- Duration: 26 min
- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01JWRG8TS65CDTCA30H35ANTDG (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JWRG8TS65CDTCA30H35ANTDG)
Transcript
[Mohammad Raafi Hossain]: So don’t mind if I turn my camera off. [Michael Houck]: Oh, you’re good. We can get the camera off. I got some weird lighting going on over here, apparently. [Mohammad Raafi Hossain]: All good, man. All good. All good. No, thanks for being flexible, by the way. I appreciate that. [Michael Houck]: Sorry I canceled earlier. [Michael Houck]: No, no. Dude, it’s totally fine. I know things come up. I’m glad we were able to find some time after I reached back out. [Mohammad Raafi Hossain]: So all good. Excellent, man. Excellent. Excellent. Look, so I’ll just get straight to it. Great to connect and hear a little bit about what you do from a guy from a company called Alpha. Yeah, yeah. He’s a lovely guy. He’s one of our good friends, and we’re actually putting some of the work that he’s doing onto our platform, I think, very soon, next month. And he was telling me about you. Did you guys work together? I don’t know how you guys met. It’s been a while since he told me about you, to be honest. I haven’t brought it up since then. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, yeah, yeah. We’ve been working together for a bit now. Like, I don’t want to say three, four, five months, somewhere in there. He’s, yeah, he’s been great to work with, super easy. And I love what he’s building too. It’s a super cool idea. Yeah. So yeah, we’re working together for a bit and it’s been going well. So I think he just was like, well, you guys should meet. [Mohammad Raafi Hossain]: So there we go. All right. Brilliant, man. Brilliant. Brilliant. So I don’t know what you know about us, but in short, basically building, what is going to be rebranded as a kind of a, you know, what we call Morocco to Malaysia crypto bank, but really focused on helping the average person move their money via IBAN and Stablecoin, but also get invested into RWA. So we have five asset classes that are all tokenized on the platform today, do about a half a billion in volume every month, but predominantly, yeah, predominantly in tokenized U.S. Public equities, gold, different types of gold, Osman’s hopefully being one of them soon, into bonds, into commodities, and into other currencies of stablecoins as well. So heavily regulated across, you know, regulated by 15 countries in African Asia. And really just positioning ourselves less of an exchange, but more of a bank that instead of gets you traditional into debt as banks do. We want you to become asset owners and we have our own underlying chain in which we’re migrating all of our tokenized assets to by the end of the year. So that’s kind of the gist of it. And even facet, it’s a play on the word asset, but it’s also a play on the word F-A-C-E-T, that we look at assets in a multifaceted way. So that’s the TLDR, Matt. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I think the brand comes across really strong. When I was when I was looking you guys up, it was very clear that it was like, you know, the idea isn’t to just sort of be a store of someone’s cash or be able to transfer from one place to another. It’s like a full all service, all in one place, like financial ecosystem for somebody. And I think that’s to make that to make that global. I love that. Exactly. Exactly. [Mohammad Raafi Hossain]: And, you know, really kind of honing in on what we call Morocco to Malaysia is that we kind of picture Morocco on the map and Malaysia on the map, that belt between those two countries. And what we’re saying is that, you know, it would be very difficult to build a revolute traditionally between those countries. But doing that natively, you know, on blockchain, leveraging stable coins, tokenized assets, it does become a way. We’re equally important in what we do not do. We don’t do meme coins. At the moment, we don’t do futures. We don’t do derivatives. We’re really, really just focused on kind of early stage, even non-crypto customers, really. A lot of this stuff is chain abstracted from the views of our customers. That being said, we do get a lot of people coming in who are crypto natives coming in as well. So yeah, I just kind of want to lay that out for you as we kind of talk about it. But the long and short of it is that, you know, obviously you know how this game works. I’m extremely busy, not natively a social media guy. As it is. I don’t even run some of the accounts that we have for me. But, you know, I think having that platform when needed is extremely important. But I understand that we’ve got to build that up and be regular and consistent, et cetera, et cetera. So that’s what I was telling Osman. Osman’s like, look, I know the right guy for you. And then that’s how we’re here. [Michael Houck]: Cool. I mean, look, you do have a bit of an audience yourself, at least on LinkedIn, right? You’re at like 12,000 or something followers on LinkedIn. So there’s some sort of initial platform there. To go off, which will be helpful. So, okay, I guess I can tell you a little bit about how we work and all that stuff, what we focus on, and then you can tell me sort of how you see us fitting into what you guys are doing most effectively. So just for some quick background on me, I’ve been a founder for a while now. I spent some time at first Uber and Airbnb, early days helping those companies, small part, obviously. And then found a company called Launch House. We raised in total about 23 million from Andreessen Horowitz and some others. And ended up turning that company into a venture fund, as odd as that sounds. And so we’ve made some investments out of that, into companies like Figure and Beehive and some great founders. And then I also then have of the extract holding company that I’ve built up over the past couple of years, you know, I’ve built up my own audience to, I have a, between Twitter and LinkedIn over a hundred K, 200 K on sub stack. And, you know, I realized that as I was doing that, I was meeting all these creators and, you know, I was getting the benefits of that because creators would comment on my stuff and their audiences would see my content and vice versa. Right. And so I was like, well, that helps you grow, but not everyone to access to that. So I pulled all these creators together and I built this platform called Megaphone where anyone can pay to have creators engage with their stuff and sort of get that exposure. The problem was a decent amount of people, even if they had creators comment on their stuff, the content wasn’t very good. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: It’s the other piece. And so they kept asking me, like, hey, will you just write my content? [Michael Houck]: I didn’t have time to do that myself at the time. But I had writers who I worked with for a while, and I was like, well, let’s just make a content agency. So we did that. And now we’re about a year into that. It’s been going really well. We work with everyone from early stage founders to literal billionaire VCs, and it’s great. Substack, all that stuff, Beehive. And we can do it all for clients. We can take on part of it, create packages, and we can layer in the creator network that we have, too. [Mohammad Raafi Hossain]: Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant. And this creator network, just trying to get an idea, is it like Web3 people? Are they from America? Is it all over? [Michael Houck]: There’s definitely some focus on the US, just because that’s where my network started. But we have a bunch of folks actually from Asia as well. So they’ve really taken to the concept. So definitely some folks within your Morocco to Malaysia belt. And in terms of niche, it’s all sorts of niches. I would say the crypto folks tend to charge more than other niches just because they’re, some of them are like folks making money. [Mohammad Raafi Hossain]: Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally know that. But no, but we we cover basically it’s like 500 creators at this point, you know new ones are joining every week And and how did the process uh work, uh from here on just just How do you? Get that voice, uh going and yeah. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: I mean look we work with super busy people So we’re not trying to put a bunch of meetings on your calendar or anything like that Basically, what we would do is we’d set up a slack channel. That’s like slack connect. So it’s native on your site native on our side. And every week, we would come in and send like a few questions that came up during our research. So we’d be doing independent research on the topics of like news in the niche or specific content pillars you want us to look at. We’ll come back every Monday. All we need from you is like, if you see those, you’re like, hey, I kind of ramble, just give us like a couple minute long rambly voice note directly in Slack. And the voice itself is super helpful because we get your nation, we get your wording, all that stuff super organically, that let’s us translate it into the written content super easily. So if we get that from you by like Wednesday, then we get the content back to you by Friday. And you know, we’ll work to get a couple weeks ahead. [Mohammad Raafi Hossain]: So we’re not always sort of scrambling from week to week. Perfect. Perfect. And, and what is the outlay look like from there in terms of the output? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: So it depends on like, again, if you’d want us to take on one social account or social and a newsletter or more multiple socials or whatever, but our standard packages is, um, well, if we want to include the creator network, standard packages, 4k a month, if we don’t want to include the creator network and you just want to do that, like ad hoc and you’d have access to do it as you want, then it’s 3k a month. And basically, uh, for that, you would get, uh, uh, three long form posts per week or some combination of long form and short form. So consider like you could do daily posts if you wanted, just wouldn’t all be long form. And we handle all sort of content operations on the account. So we’ll optimize your profile. I’ll personally go in and do a profile audit and optimize it for whatever goal you want, whether that’s follower conversion or users, whatever it can be. Then we will also handle all scheduling. We’ll handle all like analytics, metric reporting. We’ll handle proactive and reactive engagements. Proactive like us going out and saying, Oh, you know, here’s 10 or 20 thought leaders in in Mohammad’s niche. We should be commenting on those on their posts from your account. And so we’ll do that. And then reactive is like, you know, if people comment on your stuff, we want to be replying quickly. So the algorithm is like, Oh, hey, conversations are happening here and pushes it to more people. [Mohammad Raafi Hossain]: Got it, got it, got it, got it. And like, what is the universe of channels you work on? So it’s it’s Twitter, It’s uh linkedin. What else is it probably won’t be all but I’m just trying to understand what is the rev? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, totally. So twitter linkedin we can do like instagram threads the threads platform. Um, okay And then I want to do a newsletter, you know, we can do some stack or beehive. Um We also have recently started Working with a few people on a digital twin like a um an ad digital avatar for like instagram real talk and things like that Is that? It’s newer, but we’ve seen some good success with it. So I’d be happy to include that as well. [Michael Houck]: Got it, got it, got it, got it. [Mohammad Raafi Hossain]: No, very, very cool, very cool. So look, and sorry, one more question. So on the initial one with the creator network, so how does the creator network fall into this? Yes. [Michael Houck]: So basically for social, if we’re making push from your account every day or a couple of times a week or however much you want, then we will take some of those posts that we think are highest potential, and we’ll put them through the Creator Network, so we’ll match them with creators who we think are a good fit for it, and you’ll have credits that are used to pay those creators. So it’s no extra out-of-pocket if you want to include it in that 4K package. [Mohammad Raafi Hossain]: Got it. Very cool. I like the systems. And what does a roundup look like, Do you just start with Mondays, or how does that work from here? [Michael Houck]: We would need to do one kickoff call, which is you, me and the writer. And then from there, we’ll go deep on sort of like content pillars and target audience, what they care about, things like that, your voice. And after that, it can all be async and we’d be able to get started ASAP. I would give it one week of research before we’d be able to start delivering. But then it’d be every week you get batches from there. [Mohammad Raafi Hossain]: Love it, love it. I think it looks bro. I think it sounds pretty good. And how comfortable are you in? I mean, it doesn’t really matter. Of course, I understand you guys have the game, but just just understand like on this real world asset side web three emerging market kind of Nexus. Do you do any work there? Does your writer have any experience? Is that a present? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, we have we have one guy on our team. He’s like very deep into that world. And he’s he I know he has bandwidth right now. So he’s definitely the guy I would go to for this. [Mohammad Raafi Hossain]: Brilliant. Look, that’s good. That’s good. I think I think this just kind of gives you like the high level, obviously we’ll dig deep should we continue. I’m actually from LA, right? And one of my goals out of this is that I do want to bring, you know, we’ve been branded as Dubai, which is not a problem, but the fact that I am from there, grew up there, sexually born and raised there, I do want to start positioning the company as a bit more American than we’re given credit for, especially at a time where I think it’s beneficial for us. I went to school in the Bay, you know, in San Francisco and stuff. So we don’t get that advantage. And what I’ve realized, having lived out here for a long time, is that there’s no megaphone, so to speak, like a megaphone of an American, right? Immediate. So that’s kind of the goal that I want to do subtly, slightly, but much more than we’re doing right now. All right. So that’s just one nuance that I’m kind of asking about the network you have and where they’re based and stuff. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I mean On the creator side. We have tons of folks, uh based in the states with like, you know, they’re Millions of aggregate followers combined so we can definitely help you get exposure to those folks audiences for sure. No problem Brilliant brilliant brilliant. [Mohammad Raafi Hossain]: So how does the next steps work? Um, just kind of walk me through that and then you know, I’m Pretty quick and agile. So I’m understand. [Michael Houck]: Yeah Next steps are super simple. [Michael Houck]: I’ll send over an email at some point, well, this morning for me. And you take a look, I’ll just cover everything we talked about, you let me know what kind of package you want to go with. If you do include sort of social and multiple social accounts or a social account and a newsletter, then we’ll include a discount like 10% discount as well. If we are month to month, but we do have 30 day cancellation notice. If you do commit for longer term, we can give a slightly larger discount, like a 15% discount. So that would be like a six month or longer commitment. But by default, we’re month to month. So next steps would be I’ll send that over, you let me know what you want to go with. And then we’ll get things started. That’s it. We schedule a kickoff for later this week if you want. [Mohammad Raafi Hossain]: All right, bro. I’ll look I’ll just where are you based by the way? [Michael Houck]: I’m currently based nowhere. I’m just kind of all over the place. [Mohammad Raafi Hossain]: All right. All right. All right. So I’ll just follow your lead. And as soon as I get it, I’ll talk it over with the team and stuff, and we’ll get back to you right away. And aiming, if all goes well, to hopefully have a kickoff call this week. [Michael Houck]: All right, sounds good. If any questions come up after the chat with the team, just let me know. Happy to hop back on and chat more. Brilliant. [Mohammad Raafi Hossain]: Sounds good. Sounds good. Really appreciate it. All right, man. [Michael Houck]: Great to meet you. [Mohammad Raafi Hossain]: Talk more soon. Yeah, likewise. Thanks. Thanks so much.