- Duration: 17 min
- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01JWS37WHX1443AFXHG87EQAE1 (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JWS37WHX1443AFXHG87EQAE1)
Transcript
[Michael Houck]: Yeah, we work with, at this point, I think it’s like 35 clients ranging from early stage founders to billionaire VCs. And we focus on founders and VCs. Okay. [ankesh Kumar]: You want to promote the founders or promote the business? Okay. [Michael Houck]: So, you know, for example, some, some founders want to really build up their personal brand and be known in their industry and therefore make it easier to talk to investors. I don’t think you have that problem. You’ve been, you’ve been around for a while. You’re you’re a vet. And I took a look at everything that you’ve built over the years. And for other folks, it’s, you know, how do I generate leads for this business? How do I grow my user base for this business? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Things like that. [Michael Houck]: So sometimes from the founder’s personal account, other times from the company account or both. [ankesh Kumar]: So you said X LinkedIn, right? Those are the two platforms. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, we can also do like Instagram threads, you know, like their Twitter account. And then we specialize in an email newsletter. So for context, I built my audience to 100K between Twitter and LinkedIn, and my sub stack is 217,000. Nice. [ankesh Kumar]: How many are they paid, your sub stack? Not all of them. We do have a paid contingent. [Michael Houck]: We have case studies that I’ve done with a lot of founders that folks pay for. But yeah, it’s paid and free. [ankesh Kumar]: So let me tell you what we’re doing. So we built a conversational interface. For content creators, right, using only their content. So our typical target audience would be someone 18 to 35, probably female, with Instagram, TikTok, maybe X, Pinterest, YouTube, you know, I mean, but probably, you know, Instagram, and there’s a product called, there’s a service called ShopLTK, which they sign up for, it’s like a Shopify where they can promote products and make some money with affiliate links. So that could be an additional service they have. And we’re looking to recruit them all. So what I’m doing is some Instagram advertising. We just started doing that. We are looking to also do some Read.AI. There’s a sub-Reddit group like LTK, which you can actually target to that group. So it was really, really want LTK users. And so I’m not the right demographic for that. Audience in the sense that I’m not going to be a spokesperson. But we’re also looking to work with people who are content creators. And there’s a lady called Vanessa Lau, I believe she has close to a million followers on YouTube, and she talks about content creators and monetization and stuff. So I’m just looking for new ways, different ways that we can sort of build up that audience and build up some brand, what’s the word, brand equities and You obviously don’t want to be selling people. You want to sort of be adding value, you know? So I think that’s kind of like why I was curious to see what you could do. Does that sound like something you could help us with? Yeah. [Michael Houck]: I mean, if you have folks who are looking to build up that credibility and that brand equity on the platforms that we service, I think what we’ve seen is that a lot of folks who have big audiences on the more image-focused platforms, like Instagram or the TikTok or YouTube, They don’t really know the value of owning their audience through a newsletter. So a few creators, we built newsletters for them. They’ve done very well. There’s one YouTuber, for example, that we work with has a big audience in the tennis niche. And so we built a big newsletter for him that way. And he loves it. He’s able to sell services through there and really build his business, whether it’s the affiliate links or his own. He has a membership that he sells through it too. So definitely think we could partner with some of those. [ankesh Kumar]: So you, your value add is actually the content that you would add in the email newsletter on a regular. So would you go and do the research for that and market research and is that how it works? [Michael Houck]: We do research, we do content creation, we do all operations and reporting and segmentation and analytics and automation setup and things like that. It’s a full service shop. And if they want, we also have a service, kind of a tangential. Where we’ve built an AI digital twin creator. And so if they want to include videos in there from their AI twin, we can do that as well. [ankesh Kumar]: That’s interesting. So it’s like an animation of the [Michael Houck]: No, it’s like an avatar. It looks like you and me on this call right now, except it’s totally generated by AI and runs on a script. [ankesh Kumar]: OK. Is it a dynamic script? No. [Michael Houck]: So like, for example, we create a video, we create multiple videos based on what they want to talk about. They can even post these on their Tik Tok or their Instagram if they want. It’s, um, we have some clients who’ve grown to as many as 400,000 followers on Instagram, primarily by using these types of videos. So it’s, it’s in some ways hard to tell, but in other ways, if the scripts are good, people don’t really care. [ankesh Kumar]: Yeah. And the reason I’m asking is we’re doing something similar, but, um, it sounds like you, you basically of a script that you just have a voice clone, right? And then you have an animation that just speaks to the script in the voice, sound voice. [Michael Houck]: I wouldn’t necessarily call it an animation. Like it is AI generated for sure, but it looks realistic. [ankesh Kumar]: It’s not like a cartoon or something like that. What tools are you using to build that? We were looking at something called 11-something labs and 12-something labs. [Michael Houck]: There’s 11 labs. With voice, we do use their API, although we’ve sort of built some proprietary stuff on top of that. And then it depends on the actual type of video, but there’s a few of these video creation ones too, like, hey, Jen has an avatar creator, and there’s a few others as well. [ankesh Kumar]: It’s actually in our office here. The challenge we were having technically, that’s why I was surprised when you said that, was what we’re planning on doing, and I can show you really quickly, and the technology She’s not there just now, but we talk to Google, we talk to a bunch of different people. So we have the avatar there, but as you ask questions of the conversational interface that we have, in this case, Carolyn’s website on Instagram and YouTube, and you ask a question because it’s dynamically creating the answers from the AI, then she’d be speaking back. So there’s no script. And then… [Michael Houck]: It’s a different setting. Right. That’s like a, like a chat bot interaction, but this would be like content that’s shared, you know? Yeah. Yeah. [ankesh Kumar]: I was like, Oh, if you built something that’s cute, we weren’t able to do it. So let’s do this, Michael, could you send me some, I’ve actually got two people at work. I mean, I’ve got an advisor. She’s like a board advisor. I have a call with her once a week. I actually got a call today with her at two third. I don’t know if it’s in about an hour and a half and about an hour. So it might be a little bit short notice for you. Um, and then I I’ve got a new lady called Chloe, who’s also a content creator, who’s working us in the marketing capacity. And I’d love to run it by them, sharing a lot of other priorities. It’s not my strength, to be honest, content creation and marketing. That’s why I got them on board. And then, so you get it to me whenever. I can get back to you early next week and let you know what their thoughts are. Yeah, I’ll shoot over an email in the next hour. [Michael Houck]: I have one call after this, so after that I can send it over, so like an hour or so. Yeah. It’ll cover, there’ll be a notion in there that’ll cover like all of our standard services. And then I’ll also talk a little bit more about the AI avatar in the email as well. So you’ll have everything kind of all in one place. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Perfect. Looking forward to it. Thank you, Michael. [Michael Houck]: Good to meet you. Bye.