- Duration: 41 min
- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01JZ8K5RVWAH71Y7QH2C77FAB2 (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JZ8K5RVWAH71Y7QH2C77FAB2)
Transcript
[Blake Stewart]: We’re good, just had someone pay for two links of the week. They were not even really on my radar. They got back to me last night and closed them today, so we’re good. [Michael Houck]: It seems like we’re in pretty good shape for July, like pending things actually paying. [Blake Stewart]: Yeah, I mean, if QA Search pays, we’ll be happy, but yeah, I mean, there’s like 18,000 and invoices out there. And then, you know, another four for delete me, which, you know, a push to get a July payment. But I mean, according to their terms, it’ll be August. [Michael Houck]: So we’ll see. Yeah, I mean, they just paid the first half. So we have half of that in July, at least. [Blake Stewart]: Is that is that 18 not including the 4k or whatever that they’ve already paid? Correct. That’s dope. Nice. So it’s like 23, 23 out there. [Michael Houck]: Well, we’ll see what closes, but this could be our best month of the year so far, except for January with the bamboo. I would love to get our numbers up there, so we’ll see. [Blake Stewart]: Yeah. Yeah, so that feels good. It’s kind of like casually, you know, trying to close them all and push them without scaring them off. Like QA Search, I’ve followed up a couple of times, like, all right, guys, we need We need some payment to kind of get the ball moving. And they’ve been a little quiet, so. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, on the call, I remember the guy was like that they were going to pick it back up in July. [Blake Stewart]: So hopefully, just after the fourth, they speed things up. Yeah, so on that front, yeah. Yeah, for outreach, so I duplicated that sequence. Sequence, and I’ll kind of just track fresh numbers. It looked fine May and June, at least the first half. I still haven’t really gotten to the later part in June to really dig in to see how those metrics look. But I mean, we’re still seeing opens and replies from the start of those sequences, so it should be fine. So yeah, I’ll have a good idea on that or so once more. Those go out and contract that. I do want to get a little bit more creative with some of the outreach. Maybe hitting up people like start on HubSpot, cold at email. And then, you know, if they open, maybe hit them up on LinkedIn, SalesNav. I don’t know. I liked what I’m seeing with Valley. Like the responses seem higher on LinkedIn. Um, I think that’s just true across the board. [Michael Houck]: Um, so I kind of want to use sales navigator a little bit more. Sorry. You mean, you mean you’re seeing higher responses through Valley than through email? [Blake Stewart]: Yeah. Okay. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Um, yeah. [Michael Houck]: Man, how much higher is it like comparable or is it like meaningful? [Blake Stewart]: Um, I think it’s pretty high. I mean, I think this is Valery’s whole premise of why they do LinkedIn outreach instead of code email in general. But I don’t have numbers to share with you. [Michael Houck]: I just feel like it’s higher. Yeah. I wish they were converting. That’s the thing, right? [Michael Houck]: It’s good that they’re responding. [Michael Houck]: We want them to pay, though. Yeah. Maybe that’ll change when we have the AI thing launched. I think what we’re going to be able to do is offer like an AI self-service option for like, I don’t know, a couple hundred bucks a month. And then basically upsell more of like a strategy component. And so it would be like probably Blake, um, and maybe Jacob, um, like leading that. And then over time, you know, we basically wouldn’t take on any more human writer clients. We wouldn’t disrupt things necessarily for existing, you know, writers and clients and things like that, unless the clients want to switch over to the AI thing. But we can honor those as long as they want and still have the writers do it. But yeah, I think for new clients, we’ll push people towards this offer and then Yeah, and you know, for folks like Draper, they’ll probably want to do the strategy component, more coordination, more operations, and we’ll have a higher tier package for that. [Blake Stewart]: Okay, cool. Yeah, I like that strategy. [Michael Houck]: Okay, I just want to quickly go through any other stuff from the agenda you sent over the other day. I think there was the one multiple placements Are we are we good there? I don’t know yet. [Blake Stewart]: So they reached out through passion fruits It’s called teammates AI. They’re launching on product hunt on the 8th or 7th, I think Hey, right 7th is Monday And so I was like we could do a Tuesday link of the week They said their budgets 500, but they’re looking for like a feature placement. I was like that That’s just not going to happen. I’ll give you a link for you. And so I’m trying to close them there. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: I mean, if their launch is on the 7th, it wouldn’t really make sense to advertise Product Hunt link on the 8th because they won’t be ranking anymore, right? Unless they get us copy at the end of the day and like, hey, we’re going to be like first of the day or something or second of the day or something. You can advertise that. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Right. OK. [Michael Houck]: Because Product Hunt is like, you go live at midnight. And then you have 24 hours as many upvotes as you can. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: That’s it. [Blake Stewart]: That’s again Okay Do you want me to pass them to you for megaphone or to bin for like a Well bends out till I think till he’s back Monday. [Michael Houck]: He’s on like a family vacation right now or something So You can tell them about megaphone, but we’re not gonna have bandwidth to set up a campaign for them or anything like that that. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. [Michael Houck]: All right. [Michael Houck]: So when they could do is they could just drop the, like they could sign up and then drop the post URL when they post on Twitter or on LinkedIn or whatever, or both. Um, and set a budget and then we’ll, we’ll get some critters on it. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. [Michael Houck]: If they only have like very limited budget, like use that as a, as a backup, It is on the 7th because it’s on the 8th. We can just put it in the newsletter and get in front of people, you know, yeah, yeah Okay, I actually think this would be a pretty good strategy for Responsors now that like you bring it up Because people launch a product on every day. The problem is we don’t know in advance who those people are gonna be, right? So if there was some way to identify who is going to launch on products on a they’d be good candidates because they’d run up a budget behind it to our builder audience. Definitely, yeah. [Blake Stewart]: Yeah, I kind of went down that rabbit hole for a little bit of trying to find where people would even start to learn the best ways to launch on Product Hunt and see if we could somehow get in there and scrape. I don’t know. Yeah. There’s definitely a strategy there, I just don’t know what it is. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I mean, I don’t know if there’s a good way to identify them reliably, because I feel like I could look at how to launch on Product Hunt weeks in advance, right? So it might be good. But another way to do it would be if we were to spin up something that was advertising Product Hunt launch support or something like that. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Right, yeah. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: I just worry that there’s a lot of really established folks who do that. And it might be, I don’t know, it might be hard to, to meaningfully stand out because there is no differentiation really, you know, we’ll get your launch in front of some people and get some upvotes to it and there’ll be real people. Like that’s what they all say, you know? Yeah. [Blake Stewart]: Yeah. Um, I might find a couple anyway, and just reach out to them to see if they want to do some sort of partnership opportunity where like, you know, they could upsell our services for every Tuesday. If anyone’s watching on Tuesday, they can, you know. $500 more, you could be featured in this newsletter. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I like that idea a lot. [Blake Stewart]: I think if you identify the players, let's partner instead of compete. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: OK. All right. Anything else from here? Yeah. Yeah, go for it. [Blake Stewart]: 101 Outreach. Two subscribers in your newsletter. You said you did that before. You might want to do it again for Megaphone. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. I think there's like a, like basically we grab a list from the newsletter of folks who are like, you know, meaningfully engaged and maybe who like don't have a Gmail address, you know, they have a business address. Okay. And then we start them in a drip campaign. Where it's just, it's very casual, right? Like it's like one or two lines. It's like I, it has to be from me. It has to be from like a hawk at email address. And it's like, I'm emailing them just to like, like I identified you in the newsletter or something like, Hey, let's, I thought you might want to hear about this. [Blake Stewart]: Let's, let's chat about it. Okay. Yeah. Um, yeah. Do you have the old copy? We could use your simple direct rewrite. [Michael Houck]: Uh, I can, it would be simple to rewrite. I can probably find it. It's in Salesforce. I know we don't have a subscription to that right now, but yeah, if I like re-sign up for a month, we could probably get it. So, um, yeah, this is like, it's also very right. [Blake Stewart]: Yeah. Yeah. And as far as like, we've kind of mentioned enriching some of that data, maybe pulling a LinkedIn. I don't know if we want to do like, you know, add their company and Hey, we see your founder at whatever, or do you just want to keep it generic? Maybe, yeah. [Michael Houck]: I mean, the more personal we can get, it might be good. But it has to be, like, we have to integrate it really organically, right? Because it's more important that it feels like I am just emailing them than it's, like, any semblance of coming off, like, some templated copy. Yeah, OK. [Blake Stewart]: Yeah, I like the idea of kind of being like, hey, like I saw you just signed up. So we could do new subs that were pulling from these Facebook ads. And then we could be like, you know, saw your domain name was, I don't know, I don't want to, I don't want to mess that up too much. [Michael Houck]: Um, oh, one thought I just had about the, the cold email replies, because you mentioned that they've been going down. Are we in the art, these sequences? Are we spin taxing the copy? Or are we just sending the same copy to everybody? [Blake Stewart]: spend taxing, like personalization. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: Like you throw it through, you know, but not, not personalization really like, um, just variants. Right. So like, do we talk about spend taxing at some point? No. So basically with cold email, um, if you send the same exact message out too many times, it will impact deliverability. Um, cause it recognizes it as like a mass email. So what you do is you, is what's called, I don't know why it's called spin taxing. It's kind of a weird name, but basically there are these tools and you can honestly just use chat GPT for it. You throw, you write the copy, you put the copy in there, you tell it spin tax it and give me, you know, three variants for each, whatever. And then what will happen is it'll come back in this format where there's like curly brackets around certain words or phrases. And then inside there's like three like syllables or synonyms of that word. And they're all set in a straight line. And so what happens is, because you do this at like three or four places or five or six places even throughout the email, email systems like Salesforce and probably HubSpot, I don't know, will recognize that the copy is spin text and will basically combine the different variants from the different places where you're introducing variants. Are you frozen? I think you froze. I don't know when you stopped hearing me. Hey. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Hey. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Sorry, my power just shut off. [Michael Houck]: Lost the Wi-Fi. [Blake Stewart]: OK, so spin tax game three, just synonyms for different words. Like right now, I'm using. Well, no, sorry. So I don't know when you cut off, when the power went out. [Michael Houck]: So let me just, because it's basically, you put it through one of these tools, or to GPT, and it'll identify places in the email where there are synonyms that can be used, or similar phrases even. And so then it'll format it in a certain way, then when you send the emails, it combines the differences, the variants. So like, the more types of variants, the more places with variants and the more variants within each option, obviously, the number of like, permutations go way up. And so you can have like 1000s or 10s of 1000s of permutations for a single email, which then makes receiving email servers and sending emails are all view them as unique, different personalized messages. So it's not personalization, it's just like variants really. Okay. Yeah. So if we're not doing that, then the reason you're seeing lower price is probably because we've been flagged in some way and we probably should get new domains. It's my guess. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. [Blake Stewart]: Um, I, so I've been doing just a little bit of personalization. So it probably has some of the same effect, like in the subject line, I'm using their company name and I'm using like the first name. Um, but I will look into, yeah, it's, it's, it's not, it's not the same. [Michael Houck]: It has, it's like, they're, they're very, very good at this. You have to, um, you have to add, like, if you just Google like spin taxing or like put copy into chat GPT and just say, spin Texas, it'll show you sort of what I, what, what I mean. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. [Michael Houck]: Um, I'm going to make a note to get new domains because I think we probably fried them if we're not, if we're not doing that. [Blake Stewart]: Okay. Um, Yeah, I thought we talked about that. It's probably my bad that we didn't. [Michael Houck]: So all good. We'll just need to get some new ones. So I'll get that. For the next two weeks, we'll just need to roll with what we've got. But then once those are warmed up, we can use the new ones instead. [Blake Stewart]: OK. OK, I'm thinking about the best way. And so should I just have multiple different sequences? Or I'll look this up, but I wonder if there's a way in HubSpot that it can just kind of do that itself. [Michael Houck]: Sorry, HubSpot can do what itself? [Blake Stewart]: I'm wondering if HubSpot can do that with my sequences, or if I should just have multiple sequences. [Michael Houck]: Oh, yeah. It can't create the spintext for it, I don't think, but I don't know whether it can recognize it or not. So I would just, you know, do something we can just chat GPT or Google or whatever. Okay. I could take a look at that. I just need to know to get the new domain. So I'll do that. Also, I like your idea about the founding journey website. I'm gonna do that. As far as the webinar, I think, you know, we didn't much feedback in Luma. The feedback that we did get was all positive. We had three five-star ratings and zero ratings of anything else. One comment, great info, five out of five. I made some changes on my LinkedIn on the fly, would love to get feedback on that. Maybe I'll follow, oh no, I talked with this guy already, I had a call with him. I also did schedule one for next week. Yeah, so he was not, unfortunately, qualified and just sort of wanted some free advice, but at least good ratings. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Cool. [Michael Houck]: OK. So I think what we've proved here is not that this drives business, unfortunately. But we have proved that we can do it and that we're good at it, or at least good enough. So I'm not opposed to doing a second one. That's more public where we push it on LinkedIn and invite a ton of people to it and just see who shows up. Maybe make the messaging even a little bit more targeted since we'll have a bigger audience to pull from [Blake Stewart]: But I don't know. What's the timeline on this AI self-serve tool? [Michael Houck]: Next week. Yeah, we have some time this weekend to finish it up. So I'm optimistic that we we will be able to use it for my own accounts for next week. And assuming that goes well, by the end of the week, start introducing it to some existing clients who might be interested. [Blake Stewart]: And if they bite, then we'll start selling it. OK. OK. Yeah, I mean, we can try using that as the CTA for our webinar as well, kind of at the end. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, of course. I mean, once we have it, we'll be using it, pushing it everywhere. Because it'll be similar offer for significantly less money, similar service for significantly less money. So yeah, it'll be good. OK. So also, need to chat about where the business is at. So obviously, June and May were pretty rough. So I closed the book. Books last night, just for, you know, I like to be transparent with this stuff. So basically, when we look at it, let me open it up. Yeah, so last month, we literally just broke even, like we lost $500 for the month. And, you know, that’s the first month this year for sure. Overall, we’re doing pretty well to them, but it’s We lost $40,000 of monthly revenue from ghostwriting clients since basically the last seven weeks, eight weeks, which is crazy. So the combination of that plus sort of all the time been spending on Valley that has not been leading to results, it just puts me in a position where I gotta make some shitty decisions. So I think for this month, maybe TBD after that, I’d like this to just be a one month thing. We’ll find out how the AI thing is received. I want to bring the growth stuff back under me and just sort of take that on myself and just go hard at it. Obviously, this doesn’t affect anything for us on the partnership side or anything like that or anything bigger. But I think I just want to be a control freak there this month. And the idea would be once I figure out what’s going to work with this AI thing, then I’ll just turn it back over to you, we’ll just system around it, and we’ll sort of go go ham. So don’t want you to think that’s any reflection on, you know, what you’ve done, I actually think you’ve done an incredible job with Valley. I just don’t think that the channel is right for us. And I think we’re kind of, we invested a lot before Uh, we were probably ready to so, uh, that’s probably on me. Um, but, uh, yeah, just wanted to, wanted to flag that just for the, the idea would be just for this month. [Blake Stewart]: We’ll kind of evaluate at the end of the month where we’re at. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. [Blake Stewart]: Yeah. I think that’s smart. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Um, all right. Yeah. [Blake Stewart]: Is that cool? That’s yeah. Yeah, no, totally understandable. Yeah. It makes sense. Yeah. Um, definitely. Yeah. It needs to be addressed. So let’s yeah. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, there’s some there’s some other areas of the business from having to make sort of Bigger cuts like we’re dramatically reducing engineering bandwidth for the month as well And actually Ben is gonna probably reduce his hours a bit too, so I don’t know where that’s gonna land yet, but Yeah, it’s a it’s not a Not a fun month, but you know, yeah, so But just want to like reinforce like, you know full steam ahead On the partnership side crushing it and we’ll get the growth side figured out and then the idea is to sort of roll it back And turn it back over to you Okay. [Blake Stewart]: Yeah, that makes sense Yeah, just let me know how I could support him Obviously no clear answer yet, so I’m excited to see Yeah, it’s going to be a little wild while I’m also adjusting to being in a new city, hopefully for the long term. [Michael Houck]: But we’ll figure it out. Yeah, I mean, we could probably break even, obviously. But I don’t want to be in a place where, if we have to adjourn, we’re down a substantial amount. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: I hear you. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I appreciate the sort of willingness to roll with the shitty punches here. Hey, man, it’s your company. [Blake Stewart]: It’s what startup life’s about. Don’t worry about it. [Michael Houck]: But I’m bullish on the AI thing, because it’s getting to a point where I feel like by the end of this weekend, I will be able to use it. [Blake Stewart]: We’ll see if that’s true. [Michael Houck]: I don’t know. Maybe I need more time next week. But I feel like we’re pretty close. So if it works for me, it can work for other people. And then we can turn you, we can turn Ben, we can turn Andrew into influencers too. Yeah, I don’t know about that. [Blake Stewart]: I might start kind of tweeting about the tools and the links that people are paying to be in your newsletter for, just to kind of create some sort of another inbound channel. So yeah, it could be interesting. But I don’t know. I hate it. [Michael Houck]: So we’ll see. Yeah, please. The more we need visibility on X, because I can’t give us any. [Blake Stewart]: Yeah. OK. OK, so then the last part of this would just be on the full day. Sorry to interrupt. Another interruption. Oh, we got another one through. [Michael Houck]: Oh, sick. [Michael Houck]: Dope. No, all good, man. Um, you know, the lovable is like, they’re like a huge company now, right? Or like a hyper successful one of these companies. Do you know that they were using megaphone before they got big? Oh, really? The founder was, yeah. This is, this is a perfect case study. [Blake Stewart]: This is what you need to be shouting. [Michael Houck]: I know we need to talk about this. [Michael Houck]: Um, yeah. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I don’t know, but if you have a relationship with them, maybe we try to, I mean, cause I think I was emailing with the founder early on, but like we don’t, you know, he’s had a crazy journey since then, he probably doesn’t remember. But if we have a relationship with them, we should try to get them on the podcast and do a writeup of it. Whether they pay for it or not, it could be a good case study for Megaphone if they’re going to talk about it. [Blake Stewart]: Okay. Yeah, I already kind of pitched them on part of that. So yeah. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Cool. [Michael Houck]: Okay, sorry. No, all good. So yeah, so I guess it’s like for this month, like in terms of comp, how do we want to structure that? Right? Do we want to do it split it half and half? Or do we want like, because we’re doing bi weekly right now? Or would you rather just have it all sort of at the end of the end of the month? [Blake Stewart]: Whatever’s fine. End of the month’s fine. [Michael Houck]: That’s easier is to cut out one of those payments. Doesn’t matter. Yeah. Okay. Well, also, So I think in Thera, you have the sales nav thing recurring every two weeks instead of every month. So I’ve been denied. If you see the notifications, that’s just why. Yeah, it’s not because I’m actually denying it. Weird. Sorry. [Blake Stewart]: I didn’t know that it did that. [Michael Houck]: I think it happened when we changed the pay cycle. [Michael Houck]: It copied it over or something. So it might just be something about that. [Blake Stewart]: OK. I’ll make an adjustment. Sorry about that. All good, man. I’m just trying to get an extra hundred bucks from you. [Michael Houck]: You’re trying to profit off of LinkedIn salesman. Okay. [Blake Stewart]: Well, I guess on that note too, if we’re going to, we’ve got another month of Valley. [Michael Houck]: We have, yeah, it’s like, I think our contract ends with them in two weeks, but then we have three extra weeks for free. So yeah, basically second week of August it ends. [Blake Stewart]: Okay. Um, I’ll try to put together some strategy because I mean, going back to email versus LinkedIn outreach, I do think LinkedIn might be a better channel. So let me, let me try and get some metrics and numbers and see if it’s worth keeping this. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. I’m experimenting with that other tool. I actually don’t know if I sent you the tool and I don’t know if their website is up to date either. Um, what is the, this is a website. Uh, so these guys, let me send it in, um, in Google meet here. These guys are friends of mine. I do advising calls with them sometimes on their product strategy and sort of just like founder coaching. Um, it actually works pretty well for some of their users. Like I’ve seen, I’ve seen it work well on what they do. Basically it’s like Valley, but with your existing network, um, and their connections. So they only do 10 messages a day for now. But I’ve been testing this for the past couple of days. And it’s easy to use. I like the angle that it’s warm, and especially because my LinkedIn has all these people who I also don’t know, but who I am connected to, and who are probably in our ICP. We’re trying it out for VC outreach is what we’re doing. So I don’t know if it’s going to be the best for VC outreach, because LinkedIn DM I don’t know how active VCs are there, but that’s the first sort of market that we’re going after with it. [Blake Stewart]: So I’ll see if it leads to calls. [Michael Houck]: OK, cool. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah, interesting. [Michael Houck]: Thank you. Yeah, so. [Blake Stewart]: Yeah, I really do think you need to push hard on the VCs. I mean. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, so I’m finally not flying anywhere for like three months, which is nice. I’m just I don’t need to reorient myself in a new cities for a while. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: So You’ve been traveling with the dog. [Michael Houck]: No, I’m a dog. No, okay. I’d be that’d be insane if I was traveling with a dog There’s my parents dog, that’s my parents. Yeah Their dog is uh, he’s a He’s never trained very well. So he just barks any little thing and now he’s like slightly deaf so he’s like really barking at everything. [Blake Stewart]: Okay well that’ll be great yeah you can settle down a bit. Yeah I will yeah so basically I’m gonna push really hard on VCs. [Michael Houck]: I guess well no one’s gonna be in the office tomorrow in VC world so tomorrow or Monday I will and then yeah we’ll get some calls on and there’s a lot of people we can we can pull from Mantis guys still seems excited. [Blake Stewart]: So see how that goes. Yeah, that’ll be good. Cool. All right. All right, man. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Well, I will. [Michael Houck]: We’ll chat. And yeah, thanks for all the punches. It’s fucking been crazy. So appreciate it. I get it, man. [Blake Stewart]: No worries. All right. All right, cool. Talk to you later.