- Duration: 64 min
- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01KAVPWHCSVM3D9DB2SVSJT95E (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01KAVPWHCSVM3D9DB2SVSJT95E)
Transcript
[UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: same area. That’s awesome. [Nathan May]: Wow, small world. All right, we’re good at making sure The pods, you know, get along with everybody. This is all planned. You’re a mastermind, Nathan. Yeah, yeah. [Michael Houck]: How are you feeling, by The way? [Nathan May]: Are you doing better? I’m like 90% there. [Michael Houck]: I was just saying, like, I haven’t been sick. I never get sick. I haven’t been sick this long since like 2020, like COVID. And so I’m finally not hacking up a lung. I don’t have a fever. But still a little question, but that’s it. So should be good for Thanksgiving, thankfully. Yeah. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Cool. [Nathan May]: Well, I’m excited to kick off. I usually will do two things on this call. I’ll kind of walk through what The first month will look like and process stuff. That’s The less interesting part. It would be 10 or 15 minutes. And we’ll spend The rest of The time on what I think is kind of more than The meat and potatoes which is Talking to The audience and like what is a qualified lead mean to you? It’s like how I’m they’re reading The type of person who’s going to convert into a high-ticket service Yeah, anything other than those two topics you guys want to make sure we cover No, I mean The one thing I want to do just start off is just to apologize with how slow off The block I’ve been this is not normally how I operate and so I was getting started here. [Michael Houck]: So I want you to feel like you’re always gonna be waiting on me for things or anything like that. Like I know The onboarding form isn’t done yet. So I’m very conscious of that. And I just want to say to you guys, like, you know, my apologies, we will get it done. I just, I was telling everyone before you hopped on Nathan, I also had like move Airbnbs this weekend unexpectedly because they sold The house that The Airbnb was in. So yeah, a little bit of chaos over here on top of The sickness. So apologies for The problem. Process issues on our end. No worries at all, no worries at all. [Nathan May]: And we’ll get part of like, we’ll have like The most time intensive parts of The onboarding form done like during this. Like part of it’s like, we’re gonna talk to The audiences and like, we’ll kind of, we’ll discuss it together a lot. [Michael Houck]: I’ll be out tonight for you guys. Like, I’m sorry, it’s just been. [Nathan May]: Cool, well, let me share my screen. [Michael Houck]: Ben, do you have that sheet also that we were filling out in The call? Last week or do I just have that with The different flows and channels? I don’t believe you ever shared that with me. Okay, I’ll find that real quick to reference on. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Nathan May]: So this is just how we’ll split The time, what we were saying before. Typically, The way I like to always start these calls is like, okay, everyone wants to know, like, cool, we do these ads, like, when do they win? Right? And how often? And typically, what we find is that like 20 or 30% percent of concepts end up being quote-unquote winners. And a winner to me is something that is both below your target cost per lead and scales, but then also it needs to make sense down The funnel. For some people, that’s like open rate and click-through rate. That will be a guiding KPI for us as a group. But The most important thing is going to be actually The qualification form, like how much we’re paying for a qualified lead. And so The goal of The trial period together is define, let’s call it three or four great concepts that meet all these criteria. Decently low cost per lead, qualified lead, and skills, right? It doesn’t do any good if, you know, we spend $100 day on an ad and The cost really blows up. When that happens can depend. And so this was like our, it's from like two years ago now, but our original like old kind of Google Sheet doc with The neuron we were with them, for them, like, found a lot of winners right off The bat. We had two in The first month, another one in The second month. The third month was kind of quiet, nothing there really scaled. You know, fourth month, two again, you know, so on and so forth. And that, you know, they're into like The hundred something plus. So The overall thing I'll say is like, we should expect to find something within The first six to eight weeks. That should be like The goal. Ideally have first week, that's awesome. That's usually not The case, but you know. There are no unrealistic expectations here. [Michael Houck]: I kind of know how this goes, and you know, we'll see them when we see them, basically. [Nathan May]: Typical ownership responsibilities, this won't be super new to you guys, right? We're handling The research, The media buying, The creative, The analytics and reporting, you know, for us are going to be joint ownership. So we are going to have eyes on everything from a cost-reliant, up-rate, and click-through-rate perspective. We'll have shared visibility fairly easily into The qualification rate, because that's going to be visible in type form. There was some additional reporting that is a nice to have, but not a need to have, which is in The loom I sent you, which is like, oh, it's actually cool to see The qualification rate per day. We don't really need that from day one, but it's just a nice thing to have. [Nathan May]: we basically do creative on a monthly cycle. So we'll do a set of, in your case, five broad, non-overlapping concepts. So that means, you know, we may talk to, you know, B2B service founders, right, in one, and then for The other we may not even call The audience, we'll say people that are having, you know, a problem, I'm making this up, but like, you know, building their audience, right? Every VC is telling everybody, oh, you've got to have a personal brand, you've got to build your audience, right? So we want to, like, twist that knife a little bit. That's going to be based on this call, but also performance of social posts, reader surveys, email engagement, et cetera, et cetera. Again, each concept is designed to speak to a specific persona with one problem. You will obviously approve all final copy and ads before they go live. Testing from a cost-per-lead perspective is quite fast. You don't usually know by day three or four whether somebody is going to be wildly off The mark or not. Down-funnel metrics, The open rate, The rate take a little longer to come, you're still sending once per week, is that right? [Michael Houck]: We send like, we usually send twice a week, although I've been sort of inconsistent with The second send for The past months or so. So it's, I'd say once or twice a week we send. [Nathan May]: Yeah, so yeah, probably, probably like a, let's say one to two weeks to like fully bake in like reader quality. Like this should be like enough data, one to two cents per cohort. We'll share those weekly, and then generally, you know, we'll double down what works and what will test that new for everything else. Sounds good. Quick summary. Again, none of this will be new to you guys, but a couple of ways that we address ads at UGC is your content, static ads, text or video, et cetera, et cetera. The other thing you'll commonly hear me use is concept versus ad. These to me mean two very different things. A concept is a group of ads, usually three to four that all have a very similar persona problem. Usually The main variation is The hook. So this is a newsletter called The Average Joe. They have, I'm going to like oversimplify it, but let's say there's two groups of people in The newsletter. One is older retired investors who are wealthier. They care about blue chip stocks and more preservation of capital. Whereas The younger guy wants to trade crypto and is willing to do a bunch of stuff that they're not. Well, when we talk to The retired investor, we need to talk about about being accredited and managing your retirement portfolio. And we're talking more about not just stocks, but blue chip stocks, and interest rates, and things like that, more macro stuff that they're going to care about. And so we'll endeavor to do The same thing with you guys. There are only three things I typically see cause roadblocks in an engagement. One is confusion over target cost per lead. That's one we're going to have to figure out. I mean I'll tell you typically for like qualified lead funnels anywhere between like five to fifteen dollars, like if you're truly qualifying right, you're getting leads beyond that right. So there are people who are coming in who aren't technically qualified, there's only reporting on The folks who meet your criteria. The second thing is frequent landing page changes, URL changes. It depends a little bit on how your conversion events are set up but basically without getting into a bunch of my Anusha, just let us know when and if you make changes to The funnel. And we'll know very quickly whether it's material or not, whether it is or isn't. It's very easy for us to do that. We are familiar with The conversion events and URLs. [Michael Houck]: So yeah, don't worry. We won't change it up on you without letting you know, for sure. Cool. [Nathan May]: And you guys, your landing page is Beehive hosted, right? Or is it separate? We have a Beehive one. [Michael Houck]: We also have a Card one. We have a couple of Card ones that we've used over time. I would prefer to keep it all in Beehive, but I haven't played around with The new website editor too much yet, so I'm not sure if that's realistic or not. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Nathan May]: It's not switching off is kind of painful, but once you're there, it's good. I'll think more on this. They have a specific weight that they track that actually is very good and basically impossible to break. We may want to switch over to that, is fast and something that we can do, we can talk about that offline. [Nathan May]: Should we care about brand and creative? I know you guys don't really mind that much, but I'll just say it since it's here. Brand and creative is pretty, you know, we can do it. A lot of people like it. It feels good. You show it to investors and stuff. This is generally not what performs The majority of The time, maybe 20% of The time. Typically what we see The non-branded stuff, right? It's what you see in your car. It's text over video. It's voiceovers. It's like all this stuff. Podcast ads, actually, which is a little bit more branded. So that is The majority of what we'll do. We only create a little branded as well, but it's atypical for it to scale. So I think we're on a bit of a lag. [Michael Houck]: I don't know if it's my Wi-Fi, Nathan, or yours, but I do think we're on a bit of a lag. I see Ben and Edward, you guys are showing up with no lag, so it might be I don't hear anything, I'm not sure. I think it's me. [Nathan May]: Yeah, you are a little lag. I had a couple of calls like this today. It's probably me. Go ahead. [Michael Houck]: I was just going to say, we don't have yet any external partners. We might raise a fund in Q1, and then we'd have some LPs. But this wouldn't be material for them anyway. So I don't care at all about branded versus non-branded. Let's get results. Let's get leads. That's all that matters. Cool. I like it. [Nathan May]: Um, and then, uh, just one of The, uh, uh, Ed, if, if you don't mind, could you, could you just pull up The onboarding doc in your background? So since I'm lagging, uh, I will go through it. I can kind of drive, but if, if you could just like take notes and stuff, it'll be, um, it'll be annoying if I take notes because people won't see them in real time. Um, but yeah, just, just. It does that so yeah, that's really it By weekly time async And we can switch over The audience and anything we should talk about before we talk audience stuff No, I think for The bi-weekly. [Michael Houck]: I Think do you guys like to do them early in The week or sort of end of The week recap? How do you guys like to do it normally? [Nathan May]: Um, I would say like Tuesday and Thursdays is typically when we'll do most of The meetings. Yeah. [Nathan May]: If that works in general. I'm pretty wide open. [Michael Houck]: I don't think I have any recurring calls on a Thursday. Thursday's kind of my ad hoc day, so I'm down to do it then. [Michael Houck]: Cool. [Nathan May]: Yeah, we'll plan tentatively for a Thursday. I think that works. OK, cool. [Michael Houck]: Sounds good. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Awesome. [Nathan May]: Ed, do you want to just share your screen screen really quick and pull that up and we can navigate through. [Edward Miller]: Yeah, hang on one second. [Nathan May]: Are you still hearing me on a delay? Am I choppy? [Michael Houck]: Only a little bit, not as much as before for sure. [Nathan May]: Okay, all right. [Edward Miller]: Cool, cool. [Nathan May]: Let's go down to audience segmentation number 11, if we're not there. [Nathan May]: Cool. So let's just start with this. What do you guys see as The three largest segments? I assume they're all founders, and maybe different types of founders, since you're doing The service, but you tell me. There's really, there's three clear types actually perfectly. [Michael Houck]: You're asking for three, cause there are three clear types. Type number one is The smallest type, which is hyper-connected people who are based in SF, you know, sometimes New York, sometimes LA, sometimes Miami, but they're like, you know, they're very deep in The startup world. They have connections to investors. They have connections to founder communities. Like they're in this sort of Silicon Valley, scene, let's say. [Michael Houck]: They're a small contingent, but they're very important for credibility. And they mostly come from like an extension of my personal networks. I have like relationships with a lot of them. These are The people who are very important to us. Because if we do raise a fund next year, these are The people we will want to invest in for The most part. And so kind of having content that speaks to them, you know, whether that's being me me about like Silicon Valley culture, whether that's being serious about like, you know, Paul Graham style thought pieces about where Silicon Valley is going, where a startup world is going. These are critical people for us to sort of cater to, cater The voice, cater The brand to. But they're small, which makes it tough. [Michael Houck]: The sort of next concentric circle out is people who are founders. And there's sort of a mix of I'd say venture and bootstrap people in this bucket. They're successful to varying degrees. Maybe they've raised a round or two of capital. Maybe they have a million dollar cash flowing business. Maybe they don't. Maybe they're earlier than that. But they have a company. It's real. They're founders. And they're sort of in The earlier, let's say, stages of where that could go for them. And they're interested in coming to us to learn what they can do to sort of be a better founder, take their company to The next level, build a better, more sustainable business that can grow faster. They see The stamp of approval, The blue chip resume, if you will, that I've had raising from Andreessen, working at Airbnb and Uber, and having built both a successful venture-backed business and a bootstrap business now, and also having raised a fund myself. They see The amalgamation of of that as just like a very interesting person to hear from and get like tactical. The third buckets or The third concentric circle out is The sort of aspirational builders. These are The people who maybe they're indie hackers, maybe they work in big tech, maybe they don't even work anywhere near, you know, Silicon Valley. Maybe they have no connections to it, but they want to, they want to learn. These are people who just sort of want to be part of that world. And they see me as like a way to get into that world. And sort of learn from somebody who's done it. Because I started with no connections to Silicon Valley myself, right? I cold emailed my way into Uber. And I raised money from some of The best investors in The world after having never run a startup before. Like, that's The story that they see. [Michael Houck]: And so I would say that I don't know The exact percentages between that second and third bucket, but I would imagine just based on sheer numbers that The third bucket probably is larger. But there's a lot of people in that second bucket who maybe don't live in Silicon Valley but still have successful or earlier stage businesses themselves. Yeah, I like it. [Nathan May]: And who... Actually, maybe an overarching question for you. How much do you wanna be in The ads? Doesn't mean that we're gonna like have you record a bunch, but even like B-roll, like do you wanna be seen as like The guy behind The newsletter or do you wanna be a brand? It's tough, man. That's a great question. [Michael Houck]: I'm totally fine to be The guy recording The ads. Like I have my phone, I have a camera, I have a new person we hired who's like teaching me how to do TikToks and Instagram reels. So I'm fine being that guy, like I'm here for that. I love making content, but I'm also fine not being it. It used to be called Like that was The original name of The newsletter. Yeah. It's a founding journey because we thought it could be maybe something, um, that we do raise a fund around and maybe I'd have other GPs that I work with on that. So it was just one more flexibility with The name. Um, but I do think a lot of people still Read it because of me. Like they Read it because of my voice. I couldn't just plug some other writer in there. This is why I don't have any of our writers write my newsletter. Cause I think a lot of people do. Do Read it from my sort of voice and perspective. So is that a great answer to your question? Because The answer is I don't know where we want to go with it yet, but I'm not sure. I'm not sure. Yeah, we can try both. [Nathan May]: I mean, I think for selling any kind of high-ticket stuff, for investing, it is good for when you go to cold traffic, but we want to probably endear you in The same way that like Max has done this I think decently well for like actually doing stuff in this newsletter agency that he started. Cool, okay, this is helpful. These three groups, I imagine want very different things, right? So you look at The smallest concentric circle, okay this is potential investor money. The second group maybe tell me it's more The services. The third I don't know how, maybe it's just kind of monetizable? Like, what's The main thing? What's The priority? [Michael Houck]: I mean, look, The priority today is The services, because that's what we have, and that's what we want to continue to build out. So for some broader context on The business, we have The kind of content agency, which is a social media content founder-led audience building on LinkedIn and X. [Nathan May]: And amplification, is it all one service? It's all one service. [Michael Houck]: They can sort of pick and choose a la carte what parts they want to to do. And we can also break it out where like we just sell The application, like we're thinking like funnel design, I can walk you through my thoughts on that a little bit later. But yes, there's The there's The ghost writing service. We also have a geo and SEO agency now that we've spun up. And we want to continue to do this and sort of let founding journey be like this layer on top of like The services that a founder would need. So we'll create like an AI powered design agency next year, you know, maybe create like a, like a competitor to 10x, like Alex Lieberman's new thing, right, there's like all these other options that founders want from us, and we've pulled them on this, and they like would want it, they trust us, they trust The brand. So part of our strategy for next year is let's just, you know, whether we build them all ourselves, or whether we just white label services from other people, let's create like a like a menu of services that different potential people who are founders could want. I also think this is going to help out with our messaging, because then we're not advertising We're advertising a founder newsletter. We're advertising a funnel towards The service that you want. And hey, you also get this great tactical advice from an Andreessen-backed founder. That's sort of The thinking there. Now, as we go into next year, we're also, as I said, planning to raise The fund. So The highest upside thing that we have, we'll be investing in that core concentric circle, The first smaller group. But cashflow is very important. Cashflow is a priority. So I would say, as of right now, it's sort of selling services to primarily The middle segment, but also The, also The inner segment as well. Yeah. Makes sense. [Nathan May]: So, um, if we think about The type of founder who's buying, what, what's The, uh, what's The gross writing amplification? Is it still called megaphone? So-called megaphone. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: We don't have like a, we just have like a notion page that we send people to and they, as I said, there's a lot of trust in The brand. They get on a call with me. I have built big audiences for myself and they're just like, yeah, sounds good. Yeah. [Nathan May]: Um, Who is immediately disqualified from that? How do you know somebody is not a good fit? [Michael Houck]: They're not a good fit for Megaphone if they are super early stage for sure. Like if they need to focus more on just like, what is my product? Who is my ICP? Rather than like growing something, right? They need to be at a point where they can have something to sell and there's going to be ROI for them. Because what we see is that The clients who we've worked with for The longest time on Megaphone are The companies and The founders who have some success. We've had a lot of people who come to us like, Oh, we really need to get The word out. And then we work with them for like two months and then they're like, well, we don't have any more money. Ben's nodding his head in and grimacing because he knows this life. Um, but The folks who've been with us for like over a year are ones who, you know, one of them just raised their series a and they've had a great year. And, um, In some cases, they've even introduced us to investors, and now we're writing content for their VCs as well. So if The company is successful, The founder is successful, we tend to have a more successful engagement with them. Interesting. Okay. [Nathan May]: This is helpful. And so if we look at The mix today, how many clients roughly? 20, I think it's like 25 today, maybe somewhere around there. All right. [Nathan May]: Let's say because it'll be a rounder number to cut up. So is it 15 15 bootstrapped in venture? Is it more or less one or The other? Good question. [Michael Houck]: I would say that it's like 80%, if not 90% venture. OK. Cool. [Nathan May]: And post-revenue, I guess. Have they raised, most likely? [Michael Houck]: I'm looking. Yes, all of The venture clients have raised, correct. Yeah. [Nathan May]: And do you see it more of like a, I know this is hard, we're really kind of, you know. I love it. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Nathan May]: Is it like, can somebody do this and be retained if they've just done their seed round? Or do they need to be like, they did a seed in a bridge, or they did a series A, like, how do you think about it? [Michael Houck]: If they have a seed, we're usually fine as long as, as long as it's a good company. Like again, we, we, we started working with a company a year ago, over a year ago, and they had relatively relatively recently raised a seed, and then they just closed today, kind of recently. So, but if they're a company where, you know, this is The hard part eventually, we need to sort of look at this like an investor, like, are they going to be successful or not? You know, let's make a bet of whether we want to work with them, basically. [Nathan May]: Yeah. Are there themes to The businesses? Like, if I look at most LinkedIn ghostwriting agencies, you usually need to believe, okay, leads from LinkedIn are very valuable. Well, you need to have a very high customer So you're probably like B2B SaaS generally. Is that fair of your ICP? [Michael Houck]: I'm looking through The list right now trying to give you a quick answer. There are definitely some SaaS companies. I'd say there's... Okay, maybe The percentage is 70 to 30 rather than like 80 or 90 to But yeah, a good chunk of The venture backed ones are SaaS, most of them. I would say, but not all of them. There are a few unique ones, but most of them. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Cool. [Nathan May]: And then maybe, so what I want to do is, if we do this qualified lead funnel, I want to make sure we're talking about how The newsletter is going to meet them where they are in their founder journey, effectively. And so when you think about people who come to The newsletter, get value out of it, and are good fits for The service, problems do they have? [Nathan May]: Is growth, growth is probably The main thing. Is growth The main thing? [Michael Houck]: I would say that The overlap for these two, for Megaphone and The newsletter, definitely growth is The core thing, The sort of central thing. But with that said, again, because of that initial, that inner concentric circle, they're also very focused on like fundraising and The outer concentric circle is too. They're very focused on fundraising and they see The Andreessen stamp that I have as like Hey, this guy will give you good fundraising advice. So a lot of people we ask like what topic should I talk more about? Fundraising is always The most common answer. [Nathan May]: Yeah, okay helpful. There's a fundraising and then I guess within growth like would it be would it be weird for us to position The newsletter as like Being tactical around helping you build a personal brand and that person runs gonna lean lead you high LTV clients It's gonna lead to more investors Is that too much? [Michael Houck]: We talk about that on sales calls from Megaphone, especially The investor stuff and partner stuff and even hiring The right people. These are things that founders aren't normally thinking of They're thinking about audience building for customers. We sort of illuminate them that it can do more than that. It would be weird to position founding journey specific... And Ben, you can let me know if you agree, but in my opinion, it probably would be weird to position founding journey around this because, For example, on Saturday, I interviewed Mike Cagney, The founder of SoFi and Figure, and we did a YouTube video on him and took his five lessons from two IPOs that he's now gone through. So that wouldn't make sense for someone who's just looking to build a personal brand. This is helpful. [Nathan May]: you know, when we do The qualification, um, maybe it should just be around, maybe it should be around revenue or team size. Like, is there, if you had to guess, if you had to draw a line in The sand, any strong opinions on where that would be? Okay. We would take a call versus we wouldn't. [Michael Houck]: Um, I mean, honestly, like, Ben, what do you think on team size? Cause you're closer to The clients than, than I I am on most of The day-to-day stuff. [Ben Ornstein]: Team size is tough because, you know, some venture-backed companies have way too many people on their teams, but [Michael Houck]: Let me put it like this, Nathan. So The most successful clients that we have are The ones who just like, it's us talking to The founder directly, like one of The founders and their point of contact. There's not like a too many in The kitchen type scenario, they're not bringing in like three marketing managers or anything like that. And they give us sort of free reign to go create good content for them. The opposite end of that is companies where they have like a director of marketing, and they have like a social marketing person, and they have like two founders who are always arguing on direction and voice and what's on brand for them. We get that sometimes. And we can hold on to those clients for a while, but like they're a fucking pain to deal with, you know? So I would say, I don't know how you qualify for that really, but that's probably The truest hallmark of success versus not success in this area. Yeah, I like that. [Nathan May]: I think so The person at The very least has to be a founder, right? Not a like, I'm in my nine to five and I'd love to start something originally or eventually like that kind of thing that's helpful. And we'll think on like, okay, is there some second factor that's is so important, you know, we have to have it. [Michael Houck]: When we are running ads, like we can run ads, not about being a founder, not about founding journey, The newsletter, we can run ads, essentially for like, hey, you're a founder, you want to build an audience, here's how to do it. And The funnel basically is like, you know, here's some free lead magnet that we offer, maybe here's some low cost thing, like front end offer, we try to get you in The door with on that, and then we upsell The high-ticket service from there while also sort of mentioning it as we go. Like, we can build email sequences that do that, and that's sort of, you know, in my head, sort of The lead magnet could be The way in The door there. And then they just get Founding Journey anyway, and since they are a founder, they will find it valuable, even though it's not, like, The thing that The ad was about, you know? Yeah, I like that. [Nathan May]: I like that. [Nathan May]: Let's say they've raised at least a seed. [Nathan May]: Growth is a big thing. Let's just list it out. What are all their major problems? What's The stuff that they're stressing out about? Oh, excuse me. [Michael Houck]: I still got a little phlegm in there, I guess. [Nathan May]: I mean, look, they're sprinting, right? [Michael Houck]: So The clock is ticking now. They've raised investor money. They know that The game is on. There's no going back. [Michael Houck]: So what they're really focused on can be a few things. One, initially, is like, who am I talking to? Like, how do I identify my customer, my ICP? How do I know The boundaries of who those people are? And then The second step is, okay, well, how do I understand their problems, right? How do I really get a sense of what they want and would pay for? The third step then would really be, okay, them and what they're willing to pay for. Well, how do I speak to that? How do I how do I position ourselves? How do I build something that like product planning, product market fit and finding message market fit for that. And then after that, once they have that, then it's okay, what tactics do I use to go to go grow, to go actually like, get to The next milestone for The next round, they're always framing it through like, what is The next round. And so we have like a fundraising framework about like The first step in that is like identify your next round. What are The milestones you need to hit to raise your next round, right? And so we frame a lot of stuff through that. And yeah, so then it's like, how do they position themselves well for The next fundraise, basically. I like that. [Nathan May]: And is there a newsletter that kind of lays that out? It could be interesting. We could do a graphic Yeah, I'll send you that issue. [Michael Houck]: I'll make a note. Okay, got it. [Nathan May]: So focused on your next round of capital. And then it's interesting. So a lot of folks, you talk a lot about finding product market fit. Let's go to The folks who have it and are trying to figure out The tactics growth part. What's hard about that? Why can't they just choose? And what should they choose? How do I think through that? I mean, they don't know what channels Are working right now. [Michael Houck]: They don't know what channels are right for their business They probably are not marketers themselves and therefore don't have expertise in those channels So when I'm like, hey, I've built, you know, I have 200,000 followers on substack. I have 40,000 LinkedIn I had Twitter 55,000 before my account got suspended when I when I can say those things to them They're like, oh this guy knows social, right? And also just they trust me on marketing in general at that point, too, so So yeah, they're really just looking to understand marketing for The first time. Maybe they're heads-down engineers. We have a good client, actually, who's one of our highest-paying clients. He was a hyper-successful engineer across Google and Instacart, principal-level engineer. And he started with zero followers on Twitter. He had no idea how to... Write a tweet or anything about marketing. We have to explain very simple things to him. But over time, he's come to trust us more. That's cool. [Nathan May]: I like that. And so do you think a lot of The tactics are around content marketing then? [Michael Houck]: We talk about content marketing. But I've also an issue we put out maybe a month or so ago when we soft launched The GEO agency to see if it would be real, where I outlined like, hey, here's why SEO is dead. Here's why there's a big white space opportunity for GEO right now that startups can disrupt these big legacy SEO giants like Zapier and NerdWallet and whomever. And here's why you should be doing that. And here's how to do it. And for that, I just collaborated with our head of GEO, our new hire. And it was great. We got a bunch of calls from people, took it at face value. Because again, there's brand trust. [Nathan May]: Yeah, that's cool. What did they try that hasn't worked? They're spinning their wheels on growth stuff. Maybe give me some examples of that. [Michael Houck]: Well, a lot of them, not a lot of them, but there's a chunk of them who just don't know what to do. And maybe they haven't tried anything. The small contingent maybe has run ads. [Michael Houck]: Another contingent maybe just is trying to build PLG into The product and sort of hope that there's referral loops or feature hooks that sort of pull people in and get new people to join. Yeah. Do you guys cover PLG a decent amount? [Nathan May]: What's that? Do you guys cover PLG a decent amount in The newsletter? Sometimes. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, sometimes. Again, it's too varied to be like, yes, we focus on this, yes, we focus on this. But I guess what I'm trying to say is that if there is a topic in these types of spaces, that we want to cover and drive people somewhere as a result, I can do that and The audience will buy into it. Yeah, fair. [Nathan May]: Clear. Obviously, they tried a couple different things. I'm trying to think of like other other usually what we'll like to dig into is like failed solutions is like helpful to have. [Michael Houck]: So for instance, like for a lot of them might have tried these same channels, like they might be tweeting or they might be posting on LinkedIn and they might just not be getting any results like that's that's very we see that I'm looking at our client list again now yeah like there's there's a design agency that we work with I'm not a venture backed client but sort of they work with a lot of startups and they are their last company that did very very well their design agency and they were tweeting and they didn't really know how often they should be tweeting like very basic stuff like you know what What length of posts should I write? How often should I be posting? [Michael Houck]: If you assume that The founder cohorts will have any knowledge of marketing, there will be people who prove you wrong within The group of people that we talk to. Sure. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Nathan May]: Cool. What else would be a nice thing to dig into? [Nathan May]: It's more of a logistical thing, but do you have some other things that could be useful? You might tell me that you've run surveys, and you have a bunch of free response stuff from people, and you can just dump a CSV on us, and we can summarize that. That can be very helpful, because we can pull out quotes from The potential customer. We can say The same thing about sales calls. If you guys are recording and transcribing, you might send us a couple of transcripts, and tell us, oh, were people's Like, what are people's problems? Are there objections? And like, what would they try that would help reinforce some of The things we've talked about? Do you guys have some of that stuff? Server responses, free response, like free text. [Michael Houck]: We have a lot of that from The early days of founding Journey. Some of it will still be useful. So I can send some of that over to you. Sales call transcripts. Yeah, I have a ton of those. I can send those over to you as well. You can drop in like 10-20 or whatever. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: I like it. [Nathan May]: Ed, anything on your side that we haven't covered that we should? Any questions? I think this is good on my side. This is very helpful. Yeah. [Edward Miller]: I think The same. I think we kind of jumped into it and delved pretty deep into it. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. I think that The one thing I would add is, I sort of hinted at this a little bit earlier, but I didn't say it explicitly. Going into next year we don't just like we want to work with you guys not just on how can we drive people who want to do marketing right we don't want to just be like The marketing founder newsletter founding journey is this sort of like stake in The ground for founders broadly and so far because of my you know personal journey and expertise marketing has been what we've focused on primarily through audience building and now geo but we want to be building out these different spokes and whether these are businesses agencies that we build, whether they are white labeled services that we set up like good partnerships with people. I've talked to Max actually about doing something together. [Michael Houck]: We see founding journey and we want to position founding journey and me for founders first, but we can run very specific ads in like each of these buckets, whether it's a design or engineering or, you know, fundraising, if there's, I don't know what The offer would be around fundraising, but whatever it is, we want that flexibility So as we sort of start to set this up, I would just keep that in mind. Yeah. [Nathan May]: Is part of your offer going to be, you know, in The new year, like you raise and like, in theory, you could invest in founders that are on The newsletter. Like, do you think of this as like a, Hey, this is a founder operating system, right? Like we invest in some of our readers, we have content marketing for you, right. Everything's very plug and play. Yes. [Michael Houck]: That's, we want to be able to go to founders and get into their more rounds specifically because we can say, hey, we can help you out with basically whatever you need afterwards, right? We'll give you $100,000 now as an investment, $200,000 now as an investment, and then you'll start paying us a couple thousand dollars a month back for us to fill these services for you. That's a very interesting model that we want to set up with The fund. Yeah, I like it. [Nathan May]: Is there anything that has very obviously not worked when you were working with Matt or other people? And that could be like ad angles, that could be things on comms, even just things about The service, right? I mean, ideally ad angles too, but yeah. [Michael Houck]: No, I mean, The reason that we're doing this right now is because I think you and I are aligned on The goal being qualified leads rather and The goal being subscriber count. Like, I'm gonna be candid with you. I don't care at all about open rate. I don't care at all about click rate. I care about maybe unsubscribe rate to see like, are The people, is this hypothesis that people will be interested in The service and also The newsletter? Like, are we gonna prove that to be true? So unsubscribe rate is maybe a little more important to me than it would be for a normal person. But all I really care about is, is this thing generating good leads and revenue for The business. So no, I am, in terms working with Matt, we were very focused on just top of funnel, like how low can we get CPA, you know, how can we fine-tune The creative. Process-wise, it was pretty good. No real complaints, just The wrong focus, I think. Yeah, fair. [Nathan May]: The funnel. How are you guys thinking about it? Like, what's in place today? For instance, like you might tell me, not just The qualifying form and like, you know, deciding whether or not you're going to do a call page. But like, I'd love to know a little bit like, how are you nurturing people in The first 30 days to ascend up into this? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, so I mean, once once we get them in, once we, you know, again, I think it makes sense to lead with lead magnets as much as possible. And we have some sort of thoughts about what those could be for audience building versus geo versus like just core founding journey ads, like we have a great pitch deck database that you know, does really well when you put it out there as a lead magnet. I'll send you over a little a little sheet I have that kind of talks about what we see as like lead magnet to front-end offer to sort of back-end service. Excuse me. But, you know, our idea would be let's just hit them, let's get them into Beehive, let's get them into Founding Journey, and then we'll hit them with specified welcome sequences for each of those. So Core Founding Journey, Geo SEO, Megaphone Audience Building. [Michael Houck]: And, you know, that'll be maybe it's a 30 day campaign. I don't know exactly how long it'll be, but, um, we'll be upselling sort of, uh, excuse me. So they'll gotten The lead magnet. We'll upsell like a low price front end offer. Like for example, for GEO, maybe it's like a GEO website audit or something like that. And it's like, you know, uh, between 20 and $50. And then they do that. We upsell them sort of The monthly service, um, from that point on, um, and they get into into some other sequence for that, The initial one stops. So I don’t think anything crazy. I don’t know if that answers your question. That’s just where my head goes with it. No, yeah, it makes sense. [Nathan May]: Let’s take another friend and then like ICP specific nurture flow to send them right to service. Have you talked with Max at all about like what’s working for him? Like, is his stuff all just The blasts he’s doing? Or is he doing any custom nurture? I haven’t talked about this specifically. [Michael Houck]: Excuse me. But I can. Yeah, we’re, we’re friends. So I can Yeah, he’d be a good person to look at. [Nathan May]: I mean, I think that’s… I haven’t talked to him in, like, I don’t know, three months or something, but it seemed like it has worked well even above, like, The initial pop in, like, January and February when he first did it. I don’t… I see his paid ads every once in a while, I don’t know how well those are working, but I know he obviously thinks about this a lot, right, because he’s been doing this. He’d be a good person to look at. Who else is interesting? [Michael Houck]: What questions would you like like I could just ask him some questions like what should I ask him? [Nathan May]: Yeah, I would ask him it’s it’s more for you guys on product right versus like paid ads. It’s more like cool once if it is on The list like What’s The sauce for how you’re converting them to a book call other than these blasts? And I’d be interested to hear Um, okay, cool. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I’ll check in with him. Um, and I’ll, I’ll let you know what he, what he comes back with. Cool. Um, this is super helpful. [Nathan May]: So I think on our end, we’ll take this back. We’ll propose, um, a first set of app concepts to you by Wednesday, Thursday, and assuming that is all good. We should be able to get things live, no more than five business days. Um, after that, right. So we’re really talking about like Wednesday, uh, Thursday of next week. I know this week is Thanksgiving. So it’s a you know, it’s Thursday next week Anything that we haven’t talked about that we that we should Thursday next week sounds fine. [Michael Houck]: I will get The onboarding form totally done for you guys tonight Sorry again about that. And then I will also be spending most of my Thanksgiving weekend where I’m not eating turkey I will be building out some of these funnels. So I’ll talk to max probably today or tomorrow and we’ll get sort of The logistics ready on our side. If there are specific things, I know you guys, I think Nathan you sent over like some context on that, but if there’s anything else we should know from your end about that, just let us know. I can also make sure to get you access to everything that you would need, so let me know what that is. [Michael Houck]: I don’t think there’s anything we didn’t cover that feels urgent. Ben, do you on your end feel that Is there anything we missed? [Ben Ornstein]: No, just other than that spreadsheet that outlines The different, which you already said you’re going to send. No, I think we went really deep here, so I think we’re good. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Cool. [Nathan May]: It’s a spreadsheet. I send you guys an example of how to track The qualified leads, you’re saying? [Michael Houck]: No, so Ben and I did a little exercise last week, or maybe it was two weeks ago. I don’t know when it was. Maybe before I got signed. Time has sort of been a construct for The past Basically what we did is we outlined like hey here are The different because I’m talking about like those those Services that we want to offer right so of The ones that we have live today and can actually sell and build a funnel around What does The lead magnet look like, What does The front-end offer look like, What does The back-end service look like and is there like a beyond that like a 10k plus high-end offer? Because for founding journey like The core funnel, you know So we’re going to be upselling retreats. We’re doing one in Costa Rica with Tyler in February that we haven’t announced yet. So we’re going to be doing one of those a quarter, at least, as well. So it’s very simple, but I’ll send it over to you, sort of like where The thinking there is at. Cool. Awesome. I like it. [Nathan May]: Appreciate you guys doing this. We’ll be in touch in The next day or two, and we’ll hop over from there. I’m looking forward to it. Cool. Well done, guys. [Michael Houck]: Have a good Thanksgiving. Great to see you guys. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Cheers. [Nathan May]: you