- Duration: 32 min
- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01JXXM6N9Y0ZXSFBFQQ423VNP5 (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JXXM6N9Y0ZXSFBFQQ423VNP5)
Transcript
[Michael Houck]: Natio, we’ve done some work with them. They’ve advertised on a newsletter a few times. Yeah. [Jules Deplanck]: Oh, nice. Oh, that’s why the name is familiar. I’ve seen your newsletter. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Oh, that’s cool. [Jules Deplanck]: I used to write a small newsletter in the VC space. [Jules Deplanck]: Oh, nice. [Jules Deplanck]: I feel like I’ve seen this as one of the boosts, on the boost offers or something. Probably. Yeah, I took a look at what you’re doing up in Boston. You’re in Boston, right? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, we are in Boston. I’m traveling right now, but yeah, we’re based out of Boston. [Jules Deplanck]: I keep meaning to get up there. [Michael Houck]: My friends are trying to get me to come up in September. So maybe I’ll be up then. I’m all over the place. I’m nomadic right now. You’re going to SF tomorrow, New York next week, all over. But yeah, good to meet. I guess, thanks for grabbing some time. I think we’re just chatting over LinkedIn DMs. I appreciate the willingness to jam. I can tell you some bit about us and about me and everything like that, that’d be helpful. But then also would want to learn, I guess, maybe first, I think you mentioned looking for some help with X, just some context and sort of your goals there, so I can kind of frame the conversation around that. [Jules Deplanck]: Yeah. Essentially, I think I’ll just give background on what we’re doing. Essentially, we created a venture capital fund in Boston, investing in student startups in the city. So we’ve raised, we’re a $5 million fund, and we want to use X because a lot of the cracked engineers, especially the students, spend their time on X. And so if we can get really good branding and exposure on X, it will help with the inbound of deal flow. Because right now, we handpick a lot of our investments. And so it's a lot of outbound. But we'd like to have a lot of quality inbound as well. And I think having a strong presence on X will really help us do that. [Michael Houck]: I completely agree. Especially with younger folks, that's where they're hanging out. That's where they're consuming information. That's where they're trying to get plugged into the startup world, basically, remotely or in person in both ways. So OK, cool. That's really helpful. Would this be for your personal account or for an account for the fund? [Jules Deplanck]: How are you thinking about that? I'm open to both. Because if it's on the personal account, it will eventually just drive a lot of traffic to the company account. If it's on the company account, might not drive as much traffic to the personal accounts, but I'm open to both. Okay, cool. We can talk about that. [Michael Houck]: We can circle back to that at the, at the end, but I'll give some background on me and on us and we can, we can go from there. So yeah, I've been a founder for a while. I was earlier in my career, I was in, Uber Eats as part of the early team, helped grow that business. Like we were literally loading burritos into people's cars in Santa Monica. And then was a PM at Airbnb for a bit. And then in 2020, I started running these co-living retreats in Tulum and a few other places. And it ended up becoming this community of founders. We're all building stuff, interesting people coming together, you know, when everyone else is stuck at home. We ended up building a pretty great brand around it and called it Launch House. And so after a couple years, we realized it was really more of a fund than a venture backable business. And so we had a fund and we just sort of combined the two entities. We'd raised a Series A for the company from Andreessen, but they were more than happy to participate in the fund as well. Yeah, I mean, we were kind of positioning it like an IRL, like co-living YC co-house. Membership club. But maybe it could have gotten to 100 million ARR. I don't know. But we just thought it'd be better off as a fund. So that's what we ended up doing. Anyway, that's still going. But I also have a sort of a bootstrapped holding company that I've built up over the past two years. So I built my personal brand on LinkedIn and X to 100k and on Substack 200k. And then I port those over to Beehive and send emails through because it's better in a lot of ways. But yeah, so did that myself. And so I met a lot of creators through that. And they were commenting on my stuff. And I realized, obviously, I'm growing, because they're commenting on my stuff, their audience is seeing my stuff. And so I thought, well, I know a lot of founders who don't have those creator connections. So I'm going to build this platform to connect them. And so I built Megaphone, which is a platform where Partner with creators to have them amplify your social media content in real time And on like more, you know structured things like sponsored post product testimonials like that And that's been going great for two years now But what we realize is that a lot of people want that distribution But they don't have great content themselves or they don't have time to do it or you know, whatever the case may be and so Uh for the last year we've now built up a content agency as well. And we work with about 32, I think it is now. Anywhere from founders to VCs, you know, one of our VC clients has been in the game for 40 years, and he's a Bitcoin billionaire, and he has like, five different venture funds and all this stuff. So a lot of experience on both sides of the aisle, basically, is what I'm trying to say. And so, yeah, I mean, when you when I saw you booked a call, check you guys out seems like right in our wheelhouse. And so yeah, I can go into process if you if you like, but that's the that's the TLDR on us. [Jules Deplanck]: That's, that's amazing. What a story. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: It's fun. I can imagine. [Jules Deplanck]: Yeah, I mean, for us, the biggest the biggest concern would be pricing. So here's to be fully transparent. Here's the situation. So you've raised 2.1 $1.4 million so far. And we’re going to do a first close on July 1st. So that means for the first year, we’re not taking a salary or anything. Our budget is fixed on all costs, like we have front admin platform, softwares, travel expenses, dining, etc, etc. It gives us 100k to work with for that year. Our fundraising momentum has gone berserk over the last few weeks. And so we’re going to $5 million, but that will all be kept for the following year. The management fees will all be during the following year. So for the first year, we want to get our social media platform off the ground. But money is tight. So I'm just wondering right off the bat, what is pricing on something like this? Are there different tiers? [Michael Houck]: We do have different tiers, different packages and options you can put together. So I'll lay it out and you let me know what makes sense. For context up front, We are, we tend to be more cost efficient than other, at least US based agencies because we operate pretty lean. So for context, I'm not about to pass you off to some account manager. Like I'm your primary POC and my partner, Blake, who has 93 or 94,000 followers on X himself, you know, he's our editor in chief, right? So we have one writer who works underneath him and everything is reviewed by him. And then, uh, one content ops guy who'll be doing like, you know, engagements from your account, basically. But that's it, small team. So our standard package is 4k. So that's, you get sort of full batches of content per week, you get extensive content ops, where we're engaging on other thought leaders posts and sort of driving profile views for you. You get credits for the creator network at that price point. So if you're like, hey, maybe I want to use the creator network more ad hoc and or consider, you know, instead of, instead of say, more than one short to medium form posts per day, or three long form per day, if you want like a smaller batch than that, we can do that at either 3k or 2k 2k sort of the entry level. For what we do, you'd still get the content ops at that point, it just be smaller batches of content. And like the creator network would be engaged on an ad hoc basis. Basis instead of default credits. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. [Jules Deplanck]: And so that's monthly, right? That's monthly. [Jules Deplanck]: We can give a discount with a long term commitment too. [Michael Houck]: So we're month to month by default with 30 day cancellation notice. But if you wanted to do a six or 12 month commitment, we could drop that down a bit to the exact percentage would depend on sort of what plan you choose, because I need to calculate kind of our. [Jules Deplanck]: Interesting. And so in the, was an example that I received. I don't know if it was via email or via LinkedIn. But it was, there's another like VC account that you had grown to like 24,000 followers within what was it two months? [Michael Houck]: I'm gonna pull up the exact message. I don't want to give you the wrong information here. Let me see if I can find this. We've got stuff all over the place here. It was nine weeks, like a little over two months, like two Okay. [Jules Deplanck]: So that would be like, and that was like what on the, on the standard $4,000 package or. Yeah. So they’re, they’re getting the creator network. [Michael Houck]: And I also have to say like, that’s a good result, right? Like that shouldn’t be sort of the expectation. We’re going to come in and in, in two months you’re going to have a, you know, 25,000 follower account, their content, just they had a couple of posts go super viral and really hit and you know, growth is spiky on social. Right. Yeah. So I just want to set that expectation. That’s a big expectation, but it can happen. It has happened multiple times. [Jules Deplanck]: But yeah, that’s a yeah. Yeah. I mean, there’s there’s hype around the brand. It’s just we need to just start getting content out. Okay. Honestly, that’s pretty reasonable. If we do something like this for like three months, 12 Okay. Oh, cool. Um, there’s another option I’ve been thinking about and that’s getting like a, just an intern. I know is good at like doing this and paying, paying them like a thousand, 2000 a month to do the same thing. So I’m exploring that as well, just to be transparent. Uh, but this was good. Is there like a, a booklet of like what a program looks like that I can just have on file so I can review when I’m weighing the options? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I can send over a notion doc that we have. And I’ll also add some sort of like, you know, custom thoughts for you guys in the email that I send. But yeah, I mean, look, we’re never going to be able to compete on price with hitting college or something like that, for sure. But you get a team of experts supporting you guys in different ways. And again, we can bring the price down to 2K a month if that’s a concern too. It’s just you get slightly less content and sort of the creator network would be more of an add-on than a default. [Jules Deplanck]: Yeah. I mean, to me, the most important thing with this is that it’s like off the shoulders so that we can focus on more important things. Yeah. Cool. I appreciate it. I’m going to be back in touch by the end of the week or by early next week. Unless you’re new. I appreciate it, Michael. Yeah, of course. [Michael Houck]: One last thing I’ll say is that process-wise, so we can take this pretty much off your plate. We do one call, which is a kickoff call when we first get started. That’s it. That’s you, me, and a writer, three of us. Or anyone else from your side, obviously, can join, too. And then everything else is async through Slack. Unless you want to do content interviews, which we can obviously update, we just send over questions that up during our research every week on Mondays, and then all we ask from you is, hey, pick up your phone, record a voice note into Slack for five minutes, and give us your POV. [Jules Deplanck]: That’s it. [Jules Deplanck]: Okay. Sounds good. Yeah. All right. Cool. [Michael Houck]: I will follow up via email tonight then, and anything else we should cover now while we’re on the call? All good. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Very clear. I’ll let you know. [Michael Houck]: Good to meet, and hope to partner up. [Jules Deplanck]: Likewise, Michael. Me too. See you brother. Bye.