- Duration: 30 min
- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01JXNH2K9ZW50EM7SWZXKAFN7B (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JXNH2K9ZW50EM7SWZXKAFN7B)
Transcript
[Michael Houck]: Jeremy, what’s going on, man? How are you? Good to meet you. I’m good. Good to meet. Thanks for grabbing some time. [Jeremy Steinbring]: Absolutely. Happy Friday. [Michael Houck]: Um, yeah, I know we just reached out. I think Blake reached out randomly over, over LinkedIn, right? Is that correct? Yep. Cool. Um, well, yeah, man, good to, Good to chat. Your profile already has a lot of great stuff on it. I think how narrative driven you’re about such is, and the branding is really solid too. Take a look at the site as well. So. Oh, thank you. Yeah. [Jeremy Steinbring]: It’s a good starting point. Always room to improve. Yeah, of course. [Michael Houck]: That’s what we’re all trying to do, right? Totally. So I guess I can give some background on me and on us, but I think first, would love to just get a sense of how you’re thinking about content. You said there’s some like shifting transformational things happening for you guys right now. So just give me a sense of like where that is on the priority list and sort of what you’d want to use content to do, whether it’s social or newsletter or whatever. [Jeremy Steinbring]: Yeah, well, obviously, we’re in the in the service base, you know, productized here. So we’re about to surface agency at this point, the business has been mainly built around me. Now we are a team of 10. So like, I’m far but the only person on the team. However, we’re going from kind of entry phases to scale so we can get to growth because the idea is to build out a pretty significant agency for this. So what we’re doing right now is we are rebuilding our product offering, which right now everything is custom. So like you work with us on a retainer basis, it’s hourly, but what we do is pretty much everybody for one in a specific niche, which is mainly SaaS and technology companies. So Salesforce, HubSpot, we do both of those, all your tech stack tools, plus go-to-market strategy. Every single client is completely different. That works when I am running the show. It does not work when other people are running the show. So what we’re trying to do is trying to design a more product-tied service offering, which will then help us markets and build put out content for specific avenues that customers can take to engage with us. We’ve already kind of established what those different tiers are going to be. We’re just now fully defining them grading pricing, and then of course, all the operational stuff that goes along with it. Right. So we have a current team and you know, Bank of about 25 engagements going on right now, something’s gonna have to be done with a Legacy customers that we have do we transfer them? Do we not do we have the right people on the team? Do we not so like the rest of this year is really meant For that like let’s right size the business for the next Growth stage and a big part of what’s worked thus far is Content podcasts the things that i’ve done in the past to make a name for myself. Um, most of our customers have come from Slack, LinkedIn, networking, no content other than what I post on social media or someone posts on my behalf for podcasts, no ads, no nothing. So we know that we’re going to need to build a marketing strategy, a content strategy into this next relaunch. And rather than doing it now where we don’t have this productized offer, I’m trying to get as much information as I can. Because once we’re ready to tell the world about what we do, again, I will have something more formal. Okay, cool. [Michael Houck]: That is a very helpful context where it gives me the full picture. Okay, so on our side, we’re a content agency, but we’re sort of content and distribution, so we handle both sides of the coin. So for some context, I’ve been a founder for a while. I was part of the early original team at Uber Eats, helped build that business, and then was a product manager at Airbnb. Then during COVID started a company called Launch House. We raised $23 million in total from Andreessen Horowitz and some other great investors. Ended up turning that into a venture fund, invested in a lot of startups. And then for the past two years have been basically building out a personal holding company, totally bootstrapped. My audience on LinkedIn and X is over 100K combined. I have over 200K on Substack. And so as I was building that sort of personal holding company, media brand, I met a lot of creators. And so what I realized was, you know, they're commenting on my stuff, my stuff's being seen by their audience, I'm growing, right? That's the equation. And so not a lot of founders had access to that. So I built a platform called megaphone, where you can share any post URL, and you can partner with those creators, they can engage with your stuff, or they can do sponsored posts on your behalf, or you can run ads in their newsletter, or in the podcast, or wherever. And as we grew that, we realized that a lot of people were coming to us and being like, well, it's great to get this distribution, but my content isn't that good in the first place. And so over the past year, I've built up this content agency where now we handle LinkedIn, X, newsletters, and sometimes other things as well. We have like an AI digital twin machine that we've created and system that we've created. We do like Instagram reels, people to 100k that way. And we work with about 30 clients, ranging from early stage, and or bootstrap founders, all the way up to like actual billionaire VCs who've been doing it for 40 years and have a massive personal brand. So we focus on founders, we focus on sort of the startup ecosystem, because that's my experience, that's my niche. And our process is super lightweight, because we know that those people are super We're busy all the time. So we can do everything totally async. If you wanted to do content interviews, we could do that too. But most of our clients prefer, hey, let's set up a Slack Connect channel. You share ideas. I'll respond with voice notes. We take that in and create unique content with your intonation, and your voice, and your POV. And that's been working pretty well for us. So happy to dive deeper in a process, or however anything else works, or pricing, or whatever is of interest. Yeah, that's the TLDR. [Jeremy Steinbring]: Yeah, that's great. I think for folks like me, we're tech people. I mean, that's what we do. So we understand the tools that are out there. So for the most part, I can build my own content. What's kind of unique is while I'm not a graphic designer, I am not somebody who spends most of their time in Canva, even as a self-proclaimed content creator. I went to audio engineering school. I have half the stuff behind me on my floor is audio gear. So like I'm I'm a little bit further along in the tech, you know being able to use ai to generate and ideate content and then like I feel like I have a pretty good voice on some of my posts like you can tell it's me talking like it really is just becoming a a Consistency thing than anything. Sure, um, which I know you know feeding the algos you know often and getting engagements often is a big part of that too um um and I feel like over the last probably six months since our company has grown uh exponentially it's been really hard to keep up with a lot of it so I think for me it's like I have a pretty clear vision of where the company is going the message that I want to share that I obviously have a style that you'll easily pick up if you read if you read any of my posting or anything I'm just like a no bullshit kind of like I don't care who I'm going to piss off kind of voice which is fun and I just you know it's the bostonian enemy that I get to I get to let out every once in a while I'm probably like yeah so you know I just don't care like just hate me fine it's almost more exciting that way um but yeah I mean that's I mean that's that's kind of the the deal I I do think that I have a really interesting um in the space that nobody else is doing, which is what I'm really excited about screaming from the rooftops. Once this new product ties methodology is like put out there. I just got, I just went through a competitive, a competitor analysis with like a fractional outside CFO where they took like the top 25 RebOps agencies and competitors in the space. And over the last two years, I've had over 200 percent in growth and revenue without any funding completely bootstrapped all based on word of mouth like our products our service market fit is so friggin good that if we just started telling people about it we we'd go and like because right now I don't it's all the word of mouth the people that we work with you know because right now you're the you're the bottleneck you're the one who has to be there to set everything up and make sure once you know everything's operating to your quality bar but with the product that service you can overwhelm yourself with business more easily. Yeah. Yeah. And I'll have a system to be able to handle it because it will be built not on my time, but this team, my team skillset. And then it just becomes a process that you repeat over again. [Michael Houck]: A hundred percent. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: So, yeah. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Cool. [Michael Houck]: Well, we do, I actually didn't mention this. We also do like content operations is a pretty core part of what we do. So for example, we do proactive engagements where we'll work with you to list out all the thought leaders in your niche who already have your customers in their audience, basically. We'll proactively engage with their posts, leaving comments on them that are either a little bit insightful or a little bit funny. Get some engagement, drive some profile views, drive some leads. And we'll also do reactive engagement. So if people are commenting on your stuff, we'll make sure the algo likes the fact there are conversations happening and the replies. Your profile's already pretty good. I did notice a few things that I could probably call out on a Loom video that maybe we could tweak of conversion to leads or conversion to followers. But overall, it's in better shape than most people when we first start chatting. And if you want to do outbound DMs and things like that, we can do those as well. And so yeah, content ops is a big piece. We handle all scheduling, all metrics and performance reporting and things like that. [Jeremy Steinbring]: It's totally done for you, hands off. [Jeremy Steinbring]: Yeah, it's interesting. I haven't tried things like this before. Sure. They definitely did not work. Um, part of it, I think, well, I think part of it was because we don't have a productized offer, right? Like it's very hard to market. Hey, we do consulting on everything to everybody. Right. That is hard, right? Like, like niche up is not exactly the term you hear when talking with my marketing and content creators. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: It's possible, except everything possible, except everything. [Jeremy Steinbring]: Like you can do oil changes if you want. You know, like that's not what they're telling you to do. It's a big part of it. So it's like, I, I think the point is like once we're in a place where we feel like, okay, we have the message, we know it works. We have the case studies, we got all of that. We know what the message needs to be. Go for it. I think at that point it's going to be just like every possible channel we could get to go wide net on marketing content seems to work the best for this kind of business. And in consulting, it's all relationship based. So it's where you can really build a relationship with somebody, you know, and, and go from there. So, yeah, I mean, I'd be curious about, you know, your thoughts. You know, obviously we're not in a place where I can give you the whole pamphlet of this is what we want our content stack to look like and, you know, our messaging to look like yet. But I'm trying to get some initial info. So I have a plan put in place, say for, you know, as we approach the fall. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: I mean, look, we, we could do this where we take social, whether it's LinkedIn or cross-posting to X or even cross-posting to like sub stack or Instagram threads, which both actually are having more activity these days than you would have had a year ago on there. So we can handle that primarily maybe targeting LinkedIn. Cause that's probably where most people are hanging out and you already have the, well, it's like six or seven K following on there to start with. So it's sizable. So yeah, we could take that off your hands. We'd work with you initially for a couple of weeks on nailing the tone. You would do one kickoff call at the beginning where it's you, me, and a writer from our team who, you know, high level of trust. For context, we won't send you any content until either I have taken a look at it or Blake, my partner, who has an even bigger audience than I do, have taken a look at it. Like we're, we're actually operated by real creators. It's not like I'm some founder or advisor who's like going to prosper. Right. Yeah. [Jeremy Steinbring]: That's that's not do that because that's like, is like, you know. [Michael Houck]: This is real humans. Like we might get some in spill or do research with AI, but in terms of like how we're actually writing the content, our goal is your voice. And that's why the voice notes are helpful in Slack. And it's all human, all human written. Got it. And human edited. Actually, I should, I should qualify because there's both steps now. So yeah, so that's how we operate. And if you wanted to sort of build a, I'd say like a, a multi-step funnel where you're using LinkedIn and social for top of funnel. And rather than trying to get people to sign up or something like that from there, collect their emails, put them in a newsletter, send out sort of recurring messages through Beehive or Substacks, unlimited shots on goal. We can set up email marketing automations and segmentation within Beehive for you, or again, position Substack, which is more of a social network and sort of cross-post the social content there from LinkedIn out emails from there to either direction, we could go there. But that sort of is a good way, especially for a higher ticket offer, to sort of build trust, rather than sort of trying to have people see in their social feed, decide whether to follow you and then decide to buy right there, not or never see you again in their feed, right? So it's Yeah, low friction way to get people into into the ecosystem. [Jeremy Steinbring]: Yeah, yeah. I mean, I've found just through experience, people are going to our website and my LinkedIn just to make sure that I'm not like Bob's accounting, you know, it's like, it's, it's an actual reputable company that like knows what they're doing. And like, that's, that's the place we're in. Um, so it's really not meant to sell, but it's meant to share. So like when people have that problem, they think of us and when it's the right time they reach out. So I know that also this is a invest early and the returns come later, you know, like a traditional SEO, this is not a paid ads like get leads now. Kind of thing and that's not what I'm looking for. So I definitely think that there's an opportunity to potentially work with one another. I mean if you have any documentation to send me now that you know kind of where I'm at, what I'm doing, let me know. It'd be helpful to kind of get some idea of what an engagement would look like, [Michael Houck]: I can send over like a standard Notion doc and then I can also in an email sort of write up more specific thoughts for how I think we would best work together based on Yeah. And then do you guys have like a timeline on your side of when you think you'll be ready to jump into something or where's that at? [Jeremy Steinbring]: Probably like August, September. I know you guys reached out now. It's always how it like we're the very beginning stage. I'm also I have a new baby coming August 1st. So congratulations, man. [Jeremy Steinbring]: That's awesome. [Jeremy Steinbring]: Well, that's good. It's great. I'm not going to sleep again. [Michael Houck]: I don't think all the more reason to get social off your plate, because you're never going to have time. [Jeremy Steinbring]: Yeah, right. Everything is the like, is it is like before after Christ? Is it before baby? Is it after baby? And so I feel like this is an after baby kind of thing. But that's where I'm landing right now. All right, cool. Here's what we'll do. [Michael Houck]: I'll send that over. And then I'll set a reminder to follow up sometime in August. And we can touch base then and see where things are at and go from there. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay, that sounds like a plan. [Michael Houck]: Any questions or lingering kind of thoughts that we should to talk through now while we're on the call? [Jeremy Steinbring]: Not necessarily. Like I said, I've done this a handful of times already with other agencies. [Michael Houck]: I feel like... Yeah, what hasn't worked there? [Jeremy Steinbring]: Well, direct messaging hasn't worked. Okay. So your, you know, your sequence, LinkedIn sequence thing, cold messages doesn't work. And I hate it. So even as a founder, like when I get them, I'm like, no, like, I'm not gonna even if I did, you know, I just, I just wouldn't. Well, I also know that only like 3% of your markets looking to buy what you want. So like, it's really just a numbers game. How many people can you annoy before you get to a couple people that, you know, like, I mean, honestly, like this conversation, right? Like, if I wasn't thinking about this, you probably never would have heard from me. And only so many people are actively thinking about what you're what you're offering. So that has definitely not works, um, you know, having somebody respond to like inbound and trying to set demos does not work because again, and again, I think some of that is because of the channel and the medium and how it's being delivered. But I also think part of it is because I don't have that product ties offering yet where it's very clear what you're putting into it, the process and what you get out of it. It's very custom. Um, so I think part of it was like the actual packaging of what we do um but i've also like every single business I started this business after getting fired and I started my own agency just on like a whim I'm like I'm either gonna have some consulting success here or I'm gonna like go back to the office and you know just give it a shot I turned into something much greater but I didn't have a rolodex of people I didn't have like a a giant list of VCs and private equity and all these people to go talk to. What did work though, was connecting with people, anyone that ever wanted to talk with me, I said yes. And then I just added as much value as I could. So anybody on Slack communities, LinkedIn looking for help, I didn't ask for anything, I just helped them. And a lot of their problems are solvable like very, very quickly, at least the next step is solvable very, very quickly. So I want to do that at scale. [Michael Houck]: I love that, man. I think that's the exact right way to do it. And you know, you're actually building real relationships with people, you're not sort of coming in transactionally. That's the exact way to do it. That's actually similar to how my venture backed business started was, I was bored in my apartment during the pandemic. And I wanted to be around entrepreneurial energy, because I was sort of in that phase myself, like new company, what am I going to do? Right. And so I just booked an Airbnb in Tulum that was like giant, like $25,000. I booked it for like a month. And I was like, how can I get cool people to come here? And I just talked to a bunch of similar early stage folks. We came together, it became this community, we were all helping each other. And then people were sort of interested in what we were doing and ended up getting funded and building a really incredible community. So I love that type of energy. That’s, that’s great. And it’s also great that like, I can tell you someone who sees sort of the value of just like, you know, building a brand, building awareness on social and just sort of being the guy for something, right? I think that’s, um, sometimes you get folks who are like, why didn’t I get five customers from this post? [Jeremy Steinbring]: You know, not how it works and you’re forcing it and like, they’re going to be bad customers, even if they do sign and like all the, all the things, but I do know if you got something interesting to say, and it works. You just got to tell people about it and they’ll kind of like educate themselves It’s just right now. No one knows that we exist beyond the small network that we have. So That’s it. [Michael Houck]: And so as you get that offer finalized and put out there and then ready to ready to accept people Yeah, we’ll be here. So let’s let’s August Love it. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Thank you, Michael. I appreciate it, brother. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Oh, good to be back. Talk more soon. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Congrats again Thank you. Take care