- Duration: 35 min
- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01JXXBM0QWPCTVGAV2ZB43N7FY (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JXXBM0QWPCTVGAV2ZB43N7FY)
Transcript
[UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: I’m so curious. [Conference Room (Tyler VanderVeer) - Speaker 2]: Sebastian was telling me that you’re, you’re a beast. It’s, it’s ghost writing, right? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I mean, we do a bunch of stuff. It’s, it’s go to market. But the primary thing we do is content. So whether that’s, you know, LinkedIn, or x, or AI, digital twins for Instagram reels, or newsletters, we do it all. Oh, nice. Cool. Yeah, I mean, I’d love to Um, so let’s see i’ve been a founder for a while. I was in big tech before early team at uber eats helped build that business Yeah, it was crazy, man We were I was living in santa monica and we were loading burritos into cars and then sending them out All throughout la so you could get like bay cities deli anywhere in the city in five minutes. Um It was wild. It was it was it lost money even by uber standards. So we had to change the model But that was that was v1. Um but Yeah, that was Airbnb for a bit as a PM. And then in 2020, founded a company called Launch House. That’s where I got connected with Sebastian. And he did some great work for us with short form video. And we had these co-living houses for founders all over the world. Yeah, it was really cool. We built a community. We raised a venture fund, had A16Z involved. It was pretty cool. And then the fund’s still active. We still invest out of it. But for the past two years, I basically built up a personal brand, which then became a holding company where I have a few different things that we do. So I have 200K on Substack with my newsletter, 100K across X and LinkedIn, and met a lot of creators. And so we realized, oh, you can grow obviously a lot more easily if creators are engaging with your stuff. So we built a platform to let anybody who doesn’t have those relationships necessarily get creators to engage and partner with them on content and things like that. [Conference Room (Tyler VanderVeer) - Speaker 1]: So that’s really interesting. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. It’s been cool. It’s called megaphone. [Conference Room (Tyler VanderVeer) - Speaker 2]: Um, and that’s like UGC, any type of content like that? [Michael Houck]: Yeah. You can literally have them engage with like repost or comment on your own posts or you can partner with them on like sponsored posts and things like that too. Um, or like advertising their newsletter or product testimonials, whatever you want. Uh, so we’ve got like five, 600, creators on there. I think our total network size is like 60 million or somewhere around there, maybe a little higher. Anyway, we’re helping people grow that way. But a lot of people were like, Well, you know, it’s nice to these creators are commenting on my stuff, but my content sucks. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Exactly. [Michael Houck]: They’re like, Can you just write my content. And so then for the past year now, we built this content agency. And it’s sort of the other side of the that same coin. And so we work with everyone from early stage founders, all the way up to billionaire VCs who’ve been doing it for 40 years and have, you know, crazy personal brand attached to that. So I think one thing that is pretty unique about us is that, like my partner and I, Blakey Mall, who has an even bigger audience on X than I did, we are actually the ones sort of in the trenches with clients. Like, it’s not like I’m some like advisor, like And hands you off to some ops guy or something like I’m your primary POC Blake is the editor-in-chief We’re actually in the trenches making sure everything passes our quality bar. [Conference Room (Tyler VanderVeer) - Speaker 2]: Wow That’s really that’s very interesting And how’s that good? How many people do you do you do that for create the content? [Michael Houck]: Yes We have like 32 active clients, I think And we operate pretty lean, you know, I think some other agencies they you’re paying for that Internal syncs with their like multiple department people and stuff like that Our team is pretty lean. It’s one content ops guy Writer me and Blake. That’s that’s all we do for each client. So Yeah, we try to keep it pretty pretty lean and pretty small, but it’s uh, it’s grown. [Conference Room (Tyler VanderVeer) - Speaker 2]: It’s grown a bit and it’s it’s been great well, yeah, cuz I was talking to Sebastian and I was just telling about kind of our launch and like what kind of happened because we posted to tick tocks the second one got you know, 800,000 views on Tik Tok, it went crazy. And on Instagram we got like 500,000 and we just had people flood our DMs, flood everything, just wanted to like work for us and do all these different things. And I was telling him, I had this group that reached out wanting to invest like a good amount, like a million for 4% or whatever. And he’s like, dude, honestly, he’s like, that’s cool and all, but you have to get on Twitter. You have to get on X because if you get plugged into like the startup Twitter startup, like that’s the VCs find you on Twitter and they’ll blow that out of the water. And I was like, Oh, that’s so interesting. Cause like I downloaded my Twitter, I didn’t, I haven’t tweeted in four years, four and a half years, but look at it. [Conference Room (Tyler VanderVeer) - Speaker 2]: I’ve like my, my last tweet is literally like diamond hands, 2021. [Conference Room (Tyler VanderVeer) - Speaker 2]: I was like, this is insane. And then I, uh, I was like, Oh, he’s like, just, like warm up your account, like tweet some things. And I was like, he like, and I would screenshot, send it to him. He’s like, I was like, dude, like, can you, you’re, you’re giving me this information. That’s insanely good. Like, do you want, like, how can I get you to do this for me? He’s like, I appreciate it, but I don’t have time. And I was, and then I realized that I have no idea about the whole Twitter game. Cause it’s, it’s a game. I realized this in the last few days. Um, so I just went on there. I started tweeting some like zero and like 12 views, you know, Yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s so interesting. And I’m just curious, like, I’m just learning about it. I don’t know exactly what I’m going to do in that, in that front exactly. But I do believe and know that it is important in that whole world. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: I mean, look, we, when we started launch house, like, obviously we knew some folks, but like, you know, we weren’t the biggest personal brand folks in the world at the time, but we were able to successfully leverage You know get people like gps at andreessen were part of our first 100 200 followers and they followed our journey and then when we raised our series a They were the ones who led that round because they had just seen our story and they trusted the way we thought because they kind Of saw us play it out in real time. So I think that the most interesting people Waste the most time on x like that’s that’s sort of the heuristic that I think about it in and so If you’re posting there like is it going to be? The crazy viral user inbounds you’re gonna get from a real or a tick-tock that goes viral like probably not But are you gonna build a reputation? This compounds over the long term with these very powerful people who can just change Step function like that that that’s what you get on X. [Conference Room (Tyler VanderVeer) - Speaker 2]: It’s way less about like views It’s about specific people that see it and for our following. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, it’s quality I mean you can you can go viral we can you know, write tweets that are and things that are sort of in the style of, let’s just get as much engagement as possible. Like we can do that, but the real way to get the most value out of the platform is building like a highly trusted audience of people who like are in your niche. [Conference Room (Tyler VanderVeer) - Speaker 2]: And you, how do you guys write that for me? Like, how do you know? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, so no, no, it’s, it’s pretty simple though. I mean, you know, we, this is what we do, right? So we sort of know the formats and the templates that do particularly well, and we sort of of apply your voice to those and also experiment with unique stuff for your niche that we think might do well. During the actual process, we’re only gonna ever need one call with you, and that’s a kickoff call. It’ll be you, me, and a writer, and that’s it. And then what I would do, do you guys use Slack? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: Okay, so we would send over like a Slack connect request, so we have like a channel that shows up natively in both of our Slacks, and I would add our team to that And basically every week on Monday, we would send over some questions that came up in our research about the niche news that’s happening Bigger topics like thought pieces we want to do and all you need from you is you open up your slack on your phone You ever hit the voice note button and you record like yourself rambling for like two to five minutes. Yeah, that’s it The more like unique intonation and like off-the-cuff takes that we get the more unique the contents gonna be And then we deliver back to you every week based on that. [Conference Room (Tyler VanderVeer) - Speaker 1]: Well, I mean, that sounds, that sounds fantastic. I’m curious on pricing. It’s probably, I mean, I don’t know exactly how much it’ll cost, but I’m sure, I mean, you guys are providing a very important service. So I’m just curious on what that looks like, [Michael Houck]: Cause yeah, I mean, as I said, we run pretty lean, so we, we tend to price better than most other content agencies for X and LinkedIn can. So what we do, our standard package is 4k a month. And what you get for that is basically weekly batches of content where we’re either posting three longer form threads that have viral potential each week. Or what I would recommend for you, since we’re starting out with a colder account, is that we do a higher volume, like, say, 7 to 10 shorter form posts, short to medium, I’d say, where we’re trying to build credibility in the niche, share hot takes, things like that. And in line with that, We also have our content ops guy log in as you for a few hours every day. And so he’s going to go in and find like a list of thought leaders in the niche who have the audience that you already want. He’s going to comment on their stuff. So their followers see those, those comments, check out your profile, end up following you, uh, and, and build the following that way. And then included in that will also be some sort of credits to partner with creators each month to amplify your stuff as well. So. If you wanted to use the creator network more say ad hoc And or reduce the volume of content, which if you’re starting cold, I probably recommend higher volume to start But you could reduce that down to 3k a month or the very lowest we would go is a 2k a month package Which look with lower content volume? [Conference Room (Tyler VanderVeer) - Speaker 1]: I mean, I’m definitely seriously look into that that because I’m curious, how well does it work? [Michael Houck]: Again, it depends what your goals are, right? So let me toss that back to you. Is the idea, let me build my personal brand to get in front of investors as we grow the company, or is the idea, hey, I need users, I need people to sign up, what’s the thinking? [Conference Room (Tyler VanderVeer) - Speaker 1]: I think it’s probably more for just connections and kind of getting on the radar of the people that are the big movers, I guess, less about downloads. Cause I think that that space, it’s just all developers and like other start. You can find anyone, any niche on X for sure. [Michael Houck]: So if you’re like, Hey, we want to try to go viral and build a meme account instead of building up your personal account or something like that, like we could create a meme account from scratch and try that. Right. It’s totally possible. But, um, the most value you’re going to get. And again, what we saw ourselves and what we’ve seen for clients time and time again, is that if you take a long-term view and if your focus is on relationship building, sharing sort of what you’re building authentically through the platform and commenting on sort of the trending topics as well, obviously, if you do those things and have that view, that’s where the value is going to accrue because the interesting people are going to be checking you out and eventually maybe writing you a check. [Conference Room (Tyler VanderVeer) - Speaker 1]: Yeah. Okay. I don’t think I’m going to make a decision right this second. I don’t think you’re really expecting that. I do think this is, this is very interesting and I definitely would look into it extremely heavily. Um, I’m trying to raise a little bit more money cause right now I probably shouldn’t do that. Um, even, I mean probably in the long run it’s, I do think that like it’s definitely worth it, but I don’t know if I necessarily should at the moment, but if I do secure that next, like, you know, still precede seed, whatever funding that I’ll have more flexibility to definitely invest into that because I do think it is an investment, right? With longer term results that could result in a meeting with a VC that ends up putting in way more money, right? So I am totally on board with the concept and the value of it. I just think that I need to be probably in a position with a little more money in the bank before I go ahead and do that. But I have a question for you just generally, I don’t know if this is something that you’re And I’m sure it’s something that you know about. Yeah, go for it. So when it comes to PR, this is kind of similar. It’s not really, but it is. It’s your personal PR, right? Sure. When it comes to general PR, like something, for example, I just got the founder of Myspace to join the board of my company. Tom? [Michael Houck]: You got Tom? [Conference Room (Tyler VanderVeer) - Speaker 1]: Not Tom, Chris. OK, OK, OK. So cool, so cool. So what I’m creating is like in the social space or it’s kind of a social network in person. But I’m curious, like if I wanted to go out and I don’t even know anything about the space. I know, you know, TechCrunch, they run articles and whatnot. How does someone go about getting into that or like in front of the people? Do people just pay to get their stuff in there usually? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, so it’s there’s two ways. It’s relationships or it’s pay to play. That’s it. And so like I know people I could connect you with who have run, you know, they, my one friend sold her PR agency for, I think like 70 million or something like that. So she’s super in this, I know. Yeah. 70 million is nuts, but, um, she’s super connected and she’s really good. Um, she’s expensive, but she is really good. But the, the, the issue is like, this has been my, my take on PR for forever. Cause you know, we got, you know, the second month of our company, the New York times wrote about us tech a full profile on us three weeks in, literally, because we were, it was COVID, we were going IRL, they were interested in what we were doing, right? It was, it was contrarian and weird and interesting. So yeah, I mean, like, did that help build our brand early on? Maybe, maybe. But what we did on social, in my opinion, built those long term things more. Like, I’ve always seen PR and I won’t tell my this, she’d be mad at me for saying this, but I’ve always seen PR as like a little bit of like founder vanity. Like, let me, my company’s like cool. Right. So it’s like, it’s like a short term sugar rush and maybe it’ll help a little bit, but it’s, it’s way less effective in the long run than, than building up an account. [Conference Room (Tyler VanderVeer) - Speaker 1]: Yeah, I agree. I was just curious on your thoughts on it just because I don’t know, I’m in a stage of collecting information to to see what actually matters. [Michael Houck]: It’s expensive, but I can get you a rap sheet of, oh, you want to get a profile on Vogue, here’s how much it costs. Whatever publication you want, they have it on this sheet that my friend has. It’s really interesting. [Conference Room (Tyler VanderVeer) - Speaker 1]: I’d love to see it, just to check it out. Because most people are paying. It’s so funny, you get the emails where it’s like Forbes 30 under 30, and you’re like, wait, what the fuck just happened? And it’s just paying. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, it’s the pay to play to prison pipeline through the Forbes 30 under 30, right? Yeah, no, I mean, look, it’s cool. And it’s something you can put on your LinkedIn or in your Twitter bio, or what have you. But the ROI isn’t going to be as high as what you can do to sort of, yeah, you know, you got it. [Conference Room (Tyler VanderVeer) - Speaker 1]: I think that makes total sense. Yeah. Okay. Well, let me think what what could next steps be? I’d like to stay connected, even if I’m not moving forward immediately. But I mean, you’re obviously a wealth of knowledge in the space. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Where are you at with the raise? [Conference Room (Tyler VanderVeer) - Speaker 1]: Maybe I can help with that. [Conference Room (Tyler VanderVeer) - Speaker 1]: With the raise? Yeah. So honestly, I raised 200 grand, like three weeks ago. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Nice. [Conference Room (Tyler VanderVeer) - Speaker 1]: Or a month ago, whatever. Dude, zero rev, zero anything. Nothing works. I love it. Early stage. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah, super early stage. [Conference Room (Tyler VanderVeer) - Speaker 1]: But like, there’s a lot of momentum for video just kind of crushed. We have, you know, a lot of connections of people that for this type of app is required, but it’s an in-person. Do you know what it is at all? Yeah. [Michael Houck]: I took a look at it when Sebastian connected us the other day. Yeah. [Conference Room (Tyler VanderVeer) - Speaker 1]: So, I mean, in-person social, right. People have tried. It hasn’t worked. It’s all about critical mass density. It’s so fucking hard. It’s really hard. It’s really hard. I do think it’s possible and I think I can do it just I’m fairly sure I can do it. Do you know the 222 guys? Yeah. [Michael Houck]: Well, I know what it is. Yeah. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: They were, they were in our founder community back in the day. [Michael Houck]: Like that came out of, um, I don’t know if they’d be willing to chat. Cause like you guys are sort of playing in the same space, but I could see if they are up to share learnings and it might be, no, I don’t know. [Conference Room (Tyler VanderVeer) - Speaker 1]: Well, honestly, I think I probably want to pass for now just because, I don’t know, I want to build myself up as a real person first. But no, the reason why I’m so confident about what I’m doing is because people like the 222 exist. Because time left, because Thursday date or whatever it is. And the run clubs. Have you seen the run clubs? [Michael Houck]: I have seen the run clubs. [Michael Houck]: I was in New York. [Conference Room (Tyler VanderVeer) - Speaker 1]: I did one. It’s hilarious, right? But they’re the ones taking advantage of community and in person. Um, and what I’m trying to do is create something that’s scalable. New York run club is in New York and it’s on Wednesdays or whatever it is, you know? I don’t know. But yeah, I mean, I, I, I mean, Hey, I, this is fun. [Michael Houck]: It’s horrifying and it makes you want to, you know, if you, I assume you have a deck, but if you have a deck, we have a process that we help a lot of founders. For context, my niche and my personal brand is all built around founders and advice for founders, because that’s what our company was about back in the day. And so we have a newsletter with, I think it’s like 75,000 or 80,000 subscribers now, all of whom are founders, most of whom relatively early stage. And we run a fundraising support process through that. And I have my network of like 14, 1500, uh, VCs and, and angels who we then send a digest to, and also sometimes one-on-one interest to, um, every month. So I could send that to you. There’s like a, it’s like a form, you know, to drop the deck and a couple other things, but, uh, we can take a look and include it out to some folks if it’ll be helpful. [Conference Room (Tyler VanderVeer) - Speaker 1]: Yeah. I definitely need to revise my deck. Everything’s moved extremely fast. My last investor didn’t even care. I just told everybody he was okay. What do you need? Money, advice, or both? I go both. What’s your bank account info? [Michael Houck]: I was like… Another thing I would say, just because I’ve sort of seen how these hype cycles go. If you have someone offering you a million dollars for 4% this early, I don’t know who they are, obviously, and you want to make sure your cap table is full of good people, but there’s something to be said for taking that money and putting it to work. [Conference Room (Tyler VanderVeer) - Speaker 1]: 100%. I would take it in a heartbeat. I know who it is. He’s a part of the Thunderbirds. Birds in Scottsdale. It’s this like, um, kind of like an exclusive business club for the people that are like the movers and shakers in Scottsdale, like over 10 mil net worth or something. So he said, he said it to his daughter. I know his daughter. He’s like, I was just fucking around. I was like, Hey, yeah, minimum would be like 500,000. He said, okay, I’d be in. I said, okay, well it’s a million for four. And he said, okay, let me put a group together. And I was like, sounds good. [Michael Houck]: She followed up with that relentlessly, man. [Conference Room (Tyler VanderVeer) - Speaker 1]: So I’ll let you know how it goes, but yeah. I mean, if I could get that with like… [Michael Houck]: I mean, because at the end of the day, I think a lot of these folks who are normally either LPs or big time angels or have a family office or something, what they’re all realizing is what we as founders realized a couple of years ago, which is that the number one thing that matters now, especially with AI, making it really easy to build product, is distribution. And if you know how to do that, they’ll pay for it and they’ll pay early for it. And so they probably saw, Hey, this, this guy knows how to make short form content that resonates and gets a ton of attention. He’s clearly onto something in the zeitgeist. They want to be part of that because there’s not a lot of those opportunities out there that you even tangentially connected to. Right. So let me know. I mean, keep me in the loop. If, if, if they come in, you know, um, we could probably accelerate timeline, but I’m also happy to help with other folks in the meantime too. [Conference Room (Tyler VanderVeer) - Speaker 2]: Yeah. Yeah. [Conference Room (Tyler VanderVeer) - Speaker 1]: It also, I mean, I feel like raising four per, I mean, I feel like raising that also drives a future raise quick, right? Yeah. I mean, there’s, there’s two things you can do with it. [Michael Houck]: You can either say, all right, that’s our precede. Let’s go heads down and try to hit some, you know, some metrics. [Conference Room (Tyler VanderVeer) - Speaker 1]: Let’s get track. If we take over SoCal, we raise 25 and go do it in every big city. [Michael Houck]: A hundred percent. The alternative thing to say is, you know, Hey, we just put this out and we already have a million in a week or two or whatever it is, right? Like let’s try to now round up an extra million and fill out like a sort of in-between pre-seed, seed stage type round and get some more folks involved. So, you know, momentum sells at the end of the day. [Conference Room (Tyler VanderVeer) - Speaker 1]: 100%, 100%. Yeah. And also like, what’s so funny about that video is it was literally our second video ever. And it tells exactly, it did a few things. This is why it went viral. It does a few things. One, it’s all about hitting dopamine, right? So if you scroll and someone feels like it’s an ad, they scroll immediately. It feels like a real video they already are seeing on their feed. I don’t know if you ever saw it. It was us at a bar. It was my buddy going, who’s that cute girl over there? My brother goes, I don’t know. Did you check the room app? He goes, good idea. He clicks it. We show what it is. We show the app. Oh, and then he goes and talks Right? So they see exactly what the app is and it looks like a video that they already are going to see anyways. [Michael Houck]: That’s the thing. It’s like you see these videos that’s like they’re there, they come off like real moments that are happening. [Conference Room (Tyler VanderVeer) - Speaker 1]: Exactly. People think it’s real. Like I, like I’d say like 80% of people thought that that was a 100% real video. We don’t know who the girl is. Right. [Michael Houck]: Like you get like the 5% of people who comment on it and be like, Oh, this is scripted. So real or whatever, but the vast majority, they’re like, we’re at the point in like the awareness cycle where they still believe that it is a real, a real. [Conference Room (Tyler VanderVeer) - Speaker 1]: It’s scary. It’s honestly scary how like, dude, everyone is becoming an NPC. [Michael Houck]: Dude, imagine in two years from now when those same type of things are going to be happening, but they’re not even real people. [Conference Room (Tyler VanderVeer) - Speaker 1]: It’s all AI generated videos. It’s scary. Horrifying. [Michael Houck]: It’s like the I get I get like the SWAT team coming after me because a video of me doing something crazy is is posted. I’m like, wait, I got a world coin and scan my iris for proof. That’s so true world. [Conference Room (Tyler VanderVeer) - Speaker 1]: Yeah, that thing’s that thing’s pretty cool. And it’s something I want to integrate into my app eventually. Yeah. [Conference Room (Tyler VanderVeer) - Speaker 1]: Oh, yeah. [Conference Room (Tyler VanderVeer) - Speaker 1]: There’s already doing it. That’s true. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Doing it. [Michael Houck]: So I’m a little scared of giving Sam Altman too much of my data, but it’s only your eyeball. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: It’s only your eye. [Michael Houck]: It’s only, it’s only proof that I’m a real person. Yeah. [Conference Room (Tyler VanderVeer) - Speaker 1]: But yeah, man, look, I dig this. [Michael Houck]: You clearly get it. [Michael Houck]: Um, I dig your vibe. I think we could partner well together. Uh, you know, I like working with people who I feel like are going to be, you know, good people to, to work with and things like that. So it’s important to me. But yeah, I guess just keep me in the loop and I can send over the stuff so we can help out maybe with the rays on our side too. But you know, no promises on what comes out of that. But we can we can take some shots. But yeah, I mean, we’d love to we’d love to help out with social. And if you want to layer on a newsletter or anything like that, we can do that too. So we can talk about it. But just keep me in the loop with the race. [Conference Room (Tyler VanderVeer) - Speaker 1]: Yeah. And I also like Like I could send over my business plan or like my pitch deck to see your thoughts. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I’m traveling up to SF tomorrow, so I’m going to be tough to reach for the next few days. No worries. But I can get something back to you next weekend, let’s say. [Conference Room (Tyler VanderVeer) - Speaker 1]: And where are you based out of LA? [Michael Houck]: Nowhere right now. I’m a nomadic. I’ve been nomadic since December. I was in New York for a bit before that. [Conference Room (Tyler VanderVeer) - Speaker 1]: Oh, nice. OK, well, if you’re in Southern California on Friday, we’re doing a launch party at Local bar, we’re gonna have like one whatever. It’s cool. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I don’t think I booked my flight back from SF yet So maybe I’ll maybe I’ll pop down to cheap flight. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, whatever. [Michael Houck]: Just let me know Where is it in is on what side or where is it? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: It’s Newport Beach. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. Oh nice. Okay, so get down to see Thanks, brother, it was great meeting you maybe you to talk more soon and yeah, keep me in the loop on the race I will thank you so much Michael. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: I appreciate it. See you dude. Bye