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- Source: Read.ai 01K983DK4Y3GVTWAN09XA51HMB (via Ben Ornstein’s account, imported 2026-08-06)
Transcript
UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: good threads that are templateable. Ben Ornstein: Like I just spent two hours because and I’m, I’m using the X advanced search. I’m going, I’m looking at specific people that have had good threads in the past. Like I’m not just like scrolling through X and being like, Oh, here’s one. No, it’s, it’s kind of nuts. And like, I’m, I don’t know. I don’t know what I’m doing wrong. Michael Houck: Um, if I mean, it sounds like you’re doing the right things. Ben Ornstein: Like I’ve curated my feed pretty well where it’s not like garbage and yeah, I don’t know. Are people just posting threads less frequently? Yeah, I think there’s a lot less threads in general. Like there’s, I don’t see them very often in general. Everyone’s doing these like little short, quick bits. Like, yeah, just in general, I’ve seen less. Michael Houck: Well, if you want to surface those, that’s fine too. They just need to be templateable. The problem with those two is that they’re often like very of the moment, right? And so like, if we’re finding something a week later and then surfacing it to them and they write it for another week later, even if like the template is the meme. And so if we miss the window, it’s gone anyway, you know? Ben Ornstein: Now I turn, I know the exact type of like, obviously from viral examples, I know what I’m looking for. I just, I just, I just can’t find them. And that’s the frustrating part. Cause I know, I instantly know now when something’s templateable, I could be like, Oh, okay. Here’s what you would do with this one. I just can’t find the actual examples. It’s brutal. Michael Houck: I wonder if this isn’t something we’d do before the end of the year but I wonder if like for next year we sort of revamp the viral examples thing a bit and instead of doing the you know here’s three templates from threads that have worked in the past or whatever what if we just look for that and we made it more dynamic so like we look for a template that’s trending today or like over the last 24 hours and we spontaneously send out an email about that be like hey guys here’s what’s happening today like wouldn’t that be better and more interesting I mean, yeah, because like the ones I’m pulling for viral examples, I’m just Ben Ornstein: looking at the ones we still have in the past that that’s from the, like they’re from like I mean, that’s fine. Michael Houck: They probably still work, right? But it’s like, Yeah, because the formats are great. Right, but if you’re, if there’s like a meme template that’s going live or going viral right now, like I feel like people would appreciate like being made aware of that, you know, like a, like a, like a template alert. Email basically. And we could do like three a week if there’s, I mean, not that I would say that cause it’s a lot of work, but if there, if we see one going viral one day, we just send out an email spontaneously about it. Ben Ornstein: I think that would be way more interesting. Um, it doesn’t lock us into something that we need to send out every week as well. So it’s like, um, and it’s just more interesting, right? Like if something’s trending and people can get in their inbox that second, obviously it’s, there’s, there’s more of like, okay, you’ve got to be on the pulse even more than normal, but you’re at least not locked into a weekly email. I think that could be interesting. Michael Houck: Revisit the idea for later. Cause it’s, it is extra work of like monitoring all the time basically for it, but it would be useful. So we’ll come back to it. Michael Houck: Let’s talk about ad Funnels. So I’m going to open up a little Google sheet here. Michael Houck: What the hell? Why does, sometimes Arc is really dumb. I feel like they’re just not doing anything with it anymore. Michael Houck: They’re all on the new AI browser that no one’s asking for. Ben Ornstein: I don’t really get why an AI browser is useful personally, but maybe I’m just not paying attention or like thinking about why Personally, right? Michael Houck: I don’t get it. I feel like this way could be Read about this in the newsletter But like I actually like honestly feel a little bit the opposite way, which is like I want the full screen space I don’t want half of the screen space to be taken up by a chat bot I had the value is not equitable to what I lose and like navigate navigation Was a newsletter release yesterday Okay, it wasn’t. No, yeah, I’d love to comment in the thread. I was feeling a little ill last night. Oh, sorry to hear that. Ben Ornstein: I don’t know why I didn’t see that. It’s okay. It wasn’t for you. Michael Houck: It was for Blake for sponsor stuff. Got it. Michael Houck: Okay, so we have our three we have FJ, I’ll just call it core. We have geo slash SEO. We have audience building. Michael Houck: And we can, there’s sort of like a note I’ll make here that may be split up by platform. Michael Houck: And then other ideas for white labeling that we could do that are not as established, let’s say, but just things that I’ll include here are Reddit, because we have a Reddit guy, not Noor, who I added to Slack. You might have come across, but a different Reddit guy who’s better. Michael Houck: We could do landing pages with Blake. Michael Houck: We could do Instagram. I have an Instagram person I’ve been talking to, both for myself and also for the agency. We could do bookkeeping with Curtis, that guy we talked about back earlier in the year. I’ve talked to Studio Salt about doing design. And that probably needs to be break down into subcategories as well. Michael Houck: And that’s probably it. That’s probably the initial list that we would consider. And then for these, There are three things there’s lead magnet Which is free there’s front-end offer which is like nine to forty nine dollars and Then there’s back-end service Which is like, you know, like 1k plus And so the whole idea here is we hook them with the lead magnet, we redirect and email them about the front end offer. And then if they buy into that, we hit them heavily for the backend service. If they don’t buy into that, then we just like a little bit hit them about the backend service. And there could also be another product in the middle here too, which would be like, you know, like a, like a, like a mid tier. Offer which would be like $100 to $400 so like let’s call it $99 to $399 and that could be like something we consider over time but I think building all that out at once probably a lot so for now probably just focus on the other three. Got it. Michael Houck: Like if we see that the front end offer is getting a lot of purchases, but the service maybe isn’t, then we would build out a mid-tier offer for it, let’s say. Or maybe the opposite. Maybe the service is getting a lot. Then we say, all right, people really want to pay for this. So we’d try out a mid-tier offer. So we can deal with that part later. I’m going to sort of gray that out for now. Michael Houck: But OK, so for FJ Core Lead Magnet, have the pitch deck database, that’s the one that people like the most. So we do pitch deck database. Then for geo and SEO, we have one, what did Emma put together? Was a free website, search ready, you know, you don’t have context on this yet. Search readiness checklist, and then the front end offer is a website audit. And the back end offer is the monthly geo SEO service. For audience building, we don’t have a lead magnet. We don’t have a front end offer. The back end service is ghostwriting. Michael Houck: I guess sort of the front end offer could be megaphone. Yeah, that makes sense. Ben Ornstein: It’s gonna be a little bit more expensive though for V3 than 49, right? Michael Houck: Yeah, it’s more of a mid tier offer. So I’ll keep it here. We can bring it up if we want to, but I’ll keep it here for now. Yeah, I think that is a good mid tier offer actually. Yeah, cause it’s like software feels more like weighty. Okay, so we can come back to these later, but I think that things we need to iron out on this call are, what are these two? And what are these two? So maybe we start with FJ. So what is something that we could offer founders? Like, it’s so broad, it’s hard, but excuse me, what is something we could offer founders in either these price points that we’ve feel like they would pay for. Michael Houck: Yeah, I have some ideas, but I want you to sort of go in unadulterated by my feedback. Ben Ornstein: I remember yesterday you brought up general advising as a potential one. The problem is you’re constrained by your time there. But that was one that, I mean, it’s well worth it in terms of because it’s so broad, I feel like the advice, because you and advise on different kind of areas, right? So like that would be a potential one. It’s not the most ideal one in my mind, but because the offer itself is so general, like this kind of like flow and path, I feel like a general like advising offer kind of works there. Would you agree with that? Michael Houck: I would agree with it, but I’m not interested in it because we’re gonna sell, like what five times and then I’m gonna have less time than I do now like that sounds that sounds like it’s gonna stop us from growing more than it’s gonna enable us to grow yeah and also again we can only sell it so many times before we lose that monetization which kills that budget for this vertical anyway so we can’t monetize on the high ticket offer then we can’t put budget behind it so that doesn’t work so one thing that I was thinking well can Keep going. Any other, any other thoughts here? Ben Ornstein: Not for now. Michael Houck: So for backend service, I think that the best thing to do here is retreats, masterminds, IRL programs that founders can go to, you know, it’s expensive. Um, and maybe this is even like another tier, right? Maybe this is like, I don’t know, like high end offer and this is like, like a 10K scenario, cause that’s what we’re charging for, for the Costa Rica retreat is 10K per person. How many people do you have signed up so far? Ben Ornstein: Well, tentatively we have like seven, but Michael Houck: It’s pretty great though. Yeah, but we kind of dropped the ball on the sponsorship side here. And so I’ve been holding off on like announcing it, but we’re getting at the point where I just need to announce it. So that’s a whole other conversation, but We know from Tyler and his him running a couple of these himself that people will pay 10k for this. So we can debate whether that’s a back end service or not. I mean, one one thought could be like, this is like retreat. And this is like, you know, another person who does this really well is Matt Gray. You ever seen his stuff? Of course, yeah. Founder OS or whatever I Don’t know what his current pricing is for that, but I know it’s more than $1,000. I know he has this like mastermind Service that he does and I think that there is like an IRL Component of it and it's like frame is like personal board of directors or whatever And then there's like the in-person side of it too, I think. So, again, I don't know how much, what the price point is there, but this might be an area where there is no service at this layer and we just have to upsell like a high-end offer to start, you know? Or alternatively, it's like, you know, we match you with people in like a digital mastermind setting and then there's like an IRL thing. Although I don't know if it makes sense to break that out into two different offers probably makes more sense to combine it into a higher end um higher end option Um, I looked up his pride that founder os light is 24 97 Founder os light. Yeah What are the tiers? So that one's like the self-paced do-it-yourself system. Ben Ornstein: And then he's got it's weird. He doesn't have tears. He just has like these different like Streamlined offers. Michael Houck: It's actually something we should probably look at He's got like audience engine audience accelerator organic content engine very specific Yeah, but like that's kind of the same thing we're doing here on this Google sheet already right like audience building geo reddit like we don't have names for them that sound fancy yet, but Yeah, that's what it is No, exactly, right. Ben Ornstein: I'm saying like we you we could use it as a bit of a model. Michael Houck: That's what I'm saying No, yeah, but we're specifically solving for the core the core one right now, right so it's like All I'm trying to understand is that for his like core offering and I'm looking at his website right now, too He's got like founder os founder os velocity and then mastermind like what is the difference in terms of Pricing between those three. Michael Houck: Doesn't say on the page, unfortunately. Yeah, there's no pricing. Michael Houck: and try to get Grok to figure it out. OK, I don't know if this This is right, but this is what we got. FounderOS, the core thing, is 2k as a one-time payment. Looks like it used to be 1k, and he raised the price somewhat recently. Michael Houck: Then FounderOS Velocity is not publicly listed anywhere, and FounderOS Mastermind is also not publicly listed anywhere. Michael Houck: Founder OS light, it looks like is 500, but I don't see that on the site anywhere anymore. So I don't know if he's offering that anymore, really. Ben Ornstein: I couldn't find anything. Michael Houck: So I think what that communicates to us though, is, um, basically that some sort of I don't know, some sort of program is required at like a 1K price point, right? Ben Ornstein: So if we go here. Michael Houck: Yeah, like I'm just going to write founder OS-esque program. Michael Houck: And then higher end offer would be, we'll start off selling these like one-off retreats, and then maybe we build it into like a mastermind thing. Over time or something like that. So then what is the front end offer? What are we, what's our first touch point where we're trying to just prove that this person has a willingness to pay or not? Would that be the case studies? Michael Houck: It could be, but we haven't seen good opt-in for those. Like we've seen some $19 buys, but not, not many. And maybe that’s a marketing thing. Maybe we’re not positioning it well enough on the landing page. I’m not sure. Um, I talked to marketing max about this and he said that what he sees doing well, um, is templates. Uh, like rather than like, Hey, go Read something to learn something like, Hey, here’s like a template that you can use for, I don’t know, like we just have to brainstorm what they would, what they would be. Um, it’s just like a pack of templates that we give people to like get started for like, you know, 19, dollars or something like that. Ben Ornstein: When you say templates, do you mean like, uh, like literally anything for useful to founders, like a template for like a, um, uh, I don’t know. Um, like an income statement, like that kind of thing. Could it be like anything to manage money? Could it be, uh, yeah, I don’t know. What do you mean by templates? Michael Houck: We would just need to brainstorm them. Or it could be literally anything. I mean, he said like a pitch deck template or an investor email update, like a monthly investor update template or burn rate calculator or just bundling them all together or something. Uh, but you know, he’s not, you know, he is a founder, but he, he doesn’t sell to founders really. He sells to like marketers. So we would just need to brainstorm what they should be. Michael Houck: The idea here would be like template pack, you know? Michael Houck: And maybe over time that evolves into whatever this program is at the sort of mid-high tier here. Got it. Probably don’t want anything for this. Probably don’t want anything for this. Although maybe we could do something. Michael Houck: So next is audience building. So what’s a good lead magnet for founders want to build a social media audience or show them the value of building a social media audience for their startup. Ben Ornstein: Well, on the first point, we have those LinkedIn and X best practices. Could that be interesting? Could we package that up? Michael Houck: That’s a good idea. That’s on the same tier as a search readiness checklist. Michael Houck: I like that. Ben Ornstein: And I love the idea of like repurposing things we already have in some capacity, so. Michael Houck: Okay, so like a best practices guide, right? Yeah, yeah, exactly. Michael Houck: Okay, and then what, okay, so then let’s take that. So people who want a best practices guide, for one of these two platforms, what would they pay for? What’s a low-priced offer that we could sell to them? Ben Ornstein: I know we’ve talked about this in the past, and it wasn’t feasible. I think I brought this up a long time ago. The idea of maybe someone’s not fully committed to doing a full month of ghostwriting, even though that’s a low commitment for anyone who’s raised money could we create have some like AI generator maybe even something close to the reply generator that out of bio created that could be like a generate like one week’s worth of content but it would be low extremely low lift from us because it would be automated like we build the system there’s a few things like it’s not extremely customized but it’s something where like Like you can pay, I’m trying to explain this succinctly. Basically like something to have a taste of what the ghostwriting offer would be, but not as actually dedicating the time and effort and money to have someone actually write them. Does that make sense where I’m trying to get at? Yeah, it makes sense. Michael Houck: It wouldn’t work because we would be these people’s first Impression of working with us would be that we’re they’re paying for generic low quality stuff. Ben Ornstein: Yeah, that’s a good point It’s the opposite of what we’re trying to go for. Yeah, right Okay, so if they want linkedin and xbox best practices if they’re interested in that the logical would be to, I guess I would want the content done for me, but I’m not willing to pay or not even considering like a full ghostwriting offer. Michael Houck: A tough part about this one is that there’s a couple things we could offer at the mid-tier. We could offer bespoke workshops where either Blake or myself goes in and does a workshop with their team or something like that. You know what this could be? Like a strategy formulation. Like we, like website audit is simple because we can just go in there and audit their website. In this, we could do a similar thing where like, again, Blake or myself, or maybe we have Jacob or Austin do it, goes in, analyzes their content, analyzes their niche, creates a notion document with the template that we provide, we just sort of fill in the blank with it. And be like, hey, here’s like your top three recommendations of what you should be doing. Here are the top three mistakes you’re making. Type deal. I like that a lot. Ben Ornstein: And if it’s easy just to kind of fill in the blanks, given like an hour of work or something, that’s pretty appealing, actually. And then when people see how high quality that is, that’s logical, actually. Michael Houck: they know what they’re talking about, maybe I do wanna work with them on ghost writing. I like that a lot, actually. Ben Ornstein: That works, yeah. I think the problem there is time, right? Michael Houck: Where it’s like, you know, if we’re getting, even on the high end here, if we’re getting $50 for this and it takes one hour, like that’s not great, you know? It doesn’t really solve the, like the website audit is kind of the same, but Emma’s just doing them for us for free. So maybe we just see if Blake will just do them. I just do them, I don’t know, you know. Yeah, we’re gonna make our money on the backend anyway, but we do need some return of capital for the ad costs here. I think this is our best idea so far. So I guess what should we call this? Like bespoke, well, that doesn’t need to be said. Like a strategy doc, we’ll just call it strategy doc. That’s good. Ben Ornstein: In terms of the calls that you’re doing, with Nuon each week. What does that involve? Michael Houck: Well, we’re doing two things for them. We’re doing calls and we’re editing their posts. So they want to write the posts for whatever reason. And they’re submitting those posts to Blake. Blake is going in editing their content. And then on the calls, we are sharing best practices, sort of like just educating them on how social works. They have no idea. Even know you shouldn’t write paragraphs in their post basically you know like very simple stuff like that. I imagine that you know they’re smart guys so I imagine that over time sort of the slope of learning will be high and we will need to bring more to the table but initially that’s been enough and then John even messaged me he DM me he was like we’re learning so much we’re loving this loving working with you guys so that’s the bar has been pretty low. Ben Ornstein: Interesting I was curious to see if anything from that sparked something for this I don’t think so. Michael Houck: I don’t think anything that’s more scalable, which is really the problem that we would want to solve. Michael Houck: But yeah, look, I think that this is all these make sense. And then back end offer like very high end offer here could be like full like exec comms for their team. So not just go straight in but like we are your marketing department type deal. We are your social marketing department. Michael Houck: Now, we should also have this for newsletters, too. Basically the exact same thing. Michael Houck: So like a newsletter’s best practice, let’s say that. Yeah, because in those cases, they’re not going to have a newsletter already. They’re going to be thinking about starting one, right? And so it’s like, here’s what you could do with your newsletter. Here’s how easy it is. Is here’s what we would do if we were working with you, Ted Gill. Ben Ornstein: So that, I mean, and it makes sense, but the audience building offers the one that seems so clean to me, like that progression, which it makes sense, because that’s our bread and butter. Michael Houck: Yeah, and here, I’ll make this one back to, because we do have that. We have so much here, right? This is fully built out. Michael Houck: This one, there’s a lot of work to do. This one, Emma’s handling these two this week, and then it’ll be ready to go. I don’t think there’s a higher end offer that makes sense to do here. I think this is just fine as it is. I agree. Ben Ornstein: I mean, I don’t have context on the GEO side, so I don’t have too much to add. I mean, mid-tier, I don’t know. Michael Houck: I don’t think we need it for GEO yet for for FDA, this would be like, I just, it could be something like courses, right. Or advising calls, like one-off advising calls. Um, but I also don’t think it makes sense to break those things out. Like if our goal is to, similar to what Matt does, Matt packs all his value into these different tier offers on the high end. And I think if you start piecemealing it and giving people a little taste of what they want here, there’ll be a lot less likely to make the bigger purchases. Michael Houck: So, okay, I think that’s good. I guess next steps here are let’s start executing on this. So let me just, I hate color coding stuff, but let me just color code this. So this is like done. This is like ready to go. This is not ready to go. This is not ready to go. This is like in flight. Michael Houck: These are, well, this is good. This is in flight. This is good. This is good. Michael Houck: These two would need to be put together, but not ideated. I’ll put them there. And then this is not started yet. Michael Houck: So that’s where we are. So basically, over the next two weeks, before the 17th, we need this, which will be done this week. We probably want to build this and this. And then we want to compile this. This is going to be easy enough to do, because it’s just writing a template. So my STU would be two things. Michael Houck: One, put some thought into templates that could be useful for founders. And also start compiling what we have already on this stuff. The best practices for social newsletters. Michael Houck: I don’t know. If we don’t have it, then we don’t have it. Just compile what we have to start, and then I’ll have Blake create the rest. Sounds good. Yeah, because the next week is going to be about basically building out. I’m going to move this to yellow, even though it’s not started, because we’ll use yellow to be like, we’re doing it. And the red will be like, we’re not doing it for now. Michael Houck: And also, I guess. There’s like another kind of like tangential thing on founding journey here, which is like not even a tier which is like Venture fund That’s that’s yeah, you know, that’s like a separate thing But Okay So yeah, so template pack best practices guide first steps for those I’ll put on your plate Emma’s got search readiness checklist I’ll work with Blake on strategy audit, and I’ll work with myself on the masterminds and retreat stuff and loop you in there as needed. Okay, that works. Michael Houck: I’m just sanity checking this to make sure I’m not missing anything. These are all compelling, right? We’re not talking ourselves into an idea here? Ben Ornstein: Again, the audience building one makes the most sense to me, but it’s obviously the one I’m the familiar with anyway. So that’s the geo SEO, it makes sense. And it seems like it’s working. So I don’t have too many other comments there. I can logically think through the process of the of like the FJ core side. So I, I think it makes sense. Yeah, no, I don’t I don’t think we’re talking and I don’t think we’re talking ourselves. Into anything that’s not insane, or we’re just talking to just to fill a box. I don’t think we’re doing that. Yeah, because it reads coherent to me, too. Michael Houck: So I think we’re on the same page. Ben Ornstein: I just wrote this in here. Michael Houck: For the strategy audit, I actually think we might be able to automate this with Hey, Jen, if we record 10, 20 of these. And then we create videos of us walking through their social feed and profile and then we send them the doc along with like a loom video that’s like created by Haygen rather than us. I’ve seen some people do this in like cold outreach and it’s very effective. Like I’ve even watched them and been interested. Ben Ornstein: How does that work? Like you said Haygen creates the video for us? Michael Houck: Haygen creates your like your avatar and your voice and whatever and so So you then can basically create a video of yourself doing that and then use that video as the loom like little circle thing and have like some other AI thing scroll around the page or maybe you’re scrolling around the page. I don’t know how exactly they do it, but I know that it’s possible. So we just need to figure out what that would be. But I feel like that would be a pretty compelling email to folks to get. For sure. And I wrote this to like workshops, like, you know, not for actually, this is not even for my phone. This is for like, um, or it could be, it could be here. We like sell them. Workshops are tricky because we know we can do them well, but it’s like, do we sell a workshop to a company as like a mid tier offer or do we offer it for free as a way into like an exec comms type situation? You know, That’s interesting. Ben Ornstein: Something to think about there too. Ben Ornstein: Okay, cool. Michael Houck: Anything else? Top of mind? Ben Ornstein: I’m still cracking through the edits on the, not the edits, the getting the quotes and clips on the podcast. That’s what I’m, I’m trying to finish that today. That’s like, I’m like, that’s what I’m focusing on. I finished Ben’s first one. I’m in the middle of Kai is, he’s interesting. Ben Ornstein: He’s a funny guy. Michael Houck: Okay, cool. I think if you can get me the best practices stuff and ideas on templates by like end of day tomorrow, that’ll give me enough time then to make a plan of what to do over the weekend in terms of like prepping them for Nathan. Sounds good. Ben Ornstein: All right, man. Talk to you soon. See ya.