- Duration: 38 min
- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01K054P6ZED4Z3M8GJX9V89N0T (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01K054P6ZED4Z3M8GJX9V89N0T)
Transcript
[Thede Loder]: You know, we’re planning to launch our direct to consumer product in a couple of months. So your outreach was timely. I think, you know, my take was you have some expertise in maybe a combination of social and or earned media and or influencers. And so wanted you to meet us. I’m joined here by Scott Spencer, my co-founder and the CEO of Rewarded Interest, and wanted to hear a little bit about you, the service you guys provide, and maybe get some ideas. So, yeah. [Michael Houck]: Sounds good, and good to meet you both. When I saw the product, I was like, this is needed. I hate those fricking pop-ups, and it’d be good to get those out of my life. So I’m excited for the consumer. When you guys launch, please, regardless, let me know so I can become a user ASAP. But yeah, so brief background on me. In on us. So I founded a company called Launch House. We raised a series A for me and Greeson Horwitz. I founded a venture fund, made a bunch of investments in early stage startups over the years. And for the past couple years have built up a personal brand and a creator sort of network around that. When you build an audience, you meet other creators who are building audiences, you sort of help each other like grow. Right. And so what we found was that a lot of founders want that for their business. They want the both the amplification and the social proof that comes along with having creators engage with their content, but they don’t have those relationships. And so we built Megaphone, which is a platform where you can partner with creators on social media engagements on your own content within an hour of you making a post, and also on larger campaigns and things like a sponsored post, product testimonials, newsletter placements, podcast placements, things like that. So we built that, and then we had a lot of folks coming us saying, hey, well, this amplification is great, but my content, like I’m not a good content writer in the first place. So can you write my content for me? I was like, I don’t have time to write your content. But we built a content agency then. And so for the past year, it’s sort of been this two sided business of content creation and amplification distribution. And so we work with 30 clients, they range from very early stage founders, all the way to billionaire VCs who’ve been doing it for 40 plus years. And want to create a bigger legacy for themselves on social media, basically. So that and everything in between. We do LinkedIn content, we do X content, we do email newsletters via Beehive or Substack, and we can loop in our creators as needed as well. So that’s the TLDR of what we offer and how it works. I can go deeper into the process. We work with a lot of founders, so we’re a little bit different than a normal content agency. Would be in terms of making sure we’re not taking up a ton of you guys’ time or anything like that. [Thede Loder]: So I’m happy to talk more about that, but that’s the TLDR. Great. [Scott Spencer]: Scott, you have some questions? I’ve got a few. Yeah, I mean, it definitely sounds interesting and something we are just getting started with social media. Our posts get 2,000 impressions on them, which is not terrible, but not what we need. [Scott Spencer]: Of course. [Scott Spencer]: And we do think an influencer-based approach is the way we want to go to market, more so than direct advertising. And so curious to understand sort of two aspects of what you were discussing. One, on the content creation, I’ve been trying to create sort of something every week out there kind of push, lightweight things. I’ve been pretty effective at that, but it’s a thing to do. And then on the influencer side, we think we will do best when somebody really understands what we’re doing. And so we’re, I mean, it’d be fine if we paid some big name influencer to talk about us for 30 seconds. But I think it’d be more interesting if we can start to find some organic kind of engagement where someone actually digs into what we’re doing and really likes it. Hey, I found this cool thing. [Michael Houck]: Totally makes sense. On the content side, I hear you a thousand percent. It’s something a lot of founders come to me and talk about, which is that content ends up being a full time job if you want to do it right. And if you want to be putting stuff out every day and building an audience, building trust and taking all the shots on goal, you sort of would need to. I think the fact that you’ve already put out some content will be helpful because that gives us some examples of your voice and the tone and sort of your intonation, right, online that we can use. We also would ask for, if we worked together, we’d set up a Slack channel and we’d ask for basically, we’d send questions to you every Monday that came up during our research. And we’d want you to sort of pick up your phone and record a voice note into Slack. We’d just ramble for an answer for like two to four or five minutes. And that’s all we need. The emotion we hear the intonation in that voice note the ums and ahs and that sort of helps us understand uh your voice in a really uh uh effective way uh very quickly as opposed to hopping on like a content interview call every month and or every two weeks and having to schedule that between everybody um so that’s the process we found generally works best and like I said it’s gonna be fresh and sort of on the pulse of what’s happening especially in consumer And yeah, so it totally makes sense. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah, and also in your voice. [Michael Houck]: I think that’s the key part. Like, we want this content to sound like it could only be written by you, basically, right? Not some, like, AI slop that someone else is putting out there. We’ll make it a little more unique. We’ll make it stand out a little bit more. But to the second part, yes, 100%. So when you share content, your content with creators through our network or when we share it on your behalf, we can add context that we’ll actually send to them. So we’ll send the URL, we’ll send the context about the post and what we sort of want them to talk about. But as I mentioned, there’s two ways to partner with creators through our network. One is this sort of like instant sugar rush engagement, let’s amplify the impressions on this specific post. And that’s actually very effective if done sort of consistently, because we do have an algorithm that matches you with the right in your niche who have the audience that you want. But we also do have those deeper partnerships where we can set up ongoing campaigns where they’re talking about the product, talking about meeting you maybe even and sending people to your page as well. There’s a whole bunch of different things that we can include in there. [Thede Loder]: So Michael, the posting that we’ve done so far has been on LinkedIn, right? And we are, you could say we’re directly consumer, we also have customers who are businesses, right? So, you know, between Scott and I, heavily on Scott, like we have a lot of reach and kind of credibility in the space of our potential customers. And so reaching a few thousand people on LinkedIn is helpful, but what we need in the next six to nine months is we need consumer acquisition, right? And consumers, for the most part, aren’t on LinkedIn. Some are, right? Particularly really discerning ones, right? Might know our space, but in terms of like our value proposition to consumers is very broad. You use our extension, you don’t have to get cookie banners and dialogues anymore. And you get the confidence that whatever your choices are about consent, they’re going to get set and recorded. And you just go straight through to the content. So we feel like that’s a fairly general, any consumer who spends a lot of time on the web and maybe in their day job or for fun, they’re visiting a lot of different content sites, this is going to make a material difference in their level of frustration, right? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: We make Chrome better. [Michael Houck]: That’s a very simple value prop. It’s Yeah, does it work with other browsers, too? [Scott Spencer]: Or just the seed round? Yeah, Chrome and a few other Chrome based things. But it’s a Chrome extension for now. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Oh, okay. [Scott Spencer]: Sounds good. Yeah. [Scott Spencer]: And goals like we’re looking to show show that we can grow to the hundreds of thousands of users. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. [Michael Houck]: So volume, volume is the play here. Yes. [Scott Spencer]: Right now we’re purely in a volume play. It’s free. We’re not, it will always be free. As a matter of fact, it pays you rewards once we get enough people. And part of what we’re trying to show is we’re creating a movement where we get enough people using this so that advertisers are compelled to pay for identity. They’re compelled to pay for access, and then we’ll start to charge them and consumers get 5% of that spent. [Thede Loder]: Yeah, so it’s almost like collective action on the part of consumers. They’re getting together, adopting rewarded interest and saying, you want to reach any one of us in this audience, you’ve got to pay when you use our ID. And we are the platform that orchestrates the identity. [Michael Houck]: I like that bet. That’s a pretty good bet to make. Okay, very cool. [Thede Loder]: So we need to be where user, you know, so for influencers, which influencers are out there that have an audience of people who want convenience use Chrome, right? And maybe where this longer-term message might resonate, right? Either, you know, early adopter or just simply people who browse the web and consume a lot of content. And if you’re in Europe, cookie banners are even worse, right? [Thede Loder]: Way worse. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yes. [Thede Loder]: So we’ll play well to a European audience, right? So if we add influencers who reach there, that also could work. Got it. [Michael Houck]: I mean, we have, you know, I think it’s like 550, maybe 600 at this point, creators who have 60 plus million combined followers across platforms. And they’re all over the world. You know, we have folks in the US, obviously, which is where I’m based in South Carolina, North Carolina, by the way, I saw Yeah, you guys are just a bit further out than in Charleston. But we have folks who are based in the UK based in Europe, based in Asia, and we target those to whoever you would want to partner with. You guys would have your choice also, if you wanted to look at a roster or something like that and just choose who you want to go deeper with. The other thing I was going to say was, I’m trying to think of a thought. But I think that answers that last part of the question. [Scott Spencer]: Oh, go ahead, Scott. [Scott Spencer]: One of the thoughts, we’ve looked at places where they have lists of influencers, they can match you, whatever. And we can go down that route. We can go buy those lists, do some of that outreach. The real thing we’re looking for is where there’s genuine resonance. Because the belief is that, one, our dollar will go further. If we find influencers, when they look at what we’re doing, they’re like, oh, that’s actually really cool. And the fact that we’re paying them a little bit to talk about it is one thing, but they genuinely like it. And two, their audience will resonate better with what we’re trying to do. So with that in mind, how does your process work in terms of that matching? Is it like you give us a list of people you think we match with, you do the outreach, how does that work with you? [Michael Houck]: We already have relationships with all these creators. They’re on our platform, we’re sending them posts every day, we’re paying them every month, right? These are folks who we work with. So we don’t need to do outreach. Of course, we can find more creators who aren’t in the network who you know maybe you have specific targets or things like that we’re happy to bring those folks in too but um our bench is deep uh and so we have ongoing relationships uh with all of them um they can’t all be talking about every product that comes to your channel right they can’t be like talking about tomatoes one day and and spam that so how do you know of of course not so so we have similarly to you, we have folks who are using the platform and who are working with us. And we go through this process on the longer term work where we pick creators who they’re going to do these deeper partnerships with and we will suggest and they will pick. And then we also have the sort of immediate pushes where we have an algorithm that automatically matches you based on your niche, what’s in the content, budget, who’s online right now, and it finds the best fits for those. So that’s, I mean, that’s totally automated. That’s something that we’ve been for a long time. [Thede Loder]: Michael, tell me about the process of onboarding. So I’m imagining like, what if in your 600, there were some good candidates for us, but we were able to find a few more influencers and they’re not yet in your universe. What’s it like for them to be onboarded into your universe? Because if we, let’s say we engaged, right, you could be, you know, that would help you build your universe of influencers, but it would also maybe take the load off us and that we don’t have to have a series of individual relationships with these folks that don’t scale for us, but might scale for you, because that’s just what you’re doing. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I mean, we have no problem taking all that outreach off your plate. We also have no problem, we don’t demand exclusivity that you’re only going to work with influencers who come through us. So if you guys are like, hey, there are these 10 folks who we have relationships with, who we want to be part of this, then great. We can incorporate them into a strategy, we can track them for you, we can give you performance metrics on them versus the other creators. Or if you’re like, hey, we have these 10 folks, I don’t have time to reach out to them. Can you just do this for me? Then of course, we’re 100% willing to do that. And onboarding them is super easy because our value prop is super strong. We’ll send you posts every day from various folks who you can go leave a comment on or maybe repost, and then bigger opportunities will come through. So monetization is an easy pitch. Our conversion rate when we reach out to creators is very high. [Scott Spencer]: So I’m assuming when you’re doing this, Michael, it’s like, here’s our we created a post a video or something. It goes out to your networks, and then they share it with their group. [Michael Houck]: Yes. So think about it like this. So if you are making a post on LinkedIn, immediately, you know, either our team can do this for you. Or if you want to manage it yourself, you can but that URL gets put into our network along with a budget, say we want to spend $30 on a post or maybe $100 on a big announcement or something like Then that post goes into our network, and our algorithm will say, OK, here are the creators who are online right now. Here is what they charge. Here is their alignment to Scott’s niche and to this post. And then it rates them, it ranks them all, and it picks the best ones that fit under the budget that you set or we set for that post. And then they get a notification via WhatsApp or Telegram or SMS, whatever they’ve chosen, and it includes some context, it includes the link, and it tells them what action to perform, whether that’s a comment, a repost, or a quote post. And then they take that action, and if they don’t take that action within one hour, then they don’t get paid, and you don’t get charged, and we reach out to the next best person on the stack ranked list. And that goes on, if needed, for like a couple iterations, but normally it’s, you know, I think our rate of sending to engagement is like 85%. [Thede Loder]: So your closure rate, right, if someone’s going to take the bait, it usually happens with the first three people. Oh, yeah, for sure. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: For sure. [Michael Houck]: And usually, it’s multiple people, right? So like, you know, if we’re spending, say $50 on a post, that'll get you definitely a few creators, a good way to think about it is that for every 100,000 followers a creator has, they tend to increase the cost of a comment by just $10. It’s cheaper than most people think it would be. Now, three Posts and quotes tend to be more expensive. But if we’re spending $50 on a post, you can expect a few creators to engage with it. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Interesting. [Thede Loder]: So can you give me that stat again? So for every additional 100,000 users that are in an influencer's realm, it's an additional $10. Roughly. [Michael Houck]: Every creator sets their own prices, and our algorithm factors that in. But that’s like a rough heuristic that I like to give folks. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Scott Spencer]: And Michael, what about more in-depth? Engagement. So this is like, we’ve done the post, they can react to the post and pass it on to their audience. What about more in depth ones where like, okay, we actually want someone to do a review of the product? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, so that’s gonna vary a lot, depending on what the type and scope of the engagement is, whether it’s a long term package or a one off thing. And just that creator, you know, some creators, they’ll charge, you know, like, Fifty to a hundred dollars for a sponsored posts on LinkedIn or Twitter or mentioning it in a newsletter or something others will charge over a thousand and you know There’s we can sort of advise you guys on the cost-benefit the ROI and what we’ve seen from other folks who worked with that creative versus a different one we have a lot of a lot of experience and data on that at this point got it and in terms of the relative mix of hosts we do Boosted through the network versus in depth sponsorship processes. [Scott Spencer]: How do you guys look at that trade off and that makes. Yeah I mean it’s different for every every kind of work with what their what their goals are you know the the sort of [Michael Houck]: Share the post get the engagement that’s that can be totally self service we have hundreds of users who use the platform and I don’t ever. We don’t we don’t work with them right there just use of the of the platform. For more for deeper more extended campaigns and especially if we’re also doing content for you guys either in the form of creating posts for your socials the company socials or Maybe an email newsletter if we’re doing that then we’ll have that dedicated slack channel sort of set up or going back and forth talking through strategy And things like that. [Scott Spencer]: So that’s gonna vary quite a bit. So one interesting Factor as I’m thinking through how to look at this given what you’re doing in the industry. Online advertising, as I’m sure you know, is not one of the most trusted businesses in the world. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Sure. [Scott Spencer]: And we are trying to provide our consumers a level of trust and transparency that doesn’t historically exist. Yes. And so I bring that up because I’m a little hesitant to use the traditional tactics that would be, oh, OK, yeah, they paid to get this post liked or commented. Data shared because they’re just using the normal tactics like that’s not genuine, that’s not real versus say an engagement with an influencer who’s actually looked at what we’ve done can make their own informed opinion about it and then say something that is far more genuine than getting a few dollars to pass on something interesting. I’m not saying we won’t do any of the former, But I’m just thinking as we think about where our brand fits in this world, if there’s a real difference between those two techniques and how we’re going to be perceived. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I mean, just based on this conversation, I would say it sounds like just in terms of where your comfort level is, the sort of longer term, deeper engagement sort of fits more into that. But I would also caveat it with the fact that, you know, every single big influencer out there on every single platform has private group chat set up with other creators who they’re friends with. And they all share their post URLs, and they all comment back and forth. It’s just very common. A lot of people, when they see that stuff on social, they don’t think that it’s coordinated. They think that it’s just, oh, this creator found this interesting thing, and it’s actually good. So now I’ll check it out. It takes them two seconds to click into it and assess for themselves, basically. So if your primary goal is the volume game, then I would say maximizing impressions is the number one thing you can do. But if your comfort level is at a place where you’re like, hey, that perception really matters to us, and we’re just not comfortable with this other approach, then I would say, obviously, the campaign should be the way to go then. [Thede Loder]: Scott, great points, and good questions, and Michael, great advice here. I wonder, Scott, thinking out loud here, by doing some, let’s say, some of the more traditional, like the eyeballs focused, right? The maximum numbers, that gets us awareness amongst influencers, right? Now, if they forward it and echo it a little bit, we could say, all right, we’re doing a little bit of that to find the influencers who like what we’re doing so that we can reach out to them and do a bigger engagement where we pay them to do something in depth, right? And so that, I might be able to live with that in terms of genuineness, right? And we can even be really open about that use of that strategy, right? It’s up to you at the end of the day. [Scott Spencer]: So Michael, I was assuming, obviously there’s budget that we would have towards like the media process of this, but how do you guys, what’s your fee structure look like, Is it a percentage of media spend on the influencer side plus creative or how does that work? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, so if you’re just signing setting up for the platform and you’re like, we’re just going to engage these creators sort of on our own, then there’s a subscription to use the platform and then everything you put in as budget to spend on the creators, we don’t take anything out of your deposits there. We take a small percentage on their end, on the back end when they go out to take those funds out of their account later. So it all gets spent through the network at that point. If we’re doing deeper campaigns where our team is going out and coordinating these with with creators and things like that, then we take a commission on the final campaign amount. And it seems like you guys are not super interested in the content creation side of things, but that’s a monthly flat rate that we do. [Scott Spencer]: It’s not that we’re not interested in that side of it, because I think there’s a scale option. And there’s also, at the moment, we’re trying to figure out what is going to resonate. Our challenge at the moment it’s a complicated value proposition to get across quickly. Once people get it, they like it. Sure. So our, our cognitive load is high, right? This is not a hamburger that everybody’s seen before and knows what it is and we’ll eat it. Yeah. There’s some, there’s a little bit of, it’s not, not even education really. [Michael Houck]: It’s just like awareness that, that this is an option now, you know? Yes. [Scott Spencer]: It’s comprehensive learning. You can do something you’ve never been able to do before, which is you can skip all of those annoying consent dialogues and keep your privacy in the process. [Michael Houck]: People have just resigned themselves to the fate of shitty internet, and you guys are providing the, hey, actually, there’s a better world out there. [Scott Spencer]: Exactly. Exactly. That’s the balance we’re trying to do. And we’ve learned a few phrases and tools to be able to get that off efficiently. But there’s something attractive to if there’s But a group that has got experience in dealing with those kinds of things that can help guide a few things, it may be worth doing a small engagement to validate that, create some assets, have those things as a springboard to doing more. Sure. OK. That makes sense. [Michael Houck]: Well, maybe what I can do then is we can go through any other questions you guys have, too. But I’ll send over an email either way later tonight. It’ll just cover the full kind of gamut of things. Like if we wanted to do a content engagement here’s what it would look like, If we wanted to do creator campaigns, like the deeper partnership type campaigns, here’s what our options would be there. And if you do wanna move forward with that, we would just need to have a doc sign that basically said, you guys aren’t gonna go reach out to those folks after we share their names with you or anything like that. And then the last part would just be, excuse me, what it would look like if you guys went full self-service and just use the creator platform on your own. [Scott Spencer]: Does that make sense? And looking forward to those pieces. One of the, so this is sort of like the paid media world. Do you guys do anything in earned? [Michael Houck]: Not a ton, not a ton. We have, but it’s not our bread and butter and it’s more operationally intensive on our side. So we try to stay in the creator world as much as we can. [Thede Loder]: Michael, do you have any other experiences extension publishers or ID operators like we are, we’re basically an ad tech ID platform, right? In a DTC form. Do you have anybody in our space in your 30 client list? And then next question would be of your 30 client lists, do you have any that are enough like us that they would be a decent reference? In other words, if you wanted to talk to them about working with you and your platform, who would you recommend? [Michael Houck]: Well, the 30 clients that I mentioned, those are content clients. So those are folks who we are actually going in and creating weekly batches of social content or newsletter issues for and things like that. Within that space or within that list we don’t have anyone who would be like competitive with you guys for sure. And I can see if a couple folks who come to mind who might be willing to chat but you know it’s it’s ghost writing right so it’s it’s pretty sensitive folks don’t like to admit that they’re working ghostwriters. We’ve taken folks from 1,000 LinkedIn followers to 20,000 in five and a half months, and they’ve seen great results, they’ve grown their business, all that stuff. I can share the data and anonymized screenshots of some of their content, but I can also reach out and see if they want to talk, but most times they’re like, hey, no, I don’t want anyone to know I’m using a ghostwriter. For the other clients who aren’t ghostwriters, being written being written ghost written for what about some of those yeah so the people who are just using our platform or have used us for like creator partnerships and things like that um I mean you know for the platform it’s it’s pretty low lift to just get started so we don’t generally facilitate you know it’s like you know the subscription is like 49 a month right so it’s not like it’s a huge commitment I could ask people for sure uh but we’ve never had someone um ask about that but usually you know people just are signing up to the platform and and using it so happy to do that if you guys would like um for things like the campaigns the deeper campaigns yeah I can reach out to a few people we worked with and see if they’d be up for a up for a chat there okay yeah because that’s probably the campaign uh product offering on your side is the highest touch right um yeah for sure yeah yeah okay well this question how many how many of your company of your clients work with a they’re doing it through their own individual voice versus company voice. [Scott Spencer]: One of the questions is, when do we post as rewarded interest? And when do I post something that rewarded interest likes? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, so I would say that it’s sort of the structure of that is faulty, which is that you should pick one and just do it and ignore the other one almost entirely. The reason for this is because time and effort on your end or on whoever you’re working with More shots on goal from the one, more focus on the one, and you’ll see better results if you have sole focus on one. It’s really hard to grow two different social voices and brands at the same time. It’s a lot easier to do it for one. Someone who’s done this really well is Andrew Gazdeki. He built a 150,000 person X audience before he even started growing his company’s X account, but he was still driving a ton of business because it was linked on his bio. And all that stuff. What I would say is that people trust people, people buy from people. So if trust is a big thing for you guys, I would totally recommend Scott doing it probably through your account and in your voice. And keep mentioning the company, keep driving traffic to the site, all that kind of stuff. But don’t also try to spend time on the company account unless you have a very unique vision for it. Maybe it’s like you’re a thought leader and it’s a meme page or something. Because on LinkedIn now, you get a little more unhinged, and people are sort of okay with that. But yeah, my advice would be, especially early on, pick one and just make it really, really good. [Thede Loder]: Yeah, I was gonna say, if we have 10 million users, then we can have a company page and a CEO page, right? But that may be the right strategy. But you’re right, I think your point is good, which is we’re too early. So one is better than, you know, one is better than the other. [Scott Spencer]: I’ve been strongly advised to do it on the person basis to that point, like people, companies are It’s people and the the one I think YouTube Neil Mohan’s voice is like that’s done fairly. [Michael Houck]: Well, yeah You want people to think you’re the rewarded interest guy? Like if anyone on the internet is like, oh check out this rewarded interest thing. Oh, yeah You want them to go follow you on on LinkedIn first and foremost? Yep All right. [Scott Spencer]: Just make sure it’s the other end All right, cool. So looking forward to understanding the rate card, what that all looks like would be great. And given where we are, my guess is we might want to dabble with your agency side first, because that gives us more corpus of ideas to go forward and then go to do the link, do the actual posting. OK, that sounds good. [Michael Houck]: I will keep that in mind as I give you a couple options. And just let me know what you think. [Scott Spencer]: Happy to hop back on later this week and chat more whenever is good for you guys. Because the Ginsberg’s company, 50% of his stuff is him. 50% of his stuff is he’s got a group that basically helps him brainstorm out different concepts. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. I think it’d be valuable. [Scott Spencer]: It’s a casket company. Best marketing ever done for a casket company. [Michael Houck]: You can have some fun with things folks normally don’t see marketing for. So yeah, it’s like I always think of Squatty Potty, right? The shark tank company. But all right, cool. I’ll send that over tonight, guys. Appreciate the time. And yeah, looking forward to see what we can do here. [Thede Loder]: Definitely, Michael. Again, thanks for reaching out. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Great. Talk to you guys soon. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Thank you.