- Duration: 19 min
- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01JXB49TVFTMJQDGNZYDW3X46M (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JXB49TVFTMJQDGNZYDW3X46M)
Transcript
[Michael Houck]: Yo, what’s up man? Nothing, just raced up the stairs for this. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Oh, wow. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, well, we’re waiting on… Did that ever happen to you when you’re like, I’m running late, you run up the stairs, then you hop on a call and you’re out of breath? No, not quite, but it’s all good. Hello, guys. [Shahrear Ridon]: Hey, how you doing? [Michael Houck]: I’m doing great. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: How are you? [Michael Houck]: Good, good to meet. Thanks for grabbing some time. Thank you. So I invited Blake, who’s my partner in the agency. So we both wanted to say hey and meet and all that. But yeah, I guess excited to chat. I know we only have 15, so we can just jump right into it. Would it help if we give some context on us and the agency and sort of how we work? One quick question before we do that is for on your side with content, are you thinking more you’re thinking more newsletter, do you have a preference thinking both? [Shahrear Ridon]: Just so I can sort of… More social, like especially like LinkedIn or similar network reaching out to the direct people, like the decision makers. Well, sounds good. Okay, so yeah, so brief background. [Michael Houck]: So I’m Michael, I’ve been a founder for a while, started my career early at Uber Eats, helped build that business, and then I was a product manager at Airbnb for a while. Founded a venture backed company, where we raised about 23 million and ended up turning it into a venture fund. And so I’ve invested on a bunch of startups out of that. And then for the past couple of years, I built up my own audience to 100K between X and LinkedIn, and then 200K on Substack. And met a lot of creators sort of throughout that process and realized that folks really want to get partnerships with those creators, whether it’s for engaging in their content or amplifying the reach, or whether it’s to do product testimonials, sponsored posts, things like that. And as we started to do more of that and build a platform around it, what we realized was that folks really also wanted help making their content great. And so about a year ago, Blake and I started this content agency and it’s become a really big part of our business. And basically we help founders, anyone from early stage founders to literal billionaire VCs build their personal brands across social. And through newsletters and yeah we have a small team happy to get more into the process we can talk more about how it works but at a high level that’s us that’s how we work what I’d say is that we are one of if not the only agency where actual creators like blake and I who have built up our audiences to six figures are the ones who are working with you and the writers every single day so no piece of content that we create gets sent to you without at least one of us, in some cases both of us, actually editing it and making sure it meets our quality bar. And I’m your primary POC for everything on the day-to-day. [Shahrear Ridon]: So it’s not like we hand you off to some team or anything like that, like we’re the guys. Great, yeah. Well, regarding myself, like I’m in the university faculty, that’s my part-time role, but the strategy pathway, that’s why I’m still teaching at university part-time. The product we’re going to talk about is actually Metablick. Actually, it is an end-to-end platform for managing programs, funds, and compliance. So I’m sure you have noticed most of those traditions require a lot of programs to manage and also the funds to release disbursement, back and forth tracking analysis. And on top of that, the big four like Deloitte, KPMG, PwC, they do their compliance using agent do audit so all those things can be done in one single platform without having or hiring a bunch of employees and like hiring outsiders like all the big firms so this is our platform we have some revenues at this moment we are raising 1.5 mil well as you mentioned already you guys invest into companies, like if you have something in mind, happy to look forward to it and happy to hear. So we are raising 1.5 safe round. There are some commitments we received. We are still exploring a few other options. Well, that’s also part of like, I would like to hear from you, our firm, our VC firm. And well, yeah, so most of our clients are like B2B clients like traditions, like universities, big non-profits, enterprises, investment firms, private equity, or even VC firms as well. So a lot of back office work. And like some of our compliance and reporting will be done through AI. So that’s where like our AI impact, make the impact. So yeah, so like, I kind of figured out like you guys do a lot of marketing so And we I really thought like you guys do also investment so yeah happy to dive in to this even more here more like how you guys can help and like what do you guys charge and what’s like the structure or Bill you guys work with yeah sure so the fund is is totally separate. [Michael Houck]: That’s I have that with a few other partners, it’s not related to Megaphone at all. So happy to talk about that, maybe later over email, we have a process that we can run through if there’s a trip. But as far as the content side, yeah, I mean, look, we, it depends really on what your goal is for the product, right? Is your goal, hey, let me build up my founder personal brand, sort of get the word out on LinkedIn, is the goal to sort of build your follower account or is the goal more to generate business and get folks through a funnel or something like that. Like how should I answer that? [Shahrear Ridon]: Well, I would say more about funnel. So the goal is to generate business, grow revenue. [Michael Houck]: Right. Cool, that makes sense. So yeah, so basically what we would do is I would run through and do sort of an initial profile audit for you and record like a five to 10 minute Loom video, just like, where can we set up those CTAs effectively on your profile to advertise everything correctly and to get folks in the right place at the right time. And then what we would do is we do one kickoff call. That’s the only call we ever sort of require from you because we know that you’re probably pretty busy with the raise and building the business and everything else. We do one call and it’d be you, me, and a writer from our team. And they’d be our kind of thought partner. It’s not like we’re going to throw you to a different writer from week to week. They’re your person. And then we go deep on sort of content pillars. You want to talk about your voice and how it’s unique and stands out and also audience. Like what do they care about? What do they react to? What do they engage with? Just what you’ve seen sort of so far. Sure. We take all that in and then basically from there every week we’ll be sending you content batches. So on Mondays we’ll set up a Slack channel and on Mondays we’ll send you questions that have come up during our research. That we just want your unique POV. We can write content about the topics, but it’s a lot to get your unique voice in there. So all we require from you is that if you wanna go into Slack and record like a couple minute long rambly voice note, where you just give us your raw off the cuff take and answer to those questions. That’s what we’re gonna hear your intonation. We’re gonna hear the way you talk about things. It’s really gonna help us get up to speed on your voice quickly. And so from there, we’ll take that, we’ll incorporate that into the content. And then by the end of the week, we’ll deliver that week’s batch of content to you. And we’ll get a few weeks ahead too. So we’re not sort of always scrambling from week to week or anything like that. And then that’s it. That’s sort of the process going forward. We have a notion board where all the content will live. We handle all scheduling, all performance reporting and analytics. We have someone go into your account and do sort of content operations. So for example, they’ll be engaging with people who reply posts and also we’ll have a list of like thought leaders in the niche who already have the audience that you want and they’ll be engaging with their content so they get free profile views from their you know as their post gain impressions will gain impressions sort of deal. And then we also have our creator network as I mentioned before of I think it’s over 500 creators at this point with about 42 million aggregate followers spread across various niches. And so you can engage with them either on an ad hoc basis or included as part of as part of the plan that we that we go with sure Yeah, that works perfectly then. [Shahrear Ridon]: Yeah, that definitely works. Perfect. I’m happy to Yeah, feel free to send me like the link or wherever I need to send my voices and like yeah, we can go from there and If there’s anything else you need like I’m happy to share Yeah, I mean to sort of next steps and pricing, if that makes sense as well. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, please. Cool. Yeah, so our standard package is 4k a month. And that includes sort of full weekly content batches where, you know, we’re doing either three long form posts per week, or, you know, six to eight shorter to medium form posts per week. So you can post every day if you’d like, And that includes all kinds of content operations, we’re sort of going in and doing everything on your account, including the profile audit, the proactive and reactive engagements, everything else. And then that also includes credits for the creator network. So we can automatically get them involved in amplifying your posts from day one as well. If you wanted to leave the creator network off the plan and sort of do that more ad hoc and do sort of smaller batches of content per week, maybe, you know, too long form a week, or maybe a smaller amount of shorter or medium form posts per week, then we could drop it down to three K. But that’s, that’s a, that’s our structure. [Shahrear Ridon]: Sure. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Well, yeah. [Shahrear Ridon]: What about, like, revenue share model? Do you have anything like a revenue share model? Like, let’s say if you bring customers and clients in the pipeline and, well, if you close the deal, will you share, like, some revenue or commission on a continuous basis? Yeah, it’s a monthly, it’s a productized service. [Michael Houck]: You know, we have our writers on our team who charge us a flat rate, so we need to to work with that. So no, we can’t do a rev share, although sometimes we do feel bad about leaving the upside on the table, but we have to make sure that we’re covering our costs too. [Shahrear Ridon]: So is that a deal breaker for you? Is that a blocker for you? Well, I personally received like multiple offers regarding content creation and like other pricing as well. So I just have to think about even more actually. So like that, then I might be able to make some decision. Yeah. So I have to think more, but like, if you have my email, please feel free to send me the documents and the details, which can I go over later with my team. Sure. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: I mean, what are you seeing from, from other folks that might, that might be appealing so that we can, we can consider that in the, of course. [Shahrear Ridon]: Yeah. So like the price range where like they’re offering like 20, I’m sorry, $2,000 to $2,500 a month. This is something, and on top of that, well, the people were offering that they have a real marketing background and pretty well networked with B2B sales, enterprise sales, and I mean, they’re kind of well-reputed. Yeah. And besides that like the kind of offering like a revenue sharing model? So yeah, we’re just exploring like multiple options. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I don’t think we could do the revenue sharing model, we could potentially put a package together in the 2k a month range. And I can think about what the sort of frequency of content we’d be able to deliver at that price point would be and also the kind of additional things included. But I mean, you know, Blake and I have both built six figure audiences ourselves, we’re, you know, we’re pretty established, have pretty good reputations, especially in the founder uh space and the um You know the the folks who are your targets they follow the creators in our network, right? So initial proof you get from those creators That’s gonna like those same people are gonna be like, oh, why is my favorite creator, you know commenting on this post? I should check this guy out. So that’s that’s something that we offer. [Shahrear Ridon]: I don’t think a lot of others can can deliver Yeah, I mean like I would love to uh Share that with my team definitely like I mean like prices Price is not the ultimate deal breaker, right? So like there are like other factors. So yeah, happy to explore more and like receive any documents if you have. Like as you said, also you’re going to do some customization for me. Then like I would love to have that and share that with my team and see like what they say. Especially like my CTO takes a, plays a big role making a decision. Like, I mean, even though I make all the decision, but like my CTO plays a vital role. Yeah, sure. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Absolutely. [Michael Houck]: Do you know what your CTO is prioritizing on his side? [Shahrear Ridon]: Well, as long as we get the customers, everything should work out great. And we are raising, so we should have some funds set aside for that. So we’ll see. Cool. Sounds good. [Michael Houck]: I’ll be happy to talk about the fundraise too, whether it’s through our fund or also through, you know, I send out a newsletter that goes out to about 1300 VCs and angels on a monthly basis with like a curated selection of a couple of deals that I’m excited about. So I’ll potentially talk about helping out in some other ways too. [Shahrear Ridon]: Perfect. Well, perfect Michael. Thank you. Cool. [Michael Houck]: Well, thanks for your time. I’ll follow up over email later today and we’ll, we’ll go from there. Have a wonderful day ahead.