- Duration: 30 min
- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01JZXM2Z7TRMQHZXHK7VQBKJ1M (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JZXM2Z7TRMQHZXHK7VQBKJ1M)
Transcript
[Michael Houck]: Bye. Hey, how’s it going, Michael? Hey, Jack. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: How you doing, man? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Good to meet. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Doing good. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Good to meet you. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: I’m sorry about that. [Michael Houck]: I was coming off a few calls back to back. [Jack Haymart]: No, you’re good. Don’t worry about it. Thanks for being flexible with the time. [Michael Houck]: Sorry about the weird… I’ve never had that happen with Calendly before where it puts it right in the middle of something else. It was super odd. But yeah, look, man, you’re building something pretty cool. One of my team members shared it with me the other day, and it was just super serendipitous that you reached out on LinkedIn. I thought maybe you saw that they were on your site or something. I don’t even know how it happened, but it was very serendipitous, so I love it. [Jack Haymart]: Yeah, I love that, man. No, that’s crazy that your teammate came across us. What do you know about Squibb so far? [Michael Houck]: I’d love to, I can fill you in on a little more about us or, you know. Yeah, I mean, it seems like you guys are building basically an agentic platform to help people grow on social media. And that can be through various ways of doing that, probably best, the same best practices that we would think about if like a content agency or general social media growth perspective. Um, so I think it’s pretty cool. Um, obviously, you know, we want to see an action and all that, but I think that, The approach seems seems right. It seems like folks would like it. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Jack Haymart]: Yeah, that’s almost exactly right What we do is we build digital twins of founders and brands that help handle the entire social media engagement cycle for you as you So they did a posting in the common team. They’re applying Interacting we’re actually building out DMS down the line But it’s just one way to kind of scale your voice save yourself that time and keep growing your business or your brand We’re currently just on Twitter. So in terms of platform access, we’re just on Twitter right now. We are launching LinkedIn next Friday. So it’s very close to being integrated. We’ve got testing going on and we do see a pretty large market on LinkedIn coming up as well. And then down the pipeline, we have Instagram, we’ve done Discord, Telegram in the past. So really, yeah, that voice of you that can handle social media, save you time, save you money and make you money as well. [Michael Houck]: So just to clarify, it’s more about about the sort of using growth and engagement to, or using engagement, whether it’s on people’s posts, or whether it’s replying to people, or eventually whether it’s through DMs, rather than like, hey, let me create content for your account to post, like creating threads for someone, right? [Jack Haymart]: So in tandem with that engagement cycle of doing the micro interactions, the liking, the comments and stuff, it does create content for you and is able to execute and post that content as well. So we can write threads, it can write posts on LinkedIn using your tonality. We have a pretty complex training process that really gathers your brand history, gathers your KPIs to kind of fully encompass you. And then from there, yeah, it’s able to do content writing as well, execute on it. [Michael Houck]: Cool. That’s exciting. I like that. I, yeah, I’d want to see sort of Yeah, I think there’s I’ve seen tools that tried to go out there and be like I will create the viral content for you But then it like, you know, they just it ends up putting in like emojis everywhere and hashtags I’m sure you guys aren’t doing that. But yeah, I think that’s that’s a That’s like a whole separate separate piece of the engagement thing. I think makes sense. [Jack Haymart]: Like let’s automate that let’s turn that on Engagements is helpful and a little more a little more about yourself and megaphone and what you guys are doing over there Yeah, so I’ve been a founder for a long time. [Michael Houck]: I started my career sort of early Uber Eats, helped build that business, and then was at Airbnb for a bit. Got laid off during COVID, started a company called Launch Houck. We raised a Series A from Andreessen, raised a venture fund as well, invested in a bunch of startups. And then recently I sort of built up my personal brand like a couple of years ago. And I have a sub stack that goes out to 200,000 people. And yeah, so off the back of that, we’ve built a couple businesses. We built a media brand called Founding Journey. We’ve built a creator network platform called Megaphone, basically where you can drop in a URL for a post and we match it with our algorithm with the best fit creators and best value creators in your niche. And you can pay for them to repost, comment, or quote post your content. You can also like deeper partnerships with them, like product testimonials and newsletter ads and things like that. But the core thing is, if you share a post that you just created, we will send relevant engagement, strong social proof of credibility to your to your content based on help. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: So that’s been great. [Michael Houck]: And then we, a lot of people were using that and they were like, well, my content sucks. And so while the engagement is not going to be as impactful if your content sucks. And they were like, well, do you want to write my content? I was like, no, but I can build a business to have other people write your content. And so that’s what we did. So about a year ago, we started a content agency side of the business. And so now Megaphone is sort of a two sides of the same coin business. We do content creation and distribution through our creator network. And so yeah, so that’s it. We work with on the content side, we work founders and VCs, everyone from early stage folks to billionaires. And then on the megaphone side, you know, it’s a few hundred users who are paying to engage with the creators on a sometimes daily, sometimes monthly basis. Super cool, man. [Jack Haymart]: That’s that’s kind of along the lines of where Squibb is heading, is wanting to work with agencies, work with people like yourself that are kind of helping distribution for founders. Because our ICP really is those founders that want thought leadership, We don’t have time for it. I’m sure as you know, I don’t have time to get a haircut most days of the week because I’m so busy. It’s crazy. So that’s kind of where we’re heading as well. We’ve been working with personal brands. We’re talking to a few other agencies actually throughout this week. It’s been a crazy back-to-back. A few companies were working to build out some white label product solutions for some admin dashboards so they can use us for their clientele. And what we tell them is kind of happy to talk on the numbers, figure out per agent fee that we charge you for each account you’re managing, and you can mark up your clients, make that middleman revenue, help with some of your lift as well. I like that idea. [Michael Houck]: I’ll give you some more context. So right now, we do a lot of these, we call them the difference between proactive and reactive engagements, where basically we have someone from our team, identifying thought leaders in the niche, leaving comments on their posts, and then also replying to comments on the posts that we send out for our clients. And that’s a human cost, right? And I think we tried it with VAs, but it’s tough to give them the industry and business context for the comments to be high quality. So I actually have a US-based guy doing this right now. And so in the ideal world, I would love for that to just be some agentic workflow that we set up and completely lower my costs, increase our margins, and make it more scalable that way. So I definitely see a fit. A fit there depending on sort of what the structure would look like, And we probably wouldn’t even mark it up as a separate service to our clients, because we already include it. It would probably just be like, we just maybe increase the price of our packaging. Yeah. [Jack Haymart]: Yeah. Right. Exactly. Exactly. Totally. I mean, happy to explore that. If you want, we can look at another time. I can give you kind of a platform walkthrough, go through our classic kind of pitch deck that talks just a little bit about the value that we’re driving, maybe a few case study samples. I’m curious as well, have you thought about possibly doing anything with your own brand, whether on Twitter or on LinkedIn, like looking to get some automated organic growth from that? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, that’s I think where it makes the most sense to start because I’ve been, you know, as I built these couple of businesses over the last few years, I just had no time to continue building my own personal brand. And I think we’ve left a lot of opportunity on the table as a result of that, which is ironic because, you know, we were taking people from 1000 to 20,000 followers on LinkedIn. Themselves, but I myself I’m not saying anything at all. It’s such as weird this weird thing, but Yeah, so I’d love to do that my Twitter account is suspended right now, so I probably need to do this for LinkedIn but I would love to do it and Assuming that goes well, then I’d love to roll it out to You know all our clients and everything like that. So yeah, it’ll be cool. [Jack Haymart]: Oh and you want so like Like I said, so LinkedIn would probably be the highest ROI for you, I assume Twitter suspended and you wouldn’t want to start from scratch or something like that, I assume, right? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I mean, I’m working on getting it back. I actually know the son of the now about to leave CEO of Twitter. So I’m trying to get it back before Linda steps out of the role fully. But basically, what I would say to you also, as you guys look to launch DMs is be really careful with DMs on Twitter. The reason I got suspended was because we were using, you know, I had this big audience, like 56,000 followers or whatever it was. And we were using that to send a lot of DMS about our agency. And they just I hit some threshold, like some automated threshold and just boom overnight. And so I tried going through the normal channels, but you know, their team is so stripped down that they just can’t get anything right. So I’d be careful, I’d be careful that because we were using drippy, which is one of those like, like DM. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: So just be careful as you guys, as you guys set that up for folks. Okay. A hundred percent. [Jack Haymart]: So yeah, if you want, I sound like LinkedIn will be the best. And then maybe if your Twitter is up and running then too, we can talk about maybe a two for one deal or something. [Michael Houck]: Um, we have clients on both platforms too. So we’d want to, we’d want to include all of it for sure. Sweet. [Jack Haymart]: Do you, and in terms of like timeline, um, so Twitter, like I said, Twitter or Twitter is done and then I can show you the platform, show you like Twitter output or if you’d rather wait, how LinkedIn is integrated, that’d be probably like next week on the 18th. Do you want, like how, what time you want is like what works best for you? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, let’s let’s grab some time next week, maybe like mid late late week. And yeah, 17th is fine. And then once once it’s live, I’ll you know, I’ll sign up or whatever. And we’ll test it out for a couple weeks and see how it is. And then I can make a call on bringing it to the rest of our our folks. I would say we probably won’t use it for the content. I’ll experiment with it, but we probably won’t use it for the content creation side. We’re actually working on some stuff to automate that side of things. Basically, my co-founder and I are putting all of our content expertise into an agent and throwing it out there to our clients. And we’re testing that right now. So we probably wouldn’t use it for that. But I think for the engagement side, I don’t have bandwidth both of those, so it just makes more sense to plug into what you guys have there. [Jack Haymart]: Okay, perfect. I’ll send you, what’s a good time for you on Thursday? I can send you a calendar invite now. Let’s see. [Michael Houck]: Or I can just click with your thing, whichever is best for you. Could you do 1 p.m. Eastern, and I’d have a full half hour there. [Jack Haymart]: 1 p.m. Eastern. Yeah, I can do 1 p.m. Eastern. Yeah, perfect. I’ll send it over. We’ll do Jack, Michael, me. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, this is this is timely right now man We’re we’re actively looking to sort of increase margins and make our processes more scalable And this is like I mean it’s very perfect addition to that. So yeah. Yeah. [Jack Haymart]: Yeah Thursday should be good so I’ll send I just sent that over we can chat then and then Yeah, looking forward to continuing the conversation Michael. Thanks for the time and and if anything if I don’t have any questions in the meantime, yeah, but only the question would be like, what’s your, what’s the, what’s the vision here? [Michael Houck]: Like, what’s the, are you going to go on venture route with this? Like, is this, are you raising money? [Jack Haymart]: Like, what’s the, what’s the vision? [Jack Haymart]: Yeah. Yeah. I’m going to share. So, um, vision wise and like where we’re at right now. So right now we’re on Twitter. Um, we just launched like 30, 30, 30 days ago. We’ve already got like eight to 10 customers, uh, eight clients doing pipeline in a few agencies we’re talking to as well. So they’re in the pipeline. Um, we are re right now we’re on X for about 500 bucks a month or X dollar And then we’re gonna still link them. We’ve seen really strong demand. We already have about 35 people on the waitlist for LinkedIn All right, we’re gonna probably price that around a thousand a month commercial and Obviously, we’ll do different rates for like partners partners and stuff. Of course And we just seem like there’s there’s competitors that are marking that up even higher lots of demand there And then come pipeline and our roadmaps we’re starting off I guess I’ll go full picture. We’re Squid Labs. We’re an AI research lab focused on modeling human psychology at scale. That’s like our mantra. That’s our vision is to continue to build digital twins of people. We’re starting off in social media because that’s where you get the most data, where you know the most about a person, visually. We’re collecting this data on people, on cohorts, while we’re tuning and we’re creating people. We’re also collecting more data on the engagement to eventually build out, we’re starting off with Persona. These are the digital twins that engage, manage social media for you as you. As we expand, we’re going into Warehouse. Warehouse is our next product and our roadmap. It’s about a year out. While we’re collecting all this data, they’ll now be able to engage with these digital twins of themselves and of your cohort and ICP. So you can pick, I want to speak to a group of people on Twitter that fit my ICP, they’re 18 to 24, they do this, they’re in this vertical. And then you’re able to test marketing messaging, able to do prediction modeling on these cohorts. And we’re also going to build out like lead generation enrichment, ideally off of these profiles as well. That’s why it’s called Warehouse. Then we have from Warehouse, we go to Telescope. These are larger scale social prediction models that we’re hoping to sell to government groups or large enterprises to do prediction models on events, on elections, And then finally we have Omega. So Omega is like the whole suite enterprise targeted with like special compliance, on-prem servers, things like that. So that’s like our five-year roadmap. We are honestly full transparency. We’re working to start kicking off a pre-seed raise. We’re starting to fundraise, kind of getting our boots wet in that area, that process. We’ve got an investor memo at the pitch deck and then we’re just starting to distribute that to our network and really probably going to fully kick off fundraising in two weeks. [Michael Houck]: Have you guys raised before, like not for this company, but for another? [Jack Haymart]: So my co-founders, I have two co-founders and we have about five, like three other engineers on the team, sorry, that are all working for equity. No one’s paid. Everyone’s just putting the work in. One of my co-founders got acquired, acquired by a tech, health tech company. He built a digital spin of a therapist and was able to get that acquired and then worked there for a few years, worked at another startup. And now this is like a second venture. And then we’re really just continuing to learn and learning from people in the space. [Michael Houck]: Well, look, man, I mean, I’m very deep in that world. If you want, I’m happy to, assuming that I love the product and all that stuff and we move forward with that, happy to take a look at things from that perspective too, both for us and also for people in my network could be a fit. So if you want to, if you want to kind of 10th set of eyes on it, I’m happy to, happy to offer. [Jack Haymart]: Yeah. That’d be amazing. That’d be amazing, Michael. I’ll send over our memo in LinkedIn and you can check it out sometime to give any thoughts before you distribute it or anything. And I’ll be looking forward to chatting next week and showing you this LinkedIn stuff. Hell yeah, man. Let’s do it. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Looking forward to Thursday. Awesome, man. Thanks so much for your time. [Michael Houck]: Have a good rest of your day and appreciate it. Yeah. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Have a good weekend. See you. Yeah. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: See you. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Bye.