- Duration: 37 min
- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01JZV1TNZQVKB9MC25QDEE7QMN (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JZV1TNZQVKB9MC25QDEE7QMN)
Transcript
[John Knapp]: Hey, Michael. [John Knapp]: Not bad. Not bad. Yeah, good to see you, man. [Michael Houck]: I think you first. Likewise. [John Knapp]: Oh, that’s your meeting note-taker. That’s no problem. So yeah, we can kind of keep the call tight. What I’m hoping is that I can give you enough information that you can give me a proposal for how you can help Stroud Rocket. Sounds good. In a nutshell, we’re just rolling out an interactive microsite that’s gonna be like our universal landing page. And it’s my objective to drive a bunch of traffic there. We’re going to, we should build up a pretty good email list off of that. So start spamming them. Uh, and, uh, and then also the, the, the real CTA is start a trial. Uh, you know, it’s a self-serve, uh, PLG thing. So hopefully you can just kick it in gear and yada, yada. Um, we think that a LinkedIn, uh, is where our customers will be most easily identified. Uh, and I, um, I don’t know how, exactly to reach them. We’ve got access to a buy-in list so we can do some cold outbound. And so there’s a little fire hose for you, what do you say? Yeah, that sounds good. [Michael Houck]: I think your intuition around LinkedIn aligns with my own just based on what I’ve seen about the product. And also there’s a lot of people I think are spending more time on LinkedIn these days. Like you’ve seen a lot of increase in Both interests from people to create content there the quality contents gone up and more people are spending time consuming it, too So I think your intuition is right there In terms of Michael excuse me when you say creating quality content you’re thinking posts and articles Probably posts the articles don’t get a lot of a lot of visibility I would definitely recommend we lean heavily into posts and we could even engage with creator network, you know, they we have, I think it’s like 500 or 600, somewhere in between their creators who have 60 million total followers. And we can loop them in on to engage with the posts that we send out from your account. So it amplifies it to get by their audiences. Is that a standard part of your offering with with megaphone? [John Knapp]: That’s it depends on which sort of package you want us to put together, I can give you a couple options. [Michael Houck]: And you sort of choose what’s best for you. Basically, with one option, we’d include it by default. With another option, you could still use it, but it would just kind of be on an ad hoc basis that you’d operate. [John Knapp]: Can you generalize and say what the demographic of those users, between five and six hundred, are these college students or senior executives or startup founders or a mix? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, so they’re across tons of different niches. So we have creators in the, you know, everything from aviation to growth, marketing, to sales, to, you know, founder focused things. And we have a matching algorithm that for every post that we share from your account with the creator network, it would choose the best fit creators to go engage with that. And then we’d send them a message and they’d go leave a comment or repost it or what have you. [John Knapp]: So that’s all do that. That sounds like gas, dude. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, no, we build a platform. We have an engineering team that maintains that. So that’s, I think, pretty unique to us relative to other content creation. We see content distribution as sort of two sides of the same coin. So we try to provide both. So that would be, I think, what I’d recommend. And there. And we could do that either from your personal account or from the Strat Rocket account. I think just based on, you know, sort of your credibility, I think it would make more sense to do it from your account. This is what we’ve seen from a lot of founders who build up their personal account first to build more trust and then eventually use the personal account once it’s big enough to quickly grow the brand account from there. But people buy from people they trust people. So I’d recommend we do it from your account. But if you want to do the company account, we can do that too. The one benefit of doing it from the company account is that on LinkedIn, in particular, you’re really limited to like one post a day maximum from the personal account. Otherwise, they sort of depress your impressions. But with company account, because they want you to buy sales navigator and recruiter packages and everything, there’s no limit like that. You can post as many times as you want from a company page. [John Knapp]: So that’s sort of the trade off that we’re making. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, there’s a whole quality quantity thing too, though, dude. Yep. Yep. [John Knapp]: That’s why I recommend the personal account is probably the best place to start. Yeah. [John Knapp]: I’m told, I’m told I’m an early adopter on LinkedIn. [Michael Houck]: Yep. I mean, LinkedIn is, LinkedIn is like a 20 year old platform at this point, but just now we’re starting to see people really take it seriously for distribution and for growth and for content. Um, so yeah, I mean, I wouldn’t disagree with that really, which is kind of crazy just based on how old the platform is, but they just had such a low quality content on there for so long. And that’s finally, finally changing. Um, as far as the email side goes, so what we could do, What I would propose is that we could do a newsletter. So we’re building trust. We’re bringing people further down the funnel. We’re establishing you guys as, you know, it’s not just like marketing comms that we’re sending to these people. We’re leading with value, right? So we’re giving them something. And then sort of including very organic CTAs. And then also it’s a standard CTA in the footer to have them go sign up for the product and become users there. So that way we have justified reason to show up in their inbox on like a weekly basis as opposed to just, you know, trying, you know, at this point in email sort of life cycle, so many people are doing these like AI generated outbound campaigns that if you’re not leading with sort of authentic value led content in your inbox, it’s hard to stand out. And that’s what we see time and time again. That’s why I started my newsletter and that’s why I’ve been able to build a business on the back of it. I’d recommend something similar and what we would do is take those folks that you’re collecting those emails you’re collecting we didn’t put them into Into the newsletter and the first thing that we would send them is like something for free So whether that’s like a lead magnet that we create that might be interesting to them whether that’s a free trial on Strat rocket Or something like that. The first thing they get from us should be a gift. [John Knapp]: And then from there, they’ll be more likely to open our emails about the newsletter sort of going forward. OK. So the posting from my personal account, how is that done? Do I flip my password or what? [Michael Houck]: So there’s a couple ways we could do it. [Michael Houck]: Totally in your control. To actually get into the account or not. But basically, there are third party tools that we can use where we schedule the content and it posts via API to your account that way. The one thing that we lose if we don’t actually have access to the account is that we can’t go in then and leave comments on other people’s content or reply to comments on your posts on your behalf. And this is something that we do for a lot of folks because those types of engagements on people’s content that’s, you know, going viral, it’s a great way to get free profile views and free followers that way. That shit counts. [John Knapp]: It does. Yeah. And so then that’d be, uh, I’ll just change it from P-A-S-S-W-O-R-D to, I’ll put a zero instead of an O, huh? A hundred percent. [Michael Houck]: Um, so yeah, so that would be included in any package, that’s just a service that we include with whatever we end up deciding to do. But the process on a weekly basis would basically be, we’d have one kickoff call, where it’s you, me and a writer from our team, and they’re sort of your thought partner, right? They’re dedicated to you. It’s not like you’re, you know, it goes into a pool. [John Knapp]: How many do I get to interview before I pick one? [Michael Houck]: If you want to interview a couple, we could do it. We never done that before, usually, usually I will pick them. But if you want to pick it yourself, that’s totally fine. We can provide some samples, you tell us who you like the best. [John Knapp]: Give me a give me a short list. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay, sounds good. [John Knapp]: Being able to communicate is kind of important. Yep, 100%. [Michael Houck]: And so the way we do that normally is that after this kickoff call, we’ll set up a Slack connect channel. So it’ll show up natively in our Slack natively in your Slack, you don’t need to join any other Slack workspace or anything. And every week we will provide on Mondays a list of questions that came up during our research the previous week about things we want your unique POV on, right? You can propose topics too if you want, of course, and we’ll use those, but we want to be proactive there. So we’re doing that research. All we need from you is you pick up your phone, you record a voice note into Slack where you just sort of ramble on those topics. The more rambly, the better. Because then we get your intonation, we get your unique POV, the emotion behind it, the ums and the ahs, right? All the stuff that makes it uniquely you. And then by the end of the week, we turn that into content. [John Knapp]: And then by the end of the week, you turn that into what content? [Michael Houck]: Well, it depends what package you go with. So that could be the social post, that could be an issue of the newsletter, that could be both. So it sort of depends. And then we’d work together. Get a couple weeks ahead. So there’s a backlog and we’re not sort of stressing on a week to week basis. [John Knapp]: So on the Monday, by the end of the week, which would be something content, which would be then for distribution the subsequent week. So you got a bucket brigade. Is that what I hear? Yeah. [Michael Houck]: I mean, in best cases, we want to get, you know, two plus weeks ahead. So we’re not like scrambling. So if you don’t get us those voice notes by Thursday, then we can’t get you the content for next Monday, you know? So it’s like, we want to, we want to de-stress that process as much as possible. [John Knapp]: Yeah, I guess frequency or consistency, which is more important? Don’t say both. I mean, it’s kind of both. It’s a volume game. [Michael Houck]: We do want as many shots on goal as possible, but those shots on goal should be consistently sort of spread out so that it’s not like we have one week where we post Seven times once a day and then the next week we post two and then actually post seven like the platforms reward you showing up Consistently no matter how many times a week that is Okay So I guess I I guess I like the idea of having this done for us, just because I know what doesn’t come naturally to me. [John Knapp]: Sure. But at the same time, I’m the fussiest, most inattentive, picky dude you’ve ever met. So how do we handle that? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I mean, we’ll figure it out sort of a little bit as we go. Every client that we work with is different, right? I think the key is when we have like trending topics, for example, it’s important to get those out quickly. And it’s not necessarily as important in those cases to have, you know, like three or four rounds of edits or anything like that. You want to just comment on what’s trending right now and have that be out there. But for things like the newsletter or maybe longer form content for social too that we you know, more rounds of reviews and making sure that it fits the voice sort of 100% perfectly is fine. The one thing I would say is that, you know, when we start working together, you know, you shouldn’t expect us to have the voice perfect in like the first week or something like that. Like it takes time. We have to see your feedback. We have to get your edits, learn what you like and don’t like, So there is a, there is sort of a ramp up process to that, but you know, we’ve been doing this a long time. We work with a lot of great folks and we know how to find the voice. For each specific person to work with. So all I would say is that there’s a level of trust, but we know what we’re doing in this space. [John Knapp]: Good, yeah. So then it sounds like you will, or we will, identify an individual that will be our primary point of contact? Well, I’m your primary point of contact. [Michael Houck]: I don’t hand you off to anybody. It’s you and me just like this. But the person who’s actually writing and drafting the content will be someone from our team. And basically, the process that that goes through is when they draft the content, it gets reviewed by my partner, Blake. He has, you know, an even bigger audience on Twitter, for example, than I do in a similar one on LinkedIn than I do. And he’s fantastic. He’s our editor in chief. So he edits everything. And then sometimes I’ll jump in, especially early on with new folks that we work with, I jump in and do a round of edits before we send it due to, but everything that we send to you for review has already passed that internal review. And so the quality bar is consistent there regardless of sort of who on the team is executing the posts. [John Knapp]: In terms of best practices to, I guess that’s what you call it, is to build a personal brand. Then how, what are your typical recommendations for my wandering around in the feed and making proactive comments or reposts or all that shit? So what, how important is that? And is that something that you help with? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, so it’s very important. Similarly to how POP the platform rewards consistency, it also rewards adding value, like it doesn’t just want to see you as someone who’s like, Oh, how much engagement can I get on my content, it wants to see that you’re engaging with other people. And you actually get shown more to that person’s audience with your own content, if you’re engaging with theirs. Yeah. So you know, this is something we offer basically by standard, where one of our ops folks, usually Andrew, who you probably work with, if you if we do work together here, he would go in and he would log in as you, and we’d have a list of folks who we build with you about who we want to be engaging with, who has the audience that we want to bring to follow you. [John Knapp]: And every day he would go in and leave some comments on some of their posts that seemed like high potential to get some views. And how How do we go about deciding who the important individuals are? In a lot of cases, we already know, because we know a lot of niches. [Michael Houck]: We know a lot of who the big creators are, who the credible people, a lot of people following different niches are. And so we put together a first draft of that list for you. And then you can either say, oh, these people look like good fits. These don’t. Here are some that are missing. We always adjust it over time, too. Like if we see a bunch of followers coming from comments on certain people’s posts, then we’d find more people like them to engage with. [John Knapp]: Yeah. The challenge, obviously, we’ll figure it out like anything. You figure it out as you go. Double down on what works. But at this point, I’m at a risk of getting impatient here that I really don’t have, I don’t a strong enough sense of who our buyers are, who are our influencers. And so my sense is that we need to be a little bit experimental, perhaps, and pay attention and zero in on what we think. I guess that’s probably like with most of your clients, eh? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I mean, any client that we work with, we treat it like a new project, you know, unless they come And they’re like, hey, I have a perfect system already set up. I just want you guys to write the content for it. Then, OK, fine. But with the vast majority of clients, they don’t have that set up. And so that’s where every first month to two months is really very experimental in that way, both in terms of the content we’re publishing from your account and also from who we’re engaging with and who’s going to follow you and things like that. [John Knapp]: What would be the frequency that you’d that you’d recommend? Obviously, we might turn the throttle up or down based on stuff. [Michael Houck]: So the way to think about it is also based on what types of posts we’re going to be creating, right? Because if we’re creating mostly shorter to medium length posts, like more short quips and brief TLDRs on various topics and one-off insights and things like that, then we’ll be posting daily from the account. But if we’re doing like longer form like thought pieces, you know, not the articles, but like long form posts in the feed, then we’d be doing, I’d recommend three at max four of those per week. Otherwise, your audience can start to get fatigued on them. The ideal split is probably a mix of the two where we maybe do two long form. And you know, every other day, we have a short form or something like that. That way, over the first few weeks, month or two, we really see what types of posts gets the best engagement, what leads to the most followers, what gets the most impressions, and then we just double down on what works from there. So that’s, with new clients, that’s what I generally would recommend. And if you pair that with a weekly newsletter issue, and we link to the newsletter in the post so that people can go create that following right into the newsletter, then that’s usually best practice. [John Knapp]: When was this, three months ago, I thought like April or something like that. I thought, well, I’ll just do one of these a week. And, you know, my understanding is that these PDFs work pretty well. And I wrote up a series of those things. And I did one. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: Those carousels, those document upload posts, those do do well. [Michael Houck]: I would say that they used to be very overpowered. They would just do, nothing could compete. Now they’ve sort of adjusted impressions. And while those do tend to do well, text posts can also do well, or image-based posts, like one-off image posts can also do well. So if you wanted us to focus on the carousels, we can do that. I wouldn’t recommend that right off the bat, just because they do take a lot more time to create, and so our shots on goal would go down. What I’d say is, let’s spend the first month or two figuring out, OK, exactly who is that audience who’s going to engage with content, and what are the topics that resonate with them from your account? And then once we have that really narrowed in, we can say, oh, at this point, maybe we can reduce the frequency and take bigger shots these carousel type posts? [John Knapp]: I have to go back and look at my notes, Michael. Because as I recall, I think I planned out like 8 or 10 or 12 of them. [Michael Houck]: And I was planning on just reusing them. [John Knapp]: Sure. Yeah, you can repost those. Yeah. Every so often. And I think that’s a pretty common recommendation for Twitter posts. Nobody’s going to remember what you said three weeks ago, that type of thing. Is it the same with LinkedIn? Or is the topic, here’s an article from HBR? [Michael Houck]: No, so I’ve reposted carousels on my own LinkedIn before. I usually try to do it six to 12 months after the fact rather than three. I feel like three, you get some overlap. But you definitely can. Once you have them as assets, you can reuse them for sure. So I definitely think it should be part of our strategy. [John Knapp]: I just don’t necessarily think it’s the right initial strategy, because it’s going to reduce our shots on goal and our learnings as a result. OK. Well, yeah. So maybe over the next handful of days, you have enough to paint me a picture. Maybe a few different options, small, medium, large, see where we fit and try something. Yeah, man, would love to. [Michael Houck]: I will get you something by the end of the weekend so that on Monday you’ll have it in your inbox ready to review. And then you put some thought into it, let me know, and we can hop back on a call next week to finalize next steps. [John Knapp]: OK, all right, all right. Good, well, I’m just chomping at the bit to get something kind of show on the road here. Sweet. [Michael Houck]: Love to hear that. I think I feel like we have a good sort of vibe. And so I feel like it’d be good to work on something together and sort of apply what we do to you and to Strut Rocket and see if we can take it. [John Knapp]: Yeah. Yeah, good. And about that link I sent you this morning, just to touch on that, I figured that that would either the fifth it up on the call once we wrapped up. [Michael Houck]: But last weekend, I actually came across somebody who runs one of these, I guess you’d call it like a private marketplace, where they have a bunch of contacts who are looking to acquire attractive startups. And I mentioned you guys to him. And it was just like a July 4 sort of pool party. Casual environment. But we were thinking about doing some sort of partnership between founding journey, which is our founder newsletter brand, right? Yeah, yes. And then and so it could be a good test case to sort of get in front of them and see what they think and see if they have any buyers who could be could be a fit. [John Knapp]: Yeah, cool. Cool. The the typical thing with I don’t want to I don’t want to assume anything. So I will just simply say, sounds good. Let’s talk. I’ll just toss that out there. But we’re not at a point to say, what’s your MRR? [Michael Houck]: I think they have folks who are looking at any and all stages. So I don’t necessarily think that would be a blocker or anything like that. [John Knapp]: But we’ll find out. Yeah, sure. Well, that’s cool. There’s always people out there looking for something interesting to do. And, you know, we just did this one last year and we’re thinking about kicking something else off. And there’s a turnkey deal. And there’s a hell of an opportunity, a hell of a big opportunity with where Stryroget is going. That’s an unsolved problem. [Michael Houck]: Well, do you mind if I send over that link to them as well? [John Knapp]: Um, no, would you, would you combine that with a CC to me? Yes, of course. Absolutely. I will. [Michael Houck]: First I’ll gauge, I’ll gauge their interests and we’ll sort of figure out things on our side. And then once I have that, they’re like, Hey, what’s the first one you’d want to send us? And it would be, it would be you guys. So I’d CC you on that for sure. [John Knapp]: Okay. Yeah. You handle that however you think is appropriate. Um, and I would just kind of like to know what’s happening out there. I just put that sheet together. I was actually thinking of you when I put that referral thing on there. So I am so darned open-minded with this. I want to see businesses benefit from what Strat Rock can do for to a if we find the right person for it. [Michael Houck]: So yeah, look, I mean, this is a potential link for, as I said, I’ve never worked with this guy before, so I don’t know everything about his buyers, but he works with someone who I know and who I trust. So that makes me have some faith and trust in him too. So I’ll let you know where it goes. [John Knapp]: All right, Michael. All right. Well, appreciate it. If any other questions come up while you’re pulling things together, together, let me know, obviously, and I’ll look forward to getting going on some good stuff. Cool, man. I’ll shoot something over this weekend. [Michael Houck]: It’ll be in your inbox Monday morning, and we can hop back on next week and finalize. I’ll look forward to it. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Take care, man. Good to see you, man. [Michael Houck]: Talk soon.