- Duration: 29 min
- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01K11WH6TWT7AZJAQTXNWX7SJV (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01K11WH6TWT7AZJAQTXNWX7SJV)
Transcript
[Daniele Bernardi]: So I should be the one. Thank you. [Michael Houck]: I know how it is as a founder. It’s all good. But yeah, excited to chat, I guess. I don’t know how much context you have on me, on us. So happy to give a brief TLDR, but also super excited to hear about your goals, whether it’s for yourself or for Toolhouse, and how you think we could fit in, where content lie as a priority. So we can get into it all, but I guess first question would be, how much context do you have? Should I give background or, yeah. [Daniele Bernardi]: As much as your website gives away. So if you want to give your, your spiel, I’ll be more than happy to listen to it. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, sure. I’ll give you the, I’ll give you the TLDR. It’s mostly what’s on the website, but you know, I’ve been a founder for a while. I built up my sort of creator brand as I’ve been building companies and basically have, you know, met all these creators. Through that world. And I grew because they were interested in what I’ve been building, and they’re commenting on my content, and I’m growing as a result. And I thought that was really interesting. And so not a lot of founders have that sort of creator network. And so I built a platform called Megaphone, where basically there’s 550 creators with 60 million total followers in various niches. And I let people basically pay the creators to amplify their social content and give them the social proof that sort of goes along with that. Of having the creators engage. And that’s been great. But then we had a lot of people who were like, well, my content isn’t actually that good in the first place, or I need some help with it. And I’m like, well, I probably don’t have time to help you write your content, but we can build more of this business to help out with that. And so a year ago, we started this content agency, myself and Blake, who’s on the site. And basically, we are the only content agency specifically for social media media newsletters that I know of that’s actually operated by like the creators themselves. Like other ones, you know, they’ll hand you off to some account manager or some strategist or something like that. Like, no, like you’re working with me, you’re working with a writer on our team and they report into Blake. Blake edits everything before it gets sent to you. Like that’s how we operate. We’re super lean. [Daniele Bernardi]: So the quality bar stays really, really high. [Daniele Bernardi]: Nice. What would you be, What would your sweet spot be like if you had to pinpoint one successful campaign that you run? Why would you say that that was successful? [Michael Houck]: Well, so right now I have founding journey and megaphone both of them are underneath rye valley, which is our hold co and honestly being able to bootstrap both of them and now, you know, running them on a day-to-day basis without sort of having to worry about investors or co-founders or anything like that. Like, it’s super easy. So it’s allowed me to sort of build the life I want. And I think that’s what’s made them such a success in my mind. Like, you know, could I go out and do another venture-backed company like I did with Launch House? Yeah, I could. And maybe at some point I will. But for the past two years or two and a half years, I guess, it’s really been great to just sort of focus on not only building the company that I want, but also building the life that I want. [Daniele Bernardi]: I think that’s been a great success. Okay, yeah, makes sense. Maybe I can give you a little bit of background about myself, who we’re looking for. Please. Yeah, so I’m the founder here, co-founder and CEO. The platform is growing, and it’s growing because we are getting more distribution, so we’ll And with that, obviously, all the good things come to us, like revenue from users, investment money, all this kind of stuff. So obviously, we’re looking to maximize our distribution as much as possible by looking at a couple of things, basically. One is the user-facing content. So go on outlets where our end users are and tell them, hey, we exist. We’re new. Try us out. And then the second one is making sure that our stories are heard. And the audience for that is twofold. I would say investors, though we’re not particularly looking for investors right now. And it’s also users. We want people to organically come to our content somewhere through a newsletter. They find the reading or online content on socials where they figure out there was an interview with this founder or founders. Maybe your father can join, where we tell people why we built this, why we stand for it. And with that, try to find some sort of association or almost even emotional connection to our mission. Cool. I love that. [Michael Houck]: I think that’s really important because the best brands that people actually feel affinity towards, actually feel loyalty to, are the ones that tell a story, have a mission, have a cause, have something to draw them in and keep them coming back. Because, you know, especially with AI now, I mean, you guys are building the product that’s enabling this. Like, you can build a product, you know, a lot faster than you used to be able to. Product is no longer the moat in most cases, right? And so what is the moat? You know, data is a moat for sure. But brand is also a moat. And the association that you have in that person’s brain and their heart and their soul, that’s really important. [Daniele Bernardi]: So, yeah. That’s a good pathway. So to that, basically, what we’re looking for is an audience where there’s obviously a good audience size, but also there’s some of the people we want to reach. And if you have both, then we will definitely evaluate. Well, yeah. [Michael Houck]: And I mean, you have on your LinkedIn, I imagine you’d want to do this for both LinkedIn and for X. Is that fair to say? [Daniele Bernardi]: Yeah, I mean, I’m mostly doing X right now just because it’s like the same post gives me like a thousand times more views than like I, that’s weird. I used to work there and then they changed the algorithm. I think there’s something like all the, uh, even, even people got impressions before, uh, they don’t get it anymore. So maybe they get a list of the former employees and they wanted to boost them. I don’t know what’s going on, but no matter how hard I try, you know. [Michael Houck]: Well, I personally, I love your bio on X. I think it’s hilarious. But yeah, man, look, I mean, you have like, I think four or 5000 followers on LinkedIn, if I remember correctly, I looked earlier today. And I think on on X, I’m looking at right now you have like 300 or so. So I would say like, let’s not sleep on LinkedIn. You know, we have some built up audience there that we can, you know, use as a bullhorn to sort of get this out to more people sooner. But at the same time, building on X is super, super valuable. So yeah, that makes sense. Okay, well, look, I mean, I love working with folks who have exciting products, and who also just like care about sort of, you know, more than just the top of it, like, what is the mission? What is sort of behind the product? Those are the clients that we like working with the best, because there’s more to talk about. So I’d give you some context of what it would look like if we were to work together. Would that be helpful? Absolutely. OK, cool. So basically, I’m your primary point of contact, like I said. But we do one kickoff call right at the beginning. So it’d be you, it’d be me, and it’d be a writer from our team who knows the AI space well and who maybe is a little bit more technical or worked with more technical clients in the past and things like that. Would do that kickoff call, we go super deep on who is the exact avatar of this audience that we want to speak to? What do they care about? What do they value? What triggers them? What’s the full spectrum of who this person is? And also, for you, what is the voice that you want to speak to them with? And what types of content formats do you feel like are resonating most with you that we want to get out there? We go through all that, build up a strategy doc around it, and then excuse me, after that call, I’d set up a Slack channel for us. And basically it could be all async after that kickoff call, if you’d like, Some clients prefer to do, you know, recurring interviews with the writer. That’s fine too. We’re totally open to that. But just because we work with founders and VCs, you know, everyone’s super busy and it’s usually easier if we send over questions on Mondays that we think are interesting in the niche that came up during our research that we sort of want your unique POV on. And our only ask of you is basically to open up your phone, record a two, three, four minute voice note into Slack where you just totally ramble about the questions and you’re like off the cuff authentic take on them. And the less planned that is the better because then we hear the intonation, the emotion, the ums and ahs, and it lets the content that we create based on that really sound like you a lot more. So if we get those from you during the week, then it gets incorporated in that week’s batch of content that we’ll deliver at the end of the week. And we’ll work to get a couple weeks ahead early on so we’re not scrambling and blocking each other and things like that on a week-to-week basis. But everything is reviewable in Notion by you. I’ll set up a Notion space. You can leave comments. You can make edits. Over time, that goes down, and we learn your voice. And at that point, it’s basically on autopilot. But initially, we’ll want you to be engaged. And then we handle all scheduling. We handle all reporting of performance and metrics and things like that. And also, we do sort of proactive engagements on your behalf. So on other people’s content, we want to get those free profile views and free follows from leaving maybe somewhat insightful or maybe somewhat funny comments on other people’s stuff so that you get some engagement that way. So we have a team that just does that for you as well. We also have the creator network, like I mentioned. We have a lot of creators in the AI space who we can sort of loop in to sort of blow up the posts, or at least the ones that we think have the best viral potential, and maximize impressions for those in particular. So that’s sort of how it works. And then we can always hop on a call if we want to talk strategy and things like that, too. But we’ll report on that. Here’s the insights. Here’s the assumptions that we’re either proving or disproving when we share metrics each week. [Daniele Bernardi]: Makes sense, all right. Sounds good. Can you give me a sense of the budgets and costs you’re expecting? Yeah. [Michael Houck]: So standard package is 4K a month, and that includes everything. That’s like, we’ll be posting daily content. We’ll be posting either three to four long form a week or a mixture of long form and short form so that it is daily plus. We’ll be doing proactive engagements for you every single day. Replies that come onto your content every single day. And we’ll sort of handle the creator network side of things for you. So we’ll pay them out of our end. There’s no additional costs to like engage the creators, basically. If we lower that to 3k a month, then you can still use the creator network, but you have to do it on your own. And you sort of have to figure out how much budget to spend on different posts and things like that. Having to give guidance on like what’s normal and average and all that, but it would be on you rather than us taking it off your hand. And then if we go down to 2K, which is our lowest tier, that would be, you’d still get the content operational support where we’re doing the engagements, but you just get smaller batches of content. So instead of three or four long form a week, you’d get two, or instead of, you know, seven to 10 short form a week, you’ll get four to six or something like that. I see, okay. [Daniele Bernardi]: So it’s like two to four, based on where I want to go, if it’s fully managed, it’s four, okay. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, and you know, it’s where we focus between like how many long form versus how many medium form short form etc how many carousels or memes or whatever threads on on x that’s all going to depend on um on strategy and we’ll sort of define that early on but I just want to give you a sense of like where we where we tend to land different patches yeah that makes sense thank you um and then lastly is there any examples you could share or you know anything against and or it will be great and the reason I ask is because It’s like, we’re actually, Monday and actually mostly Tuesday, Tuesday afternoon, we’re going to figure out what to do with our budget for the next couple of months. [Daniele Bernardi]: And so that’s something I want to do next. Yeah, I can send over some examples over the weekend. [Michael Houck]: You know, just, it’s ghostwriting, so it’s a little sensitive for folks. So there’ll be anonymous examples, but you can see like, you know, how we’ve written for certain clients, how they’ve done in terms of performance and things like that. The one thing I’ll say, and I always like to caveat this, you know, when we are writing for these people, we are writing in the style and the voice that they want and that resonates with their audience. So, you know, some of the posts might be very different than the style that we end up deciding together to do for you guys. Right. And, you know, I just want to emphasize like our team can go across the board. We can do anything and everything. Um, so that’s just what I’ll say there. [Daniele Bernardi]: Yeah. And I’m going to collage my pearls with this kind of stuff. No, no, man, you You’d be surprised there are some people who like I would never talk in this style I’m like, well, yeah, of course we didn’t write it for you Yeah, no, I’m actually like the the good thing that I hear from The fact that I’m trying to obviously 10x my my following, you know, and that’s the thing. I know it’s resonating and makes me grow at the not not the piece I want obviously is the fact that I I go off the beaten path and try to be different from the rest, but also try to speak the truth. So I’m sure some investors hate me because I didn’t hold prisoners. I love that, man. [Michael Houck]: That means we can be a little bit bold with some of the content too, which is great. [Michael Houck]: Lean into something that some people might think is contrarian or something like that. That type of stuff stands out. [Daniele Bernardi]: yeah like I want to yeah like forget these scratch the a little bit like we need well but it’s not a good need to be controversial for the sake of getting engagement hello hey that’s that’s the thing that that really makes people Read on and follow and like the comments so yeah that’s the the part and so one of the things that we want to do more and more is exactly that, trying to hit on that nerve. Obviously, the posts that have the least engagement are the ones when I have to talk about the product, you know? I have to talk more about what we stand for, what’s behind the product, why we built the product in the first place. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, people resonate with those types of stories. And also, I would say that, I mean, just for us, that’s the type of stuff that we love to do. And I’ve never shied away from controversy in my career. And I think that it’s not that we want to court it, but we know how to walk that line. So I think that that could be fun. And also, what I would say, then, is if you ever have thoughts like that, once we get the Slack channel set up, just drop a quick voice note or write up a quick note to us in there and be like, hey, I just had this random thought. If you guys think this would be a good post, let’s do something for this. And then we’ll include it in the next batch. [Daniele Bernardi]: Yeah, exactly. So when you saw me ramble on for a few minutes on an audio note, then a post like this came to mind, which was the one that got a ton of not just engagement, but also a bunch of impressions. And I really liked that. I think that was the single handling, the biggest driver for following on that particular week. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I think I saw this when I was doing some research on your account beforehand. And what I loved about it was that it just, you know, a lot of people will try to talk to you about like, oh, the theory of like the right hook or something like that. And yeah, like there are best practices that you can use. But, you know, this post doesn’t necessarily have any of those things. And it still went somewhat viral because it was just so authentically you. It was just very clearly like you’re pulling back the curtain on yourself. And people are interested in that. And so I think the more we can do that and tie it into the business, the better. [Daniele Bernardi]: Exactly. Yeah. I’m going to do more of this kind of stuff, for example, more about getting more engagement on this kind of stuff. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. Well, look, I think I’ll send you over an email with, A, those examples, and also just summarizing our call. You already seen the Notion doc, but I’ll include that again, too, over the weekend. And then if you have any Any questions that come up when you take a look at that, I’m happy to hop back on Monday before you guys have your meeting. So just let me know. But otherwise, we can talk after Tuesday and go from there. I guess the last question for me would just be, is there anything that we haven’t answered that you guys will need for that decision? Not at the moment. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Cool. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Sounds good, man. [Daniele Bernardi]: All right. Well, I’m pumped. Let’s do this. [Daniele Bernardi]: Thank you. Sounds exciting. All right. [Michael Houck]: I will have a good weekend and I’ll talk to you next week. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah.