- Duration: 38 min
- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01K5SFTNVNFY93Q14S82GG24Z7 (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01K5SFTNVNFY93Q14S82GG24Z7)
Transcript
[Michael Houck]: I’m still in Charleston. I’m leaning towards getting a place here, but I’ve been delayed in making my decision because I messed up my MCL like a month ago. And so I basically haven’t been able to, today was my first day back at the gym in a month and it’s been kind of brutal. So we’ll see, but I’m here until Thanksgiving and gonna figure it out. Yeah. [Nathan May]: What part of Charleston are you in? I’m downtown. [Michael Houck]: I’m on the peninsula. Oh, nice. [Nathan May]: We’ve talked about this a little bit, I think. I used to live on Bull Street, right next to the university. And during COVID, I was there on and off for like a year. So I know Charleston super well. Like all the restaurants, all the bars, all the nooks and crannies. I’m a huge fan. Yeah, man. [Michael Houck]: It’s a good place. To be obviously slower pace, but I think everything else in life, it captures and does really well. So got to figure that out. But that’s good. Before you get in, have you been to have you been to chubby fish? [Nathan May]: Yeah, I was a chubby fish belt. [Michael Houck]: Well, actually, at the week before I entered the MCL. It was great. The caviar sandwiches were as good as ever. Yeah. [Nathan May]: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Cool. I like, I love Joey Fish. Cool, man. Well, I’m excited we get a chance to jam. What’s the update on the newsletter? How are you thinking about it? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, look, man, I’ll just be straight up with you. I want to move forward. And I’m like, ready to go. But the problem is that our front end offer is not converting well enough for me to recoup costs like at a good rate. And so that is like the only blocker for me saying, let’s put 10k per month behind this and just fucking rip it, right? So I guess I don’t, I’m sort of at a loss. I need to go and talk to some of our readers and like understand, you know, why they didn’t buy that when they signed up. We even tried lowering the price and just repositioning it and that’s what we’ve been doing. [Nathan May]: Sorry, go ahead. Oh, sorry. [Michael Houck]: What price? So, okay. So I’ll get into that in a second, but just to, um, So yeah, so we tried repositioning it. And that’s basically what I’ve been doing over the past few weeks with this, which is, I think, why it made sense to chat now rather than then. But regardless, so we had been selling at $195 for lifetime fee, basically 100 case studies or close to 100 case studies, where I interviewed founders who've raised money successfully. Like, here's how they did it. Plus community, plus a free course, plus a pitch deck database, plus a couple other bonuses. And there was too much going on, right? I think it was confusing what you were really getting for that. And so what we did, and also high price point for sort of a front end offer. And so what we did is we tried to increase conversion rate by dropping the price and making it specifically about the case studies. So we said, Hey, we'll start out really low. And we'll sort of raise it up as we see opt in at $19. And you get the hundred or so case studies. And we’ve had a few people buy it, but the rate hasn’t been like meaningfully higher. And granted, we’ve been running like very limited ad traffic to it, like to be fair, but we have been running traffic and the rate just isn’t up enough off of what it was before for me to feel confident scaling that. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Interesting. [Nathan May]: What’s the volume of traffic and what’s the conversion rate, Ben? I don’t know off the top of my head. [Michael Houck]: It’s just been running in the background. Our budget is like, I think I’m spending like $50 a day on ads right now. And so we're acquiring people at like $2,000, 230. And so, and that’s like not updating the creator, that’s just running the same creative basically for the whole period. And then the conversion rate is like super low, like we’ve probably had, I don’t know, 10 or people buy it. So like, not even close to where we need to be. And so what I don’t know is, do startup do people who are want to build startups not want fundraising case studies like that would be surprising to me, right? If that was if that was the truth, they didn’t want that, because I feel like I would want that. Or maybe we’re just doing a bad job positioning it. But like, I feel like it’s a pretty straightforward offer. So I’m just I need to talk to people because I don’t I don’t know. [Nathan May]: That’s fair. [Nathan May]: What, um, what would your expectation be? Like, like, you know, the $2.25 a reader? How much would you expect to make on the front end in your I mean, like, I don't, I don't know. [Michael Houck]: I guess it's a good question. Actually. I, I mean, I'd love to be able to price it higher than 19, right? Like if we can, I don't have good benchmarks in my head. Like you probably see more people and what they're doing and things like that than I do. So all I know is that if I put $10,000 behind this, I would lose like $9,000. I don't want to do that. [Michael Houck]: That's fair, that's fair. [Nathan May]: Yeah, I think making 50 cents to a dollar on the front end, you know, would be good per reader. I mean, you think about like a, yeah, like a $47 product, like a one and a half, 2% conversion would be pretty cool. And that would probably come through immediate purchase, like immediate liquidation or conversion, plus a couple like sales emails after. I sold a thing, and you know, it wasn’t super, super high skill, but like, I think I was getting, I have to go check, I think I was making like 70 cents or something per reader, $20 product, you know, super value-loaded, but it worked. I mean, it was too cold traffic, you know, nobody knew me. Something like that. And like half of the conversion rate came from the three or four emails I sent, you know, once somebody had joined, right? So that's also like an important part. We do that. [Michael Houck]: I mean, we probably don't do it as aggressively as we should, but like as part of the welcome sequence that all new subscribers get, we mention it in the first email, we have a dedicated email that comes out like a day or two later, and then I think we hit them again. Week or two after that too. So there's multiple emails about this that they're getting. And then I mentioned it in the newsletter that we send out every week as well. It has a little spot in there. So something is not working, something's not jiving for me, and I just don't know what it is. Okay, fair enough. [Nathan May]: So your next step is, yeah, let me get on the phone or at least Read a couple of emails with people who've been in front of the offer, but like I said, not for me. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, pretty much. Especially if they've seen it multiple times. [Nathan May]: Yeah, that makes sense. Cool. What's your timeline for that? I mean, I'd love to get on calls with folks this week. [Michael Houck]: We'll see what people's availability is. But this is a priority for me because, just for some context, I made the decision last week after sort of getting the finances in order a little bit on my end, to go out and raise a new fund, likely in January. Because it's going to be easier to do that than in Q4. But we'll probably get all the logistical stuff set up in Q4. And so I want to be able to tell the strong story going into that of, hey, yes, we have this brand, but it's also growing. We're growing the brand significantly. And we haven't announced this yet, but we're partnering with Tyler Denk and his newsletter to do a founder house in Costa Rica in a couple months. And so we're hiring. It's going to be great. And so we're trying to sort of build this as a growth story around the brand as we go into raising the fund and me getting more active on social as part of that too. But the main part of that is growing the email list. And so this is like existential. And I want to work with you to do it specifically because I think you think about this in the way that I think about it rather than I think the strategy we were running before with Matt, no disrespect to him, just I think you get what I'm going for. So literally the only thing blocking is like, I need to make sure that I'm at least making some money back on the front end, and then we can sort of upsell them on other things on the back end. [Nathan May]: Yeah, this makes sense. This makes sense. That's cool. Your quick question is, I'm just curious. Tyler does these getaway things, you guys are going to do it together. So you'll go to that and you'll do like what, like 20 people instead of 10 or something? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, so we got one of our sponsors involved in that. And we're partnering with Tyler. We booked the house like a week or two ago. And it's gonna be like super high level, like great folks coming through. It'll just be like five a week or something. But the idea is then that we're gonna make that part of what we do for Founding Journey and partnering with like, you know, we'll do one with Greg Eisenberg, we'll do one with Alex Lieberman, right? And maybe we'll get sponsors like, well, you know, I think we're talking with like about doing like a vibe coding one and things like that. So- Yeah. [Nathan May]: I love that. I mean, this rhymes obviously with what you were doing four years ago. This is really cool. [Michael Houck]: This is the evolution of, it's funny, because when I left Launch House, what I told Brett was like, I think that we could still do this, but if we make it around a founder focused media brand and a fund, and then like through these events, And we had different visions, but it's funny that it's now coming full circle. And that's actually what it's going to be for founding journey now. [Nathan May]: Yeah, that's cool. I like it. I like it. Cool. Well, that all sounds good on my end. Keep me posted. And how much will the Founder House thing be? Like 5k, 10k, something like that? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah, 10k. Cool. [Nathan May]: I dig it. Yeah, keep me posted if you have any questions in the meantime, let me let me know. [Michael Houck]: I think one thing that would be really helpful and maybe help me get off the off the blocks here so that we could get started is if you have like either seen or worked with folks who have a front-end offer that is converting really obviously it's different with different audiences and things like that, but I guess I don't know what I'm fucking up with this right now. Because it just, it logically seems like something and we've, you know, heard from people that when they do buy it, they like it and all that stuff. So yeah, there's a distance for me. And I'm going to obviously talk to people and try to resolve that myself. But anything you can show me funnel design wise, messaging wise, or just offer wise that is converting well for folks without breaking any sort of client confidentiality stuff you have, I don't know what you have there. But whatever it is, I would just love examples that I can be like, okay, here's I'm fucking up, you know? [Nathan May]: Yeah. Yeah, I'll send you two things. One is like Jesse Pugie's $47 offer. And then I’ll send you the real estate one that I did because that was converting well, also totally cold. So it was just the offer that was converting well. I didn’t have like an audience or anything. I think those would be Before I let you go, is there anywhere, I mean, I want to give you like food recommendations for Charleston. I mean, have you been to all the places? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: I’ve hit up the big names. [Nathan May]: I’ve been to Husk. I’ve been to Fig. I didn’t think that Husk or what is it? There’s a couple of them. Marygold, whatever. I didn’t think they were very good. [Michael Houck]: What did you think? Well, I liked Husk. I had Rabbit at Husk. It was delicious. So I can’t hate on it. I’ve only been there once. Fig, I really liked it. They have this very pillowy ricotta gnocchi that wasn’t even my main thing, but it was like the best gnocchi I’ve ever had in my life. [Nathan May]: So it was- Yeah, Fig I remember. I did like Fig, yeah. Fig I liked. You’ve been to, have you been to the Ordinary? No, I haven’t even heard of that one. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: That’s a new one. [Nathan May]: That one is like, gosh, I think it’s good. I remember it being good. You had seafood in like an old bank. I think that was pretty baller. What else do I have on here? Do you ever go out to Sullivan’s Island? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I checked out the obstinate daughter out there. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: That was really good. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, you know it already. I’ve had some very friendly folks here who’ve been very generous with Rex and also just taking me around before I messed up my leg. [Nathan May]: Yeah, fair. Let me give you one that probably, well, I’ll give you one more. There’s, this is not a posh place, but Ruru’s Tacos and Tequila. You know, it’s not fancy. All I know, like my buddy Will and I, they have really great, very strong margaritas. I love the frozen margarita there and we’ll go and we’ll have two and we’ll be in a great spot after that. I’m in dude. Let’s do it. That sounds good. [Michael Houck]: Cool man. Alright, I’ll let you go. [Nathan May]: I’ll send that stuff over later today and we’ll go from there. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I think I’ll keep you in the loop as I talk to folks as we sort of I guess figure out whatever the issue is here. And then yeah, would love to would love to get started once that is not just going to cost me 90% of what I’m putting into it.