- Duration: 37 min
- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01K1BRF8YKFFQQX7CQE97P8HVE (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01K1BRF8YKFFQQX7CQE97P8HVE)
Transcript
[Michael Houck]: That’s the start of my calls here. How are you? [Blake Stewart]: What’s going on? I’m good. I’m good. Yeah, it’s nice to see some replies coming in through these new inboxes. That’s definitely more encouraging. But yeah, just still not seeing the results from the ads, which is discouraging. Trying to figure it out. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: I mean, look, I think that I think it’s pretty clear that people are not happy with the ROI that they’re getting. And part of that is maybe things we could be doing with copy or presentation within the newsletter. I don’t know. We can experiment with that. But I think most of it is just because the money that they’re putting up is not resulting in the amount of clicks that they expect. So we should think about, you know, especially now that we’re going to be layering in these retreats and probably the hiring stuff too, within the next month or so, we should be thinking about, obviously we want to increase the amount we’re making through sponsorships per month, but maybe we rebalance some of that away from the main ads to whether it’s being more generous with discounts, whether it’s lowering the base price. I don’t know. Um, but yeah, I think that, you know, I don’t want your job every month to have to be stressing about how many new partners you can sell on taking a shot, right? I want it to be at least 50% people who are just coming back because they were happy with what they paid for, you know? So I think our goal should be happy partners because that makes this whole thing like work easier. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. [Blake Stewart]: Yeah. I mean, I’m definitely playing, playing the nice guy as much as I can and and trying to keep these people happy. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. [Blake Stewart]: I like that idea of kind of bundling other options too. I think ultimately that’s what it comes down to. I mean, it’s just how many times can we get a partner in front of our readers before they commit to something too. So. [Michael Houck]: And the other thing too is like the more of your time that is freed up from having to like have the same sort of first conversation Selling people on the idea and the brand and everything like that. Yeah, the more you can do more stuff, too, right? [Blake Stewart]: So it’s not like that’s like lost revenue for us lost income for you, whatever like we can repurpose that time for more revenue generating stuff Yeah Okay Well, I’ll keep an eye on it and see what’s happening It’s gonna be hard to change results anyway but I think with all the responses I’m getting, I think that’ll kind of change my perception of what’s actually happening. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: So maybe, maybe like take this week and just like think through it, like balancing all the different factors and everything like that. And then next Tuesday, like just come with recommendations that we can chat through about like, Hey, here’s, should we be changing prices? If so, what should they be? Here’s what else we could be doing to generate more revenue and package different things together? Like, let’s just do sort of a holistic meeting next week on, you know, H2 partnership revamp, basically. [Blake Stewart]: Okay. Cool. Yeah. And I mean, yeah, well, yeah. All right. Cool. I’ll do that. Yeah, I mean, once again, everything’s kind of tied together too. So like, yeah, maybe something with megaphone too, or I don’t I don’t know. Okay. I’ll work on that. That sounds good. Yeah, found a retreat outreach. Yeah, I mean, pushing there, getting some feedback, move the pricing. And so we’ll kind of just play the game of who’s interested, what they’ll pay for. Obviously, you want a bigger name than anything else. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: together. [Michael Houck]: If you run the economics of this thing, like let’s say we have 12 founders, or just to keep the number simple, let’s say we have 10 founders plus Tyler and myself, right? If we charge the founders, say 5k low end, right? Tyler’s charged 10k before Cape Town flights are more expensive. Maybe it’s somewhere in the middle, but let’s just say 5k. We charge them 5k each, that’s 50k plus an additional let’s say average 10 to 20 on the sponsorship side, that puts us at 60 to 70K total. The villa plus the experiences and things like that will probably cost us 30K total. So roughly that gives us like a 30 to 40K net that then would be split 50-50. Between us and Tyler and you’d get a portion of the sponsorship, like the same 15% of sponsorship side. So if we assume that, then yeah, I mean, it works out where he’s told me he usually makes like 10K, most like 20K on these himself, just for putting the time in. So we’ll take that away from it individually, like for the two businesses. That’s actually more successful. [Michael Houck]: Especially for the first one too. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. And then if we go higher end and we say, Hey, well, you know what, it’s actually not 5k, it’s actually 7,500. All of a sudden, you know, that’s an extra, you know, 10 to 20 K per business here for us. So it’s, you know, we’re going to make money on this. So I don’t think we should be sticklers on like, Oh, it has to be 30 K or 25 K or whatever. Like if the market is telling us they’re not going to pay that, like let’s just get it done and keep logistics simple, you know? Okay. [Blake Stewart]: Um, yeah, that makes sense. Um, I’ll push a little bit with road to because she so my contact there, she like runs dinners in New York. And so this is obviously something new. A lot of the people I’m finding are those kind of, you know, community builders who are hosting those dinners. And so a retreat is a thing. [Michael Houck]: So I mean, look, if there’s if they want to do events in New York, or even SF, like, you know, as I said, I’ll be in New York at the end of September, for a couple days, like get my stuff out of storage and everything. But if they want to do dinners, like, you know, that we do on like a Thursday night, so I can like, fly out, you know, Wednesday to Sunday or something like that. Yeah, I’m totally down to do that. Because the plane tickets a couple hundred bucks, they’ll pay us a couple thousand and for the dinner we cover the tab like 1k like it nets out you know yeah yeah good for me okay I’ll throw that out there and you can say like you know we’ve done these with partners before like we’ve done multiple dinners with athena they came back did more with us they were partners with us for a long time on various things um so that we’ve had success with this before and I I think that these types of partners, if we like ease them in with a dinner, could be very good partners for like we build that trust, and they can be more likely to pay more for retreats down the road. [Blake Stewart]: Okay. Okay. All right, I will see what she needs to kind of move forward with. [Michael Houck]: And I just let me know like Because my dates are sort of flexible right now. [Blake Stewart]: It just needs to be like second half of September. Okay? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah, 25th is a Thursday. It’s the last Thursday of September. [Blake Stewart]: Yeah Perfect, actually Okay Fun there we go. [Michael Houck]: Oh Yeah on Mantis So I talked with Steve again today. He’s great, by the way, he gets it. He’s super sharp, really like the guy. They’re like, totally in like he’s sold. He’s like, we’re just waiting for this contract to end with this other partner. But even before then, we want you guys to start doing some other stuff with us. So I have a meeting next week with him again, and with one of their partners like get started on content for him. And then They’re also talking about short form video that we can use our video team for. They’re talking about a newsletter too. There’s a lot of stuff we’re going to be doing with them. This could be a pretty big contract. We’ll see where it lands over the next couple of weeks or month or so. But yeah, they’re totally sold. I thought about hiring someone in-house, but I’d rather have just a team. You guys already have the team built. [Blake Stewart]: So I just want to plug into that. Boom. Perfect. Nice. I mean, yeah. I said, thank you for that. [Michael Houck]: I’ll send over a referral bonus once he pays. Great. Yeah. That seems like a perfect fit. [Blake Stewart]: Yeah. They just raised a bunch of money again. So I think that’ll be a good partner to work with. And they get it. Yeah. I mean, their whole fund’s built on social capital from the Chainsmokers. So they should get social presence. [Michael Houck]: He was saying that, um, the firm that they’ve been working with for content for like Alex’s LinkedIn or whatever. It’s crazy. You want, you want to hear this there? No, I don’t. I, I, he told me the name before, but I, I forget. Okay. Should I know them? Like someone worth knowing or something? [Michael Houck]: I wonder if we could poach any of their clients. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Oh yeah. [Michael Houck]: That’s a good idea. I’ll ask him for the name, but, um, They charge in $70,000 a year. And for that, I mean, that's, you know, it's a lot, but you know, you can deliver services for that. Right. What did they get? Two posts a week. That's it. [Blake Stewart]: That's like $500 a post almost. That’s crazy. [Michael Houck]: It’s insane. [Michael Houck]: And then he also said that like, they like asked him if he could give them like backstage pass like the chain smokers concert in vegas and everything like that I’m like you’re fucking kidding it’s so unprofessional like what the hell yeah it’s fucking annoying geez yeah it’s 673 dollars a post how crazy do you have to be um yeah I think they’re pretty sold um yeah I mean I think 70 70 000 a year is like the floor for what we could end up doing with them which is great Yeah, I’m sure they want to increase cost to and kind of get more. [Blake Stewart]: Yeah Sweet that’s awesome. Great here. Yeah, I mean Part of me wants to tell you to this like spin up a whole nother landing page. [Michael Houck]: That’s just VC focused Yeah, I know. I know I Want to I just Man, I feel like you actually Like the stuff that you own, I feel like you’re pretty autonomous with it. Like, you know, every now and then the partnerships were like, we need to pump a funnel or whatever, and I need to help with that. But that’s the majority of the stuff that might hand it off to you. You just like go do it. And that’s great. I feel like with the parts business, I’ve just gotten tied and pulled into like so many little things over the past, like couple of months that on top of like the travel and everything like that until recently, it was just like very hard to like do new things and like have that deep work and stuff like that, but I do think that that’s something we should do. Like even just a separate simple notion doc that’s targeted towards the VC folks, because the messaging does need to be different for sure. [Blake Stewart]: Yeah. Yeah. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. [Blake Stewart]: I might put some ideas together. I mean. [Blake Stewart]: Yeah, feel free. [Blake Stewart]: We just kind of get some, Some copy that makes sense for vcs then have selene design a landing page and then it’s they can just be as simple as that Yeah, yeah, like megafunkstudio.com slash vc or something like that. Yeah. Yeah I don’t know. I’m just like I mean, we’re you’re kind of going two for two It’s these big vc brands like I think there’s more out there And it’s okay. [Michael Houck]: We had one pass which I wasn’t happy about um Offline that came in through cape the new sort of like warm intro growth channel. Yeah They ultimately wanted to hire someone in-house and I couldn’t convince them. Otherwise, um Which was unfortunate? But They were like very close. And so I agree with you. There’s a lot more of these folks out there I do have more combos in flight, but they just take her because they’re bcs and not all of them move very quickly. Um But Yeah. [Blake Stewart]: What’s your strategy there? [Blake Stewart]: Is it just personal network? Yeah. [Michael Houck]: It’s just personal network. [Michael Houck]: It’s starting with just people who I know, like, Hey, you know, how’s it going? Like, you know, your firm, are you guys doing anything? And I frame it like either for you and your partners or for your port goes, like, we’ll come into a free workshop for your port goes, you know, whatever. Um, so there’s like multiple of those convos that are in flight, but we’ll see if they, they turn into anything or not. Okay. [Blake Stewart]: I had a Google Sheet somewhere, a bunch of funds. Yeah, I have it bookmarked in my Slack reminders. [Michael Houck]: OK. Yeah, I mean, I keep refreshing it to like, oh, two days later, two days later. I know that game. [Blake Stewart]: OK, cool. [Blake Stewart]: All right. Well, yeah, it’s fun to talk about, but I know that’s backward. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I think that like by the end of this quarter, if we can have, let’s say, five VC firms here right now, if Mantis converts, we’ll have two, right? So if we can have five by the end of the quarter, that’s like, you know, a good stable thing that, you know, we should do so. Okay, again, we’ll see where they land. But it is a priority. It’s just That’s like one of 20 priorities I’m gonna tell you right now. [Blake Stewart]: Cool. All right. You got the job board thought too. I don’t know if you’ve given that any more brain power, speaking of being Sorry, I think we just lagged. [Michael Houck]: What’d you say? [Blake Stewart]: Cutting out a bit. [Blake Stewart]: Your job board thought that you sent over the other day. Yeah. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: In line with not having time to do more stuff. [Blake Stewart]: No, no, no, no. [Michael Houck]: I actually don’t think that’s going to be that big to do. I think I can spin up like an MVP there pretty quickly, actually. But I still have the concern, which is like, if we list jobs in a newsletter that’s being sent to people who don’t need jobs? Like, yeah, weird, you know? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yes and no. [Blake Stewart]: Like, I hear you. But I also think it’s not just about it’s not just about the reader wanting a job. It’s about the reader having a network of people who are always doing stuff and can kind of pass it on. But it’s also about following the startups. It’s like, oh, they just raised now they’re hiring for this position. That means like, they’re kind of advancing, they’re progressing a bit. Like, it’s kind of cool to track a startup, their progress, if they’re hiring for certain roles. [Michael Houck]: I think as long as we, as long as we give a financial incentive to people to make referrals, and then can actually track if the referrals like convert or not, then I feel like it can work. I have this, I have that hesitation, but I do feel like yeah, yeah. So, look, I mean, maybe the move is like, we try that out. And if people list their jobs, and if people refer people to the jobs, then, okay, you know, make some offer, we start to get a place in the ones that get featured in the newsletter, you know, something like that. And then maybe we expand it to be expert network, co-founder matching, and jobs all in one place. The expert network thing is something I think we can easily make a lot of money on, where we’re just reaching out to a bunch of these people, initially in our network, but later just more broadly, who list like area of expertise and the stage that they get with and things like that, examples, whatever. And then people just, we set up like a paid calendar link for them. [Michael Houck]: And then we pay them out based on how many bookings they get per month or something like that, you know? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. That seems simple. It’s like a, it’s like a private type of intro. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Hmm. [Blake Stewart]: Yeah, and a little bit more niche as well. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Blake Stewart]: Okay. That’s fun. I think this goes kind of come down to I sent you that survey for the LA grinds newsletter. When you sign up for it. He’s got a pretty good intro survey. I wonder if we need something like that to kind of collect some data on people and what they’re looking for. So like, opportunity to sign up for expertise, advising, or like opportunity to share a job? Splash? Yeah. Yeah, I think we can do something like that. [Michael Houck]: Like anyone who signs up to the newsletter has this, those opportunities. People fill out those surveys at very low rates. We used to have one before you joined the team forever ago. Response rates are super low. But those were just to collect demographic information on our readers. If there’s an action tied to it, maybe it’ll be higher. [Blake Stewart]: I don’t know. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Blake Stewart]: OK. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Blake Stewart]: I think it’s helpful, too, just to know more about the readers. Have some demographics, but like, like, are they more micro sass? Is it e commerce brands? Like, are they just interested? The response rates are just so low, man. [Michael Houck]: Like, it’s like under 1%. Like, we’re just not going to get enough to draw any real conclusions unless it’s like we do this for like, six plus months, and then we have enough to like, kind of tell, you know? Yeah. But I like the idea of like, actionable things so probably what we’ll do is After we set some of this stuff up we’ll just revamp the sort of onboarding experience to founding journey in general and There’ll be opportunities to feature this stuff sort of more prominent. Okay, cool All right, that sounds good Okay, oh One thing when I ask for you is Just like keep a close eye on these new inboxes, if you start to see like any degradation, because remember, we need like two weeks, right to like ramp up new ones. So just as you notice anything, just let me know. [Blake Stewart]: And I’ll set up a couple of new ones to warm in the background. Okay. I’m looking in Salesforce now. I don’t really know what to track. Like I see bounce rate to track. Those are heroes. [Michael Houck]: Main thing is just If you see a big drop in open rates, the reason is probably because we’re showing up in promotions and spam more. [Blake Stewart]: Right. Okay. I’m not even tracking open rate through Salesforce on some of these because that also hurts deliverability, I think. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah, it does. [Blake Stewart]: Okay. It tracks reply rate, but yeah, I’ll figure out what to track there without hurting myself. [Michael Houck]: If reply rate is our best proxy, then yeah, that’s fine. We can just use that as a proxy. Proxy. [Blake Stewart]: OK, cool. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: OK. [Blake Stewart]: I can probably, we got like six of them. I could probably just set like one or two aside and just like not even touch it until we need it to. Yeah. OK, I might do that. Good idea. Yeah, no, it’s such a good feeling to get some replies. Like I was showing the badge last week, just like no one replied to me. And then like this week I’ve got like 15 replies. I’m like, yes. [Michael Houck]: Let’s go, dope. So it feels good. Okay, last thing on my end then is like, is there an update on QA source? Should we kind of consider them dead or what do you think? [Blake Stewart]: He said August like they’re gonna consider in August so I’ve been waiting until Like next week to reach out to him and kind of kick it off again Should I mention the counter-retreat too? Yeah. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Blake Stewart]: Yeah, I was gonna use that as kind of my in to kind of reconnect So maybe I’ll just do it this week I don’t know. I’m still pretty hopeful. I don’t want to get your hopes up. I personally feel like it’s 50-50, but I’ll tell you that it’s 70-30, maybe less. From the conversations I was having, they seemed pretty likely to do it. But we’ll see. [Michael Houck]: We will find out. We are going to have our first two these YouTube videos going live pretty soon, because we’re doing one with Generation Lab, the HF Zero company. Really? Sweet. Yep. It was like, they made it like a condition of the investment, because I don’t have like $50,000 to go invest in these companies, right? So in order to like accept a small check, they were like, will you help us distribute it? And I’m like, yeah, sure, of course, whatever. Um, so we’re recording that later this week and then, um, editing it next week. And then also there’s a founder down here in Charleston. There’s like an exit founder. He’s a good guy. And I have a video editor who I know down here. Um, it was good. And he’s like, has all the equipment to set it up and everything. So we’re gonna actually record one in person down here and I’m gonna try to get him to pay. So, you know, I’ll loop you into that. But if not, I just want to do it to do one in person. But I think I’m going to pay at least a couple of grand because like they’re a successful company. Okay. [Blake Stewart]: So I’ll let you know. Who’s that? Can I look him up? [Michael Houck]: Yeah. This guy’s name is Hunter Stunzey. His company is advisor.com. Oh, cool. Okay. He’s like, he used to work in Morgan Stanley and he built some company and like sold it or whatever. And now this is his new thing. It’s sort of like a dual company where they have an advisor, financial advisor marketplace, and also their own in-house AI financial advisor thing. It’s pretty cool. That sounds sick. [Blake Stewart]: Cool. Yeah. That’s awesome. OK, that’ll be great. [Michael Houck]: So in August, we’ll probably have at least those two go live. And so we’ll get some reps on it. And I don’t know if I told you, but we’ve been doing this YouTube cohort with Mr. Beast’s editor, Patti Galloway. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, so for the past two weeks I’ve been doing this. [Michael Houck]: I think we’re like the smallest channel in the thing. Everyone else is like 50,000 subscribers, but again, I think because of the brand and the audience, he’s like, oh, you should get in here. So it’s been great. I think our YouTube video quality is going to go way up from now through October is when it runs to. [Blake Stewart]: That’s awesome. Okay. Have you thought about ads within YouTube at all? Not yet. It’s too early. It’s too early. [Michael Houck]: But once we’re at like, I don’t know, 10, 20,000 subscribers or something, we can talk about that. But for now, I think we can just get the founders to pay for these videos. You know, definitely. Yeah. Yeah. People want it. [Blake Stewart]: Yeah. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: And the in-person one’s great. [Blake Stewart]: That’s kind of like, Hey, we can come to you and we can do this. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: And like, if they’re willing to pay, like I literally can just fly to them and do it, you know, um, like you have starter story. That’s what he does. He flies to these like little micro entrepreneurs, like indie hacker bootstrapper people, and he records their stories. Well, fuck if that’s, if he’s built a big channel off that, we can build a way bigger channel on these like higher profile companies with bigger backers, bigger audiences, things like that, you know? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Definitely. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Blake Stewart]: Um, that’s what this guy does. His company is called demo day. He’s very young and it’s early. Um, but that’s, yeah, he flies around and interviews people. It’s kind of like the 20 VC model back in the day. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah, sure. Yeah. [Blake Stewart]: Cool, that sounds awesome. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, man. I think the tough part is time. We’ve got so many interesting opportunities in front of us. We need to really make sure we’re focusing on the right stuff. So one of my goals for the second half of this year is to just say no more, because I think I’ve spread myself too thin, which has caused us to not be as productive as a whole company. So if I’m saying no to things over the next couple of months more, just know that’s why. It’s not because they’re bad ideas. Making it into conscious effort. [Blake Stewart]: I’ve been surprised by how much you say yes to and how fast you move. It’s awesome. It’s like inspirational of us. That’s just like, yeah. [Michael Houck]: The worst part is sometimes it actually makes us move slower. Cause I like, I don’t know. I’ve just, I’ve noticed in myself this year, especially because I’ve had more going on in like life, you know, I’ve been personally disappointed with my own performance, like the whole year. And so I just, I need to recalibrate a little bit. And so this is my way of sort of, sort of doing that. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. [Michael Houck]: Well, I’ll see you at six. Yeah. As one says, you ain’t seen nothing yet, right? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: All right, man. [Michael Houck]: Well, I’ll talk to you, but yeah, I think we got some good stuff going here. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Sounds good. Nice catching up. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: All right.