- Duration: 26 min
- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01JXWTPEKHV2DDD53NAM7FKXEE (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JXWTPEKHV2DDD53NAM7FKXEE)
Transcript
[Michael Houck]: Hey, how’s it going? [Michael Houck]: Shishar, what’s going on, man? [Tushar Soni]: How you doing? It’s been a while. Yeah, it’s been a while. [Michael Houck]: How are things, man? Yeah, things are good, man. I’m a nomadic at the moment for the last, like, six months or so. So just been up and down the Western Hemisphere, basically. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Where have you visited? [Michael Houck]: Oh, I did the winter in South America, you know, get an extra summer. I was all over Argentina and I did a little bit in Chile and wine country and then hopped up to southern Brazil Florianopolis for some beach time before coming back up. And since I got back to the US, let’s see, Texas, Tennessee, Alabama, South Carolina, New York, and then I’m going to SF tomorrow. Oh, that’s crazy. [Tushar Soni]: So I assume you picked the Western Hemisphere just as taking the right time zone, is that it? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah, just a time zone thing. [Tushar Soni]: But even then, how do you pick the next place to go to? Is it like looking for founders to work with or something else? [Michael Houck]: No, it’s really been just sort of like a, I don’t know, just wherever the wind takes me type deal. Right now, I’m looking to find like, where’s the next place to plant roots for a bit. So starting to get a little more serious about that. [Tushar Soni]: Yeah. So San Francisco and New York, those are the shortlist places for that. [Michael Houck]: And actually Charleston in South Carolina. Yeah. Did you have fun there or you just enjoyed the place? [Tushar Soni]: Just loved it. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah, it was great. Oh, that’s amazing. [Tushar Soni]: How about you? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: What’s going on? What’s new? Things are good. [Tushar Soni]: So we have been sort of working on the product side of things, you know, for like a while now. And just as the market is getting better now, we are focusing more and more on sales. So the reason why I reached out is essentially, we have been looking to hire go-to-market people and just try to increase our visibility on the sales front just for more customers and whatnot. I know what you guys do, at least from our last conversation, it’s more around LinkedIn takeovers and building content and stuff like that, but I wanted to just figure out, is there something else that maybe you guys can help with on the GTM side, or is that the thing that you guys focus on, or has something involved? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, so I think that our core forward-facing offer that we put out there into the world is a mix of social content and distribution. So we have our creator network you know, I think at this point, it’s like five, a little over 500 creators, with, I think our total network size now is like 60 million, somewhere around there. And so, you know, they will partner with founders to sort of get the word out, whether it’s through sponsored posts, product testimonials, newsletter ads, or just engaging with the founders content, right. And then we help a lot of startups with founder led brands on social and also through newsletters as well. So that’s like the core thing that we put out there. But we also do do some strategy consulting for and like advising for general go to market, whether it’s whether it’s content or social, whether it’s other kinds of avenues. That’s something that either I or my partner or the agency just does through. And so open to chatting about it, see what the right structure could be. It’s something we could help out with for sure. [Tushar Soni]: Interesting, yeah, because I feel like our team has just been very tech forward. And now that we’re focusing more on the sales side, whether it’s even just advice and consulting or anything really, I think could go a long way in just trying to speed up the process. Because we have set up something and we have had some success with it. So we know that there is a process that is working. I think it’s just a matter of trying to figure out how can we scale this thing and just increase the numbers. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: I mean, just to be totally candid with you, like if this wasn’t you and I, like if this wasn’t someone who I already kind of knew and trusted and all that stuff, like I would have said no. Because this is not going to be our core product. [Tushar Soni]: This is going to be outside of that. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: I mean, and it’s just, it’s not something, you know, these are like sort of deeper engagements where it’s like, I knew we’re spending, I want to make sure that I’m going to be able to help and A also that it’s people that I probably would enjoy working with. [Tushar Soni]: So that’s why I think maybe we can go a little bit more into the details so we can try to figure out whether this is something like the problem space if that’s something you would enjoy if there’s a value add here and then maybe we can find a way to work together. [Tushar Soni]: Yeah, sure. [Tushar Soni]: I’m down. Let’s explore it. Okay, so I can just go over the product like in like 30 seconds or less. Essentially, we have been on the crypto side, right? And we started focusing on the payment space. So instead of just going out there saying, hey, pay with crypto and add it to a bunch of products, we found our niche within that, which is, let’s say you go to a product and you have to fund your wallet or you have to deposit funds to that. Take an example like PolyMarket. You go there, the first thing you do is you add cash to it. So they use one of our competitors, but essentially that’s the product where we help bring money into these apps. So we’ll work with other prediction markets, we’ll work with exports betting and other industries where the first step as part of the onboarding after you create your account is you do your KYC thing and after that is bring money into this platform. And we sort of come in there and we help you sort of add crypto and normalize it, swap whatever is needed behind the scenes and simplify that whole process. [Michael Houck]: That’s the core offering. [Michael Houck]: I’m curious if this also extends to secondary sales in startups. Have you guys explored that space at all? We have not. [Tushar Soni]: Our focus is the verticals that have been working for us up until now. It’s just been the prediction markets, force betting, DEXs, that kind of thing. But I’d love to learn more about any other verticals that you think are interesting. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: One of my friends runs Augment Markets, which is like the secondary sale market. And it might be sort of the reverse motion to what you guys are doing for the prediction markets and the sports betting companies. But I feel like maybe there’s something there as well because I know he’s he himself is into crypto. And I also know that there’s a lot of like whales who are looking to sort of get into the secondary space as opposed to like meme coins right now. And so I’m just, I don’t know what it would look like, but I think maybe there could be something to that. [Tushar Soni]: No, 100%. I’m going to try out their float, see if it’s open for public access and see if there’s something that we can do there. Yeah, so that’s our core offering. And then the other one is the more standard pay with crypto, but instead of going to merchants directly, we work with payment service providers. So these are companies that already have credit card-based CH offerings. And out there, like, oh, we need to add a crypto option, but we don’t know how. So we just sort of go and plug and play there. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that makes sense. In the prediction markets and the sports betting markets, it’s like in their brain. What messaging is working with them? What channels are working for them? Like, where are you finding them? Where are you getting in touch with them right now? [Tushar Soni]: Yeah. So the initial customers were from referrals, investors, network, that kind of thing. But once we found that product to work well, you’re like, okay, now we got to do some cold outreach. And that’s where it was brand new territory for us. So initially, initially, my hunch was that we’re only going to target crypto forward companies. So we found GTM tools like Apollo, Clay and whatnot, right. But for crypto forward companies, the data on that just kind of sucks. Right. And it was impossible to find any founders or any teams there. But then our product evolved a bit as well. And then we sort of started partnering with companies that were not super crypto forward. So these were normal sports betting companies or normal prediction markets like Conchu, where you would just have actual cash in it. But they still wanted to support depositing with crypto. So you would bring in stablecoin ETH, BTC, but it would get converted to U.S. Dollars now instead of just staying in crypto. So once our product was able to do that, then the Apollo machinery sort of started working because their data was now much more useful here. So we set up our Apollo campaigns, we started getting calls set up, that was kind of working, but we completely nuked our domain reputation. And then the graph just sort of went down and I’m like, wait, what? I thought like we had exhausted the data and I was like, shit, like, is that all there is to the market? But then I looked into it. I was like, no, it’s the domain is just completely nuked. [Michael Houck]: Please tell me you didn’t do that with your primary domain. [Tushar Soni]: No, we have two domains that we are sort of going with. So there’s paywithlight.xyz and then there’s buildwithlight.com. So we didn’t do it with our primary domain, but I think there’s some emails sent out, but the majority of them were sent out through the other one. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I mean, cold outbound through email is getting tough. You can still do it at scale with like very distinct… Actually, let me ask you another question. [Michael Houck]: Were you guys spin taxing everything? [Tushar Soni]: Sorry, what’s that? [Tushar Soni]: Were you spin taxing everything? [Tushar Soni]: Spin taxing as in… [Michael Houck]: Basically, when you’re sending out mass cold email, one of the many ways you can nuke your domain or one of the things that can impact that is that if the copy is the same in every email, they just identify it as spam right away. And so there’s this process called spin taxing and there’s very simple tools that can do it. You can actually even do it through custom GPTs and things like that. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: or pre-set, essentially? [Michael Houck]: Well, basically, you write a cold email, you throw the copy into this tool, and then it spits out variants that are formatted in a certain way where cold email tools can recognize that they’re meant to be variants. And they’re all very similar, but normally you want at least three per email. And there’s many phrases within the email that’ll be spin-tached with these three variants so that they all get mixed and matched together, and then the total number of variant emails that go out is in the tens of thousands or something like that. [Tushar Soni]: Oh, interesting. Okay. And then these would work with tools like Apollo to figure that out? [Michael Houck]: I would probably recommend a dedicated… Apollo is good for getting the leads. It’s not totally optimized for actually sending the email. So there are some other tools that we could explore and pick the right one. But yes, basically, you can get the leads from there. And send out the spin text. Yeah. [Tushar Soni]: And then after that, I did, I mean, we were talking to this company called Send to Win as well. So they’re very much focused. So they were recommended by the Apollo folks. And they’re very much focused on doing this process of making sure your emails get delivered. So they like buy domains on our behalf and then warm them up over the next month or so. And then once they have some reputation built up, that’s when they start doing the outbound campaign. So that’s kind of where we are right now in that one-month phase where we’re just waiting for these new domains to get warmed up. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: They’re taking a full month to warm them up? [Tushar Soni]: Yeah, they’re taking a full month to warm them up. [Michael Houck]: It seemed a little long to me. Yeah, standard practice is like two weeks minimum, three weeks ideal. But we usually start sending after two weeks and rarely have issues. So since the domains and inboxes were super cheap. If you’re if you’re doing this taxing correctly, if you’re setting everything up correctly on the infrastructure side, you can usually get things out in two weeks. Interesting. [Tushar Soni]: Okay. So, yeah, that that’s the arc of how fear frees you. So tell me now, tell me now more about how maybe you can help us with it. Is that something that maybe you can help with? Because the goal here is to essentially build an outbound campaign that works, because the copy that we had in it at least for the first two weeks when our domains were still working. We were getting like decent open rates, decent click rates, we got demo scheduled, we landed customers through it. So within just the first two weeks, that process was starting to work. So now we just want to scale that up in a more legitimate way. Yeah, I mean, okay, so a couple things. [Michael Houck]: First, I’d want to get in there and take a look at what was working for you guys before. If we have some sort of lead magnet that we can create that can drive that response rate up even higher. That’s really what we want to see in minimizing links and any images. [Tushar Soni]: I don’t know what you guys were including, but I want to get in there and sort of audit. It was just text because I wanted to keep it simple, no heavy formatting or anything, just make it seem like it’s the founder reaching out and very simple, straightforward text. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, literally making it as casual as you possibly can. We see really good results even with just a subject line of just like, quick question, and then like a one or two line email getting responses from there and taking things from there. So we can get in there, we can take a look. That’s that’s easy. I’m happy to do that. And then as far as like what the go forward would look like, yeah, I mean, look, we can sort of take this up and down the stack where you want it. So maybe we have a recurring call where we’re chatting through strategy and things like that. And then, you know, we have some folks on my team who can handle some of the operational stuff if you want around managing the campaigns and getting the copyright and ensuring that we’re responding to people and things like that. So I’m happy to do that too. And then if you wanted to explore, like once we get that sort of working, if you wanted to explore other channels, like we’ve seen a lot of success recently with LinkedIn outbound. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: So we can explore that. Some of the tools to do that with well are a bit expensive, but you can do it. So we can talk through options there and see what would make sense. [Tushar Soni]: Yeah, because surprisingly LinkedIn’s own sales navigator is just not good. I’m not being very generous with them. It’s like, I don’t know how people are using this, but it seems like there are other tools that you would use to get through LinkedIn. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, there’s actually another Launch House member who made a tool called Valley. They do a good job of this. There’s a couple others as well. And then another friend of mine has one that’s less focused on cold and more focused on like your own existing network and getting intros to people in their networks who you’re not connected to. So a couple of different paths we could explore there, but I think probably first let’s get the cold outbound email campaigns humming and just kind of on all unless you’re getting calls booked. [Tushar Soni]: A hundred percent. [Tushar Soni]: Okay. That sounds good. And I’m just trying to structure it, like how we could best use your time, because I know you’re sort of like an expert at this, so maybe use more of your time on the strategy side of things, and then send to when folks who are more optimized for just the operational side of things, maybe you can use it for that. Would that be a good structure? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, we could do that. Again get in there and sort of get more context on like why they’re taking the four weeks and just make sure that they’re not like stringing you guys. But I can be that sort of sanity check and then we can kind of make a decision from there. So maybe what I can do is I’ll put some thought into this tonight and I’ll send an email with like hey if we wanted to do you know a bi-weekly or a monthly or even a weekly like what would those options look like and go from there. [Tushar Soni]: That sounds good. [Tushar Soni]: Okay. And as you’re putting these options together, the other thing that maybe, and you can totally say no to this, this is just completely optional. We are also thinking of interviewing and hiring a GTM person just so that they can take some of this work full-time. Now, I have got an interview loop that is in a draft stage, but again, I don’t know that interview loop is good for a GTM person or not. So maybe just some consulting with that and optionally doing the final, final round sanity check round once the recruiter has done their calls. I have done the calls, my co-founders have done the calls. So one sanity check is to make sure that you’re getting the right person. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: And we could either, I mean, it sounds like we’re already sort of have a small system that can work for cold outbound so my thought would be let’s get that set up and humming and then bring somebody in to sort of manage it but do you see this person sort of being maybe more senior where they’re going to take on more of a strategic lens or is it more hey let’s get this system running and then they can come in and operate it? [Tushar Soni]: I think it’s going to be slightly more in the strategic sense like right now we are just going to do the cold outbound but once that system is done then I would have them sort of grab to other stuff, whether it’s more partnerships-oriented, more video-oriented, maybe finding new verticals like the one that you just mentioned. I would want them to explore these new verticals and see where else we can position our product. Yeah, OK. [Michael Houck]: That makes total sense. So we can parallelize it then, and no need to wait till one is done to do the other. [Tushar Soni]: Sounds good. [Tushar Soni]: OK. So I will look forward for your email just to see how we can structure this and then and then see if we can work together. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Cool, man, I’m excited. [Tushar Soni]: This will be fun. [Tushar Soni]: Yeah, I think this should be interesting. Yeah, it’s just me finding more work outside of my core expertise. But I think now that the market is doing well in general, and we’re seeing positive response to the product, I’m excited to just, you know, like scale it up and see how far we can take this. [Michael Houck]: I feel like this is like a full circle moment from like way back Uber days. [Tushar Soni]: Because I mean at Uber like I would see the Ops folks like completely scale up a product that was given to them and they would have like this playbook and they would just like go nuts for that. I’m like damn like that that was impressive stuff. So just just need a little bit of the know-how of that and see how we can do that. [Michael Houck]: They gave us they gave us a lot of leeway, man. When I joined Stephen Tucker’s team and then Chen’s team, they were just like, yeah, don’t be afraid to step on the PM’s toes, basically. [Tushar Soni]: The focus was growth, right? So it’s basically like, do what works. 100%. No ego about it. [Michael Houck]: But yeah, okay, cool. I’ll send an email over tonight and we can go from there. Sounds good. All right. [Tushar Soni]: Thank you so much. [Tushar Soni]: It was great chatting. And let’s talk more soon. Yeah, man. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Looking forward to it. See you.