- Duration: 30 min
- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01JWVJ5WQX4JPPBRAYKS1CW8DQ (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JWVJ5WQX4JPPBRAYKS1CW8DQ)
Transcript
[Michael Houck]: uh in two weeks for the hf0 thing sorry I talked to talk to dave again um but I’m leaning yes leaning yes yeah I think you should cool yeah I mean their companies are are really high quality so um yeah it could be worth it you are there that’s the thing it’s small it’s like eight or nine companies like Oh, wow. So it’s like, like, you know, I assume that a couple of them at least will be appealing. But, you know, with that small batch, you don’t know for sure. [Blake Stewart]: Yeah. Yeah. I wonder if there’s a microphone studio play there as well. Can I get in? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I think, honestly, that’s part of the reason just to go out to SF, you know, Maybe even spend a couple days there. Um, mid June. Yeah. [Blake Stewart]: I wonder if there’s other events going on too. Yeah. I mean, there probably is. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Right. [Michael Houck]: But like that would be the, like, that’s like the, the reason to go, you know, rather than to go in a month or two months or something like that. So it’s probably, it’s probably worth it, but I don’t know. I gotta, I gotta talk to Dave. I think you should go, but keep me posted. [Blake Stewart]: Yeah. Um, what’s going on with you? Um, not much. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. Um, last September is going to be pretty crazy. [Blake Stewart]: Okay. Um, I guess I want to go ahead and talk about that just to have that on your mind. I’m going to be traveling a lot. Um, where are you going? I’m going to be traveling a lot. Okay. My plan is to still work. We are going to a wedding in San Sebastian, Spain. Oh, I love San Sebastian. [Michael Houck]: Have you been? Yeah, I went last summer. I did San Sebastian, I was in Rioja for a bit and then Barcelona and Madrid before. Nice. [Blake Stewart]: Yeah, it’s for a wedding and so they want to do like a party in Ibiza the weekend before And then I’m going to spend like an extra week, probably in Portugal. Um, cause then we had to be in the East coast of the United States for another wedding. So instead of flying back to California, might as well stay in Europe. Um, so a lot of travel. Um, if you want, um, if you want, I mean, have you been to Spain before? [Michael Houck]: I’ve been to Madrid, but I haven’t been to Spain. Um, Not been anywhere else if you want either restaurant or winery wrecks in the northern region or out by Barcelona I’ve got I’ve got the best ones for days. [Blake Stewart]: Yeah, let me know so that that extra week is not Like we’re just leaning into Portugal because everyone keeps talking about it, but we might stay a couple days in Barcelona And so if you’ve got a nice winery Great, my favorite winery in the world is near sands fashion, actually It’s, I’ll send you, I’ll send you some of the photos of their cellar. [Michael Houck]: This place is called Lopez de Heredia. Um, okay. They normally only give tours to like wine industry people, but like you can sort of finesse your way in if you’re nice to them. Um, we got a tour and like, dude, they don’t use any like modern stuff at all. Like there’s mold on all the walls. All the barrels are made on site from the broken remnants of old barrels. It’s so legit. And the wine also is just like amazing and beautiful and very pure. And tannic, which I love. So I’ll send you some photos, but that’s a must do. And then there’s some others as well. And restaurant wise, I mean, you know, El Celler de Conroca, right? I don’t. [Blake Stewart]: I don’t. I’m like doing all my research. [Michael Houck]: So they won best restaurant in the world, like three or four years in a row. And then they got retired from the list because they were just like, so, um, it’s three brothers. One does the food. One does the dessert. One does the wine. Um, that’s cool already. Each one of them individually is like a world master at their part of it. And, um, it’s literally the best meal I’ve ever had in my life. Like number one, not even close. [Blake Stewart]: That’s all right. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: It’s in it’s in Girona, which is like an hour north of Barcelona. Okay. Yeah. [Blake Stewart]: Can you, can you send me these? I’ll send you a couple. [Michael Houck]: We have some others, like, there’s a ton of good Michelin star restaurants in Spain, but some of them are like, kind of like shitty. Like, they’re like, Oh, like we do, you know, the, we turn the wine into foam, mix it with beef curd or something. I don’t know. Yeah. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. So experimental. [Blake Stewart]: Okay. Yeah. So I’ll give you the good ones. [Blake Stewart]: Cool. Okay. That sounds awesome. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Um, and so I love Spain. [Blake Stewart]: Yeah, I’ll keep you posted. [Michael Houck]: Move on. Like now because if it’s September, you’re you’re already you’re already lucky if you get one at this point. Yeah, that’s a good point. [Blake Stewart]: We’re going with a massive group, too. Let me send these to you later today. [Michael Houck]: Send Blake, Spain Rex. OK. Perfect. [Blake Stewart]: But yeah, I don’t know the best way to go forward with that. Obviously, I want to keep working, but obviously, I want to enjoy Spain. So I don’t know how much we’ll be able to put into it. So we might need to adjust my rate or whatever. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, just just let me know as it gets closer. Like are you gonna be part-time or you just want to take a week off? You’re there two weeks off or whatever or the whole time off, you know, um And then we’ll accommodate I can flex up and can flex up. Um Reena can probably take on some of the like simpler stuff that we give her a clear playbook on. Um So we can yeah, we’ll manage. It’s all right. [Blake Stewart]: Okay, great. Thanks. Um, and yeah, I mean ideally I just work extra hard in august and load up the the calendar for september but we’ll see yeah for sure for sure I’ll keep you posted um I’m comfy you’re gonna have so much fun I’m really excited yeah they hate they hate tourists in san sebastian though like barcelona too but san sebastian there’s like you walk around like the walkable area and whatever and they have like graffiti on the walls like go home americans Yeah. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Great. [Blake Stewart]: Looking forward to that. Brush up on my Spanish, too, and that’s a whole nother accent. Good time, man. [Michael Houck]: Good time. Yeah, so that’s my highlight. [Blake Stewart]: That’s been on my mind for a little bit. I need to make some reservations and plan and lock that all in. [Michael Houck]: I’ll get you something tonight so that it doesn’t That’d be awesome. [Blake Stewart]: Yeah, thanks. [Blake Stewart]: Yeah, work-wise, it looks like somebody just paid a Link of the Week invoice, so… Nice. Cool. That works. Yeah, feeling good there. Obviously, I want more feature placements throughout. Yeah, but I think with the… [Michael Houck]: I mean, assuming that the 12.5k package comes through and also that delete me doesn’t stiff us or something. Obviously, we need more features than just that. But OK, let me pose this question to you. Do you feel like we are overpriced on the feature placement? [Blake Stewart]: Yes and no. I think majority of people are pretty unhappy with the results And I don’t know if that has to do anything with deliverability and just clicks being down. Um, so maybe, I mean, like people are, are going forward with it. So they’re happy with, like, there’s not that much hesitation with it, but we’re not, we’re not getting renewals as well. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. [Blake Stewart]: I don’t really have like my plan, what I’m really starting to do and like what I want to do. Is push these starter packages so that I could sell a couple placements, discounted, people test it out, they like it, and ideally, they come back for a multi-month agreement. That’s my ideal sell cycle. But yeah, I’ve got people who just wanna test one or two placements, I go back to them, and they’re like, yeah, we’re pretty disappointed with the results, we don’t wanna try this again. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, we definitely don’t want that to be be the, that makes it harder. Cause then you’re always sourcing new folks instead of having built folks you can go back to. Some of that probably is the deliverability stuff because we are just bland, like fewer people are opening the emails than normal. Right. And that will change over the next, I would anticipate one to maybe two months as it goes back up. Okay. [Blake Stewart]: Um, yeah, industry, like some people are just like, we’re, we’re done with newsletter. Like across, like it’s not you, it’s the entire. It’s, it’s the combination of, of industry wide. [Michael Houck]: There is a little bit of newsletter fatigue and clickable newsletter fatigue out there. I think our own issues with deliverability that we’re, we’re solving. And then also I think it’s the growth thing. Like we spent 12 months without running paid ads, right? I think a lot of those folks, like if you even look at the click rate, for our newsletter today, it’s our first one over 2% in forever. So the ads are working. The ads are bringing people who are clicking on these things. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah, that’s cool. [Michael Houck]: But I think that it’s going to take a while for us to get back to that place where we are averaging a 3%, 4%, or 5% click rate, and a decent chunk of those are going towards the sponsors versus people who’ve been seeing ads in our newsletter for years and they’re like, well, you know, there’s only so many ads I can clear. Basically. Um, so I think it’s a combo of all three of those things. [Blake Stewart]: Yeah. I wonder how much the beehive ad network has to play in that too. Like people are probably less likely to do direct ads now that they could just go through beehive and it’s a little bit more. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: I mean from the From the sponsor’s perspective, the Beehive ad network is great because A, they only pay for clicks, and B, they can get really low cost because they’re basically just taking whatever newsletters will accept it within their niche versus us. We charge a premium for the brand association and things like that. I told Tyler that the way he has the ad network set up is communal. It’s all good fun, but we had a good laugh about it. Yeah, that’s kind of funny. [Blake Stewart]: I mean, you see the same ads like the rundown has been sponsoring every newsletter out there. [Michael Houck]: Dude, I don’t know how they I don’t know how they make money. I mean, they must be getting features from these AI startups and just be like crushing it with sponsored features from them because they spend so much on acquisition. It’s insane. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, yeah. [Michael Houck]: And same with TLDR. I see TLDR ads on every single day. Yeah. [Blake Stewart]: I don’t know. [Michael Houck]: So what we’ve got to do is get the monetization wheel rolling a bit more. So one of the things I want to do after we sort of get the ghost trading agency set and sort of through that process is revamp the other offers that we’re making through the newsletter. So whether that’s membership, whether that’s another agency, sort of TBD, but I think that we need more monetization in order to reinvest in growth. Because if we’re making more than we’re spending per sub, obviously we invest infinitely, right? But we’re not. We’re not there right now. It’s a net spend Yeah. [Blake Stewart]: I have some campaigns on partner stack or like affiliate deals. I don’t know if any of them are compelling enough to consider, but I just, I just feel like affiliate deals are tough. [Michael Houck]: Cause like there’s no guarantee. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Right. [Michael Houck]: And if our audience is, is, you know, if they’re not clicking on ads, then affiliate deals are worth it. And so the thinking would be, we should just use that inventory to pitch our own shit. [Blake Stewart]: And yeah, I mean, you know, not all that 50 K is going to convert, right. [Michael Houck]: But a meaningful chunk of it is, and we’ll make more revenue than we would have from a three K future placement from that for sure. Yeah. So, um, so yeah, I think, I think we just need to, Get more new folks in the audience who are clicking And then maybe at that point later this summer or something we evaluate. Okay, you know now we’re at 80,000 subscribers and our click rate is up to 2.5 to 3% per issue You know, what does that mean in terms of how we think we should we should price it? [Blake Stewart]: Okay. Yeah That sounds good I Could be a little bit more experimental with trying to see what people are comfortable paying with. Like if there’s pushback on a 3K feature placement, I’ll try and see what they’re comfortable with compared to like what else they’re paying for in the market, so. Yeah, I think you totally have free reign to experiment and test and do whatever. Okay, cool. Yeah, I mean, I think pricing, I think it’s fine, but yeah. Definitely would like to see more re-engagement. Even today, I reached out to someone who ran an ad last year and they said they didn’t see anything. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: I mean, it’s just, it’s been a problem for a while because we haven’t been adding new folks, you know, like we were, we were getting a ton of renewals in the first, like, I don’t know, 18 months or so, but then that’s around the time that we stopped running ads. It was like last April. Um, and so it’s basically been a year since then so it’ll take some time but Later this year. [Blake Stewart]: I would expect that some of the sponsors we run in like q3 for example where we’re new for q4 Right. Yeah Yeah Okay Well, that makes sense Um I know you went over a lot of stuff yesterday in the The the team the growth meeting. Um, so I don’t I don’t think I have anything else today Have too much I Get some contacts for these VC funds for you to reach out to I think this would be good. I mean new funds Need new branding that makes sense. Yeah and you tan who booked a call with you, this guy looks pretty good. [Michael Houck]: Do you know him? [Michael Houck]: So he also added me on LinkedIn. I feel like we used to know each other through Twitter a little bit, um, but I don’t remember how, so yeah, I don’t know. Um, I mean, he seems, he seems legit. He was like working on TLDR. Maybe, maybe that’s how, maybe he talked to Matt back in the day. He invested in OpenAI and Anthropic, so he’s pretty connected to some folks, I guess. [Blake Stewart]: Yeah, and he’s pretty young, too, I think. So that’s funny. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Interesting. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I don’t know. We’ve definitely crossed paths. I recognized him when he booked. [Blake Stewart]: Yeah. I think I know that name, too. Yeah. OK. Oh, yeah. [Michael Houck]: Kimmy posted there. I think that could be a great connection. Well, hopefully he’s interested. And yeah. I have some follow-ups from the meetings last week to send Tonight, so I’m hoping that we get a conversion this week because if we get one I’ll feel very validated that okay now we can get More from the channel. [Blake Stewart]: Okay, I Think I realize that’s yeah, I mean we’ve Got it. [Michael Houck]: Maybe Yeah, almost a month. So yeah, I mean the first the first like Two weeks, so I feel like we were just really figuring it out Yeah, so I’m not, I don’t feel rushed. No, I don’t feel, I don’t feel rushed either. I think I’d, if I don’t see one by the end of like two weeks from now. So like, what would that be? That’d be the 20th. If we don’t see anything converted by the 20th, after like a couple of weeks of having a good amount of these get scheduled, then I’ll be like, all right, something’s something’s off here. But I think for now I walk away from these meetings, not having really many concerns. Like obviously, you know, any one situation can have things fall through or things change or minor things or whatever, but I would be surprised if none of the people I’ve already met with end up paying. [Blake Stewart]: That’d be weird to me. Okay. Cool. That’s great to hear. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. [Blake Stewart]: Well then yeah, I mean, it’s going well, keep it up. Um, I think I got a good system between that and HubSpot. Um, Yeah, I don’t really have anything else Okay Well, we can we can call a couple minutes early then and I will I’ll get to work on some us and Spain Rex for you If you go to Portugal to I’ve never been so I don’t know anything about it, yeah, everyone just keeps talking about kind of the Porto Lisbon Kind of Faro district just up and down the coast. So you should um, you should hit Yeah, that’s on the list too. [Michael Houck]: They say that that’s where Atlantis was back in the day. Ooh. Yeah, and all that ancient civilization stuff, that’s one of the two locations where they say it could have been. That’s wild. OK. Anyway, yeah, I’ll talk to you. I’ll send over a couple. Maybe I’ll send over a Google Map with some stuff laid out. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, that’d be awesome. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: All right, man. [Michael Houck]: Love it. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Appreciate it. [Michael Houck]: All right. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Later.