- Duration: 27 min
- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01JWVGFXDK40JN01475X5CTZVE (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JWVGFXDK40JN01475X5CTZVE)
Transcript
[Amitabh Kumar]: No, it was quite an interesting offering so to say and just a bit of a background. I’ve been in the trust and safety space for almost 15 years and this new company startup of our contrails is on the verge of getting funded. It’s been around for two years so it’s time to look into personal branding in a little more professional manner. And of course, one keeps on reading about it and making your own efforts. But you know, it always takes a village to do anything properly. So that’s why I’m super interested in what you are doing and would love to hear more details about it. [Amitabh Kumar]: Yeah, I mean, I took a look at the company looks super interesting, looks super needed, I think. [Michael Houck]: the problem that you’re solving is only going to get more frustrating and more prevalent. So love to work with folks who are sort of on the cutting edge like that. So that’s cool from our perspective. But yeah, I mean, look, everyone, I talked to a lot of founders and they all say, oh, you know, I know I should be posting on social or I know I should be, you know, happening in my email list with a newsletter, but then they’re super busy and they don’t have time to like sit down and write it. Or anything like that. So some background on me. So I’ve been a founder for a while. Before that, I was early at Uber Eats, helped build that business, and then was a product manager at Airbnb for a bit after that. Since 2020, have been founding various companies. The first one got funded by Andreessen, and then we actually folded it into our own venture fund that we raised, too. So kind of an interesting model there. But for the past two years, I’ve been basically helping people grow on social media. So I built my own audience between Twitter and LinkedIn combined to 100k. On Substack, I have 217k or something like that. And what I realized is that when that happens, you meet a lot of creators, and then those creators will comment on your stuff, and they’ll get more exposure, you’ll get more exposure to their audiences. And so growth becomes easier, right? Problem is, when you’re just starting out, especially as a founder who needs to make their mark and get word out about the product or the service, whatever it is, you don’t have those creator connections, right? And so I basically brought all my creator connections into this platform that we built called Megaphone and basically said anyone can pay these creators to engage with their social media content to get extra reach and authentic sort of social proof on their stuff, right? And so that went really well, and it’s still going really well. But a bunch of people who use it were like, well, my content isn’t that good. So can you write my content? And so from that, we started the ghost training agency, megaphone studio, and now they’re sort of both part of the same business at this point. But we’ve been doing the content writing for about a year. It’s myself and Blake email, who’s my sort of partner on the agency, he has, you know, an even bigger audience on social than I do. And we’re actually the operators of the business, like I am your primary POC. He’s the one in the weeds with the writers, nothing, no content gets sent to you without he or I like personally editing it and reviewing it. So we’re still super in the weeds with everything. And we have a small team of folks we worked with for a long time on the content writing side, you know, very high quality bar, we say no to 10 writers for every one that we bring on to the team. And because we work with founders, our process is super lightweight. So For example, we would do one kickoff call where it’s you, me, and the writer. And we would go deep on content pillars, who the audience is, what they care about, what you care about putting out there, your voice, all that kind of stuff. And then after that, everything can be async if you want it to be. So we’ll set up a Slack Connect channel. And every Monday, we’ll send over some questions that have come up during our research. All we need from you, couple minute long voice note where we get the intonation, your unique POV, more than we would if you write out an answer or something like that. And then if we get that from you, then we incorporate that in the content. It sounds more like you. And we’ll work to get a couple weeks ahead so you’re not always stressing out week to week. But that’s pretty much it. Super lightweight process. We have a Notion board where everything is in there. You can leave comments on content. We handle all scheduling. We handle all reporting. On metrics and performance and things like that. And we also do proactive and reactive engagements. So for example, if someone’s commenting on your stuff, we have someone on our team who will log in as you and actually have a conversation with them in the comments. That helps with impressions for the main post. And then we also have someone who will log in and seek out thought leaders in your niche and leave thoughtful or maybe sometimes a little bit funny comments on their stuff. So you get some free profile views that way. And I’ll also personally go in early on audit your profile and make sure that we have a totally optimized for conversion for whether your goal is follower growth or leads for the business or whatever the case may be. [Amitabh Kumar]: Got it. Got it. Got it. That’s pretty impressive. And based on your experience, let’s say somebody like myself, whether I don’t know, 5,000 followers on LinkedIn, what are some of the stats or numbers that you see? And also what’s the frequency of the posts per month that that you see maximum growth in? [Michael Houck]: A couple of options there. We can do, say, three long-form posts per week, or we could do seven short posts per week, so you get one out every day, or some mixture of the two. We can do lower frequencies if you want to, like two long-form a week or something like that. We’d reduce the cost accordingly for that. In terms of performance, you’re starting with a solid baseline. I don’t know how engaged that audience is today. Sort of probe and test for the first couple weeks just to see like what they’re responding to what they’re not responding to. [Amitabh Kumar]: Oh, I get roughly about 5000 impressions a week on LinkedIn. And some of my videos in the past have literally gone viral with 100k 1 million views on specific topics, per post, depending on the post, the video post will be anything between 1,000 to 2,000 impressions. Normal text post, if it is a conference, goes up to 500 impressions. And just a generic post, anything, depending upon how it is treated, between 100 to 500, I would say. So those are kind of the numbers that we get at the moment. The good thing about our world is, I mean, worked at Uber and Airbnb, so you’re aware about this aspect of trust and safety, this Department of Trust and Safety. Our whole world is 10,000 people on the planet. It’s not like basketball or random marketing, where it is millions of people. My whole world is 10,000. If they see me, I’m very happy. And in these 10,000, I can very proudly say I’m probably connected to 3,000 already who matter. And my focus is on the remaining 7,000. And it is all about value add, right? So it is all about the people who are reading this are mostly in this for the long haul. And they just want to read something which is adding value to their original knowledge base. [Michael Houck]: So that’s kind of Do you have an interest in also getting in front of like C-suite folks? Who maybe are like the buy-no-go decision makers for tools like this? [Amitabh Kumar]: Totally, totally, totally. [Amitabh Kumar]: So I mean, the good part is I started my network with Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey. These were my early days, 2008, 2010, pretty much directly mentored by them as a kid. That’s amazing. So in the social media world and the big tech world, which are the 15, 20 really big companies, I think Except for Amazon and Microsoft, we have the attention of the big guys because I’ve worked with them for almost 15 years now. But where the lacking is, is actually in the upcoming startups like ours. Series A to Series C companies are actually the most interesting one because they are our clients. And this is where my network is very, very low. So that would be the focus. And I mean, as we and our client list. I can also share it with you so that you are aware about who to look into. So I think this looks good. What are some of the commercials? What is the ballpark number that you guys work in, I don’t know, on a retainer basis or a per post basis? How does it go? So we’re month to month. [Michael Houck]: We have 30 day cancellation notice. So effectively, it’s a two month commitment to sign up and then it goes month to month from there. And our full, our standard package, which is like, you get everything. So you get content operational support on proactive and reactive engagements, you get scheduling, you get reporting, you even get some credits for our creator network to have them go engage with your posts and amplify it to a wider audience. We have a bunch of folks who have that sort of like, you know, I’d say seed to series C stage startup style audience, founder audience, bunch of folks in that niche, because that’s where my personal network is. So all of that plus the three long form a week or sort of long and short mixture together, that’s 4k for a month. So $39.95 a month. If you wanted to either drop the creator network credits and do that kind of more ad hoc or have a lower frequency of content, we could drop that down to $29.95 or $19.95 a month. [Amitabh Kumar]: That’s the lowest we go. And just because in my peculiar case, actually the videos do a lot better. I’m more of a, whatever, visual person. This, we are talking about only text posts, or are you also fit for doing like video editing and all? If I sent you, I don’t know, a 30 minute, like you said, a rough cut, can you convert it into something beautiful for the socials? Yeah, you send us a rough video. [Michael Houck]: We have an editor on staff who’s really good. They can chop it up and we can also write sort of a text post to go alongside that. If you just post the video, I feel like you’re asking a lot of the audience. So you got to have some insights in the tech side too. Maybe also interesting, if you get super busy at some point and are not able to record those rough cuts yourself, we actually also have the capability to do an AI digital twin of you, where we would write scripts, we would put them into the AI, and it would be like you. We have someone on Instagram who’s taken this with us, and they’ve grown to 400,000 followers on Instagram. Because the videos are either really good to the point where you can’t really tell, or people just don’t care, and they just want the information. So yeah, that’s helpful. [Amitabh Kumar]: We work in deepfakes, so it’ll be quite good to have a conversation between the real me and the deepfake me. I can almost see something going well. Good stuff, Michael. This sounds really interesting. I think the next action points are, like I told you, we are very close to closing the funding round. And coming out of India, even 4,000 bucks is a lot to do by myself. It will be post the funding. So the realistic timeline is mid-August. I can actually take a call on it. And if we go ahead, it will be for me and my co-founder. Digvijay, I’ll share his profile with you. What will help in kind of making this decision because we are getting proposals from other folks as well, we’ll be getting like a specific proposal from you. It doesn’t have to take too much time but based on Contrail just even give us a one pager. But it shouldn’t be like a cookie cutter, it should be more focused on contrails. Because once you get funded, even the investors kind of have a say. So it’s almost like, even though we are a startup and a very small team, it’s almost like a procurement process. I look into at least, yeah, at least three proposals. You know, but where you have the advantage is, we are actually looking for somebody who understands the geography of United States, right? Because this is where we want to build our mark. Coming from India, having built a few brands back in India, that space, I think we understand pretty well. I personally did the marketing over there for my older organization and companies. But United States, we can definitely use a team. So if you can, whenever you have time, shoot me a proposal. [Michael Houck]: And I circle back with, you know, once the funding is closed, and we money on the table then we can get into the nitty gritties but just to have a specific proposal will be pretty cool yeah that’s totally fine man I totally get the the sort of quote-unquote like pseudo procurement process in this case um I will I’ll put something together by the weekend let’s say uh just based on sort of our conversation and I think where it seems like you’re sound most interested and a couple options in there but there’ll be like one one main thing that I think will probably make sense so I’ll send that over and then I’ll I’ll make a note to touch base later this summer, and we can go from there. [Amitabh Kumar]: Yeah, and I think in the target audience, because you spoke about funding, the second round that we are targeting will be out of the United States. The first one is out of India, which is a pre-seed round. But our seed, we are looking into the United States. So maybe the target audience is also the seed VCs and micro VCs, which you could add to it. And that could give you some extra ground points when we are evaluating various proposals. Uh, but yeah, this, this, this was wonderful. I think, um, you know, Um, good stuff in what you’re doing. And I think another advantage while setting the rates are see a lot of Indian startups are building out of India, but for United States. Yep. And there I have a crazy following, like back in India. Um, a lot, a lot of people do follow me in a lot of young entrepreneurs. Uh, this is my third company. So collaborating with us also opens that market up for you and actually we can tell them that hey here’s the team which can give you visibility in United States right because the hyper local tribal knowledge is very different and there are just some things you know by working in this environment that an Indian cannot so and and your rates are also quite founder friendly so I do see a lot of folks coming to you so maybe that is another consideration where we could do a barter of sorts. We present you in India and promise you that we’ll get you 10 more clients or something like that and just get more effective rates from you. [Michael Houck]: One thing we do there is we have a pretty generous referral fee for folks. So if you’re sending folks our way, assuming that they’re doing the 2k minimum per month package, which is our lowest, assuming they start there, there, the referral fee would be four figures. So that could effectively, if you have a bunch of folks you send our way, that could effectively make the service free for you over the course of a couple months. [Amitabh Kumar]: So we’re happy to do that. Yeah, totally, totally. I think I can already see four or five companies who would be eligible for it. In fact, I’ll send you the link of one right away. This is my older organization and they are more in the nonprofit space, but also in the trust and safety space. And the person I would like to kind of promote over there is this one. She’s like a TEDx speaker and everything, but I think she has a lot of potential on socials. So if that is something that is interesting for you, I could already see them coming on board I see you on her page on one of her posts. Yeah, this is the organization I created and moved out and did contrails. So I have a lot of say over there. But I think they can definitely use a professional team to do it. Because as I said, India, we are pretty fit, like this organization is also like doing pretty well in India. But to get the US crowd, it’s a different flavor. And maybe that is where you could be very helpful. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, definitely, man. Let’s do it. If you want to intro me over email, I’ll send over the proposal. And then we can go from there. And yeah. [Amitabh Kumar]: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Wonderful, wonderful. Really nice. Are we connected on LinkedIn? [Michael Houck]: I will make sure that we are if we’re not. [Amitabh Kumar]: I’ll send you a connection if we’re not. Yeah, let’s just finish it right away, Michael. Yeah, perfect. Perfect, because then basically it becomes easy for me as well. Yeah, perfect. I’ve sent you a request. So it just becomes easy for me to kind of share the profile with anybody in India and say, this is what we are thinking about. And yeah, for me, as I told you, the timeline by mid August, we can actually take a call and start working on it. I know it’s three months down the line, but I just want to be realistic with you that that is we have the cash. No point talking before that. [Michael Houck]: I appreciate you not stringing me along for two months. [Amitabh Kumar]: I’m in the same boat as you. I’m doing GTM. I know how painful it is. The least I can do is be straight with somebody else who’s doing exactly the same thing. So no, I really appreciate it. And with all honesty and transparency, I would recommend you wherever possible. [Michael Houck]: Appreciate it brother. Awesome. Over the proposal and we’ll touch base after that. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: All right, man. Pleasure talking to you. Take care, man. Good to meet. Bye bye. Bye.