- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01K84083ZSYTW8PFMYZR8PSKAD (via Ben Ornstein’s account, imported 2026-08-06)
Transcript
UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Yeah, I’m doing good. How are you? Isis Decrem: Yeah, doing well. Hey, Ben, how you doing? Michael Houck: Yeah, so excited to chat, I guess. Let us know how we can help. Isis Decrem: Yeah, so I had been kind of asking around if anyone knew of sort of an organic agency that could do like LinkedIn organic posting. And two people told me about Megaphone. And someone alerted me that you may have kind of your model to now engage with posts instead. So I signed up for the platform, a little confused like what it does. But what we would be interested in is getting other people to post not to boost our engagement. Got it. Makes sense. Michael Houck: So first of all, glad that you say thanks to whoever mentioned us. But yeah, so traditionally, Megaphone started as a network of creators to amplify content that you post on social and as that grew, a lot of people asked us to just create content for them. So we built a content agency on the back of the business as well. And then more recently, a lot of folks have wanted to do what you’re describing, which is get like sponsored posts or even like partner with creators on product testimonials or events, newsletter ads, podcast appearances, things like that. So what I mentioned over email, Isis is like the relaunch redesign we’re going to do next month. That is bringing all this into the platform, but we’ve sort of been doing it ad hoc for folks in the meantime Anyway, so happy to set up a one-off sort of campaign or even ongoing campaign Is that is the the target like a specific announcement or launch or more of an ongoing thing like what do you how do you envision it? Sugar. Isis Decrem: Yeah, we just launched. Sreekar Kuchibhatla: I don’t know how much content context you guys have about perplexity. Do you? Okay. I’m seeing head nods. Awesome. We just launched our agentic browser about two and a half weeks ago for general access. OpenAI launched theirs today. I don’t know if you saw that. We were actually surprised with their launch because they made everything gated by paywalls and stuff, where only if you’re a Plus user, you get the agentic mode and all of that. So we want to use just as an opportunity to basically catapult ourselves as the no-brainer browser choice. And I think LinkedIn is an awesome place where there’s a lot of these discussions happening and people go in depth on comparing two different products and all that fun stuff. So we’d love to push Comet to begin with. And as an ongoing partnership, we’d love to explore Organic LinkedIn posting as something for a core app and other stuff too. So let’s start with comment I’m gonna pass the mic over back to you guys to just walk us to do What your platform is that today and how you can help us? Michael Houck: Yeah, so I mean sounds great Love the product obviously so happy to happy to support I think it’ll be easy to get creators interested in taking part in a campaign around this too in total we have around 500 creators with about 60 million total followers. And that’s across platforms. That’s not just LinkedIn. We also do a lot of things on X. And some people have other platforms they work with us on too. So most of them are in the sort of startup business tech tangential world. So very on point for the audience you guys would probably be looking to reach. We’d want to dive a little bit deeper into like who is that audience for sure. But basically the process would be we would send over a Panda doc that we need someone to sign, which would basically say, you guys aren’t going to cut us out of the process and go direct to the creators, essentially. So then we’ll take on everything, manage the whole process from there. Ben will pull together a list of folks who we think could be a fit for the campaign and their various rates for various different actions that they can take. That’ll just be in a Google Sheet. You guys can let us know who you want to partner with. And then we’ll handle scheduling the campaign on our end with them. But sort of ops and logistics there. We’ll just need a date and any sort of assets or phrasings that you want them to use. Isis Decrem: Do you have any benchmarks you could share about the cost per creator given, I don’t know, like some tiers of size and then also how long it usually takes to get a post out? So it’s going to vary a lot. Michael Houck: We have folks who have 20,000 followers. We have folks who have hundreds of thousands of followers and their rates will very substantially. I think the easiest way to do it is we can just send over a sample roster, and you guys let us know this is the range that we think makes sense for the campaign. And we can start with whatever level you guys want to start out with, that’s fine. But some people, for example, only have 20,000 followers, but those are hyper-targeted. You can reach a very specific audience, and they have a lot of trust with that audience, and so they charge more than somebody with 50 to 100,000 followers maybe that are less targeted, right? So the variance is just super, super high. It’s easier to just go on an ad hoc basis with that. Sreekar Kuchibhatla: Do you typically operate off of CPM and looking at their median reach? Are you integrated with their central profiles or is it just publicly available data? Michael Houck: What do you mean by publicly available data? Sreekar Kuchibhatla: Do you have their profiles integrated to an extent where you see impressions and can make guesstimates on what these CPMs would look like, Or is that all just on a trust basis or publicly available metrics like engagement? Oh, I see. Michael Houck: For LinkedIn, we don’t require them to give us their login credentials or anything like that. But if folks are not performing and their rates are not comparable to that, we’ll either advise them to change them or we’ll just not send them requests. So we’re pretty diligent about that. We’re pretty sort of, we protect the relationships we have with folks on your side of the equation. So yes, that would basically be the next step from our end. What other questions can I answer? Sreekar Kuchibhatla: So would the pricing be based on CPM or is it just extremely? Michael Houck: We advise them to price it based on CPM, but we can’t guarantee. At the end of the day, they have to feel like it’s worth their time, and they value their time on an individual basis. We don’t set their rates. They set their own rates. Sreekar Kuchibhatla: Where do LinkedIn CPMs fall, typically? Let’s say if we’re doing a good, healthy mix of broad plus, honestly, for the first run, we’ll probably just go broad. Get some learnings, and then go into the niche group. So what would the CPMs look like for those? Yeah, I mean, it’s going to vary substantially by niche. Michael Houck: I guess, tell me a little bit more. You say super broad. Who are we targeting here? Is there any sort of person who would want to use Comet? Or I guess, like, yeah. Sreekar Kuchibhatla: So one person on LinkedIn basically qualifies for using Comet. Because we were building a replacement for Google Chrome and what make it seem like that. So when I say broad it’s not necessarily like we just want people talking about random stuff. Broad just means it could be a student, it could be like a work-from-home mom, it could be a finance person, it could be a tech bro. And we’re open to all those without being picky about let’s say job titles or you know the typical LinkedIn targeting sets that people are interested in. Michael Houck: Yeah I mean honestly I think that makes sense. But with that audience, it’s just going to be pretty tough to give you a number that I feel there’s not a huge variance within. So I don’t want to lead you down the wrong path. I’m not trying to be evasive. It’s just the truth. So what I can do is we can send over a sample of some folks who you guys can let us know, hey, this seems overpriced to us. This seems the right range for us. And then we can go deeper with the rest of the roster and pull out folks in that range. Sreekar Kuchibhatla: the cheapest creator on your platform? Isis Decrem: Sorry, what’s that? If I picked a really small creator on your platform, what would their cost be? Michael Houck: Yeah, again, it’s really going to vary. Isis Decrem: But there is a cheapest person on the platform. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Sure. Michael Houck: So for a sponsored post, I don’t know, Ben, the cheapest one would be not very expensive, right? Ben Ornstein: If I’m thinking like top of top of mind, like 20,000 followers, I don’t know the niche, but 20,000 followers, they cost like $65. Isis Decrem: Okay, that's good. I was just checking because like, I've seen some like really crazy prices for LinkedIn. I wanted to make sure the bottom wasn't like $1,000. No, no, no, no. Michael Houck: There will be people that we show you that price very aggressively, but there will also be people who we show you who price very conservatively. That’s why it’s hard to get a number. Sreekar Kuchibhatla: I guess as a next step, we’d love to hit very high volume with this test. So if you can just send us a roster of a few hundred people that you think would be a good fit that can do a good job talking about Comet, like if they’re completely random and they haven’t performed well, if they’re who heavily priced on the CPM side, then let’s just go ahead and skip them. But anyone that you think is a good fit that’s reasonable on CPM, shoot them over. We’re happy to just move very fast here, get something up, so we can go live in the next one week. Yeah. Sorry, go ahead, Isis. Isis Decrem: No, yeah, like, I know, like, there is a case for like, oh, like, the more, like, experienced creators, like, let’s just do with a ton of people for now, and then circle back on quality creators in the future. That works. Michael Houck: and then timeline-wise, Sreekar, you said a week. I think that Ben can confirm, but that seems realistic. We should be able to get something up next week for sure. And we’ll just handle all the coordination there. So first step will be the Panda doc. I’ll shoot that over after I get done calls in an hour or two. And Sreekar, should I send that to you, to send that to you as the signatory? Signatory? Isis Decrem: We’ll have to forward it to our VP. Sreekar Kuchibhatla: Yeah, just shoot it over to me and Isis in the thread. We’ll figure it out. I think the bigger piece is just getting a quick estimate on how much buffer do we build for this project. And as soon as Ben, if you can shoot us a roster with pricing, that’ll help us just push this through quicker. And get the Pandadoc sign, get some budget to sign. In the meantime, let us know if there’s any self-serve things that we can just go poke around on the platform. Michael Houck: Yeah, so the version of the platform that’s live right now, the functionality of it is just you make a social post from one of your accounts, you put budget behind it, and it pulls in creators automatically in your niche. We have like a matching algorithm on it, and it just pulls them in to go comment on your post within like an hour. It doesn’t have the larger creator partnership features built into it yet. Michael Houck: Okay, so just for the PandaDoc, just so we don’t have to go back and forth on email, I need a couple things. One is entity name and address, and then the signatory name and email. Are you guys able to shoot that over? Isis Decrem: Yeah, you should be able to see our address on PitchBook, CrunchBase, Samsung San Francisco address. And then we can email you Roman’s name. Actually, if you just can hold like 10 seconds, I can get you some of those right now. Sreekar Kuchibhatla: Perfect. That’s great. Any other pending items that you’d need from us to get started? I would highly recommend you just poke around, just look up, comment on LinkedIn and ask. There’s a ton of really good use cases. We’d love to lead with use cases heavy posts. So take a look at what’s out there and use that as a reference. And I’m dropping our details to you right now on this thread. So you have it. Sreekar Kuchibhatla: There we go. Michael Houck: Roms full name and email. Michael Houck: and then I’ll include you guys on on the doc as well, but I’ll just make him the signatory. Michael Houck: Awesome. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Perfect. Sreekar Kuchibhatla: Awesome. Michael Houck: I’ll send that over an hour or two, and in the meantime, we’ll get started pulling together a sample list for you guys. Sreekar Kuchibhatla: Another quick ask before we drop is, Ben, if you can parallelly also send me a list for x and anywhere else Am I frozen or is Michael frozen? I think it’s… Ben Ornstein: Okay, I hear you. I can hear you. Sreekar Kuchibhatla: I’m frozen. Yeah, it’s my internet. Michael Houck: Ben, if you can send us like other channels that you’re bullish on. Sreekar Kuchibhatla: Michael was mentioning X. So if there’s anything interesting there, like just shoot over a parallel doc so we can put that into our… The creator network is primarily LinkedIn and X. Ben Ornstein: That’s where we have like the… Isis Decrem: Do both like if like there’s a creator that we’re doing with linkedin we can just cross syntax. Ben Ornstein: I think that would make things pretty simple Yeah, most many of the creators are on both platforms while some are, you know, heavily focused on one versus the other Yeah, that’s great Let’s have a list of both Do we want to explore like dedicated placements in newsletters or podcasts as well or not mostly social? Michael Houck: Let’s do social first. Sreekar Kuchibhatla: Dedicated placements on podcasts does sound interesting. Let’s definitely chat about that, but let’s go ahead and wrap this up, like have a blast of posts and get some really good wins because I think it’s really hot right now. Everyone’s looking it up. So yeah, let’s do that for these two. Isis Decrem: If we can just like look at like, yeah, if you have any existing creator lists, we can just start there and like just try to like speed run this. I think we’re thinking on the scope of like, hundreds of posts. Ben Ornstein: Yeah, we’ll move as quickly as we can. Sreekar Kuchibhatla: Context is like, for example, in other geos like India, we just launched 3000x influencers today, and 1500 Instagram pages. So I’d love for you guys to basically own this end to end, give us the full roster of your five 600 creators and let’s see what makes the most sense. Cool. Well, we’ll get to work on it. Michael Houck: I’m I think this is going to be great. Isis Decrem: Yeah, this is super exciting. Michael Houck: I’m glad whoever recommended us, I’m glad that we got connected. This is such an unexpected call for you guys, probably. Ben Ornstein: Ben woke up to Perplexity’s call. Sreekar Kuchibhatla: I see it. I’m so perplexed. Ben Ornstein: Ben thought we were going to be like, oh, yeah, let’s do a one week free trial of the platform. Michael Houck: No, this is gonna be fun. We’ll do it. We’ll do a lot. Ben Ornstein: This is such a new like content Avenue. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: I’m really excited to nail down. Isis Decrem: Yeah, and then we’re also always growing the network too. Michael Houck: So if we have any new people come in on like a week to week basis, who we think could be a fit to do something with you guys based on what we see with the this initial blast. I’ll just you know, we can just shoot a We can even set up a Slack channel if this is going to be an ongoing thing too and just go back and forth in there. Yeah, I think we should set up a Slack channel for sure. Can you send us an invite? Isis Decrem: Yep. Okay, cool. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: That sounds good. Isis Decrem: and then, yeah, I think we would love to lean into, like, comparison posts, but if that’s not feasible, like, someone doesn’t feel comfortable doing that, then they can just, like, talk about how great Comet is. No, most of these people are total mercenaries, so they’ll say what we want them to say. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: That’s great. That’s great. Isis Decrem: Yeah, I think especially at the lower level of creators, we can do a lot more comparison stuff. It doesn’t need to be straight slander. It probably shouldn’t be. But we’ll send you some docs about Comet, and we can all kind of brainstorm together. Cool. This sounds good. Michael Houck: If you guys have like a, we can do some stuff in our Notion workspace too, Ben, if we want to set something up there. So OK, cool, guys. I’m really pumped about this. And you’ll hear from us a couple different ways tonight. So we’ll go from there. Sounds good. And around the nose. Isis Decrem: So he’ll sign as soon as you send that over. Oh, perfect. Thanks. Michael Houck: Appreciate it. Bye, guys. See you.