- Duration: 49 min
- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01JYMC207W37C51B10S21CH2MB (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JYMC207W37C51B10S21CH2MB)
Transcript
[Blake Stewart]: Hey. Thank you. [Blake Stewart]: Oh, joining in two minutes. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: No rush. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah, that’s awesome. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah, it’s cool. [Michael Houck]: And they reached out about, um, we’re talking to them about, uh, what sponsorships [Blake Stewart]: Yeah, I was talking to them about sponsorships. They’re not ready for that because they’re working on launching. And I was like, oh, well, we could help you with that. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, we can. [Michael Houck]: Matter of fact. [Conference Room (Barak Ben Noon) - Speaker 1]: Is there a founder on? Oh, there we go. Hello. [Blake Stewart]: Sorry we’re late, guys. Nice. Got your email. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: How’s it going? [Conference Room (Barak Ben Noon) - Speaker 1]: Good, good. Appreciate all the shout outs over the last couple of issues. Yeah, really appreciate it. Glad to be involved. [Michael Houck]: It looks like you guys are building something cool, so I figured let’s pass it along to some more folks. [Conference Room (Barak Ben Noon) - Speaker 2]: Yeah, I appreciate it. I appreciate it. So I think that what we are looking for is someone to help us experiment over different channels and strategies for marketing. We are in a competitive space. That the competitive advantage feature-wise is honestly slim. And we’re looking for strong distribution channels. We are great builders and unfortunately we’re stuck in a place where our skill set is not what the most matters, which is marketing. So we’re learning and we’re experimenting. And I think you guys have a great distribution trial. And we just want to see what you can offer us in terms of experimental trials and how you measure that. Yeah. Yeah, makes sense. [Michael Houck]: I think one thing I’ll throw out there at the beginning, and then I think Blake will will kind of take the lead from from there is, you know, I feel like when that when this is the case, when there’s a space that’s competitive, there’s maybe not feature parity, but at least feature similarity between different products. And especially when it’s a new sort of fast emerging space where I mean, I would imagine the product’s going to change as you guys grow and as as the space space evolves. What really stands out in that type of situation is a strong voice, strong persona. You know, I think that we even saw this in more traditional SEO with the boring marketer, right? He kind of came out of nowhere, had the support of Greg Eisenberg. And they built a big brand and a big agency around that. The same can be true for products, not just services, where some sort of, whether it’s you guys or whether it’s someone else in the space who’s trying to make a lot of noise, building that level of trust through either yourself or through a pseudonymous identity, either one, that’s a strong way to stand out and make people go to you and build gravity around that over competitors who have maybe similar, but even if it’s like slightly less effective products. [Conference Room (Barak Ben Noon) - Speaker 1]: Got it. So I guess your, your, uh, your biggest recommendation is just to put our personal brand at the forefront. Essentially. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: My, my first thought would be to differentiate that way. Pick one of you guys who you want to be sort of the public face of this, who’s going to be on most of the sales calls and, um, and, and be building that trust with people in sort one-to-one or one-to-many type format. So we can obviously help you guys out through the newsletter and things like that, too. But that’s just a high-level recommendation I would make, first and foremost. [Conference Room (Barak Ben Noon) - Speaker 1]: That makes sense. So essentially, to continue with founder let sales, just keep going. No, that makes sense. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, but even if you get to a point where you guys are too busy and you’re not the ones who are sales calls at that point, at least having that first touch point be this person who people recognize and they’re booking through your Twitter or your LinkedIn or something like that, or a newsletter that’s from you, maybe less so than the brand and just like product updates and things like that. Those are the ways to sort of build those sticky relationships, get shared between friends when the product is more comparable. [Conference Room (Barak Ben Noon) - Speaker 2]: Something I should have mentioned. Are going strong on the self-serve motion starting this weekend. Because our price point of $4.99 is not entry price quite yet. It's not cheap for everyone to experiment around also. It's kind of in between. So our goal is to find a way to market our self-serve without us having to be on the call. I think, on average, we need a call and a half on average, just close the deal, right? Like some people are one, some two, definitely not three, unless it's like a big enterprise. So we need to start figuring out how do we drive people into our website. Top or final. [Conference Room (Barak Ben Noon) - Speaker 1]: Before that, just to maybe qualify this call, do you guys offer marketing services? Like do you act as an agency or is it a website? No, I just want to make sure we're in the right place, that we're just dumping our marketing struggles on these two guys without context. [Conference Room (Barak Ben Noon) - Speaker 1]: I thought we were just hanging out, guys. [Conference Room (Barak Ben Noon) - Speaker 1]: No, I thought, you know, you could run a cool newsletter in the community and it has nothing to do with outsource agency. I just want to see what we've got. [Michael Houck]: We've got a couple of things, so I'll give the brief... Actually, Blake, do you want to give sort of the brief overview of what we offer? [Blake Stewart]: Yeah, so there's a lot. First and foremost, I got a link already pulled up here. You guys should try and attend this event tomorrow. So we have a couple different products I shared in the emails between Megaphone Studio and Megaphone Network. So as Hop was kind of saying, building up your own personal brand, kind of top of funnel, sharing it across social medias and newsletters, we can help amplify that. So we can match you with other creators creators in the space, and really help reach new audience, build more followers, and scale up your megaphone. You could get louder across the mountain behind you. And then with that as well, as you guys keep building, you're going to run out of time to write the copy, write the content. And so we offer a service where, essentially, we just add you to our Slack channel once a week. You kind of just drop some voice notes of what's going on, what you guys learned, what you want to talk about. We match you with a writer who will keep your voice. And we'll just continue to kind of help you market what's going on and drive people back to Anvil. So a couple of ways to start there. [Michael Houck]: We really view it as like two sides of the same coin, like content and distribution. So as Blake mentioned, like our creator network, we have, I think it's like 500 5 or 550, somewhere in there, creators with 60 million combined followers, something like that. And they're spread out across niches, so not all of them are relevant. But there's folks in there who 1,000% have the audience you guys would want to get in front of And so basically, there's a couple ways to use that. One is more traditional, like sponsored posts, product testimonials, getting featured on their channels, and things like that. Others are, if you have content you're we can rope them in in the moment, like within an hour, to go and amplify that. So comment on it, repost it, quote it, anything like that, to get their audience to see the content you're actually putting out to. So that's one thing. And then the other side, as Blake mentioned, is we do have a highly skilled team who can help take that over in a fractional chief content officer style, where it would be, I'd be your primary POC, I'm not going to offload you to someone on the team, it would be me. And we talk strategy, we create the content and can build a whole sort of omni-channel funnel for you guys around that. [Conference Room (Barak Ben Noon) - Speaker 1]: Got it. What would that option kind of look like in more detail? How many pieces of content? How are you guys posting it on our own CMS, your CMS, your distribution? What would the kind of package look like, Yeah. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: So we have some flexibility there. Um, basically it would depend how many accounts we're doing this for. Like we'll be doing this for one of you, both of you, you guys and the brand account, you know, like what's, we would need to figure out what that strategy is, but let's use one account as an example. So if we're going to use one account, uh, we'd be first of all, cross posting this across X and LinkedIn. And if we wanted to do even like Instagram threads, there's actually a, it's pretty easy to get impressions there right now. Cause it's, It's kind of white space. So we talk about that. But that's all sort of the same thing. And batches of content would depend on strategy. So for example, if you wanted us to do long form, and we talked about that, and that made sense, then it would probably be something like three to maybe four long form per week, depending on package. Or like a shorter form, quippier personality type of posting that would be like seven to 10 more shots on goal per week. And they'd identify sort of thought leaders in the niche, and they'd be commenting from you on those people's viral posts pretty early on, so that those comments get views, those people view your profile if it's insightful or funny in some way, and then they become your followers too. That strategy works really well, especially for the first couple thousand followers for a new account. And then we'd also sort of loop in the creator network to posts that are we think are high potential or doing well too. So depending on volume, that could range on the low end at 2K, our standard package is 4K, and then can go up from there depending on how many accounts we're doing and if we're layering in a newsletter and funnel design and things like that. [Conference Room (Barak Ben Noon) - Speaker 1]: I guess my main concern precisely because the product will change, the industry will change, and really the entire thing is still fairly new and in terms of the geo space, certainly around long form, right? Like where would the ideation for the content come from, the research, really the unique insights in a way where for FinTech certainly makes sense, right? The space is, it's a single entity, right? It's a known quantity, that's what I'm trying to say, right? Versus in this new space where things are moving fast half the value of us as founders is that we are close to the customer. We are close to the tech. We have a tighter pulse essentially on what is happening. How would that translate to the content being written? Yeah, so we don't really use AI in our process. [Michael Houck]: Like we'll use it maybe for inspiration sometimes, but in terms of writing the content, it's all our team who's getting in there and writing it in your voice. And as Blake mentioned, the voice notes are really all we need from you. So you and I and a writer from our team would do a kickoff call, and then they're sort of your writing partner. After that, it's all async. We'd set up a Slack connect channel. And basically every week, we'd be doing research in the space, we'd be trying to keep just as cutting edge as you guys are probably, you know, not quite as cutting edge as you guys are, but you know, doing our best. And every Monday, we would send you some like questions or interesting posts that we found that we want your POV on. And all you need to do is sort of open up Slack on your phone, record a two to five minute voice note rambling on it. And the more sort of off the cuff that is, the more unique we can like make it your tonality, your intonation, your voice. So it sounds like you, and also can capture those insights with like minimal time for you per week. So that's sort of how we do it. [Conference Room (Barak Ben Noon) - Speaker 2]: And then we handle scheduling and all that. Got it. Is there a way to gradually see out smaller and smaller? Honestly, like I said, because we're experimenting, we don't have a good pulse of what works, what doesn't work. And we need to learn as well. So is it a neat way to start a small package and kind of with milestone of how we quantify what happened each time and how we can increase, you know, if you give us the traffic, we'll be happy to increase as much as we can take. But how do we build that initial traction first? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, so right now, there's not a great solution for that any agency that's going to take you guys on for a week or two, or even a month is just taking your money. Because when you're working with especially a human writer, you know, there's research needs to go into it. There's there's ramp up time. There's things like that. So our minimum is two months. But we are actually currently working on an agent that would be able to do a lot of this a maybe without some of the human touch to it at a lower price point as like an entry level offer. So it's not live yet, but within the next couple of weeks, it should be so we could keep in touch about that as we get ready to take it live. And maybe we could even do it at a reduced rate for you guys as like a pilot type customer there. But but yeah, so that that would be what I would say. The other thing I would say is that, you know, social is a compounding thing, right? You're not just it's not like, hey, you know, we got three leads from this post. We got 10 leads from this post. From this whatever right it's like you're building trust and you're building reputation and you're building the idea of being the guy that people think of in their brain when they think about a new topic right so for newly emerging spaces like geo it's incredibly valuable because there's a ton of white space there and the amount of people who are entering into that space is going to increase and so if you can be positioned as the node in that network early you see an outside size percentage of those compounding benefits. [Conference Room (Barak Ben Noon) - Speaker 2]: And for the two to 4,000, what's the, how do we get, how many, how many counts do we get? Let's say it. Well, how does the menu looks like more precise? Right. [Michael Houck]: So let's say we wanted to do full content and also like, and full, I mean like the, the batch sizes that I mentioned before. So three to four long form or seven to 10 short form or some mixture of those plus content ops support on the account, plus some credits for the creator network every month, that would be a $4,000 package for an account. If we wanted to say, hey, let’s use the creator network more ad hoc, maybe do slightly smaller content batches to start just to see how this channel is working for us, we could drop it to 3K and then 2K, respectively. If we wanted to do multiple accounts at that smaller package size, we could do those for a bit under 4K, because we give it percent discount when we do multiple accounts. [Conference Room (Barak Ben Noon) - Speaker 1]: Sure. Can we see the output? I’m having a little trouble kind of envisioning the ultimately the deliverable here. Sure. Yeah, I can’t. [Michael Houck]: I mean, for confidentiality reasons, ghostwriting, I can’t send you like, hey, here’s somebody’s account that we go straight for and they’re doing all these leads and it’s all because of us. Right. But what I can send you is some posts from them that are anonymized. And that have seen good traction, and I can speak to sort of the results of that. [Conference Room (Barak Ben Noon) - Speaker 1]: So happy to share that. Sure. Sure. I think seeing the quality of content, the kinds of content, and any kind of, like, quantification of results, I guess maybe the best kind of output, what are you monitoring week over week? What numbers are you seeing maybe, let’s say, in the last two months of working with someone? And seeing the numbers, and what numbers are you tracking would be very helpful to understand the kind of impact here. [Michael Houck]: For a specific account or do you mean like overall like what am I using for my personal accounts? [Conference Room (Barak Ben Noon) - Speaker 1]: Any account for a client. That’s where you’re looking at. [Michael Houck]: Yeah I mean it’s gonna obviously results are gonna vary from client to client but I can share you some. Here’s average client, here’s best-in-class client so we maybe fall somewhere in the middle there. One client who comes mind who’s sort of targeting similar folks like these like, you know, business owners, startup founders, decision makers on marketing and growth. You know, they are, they’ve been a client for, I want to say, six months now, maybe five, five, six months, and they’ve gone from 1100 followers to 17,000. And actually, that might be higher, because they every week they’re growing like crazy right now. So that’s like a best in class type client. And they’re now sort of getting invited to speak at conferences in their niche and all these things. And they actually launched an entirely new arm of their business, entirely separate brand on the back of this, and have been able to build it up to six figures of ARR already. So it’s been very successful for them. And we can use some of the same things that we see working for them with you guys. In terms of metrics that we’re tracking, I mean, it sort of depends on your goals. It sounds like for you guys, the number one thing is how many people are going forward as a lead, so booking a call or signing up or what have you, is that fair or would follower growth or impressions be more valuable? [Conference Room (Barak Ben Noon) - Speaker 1]: A little bit of both, a little bit. So I think if I’m really counting the North Star metric here, it would be signups. Yeah, that’s what I figured. [Michael Houck]: So that’s what a lot of our clients focus on. And then we also have some who look at followers as number one, like they just want to build a big personal brand and maybe they’re an exit. And founder in that case or something. But I think for you guys, the follower count will be more valuable than a normal company at your stage because the space is so early. But we’d obviously tailor it to sort of whichever you’d prefer. [Conference Room (Barak Ben Noon) - Speaker 2]: Got it. OK, makes sense. I think also, sounds good. I think we just need to discuss the two of us and see it. [Conference Room (Barak Ben Noon) - Speaker 1]: Seeing the content and seeing some metrics as well would be, I think, probably the next step, along with an outline of the packages. [Michael Houck]: That would probably be perfect. I’ll shoot over an email tonight, then, that includes some examples, like a variety of examples, and also just an outline of what we talked about, like a Notion doc, and some custom thoughts that’s based on this conversation too. And then if there’s, oh, just to be clear, are we thinking more X, LinkedIn, both? [Conference Room (Barak Ben Noon) - Speaker 1]: Like what’s your, where are you guys thinking it’s gonna be? LinkedIn, yeah, all the CMOs are, all the marketing folks are on LinkedIn. I’ve tried to crack X several times. I don’t have the perseverance. I don’t have the patience, honestly. [Conference Room (Barak Ben Noon) - Speaker 2]: I mean, again, we’ll, of a month of trial and X and see if we can get a result from that. [Michael Houck]: Cause we don’t know. [Michael Houck]: Right. I mean, we can always just cross post it to like, we can just write content for LinkedIn, tweak it slightly for X cross post it there. And you know, if we, if we hit gold on X, then we double down on that instead. Like that’s totally fine. Um, but it’s actually good. LinkedIn is a little easier, especially when you’re early stage. So, um, and especially when you’re going after, uh, CMOs. So it makes a lot of sense. [Conference Room (Barak Ben Noon) - Speaker 2]: Yep. Great, awesome. Thank you so much. I’m looking forward for it. I have a question for us, actually. You want to know about us? [Michael Houck]: I’m going to help you or… [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I mean, look, we’re sort of entering into this geo world, too. And so we’re trying to figure out, you know, whether it’s for Founding Journey, or whether it’s for sort of this megaphone ecosystem that we’re in the process of sort of combining into one business. Like, yeah, We need to do more of the programmatic SEO stuff like building the foundation with content first. I’m working on some ways to do that But yeah, I guess like what like what should we know about that? That might not be obvious like obviously like long tail keywords more important longer query length and things like that but like Where do you guys see it heading and like what should we be planning ahead for? [Conference Room (Barak Ben Noon) - Speaker 1]: I think You’re interestingly exceptionally well-positioned positioned to capitalize on Geo because the citation distribution between what works in Google and what works in ChatGPT and LLMs is very different. With Google, whatever, you have one of the top 10 results and really the top three matter. In ChatGPT, they might cite sources that are on page five of So, and the channels that they do usually refer to, Wikipedia obviously, let’s put that aside for a second, that’s a hard channel to crack, but Read.AI, Medium, kind of company’s own content, and for you that have such a wide network of real people, I hope real people, who, I mean, you’re never know, um, who. Essentially target in a very kind of specific way, read it and medium and amplify the voice, your voice. Once you’ve identified trends and keywords and topics to target, I think will be very, very effective, um, for you at least. Yeah. [Conference Room (Barak Ben Noon) - Speaker 2]: Cause, um, they care much more about domain authority than backlinks. Um, that’s why for you guys. Even a small player can beat a really big player as long as they have high quality content in the right places. And you guys have the way to put it in the right place. [Conference Room (Barak Ben Noon) - Speaker 1]: Yeah. And it really is very surprising around some of the links. Like they might reference like a Read.AI post from five years ago and no one has commented on it in like years. And then a re-engagement of activity, let’s say by real Read.AI users will move the needle a ton, as an example, right? The mods are notoriously tough to crack. Let me be delicate about that. [Conference Room (Barak Ben Noon) - Speaker 2]: If you can put a case study on each one of your clients of how well you did, you’re going to have a crazy, crazy mention rate because I’m sure your website that you’re working with has a relatively high authority rate. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. Personally, I’ve always under-indexed on SEO. I think we have high trust with our audience, but I think we’ve done a poor job historically with both businesses of building the infrastructure for Google to feel that same way. [Conference Room (Barak Ben Noon) - Speaker 1]: It is so much work. It is so much work. We’re building it ourselves now. Our domain is new, so we’re trying to ramp up to the main authority as well. [Michael Houck]: It’s a journey. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: A founding journey. A founding journey, there you go. [Michael Houck]: Well, I guess the other question would be, I’m thinking about can I create some agent in just like a simplistic thing in like Lindy or Gumloop or one of these tools that will spit out just tons of long-tail content based on what we see are opportunities. [Conference Room (Barak Ben Noon) - Speaker 2]: This is what we do, actually. [Conference Room (Barak Ben Noon) - Speaker 2]: We try and do it. [Conference Room (Barak Ben Noon) - Speaker 1]: The… Chachaputi really prioritizes new data and citations within the content. So if it’s fluff, it won’t be effective. But then if you have some kind of novel data, internal data, especially, right, like the internal success metrics, and we did so-and-so and resulted in so-and-so, and that answers a specific question, that would be effective. That would be pretty effective, probably. [Michael Houck]: Interesting. Okay, that’s good. [Conference Room (Barak Ben Noon) - Speaker 2]: I can just feed it tons of context about our clients then and that should be I’ll get on board you guys as a client for us. [Conference Room (Barak Ben Noon) - Speaker 1]: Just like give a dashboard and send a link like plug in After they give us two articles for free, what do you mean? [Michael Houck]: And you can just like see what’s how it looks like Yeah happy to keep talking about you guys too. So we could even do, you know, we could do at one point, we could do like, like a podcast episode, where I interview either one of you or both of you. And we go super deep on this. We obviously show the product, but also talk about like, what should founders be doing that they aren’t doing? Basically the same advice that you’re giving me. And then we could, we could do we could do something in the newsletter where we like, you know, distribute it through there or do a write up about it and things like that. So Blake can, Blake can talk to that, but yeah, we can do something there. [Blake Stewart]: I also think that’s why this would be such a good fit for us, you guys as a client. Cause I mean, such a new space. Uh, if we take the educational approach, we’re going to be wanting to learn more about your product and the space in general, which is what you need to be putting out there for your customers to learn anyway, why it’s important to, to use the product like So it’s kind of a win for us to kind of learn the space while working for you to kind of educate, you know more followers I’ll follow up. [Conference Room (Barak Ben Noon) - Speaker 1]: I’ll fall tonight with an email that just sort of covers everything that we talked about and You guys let me know what direction We want to go with this and we can we can test a couple things out and see how it does perfect I think that would be great Just kind of us seeing the the full picture of the offering and we’ll let you know really even tomorrow. [Michael Houck]: Yeah Take us a long time to make a decision Okay, are you guys are you guys based SF by the way, or where are you? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: We were in a sack now? [Michael Houck]: We’re back. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yep in New York. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Oh nice. [Michael Houck]: Okay. Where are you guys based? [Michael Houck]: Yeah in LA, I was in New York for a long time, but now I’m nomadding sort of trying to find a new spot. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: So we’ll see. [Michael Houck]: No, we’ll come back to New York. Don’t worry. [Conference Room (Barak Ben Noon) - Speaker 2]: Well, you know, next time I come back, I might not be able to buy any groceries. [Michael Houck]: So we’ll see. Under 40k a year dance for free. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, you know, it’s like there’s something there called incentives that I’m not sure everyone’s sort of picking up on. [Conference Room (Barak Ben Noon) - Speaker 1]: Next podcast episode, a gross The industry owner tries to build a new story. That’s interesting. [Michael Houck]: Don’t tempt me. I’ll do it. I’ll do it. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: But yeah. Okay. Awesome. [Conference Room (Barak Ben Noon) - Speaker 2]: Great to meet you guys. [Conference Room (Barak Ben Noon) - Speaker 1]: And yeah, we look forward to your follow-up. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Cool. Talk soon. Bye-bye. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: you