- Duration: 36 min
- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01K0ACQ6RGR3NTB46F06YJWN6Y (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01K0ACQ6RGR3NTB46F06YJWN6Y)
Transcript
[Michael Houck]: We can just dive in, I guess. First thing that would be helpful to know, and then I can share some more context on how we work and all that, is just how big of a priority for you is content right now? And some background on where you guys are at with Adapts. [Sharad Agrawal]: Obviously, I took a look, but I’m just curious how you’re thinking about everything. So to be honest, I’m running in a bit cold into this discussion. I’m not much aware of Megafone. But I was like interested in kind of learning more into the call. [Sharad Agrawal]: So what kind of content are you asking about, Michael? [Michael Houck]: Sure, no problem at all. So Megaphone is a two-sided business. So we have a content creation agency and you can use a human writer or we actually have an AI agent that we’ve built now too that can help out. And then we have distribution and for the distribution side we have a creator network with about 550 creators with about 60 million combined followers who we can loop in to amplify content. And so usually what we talk about on these calls is just sort of like, you know, is content creation a priority? Should we think about this in terms of how can we be the best content partner for you guys, whether it’s creating founder-led content for you on social or through a newsletter or something else? And or are you interested in sort of looping in the creator network to amplify trust, social proof, and visibility for content. [Sharad Agrawal]: And by content you mean could be LinkedIn posts, could be blogs, could be different kinds of content when you say content? [Michael Houck]: I mean LinkedIn X and email newsletters as well through like Beehive or Substack. OK. [Sharad Agrawal]: We are still very early stage, Michael, I’ll be honest. We are less than 10 employees right now. I mean, if you ask me, is content important? Content extremely important for any business. In fact, whether it’s a two-member team or it’s a 200,000-member team. So the importance of it in this day and age doesn’t change one bit. I would love to understand more. Yes, it is definitely important. We need to be able to make more posts. We need to be able to get the right energy in terms of driving the community of developers. How do we do that, would love to learn from you, what you guys do, and how you kind of, I mean, both in terms of content creation, as well as distribution. And how do you guys operate? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, let’s start up. [Michael Houck]: Sure. Absolutely. So we work with founders, we work with busy folks. And so our process is pretty lightweight. Basically, what we would do is we would have a kickoff call, where it’s you, it’s me, and it’s a writer from our team. And we go really deep on sort of like, who the target customer is, what they care about, what voice you want to speak to them in, sort of examples of content that you like versus don’t like that we can sort of learn from And we’ll take all that in, and we’ll use that to inform sort of the first couple batches of content that we create for you. And obviously, you’ll be able to give us feedback as we go. But from that point, it’s a weekly process that’s totally async. So I’d set up a Slack Connect channel. And every week, we would send over some questions that we want your POV on, and we think you’d a unique perspective to add to in the niche. And all you need to do is sort of pick up your phone and record like a 234 minute voice note where you just sort of ramble on those topics. We want it to be super off the cuff and authentic so that we get your honest take and sort of the content sounds like it could only come from you as opposed to just being some like, you know, that’s out there, right. So we would, so we do that we deliver weekly, we get a few weeks ahead, so not sort of scrambling from week to week. And then it would all be through Slack and Notion. If you wanted to do content interviews with us, that’s totally fine, we can accommodate that. But just because most of our clients are founders, we know that time is very precious. So async tends to be what they prefer. And then we handle all scheduling, we handle performance reporting, we actually go into your account, and we’ll like leave engagements on other people’s content who are in the niche and have viral posts so that we get some free profile views that way, build your following that way. Sorry, Michael. [Sharad Agrawal]: I’m sure it might be very easy for this. I’m still in. Yeah, so I think about it like there’s there’s two ways to get seen on social media, right? [Michael Houck]: One is by making a viral post yourself and have it be seen by a lot of people just based on the algorithm. And two is by identifying people who already have the audience that you want and actively engaging with a lot of their content. So you show up in their But then, as who, would they be mentioned? [Sharad Agrawal]: So you’ll correct you’ll have some mechanism of connecting my linkedin account to I don’t know equivalent of let’s say I don’t know For outreach we do use like things like hey reach and there are a couple of other sas tools you’re saying corresponding for posts There are there are some tools where you will make me sign in with my account and can make posts on on my behalf For posting content from your account like new posts that we’re creating for you We can do that through a number of scheduling tools We have one that we prefer, but we’re open to whatever sort of you prefer. We’ll use your tool. Yep. And then what about replies? [Michael Houck]: Right. So for engagements, we would need to log into your account and we would just sort of do it through the account that way. So we have our team who would manage that. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. [Sharad Agrawal]: And that’s optional. If you’re like, hey, I don’t want you in my account, then that’s fine. [Michael Houck]: We don’t need to do that, but it does help with I understand. [Sharad Agrawal]: I totally understand and agree as well. Does it need to be somebody like me who is doing it? Or can this also be somebody from my teams? Or maybe my company’s posts, for example. Or you guys don’t recommend that. For example, this is at apps. We have a company page. There’ll be a possibility where you get some, let’s say, right permissions through the apps page. And you can make replies based on that as part of that. Does that work or do you not recommend that and you prefer individuals responding? We can do any of the above. [Michael Houck]: We can do it from you, we can do it from teammates, we can do it from the company page. Generally speaking, I would recommend picking one and having that be the primary page that we’re trying to grow rather than trying to split that up. You’ll get more followers by putting all of our attention towards one page. It doesn’t matter as much much whose that is, although I would say it’s easier to grow a personal founder page than it is to grow a company page or something like that, because you have more skin in the game and you’re a person and people trust people before they trust brands. [Sharad Agrawal]: Makes sense. OK, so let’s say all of this is some engagement we are doing on this front. Then what happens on that? What was that distribution thing that you were explaining, Michael? [Michael Houck]: Yes, so one of the other things we have is a creator network. I built my audience up to 100K between X and LinkedIn. I’ve built it to 200K on Substack. And in doing so, I’ve met a lot of other creators who have big audiences. And so we’ve sort of pulled them together in a network and in a platform where you can partner with them. And you can partner with them in a few different ways. So one of those ways is when we share a post on your LinkedIn, we can set a budget and have some of those creators go comment on it or repost to their audiences, and they’re matched in your niche. So these are people who already have the audience, again, that you want. And they also bring the social proof of having big audiences and having those people’s trust, right? So that’s one way. And the other way is that if you want to partner with them on sort of deeper campaigns, like product testimonials, newsletter ad placement, sponsored posts on their own accounts, we can facilitate that due to our relationships with them as well. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. [Sharad Agrawal]: Okay. [Sharad Agrawal]: makes sense. How does it work out? How does the pricing work out for the content piece and then corresponding distribution? I’m guessing there will be various, it’ll be a little more nuanced based on what kind of packages I’m picking up. Um, but yeah, what about the content piece? Yeah. So distribution side, you’re totally right. [Michael Houck]: Every creator sets their own prices and you’d sort of be able to pick sort of, Hey, here’s how much budget I’m willing to spend. And you know, it’s allocated to the right creators and things like that. So that’s more variant to your point on the content side, it depends on how much content you want. And if you want us to sort of include some credits for the creator network, just as part of the monthly package that we do. So for context, our standard package is 4k a month. And that includes daily posts on social, that includes full content, operational support, profile optimization, funnel help, things like that. It also includes credits for the creator network for the month. So you’ll be totally covered having creators engage with your content throughout the month. Now, if you say, hey, maybe I want to use the creator network more ad hoc rather than setting some budget up front, that’s totally fine. We drop it down to 3k at that point. And then if you say, hey, maybe I don’t need daily content, maybe I just want like a few longer posts throughout the week or something like that, then we drop it down to 2k. [Sharad Agrawal]: So those are the three, the three options. Okay. And so in the Again, we are very, very early, so I’m trying to see this. So the 2K that you mentioned, is that is based on like a day, so that’ll be once a week post you mentioned, or that’ll be like a couple of posts per week or something? [Michael Houck]: It depends on the length of the post. So if we’re writing like, you know, mini essays as LinkedIn posts, that’ll be two posts a week at that price point. If you say, hey, I want like either shorter form quips or medium form, like, you know, one-off LinkedIn posts here and there, at that point, it’s going to be more like a three to five range for the week. [Sharad Agrawal]: So you’ll still get a considerable amount of posts at that price point. OK. And another ask I have is that three to five that you mentioned, I somehow don’t believe in that long essays. I know there are people who engage with that, but I’m somehow not a believer of that. Given the flood of posts that I see on LinkedIn now, I’m not sure how much people engage with that. That three to five, would you recommend keeping it to one person’s account? Or since we have two co-founders, would your recommendation be that that three to five, like medium size or small size, we distribute between the two founders and you both are driving more interest and you can kind of then respond to each other or whatever, promote through the company’s page, etc. [Michael Houck]: So I think it depends on your goals, right? I think early on, I see more of a justification to sort of experiment with both and say how who’s getting better responses, who’s getting more engagement and impressions, and then we just double down on whoever sort of posts are resonating the most. But if the goal is let’s, let’s build this audience right away, like there’s high urgency, we need like very high ROI for our dollar immediately, because we are early like that’s totally valid and understandable, then I would say, let’s pick one of you and let’s try to really hone in on the voice for that person. [Sharad Agrawal]: Okay. And when you say the distribution is typically on the, like, I can define the budget, right for that. And I, I can work on to that. So let’s say I take this 2k package. And I want to let’s say set a budget of let’s say 1000 dollars for the distribution. How does it work? How much distribution do I actually get versus like, how much percentage do you guys keep? What goes on? Like, how do I understand that? Like, what is the ROI for the thousand bucks versus me spending that thousand bucks, let’s say on some Reddit ads or something? I don’t know. I’m completely new to all of this. Yes. Just trying to get a sense of that. [Michael Houck]: No, it totally makes sense. The creator amplification sort of organic growth in that way is not something a lot of people Um, even though exists in some cases, but all creators do this with each other all these group chats where they boost each other’s posts, right? Um, so we’re just bringing that to everybody Uh, but yeah, so if you put a thousand dollar budget towards that all of that gets spent through the network We take zero percent of the deposit up front and then basically what happens is You know creators have the option to either spend that themselves what they earn or withdraw it from the platform And if they withdraw it, then we take a percentage of it at that point But everything that you’re spending gets put through the network. [Sharad Agrawal]: I couldn’t understand that. [Sharad Agrawal]: Can you explain that a bit? I’m sorry. No problem. [Michael Houck]: So TLDR, whatever you deposit, that’s what gets paid to the creators. That’s what gets spent. I’ll talk about how that gets split up now. Just wanted to establish that up front. Basically, what we would do is our team would say, OK, we’re putting out, you know, four posts this week or something like that. OK, and maybe one or two of those posts we think has higher viral potential than the others. Right. So what we would do is we would say, OK, for those one to two posts, we’re going to put it through the network and we’re going to set this budget for those posts. And then the algorithm that we built will match it to the right creators. And so as soon as that post goes live on LinkedIn, we’ll share the URL through the network, it’ll get sent to the creators via WhatsApp or Telegram, whatever they’ve decided on the back end, and they’ll be told they have one hour to engage with that post or else they don’t get paid. And so, excuse me, and so then they’ll go do an engagement on the post, it’ll get seen by their audience, obviously not 100% of their audience, but a good portion depending on how successful the post is. But you’ll also get that social proof of them, you know, being engaging with you and talking about the content you’re putting out, talking about the product, maybe if the post is about the product. And we can give them guidance on sort of what we want them to say in the responses too. [Sharad Agrawal]: So. And that would affect my followers as well. Because I mean, that would effectively also grow my followers on these different social media platforms. [Michael Houck]: Yes, that is that that’s the idea. If the creators followers see that the creator who they trust is commenting on your stuff, they’re going to be like, oh, who’s Sharad? I should follow him, too. He’s talking about interesting stuff that these creators are engaging with. That’s sort of the bet that you’re making there. And so some percentage of them will follow you. Some percentage will engage with the post. [Sharad Agrawal]: And that’s how everybody really builds an audience these days. Maybe last question. Let’s say that $1,000 budget that I just mentioned, and every week, is one such post that we believe that can go potentially viral, how much do the creators actually charge, like these other influencers sort of charge for amplifying or engaging for that one hour? So every creator sets their own prices. [Michael Houck]: And it's based on their audience size. It's based on just their own preferences. Some people will have the same size audience but charge very different rates. What our algorithm does is it prioritizes the people who are most aligned to your niche and who are the best value in terms of performance versus price. And we look at that data, we collect that data, and we prioritize people based on that. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: So. Can you estimate some range, like typically how much? [Michael Houck]: Sure. So again, for every type of engagement, like a comment or a quote or a repost, everybody has different prices for all those. But a very rough sort of heuristic for comments would be that for every 100,000 followers a creator has, they'll roughly charge $10 more for a comment. So someone who has 350,000 followers might charge 35 bucks for a comment or somewhere around there. Okay. [Michael Houck]: Makes sense. [Sharad Agrawal]: Makes sense. And then quotes are much more higher? No. Reposting quotes vary significantly. [Michael Houck]: Like some people charge the same rate for reposts that they charge for comments. Other people charge 5X more. And our algorithm prioritizes that and takes it all into account. Okay. [Sharad Agrawal]: May I know if there are any existing customers of Megafone, like which kind of customers, what is your base of customers? Does it look like, [Michael Houck]: Yeah, we have a few hundred customers is what I can say. That’s split between X and LinkedIn. Some people do both. Some people just do one. As far as our content clients, we have around 30 clients right now and they range from early stage founders to billionaire VCs who just want to build their legacy on social But on the on the creator network side, we have a couple hundred people using the using the network. [Sharad Agrawal]: OK. And is it possible for you to me for you to show me some examples like what kind of [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: No, that’s not possible. [Sharad Agrawal]: OK. Also, we’d maintain your privacy in the same way. OK. For the distribution part, does it say anywhere that these things are promoted, these are promotional stuff, like this has been paid for? They don’t, right? [Michael Houck]: It’s more like a genuine engagement. It looks like the creator just saw your post in their feed and was like, that’s interesting. [Sharad Agrawal]: I should comment on it. OK. Last question, Michael. What is the minimum I can get started with? Yes. Look, again, we are completely self-bootstrapped. Startup, very, very early stage. So I’m trying to understand what’s the like, we have only two founders, four engineers, some fractional people here and there. I’m trying to understand what is the right pattern, like where we can get in. And we can obviously increase as we get funding, etc, as we start. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, so the if we want to do content together, we want to do content creation, the minimum is 2k. We don’t go lower than that, because the research time for a writer and our team is just… The margin doesn’t make sense on our end at that point, so 2K is the minimum. If you wanted to just get creators to engage with your content, you could sign up through megaphone.network is the URL for that. I’ll send you an email tonight that has everything in it, but you’d sign up there, and you could pick your tier. There’s two different tiers. The lowest tier is $49 a month, and then plus whatever you want to spend on the creators through the network, you set your budget yourself. Um, so, uh, if you sign up with us as a content client, then obviously you don't need to pay that $49 a month subscription. We just include that for you. Um, but that those are the two, the two paths you could go. [Sharad Agrawal]: Okay. And on an average, what is the trend that you guys see? Wait, how big is, how long has this company been in existence? [Michael Houck]: Like this, this entire. [Michael Houck]: Megaphone’s existed for about two years, a little under two years. Um, the content agency has been around for one year. That Creator Network started two years ago. Okay. [Sharad Agrawal]: And what’s the usual pattern that you see? How long do your customers keep you engaged? Like, for example, if you look at SDRs, there’s a definite pattern that people use SDRs or outbound, whatever, lead generation companies for about six to nine months or something. That’s the average. And then the people drop off. In this case, what happens typically? Is there a trend that you guys have seen? [Michael Houck]: I mean, the best case scenario is that somebody uses Megaphone for a while. They grow their audience really big with these creator engagements. And then at that point, they themselves have become a creator, and they actually join the other side, and they actually start getting paid for engagements rather than the other way around. So we’ve seen that actually quite a few times at this point. On the content side, we have folks who’ve been with us since the first month we were in business, multiple. We have other folks who sign up for two months and then, you know, they’re tougher clients to maybe work with in some cases, or maybe we just weren’t the right fit, whatever it might be. But, you know, it varies. And so I like to sort of look at clients who we’re potentially working with and make sure that they’re going to be folks who are maybe around for the longer term in that way. But we have quite a few people who’ve worked with us for 12, nine, six months at this point. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. [Sharad Agrawal]: Okay. Let me think of this. If there’s something like some of these links, et cetera, you’re mentioning that I can share, that’ll be great. If there is a, I know it’s tough to kind of have any customer posts, but I just, I’m also worried that I just want to ensure that the content you guys are creating shouldn’t look like and look or feel like AI content. Sick of those posts on LinkedIn these days. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. Context, the default would be that it’s you, me and a writer. And my partner in the agency is Blakey mall, he has an even bigger, you know, he has like 93,000 followers on Twitter, he is literally the guy who is our editor in chief, and every single post that we send to you is edited by him and written by a human too. So we can augment that with this AI system that we built, but our default still today, because it’s still an early stage with the AI stuff, our default is actually not to use that yet. And so that’s why we get those voice trim you. That’s why we have Blake sort of in this editor in chief seat. It’s all human done first and foremost. And that’s part of why we’ve been able to keep these clients for so long, even while AI is coming up, because they keep saying, Oh, these people are pitching me on this AI thing. And they give me a sample. And it just looks terrible compared to what you can put together for us. So you know, that’s, that’s where we’re at with that. So maybe what I can do is I’ll share everything with you tonight. You let me know if you’re comfortable. And for context, we’re 30 days cancellation, month to month. So there’s no long-term commitment or anything like that. So if you want to give it a run, I’d be open to it. [Sharad Agrawal]: And we could try it out. Okay. And I see you’ve been with Airbnb and Uber, et cetera. So you understand product and everything. It’s not like you’re a technical writer. [Michael Houck]: No, my last company raised $23 million including a Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz. So I’m a startup guy. I’m not just an agency guy. This agency is just part of what we do these days. [Sharad Agrawal]: Okay. And who did you mention is the main content kind of editor-in-chief? [Michael Houck]: Blake Emal. His last name is E-M-A-L. You can find him on Twitter or on LinkedIn. [Sharad Agrawal]: Blake Emal. And he’s part of 25,000 followers. I’m guessing he is the person. How do I know who? Yeah, I’m guessing it’s him. OK. OK, send me some content. I mean, I would love to kind of have an engagement. I mean, or maybe potentially try it out for a couple of months at least. And see where it goes from there. [Michael Houck]: I’m just going to email tonight and we’ll go from there. [Sharad Agrawal]: OK, sounds good, Michael. Thank you for setting this up. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Take care.