- Duration: 38 min
- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01JXWY1TAG6MSQFBQQQZWFG929 (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JXWY1TAG6MSQFBQQQZWFG929)
Transcript
[Blake Stewart]: listing clients. [Blake Stewart]: Cool. Looks like the last four meetings scheduled were not Valley. [Michael Houck]: So yeah, I’ve had two calls today. One of them was a guy who was in launch house who just found my Calendly and wanted fundraising advice, which was great. And the second one was an old friend from Uber who wants go-to-market help, but not content specifically. So I don’t know if there’s anything for us to do there or not, but it’s not ghostwriting. But I have three more calls this afternoon about it. [Blake Stewart]: So we’ll see. OK. OK. Yeah. Yeah, I got one with Mantis as well today. Okay. [Michael Houck]: Uh, yeah, that’s the next one. That’s right after, after this. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Nice. [Michael Houck]: And then I have a referral from one of our old vendors at launch house referred me to somebody. And then another one that I don’t know where it came from, from Genesis fund. Yeah, that was Valley Genesis fund to VC. [Blake Stewart]: Uh, I think so. Yeah. I thought that was tomorrow. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. Oh, cool. No, it’s, Oh, yeah, there, VC in Boston. Yeah, he was really receptive. [Blake Stewart]: He said, we actually need some help with X content right now. Nice. OK, so maybe we go 0 for 2 in the morning, 3 for 3 in the afternoon. [Michael Houck]: We’ll find out. There we go. All right, yeah. [Ben Ornstein]: That’s the mindset. [Michael Houck]: But yeah, so no, I’m just trying to get everything done today before I head off to SF tomorrow. So I’m probably going to want to keep this relatively brief, because a bunch of stuff still to do this afternoon. But yeah, excited for SF. Actually, I’m having lunch with Andrew on Wednesday while I’m there. So that’ll be nice. Oh, funny. Nice. That’ll be awesome. Yeah, I’ll put that on my calendar, actually. [Blake Stewart]: Have you two ever met in person? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: No. [Blake Stewart]: That’s how it’s a day and age. [Michael Houck]: I have to make my way to LA. So Blake, you and I can, I’ve met Ben in person, but yeah. Yeah, you and Ben, yeah. Yeah, Ben I have, yeah. We had dinner in Philly actually. Nice. Okay, so let’s jump into it. Let’s talk about ads. So ads are moving. Um, no drop in CPA. I still haven’t fixed the landing page, figure out what’s going on there. So the conversion is still bad. Uh, like 36%, so up a little bit, but not where we want it to be. Um, but yeah, CPA is still hovering around $3. Um, we're finally starting to see some of the spark loop folks from like a month ago come through. So, uh, confirmation rate is low. It's like, 15% so far for like old enough cohorts. So 15% convert, which means that our impact to EPS is only like 16 cents, which is not great. So that's why we launched the deep view thing last night. I had a conversation scheduled with a friend also who does do an ad agency, I would prefer to just like do a consulting call with him and then we implement whatever he tells us, but a $3 CPA is not great. So I want to get that down to two. So I need to find some way to, um, to do that. Um, but this guy’s just pretty legit. He works with a bunch of big newsletters. So we’ll see what he says. Um, honestly though, I feel comfortable scaling at $3. The problem is the monetization on the backend isn’t there, right? Like, We feel good that this will drive some ghostwriting signups, and we have no evidence of that yet. We only need one per month in order for it to work out at the current rate, and if we obviously increase it, that number will need to go up. But currently, the case study library does not convert well enough, and we don’t really have another offer to make. That will convert better. So, something to brainstorm on this week is just like what we should be doing there, because if we want to grow the newsletter to 200K subscribers or more on Beehive, obviously on Substack we have our lifetime audience, but on Beehive, then we need an offer that we’re sure will convert with like a quick payback period. So, whether that’s repositioning conditioning the case studies in some way or the membership or something, or whether it’s creating something totally new and spending a couple of weeks just putting some bandwidth on that to make something that’ll convert. Whether it’s high ticket or low ticket, we should think about that. A tough part is we know that our audience as founders, especially as early stage founders, they are cash constrained. And so we need to think about, is it better to offer another high ticket offer or just maybe reposition to target more people who we think would be interested in ghostwriting and lay into that, and kind of accept lower volume, lower frequency, or do we try to find a lower-priced product that will convert a high percentage of them to make the payback period faster and worth it? My preference would be a low-ticket offer just because we then get that capital back quicker. We don’t have to hop on calls. There’s no sales process. It’s just an impulse purchase for them. But, um, finding something that will do that for our audience. I don’t know what that is. So we need to brainstorm that. Not necessarily right now, just kind of throwing it out there into the ether. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Blake Stewart]: I mean, that makes me think of the membership though, once again, but yeah. [Michael Houck]: We’ve tried the membership in a few different ways. We tried it as a content focused subscription, like premium version of the newsletter. We tried it around. Telegram community slash circle community at one point, um, and doing live events and things like that. Um, probably could have put more into that, but at the same time it didn’t convert at a high enough rate, at least the way we were pitching it then. And then, so that’s why we repositioned it to be a one-time purchase for just the case study library as the main thing. And that actually drove some sales. We’ve made, we’ve made some revenue off of that. Um, but not enough to cover our costs on ads, basically. So I think the choice is, one, is there a subscription product that makes sense? My guess is probably no, but maybe there is. Two, second option would be, can we either reposition the case studies or create some other one-time purchase product That would convert a high enough rate and then if the answer is no there then okay we have to go high ticket so. Do we go after people who are more likely to be interested in ghostwriting and sort of shift the focus of our targeting a little bit or do we. Create some other ticket offer for these founders but again I think that unless it’s. Offering to help grow their business, I think is less likely to be successful because of the fact that most of our founders are relatively early stage. This is kind of the core problem of scaling the newsletter that we’ve had for a while. We’ve sort of deprioritized it over the last year because we’re getting the illustrating agency off the ground. We’ve been having success with that and plan to obviously continue to grow that. So it’s just sort of been this problem in the background that I think now, as we’re trying to grow it again, we’re running into. So we should just solve it, but I don’t know what the answer is right now. So maybe next week when we chat, when we have this call on Monday, let’s all come up with some ideas for what we could do there, spend some time this week thinking about It sounds good. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: So that’s ads. Content side. [Michael Houck]: So the Telegram script is done. [Michael Houck]: I left a couple comments, Ben, for you. I’m sure you probably already saw them this morning and probably addressed them or what have you. Yeah, I did. I’m recording that. In an hour and a half. So we’ll have that video in production this week. Maybe they get it done this week, maybe not. No big deal. We can push it out next Saturday, if so. But that’ll be good. And then when I get back from SF, gonna do another one on Friday slash Saturday next week. So we’ll be back on track there. Posted on social this morning. So back to that and have batched some content out for the next few days too. We should have stuff going out every day while I’m in SF, which is nice and Don’t think there’s any other adjustments needed there Sponsors, how are we doing with the existing folks and just in general with the phone? [Blake Stewart]: Not as good as I want so we got QA source Um, that’s the big one top of mind. So need to kind of push the invoice. Um, I think I will, as soon as they book a time with you. Um, I could probably try and pitch it earlier saying that, you know, we’re going to do our research. We’re ready to fully dive in, but want some commitment from them. [Michael Houck]: Um, so before we have been going there and do like hours of research on them, they need to pay for sure. [Blake Stewart]: Right. Okay. So I’ll probably, I’ll send something. Along those lines this week. And yeah, keep pushing that. But with that, it’ll be great to get over the line. The Delete Me one, that’s just, as you know, it’s been a headache with paperwork and freaking wording. But all in all, that’s an 8K package. So that’s coming over soon. So it’s 20K. That’s lined up well. Blaze AI, we had them committed. [Ben Ornstein]: He was fully in. [Ben Ornstein]: It was like he was gonna do the invoice like tomorrow, the day, like literally as we hopped off the call, didn’t. Yeah. [Blake Stewart]: And then he went on vacation and then they ghosted me. So that’s annoying. Other than that, there’s just a handful in the pipeline, but I need to get that up. Angelica’s going to, she said she’s still estimating her hours, but I’ve kind of given her the goal of, you know, increasing, doubling the newsletters she’s subscribed to. So that we could get more sponsors reaching out to them. So that’s how we found them. [Michael Houck]: What’s her process for finding those? [Blake Stewart]: I gave her a long list and kind of told her what we’re looking for. And she went through the source tab that we have on the air table with all of them there. And half of them aren’t active anymore, so just trying get that number up. [Michael Houck]: One thing you could do is both on, you could do this for both Substack and Beehive, but I’ll do it with Beehive first. So if you have Rina loop into this, cause Angelic doesn’t have access to our Beehive account, but if you have Rina go into Beehive and go into the boosts tab and just look at everyone who’s, every newsletter that’s paying for other people to refer them, that’s probably a list of newsletters that are making money and therefore who probably have some sponsors coming in. Um, so she, Rena could create a big Google sheet with those or just add them to the air table directly. And then Angelica could go in and like do the research on the sponsors from there. So that’s one thought. Um, the other thought on sub stack would be, um, you know, sub stack has sort of social networks that has more organic searching that you can do. So she could search by topic, there’s like tags and stuff, and just find like the top 200 newsletters in a couple different niches and add them to there. Okay. So we need to do both of these because she has access to both of my accounts on each one, but you can just loop her in to do that and she’ll do it. [Blake Stewart]: Okay, that sounds good. Um, I gave her access to, uh, our sponsor gap and paved. Uh, and then there’s another one called who sponsors stuff. So there’s a couple of databases out there that she’s kind of filtering through and searching for within, but, um, we’ll get those going too. [Michael Houck]: Um, we’ll find this guy. Oh, there’s his name. Okay. That’s kind of like under. The radar. But he’s, he runs another one of these type of sites that we and we partner with him on some stuff before, from what Max says his was his was the most like the best tool, basically, this is his ex I don’t know what the tool is called. [Blake Stewart]: Okay. Okay. Thank you. [Ben Ornstein]: And another small one I can add in when I’m fully done. I mean, I guess the The newsletters are in there. The one that Min requested to find newsletters for. So Venus put together a list of a bunch of newsletters for Min’s partnership. Sorry, this is for sponsors. [Michael Houck]: We want to pull from them? Yeah, I mean, it’s another source of potential newsletters. That’s what I meant. Yeah, in case any of those aren’t already in the list, yeah, we should absolutely include them too, assuming they’re in the same niche, which I think they would be knowing what it’s going for. [Ben Ornstein]: Do we send that to him, by the way? Not yet. I’m still doing the outreach for all those people. Okay. We’re a little behind because we have to go back on some of the other ones, and there’s like seven of them. [Michael Houck]: We have the… We’re building that… Sorry to go off track here. We’re building that centralized list of all the folks though, right? It feels like each time we do one of these, it’s taking multiple weeks, right? Condensing that timeline? [Ben Ornstein]: Yeah, I’ve been trying to add to that centralized list. I started it and then yeah, yeah, not in full, but it’s it had that has been started. Okay, yeah, because I think, yeah, we don’t want to take too long for these folks. [Michael Houck]: Otherwise, they will, like lose interest and we’ll have to just sell them on it twice. [Ben Ornstein]: Basically, I was gonna follow up later today about the aviation one and the other one because there were, were pretty much Cap those two. [Michael Houck]: Okay. Yeah, I mean we’ll do what we can there just send over like what you have and we’ll uh, we’ll figure it out. Um But okay, so okay waiting on the two big sponsor folks to come through we feel pretty confident But obviously, you know, they haven’t paid yet. So tbd um and then I will get the new leads from drake and we can use some of those for ghostwriting and we can use some of those for sponsorships as well because I think we have both domains, so you can just sort of, you know, obviously don’t hit them at the same time, right? [Blake Stewart]: Like different lists for each one, but Two cold emails from [Michael Houck]: So yeah, we can, we can use that. I guess more people in there, too. [Blake Stewart]: OK. Yeah, that’s a whole other conversation. That would be good. I pulled a list from Apollo. And I did people who are hiring, founders who are hiring, seed to series B, hiring for marketing. So I don’t think leading with the workshop makes the most sense Okay. So I might just try some other stuff with them. But, um, yeah, once I have Drake’s database, that’ll be, that’ll be easier. [Michael Houck]: Um, what’s, what’s the thought around the workshop? [Blake Stewart]: Uh, I’m going to pull a different list from Apollo. That’s like a smaller employee size. I think like the company that’s like under 10 employees, um, maybe, Maybe hiring for a different word. I’m not too sure yet. Yeah, I don’t know. Do you have any ideas for pulling contacts there? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I mean, I just, I want to, as much as we can, I want to stay away from like two early stage folks who aren’t going to have the budget to pay. Like, I’d rather get two people to sign up if both of them convert than if 100 people sign up, but none of them convert, you know? I think we’ll get really good response rates to the workshop from the early stage folks, but I have my doubts that that’ll end up being a valuable thing for us, right? So the later stage folks, they’re obviously super busy, they may not have time for a workshop, whatever, maybe there’s a different approach we can take with them, but I do think that they are more in line with longer term, better customers for us. [Blake Stewart]: Yeah, yeah. Um, so let’s just blow it up. [Michael Houck]: Cause maybe we get some people out of the earlier stage cohort too. Like, I’m not saying we shouldn’t do that. I’m just saying that like, we shouldn’t necessarily write that off for folks too. No, that makes sense. Okay. [Blake Stewart]: Um, yeah, I mean, right now I think I’m just going to try a little bit of everything and see what sticks, but yeah, I go after people who have money to pay. So, um, yeah, I have it finally. That strategy of how to pull the best contacts there. So kind of relying on Drake’s list, but still kind of exploring Apollo. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, he has some he has some interesting ways to cut the data. He obviously has built this stuff up for for a long time. So I’ll get in there, I’ll reactivate my account on his like platform or whatever. And we can we can start using that. I’ll get that to you today. And then the domains for cold outbound are sort of ready to go to so we can and it’s good timing. [Blake Stewart]: Yep, perfect. [Blake Stewart]: Do you want me to create a product in Valley? Do you want me to do some Valley campaigns around the workshop? Yep. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I think that’s a great idea. We should probably pivot as much as we can in Valley to the workshop for the next 10 days, right? Because it’s in 10 days, so yeah. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: OK. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: All right, we’ll do that. [Michael Houck]: And just give Rina a heads up about that, too, so she doesn’t Yeah. [Blake Stewart]: Okay. Yeah, a lot of work to be done around that. While we’re on the Valley conversation, yeah, so 31 total messages, or meetings. And so, I don’t know, like, three of those, five of those, he’s still kind of comfortable, confident that they were really positive. So, Going on a couple more. [Michael Houck]: I mean I say five five to ten. I felt good about they just haven’t they haven’t going so I’m trying to be self-critical here too and think like am I doing something wrong on these calls? So maybe maybe I’ll send you a recording or two of the calls and you let me know if I’m fucking something up, but I Think fine. [Blake Stewart]: Yeah, I think it’s more about this qualifying them up front. I which I’m trying to train the AI as much as we can to do that. And Raina knows that as well. So yeah, I mean, it’s still coming out. It’s about like 200 messages per meeting. So once we have some HubSpot data, we could see, but that’s gonna be, I guess, a little skewed with, you know, leading with a workshop. [Michael Houck]: So it should be a lot better. We just made today our third payment to Valve. So we’ve like completed the contract that we agreed to, which is a three month. So one more month and then they have three weeks that they’ve added on to that for us. So effectively we have almost two more months of being able to use it before it’s make a decision. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: All right. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. [Michael Houck]: So that gives us enough time to get some good data on, the outbound through HubSpot side of things, too. Perfect. OK. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Cool. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: All right. [Blake Stewart]: I feel good about all that. Just have some more to do on it. The last thing I had was imports. So kind of got the system down. We’re going to be doing daily. I’m going to pause Foundry Journey and Viral Examples, like your message said. I’ve got a reminder to come back to you in about three weeks to talk about that. The other ones are, yeah, I mean, it’s good to go. I’ve got the process down. We scrape, filter, check for duplicates, clean them, share them to Reina. Just needed to kind of standardize some of that. Wanted to pass off location filter to Angelica, but yeah, we’ll see how that goes. [Michael Houck]: her hours in both of these ways if we need to. I just want to make sure, because before, I think she had questionable instincts about how to do it. So I want to make sure that we’re not inflating for no reason. [Blake Stewart]: Yeah. And the filtering could be more of just a one-off job that’s just a couple hours every now and then added. Because I could just give her a huge list to filter out multiple accounts that are imported. And so that way, it’s not like a weekly process. [Michael Houck]: It’s just like a one-off big job. Cool. [Blake Stewart]: That works. [Blake Stewart]: That’s totally fine. OK. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I’ll let her know she can have a couple hours to do that, but it’s not a consistent thing. All right. OK. I think that’s good then. I’m still optimistic that we get A couple of these valley folks to close, uh, but obviously after today my calls this week are are minimal I think I might have a couple coming through. [Blake Stewart]: Yeah, I think that’s uh, when I pass this off the rain, I think there is just some there’s still a lot of Messages that need to be responded to so we’re I mean I need to get back in there too and help her um As much as possible, so I think that that’ll tick back up pretty soon It could be tomorrow Challenge myself to get you three more meetings by Wednesday Sound like a plan. [Ben Ornstein]: Um, all right anything urgent that we’re not talking about on either either of y’all’s side here I’m gonna get you the uh, I’m fishing pulling the stuff together for rafael so he can finish he can input the um actual rates for the um anti-medal campaign Um, and then also draft that email for you. Um, shortly. Cool. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: Cause Johan will follow up in like a couple hours if we don’t, um, I’ll do that right after we have off here. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: And then let’s just make sure that’s charged on his account and he has a deposit equivalent set up so that it’s all covered and discount doesn’t go negative or whatever, but, um, okay. Um, and then, yeah, I guess that’ll be that for that. And then we’ll talk about the other campaigns later as well. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yep. [Blake Stewart]: Yeah the The event I mean besides marketing do you need like 10 days away? You feel good about? [Michael Houck]: content of the events you feel like Content we’re set Blake and I talked about it on Friday and we have an outline set up and he’s gonna flush it out when he gets back from New York later this week, so we’ll do a dry run probably first half of next week and and go from there. But I’m just going to be looking for places to interject CTAs or little subtle ways of saying, hey, we’re really good at this, things like that. So yeah, he’s going to be leading it. I’ll be the hype man and just interjecting with my POV as needed. And yeah, I mean, we want to position him as the guy who knows this stuff because he’s is the editor, right? We want to position me as the guy who they trust, basically. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: So I feel really good about it. [Michael Houck]: We got some signups from the one newsletter. I’m going to include it again tomorrow and then again on Saturday and just keep pushing it. I think we’re up to 28 RSVPs now. And then he’s going to be pushing it too. I’m going to push it on social starting later this week. And yeah, we’ll see how it goes. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: All right. [Michael Houck]: If it goes well, like if we get calls booked from the workshop in the day or two following it, then I think we should just start scheduling out a couple more of these to do through the rest of July into August and everything. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: 100%, definitely. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Cool. [Ben Ornstein]: I’ll get you a Tuesday send. I haven’t started that yet. I have a lot of stuff. But I haven’t put it in Beehive yet. [Michael Houck]: Also, just want to say, you crushed the Telegram research, by the way. I literally took, like, I mean, the quotes you found were fantastic. I interjected a ton of them into the script. And also for the script, I even just, like, took chunks of what you said and, like, tweaked wording to make it sound a little bit more like me. But yeah, I mean, you basically, like, compiled the whole outline of the video. I just then tweaked the sort of angle and how I puzzle pieced it together. Really nice job. Thanks. [Ben Ornstein]: Yeah. No, that one, I found the whole story for that one. I felt like, which was good. So I’ll try to keep doing that. [Michael Houck]: It’s a bit of a shorter video. I think it’s only going to be around a five to maybe tops six minute video, which I guess is fine. We’ll see how the algorithm treats it. But it was just a very concise single point type video, which I actually I actually like, so. [Ben Ornstein]: I commented back a notion and said that I think it works for this one. And it’s going to be interesting to test that length too, because we haven’t done that short anyway, so. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, we’ll find out. I think we should try to keep 10 minutes as our max for these, just because if it’s under 10 minutes, we can post it on LinkedIn and Substack natively. Not threads, because threads is like a two minute limit or something like that. Yeah, posting natively in more places is definitely the move. We got, like, I want to say, like, 20-something likes on the Clarno one on Substack. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Cool. [Michael Houck]: Considering the fact that we barely posted there is pretty good. Definitely. [Ben Ornstein]: This week, I’m going to be working on the Apple one as well. I know we have the Peter Thiel one to kind of figure out, finalize, kind of, like, but then when the angle’s finalized for that one, that’s when I’ll dive in deep into research. [Michael Houck]: So I think, yeah, so one key thing is that like, there’s two types of these, right? So the Peter Thiel and the Apple one are like, we can post those anytime, right? There’s no urgency to post that next week or whatever, because there’s no real news happening around those. What I want you to do is sort of, and I’m going to be doing this too, and Blake, if you ever notice anything, feel free to share it as well, but what I really want us to do is if we see things like the Pavel interview with Tucker that came out, that’s his first interview since being arrested or whatever. That drives urgency. That means that there’s interest in that topic that’s going to happen. People are going to want more opinions on that. And so it should push us to do that video sooner. So just keep your ear to the ground. And if there’s interesting things happening in AI or in the tech world or startups or whatever, just Like, don’t feel like the Peter Thiel, the Apple one, we have to spend the next two weeks on those. We can totally say, hey, you know, we do that in six months, we’ll be fine, right? But if there’s urgency, if there’s cultural zeitgeist that we can capture, we should. [Ben Ornstein]: Yep. No, I totally understand that. Okay. [Michael Houck]: I’ll do that. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Cool. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. [Michael Houck]: I think that’s it guys. So let’s hop off and get the half back, but I’ll let you guys know how the calls this afternoon go. Maybe we, maybe we got We’ve got some good ones coming and I’m excited for the Mantis one in particular.