- Duration: 20 min
- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01K0YWHJ1VKEEJH84J2SJ8CA0F (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01K0YWHJ1VKEEJH84J2SJ8CA0F)
Transcript
[Michael Houck]: We try to keep these to around 15 20 minutes just so folks can get back to their day But I guess what context do you have about me about us? Where should I start? And then would also love to learn more about sort of your guys goals around content So you already have a pretty decent sized LinkedIn following so curious where you think we can maybe plug in Yeah, yeah, great question. [Nikolay Advolodkin]: Um, yeah, I’m subscribed to one of you guys’s newsletters The viral tips. Oh nice. Yeah, I’ve actually tried one of those and it worked out pretty well but of course I’m no marketing expert and yeah I’m always looking to figure out how to become more prevalent on social media so that I can spread my voice and spread my messages and so you guys seem like you know what you’re doing and so I wanted to talk to you to figure out whether there’s an opportunity to collaborate so I can get some help and grow my social media presence and ultimately that will of course influence everything that I do. [Michael Houck]: Cool. Sounds good. That makes a lot of sense. And also cool that you found us through Vyro Examples. That’s a fun newsletter for us to write every week. So I’m glad it’s actually, it’s not just a fun thing. It’s actually helping people too. Yeah. Yeah. [Nikolay Advolodkin]: Thanks for that. Cause yeah, I mean, I, of course we get so much email, but I’m glad I tried one of your tips and it’s working. I’m like, wow. So it’s not just bullshit, you know? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, no, we, we spent a lot of time looking into this stuff and seeing what, you know, different creators are trying out, what’s working them. So yeah, so good to good to know. But okay, so basically, the way we work is it’s two sides of the same coin, and content and distribution is sort of how we see it. And just for some background on me, you know, I’ve been a founder for a while, I raised 23 million, including a bunch from Andreessen Horowitz, and some other great investors for my last company, built up a big personal brand while I was building that and met all these creators and basically realized that, you know, those creators helped me build my audience. And not a lot of founders have access to these sort of creator relationships. So let’s try to find a way to make that more accessible for people. So built a platform called Megaphone. We now have about 550, I think, creators on the platform with about 60 million total followers who we can sort of loop in to engage with people’s content, amplify it to their audience, match it to the right niche, and kind of get seen by the right people. So that was a standalone business. But then a lot of people were using it were like, well, I’m not that great at writing content. Do you just want to write it for me? And I said, I probably don’t have time to write 100 people’s content, but I can build another side of this business. So we built the second side, which is the content agency. And so basically what we do is we create content for LinkedIn, for X, or for email newsletters and Substack and things like that. And we handle all creation, all editing, and then scheduling, posting, engaging with other people’s content on your website. Behalf. So you can get some like free follows and profile views from people seeing your comments on other people’s viral posts. And then we can loop in creators to sort of amplify it to their audience as well. So a very high level, that’s sort of how the business works. And yeah, so I guess like, platform wise, I mean, as I said, you have 11,000, I think it is on LinkedIn. So is that like, you just want to get that off your plate? Or it’s other platforms you want to build up to that level? [Nikolay Advolodkin]: Like, where’s your where’s your head at Well, LinkedIn seems to have the most traction for me, uh, just organically. So I think I want to just keep growing that. Cool. [Michael Houck]: That makes a lot of sense. I, yeah, if it’s working for you guys, let’s, let’s, let’s double down on it. Right. Um, okay, cool. So basically what we would want to do then is I would go in and I would sort of audit your profile and some of your content to see like, Hey, here’s some early things. I think I can, I can see that we can tweak. Um, but then we get on a kickoff call and you’ll, I’m your primary point of contact. I’m not going to hand you off to some account manager or anything like that. I’m the founder, and I’m your primary guy. So we get on a kickoff call. I’d loop in a writer from our team who I think could be a good fit for the niche and for the account and just for your voice. And basically, we’d set up a Slack channel after that. And we’d go super deep on the call about who we’re speaking to, what they care about, how they view you right now, how you want them to view you, who has that voice and has captured that audience in the way that you want to. And we’ll sort of use all that to build a strategy and a voice stock and things like that that we’ll share with you. Once we have that, then it sort of goes as async as you want it to go. A lot of our clients are super busy founders. You know, we work with, I think it’s like 32 clients now from early stage founders to billionaire VCs. And most of them are super busy. And so we’re not going to put a ton of meetings on your calendar. Basically, if you want to do it all through Slack and Notion and voice notes, we’re more than happy to do that. If you want to do weekly content interviews with the writer where we ask you questions, that’s fine too. But the process, the standard process is basically on Mondays, we’ll send you some questions that came up during our research that we think you’d have sort of unique POV to comment on. You’ll respond just by picking up your phone, doing a two, three, four minute voice note, or you just ramble into Slack. And the more off the cuff that is, the better, because we of organic intonation and things like that. They really help us, the content that we create sound like you. And that’s, I think, really important for authenticity and for growth too. So if we get that from you during the week, it’ll be incorporated into that week’s batch of content. And we’ll work to get a couple of weeks ahead so we’re not sort of scrambling on a week-to-week basis. But then we’ll deliver everything in Notion. You can review it if you like, If not, Blake, who’s my co-founder in the agency, 93,000 on Twitter isn’t a bigger audience than I do. The two of us will personally review every piece of content. So you can be assured it’s going to hit the quality bar that we would want. But especially early on, if you want to get involved and do some editing yourself, final approvals, things like that, that’s totally fine. But our goal is to get that off your plate sooner rather than later. So that’s how it would work. Then we’d handle scheduling. We’d report every week on performance and metrics and insights that we come with to update the strategy. And we just sort of go from there. It’s month to month. All we ask is 30 days notice for cancellation. And there’s a couple different packages based on what you want to include that I’m happy to talk through. [Nikolay Advolodkin]: Yeah, that’d be great to talk through that. [Michael Houck]: So basically, it ranges from 2K to 4K. The 4K is sort of our standard package because you get everything. What that means is that you get sort of full weekly content batches. So that means, you know, we’re doing three to four long form posts a week or multiple short to medium form posts a day or some combination of those, right? It means that we’re doing full content ops support where we’re identifying a list of creators in the niche who are going to comment on every single day and try to get people to view your profile from there. We’re going to optimize your profile early on, of course. And then we also are going to include some credits for the creator network to match you with the right to amplify you on a daily basis, but at least with a post that we think have high viral potential, we’ll put some budget on our end behind them. So that’s 4K. If we want to go down to 3K, we lose the creator network. You can still use it, but it would be sort of ad hoc. You’d be like, hey, I want to put $300 behind the creator network this month. OK, cool. That’s fine. We’ll charge you for that, and then we’ll go and use it. And then if we go down to 2K, you still don’t have the creator network included. But also it’s smaller content batches. So instead of the three or four long form posts a week, it would be, you know, maybe two long form posts a week or say four to six shorter to medium form posts a week. So their frequency goes down. [Nikolay Advolodkin]: You’re still going to get impact, but obviously more shots on goal is better. And what happens if I want to post throughout as well? [Michael Houck]: Oh yeah. [Michael Houck]: We’re not taking over your account. You still got control. You can still post whenever you want. We’ll use a third-party scheduling tool called Pipefully that you’ll have full access to. So if you want to schedule your own posts or even do an off-the-cuff post, just make sure that you either move what’s in there or let our team know and we can move it just so we don’t double post one hour after the next, basically. What did you say the tool’s called, Pipefully? Typefully. I’ll send it to you. [Nikolay Advolodkin]: Grab it. [Nikolay Advolodkin]: Hopefully best social media tool for creators and businesses. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, it’s really good. It lets you have access and we have access. We can actually comments right on the content in there if we want to. Um, it’s a cross post between, uh, uh, X and LinkedIn. If we wanted to also include X, we’re happy to do that. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Oh, nice. [Nikolay Advolodkin]: Oh, you’re saying, yeah, we can. So the content created can also go to X as well. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: And you know, we can try it. On LinkedIn for sure, since that’s where we’re seeing success, but we can basically cross-post and see what kind of results we get, and if it makes sense to spend more attention there over time, we can, but just as an option. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Cool. [Nikolay Advolodkin]: Yeah, sounds good, month to month. Are you guys seeing, can we use The growth and the posts. To drive business or are we ultimately just trying to create a larger network? It depends on your goals. Uh, so every client that we work with is different. [Michael Houck]: Some people, all they care about is building their influence on social and building the biggest sort of bull horn that they can or megaphone. They can no pun intended. Um, other folks, uh, you know, they’re very ROI driven and they’re like, Hey, all we care about is leads, booked meetings, things like that. But that’s totally fine, too. We can measure ourselves against that. We can set goals against that. And we can tailor the content and the CTAs that we include within that content to be more focused on that. Also, what we can do is we can ramp up the comments we’re leaving on other people’s posts as well. Because when you do that, if you add a link in this right field on your profile, it actually will show up underneath your name and be clickable off platform. Wherever you leave a comment. So for folks who are really ROI driven, we tend to ramp up the engagements because we see there’s more surface area to get people to click through to a landing page or something like that. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay, cool. [Nikolay Advolodkin]: Let me see. No, I think I’m good for now. Cool. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. [Michael Houck]: Are you feeling good about it? Like, should I send over more information and everything we talked about and we can kind of sync up maybe next week and see if, uh, see where there’s a fit. [Nikolay Advolodkin]: Yeah. Send me over more information and, uh, yeah, we can sync up next week. Um, yeah, let me do, let me do a little bit of research and look around and yeah, then we can sync up again. Cool. [Michael Houck]: Sounds good. I think the last thing I would say, uh, just so you have it is, you know, there are a lot of agencies out there that will basically say they are run by or owned by some creator or something like that. In most cases, those creators are just sort of the figureheads for the agencies or an advisor or a board member or something like that. As far as I know, we’re the only one where the two people actually in the weeds with the writing content team and with you are the creators themselves. So that usually ends up being useful for decision making and speed and things like that. So that’s the last thing I’ll say. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Nice. [Michael Houck]: All right. [Michael Houck]: Thanks. Go ahead. I’ll send over an email after I get done call this afternoon and we’ll go from there. [Nikolay Advolodkin]: All right. Sounds good. Thanks, Michael. Thanks for everything. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Nice to meet you.