- Duration: 40 min
- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01K4X733D8T9XYT0DJC3KFRMEV (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01K4X733D8T9XYT0DJC3KFRMEV)
Transcript
[UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Tucker interrogated him which is why I’m like, oh I have to watch this. [Ben Ornstein]: That’s definitely the best part. [Michael Houck]: There are good parts, but like that’s My jaw was on the floor that he was that like what one that Tucker was that candid and forward and then to that Sam’s reaction He he handled it so badly like it’s crazy. [Ben Ornstein]: I don’t think he could have handled it worse. Honestly. Yeah, right That was really yeah, so we’ll see I’m definitely going to watch more, but I’m only like 10 minutes in. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Cool. [Michael Houck]: Well, I do have a hard stop at five, so let’s jump into it. We also, we just signed another, well not signed, but verbal commitment from another client. So we are officially back at 1 million ARR for our studio. Wow. That’s huge. [Ben Ornstein]: That is not including the one that the payments channel just came in? [Michael Houck]: No, if anyone’s paying, those are people who I sort of accounted for yesterday. That’s huge. Let’s go. Yeah. [Ben Ornstein]: So we’re, we’re definitely back. [Michael Houck]: Now the question is, can we get to, you know, a hundred K a month and show good growth through the next little bit. But I’m really bullish, man. I think this is, this is really good. I think we’re gonna get to a good outcome. Things have been feeling good lately. [Ben Ornstein]: It’s the same feeling I had like a few months ago, like, like, uh, before like may maybe. Yeah. It’s ironic. Like before, like, well, I mean, cause June, June was June was like really rough. [Michael Houck]: We had so many people turn in June. It was crazy. And then we managed to sort of hold the line and like, you know, there are a couple of clients who are on the fence. Maybe they are going to turn, maybe they’re not. But with all these new folks coming in now, we have that buffer where, you know, it’s okay. So I feel a lot better about things. Okay, let’s dive into it. So let’s do viral examples first, because that’s pretty easy. Viral examples and Tuesday send. Viral examples looking good. [Ben Ornstein]: This afternoon, I got through a couple more. And so we are scheduled way ahead through October 2nd. So the next one’s already scheduled for next Thursday. But 72, 73, and 74, they just need the white work. Okay, I will do those, probably not today. [Michael Houck]: I’ll probably do them over the weekend and just get them done. Cool. Yeah, so we’re way ahead on those. [Ben Ornstein]: And then Tuesday send, other than house picks, we’re good for the next two weeks, so. Oh, awesome. [Michael Houck]: Okay, I will also do that this weekend. Then I’ll just do like a content binge on Saturday or something. My fucking knee is still, I’m still like a, I’ll hold up in here. I got my little compression sleeve and I’m just chilling. Man, is it getting any better? [Ben Ornstein]: Yeah, it’s getting better. [Michael Houck]: You know, I can sleep through the night now, which I could not do, you know, even like five days ago or so, but yeah, rough, rough injury for sure. Okay, yeah, catch me up on Augment. I haven’t been paying super much attention to them. So how’s it going? [Ben Ornstein]: Yeah, no, I mean, there hasn’t been any issues. Literally putting the stuff in Slack first before putting it into like Typefully or LinkedIn, it made literally all the difference. My confidence is back, there have not been any issues. So yeah, I just wanted to put that in there, just that it’s, these are good, so. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, let’s pop a little small champagne here that we’re back on track with them. You know, who knows, the damage might be done, they might tell us to fuck off next quarter, but I think it does seem like any issue has been fixed, so I haven’t heard anything. Obviously. So yeah, look, I mean, it was a technical thing, more than anything else. So not really in our control. But good that you’re feeling confident about it, because you should. [Ben Ornstein]: Absolutely. Yeah. So hopefully, they continue with us. But you know, we’ll see. Yeah, so, so it’s funny that that video, the figure video, the beginning of it was so It was the beginning specifically of that video. The amount of edit, I have never had to do this many edits for a video. I think they, we pressed them with the rush, but I think they like really rushed this one. Cause it was extremely poorly done. Like the amount of edits I gave them, if you look at the first one, just- I saw. Yeah, I saw. So- I appreciate the diligence. [Michael Houck]: basically rebuilt the video, like you really did. To a certain extent, I would say maybe. [Ben Ornstein]: Yeah, which is fine. [Michael Houck]: I mean, look, we don’t want to have to do that, but I think it also might be the fact that like we hadn’t done anything with them for a few weeks at least. And maybe the main editor had been pulled onto other projects. And so he was like only giving a little bit of time to us. I think there’s probably some of that going on too, you know, but yeah, I think good work with it. I’ll keep an eye out for when they finalize everything and it’s ready for my next review. I held off on sending them the Generation Lab one just because there was no way we were gonna do both at the same time. So I’m gonna get that to them this weekend then. And so next week we’ll sort of be back on track. I’ll also get the advisor.com one done too. [Ben Ornstein]: Cool. Yeah, I sent my hopefully last edits to them from my view today. I’ve watched the video like three more times and see if I can see anything. So we’ll see. I think I’ve got it now. It’s looking a lot cleaner. And so, yeah. And then the last quick thing is the Chris Worsey campaign. Rafael’s got all the data he needs to put it in. So yeah, we’re looking good there. [Michael Houck]: What was the final revenue for that? Was it like 2K or 3K? [Ben Ornstein]: Yeah, it was 2720, I believe. That might be, it was around. That was, you know, like total. [Michael Houck]: Um, so I mean, we made, we made about a little under a thousand bucks from it, which is not what we thought, but still, I mean, it’s a thousand bucks. We didn’t have yesterday, you know? So, I mean, yeah, the more campaigns we can do, I know they’re super tedious to run, but it just helps the top line, you know, with like, again, if we’re going to go out to sell the more revenue that we can be bringing in, the better it looks, you know, we want to show that this is a multifaceted business that brings and revenue in these different ways. So, um, I know it’s tedious, but it does, it does help even if it’s a little bit of revenue. [Ben Ornstein]: I think the creators are starting to get annoyed where, where they get these emails and they’re saying like, yeah, sure. I’ll give you pricing. I mean, none of these have converted cause you know, I’m not emailing all of them when the creator doesn’t move forward with them. Right. So a lot of them are starting to get a little frustrated. I can tell. Um, just, just to know. [Michael Houck]: That’s good to know. I think maybe we change our process because we don’t want to alienate the creators. That’s the worst thing we can do. So maybe what we do is we say, we make the user pay up front. Before we even go to the creators and try to get more information from them, we just say, hey, what’s your budget for this? Give us a $5,000 budget. We'll present you with a plan and then pay. And if you don't like our plan or some people in our plan, then we'll refund you the difference. Because I do want to protect those creative relationships first and foremost. I'd rather not get revenue from somebody because they don't like that than get the revenue but degrade our social capital. [Ben Ornstein]: 100%. And actually, that was going to be my idea, where we give them the list up front first. It's not a great process. We give the client the list of potential people that we could have them work with, they give us a yes ahead of time. And then we go to the creators and say like, hey, someone's interested. Same outreach message to them. So it's functionally the same, but we're already getting the opt-in from the client first. It's a little bit backward, but I think it saves time maybe. I think let's simplify it even further. [Michael Houck]: Like let's literally just tell them, hey, we have creators in your niche, right? What's your budget? If your budget is this, cool. Pay us that amount of money. We're happy to sign something that says we'll refund you the difference if you don't end up spending all of it. That'll be part of our contract. We'll make it super clear. We'll add that to the PandaDoc. But that way, it's minimal messages back and forth. It's literally, they say, here's our budget. We say, OK, great. Pay us that money. Once they pay us that money, we go loop in the creators and get them to sign on. [Ben Ornstein]: OK. Yeah, that would be even easier, actually. I have that one out to Andrew. So we'll see. He hasn't signed it yet. Or at least he hasn't indicated that he signed it yet. But we'll see how that one goes. OK. That should work. It's another spore. Is the word spore to the business? Spoke? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Spoke. [Michael Houck]: Spoke. Yeah. Spore didn't sound right. Look, what we really want is to have revenue coming in for content, for megaphone subscriptions, and for specifically add-on campaigns. Because basically with v3, and we'll get into this in a second, obviously, with v3, they're paying one subscription. And with that one subscription, they get the engagement network, a certain budget for it per month, right? Default included. Campaigns are separate. So it's it is like a third revenue stream, but all three of them are part of the same thing and like You know if I look at I look at our finances right now. Let me pull this up actually I'll see when Rena updated this last I just look at megaphone and studio Yeah, I mean look the numbers are good right so since the beginning of the year year. Again, the data from like this week might not be included in this or something. But since the beginning of the year, we've done 682,000 through both of these together. And then obviously, you know, how much of that goes to profit is not well, top line profit is actually very good top line profit is 444 k, which is great. So it's actually amazing. But And that doesn't factor in the costs of Rye Valley. The costs of Rye Valley are like engineering and operations and any marketing that we do and things like that. So the actual net profit is much lower than that, but the numbers that we will confidently and accurately and honestly be able to share with a potential acquirer are, hey, this is a business that's doing, I guess around a million a year, right? So you've got what, three and a half months left in the year So yeah, that adds up a little bit more than a million a year and it's doing maybe 600 K in profit a year. [Ben Ornstein]: Yeah. I mean, that's, that's definitely attractive. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: So I think that we're, I think that we're in real good shape, especially with these new clients coming in. But on the megaphone side, having campaigns be, you know, at least a steady, if not growing revenue channel, um, adds more interest to the business because you're like, oh, well, you're being smart about how you're monetizing this creator network, right? Yeah, 100%. And what's the plan in terms of timing in a perfect world? [Ben Ornstein]: Well, look, honestly, if we see the next like, you know, because basically, now is go time. [Michael Houck]: Everyone's back from the summer, right? We got to sell, sell, sell right now. So if between now and mid-October over the next month or so we really hit our stride and we add like 10 more clients and we launch v3 of Megafone and the launch goes well and we start to build up some growth channel for that too, that's really a key thing that we can grow Megafone itself also. Right now people come in through word-of-mouth referrals or sometimes the newsletter. Maybe we can blow up viral examples a bit, put some out budget behind that, right? If we have some channel there, then, you know, it might make sense to go out and sell it in October, November, because we're striking the right moment where we're on an upward trajectory. And if we go through the holidays and Q1, you know, it might, there's no guarantee that that's going to stay that way. Now, if the next month or so is more flat, and we have a couple people churn, and maybe we add a or two, but it's not this big bump. And the v3 launch doesn't provide us with the right opportunities to add some new growth there. If all that happens, then okay, we're making good money. So let's just keep this going into Q1. Meanwhile, we continue to try to grow through that. And then we try to sell in Q1 or do the same thing, hit that right moment then. But we'll see. I do think there's a chance we sell before the of the year. But it's also very hard to push an acquisition through in November, December. Too many variables, no for sure. I would like to sell sooner rather than later. I'd like to just get the win, put the money in the bank, and then start to think strategically about what we're going to do next. But yeah, I don't know. We'll see. It's a hard question to answer. Yeah, I mean, there's too many variables, but the TLDR is that either Q4 or Q1 is the goal. Yeah, that'd be great. Yeah, things are looking good. [Ben Ornstein]: So just got to keep it going. Yeah. Cool. Very quickly, I wrote Grant email at the bottom. I don't know why Grant's emailing about... Who's Grant? Grant, what's his last name? Is this the Yamaga? Grant Lee from Gamma just emailed and was like, we're planning to do a launch announcement. I was like, haven't you like used Megaphone like a ton? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, he spent thousands too. I don't understand. He emailed me the other day. Cause like, I think Andrew Young mentioned us to him and I'm like, dude, you, you've used the platform like many times. [Ben Ornstein]: Yeah. Yeah. So I'll, I'll come up with something size of budget as you know, he's throwing thousands. So I guess you could do it again. I'll come up with something. [Michael Houck]: Maybe I'll draft it to you first just to see what you think because that's a weird I I trust you just give him your best recommendation and You know, you can also just tell him like hey, here's what you spent before, you know, no, that's a good idea actually, okay Maybe he forgets maybe he just doesn't remember or something. I don't know. Maybe yeah. Okay. [Ben Ornstein]: Yeah I just wanted to hear your person someone else's perspective on that email This guy, yeah, okay. Cool. And then, so yeah, the biggest thing here is, oh, well, the Creator V3 Pricing Outreach were up to 67 people who provided some type of pricing. I went through the entire list twice, and today I messaged Rena and was like, hey, if there are anyone that haven't responded yet that you have relationships with, go ahead and DM them. And I gave her the script. Same email you gave me, so. [Michael Houck]: So she's, she's DMing them on like Telegram, WhatsApp or whatever. Yeah. Yeah. [Ben Ornstein]: Cool. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: I mean, I look 20, 20% how many creators is it in total that are on the list? 240. [Ben Ornstein]: I thought we had more than that. [Michael Houck]: I thought we had like 500. [Ben Ornstein]: I think, I'm not sure that I, I went to, um, pop SQL or popsicle and just downloaded all of the active and inactive creators. And it was like two 50. [Michael Houck]: Okay, ask Raphael to give you the list because that seems very low to me. We went through this when we were trying to do the new copy for the new landing page. And I think we found that it was like either around or above 500. [Ben Ornstein]: Okay, maybe I don't have the full list. Okay. Yes. [Michael Houck]: Just talk to Raphael, he'll pull it for you. [Ben Ornstein]: Okay. But either way, So 30% of 240 is, what is that? [Michael Houck]: That's like 70, 75, something like that? 67. 67? Yeah, I mean, look, that's not a huge amount, but it is enough to probably get some level of payments going through and some level of campaign satisfaction kind of happening. So it at least means like we're at like a level where we can probably launch this without like looking like a bunch of idiots, you know? Yeah, yeah. [Ben Ornstein]: And hopefully we get some more in there. I know actually I have one more to add. So it's who just emailed, so 68, but yeah. [Michael Houck]: We'd love to get it to a hundred. So you also might be able to find it for some people. Like again, just have Rena do this. She can find it, but you know, there's, you can probably go to like these peoples, like newsletter websites or podcast websites or whatever, and find their media kit or their pricing page. You're not for like maybe sponsored posts on social in some cases, but at least for some assets. [Ben Ornstein]: The other thing I could probably do is the people who haven't responded to me, but have given them in the past, I'll just use that as a benchmark and like put those in. Yeah, of course. Like if you update the pricing, but if we have something, I mean, I might as well. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I mean, you've reached out to creators a bunch for different campaigns since February, March, like, I mean, it'd be tedious, but go through the emails and find those and any piece of data that we have, even if they, if they come back to us, like, Hey, I'm not happy with this. Okay. We'll change it. No problem. You know, no big deal. Okay. Yeah. [Ben Ornstein]: I would imagine there's not too many of those, but I'm I'll find them. I'm sure I could imagine there are definitely some, so let me write that down too, really quick. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: Cause I think Raphael has been out for like two or three days with a family emergency. But he's back, I think, either today or tomorrow. So we're solving the final issue, which is this DNS LinkedIn thing. And once that's done, and he's finished testing some stuff from Autobio, once that's done, we'll be ready to launch. And so I would like to launch this month. And I think that's a realistic target That'd be huge. Yeah. [Ben Ornstein]: At the latest it'll be like first half of October. [Michael Houck]: Cool. It's going to be such an improvement. It's crazy. I'm excited for it. [Ben Ornstein]: And so I guess this goes into the next point of, I was thinking, this is a big change for existing users. And so what is that transition going to look like for users who are paying $49 a month? So it’s actually not that big of a transition. I thought about this for a while. [Michael Houck]: because I was really worried about this too. Yeah. My fear was probably the same as your fear is, which is, you know, are we going to say, Hey, you’re paying $49 and sort of ad hoc spending something else. All of a sudden we're going to charge you 500 bucks a month, right? Like that's, that's terrible. It's terrible experience. We obviously couldn't do that. So what I decided was basically right now we have a cohort of users who are just paying for their account subscription. And then we have another cohort of users who are paying for an account subscription and a deposit subscription. So what we're going to do is, for the people who are paying for a deposit subscription, we're just going to add those two together. And so if you're paying for $100 a month plus $49 a month, or if you're paying for two accounts at $89 plus $100 subscription or something like that for deposits, great. All of a sudden, you're at $149 or $270 or something like that. And basically, Raphael's just going to handle that on the back end. So rather than taking, you know, 70% of a $500 a month budget to spend on the creator network, and we take E30 for ourselves, rather than doing that, he’s just going to take 70% of that smaller number. And so that person will have lower budget to spend. And if they want to increase it, there’ll be a way on the dashboard for them to increase it. But we’re not charging them anything extra. Got it. [Ben Ornstein]: for the cohort that has both a subscription and a recurring deposit? [Michael Houck]: Well, and for people who only have an access subscription, we’re going to do the same thing. It’s going to be $49 that we basically just convert into a deposit subscription for them. I see. Got it. [Ben Ornstein]: Okay. [Michael Houck]: And so maybe that means a little bit less take for us, but it’s a way better experience for them, so it’s fine with me. Cool. Okay. And again, we’ll give them the option to increase their subscription at any time as well Sounds good And then the tricky thing is going to be like email comms around this for the launch so one of my to do’s next week is going to be finally Writing out a bunch of launch sequence emails and also changing our existing emails that we send out right To get all that kind of ready for the launch as well and But I think the messaging will be, you know, it’s not super straightforward, but it’s also not crazy complex. Like we can, we can figure that out. Definitely, definitely. I love this because it’s like, it simplifies the pricing so much. And I really think people are gonna love the change. And I have shared it like the dashboard with a few people. And every single one of them was like, this is so much better. [Ben Ornstein]: So yeah, yeah, it’s it’s the part It’s just a little complex. And for someone who has no context, it’s probably a bit difficult to understand. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: I mean, we’ll write a deep dive about this for founding journey, but like the, the issue with megaphone so far was I built the product for me and I thought that meant, you know, I would want all of this control, but people don’t actually want that. They just want a simple thing where they can add some budget and it goes and does the thing. Right. Right. Um, That was the learning is like at the end of the day Don’t always build for the power user That’s I mean, that’s a really interesting article. [Ben Ornstein]: Uh, that’s a that’s a really interesting deep. I’ll Read that one for sure That’s counterintuitive. [Michael Houck]: Obviously, it’s very counterintuitive. It’s very counterintuitive. Um, but Yeah, well, we’ll talk about that when it comes. Uh, but Um, so yeah for the last Last five minutes. [Ben Ornstein]: So I wrote down some things about when we quickly went through V3. And I’ve gone through the Figma a few times to view the dashboard and just try to conceptually understand it. I get it in terms of what it’s going to be. But in terms of coming up with a tips and tricks guide, that stuff, it’s a bit more difficult to think about. And I’m not exactly sure why. I just can’t like, I guess I don’t know what I’m supposed to be writing in terms of tips or tricks. [Michael Houck]: I guess maybe tips or tricks is like throwing you off a little bit like that makes it sound like it’s like, you know, how to like, how to like, get the most out of the platform in some like kind of way, you know, like something a little like unintuitive. But no, really, this is like, you know, again, we’ve had this problem with megaphone where people are like a the product is too complex. I don’t want to do all this stuff. I don’t want to set all these settings. I don’t know what to do here. I don’t know what a budget should be like all this stuff. Right. So what we want to do is basically just make this like dead simple. Like if you’re talking to a fucking idiot who has never posted on social media and doesn’t know what they’re doing before, like what should it say? Right. So like post in the morning, share your post URL here immediately after you make the post on social, like, you know, um, I don’t know, only use your best posts. Don’t share posts that you don’t think you’re going to gain traction or are not relevant to other people. Talk about Patty’s core casual new framework a little bit and be like, hey, look for the ones that you think can break out into that new audience as well. Just best practices for not being a dummy on social media and getting traction with your posts. There might be a Notion doc, let me see if I can find this. Notion doc, there might be a Notion doc from V1, actually before I think you even were really working on Megafone, that has a lot of this stuff for both LinkedIn and for X. I remember the LinkedIn and X ones. [Ben Ornstein]: We used to have them public. They were in the help center and then you took them down. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Right. [Michael Houck]: We can probably adapt those to like how to use Megafone. Rather than how to use platform x versus platform y yeah if you could tag me in those so I could like because I think they’re probably private um because I do remember seeing them and they were pretty extensive uh that would be awesome I’ll send I’ll send those two and yeah just like think about when somebody’s going to see this right this is going to show up when somebody first joins the platform and then they can access it later too it’s fine but the first opportunity to get them with this is they first join the platform you can walk through the onboarding flow and figment to see like what their experience has been like that’s all they’ve seen they get dumped onto this dashboard there’s a video there for me which is like hey you know here’s here’s your guide of walking around megaphone just very high level and then this document is meant to be a supportive document to that that basically tells them here’s what you should be doing to use the platform not where everything is but how you should be using it. OK. That is a lot more helpful. [Ben Ornstein]: I think I can come up with something now. I think, yeah, it could have been the verbiage of tips and tricks that threw me off. Yeah. OK. I can visualize this a little bit more now. So that’s good. [Michael Houck]: If you want to just like, Not even worry about a full draft, but just like send me like a bullet point outline over the next like couple days I’ll give you feedback on that and then you can flush it out into something full Cool I’ll do that. [Ben Ornstein]: That makes sense And so on the The other thing I want to talk about quickly was on the the transition side of things has Andrew been doing better Or or cuz like I haven’t heard like any complaints or bad things about him recently Yeah, I mean look my my issue is not that he obviously the thing with augment was not good But I think some of that was out of his hands too. [Michael Houck]: It was probably related to this issue, right? But I still have the same issue that I had before which is we brought him in because we thought he could potentially Run this product and this part of the business and be somebody who we can just kind of delegate it to he could grow into that role and just like Personally, I just don’t have faith in that anymore. I just don’t and so I think regardless of Is he making mistakes like when I’m talking with him? I just don’t feel that same sense of like like getting it level that I would with you for example, right? And so That doesn’t mean I’m going to say, yes, you, Ben, should go be that role. Your role is different. Your role is supportive across the whole business for me. But if we’re going to be allocating that capital and you have bandwidth to do that stuff, I’d rather it go towards you. And then we take a longer lens of, hey, maybe we don’t hire anybody for this. Or if we do, we don’t need to hire them right away because you have bandwidth to do it. And the role has been simplified. With Squib and whatever. So yeah, I say the issues are not there, but there’s still the sort of macro concern of just like, he’s not going to grow into, in my opinion, what we hired him to be. Yeah, that makes sense. [Ben Ornstein]: And I was also thinking about the fact that like, with Squib, oh, it’s five o’clock, so I’ll try to be quick. [Michael Houck]: With Squib, like, in terms of like duplicating roles, we may not necessarily like need the business doesn’t need to spend that extra money if like the scheduling is I’d rather spend I’d rather spend that on some portion of your time rather than you know a guaranteed amount of time for him basically that in this new phase we don’t even think will necessarily need to spend in total yeah 100% so I guess it’ll be the next phase of the business will be very interesting We’ll see. We’re still working some things through with Squib, but I will keep you very apprised of what I’m thinking timeline there. I don’t think it’ll be next week, but probably the following one. I have Andrew basically doing a report right now on some things about Squib, and depending on how that comes back, we’ll either move forward or reevaluate. Cool. All right.