- Duration: 29 min
- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01JXDH9JYGVHF6SRS080QTTEN2 (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JXDH9JYGVHF6SRS080QTTEN2)
Transcript
[Michael Houck]: Alex say how you doing? Hi Sorry for all the schedule craziness. [Alex Chung]: I just started this job and it was like tech week last week So it was a lot My brother’s he’s getting a surgery right now. So I’m like in a hospital, but I’m here. Yeah. Well, we can we can be quick. No No, I didn’t wanna I was like like I already moved it so many times. I wanted to make sure we chatted but How are you? I feel like the last time I saw your name come up was like I said email during the launch house days and I met some good friends through that so Yeah, you know Yeah, I mean it was uh, it was it was a great community There’s a lot of folks still in there in each other’s Instagram stories that I see all the time Yeah, it’s like that. So it’s good to see that I’m not like Catherine Cross and like Gabby Goldberg and that whole crew, that’s how I met them. [Michael Houck]: I actually, I invested in Catherine’s startup. Awesome. [Michael Houck]: But yeah, okay, so let’s see. [Michael Houck]: So for the past two years, I’ve basically built up a bootstrap holding company. So media brand, a creator network platform called Megaphone. And then from that, we had a lot of people sort of getting access to these creators to amplify their content, but they wanted help with creating better content in the first place too. And so ended up creating this agency, mostly focused on newsletters and social. And so yeah, written content. So basically newsletters, LinkedIn, Xthread, Substack. And we do it for a variety of founders and VCs, probably about 30 clients. Now everyone from early stage founders to billionaire investors who’ve been doing it for 30 or 40 years. So it’s a wide range of folks. Small team, folks I’ve worked with for a long time. So my agency is Blake Emall. You might have seen his content around on social too. He’s an even bigger audience than I do. And so we’re actually in the weeds operating the business every day. So it’s not like we just pass you off to some account manager or something like that. [Alex Chung]: I’m your primary focus. [Alex Chung]: How big is your team? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, so it’s myself, it’s Blake, and we’re sort of leadership level. And then there’s a content operations manager who goes into the accounts and handles proactive engagements and replies and profile and things like that. And then you’d be paired up with one writer. And I think in total, our team is like nine writers. So no content gets sent to you guys without either myself or Blake editing it and making sure it meets our quality bar. So as I said, we’re actually in the weeds. And I know that Caroline had been chatting. [Alex Chung]: So for context, I connected with Caroline by- Yeah, I was looking at the email thread. [Michael Houck]: It looks like that was a while ago-ish, right? Yeah, it was back in during the fundraise back in January, February. Yeah. Loved what they’re doing. And so we kept in touch. And then when they brought you on, or when they were going to bring you on, they were like, touch base when that actually, actually happens. [Alex Chung]: Yeah. Okay, awesome. Um, sorry, I’m just writing some notes down. Okay, so I guess my context on my side, so I was a VC before, I guess in my past life, as of like, weeks ago. So try the fund I was at in in Good Word, formerly Loop. And I met Caroline probably a year, year and a half before we even wrote that check. So, you know, definitely been cultivating that relationship. And then, you know, I’m about a week, literally a week into the job and go to market, everything sort of go to market brand marketing falls under my umbrella in terms of like paid ads, email, content strategy, all of it. Got it. And then I’m weaving that into, you know, sort of the, the product piece as well. Um, what was I gonna ask? I wanted to ask you two questions. So first on, in terms of the clients you work with, like, are you working with other consumer, social consumer tech that’s like, similar to us, like not super Gen Z. Yeah, no one who’s like competitive with you guys. [Michael Houck]: But yeah, we’re we’re familiar with how to speak to that audience. And we have folks who I’d feel very confident sort of putting in that position. [Alex Chung]: Okay, got it. And then second question, I wanted to ask, I guess like what? What channels do you guys like primarily right for like, would this Like, if we, you know, did an engagement with you guys, like, would it be like you guys are, you know, managing our, our sub stack and then maybe any sort of, you know, rejiggering of that work to live on like a blog post on the website, or are you guys also doing LinkedIn? [Michael Houck]: Like what’s kind of the scope of work? Yeah. So we have some flexibility there. Our, our bread and butter is definitely, uh, newsletters and also like social content. So LinkedIn. Substack X even Instagram threads sort of all right in our wheelhouse We can obviously repurpose that to blog posts very easily So if you guys can ask you a question on just like trends you’ve seen I’ve been I’ve been researching obviously also SEO. [Alex Chung]: It’s another thing. I have to learn how to do In terms of like on the what on you know company websites when it’s like they have their sort of blog section or you know educational pieces Do you see a lot of folks like taking a sub stack and building an audience and then like embedding that Via like RSS feed or whatever it is into their website or they’re having like an entirely like different type of content there I feel like I don’t know. I feel like in my you know week-long study of this so far. I feel like I’ve been seeing a lot of folks like, you know Leaning towards sub stack beehive and then having it just live there, but I’m curious here and what you’ve seen on your end Yeah, we see folks do more, I’d say, repurposing rather than just like, you know, putting an RSS feed up or copy into a CMS. [Michael Houck]: The reason for that is because, you know, when you’re writing for Substack or through a Beehive newsletter, you’re trying to write in sort of a more conversational tone that is going to, I think, engage people and connect with people rather than just like deliver information in a structured way that search engines and LLM cap bots will like, So what we see is similar topics but structured differently. Okay, got it. [Alex Chung]: I’m curious, what did you and Caroline, like how do you guys have a chance to chat back in the winter during the fundraiser? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, we chatted back then and we basically said that once everything of settled, we touch base on what the right strategy would be. I know that she wanted to make use of the email list because I think that you guys have a pretty decent sized email list. I know she wanted to make use of that. And then I think just for the type of product that you guys are building, like founder led LinkedIn X content probably fits into that too. But I defer to you. You’re running the show here. Hold on. [Alex Chung]: I want to find my dog. Document that I wrote up. Okay, so I wrote up some ideas like literally yesterday, and I haven’t even like gone over them with her, but I guess one thing that I’m like, I guess you kind of know what our product does-ish, but curious to know if you’ve seen like also examples post call people that have done a really good job recently in terms of keeping their waitlist warm. Hmm. Cause like, okay, so like this is like the interesting challenge slash opportunity. We have New York tech week, ton of signups, like I think decent, you know, virality and people posting about us talking about us, et cetera, joining the waitlist. But then we have sort of this period of this summer before the actual like product comes out. Mm-hmm. So I think my strategy is like Have some sort of like monthly or even bi-weekly newsletter with like behind the scenes I’m building good word like reflections on you know relationships serendipity interest that change things Potentially early product updates and like teasing out features and then maybe like putting in like latest research on like You know relationships or part of your network, and then having at the end, like, some sort of spotlighting, like, you know, good word of the week, or sharing the good word, and then, you know, sharing some sort of user moment. But yeah, I guess, like, I’ve seen, like, the building of the hype and building in public for a lot of, like, CPG brands go well, because it’s, like, something you can test, like, and taste or whatever like interact with physically but if it’s something like this where you know we’re still iterating on the product and it’s so early like I don’t know have you seen anyone crush it that’s kind of similar stage and that’s like the newsletter thought I have and then I also another idea in that like waitlist engagement I kind of want to do like a Instagram reels tick-tock and LinkedIn video series called In Good Company. And I interview people in my network and have like three questions I ask them all every single time and like have them be super different. Yeah, you get you get a lot of unique perspectives and right. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. Okay. Okay. [Alex Chung]: So we can help with that too. [Michael Houck]: We don’t sort of advertise this stuff as much but we do have video editors on the team we’d have done reels we built an Instagram account to 100,000 followers for someone before so like we how to do that stuff. Okay, so if that’s of interest, we can we can include that. But as far as the newsletter, like keeping the waitlist active, yeah, that we what we see work best is I think monthly is probably not going to stay top of mind for people enough, just candidly, like I would say, that’s why I said bi weekly, but then Caroline said monthly because she doesn’t think people want to hear from us. [Alex Chung]: No, it’s weekly, but we’re meeting again tomorrow. So this will be a helpful other data point. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: I think as long as, as long as we feel like we have interesting content to deliver and things to say, not just about, Hey, here’s a product update, but like, but just like, here’s what’s going on also to like in this sphere. Right. Like we, we want people to trust the brand and giving product updates. Sure. That shows some shipping velocity and coming and things like that. But it’s really more about like us being. Their trusted voice in the space for how to get the best use out of their network. So yeah, I think bi-weekly probably makes sense. Weekly probably would be a little too much until the product launches, at least we want to just take as many shots on goal in front of people as we could. So bi-weekly to start. The sections that you propose, I think, make sense as a place to start. [Alex Chung]: And then what we can do is sort of… And obviously that’s like not final. That’s like what I thought about yesterday. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: What we would do is we’d have a kickoff call with you, me, and a writer from our team, and the three of us would basically brainstorm, who is this audience? What do they care about? What do they want to see from us? And sort of map out the sections of the newsletter and anything else. So we dive pretty deep into that. [Alex Chung]: OK. I have a couple different side questions, and I know we’re almost out of time. Go for it. So obviously, we’re a startup, and budget is like, it’s I have a question. Do you offer like tiers or are there like different like levels to your service that you offer? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, so for a newsletter, it just is like how much, how many issues of the newsletter are we doing, right? So like it’s weekly versus bi-weekly. So for a bi-weekly newsletter, assuming it’s, you know, reasonable length, we would handle sort of all operations around reporting and setting up segmentation and analytics email marketing automations through Beehive if we use Beehive or through Substack, you obviously can’t really do that. But yeah, all of that stuff and bi-weekly issues would be $19.95, so $2K a month. And then if we wanted to go really hard on Substack and sort of do a lot of Substack notes, because that actually drives a decent amount of subscribers, we could layer that in at some frequency and sort of add that onto the package from there. [Alex Chung]: So it depends on what your budget would be. Do you think, okay, two more questions. Do you think like Substack or Beehive, there’s a big difference in terms of audience and where people are? Cause I was looking through like the newsletters I read and like the ones that I go back to. I don’t know if this is just like the ones I get, but I feel like ones that are a little bit more serious are on Substack. Like Alex Chung and I don’t know, like some of the more like established people are on Substack. That’s why I was kind of leaning Substack. And then Beehive, I feel like it’s some of the newer, like, I don’t know, more Gen Z focused, like techier companies. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Is that a correct sort of assumption? Or do you think? [Michael Houck]: I would, I would, there is a difference, but I’d split it up differently. So I got it in terms of like what the tool actually is, what the platform actually is, right? Beehive is a, platform to create and send custom branded newsletters. And they have robust and other features that sort of make that an all in one perfect box. Their editor is really good. You know, their segmentation and email marketing automations are really good. So you get sort of more features. But sub what sub stack is a sub sex trying to be a social network. They’re not actually trying to be a newsletter tool. Email is just part of what they do. Yeah, they’re long form. So you get a lot more organic growth through Substack. You’re not going to see that through Beehive. Like if we want to grow the list, we would need to, you know, be out there. Yeah. Yeah. Other type of funnel efforts, which we can help with, of course, but yeah, Substack is better for organic growth, Beehive better for like tooling and being a newsletter tool. [Alex Chung]: Okay. My other question, what if like, Cause I, I worked on newsletters at my last like couple funds and I feel like I have a, you know, okay handle on like writing and like putting it together. What if we just wanted like another set of eyes on things? And like, we like wanted like, I don’t know, like editing review and not the whole like handholding thing. Is that something that you would offer? [Michael Houck]: We have done that for one other client. It depends sort of like if that’s biweekly. Like what is that newsletter? Do we want to hop on strategy calls as part of that? So maybe what I can do is I can send over an email later this afternoon. Hey, here’s like our standard offer. And if we want something more custom, like here’s what that could look like, [Alex Chung]: Perfect, perfect, perfect. And then are you based in New York? [Michael Houck]: I was just in New York on Friday for tech week, but now I’m in Philly right now. [Alex Chung]: Okay, awesome. Should have come to our event last monday, but I was in the city. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: I wasn’t there. Okay. [Alex Chung]: Oh, yeah, okay But I’m sure we’ll do more. I think events we’re figuring out too what our strategy is going to be there um But yeah, I don’t know and I know you’ve like heard a little bit about the product and what we’re doing Any other like low-hanging fruit or interesting things you think we could be doing or should be doing? [Michael Houck]: No, I don’t think so. [Alex Chung]: I think, well, okay, I would put, I would put Caroline out there as much as you can, or if you know, um, one of my portfolio company founders, my last one, do you know, Mary, her company is called landing and now it’s called zine. I think her boyfriend is like the run influencer guy. Yes. Okay. So she has like a, a new, like Instagram, TikTok show where she interviews female founders to make Caroline do it begrudgingly. And it’s being posted this week. So I think she’ll do more of that. And then her, the co-founder Chris, he’s like a tech product person, but actually really salesy and like good in front of the camera too. Yeah. So I think we need to have him out there as well. [Michael Houck]: If, um, so we have, we have a podcast that we run and obviously we do like, you know, we have our audience of 75,000 founders. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: There are some ways to get her or him or both. Yeah in front of them. Either we do some sort of Sponsored deep dive or we do a podcast episode that we then write about or like that. So we could explore that too. [Alex Chung]: Totally What kind of people do you have on your podcast? [Michael Houck]: Is it all founders or it’s all founders is exclusive founders They all talk about sort of a like their journey like their unique founder journey Like what is their superpower like their unique? Unique area of expertise. So for this, we’d probably focus on like building a strong network and chips and stuff like that. [Alex Chung]: Um, we did on Monday, like a tech week event with Andy Dunn and Zarna Garg, the comedian that’s going to be recorded for his podcast. But, um, her Zarna’s daughter is graduating from Stanford and she could be an interesting one. Cause she’s like literally running her mom’s business. She sold, I think over 10, thousand books and got her mom’s book on the New York Times bestseller. So she’s like kind of going out and like doing these sales workshops now. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah, I would love to. [Alex Chung]: Yeah, happy to. OK, so send me the follow up email. I would copy Caroline. I have notes on what we talked about, so I can also relay them to her as well. But I would send it just before tomorrow and then I can digest everything with her. And hopefully there’s a way that we can work together and also keep us posted if you’re in New York this summer. I will. [Michael Houck]: And yeah, I will. I’ll reach out later tonight before you before you chat with her tomorrow. So she’ll be all good. Okay, with your with your brother. [Alex Chung]: Yeah, it’s like it’s dramatic. [Alex Chung]: Basically, the TLDR is, if you’re if you’re a boy, and you like have a ache and pain, like go to the doctor, he basically sprained his ankle and it never healed properly. So he had to get part of his bone and knee cartilage put into his ankle and they rebuilt it. So yeah, he’s just in recovery now. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: He sounds like LeBron James or some professional. [Alex Chung]: No, apparently the doctor that’s doing this did Kevin Durant’s son recently. That’s crazy. [Michael Houck]: So he knows what he’s doing basically. Exactly, exactly. [Alex Chung]: Very cool. [Alex Chung]: Well, I’m happy we got to meet and thanks so much for all the tips and I’ll be in touch. Yeah, we’ll chat later this week. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: All right, bye. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Bye, good to meet you.