- Duration: 29 min
- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01K0SQRA2XF2P6DX243GNYS6GW (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01K0SQRA2XF2P6DX243GNYS6GW)
Transcript
[Michael Houck]: So normally I am always on this thing. I do like 10, 15, sometimes 20,000 steps a day. And so when I have back-to-backs, I just, I do them all like this. And obviously when I was traveling around, I didn’t have it. And now I do. And so I feel so energized and pumped about you. No idea. [Blake Stewart]: That’s the way to do it, man. Especially like sales calls. You gotta be jacked up and amped and that’ll do it. [Michael Houck]: That’s great. [Michael Houck]: if we’re not out of breath and look like a fucking idiot. [Blake Stewart]: That’s awesome. Good for you. [Blake Stewart]: That’s the way to do it. [Blake Stewart]: You’re feeling better? You’re feeling better chest head? [Michael Houck]: I think we have a little bit of a lag or something. Yes, I am feeling better. It was a rough, like I basically didn’t leave my apartment for like three days. But as of like yesterday, I’m back to feeling pretty good, so. Good, good. [Blake Stewart]: Yeah, I could, that’s the worst, man. [Michael Houck]: I definitely like, like I don’t know, sprained or pulled like my left pectoral muscle here too. And so I don’t know if you’ve ever like done that, pulled a pectoral muscle before? No, I haven’t. Okay, so neither have I. But apparently, Like it feels like a very like deep like not like a surface level like bruise or pain like it’s like deep in your chest and so And it just happens like randomly like, you know, you’ll you’ll Lean forward a little bit. It’ll like pull it in a certain way. I don’t get Pain in you and so this was like Saturday night. I’m like half concussed, right and I keep having this chest pain That’s like totally random doesn’t seem to be tied to any specific thing And I’m like, do I have a fucking heart attack right now? Like, am I about to like die? When I got the first COVID vaccine, I stopped after that. But when I got it, I had like myocarditis in my head. And so I know what it feels like to have like a pain in there. It was very similar to that. So I was like, is this like a heart thing? Like, did I do something when I, fucking wiped out surfing or I’m going to die. Like, I don’t know. Yeah. [Blake Stewart]: A little bit of anxiety and some stress there. [Michael Houck]: No, I hear you. [Michael Houck]: That’s a Saturday night. Very long night. But yeah, all good now. How are you doing? What’s going on? [Blake Stewart]: I am good. [Blake Stewart]: I kind of hurt my Achilles last week. I didn’t rupture it. My buddy just ruptured it. So I’m kind of like paranoid to do that. And so it’s been sore and tight. And so like I’ve stopped doing everything. I was in a good schedule, kind of like working out every day and playing volleyball on the weekend and playing soccer on Thursday nights. And I’m just, I’m taking it easy, which is kind of, kind of hard for me. [Blake Stewart]: But other than that, I’m good. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, everything’s pretty good. So I feel like we’re just, we’re just getting old and dying. [Blake Stewart]: Gotta get a treadmill. That’s the way to do it. [Michael Houck]: Dude, this is, honestly, this is like the way, like I can’t even stress it enough. It’s, after it, it’s just like, yeah. [Blake Stewart]: There you go. You’ve got the Peloton right here, but that’s becoming a clothes hanger. [Michael Houck]: You can put the, you can put the laptop on the little Peloton thing. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: All right. [Blake Stewart]: I won’t take up much more of your time joking around, Um, biggest thing on the list is found a treat. So kind of throwing out some feelers seed legal, uh, seed legals is kind of interested. Um, I haven’t sent them any information, but, uh, I contacted the guy who does dinners in New York city. And so he said, he’s, he said, let’s do it, but, uh, see what that means. [Michael Houck]: Um, if we can lock in a title sponsor, maybe two, or max three, but probably realistically to like activity sponsors, because just one week, right? Yeah. And then like one or two, like lower tier gift type sponsors. Okay, that’s, that’s like 40k in sponsorships right there. Plus, if we charge, like, I don’t know, Tyler charged 10k for But he’s done them recently to be like each person. I Don’t think we’ll need to do or want to do that But if we charge like 5k a person or even 2,500 a person is very quickly becomes like a six-figure thing Which is pretty cool. Yeah, that’s great. [Blake Stewart]: Wow, okay And do you have pricing for his previous sponsorships like do you think our pricing is fine or just keep it we’ll negotiate Tyler’s never had them sponsored before. [Michael Houck]: So the only reference point I have here is the launch house stuff. And that’s not really because we were venture backed. We had this giant brand, right? So what I’m going to do, I’ll make a note of this. I’m going to reach out to Andrew Young and get his sponsor pricing. Cause he does the Lumos house thing, which is pretty similar, except that you don’t actually stay there. So we can actually charge more than what he charged. Perfect. [Blake Stewart]: Okay, cool. [Blake Stewart]: Yeah, that’d be good. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I’m trying to look around like chat tbt said on deck did something similar for 10k Yeah, I mean we’ll get the best data if we like talk to them direct, you know So I can talk really in and on deck too, but andrew is the guy who’s doing this the best. [Blake Stewart]: So he’s the guy Benchmark on Sweet. Okay. Um, so yeah, this sounds awesome. I’m pumped to sell it and see it come together. [Michael Houck]: I will, um, I’ll finalize the doc tonight and I’ll republish. I’ll give you the go ahead to start, start sending that out and doing all that. Um, but I also think like, well, okay, maybe, maybe let’s wait on the go ahead until Tyler takes a look at it. I don’t want him to send it out without him taking a look at it too. So let’s do that. I’ll make edits. I’ll publish, I’ll share it with him. And then we can start sending it out once he gives us up. [Blake Stewart]: Okay. Um, can I send a version to this seed legals guy or should I just kind of, yeah, you can send, you can send a version. [Michael Houck]: Just let me, let me make edits tonight and then send it after that. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay, cool. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: All right. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: That sounds good. [Michael Houck]: Dude, it’s, it’s going to be, it’s going to be so great. [Michael Houck]: I’m so pumped for this. Like, I know if we, if we do it well, but we, I was thinking about this we can do like one a quarter Yeah, and we can partner with a different creator each time, you know Like the next one we do with Andrew Young the one after that we do with Scott Scott Chisholm the one after that we do with Greg Eisenberg, you know, like be fun to I’m honestly what we even could do. This would be a logistics heavy thing. We need to hire somebody who dedicated for it but we could even do these as a service for people, like for creators, you know? Like, I don’t know if it’d be worth it, but if we have a playbook down and we just hire someone to run it, it could be free revenue for us. [Blake Stewart]: That was an idea back in the day on Kernel. Somebody ran with it. I wonder, I could look up if they actually did something about that. But yeah, I mean, even like catering it to VCs too, and like doing it for their portfolio, could be interesting to tackle. I thought about that. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Blake Stewart]: Yeah. [Blake Stewart]: Wow. Okay. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Cool. [Blake Stewart]: What, uh, what sparked the idea for you here? What made you pull the trigger? I’m sure it’s always been on your mind, but, um, just sort of fuck it. [Michael Houck]: Like, you know, like I, I basically got down here to Charleston and I was like, all right, like, you know, I’m here for three months minimum. Maybe I’m here here indefinitely, but I got to get the move on with, you know, whatever we’re going to do here. And so it motivated me to do this and it’s motivating me to start thinking more about raising a fund again. So I think we’ll probably revisit that in Q4. This is like Q3 that maybe is Q4, but I’m just sort of tired of like, you know, we saw the churn from the ghostwriting agency, right? We’ve actually picked up a folks. Um, and we have some more in the funnel that I think are going to convert within the next week or so. So like we’re seeing some growth there again, but I just got sort of tired of like sitting around and, you know, I just want to do something. And so, um, this is what I know how to do really well. [Blake Stewart]: And so I figure let’s just, let’s just do it. Okay. Uh, sweet. Uh, you just mentioned the fund. Um, I like that urban mining company a lot. [Blake Stewart]: Uh, yes. [Michael Houck]: Uh, yeah. I’m chatting with the founder on Friday. I think it’s a really smart idea. Um, what I need to evaluate is like how smart they are about the idea. Um, but yeah, I think it’s, I think it’s probably worth a, worth a small check for sure. Okay. Awesome. [Blake Stewart]: Will you send me the recording after that call? [Blake Stewart]: Yeah, absolutely. [Blake Stewart]: Let me look into that. Yeah, man, that’s awesome. I wish I had some more money to throw in. [Michael Houck]: I’m doing this all through Rivalry. So if we have a good outcome, it’ll be good for the business and we’ll be able to grow and everything. [Blake Stewart]: All right. Cool. All right. Next big topic. Outreach. So. Um, actually this did some, uh, a sequence on Salesforce just cause it’s already set up and I had all this syntax ready to go. Um, and already got a reply from like 17 outreaches. So like that’s already working better than potentially my dead domains on HubSpot. [Michael Houck]: So that makes sense for context. Um, the reason Salesforce is as active is because it renewed like the day before I was going to cancel it. So we all have it for another month and then we can just move everything over in like mid, uh, mid August. Okay, cool. Um, all right, well then let’s keep that. [Blake Stewart]: I don’t want to switch anything up, especially if you’re already paying for it. Um, I’ll look into limbless more. I think it would be nice. I mean, just as like condensing tools, Limbless would take care of that in Apollo, but I mean, the system’s already in place and working, I don’t wanna. [Michael Houck]: No, it’s an easy transfer. When Max was working on this, we moved from Instantly to Salesforce and it was pretty painless. So I assume you’ll be the same thing with Limbless. So I like the idea of consolidating the two tools, especially because Limbless seems to have some sensibility to integrate with AI workflow builders, Yeah. So, um, I won’t renew Apollo or Salesforce and when they expire, we’ll just have moved everything over to Olympus. Okay, cool. Yeah. And I also like the LinkedIn, uh, feature in there too. [Blake Stewart]: So like, once again, the value replies we were seeing were pretty high compared to Cody outreach email. So if I could integrate that into my sequences, I think that’ll be good. All right. August got it good. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: So what I’ll do is I’ll buy limbless on like August 1st, right? Okay, then the first week of August at least and then We’ll have a week or so of overlap to get it set up Perfect. [Blake Stewart]: Good plan Cool, okay Saw a bunch of megaphone studio people sign up. What was that about? Oh Yes. [Michael Houck]: So, um, sorry, this is mostly through Cape, the like Valley replacement, that’s all warm intro pads instead of a cold outreach. Yeah. So that’s working well. Uh, one of them is a VC, which I’m excited about. We’re sort of seeing some success there and we have more VC outreach in progress. Um, I still need to do more manually there. Uh, but I hope to have some time to do that this week. So, but yeah, good, good signals that we’re getting responses both from this method and this cohort. [Blake Stewart]: So yeah, cool. Okay. Yeah. Your payments channels blowing up. So that’s great. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: I mean, some of them are renewals too, right? Like Draper is in there and augmented stuff, but yeah, it’s, it’s nice to see some, some positive on the gross side there. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Cool, perfect. [Blake Stewart]: Did Anvil ever want to move forward? No, I don’t think they got the response from their launch that they wanted. [Michael Houck]: I have an email reminder set to keep following up with them, but I asked them what they wanted to do next and they didn’t respond, so TBD. Gotcha. All right, I think that’s about it. [Blake Stewart]: Cool. Yeah. Noted on the shorter sentences. Sorry about that. Yeah, we’ll keep it. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. [Michael Houck]: Why don’t we just put like a character element on it instead? [Blake Stewart]: Like I keep saying one sentence, but yeah, people keep sending like the longest run on sentence and- Dude. [Michael Houck]: Every single sponsor has the worst fucking instincts with this stuff. Do you really think people are going to want to read more of an ad? Like write a shorter ad, write a better ad, you know, it’s not, it’s common sense. Okay. Yeah. So yeah. I mean, literally just tell them, like, if it’s shorter, it will blend in more and it will get more clicks. These people actually read it. Right. Like, yeah, it’s crazy to me. It’s so crazy. But this is why this is why we know marketing and they’re asking us for help, you know, like Yeah, yeah Boy, okay, cool. All right. [Blake Stewart]: Well, that’s it on my end All right, man. [Michael Houck]: Um I’ll bring you later tonight. [Michael Houck]: Uh when the doc is is ready to send to seed legals and then um I’ll I’ll add you to a thread with tyler. So you guys just have context on that conversation too. [Blake Stewart]: Perfect Cool sounds good. [Blake Stewart]: All right, dude. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: All right. [Michael Houck]: Take care. [Michael Houck]: Later. Get a treadmill Making me jealous. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah, I will. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: All right. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: I’ll see