- Duration: 19 min
- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01JXDR4F5QA24QBB87APEBPYH5 (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JXDR4F5QA24QBB87APEBPYH5)
Transcript
[Salim Lakhani]: I couldn’t figure out, I can’t find your message. [Michael Houck]: No, you were chatting with my partner, Blake. [Salim Lakhani]: So tell me, remind me what you guys do. [Salim Lakhani]: Yeah, totally, totally. [Michael Houck]: So Blake and I have both spent years building up our own audiences. He has a huge Twitter following. I have a big LinkedIn following and 200,000 on Substack. And I’ve been a founder I was in big tech, Uber Eats early on, Airbnb, and then built a company called Launch House. We raised from Andreessen Horowitz and then raised a venture fund. And now I have this whole company. And one of the things that I do is we have a content and distribution agency. So basically, we help founders, execs, and VCs sort of tell their story, build their brand, build their influence, both through social, so LinkedIn X, And in some cases, we do video for Instagram and TikTok, but also then email newsletters. So whether that’s on Substack or through Beehive, basically getting people further down the funnel, building more trust, unlimited shots on goal. So that’s what we do. We do content, and then we have a big creator network of about 500 creators with about 42, 43 million aggregate followers. And we can loop them in to engage with your content, amplify it to their audiences, things like that. So that’s the business. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. [Salim Lakhani]: Show me some examples. Well, you know, ghostwriting confidentiality is paramount. [Michael Houck]: So I’m happy to send over some screenshots of anonymized examples, but I can’t say like exactly who our clients are. They range from early stage founders, venture backed, in some cases bootstrapped, to literal billionaire VCs who’ve been doing this for 40 years and have, you know, huge brands and things like that. And everyone in between too. So happy to send over some screenshots, but can’t, can’t like screen share anyone’s account on, on the call. Okay. Right. Oh, but you do have some references I can talk to. [Salim Lakhani]: I can reach out to folks to see if they’d be willing. [Michael Houck]: We do it on sort of an ad hoc basis. So yeah, I can, I can chat with some of our clients and see if they’d be willing to do that. [Salim Lakhani]: Oh, that’d be great. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. [Salim Lakhani]: How do you start? Where do you start? How long does it take? What does it cost? [Michael Houck]: We start when you’re ready and you let us know what your main goal is, whether that’s revenue, whether that’s followers, whether that’s just impressions and getting the word out there. We can optimize the content for any of those. Then we do a profile profile audit, where we audit your profile, excuse me, in like a five to 10 minute loom video, point out some areas we can improve conversion to follower or conversion to lead or wherever you want to drive people to. And then from there, we do one kickoff call. And that’s you, me and a writer from our team. And that writer is sort of your partner. It’s not like you just get thrown into some pool and there’s a new person working on your account every week or anything like that. Like, no, they’re your person. And then every week in a shared Slack channel, we’d send over ideas and questions, basically things that come up during our research that we think your unique POV could create interesting content around. And all we need from you is open up the Slack app on your phone and just ramble a voice note for three, four minutes about your opinions on these topics. Excuse me. Voice notes are best because we get your intonation, we get the and motion, all the little nuances that help us capture your voice. And we turn that then into batches of content. And we’ll work to get a few weeks ahead so we’re not sort of scrambling from week to week. But everything happens async through Slack and Notion. Unless you want to do content interviews, like on calls, we can do that. But most of our clients, they’re super busy, so they prefer the async method. And then our ops team handles all scheduling, performance reporting. And also, if we’re doing social, we’ll go in and we’ll do engagements on your behalf. So for example, when we’re posting content from your account, we’ll be replying to the replies because conversations drive impressions. And then also, we’ll be creating with your help a list of thought leaders who have the audience that you want to capture. And we’ll be proactively leaving comments on their posts so that their audience sees you, checks out your profile, and follows you. Then we also can loop into the Creator Network, as I said, sort of ad hoc as we go. So that’s how it works. And it’s a week-to-week process and month-to-month engagement. So we just ask 30-day cancellation. So basically, it’s two months to start, because first month, we’ll say, let’s get through that, and then 30-day cancellation, so a minimum two months. And pricing, it’ll go the standard package, where of include full batches of content we’re posting from your account, you know, three plus long form per week, or sort of daily shorter to medium form per week, plus, you know, credits for the creator network, and full operational support, that’s 4k a month. If we say take off the creator network credits and sort of let you use that more ad hoc, and or have smaller batches of content, it can come down to 3k or Let’s see. [Salim Lakhani]: So our stuff, I want to know what type of businesses you guys do, because we’re very technical. And then our audiences are very technical. So how do we know what your experience is with the technical stuff? So give me a range of, whenever you send me some references or something, give me a range of, here’s the non-technical stuff that we deal with. Here’s the super technical stuff that we deal with. So then I have an idea of, here’s the area that you guys play in. Yeah, that totally makes sense. [Michael Houck]: We can send you full spectrum so you see clients who want us to optimize their content for engagement, virality, higher-level stuff, and then also clients who want to optimize for thought leadership, where we get really deep into the details. And some who are more on engineering or technical or deep into the AI space, we can share. [Salim Lakhani]: And then if we’re paying that much, I want to see the quality of the content as well. So I want to see some examples. [Michael Houck]: The one thing I’d say is that just every example that I’m going to share with you, just keep in mind that the voice that we built for that client is based on that client’s preferences. So we’re going to work with you to say, oh, this is what we want for you and our writers have done this, as I said, for a wide variety of folks. So just want to flag that, because I think some people see examples like, oh, this doesn’t sound like me. Well, yeah, of course. [Salim Lakhani]: Right, right, right. I totally understand. That’s why I’m asking for different examples of one on this spectrum on this. There’s always a bell curve. So you get one side of bell curve. You get the other side of the bell curve. This is where you get most of the presence. [Michael Houck]: Of course. Yeah. OK. That sounds good. And get it over to you by tomorrow. [Salim Lakhani]: That’d be great. OK. And then we’ll talk more after I take a look. I’ll share it with my partners as well. And then we’ll talk more. We’ll set up another appointment. [Michael Houck]: Sounds like a plan. Any other questions we should walk through right now? [Salim Lakhani]: I don’t know. What other kind of questions do you normally get? [Michael Houck]: Well, it depends on what people want. For example, some people talk about or some people ask questions about how social plays off of the newsletter or vice versa. Some people have questions about discounts for longer term commitments, which we do offer. Some people ask about how we get their voice. And so I just talk more about that process and how we have options between the interviews or the async voice notes. But honestly, the voice notes are pretty sufficient. So yeah, I don’t think there’s anything else you necessarily that you’re not just wanted to offer. [Salim Lakhani]: Yeah, no, I mean, if we start, we’re going to date first and then we’re going to get married. And then I want to like, you know, we’ll have a, we’ll have a trial process. I mean, we have a, we have stuff we do is similar to what you’re talking about. So process we go through is do a trial, like a two month system is sufficient. We get to get to feel like my clients get to feel like what we’re doing. Yeah, I’m not concerned about any of that stuff. So let’s see. Let’s see what let’s see the meat and potatoes. Sounds like a plan. [Michael Houck]: I’ll send that over and we can hop back on once you have a chance to review. [Salim Lakhani]: Good to meet you.