- Duration: 36 min
- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01JZK0DGRW07E9KWVG0J0VV018 (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JZK0DGRW07E9KWVG0J0VV018)
Transcript
[Michael Houck]: All right, now you’ll be able to actually see my face. Where are you? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: What’s that? [Michael Houck]: Where are you in the world? [Michael Houck]: I am in Charleston. I got a spot for the next like three months basically doing a pilot run. See if this is the, I think this is the spot. [Ben Ornstein]: We’ll see if it actually is. [Michael Houck]: Nice, that’s awesome. Yeah, so optimistic that I won’t need to move around too much, I don’t need to move around anywhere until late September, mid-September. So it’ll be good for my productivity. That’s great. That’ll be good to be in one spot for a while. [Ben Ornstein]: What’s up with you? [Michael Houck]: How was Maine? Or was it Maine? You were in Maine, right? Yeah, it was Maine. [Ben Ornstein]: Super relaxing. [Ben Ornstein]: It was nice to disconnect for a bit. It was good. It was good. Really, really nice. Good to catch up. Of a family and friends. Yeah, I enjoyed it. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: That was your voice. [Michael Houck]: Oh, excuse me. It was good. Went to a barbecue down here at a friend’s place and then went by the, I don’t know what you call it. It’s not really a river. It’s not really a lake or like a ocean. I don’t know. Went out and watched the fireworks by the water. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: That’s awesome. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Cool. [Michael Houck]: OK, let’s get into it. So I Read what you said over the Oclo scripts. Nice work on those. I’m going to pick one, and then edit it, and then send it over to them probably tomorrow. Did I give you context on what this is for, by the way? [Ben Ornstein]: Yeah, you said it was for Drapers. [Michael Houck]: You I guess kind of you said like it was for Draper Well, that’s one of their port goes and you just wanted to create they wanted to create some content with it Yeah, basically so, you know, they have this This guy doing like a digital twin for them To make videos and they’ve been upset with his quality. I flagged early on that. It wasn’t good quality and so They found a new guy and so we’re experimenting We’re going to do a test. And so they just wanted the script to do a test with. So yeah, so we’ll edit it. We’ll get it over to them. And then they’ll see if they want to go with this new guy or not, based on how each of them do with the script. Cool. So we’ll probably do more of those at some point. We’ll see. But they said they can’t start anything until August there, because the contract they currently have with Existing guy is is through August. So they just want to get this sort of waiting in the wings Cool. [Ben Ornstein]: Okay. [Michael Houck]: Well good to have those done for now and then Yeah, so I like the pics you made for the The podcast interview or not podcast interview, but the the YouTube video That we’re gonna do the like starter story YouTube video. So I’m reach out to them and we’ll see what they what they want to do there and I need to give you more guidance on the like data for the AI content system. So I think the markdown files look good. And sort of the categorization looks good. I don’t know, I have a question out to the plum team of like, what’s the right way to send that data to Their system because I don’t know if it can Read like a notion database I might need arena to pull everything over into like a Google Drive or something. So I just don’t know So that’s I you know, we’ll see there’s they hopefully will respond today because I messaged them last night so we’ll find out Yep. [Ben Ornstein]: Yeah, I had Venus that a couple questions on some out like some of those and some I give her the answers and she’s still plugging through all those so there’s a on in there, so. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, there’s a lot, it’s great. [Ben Ornstein]: But yeah, cool, sounds good. Yeah, I’ll monitor that chat as well just to see if they get back. [Michael Houck]: And then, yeah, ads. So I reduced our volume, like our budget for ads. So like if I pull up ads manager right now, I’ll see what we did over the last like two weeks while we’ve been on this lower budget. Last 14 days, here we go. [Ben Ornstein]: I’ve also continued to build out the dashboard the past couple of weeks. So you can check it out there as well. [Michael Houck]: Oh, cool. Okay. Well, yeah, it looks like our CPA is down to like 235 as you would expect with like, lower budget because it’s targeting more highly likely to convert people. So yeah, so I think for now, let’s just keep running with that. Will be to, like, we can’t blow up the ad budget until we have like an offer that converts well enough. We just can’t do it, right? So I’m going to be updating the case study library pricing stuff today slash tomorrow. And then we’ll run it over the next week or so and sort of see, you know, what does that convert at? Okay, cool. How does that equate to monetization? Should we try increased pricing? I’m going to start really low like 19 bucks one time fee, see if people pay for it or not. And if we do, then we’ll ramp up interview volume, you’ll be talking to a ton of founders again. And, and we’ll just keep building that out and trying to slowly increase the price over time. So I think that’s a good move. I think we will get some responses there. But if we don’t, like if people don’t buy it, even at that low price, then we need to think of another impulse buy product for them because we can’t spend $20,000 a month on ads if we assume that that's going to lead to a couple ghostwriting clients, but then one month it doesn't, and then all of a sudden we're down $20,000. You know what I mean? [Ben Ornstein]: No, no, totally understand. It has to make sense financially. I get it. Yeah, for sure. [Michael Houck]: We have to be able to map it out. We have to be able to say, OK, if we spend this much money and we acquire this many subscribers at this rate, then OK, how does that compare? Is that a net positive for the percentage that buy into some product right away? And then what about if we upsell them something second after that? What’s the financial math there? And right now, we haven’t done that financial math because we know it’s nowhere close to break even, right? Like we assume that it will lead to some ghostwriting stuff, but that could be six months down the road someone converts to ghostwriting. So the payback period isn’t fast enough. We need that sort of front end offer, low price impulse buy that will convert highly enough. So that’s what we have to build up. The first test is seeing, you know, is the case studies, is the case study library that thing? Or do we need to sort of do more ideation on what it could be? [Ben Ornstein]: Right? Yep. I imagine it will sell well at like $19. But again, we'll, we'll see. We'll see. [Michael Houck]: I thought it was so well at 195. And because they had the community and everything packaged in. But it didn't, right? It's sold. Okay. But not not anywhere near we need So at this point, I'm sort of done making assumptions. And I'm just like, let's see the data and see what we get. But my hypothesis is that if we also throw in a bonus of the investor database and the pitch deck database, then it'll do OK. [Michael Houck]: So we'll find out. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Definitely. [Michael Houck]: Cool. OK, what else we got? So yeah. No ads for now. We'll circle back to that later this month. We'll just run the ones we have till then because they're doing fine. Okay, so then, is there anything else on your plate right now that we haven't talked about? [Ben Ornstein]: Nothing like crazy, just like I'm almost done with the Tuesday send. I just have to find a framework. Everything else is done. And I'm gonna watch another Draper video. So I can get more content for Jacob on the video front. Cool. OK, yeah, just keep identifying those clips for him. [Michael Houck]: OK, yeah, I mean, look, outside of that, there's just the highest priority thing that we have to do right now is get this content system, the AI content system, live. So there's stuff that you can do to sort of feed into that, like the writing style database and the hook library. And things like that, that's going to be part of that. But between that and not knowing the sort of price point situation for the case studies and how that's going to map and all that, we're just not in a great spot right now. We're not. I got every one of the numbers for June, and we managed to break even. We lost like $500 in June, right? So it’s our first month of the year where we didn’t make money, basically. And that’s fine. It’s not the end of the world, but it’s not a sort of sustainable business. So I’m basically, like last week while you were out, I chatted with a few folks. I was like, hey, we need to sort of be more, we need to tighten our belts a little bit, basically. And so Rafael’s time is down. I ended up taking growth stuff back from Blake. So he’s just doing the partnerships now, kind of nothing else. And then we lowered our ad budget, too. So I also need to chat with Andrew about delegating some stuff to VAs. And then on your side, I think we probably want to keep doing long-form YouTube and research for that. I don’t know how much of that is going to get caught up in the content system. Obviously, first, we’re prioritizing and X so that we can use it for our clients, make money off of it. Longer term, I don’t know. My guess is we’ll still need to source and probably edit, but not so much like write the scripts, right? Hopefully, that’s like the vision. So yeah, so I think in the short term, we probably just need to, like, there’s just not as much to do right now, basically. So I think the ad hoc stuff, let’s keep doing that. Obviously, the weekly content stuff, let’s keep doing that, too. And I probably will loop you in more for newsletter content research, like for the founding journey Saturday deep dives, because I’d like to spend more time on content and improve those, because I don’t think that they’re at the level of quality that’s going to get people talking about us and sharing us and things like that right now, just because I write them sort of off the cuff. But outside of that, I just, I don’t think that there’s like, we’re not doing really any campaigns, right? None of them ended up yielding anything really, unfortunately. We might do one for Anvil, but they like want to launch tomorrow. So I don’t, I just don’t know if it’s realistic that we can do something by then. So yeah, that is a very long way of saying that I just don’t know, like how much there is to do. Right now, right? Like the, the constant that needs to get done is the content ops for studio. That’s really it. Um, so yeah, I think it’s just, it’s not a great, not a great spot. Uh, if we want to, you know, keep building leverage for the business and, uh, and all that. So from my perspective, I don’t want that to, you know, impact anything with you and me obviously I love working with you and I want to keep doing that and I think in the short term there’s some smaller stuff that we can do but I understand that might not be as good for your situation as sort of where things were two plus months ago for us right so you know I won’t hold it against you if you obviously do what you have to do on your side but it doesn’t change anything in terms of like, you know, the vision for this role and sort of where we, where we can go. It’s just right now we’re in this sort of like weird in between phase where we’ve lost a lot of revenue in a short period of time. Like I think in total we went from like one Oh five K MRR across the business to like 65 K or like 70 K. Wow. And obviously, you know, we’re still making one off revenue from sponsors. And from like, you know, from megaphone deposits and things like that and spend through the network, but that’s not enough to, you know, that we’re making that before too, right? So as I said, we managed to break even last month, but if I don’t make changes for this month, we’re going to get crushed and we’re going to deplete our reserves in a relatively short period of time. So until we figure out the new revenue driver, which I think is going to be the AI content system and the founding journey sort of case study, offer. Until that’s true, you know, I just, I need to make some shitty decisions. [Ben Ornstein]: Yeah, no, look, I was doing a lot of thinking like while I was gone too, I kind of figured, you know, this isn’t coming out of the blue or anything. So like, yeah, it’s, it’s just, it’s the timing blows because I’m moving out on July 18th. I know, I know. [Michael Houck]: Spent I spent literally like hours Looking for ways to not have to do anything because I know I know that so yeah, I guess like my POV would be Anything that I can do in the sort of medium to short term to make sure that you’re in a good spot Like I will do that 1,000% And if that’s me reaching out to folks and seeing hey, do you have anything that I have this guy? Who I love working with, he’s amazing. Anything like that, I’m happy to do it. Anything more or less, I’m also happy to do. And also just want to reiterate, I don’t see this as let’s cut something off. I see this as we need to take a step back if we want to take a step forward or else we’re going to just keep taking steps back. [Ben Ornstein]: Yeah, no, I totally understand. And in a perfect world, I don’t want to even consider anything like any other opportunity, right? Like in my mind, I’d love to keep things as is, because it’s been great. So I totally understand where we are. Yeah, I guess it’ll just be like less hours for now, probably. Yeah, like I was doing the newsletter, I’m like, shit, I delegated all this crap. I don’t have too much to do. It’s kind of weird. First in like a year. They’re over, I mean, I’ve been working like a few months and it’s just like, this is crazy. I got Venus doing this, Andrew took my role, Blake’s on partnerships. I’m like, wow, I don’t really know. [Michael Houck]: Honestly, like that is a testament to you. Like you were able to set foundations, you were able to make them translatable, you were able to delegate them to more specialized people for these specific things. Like you did the job that I think we both we’re excited for you to do. And the vision was, okay, well, we’ll just keep building that leverage. Unfortunately, we hit this financial fucking black hole over the past two months. And it’s funny, I’ve been talking to other founders, and like everyone is going through this right now, especially high ticket sales, every single person going through this. So it’s a combination of summer slowdown and AI. But yeah, the idea was, let’s keep building that leverage and having you do more strategic, more higher level tasks as we go. But Basically, right now, there’s this stratification where something either needs to be done by me, because it just, that’s how it needs to be, or it’s like not, like your time is better spent on other things, you know what I mean? [Ben Ornstein]: So it’s a weird, like, stratification. Yeah, it’s a weird time to be in like a non, or a largely non-technical role. It’s just like, it’s a strange time. Yeah, I mean, see what happens. I think the holding company model is perfect for it though. If you have these offers that work, and I’m not talking about you, I’m talking more about like the operational generalist, like myself. It’s like, I don’t know where you’re supposed to fit necessarily. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I mean, one future here is that, you know, we get, we figure out the foundation monetization side, and then you just come in and you’re COO or CEO of Founding Journey, right? And that’s your focus. You’re holding the content to our bar, you’re using our AI content system to maybe generate some of it, you’re managing partnerships in tandem with Blake, and you’re sort of running the ads and doing all these things, right? So it’s like, once we have that set up, like, I don’t know if that’s interesting to you, maybe less interesting than going across multiple things. I don’t know, just based on past conversations. But that’s something that we could do. I would love to be able to say, yeah, Andrew is running Studio Ops, and Ben is running Founding Journey Ops, and I can focus my time on content creation, being our marketing department, things like that. That’s the vision that I would love to do, because I have no time to do that stuff right now. And that’s really held back our growth and also I think our brand. So that’s a model I’d love to get to. I just can’t pull the trigger on that right now in the best interests of the company. [Ben Ornstein]: Yeah, no, no, of course. And I appreciate you kind of like looking for opportunities for me, but the business is the business, right? It needs to stay up. It’s larger than you or me. So no, I totally get it. So, okay. [Michael Houck]: So here’s, here’s something else. I appreciate you being able to like roll with the punches. It’s, I know it’s, it’s like the worst timing. So it’s, it means a lot that you’re just, you know, yeah. Not that I would expect anything else. I mean, I feel like we have a good, good relationship, but okay. So here’s some, here’s some ideas. So I don’t know what your, what your priorities are or next steps that you would want to do would be, obviously, as I said, I want to keep working together, just it would be fewer hours for now. What I could do, if you want, and this could be either today or next week or whenever, is that I could mention in the newsletter to all these founders that I have someone who I trust and who I love to work with. And I have worked with who is looking for at least part time work. I wouldn’t put your name in there or anything like that. But I just say, this is someone who I trust. I’d hype you up, basically. So if that’s something you’d want me to do, I’m obviously happy to do that. I’m also happy to reach out to individuals. But I don’t want to step on your toes. I know this is like, you need to figure this out for yourself, too. So you let me know. I’m your tool. [Ben Ornstein]: Use me as you need to. I appreciate that. Yeah, I’m struggling to figure out what that like next step. My fiance makes fucking no money. She makes like $30,000 a year or something like that. So, um, I mean, no rush. [Ben Ornstein]: We don’t need to decide this on the call right now. [Michael Houck]: We can chat later today. We can chat tomorrow, whatever, you know? Um, but I, I just want to put it out there, like whatever you need, obviously I’m here. Um, and that’s, you know, partially just because, you know, I feel like we have that But also just because I don’t want to like cast you off into the world, you know I want you to be part of this for the long run. So that’s That’s top of mind for me, too. [Ben Ornstein]: I Think the absolute worst case scenario would for me to be like, hey how I’m just gonna go find some Bullshit full-time job elsewhere and we can do like part-time work here and there. I think that’s the worst idea I Think and yes, I I’ll get back to you later after I do some more thinking about like, what? Yeah. But in the in the near term, like some other part time work does sound appealing, just so I can get that cash flow in. Because that’s like my top priority right now. Even if it’s not a job I love the most. I enjoy all the work we’re doing here, which is just… [Michael Houck]: It could be similar stuff. I can reach out to Sahil. I can reach out to Andrew Young. I can reach out to Michael Girdley, similar guys who have similar types of businesses and who would probably enjoy being able to provide similar types of challenges. So I guess just think on it. Let me know as things come to clarity on your side. And then I’ll go to bat. I’ll go to work. And we’ll make it work. So but with the sort of idea in my head, at least, that there will be a time in the hopefully near future, we’ll see, hopefully near, where we’re able to ramp this up and go full, full time and sort of have that stable revenue coming in from something like the case study library or the AI tool or whatever it is. So I just can’t be like, hey, go build the AI tool. I have to be the one who does that. [Ben Ornstein]: I totally get it. That’s why I felt like I’m in this weird spot for you in the business. It’s a non-ideal thing. But no, I totally, totally get where we’re at and what that looks like, And the other thing is, I would love to come back and do that full-time, full-time thing. That’s what I want. [Michael Houck]: Once we’re in a place where, let’s say founding journey is sort of a stable business on its own, like a unit, right? And I can be like, okay, here are the levers for the unit. You just need to know how to pull them and where you and I can do like a weekly or biweekly call where we’re strategizing on how to pull those levers, how to use them. Then a hundred percent, like I would just love to hand the reins over to you and let you run that business. Um, so, um, That’s how I see it. [Ben Ornstein]: That’s how I see it. [Michael Houck]: That could be cool. We’ve built the level of trust where I literally feel like I can just put something big like that on your plate. We just need it to be financially sustainable, basically. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Ben Ornstein]: And so it’s already kicking in my head that I think the best thing would be, yeah, if like, the guys that you trust, like Sahil, Andrew Young, those guys, plus it would just be cool to meet them in general and just like have conversation with them. I think that would be the better route, not to pump myself up, but if you talked so highly of me in the newsletter and I got 25 people that said like, yo, I’m looking for someone like this, I think that would be like a negative actually. So I think there might be too many people and then I’d have to prioritize you, which I would never do that. Just in the realm of like all these different people. I don’t even know if that would happen, right? Just because your framing and your selling ability is so good, you can make me look better than I actually am. I’m actually here. [Michael Houck]: No, I mean, we’ll see. I think, think on it today, right? And then let’s sync up again tomorrow couple minutes and you let me know what you want me to do. And if that’s reach out to the Andrews and the sawhills, great, happy to do it. If that’s, you know, doing something in newsletter, okay, if there’s other people who are in my network who you want to chat with, let’s make that happen. Right? So just think on it today, let it marinate, maybe talk with your fiance to and to see where you guys land. I don’t know if that’s part of your decision making or not either way. Yeah, just think on it tonight. And then, and then we’ll make a plan tomorrow and can can go from there. [Ben Ornstein]: Sounds good. Okay, I think that’s probably the right approach. I’ll do that. Yeah, no, it makes sense. [Michael Houck]: All right. Okay, so then, I guess, today, just give me a heads up when FJ is ready to go. And we will we’ll go from there. So I also, I might loop you into the Anvil stuff. They like, I don’t know if I mentioned them to you, like Blake found them and they were like gonna do sponsorships and then they were gonna do ghostwriting and then they just want to do a campaign. It’s like, it just keeps getting sort of, I don’t know, like, so I don’t know if it’s worth our time today to do it. What’s Anvil’s They’re one of these new, like, ChatGPT SEO dashboard tools. They’re backed by YC. It’s joinanvil.com, I think. It’s like a dashboard to help you manage insights about how you’re showing up in ChatGPT and Grok and Claude and whatever. So it’s AI. [Ben Ornstein]: Honestly, if we did a campaign with our existing creators, like the one we have contact info for the ones We could probably speed up a lot. I know. [Michael Houck]: The problem is that they don’t want a normal campaign. They say they don’t care about social amplification. They just want upvotes on product hunt. And so I had Rena pull a list over the weekend of all the creators who we have already, who have product hunt accounts that are active. We don’t know how they’re going to price that. So I don’t know if it’s like worth the custom messaging back and forth. [Ben Ornstein]: Got it. [Ben Ornstein]: Yeah, yeah, yeah. That might be too much. That makes sense. [Michael Houck]: Got it. Cool. One thing that could be good is I know there’s a lot of these like random ad hoc things where either you are doing them yourself or you’re like making sure that Venus Arena is doing them correctly. I think if I get a sense of like what that full list is, it can help me better plan. Okay, well, that’s going to take Ben this amount of hours per week, and therefore I can financially sort of plan from from there. So no rush on that. But just in the next day or two, if you could put something like that together, it’d be helpful. [Ben Ornstein]: Like the one-off tasks that are somewhat recurring? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, just like anything that you need to sort of keep an eye on or manage or do on a weekly basis that isn’t campaign related and isn’t like YouTube research related. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Just like what those other things are. [Michael Houck]: I can do that. Yeah, I’ll pull that together. Cool. Okay, sounds good. We’ll go from there. So just let me know. Sounds good. All right, man. [Ben Ornstein]: I’ll talk to you. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yep. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yep.