. So just to make sure I heard you correctly. Did you say that I used to work at a big company or I work at a big company or? [Michael Houck]: Oh, I said that I remember that you were like a high level, maybe like a very senior designer at, I wanted to say Roblox, but I think that’s wrong. [Mahdi Farra]: I think it’s Rakuten. I worked at Rakuten in the past, but yeah, right now I have my own startup, so. Yeah, no, I know. [Michael Houck]: I was just saying that that stood out to me. Me because a lot of folks who, you know, we do these calls with, you know, they have no connection to big tech. They’ve never gone through like a hyper growth type company before. [Mahdi Farra]: So that’s when I went on your profile. Gotcha. Gotcha. Okay. So the main reason why I asked you about the one thing that I remember of my profile is just to gauge how I’m doing and if I’m doing a good job with branding. And apparently I’m not doing a great job. I didn’t achieve one of the goals So, okay, that’s… [Michael Houck]: To be fair, I was looking at the profile for, I think, a different reason than somebody who stumbles onto it from seeing your content or something like that would too. [Mahdi Farra]: Yeah, you’re probably right. [Michael Houck]: So, what I can do, I’m happy to do this, we do profile audits for our clients when they get onboarded, where I record like a five-minute loom, just like making recommendations on people’s pages and how they can convert followers better and things like that. Happy to do that and send that over. Some time over the next couple of days. [Mahdi Farra]: I would really appreciate it. Wow. [Mahdi Farra]: I’m just trying to help, man. [Michael Houck]: I really need that. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Well, yeah. OK. [Michael Houck]: I should run. But great to meet. And I will follow up on that probably by, say, Monday, Tuesday. And we’ll go from there. Sounds great. [Mahdi Farra]: And thank you for your time and for the advice. Cool. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Great to chat, man. Talk soon.