- Duration: 24 min
- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01JWVTP28Q4JD3ZTPVTQ69X1VN (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JWVTP28Q4JD3ZTPVTQ69X1VN)
Transcript
[Steve Strom]: Hey, Steve. [Steve Strom]: How you doing, man? Good. [Steve Strom]: How are you doing? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Good. [Steve Strom]: Good to meet you. Good to meet you. So I understand, Michael, that you and you and your company recently raised some money from Andreessen Horowitz. [Michael Houck]: The last company I founded, not my current company, my previous company, we raised our Series A from Andreessen. We raised $10 million from them and then a few of the partners also participated in our venture fund that we've raised. That was a couple of years ago. Um, I know Ben gave me some context. [Steve Strom]: You worked at a, at ops square. That's so crazy. I did. Yeah. This guy, that was, seems like a million years ago, but it was really probably a shit. It was probably 15, 18 years ago. [Michael Houck]: They started the fund or the firm in, uh, what was it like, 2008, 2009, somewhere around. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, yeah. [Steve Strom]: I think that sounds right. [Michael Houck]: God, where does the time go? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: We're building stuff, man. [Steve Strom]: It goes quick. [Steve Strom]: You know, it does go quick. [Steve Strom]: It does go quick. So and I refresh my memory. What does it sound like a terrible thing? What are we talking about today? I've literally had like, five straight meetings. I apologize. I actually did prepare but my memory is shot. [Michael Houck]: No, no, I know how it is. We got back to backs all afternoon or something. It's no big deal. Um, brief context. So we have a couple of different things we do. Uh, most of them are around, uh, social media growth and awareness and as a channel to grow businesses. So, um, I think Ben had reached out about our ghost writing agency that we have. So we do like content for LinkedIn, uh, X, and email newsletters through like Substack or Beehive. So I've built up an audience of 100K on social and 200K on Substack, for example. So we've built an agency around that. And then we also have a pretty big network of creators across various niches. I think in total now it's around 500 creators. And we have a platform where you can basically get them to engage with your social media content to amplify it in their audience. So combination of those two things tends to be pretty powerful. [Steve Strom]: Absolutely. And that's one of the things where I'll be perfectly transparent here. My knowledge of social media, it's not zero, but it's darn close. It's just not my area of expertise. So that is something that we would be very interested in. So here's kind of the sticking point. Right now, we don't have much of a marketing budget, we're in the process of fundraising. I certainly understand that you guys are for profit and you're not doing stuff for free. What sort of the, for the lack of a better term, what sort of the minimum engagement fee that you guys charge to kind of get rolling? [Michael Houck]: So if you just want to access the Creator Network and say, hey, if I'm going to post something from my account on social, I want some to go comment on it for reach and for social proof and credibility and things like that. We have a very, I don't know, I consider it an affordable subscription. It starts at $49 a month and then you can pay the creators individually, like ad hoc on top of that through the platform. So it’s sort of like an ad budget on top of that base $49 a month fee. That's if you're posting content yourself and you're like, hey, I'm not posting any content on social. I need you guys to come in and create it for me. That's fine. Obviously, the price point's a bit higher for that. The minimum that we do is 2K, so $19.95 a month. And so if you guys don’t have a budget right now, I totally understand. But I figured it made sense to hop on the phone, put a face-to-face, and just- Absolutely. [Steve Strom]: Absolutely. Because this is something I can assure you of this, Michael. I don’t have any plans on becoming a social media expert. Too many irons in the fire already. And the fact that we can plug into your sort of ready-made, ready-to-go offering is tailor-made for guys like me, companies like us, where that’s not our strength. It never will be. So let’s partner with somebody whose strength it is. [Michael Houck]: Totally. And we work with everyone from early stage founders to billionaire VCs who, you know, I can’t name obviously, but ghostwriting is a pretty confidentiality focused business. But, you know, we’ve been doing this, doing the distribution side with the creators for about two years, we’ve been doing the content agency side for one year. And we’re, you know, the business does about 2 million a year, we work with about 35 clients on the content side. So we’re big enough where we have our processes down, and we’re sharp, and we’re efficient and all that stuff. But we’re still small enough where literally every piece of content that we send to you, I will personally be reviewing it and I will be your primary POC. So this isn’t some big agency where you’re going to shuffle or thrown into a pool or something like that. [Steve Strom]: Like I’m the guy, like we’ll be you and me. Right. I love that. I love that. That sweet spot of, like you said, big enough to have processes and procedures where it’s not totally ad hoc, but small enough where you’re still getting that, that high touch, uh, that high touch, uh, feel, which is, you know, what, especially us as a startup, wants. And it’s your it’s your specialty. So we just give you some real quick context. We’re doing a rowing app. It’s it’s kind of like Peloton for the for the rowing machine. It’s more it’s more peer to peer rather than instructor led. I mean, you can absolutely, you know, have an instructor lead a class and do instruction and all that. But it’s also look, I just want to stay in shape and row a couple times a week with my buddies and they’re scattered all over the globe. You can jump on our app, talk with each other. It’s just like a Zoom call, talk with each other, trash talk, keep track of your stats. You know, there’s some accountability there. You have the ability to create your own private boathouse. So you could, you know, you could create a boathouse for your company. Only people in your company can access it. There’s text chat, you can schedule rows, you can do competitions, you can just do social roads if you’re just trying to stay in shape. It’s pretty full featured. And our go to market is both B2B, where we’ll go after rowing clubs and fitness clubs, CrossFit fanatics, schools and universities that have crew programs, as well as a B2C approach where it’s, you know, just guys like you and me who are trying to stay in shape as we get a little older and knowing that we’ve got buddies waiting for us kind of pushes us to do that. There’s kind of a B2C opportunity as well. So we’re both B2B and B2C. Is that the kind of thing that would dovetail nicely with what you guys offer? Yeah, definitely. [Michael Houck]: I think we have a lot of A, creators in our network who, A, some of them are just in sort of the fitness niche and have like tailor-made audience for this. But also a lot of them are in the sort of business startup world tech niche. And those, you know, those people like us are probably guys who care about staying in shape and general and things like that. So I think we have a wide range there. And then on the content side, we’ve written for folks in similar niche, not competing or overlapping, but similar niche before. So it’s definitely something that I have someone on my team already in my head who would be like the right kind of fit for it. And also I’m a rower. Like I, when I go to the gym, that’s my first 15 minutes is I’m just to get my blood pumping. I invested in Ergata and I got my hands handed to me on that one. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: They’re still around. [Michael Houck]: It’s looking like more of a PE type acquisition eventually rather than sort of what you want out of a venture investment. But they’re still doing their thing. [Steve Strom]: Yeah, they’re still doing their thing. [Steve Strom]: we’re software only. We’ve actually, we built our app on top of the Concept2 rowing machine, which is the industry standard by far. Eventually we will, you know, migrate to other platforms as well, but Concept2 is the 800 pound gorilla. So it made sense to go with them first. They’ve been very supportive and we’re really excited. I mean, obviously, you know, indoor rowing is niche in the sense that it’s not Airbnb, it’s not for everybody. But the beauty part of it is, the audience is fairly reachable, fairly well-defined. And so that makes the go-to-market a little more streamlined, a little easier, we think. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I would agree. And look, when Airbnb started, people said they were crazy for saying someone would even sleep on some stranger’s house. So it looks not niche in retrospect, but at the time, it looked pretty niche. So by building an experience that’s super engaging, you can build some brotherhood and some camaraderie around this and actually grow the market, which would be cool. So yeah, look, I think it’s definitely something we’d be able to help out with. Posting on social is also a great way to de-risk yourself to investors. I think we’ve seen time and time again, When you’re talking to investors, especially if you’re just getting a referral or reaching out cold or something like that, they go look on your socials and they’re like, how does this guy think? What’s he talking about? So we’ve seen and help with those conversations too. So it could be something to keep in mind. [Steve Strom]: And do you guys do kind of the full deal deal in the sense that you do LinkedIn, X, TikTok, whatever kind of makes sense for the business? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, we have more, I’ll say this, we have more experience with written content. So like LinkedIn X or Instagram threads or sub stack. But we actually have a video editor on staff and we do do TikTok and Instagram reels for some of our clients as well. We also have pretty cool, like new capability that we’ve rolled out with three clients now, which is an AI digital twin. So for example, maybe you want TikTok videos or Instagram reels, but you don’t have the bandwidth, you don’t want to be the guy who’s on camera we’re recording everything. We write scripts, we take an AI video, like we take a video of you and then we build an AI avatar based on that. And we create reels based on our scripts with quote unquote you talking, but it’s actually AI. We’ve seen one person who we were testing this with and he’s still an active client. He’s going on from like 100,000 followers to 400,000 followers on Instagram because of this. So it worked well. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yes, please. That’s powerful stuff. [Michael Houck]: He had a big audience to begin with. He had a brand. I don’t want to say it was all us, but at the very least, people either couldn’t tell or didn’t care. [Steve Strom]: Right. Got it. Well, that’s very compelling stuff. Well, let’s do this, Michael. Give us a bit of time to raise some money, but we will definitely be back in touch because I really like, I mean, I really have a good vibe from you, first of all. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Oh, thank you. [Steve Strom]: I feel good from you too. I like the fact that you’re a rower, so you kind of get what we’re doing from the outset. And I just like the offerings that you have, because like I said, I think they’re tailor-made for a company like us that knows we need to be out there on social media, knows that it needs to be done right, and definitely knows that it does not need to be done wrong. You can probably go better than anybody. If you stub your toe on social media, boy, it’s pretty darn visible. It’s very visible. [Michael Houck]: And the funny thing is, those are the posts that in some ways tend to get the most attention. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Be careful, but no, we, we know what we’re doing. [Michael Houck]: We’ve been doing this for a long time. I’ve, you know, I’ve built my own audience up for five, six years now across platforms. So we’re, and you know, it’s again, not some big agency where I’m just going to throw you to some account manager or something like that. You know, it’s, we’re the ones who are sure that the quality bar stays where it should be. So beautiful. [Steve Strom]: That sounds perfect. So give us a little bit of chance to raise some money. And then we’ll definitely be circling back. Cool. [Michael Houck]: I’ll send a reminder to reach back out later in the summer. I’ll also send you a one pager later today with over email, just with like, hey, here’s everything we talked about. Here’s our services today. And then also, as I said, I’ll send a reminder to reach back out later in the summer, we can go from there. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Solid gold across the board. [Steve Strom]: Great to meet you, man. [Steve Strom]: Nice to meet you, and we’ll be in touch for sure. [Steve Strom]: Looking forward to it. [Steve Strom]: Talk more soon. Thanks, Michael. See ya. Bye-bye.