- Duration: 27 min
- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01JZ3CMSAK0YS9V31DCQESASNK (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JZ3CMSAK0YS9V31DCQESASNK)
Transcript
[Eric Burgess]: Yeah, I did like it. [Eric Burgess]: And I believe it. I actually I got I read your I read your news every time they come out. And I actually signed up for the Taplio thing too. Oh, nice. Cool. I did a post on it today. It actually it looks pretty good. [Michael Houck]: So I’m going to play with that for a little bit. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, Taplio is a tool that I’ve used for a long time. I know the founder, he’s like a killer operator. So I think he actually sold the business, but he’s still involved. So it’s a good It’s probably like the best dedicated LinkedIn scheduling tool that I’ve been able to find, at least. [Eric Burgess]: Well, I like to use it, and then I combine it with, I don’t know if you’ve heard of Napkin AI. [Eric Burgess]: I’ve heard of it. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: I haven’t used it. [Eric Burgess]: It’s pretty cool. It converts text into graphs and charts and whatnot. So if you’re trying to create really good visuals that are not necessarily photographic, but more like data, charts and graphs, it’s a pretty good tool. And they’re in beta right now, so you get all the features for nothing. Yeah, I’ve been using that one quite a bit and playing with it. It’s a nice little thing to have in your tool belt. [Michael Houck]: I’m going to check it out, because I think maybe it was Blake told me about, maybe it was this tool, actually, but something like this. So I think that they’re getting a lot of attention So yeah, I’m going to check this out for sure. [Eric Burgess]: Appreciate it. No problem. I use AI every day across multiple platforms, and I’m enjoying it. I’m not using it. I don’t use it to play. I’m using it for business and building stuff. [Michael Houck]: Nice, man. Yeah, we’re exploring the right way to integrate it into the agency right now, because I think that there’s, it’s really easy to just like use Jetpack your Claude or Grok or whoever to create a batch of content that’s like 60% or 70% of the way there. But then it’s like, it doesn’t really, you can maybe get it to sound like you, but it’s not going to have those best practices for how to perform on social, that you just pick up the nuances and things like that. So we’re integrating it in some way, but we’re not totally sure what the right way to do it. It is yet. So still thinking about it. [Eric Burgess]: Yeah. And I mean, I’m finding that I’ve got, you know, I’ve got chat TPT. I have a, I’m in the playground for open AI. I, you know, the one I just signed up for today. And then, um, I also have notion that we’re building out. So it’s just like, there’s all these different platforms now that you’re part of It feels like you need to be part of, to successfully do every aspect of what needs to be done. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: It feels like the world is changing at an accelerated rate, which makes it, I think, yeah, I think it makes it more, more challenging to know what you need to do to keep up versus what to sort of ignore the noise and focus on what you’re what’s in front of you. You know, it’s like that balance is getting harder to do. I can talk about that stuff all afternoon. But I want to make sure that we chat about content for you. So yeah, just give me a sense of like, where you’re you’re at? I know you sort of saw what we talked about in the webinars, like, where are you at right now? How can we help? And we can just sort of go from there. [Eric Burgess]: Well, so I haven’t signed up for your like your your platform yet. I’ve really been considering it. You know, I’m, I’m about two weeks away from I mean, I have a working MVP. Now we just we built a very basic one. We’re doing all the branding and stuff now. So we’re gonna have our MVP. So we’re, we’re have a few things left, probably, ideally, we’re two to three months from going to market. So right now we’re just kind of building up on social and it’s all me on the social side, just like little drips and teasers and talking about the industry we’re going to target. And I have 25 years background in the industry anyway. So, you know, we’re just talking about that and giving little drips and teasers in the space and how, what we’re doing is going to help. Um, if I’m being honest with you though, like, like your background, I’d really, and I don’t know, this is probably not the right call, so I’d probably have to book something. But I’m really interested in getting feed, because we’re working on two different pieces. It’s part of the same company, but two different pieces. And we can bootstrap one of them, and I think it’ll be fine. But the other one is going to require probably investment. I’m just trying to, I’m trying to decide if the best approach on it, either seeking investment, bootstrapping with one piece, building up the revenue, and then trying to bootstrap the next piece. But because everything is moving so quickly, part of me is like, I kind of have to do both at once right now. Both of them, the main business, nobody’s doing it. It’ll be first to market in the vertical we’re targeting. And then the second business, there’s a lot of companies that are working on it, but they’re larger companies and they’re only working on it internally. They’re not looking at it as a software, as a service solution that we, that the smaller midsize companies would absolutely utilize. The problem we’re solving there is we’re going to save them 40% on overhead costs that they currently have today. It’s a huge solve. It has to do with AI. I’ve already built a very basic prototype on it, a very singular, simple guided one. I’m not even a tech guy. I built it in OpenAI Playground and tested it on several live cases. The results were great. Like I’m looking really for, and I’m sorry if this isn’t the right call for this, but I’m just, I’m really would love to figure out a way to, to get some feedback on the right approach on, on, do we try to seek, do we try to seek fundraising on this particular vertical? Do we just kind of like pros and cons? And I read both. I read both, you know, pros I’ve heard great things about, I’ve heard horror stories about bootstrap when you can, you maintain control, but some things, especially at the speed, like you might miss the boat if you bootstrap. [Michael Houck]: So, yeah, I mean, I don’t know if we’ll have enough time to dive into it in full, but I just very quickly give you my POV cause I’ve done both, which is, um, you know, if you’re gonna, if you’re going to fundraise, they’re not going to want to hear that you have another bootstrap business that you want to spend time on, on the side, that’s going to turn everybody off. You’re not gonna be able to raise money that way. A hundred percent. They want you fully focused on it. Um, if they’re going to put, you know, hundreds of thousands or in some cases, millions of dollars behind it, that’s just, that’s just a fact. I mean, you might find some angels who are willing to do it, but you’re never going to find a VC who’s going to lead around or, uh, bet on it becoming a billion dollar company because they think your time is, is divided. Um, but at the same time, I value bootstrapping. Uh, you know, I, I raised venture for my last company. I’m bootstrapping right now. Reason is I like the ownership. I like the sort of, full decision making, self accountability, all that. So I think it’s really just a personal thing. Like, what do you want the next five years of your life to be like, You know, do you want to have higher risk, but higher upside? Or do you want to sort of run a business yourself without external stakeholders, and, you know, make it cash flowing and just take profits as you go? It really just, it sounds overly simplistic, but it really does just come down to that. [Eric Burgess]: And I understand that. And the part of the business we we’re thinking about trying to fundraise on actually supports the core. Um, it’s, it’s all kind of one, if you will, one will absolutely fundamentally support the other one. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: I, I, I just, I, I don’t think that most VCs are gonna like to hear that because they have, you know, think about it. They have lots of opportunities for the capital. So for them, it’s like, there’s founder risk on that kind of model. Um, so, Yeah, that’s what I would say. On the content side, what are you thinking there? In what regard? [Eric Burgess]: What you guys presented was fantastic. So basically what we do is we have the distribution side, which is like the creator network and the platform. [Michael Houck]: And then we have the content side, which is we create content for you in batches. You give us your unique POV in voice notes over Slack. Send you questions every week, we just need a voice note from you. Then we kind of turn that into content that’s in your voice, because we hear your intonation, we hear your word choice, your emotion, all that stuff in these like rambly voice notes. And then we handle scheduling, we handle content operations, we handle metrics and reporting and things like that. We’ll go in and do engagements on other people in your niche. So their audiences see you get to know you check out your profile, follow you and build up your audience that way. And We can funnel that into a newsletter, if you like, to build trust and get them further down the funnel. Or we can just have it be like a focus on your account and grow that as much as we can and generate leads just from your account. So either direction is something that we do. And so we do the content writing for, I don’t know, a little over 30 founders and VCs at this point. Um, yeah. So I just want to get a sense of like, is that something that’s on your radar for now or in the future? [Eric Burgess]: Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, getting a setting up a newsletter, I mean, the reality is social capital and social, your personal brand is more important now than ever. Cause I mean, all, most of my networking now is exactly what I’m doing right now. Like it’s cause everyone’s all over the place. So most of the networking is on the computer. So to really open that door, your social capital, social, your social brand, it has to be, it has to be there. Right. So, um, I have something like 3000 something followers on LinkedIn and 2,600 connections or something like that. So, um, and I’m trying to post content every single day and I’m trying to do all the engagements, but yes, having a, having content writing or a newsletter is something that’s on my list for sure. Um, timing on that. I mean, I’ve looked at, I’m not sure. I mean, it could be immediately. It’s going to just kind of depend on, on a few things like costs and traction. And I have to make sure that I can continue to focus on what I have to focus on. Cause that has to, it has to go to market and I don’t want to risk one for another. Right. Cause social grants not going to matter if this doesn’t happen as much. So, um, but yeah, it’s definitely on the radar. I think the newsletter would be great, but I really like just the post, I’m not people actually are sitting down and I’m trying to be very intentional with what I’m subscribing to. So like I read yours when it comes through, I read deep sea when it comes through because it’s very valuable information. Um, and if I’m putting a newsletter together, I want it to be really value add. Yeah, for sure. [Michael Houck]: That makes total sense. And thanks for obviously for, for, for reading. Uh, that’s why I do it. So, um, yeah, I mean, so I guess keep me in the loop, right? Because, We’re here, and we’re building out, as I mentioned, some AI systems that can make it actually extremely efficient on our end, which would mean either high volume of content or lower cost or something. Right now, our standard package is 4K a month, and that can decrease if you want to leave the creator network engagements to be ad hoc. Basically, by default, we give you credits to use on the network, but you can make that an ad hoc thing, so we take that off, and then also, like maybe slightly smaller content batches we start at 2k and so there’s 2k 3k or 4k kind of depending on uh what level uh you’d want and that’s that’s broken down on the website isn’t it um no I actually I don’t believe we break it down on the the like notion doc website we’re actually in the process of launching a new website uh in the next week or so so it’ll be on the the new one okay all right good yeah and and then on your website also you have a If I remember correctly, there’s a way to book time with you, right? Is that, do I remember seeing that? Yeah. Yeah. My, my calendar should be, uh, should definitely be on there. [Eric Burgess]: Yeah. Cause that’s something I’ve been really thinking about. I, I honestly, it’s for me, it’s people that have done that have been in the space, founded something, exited something, founded something else, just getting feedback on what we’re working on. Um, I’ve, I’ve been finding very valuable. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: And look, happy to, happy to happy to be a sounding board. And I guess just keep us in the loop as you keep me in the loop as you as you move things forward, and sort of where things are landing. And, and if this is a priority for you, whether it’s, you know, we partner up on content and all that, or whether you just want to use the creator network on an ad hoc basis, because you can do that too. You can just sign up on me send you the other site, direct for for that, because you don’t need to be a content client to use the creator network. So if you’re posting every day, it could be interesting to try that out on a few posts, get some engagements. I would say that average budget that people spend per post is like $30. And then there’s a subscription to use the network if you’re not a content client. So that’s it. OK. All right, good. Yeah, I’ll definitely do that. [Eric Burgess]: And I want to go back to your website, too, and look at some stuff. This is Megaphone, right? Yeah. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. So this is Megaphone’s network. We’re combining them into one site as part of this new site we’re building. But right now, it’s Megaphone Network. And then MegaphoneStudio.com are the two websites. [Eric Burgess]: All right. Perfect. I got them both. I appreciate that. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Go ahead. [Michael Houck]: Keep me in the loop. I’m also happy to help. Let me actually send you. We do fundraising support for some of our readers, too. I don’t know if you’ve maybe seen this in the newsletter or not, but let me drop the link for that in here in case you want us to take a look and see who in our network could potentially be a fit. [Eric Burgess]: Let me grab the link here. Yeah, my pitch deck’s been a living document. I mean, I’m constantly updating it, making changes, and this next iteration should be hopefully the final version. Sweet. [Michael Houck]: When it’s ready, just drop it in there. We’ll take a look. And then we have a group of like 1300 1400 angels and VCs who, you know, we wouldn’t send it out to all of them. What we would do is we try to match it with a few who we think are interested in the sector, the right stage, right check size, and, and see if they’re interested. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: So we’d, we’d put some feelers out. [Michael Houck]: Um, I appreciate that. Yeah, of course, man. Thanks for having some time. Good to meet one-on-one. And we’ll keep in touch as things sort of develop here. Okay. [Eric Burgess]: And thank you for sharing all those links. [Eric Burgess]: I’m going to bookmark them all. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Sweet. [Eric Burgess]: All right. [Eric Burgess]: Thank you.