- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01KMQNXV0S3KEKZ910VSCXKG84 (via Ben Ornstein’s account, imported 2026-08-06)
Transcript
Dominic Forth: I appreciate you moving it forward. Usually my schedule’s very fixed, very rigid. It’s just this client meeting in Miami’s come up, so I’m like, I’m just trying to add too much in really, but I really appreciate your flexibility. Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1: Yeah, dude, no sweat at all. Happy that we made it work. Well, this is Ben. Ben, do you want to introduce yourself? Ben Ornstein: Yeah, good to meet you, Ben. Ben Ornstein: Yeah, so I’m Hauk’s Chief of Staff. I’ll be handling all things operations. So I won’t be writing the content for you. That’ll be Tanyo, of course, who I’m sure you’ll meet in a second. But yeah, I’ll be scheduling your content. I’m your main point of contact for all things operationally, if that makes sense. Dominic Forth: Yeah, that’s great. I was gonna ask, where did you get your office chair? And do you like it? Ben Ornstein: Yeah, so I was searching for one for quite a while, actually. And I randomly stumbled upon it when my fiance dragged me to TJ Maxx. And I’m like, I’ve loved the race car chair style, but like, I wasn’t going to get the one that has like the race car stripes and all that. And I randomly came across this. And I said, Oh, I’m 100% buying this. This is, is is the exact thing I was looking for. It’s so comfortable. Dominic Forth: That’s it. Yeah. Cause we’re, um, building out a podcast studio and it’s, it’s really hard to find Brown executive chairs or like the race car style that you mentioned. Um, I spent two days this week shopping for chairs. Ben Ornstein: If I hear all, I forget the brand, I’ll send it to you. Um, and maybe you’ll be able to find it. I forget what the brand is, but yeah, I’ll send that to you. Dominic Forth: Yeah. Yeah. We’re building out like a library theme behind us. So it’ll be like brick and then bookcases and then the mood lighting and stuff. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Very cool. Dominic Forth: Yeah but the chair’s tricky. This is a Shaquille O’Neal Maximus one. I don’t really like the grey. I wish it was just all black but I can sit in this for six hours and it’s really helpful. It’s amazing like because I was always cheap on chairs. I was always like you know and then I had knee issues and leg issues and I’m like oh my god overnight like literally overnight getting a decent chair makes such a it’s such a good investment Oh yeah, I became a chair nerd when COVID happened. Ben Ornstein: You need to, you’re sitting down all day, so it’s like, yeah. Dominic Forth: Yeah, I used to get really, like on Zoom calls, I’d be like, really, I’ve got to get up, I’ve got to get up, and I thought it was the conversations and stuff, but it’s actually the, it was the chair, which is so cool. Ben Ornstein: Yeah. Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1: Well, we are officially outnumbered by the AIs, I knew it would happen eventually, but here we are. Tondo, do you want to give a quick Quick intro on you, and then, Dom, maybe give the team any background on you that you think we should start with, and I can get started and dive in from there. Tanyo Gochev: Yeah, sure, sure. Hi, nice to meet you. I’m Tanyo, I’ll be your newsletter writer. I have managed over 20 newsletters, most of them on Beehive, and I’m actually a Beehive partner, so I’m familiar with the platform. So yeah, I’m really excited for this because From what I Read in the form, it looks like you’re going a little bit upmarket, which is always like a fun challenge. So we’d love to learn more about that as well. Dominic Forth: Yeah, yeah, no, it’s great to great to meet you and excited for this opportunity to work with you all. Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1: You know, we’re we’re punk man, I think this is gonna be a real fun one for us. And so we’ve been talking about it and just ready to get started. Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 2: So the point of this call, the purpose of this call, is to go deeper on some of the answers you gave us in the forum. And thank you for filling that out. It really does help us sort of get things started before we meet. But we’ll just go deeper on some of that together and sort of hear it from your mouth. And you can ramble, please ramble as much as you want. The more context, the better for us. Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1: And, excuse me, Tanyo will go through the questions around ICP, content pillars, voice, et cetera. Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 2: And then Ben will take it over to talk about Ops and getting the newsletter set up and started. And then we’ll talk next steps at the end and answer any questions that you have as well. Also, obviously, feel free to jump in and ask us as we go. But the main purpose is just to give us everything we need to get started with production, both of the content and of the operations and setting up the newsletter itself. I’m going to leave it to the team from here because, as you can tell, I am pretty under the weather. Dominic Forth: You guys you guys say I’ll be here to answer any questions But Tanyo and Ben you guys can lead from from here from our side And and Michael and I know you just thought so I’d love to and I know it’s not the goal of this meeting But the social media component I’d love to dig deeper into that once we get the newsletter launched. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely Yeah, we have so much content coming through and we might get to this discussing the newsletter We’re not repurposing it, but there’s a huge opportunity for us to really create a content flywheel where I’m getting featured on news stations, my colleague, my director of strategic partnership is, our clients are on podcasts every week. We had a radio appearance this morning with the doctor. So there’s tons of content coming in that we’re just not leveraging really. Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 2: Yeah, no, we should talk about that. I mean, usually these calls don’t take the full hour. Like usually it’s closer to like a 30 45 minute conversation. We’ll see sometimes they do go the full hour though. But if we do have that time at the end, we can use some of this time to brainstorm and strategize what we can do there, too. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Yeah, awesome. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Cool. Tanyo Gochev: Awesome. I think the floor is mine. Let me share my screen so you can see everything. I have left some notes here for myself, but I wanted to know, first and foremost, what is the goal? With the newsletter you have mentioned that you want to attract the right clients but could we I always try to put like numbers on stuff like in terms of like uh what success would look like is that maybe one client per month or is it more like a media property that you want kind of like a magazine in a sense to basically provide the rest of the stuff you have going on yeah so So if money and time weren’t a problem, the way Thought Leaders America will be built out is that we have a monthly magazine. Dominic Forth: I don’t know if I included the link to the one that we have called guide to CES.com. We did a one-off guide to CES and it was really effective. We actually created probably 20 new prospect relationships and we had nine new clients that we closed. And it’s um, it’s a big lift because I’m the one writing it at the moment and so the goal would be to be Not just booking people on the media, but actually create and become the media. That’s our vision And so by that is we have our own we have two podcasts. We have a male focused Sorry, we have a generic thought leaders america podcast that features the same icp as the newsletter And then we have a female founder podcast with my female colleague called Women for Good. That’s the goal, to grow one, because women are underrepresented in Silicon Valley and startups especially. So that’s the goal, is to have two podcasts, a magazine, the newsletter, and all kind of complimentary to one another. Initially I was looking at different branding for each one, but I was thinking, and I’d love to have this conversation, is do we just brand everything thought leaders to begin with and then we can have spin-offs because if we have different names for everything then it’s new brands or is there a benefit to having a different brand because then you can have different types of advertisers you can take a different tier of advertiser without interfering so I know it’s a long answer the short version is ideally we want to become a media publishing company that’s the long-term goal the short term goal though to fund that because money is an issue is revenue and so what we What we need to do is really, we have no marketing at all. So just have people say, these guys are legit, I love getting the newsletters, and they’re a different class from other podcast booking agencies or TV booking agencies, I’m gonna go with them. And so for the 2K investments, literally one client will cover that as a one for one ROI. To give you an idea, our gross profit margin on a podcast retainer can be anywhere from $1,000 to $1,500 month gross profit margin. Obviously I’ve got fixed costs coming out of that. But after I pay the booker and I pay the commission, it’s about a thousand on our lower tier and 1,500. If I sell a TV placement, I had an, and this is all confidential, obviously between us insides. Yeah. Um, we, we booked a segment last week for cosmetics firm. They paid $5,000 to be on TV. My fixed costs by the time I paid the bookie booking and editor and everything was 1500 and because I closed it myself, I made $3,500 on that one sale. So the scalability is insane, but, um, I’ve really just don’t, I’ve really built this business from sweat and brute force. Um, I was, I did a, I did a backwards sort of entrepreneurship where I had money in savings, but it was in a 401k. And if had known in hindsight, I could have just invested that in the beginning. But what I did was I took on loads of debt to fund the business and then I use my savings to pay off the debt to get zero. But it’s just something that I had to learn the hard way, really. Um, so long answer. Does that make sense? Sorry. I know it’s a long answer. Tanyo Gochev: Yeah In the short term you want to get customers, but in the long term you want to this to become like a media property Oh, yeah dot leader. Dominic Forth: It’s america I’d love to have a sellable asset at the end like 40 50 000 partnerships brands want to um advertise with us And this could be a okay Very similar to your newsletter where hey, you want to work with us? We go to write newsletters. I mean, that’s That’s exactly the funnel I went through. I was on a flight, I had no Wi-Fi, I was going through newsletters, the just build it newsletter. I thought that’s really just build it. I was in that mindset already and clicked it, Read it like this is awesome. And then boom, Michael and I jumped on a call and here we are. Tanyo Gochev: Got it. You want to deliver the same experience to your customers that we did for you, so that would be. Pretty good. Okay, that’s like a pretty good goal to have. In the forum you mentioned that your current audience or like founders, CEOs, I think means something like consultants or coaches and stuff like that and where you want to go is more established CEOs, founders and leadership teams of like venture-backed companies. Is that correct or could you expand on that or Does that cover everything in terms of target audience? Dominic Forth: Yeah, so it’s tough because we have people brand new to media for podcasts who are awesome to work with. They pay $2,500 a month and we make $1,000 profit. They’re the easiest to close. The problem is they don’t have much budget and we can’t get them the real results that they want because they don’t have the budget to then have a marketing funnel to build out magnets to really monetize the podcasts. And so we have, I’m actually going through this at the minute because I’m trying to build out a marketing funnel for our core offer. And I don’t know what our core offer is because I know that if I get 10 podcast clients a month, then I’m at gross 10 profit. Um, you know, sorry, sorry. If it gets a 20, then it’s 20 I mean, it’s that simple to scale. Um, we have a booking team. It’s, it’s super easy, but where the real money is I have, we have a client spending 24,500 retainer with us, but for them it’s very custom. We’re doing a full thousand persons research study. We have a dedicated TV book. We have a dedicated publicist. We have a strategy firm we use to help them with coaching, to get the messaging on point. And so that, that deal will range between on the, when everybody gets paid up front, it’s 2k on the team gross profit. But in reality, once it’s set up, it’s about six to eight K gross profits for that one client. So we can, you know, and then there’s people in between, like we have the one off with the cosmetics firm. So I know it’s hard because we haven’t dialed this in, but there is flexibility. We have people, marketing directors who buy from us. We have CEOs, solopreneurs, we have. Enterprise clients. Tanyo Gochev: Okay and of all of those I know it’s hard to narrow down but would you say like not that one is better than the other but who like pay the most and stay the longest like to which we can cater to the most so you can see like actually results faster in terms of whether that’s gross profit per client or something like this just to Make it more specific in a sense. Dominic Forth: Yeah, well and the other the other part that’s yeah, so the 24,500 clients They’re in medical and we can We’ve got how we’ve had success with them where we’ve got them booked Regularly where they’re on a Washington DC TV station every week. I’ve got them on a Tampa station every week We have all the hits when this diseases break out and stuff like that But the biggest challenge with the TV and why I shy away from it a little bit is, yes, we can do it, but it’s not guaranteed. And what I would love to build is a company that’s just turnkey, client spends X, we deliver Y, and client’s super happy. And so for retention, our podcast clients are the easiest to retain because we can get them four podcasts a month. We have a booker that’s super consistent, and we do bi-weekly check-ins with them. We’ve got this new AI platform that we’re building where we analyze all the sentiments of the podcast itself. So it scans the tone of the voice, the speed, the host’s responses, the audience responses, and then they get this really nice report at the end of it coaching them on how they can improve, what sound bites and things like that to use. So it’s a challenge because we’re evolving still. I’ve removed myself from sales a little bit, so I’m not seeing what’s on the front lines, but when I was in sales, the problem was I was going in so many directions, like every client would ask me for something different, so I would create something different. So I’m really trying to stay in one lane, and I thought podcasts might be the one, but there is more competition for podcasts. You know, so we can get people on 10 podcasts in 90 days, we’ll soak in all these other firms apparently, but if TV is what So this morning what I’m looking at, literally this morning because I’m working with a funnel company and making the offer podcast plus one TV appearance per quarter. But that’s more of an entry level person. It’s not really a savvy PR person. Um, so the, the other way approach I was looking at is because we can do these custom research projects for clients. What we do is we get the custom research project. We survey a thousand people, target audience across America, census driven, you know, that matches the census. And then we come up with, um, all these really cool data points from the study. We take that to new stations, new stations, run the story, and then our client becomes the expert commenting on the story. So I was creating that as our flagship offer at seven, that’s 17,500 I was playing with on pricing. But if that’s too much, then we can downsell them and say, well, hey, you don’t need to start that level. Our podcast booking services data first as well. We take the same research driven approach for podcast bookings. We don’t do a research study, but we have all this data and that’s only thirty five hundred or maybe we increase to forty five hundred. So it could be a data first approach that could be the front door into the organization. But the challenge is the customisation. We just don’t have a clear, you know, one offer, one funnel, you know, one fulfillment process, but I would love to get there. Tanyo Gochev: Yeah. Uh, I hear you. I hear you. Uh, and in terms of the target audience, like current audience and the one you want to go after, like more established founders, uh, currently, what are they coming to you? You mentioned like podcasts. Appearances. I’m curious specifically for the most, more established founders because you obviously want to cater to them. So do they come to you to for podcasts, TV appearances or anything else? Dominic Forth: Yeah, you see, this is where I struggle a bit because I feel like the entry level founders, the ones that like love working with us, like, thank you so much. You’re really helping me. The established CEOs are harder to close because they’ve already had success to some extent. And so I would like to evolve to working with them. But in the meantime, make, originally what I was targeting was startups and I was getting 20 meetings a week with new startup founders. And they’re like, this is awesome. I just don’t have any money yet, but some of them could get bridge funding and they would do three TV appearances with us for 15 K. And then they would put that into the presentations to, uh, to get funding. And then when they would get funding, maybe a year and a half later, We would then be their agency of record where we could then do all the really cool stuff. So it’s a longer sales cycle, but when we were, we were selling podcasts for 2,500 month and that seems to be a no brainer. Like you’re going to put me on four podcasts a month for 2,500 and I can start telling my story and get feedback and then put that into investor, you know, conversations. So maybe that’s the approach we take is just go for the low hanging fruit because we only need 20 clients. Of every single business in the US just to get 20 clients. If I’m doing 20k a month in profit, plus I keep one or two large retainer clients, I’m in pretty good shape then, like in the short term. Tanyo Gochev: Let’s help you get there. So for the content itself, I saw some topics you mentioned in the forum which are interesting media authority and business growth, how leaders can turn media content and narrative into real business outcomes. Anything else you would like to add to that in terms of like topics that we can use? Dominic Forth: Yeah, I think we have to have an AI angle. I think everyone, um, I was worried AI is so oversaturated, but everybody wants to talk about it. It’s not at the point of being a copycat. It’s like people and it’s happening so fast and, um, like Michael and I was talking about, um, open claw, for example, that’s something I want to do as a side project is get that going. And so just talking about the latest trends. Um, like, I just feel like the content needs to be people like, wow, a cutting edge of media, AI, entrepreneurship. I had a podcast idea that my original podcast idea was interviewing startup founders, investment companies or investors, and the media having like a triangle of three different ICPs. And then that way the startup founders are bringing the next big thing, the investors are fueling it, and then the media is amplifying it. And then we sit in the center of that as our category of one is this unique place because a lot of people will sit between investors and startup founders, but no one’s sitting in between investment companies, startup funds and media and all three. And so the thought for the podcast was, you know, I’d have a startup founders talking about the bill decline one day, then investment companies about tips and advice on what to look for and what to avoid. And, you know, know, guard yourself against, you know, false hope that people can provide. And then media is like, well, here’s what we look for a story and here’s what, you know, how you create and tell your own story. Tanyo Gochev: Okay. Okay. And in terms of, you mentioned AI that is very hot right now as a topic and everyone’s coding. Covering it, I’m unique on AI and intersection of media authority and business growth. How can we make this a unique news? Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1: Sorry, Tanyo, you broke up a little bit there. Do you mind restarting the question? Tanyo Gochev: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Dominic, you mentioned that you wanted to cover AI in the news, at least business section. About AI and the rest of the topics you want to cover because that way we will stand out actually instead of just creating another AI newsletter or newsletter about thought leadership and stuff like that. Like what can we use to make this really a category of one? Dominic Forth: Yeah you know it could be something as simple as the latest tools that could be, I mean I know there’s other newsletters that do this but But just sharing like three tools that are currently helping thought leaders, that’s like on our sort of hot list. The challenge is we’d have to have credibility behind it. But what I really want the agency to grow into is not just doing the thought leadership, but doing the content marketing for the clients or the social media on the back end. And maybe there’s a white label opportunity where we bring our clients on for TV and podcasts, but then when they need And and because that way then that’s already your area of expertise but we’re bringing a new audience to it or a complimentary audience and So if there’s tools that your team is seeing like like Opus Pro, you know a year and a half ago That was like cutting-edge Even they’re adding new features, but you know things like that that could really help a founder were here’s how you can do it yourself But then most people like oh, but I just don’t want to do it myself. These guys are experts I’ll just pay you guys to do it for me, like, um, or it could be like case studies of like, Hey, here’s how, um, you know, here’s how, uh, founders are building companies with zero employees using open claw. You know, like talking about the age, um, agents, AI agents and those sorts of like best practices. Tanyo Gochev: Okay. Got it. Got it. And in terms of like your content voice in the forum, you mentioned like confident direct inside children Anything else you would add to that? Uh So we can actually create a content that sounds like you um Or does that cover it? Dominic Forth: Yeah, I um I I’m probably empathetic to a fault almost Um, and but I don’t think a lot of ceos would have time for like it’s great on call because it builds relationships. You know, usually me and my director of strategic partnerships, she’ll bring a client forward. She’s more direct, black and white, and I’ve got sort of the more empathy relationship piece, and we bring, you know, a good combination. I like to tell, honestly, like for my own social media, if I had the time, the three pillars I like to focus on, like who I am as a person, you know, as a dad and a father, same thing, dad and a father, but you know, Um, you know, pictures of like putting my kids first, um, you know, um, who I am, what I do and how I understand what the clients are going through. And so I can share experiences. Like I created this lead magnet called the chaos reset kit and I can write lead magnets, but I just don’t know how to publish them, you know, and create like, because the chaos reset kit was great because it, It’s basically what happens where you have a media interview lined up, and your flight gets delayed the day before, you end up missing your connection, you have to go to a different airport, your suitcase gets sent to LAX, you arrive in LAS, Las Vegas, and now what you were gonna wear for the interview’s gone. And then all this chaos happens around you, so how do you keep your head in those situations for a TV interview? Because nobody at home knows what you’ve just been through. Live through that so I can actually talk through it and breathing exercises, you know, how do you, how do you go from calm to clarity to then have the courage to not cancel the interview, but go forward with it. So, um, I think I’m very personal and that could be personal in that way, but I don’t want the brand to be. If I don’t want it to be just about me, but if those stories help, like I got trapped in the elevator on the way to the interview in New York, I was going to the stock exchange, the elevator broke halfway between floors three and two. And there was eight of us in there and it was crammed because people were getting in with suitcases. And I’m like, I’m going to miss the interview. I’m going to, this could be two hours. We didn’t know how long we were going to be in. So I can tell stories like that. Tanyo Gochev: Yeah. Yeah. This would be very helpful in terms of like making it the newsletter truly like unique and kind of relatable and empathetic at the same time. So keep them coming. These stories, they will be very useful. You mentioned that you like Michael’s funnel in terms of how to approach the media aspect. But in terms of any people you see who can nail the process in terms of funnel other than him, this is a two-part question. Dominic Forth: And the second part is, have you seen other people who have a similar voice to contact Yeah, so it broke up a bit but I think you’re saying like just who are people that I like approaches Yeah Yeah, so It’s funny LinkedIn seem to be like filled with lead magnets, you know about eight months ago And I’m not a big I mean, I’m open to be honest of what’s the most effective. I’m a bit worried about Sometimes we post comments, TLA, and then nobody comments that can be a bit awkward. Um, I like, I mean, I listened to, um, Alex Hormozy a lot. I just like his very matter of fact, down to earth approach. Um, those I’m trying to think who else I’ve not been on LinkedIn much really in the last couple of weeks. There was someone that I would see he was, he was doing really well with lead magnets. But I don’t want to, I don’t know if you see the video of somebody scrolling through, like, uh, I guess I’m getting confused. I’m talking about LinkedIn versus just for newsletters. Um, yeah, I think Hormoses I just like is very matter of fact. Um, you know, it’s the points style. Um, yeah. And I don’t want to be too, even though a lot of our founders skew older, you know, probably 40 plus typically. Um, I don’t want to be, um, yeah, I still want to be quite edgy. I don’t want to be like stuffy and old fashioned and, you know, probably wearing a suit, a suit jackets about as stuffy as I want to get really. But it does garner a lot of respect from the CEOs that I work with because TV stations, especially they still wear shirts and ties, a lot of the news anchors and everything. Tanyo Gochev: Okay, I think I have everything I need for now. So thank you for sharing all of this. I think that’s it from my side in terms of questions. Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1: Sweet. We can also, I think, refine some of this stuff over time, but I think this is a good starting place from And Tanyo, I think you and I will talk about formats that we can test out as well. So let’s follow up on that. Ben, do you want to talk about, sorry, my voice is really giving out guys. Ben, do you want to talk about the operational side and sort of the process of getting all the information we need there? Ben Ornstein: Yeah, absolutely. So from here, we have this onboarding checklist in the Notion Hub. There’s going to be some things that we’ll ask you to do, like signing up for the newsletter. We have a code that gives you a couple free months, I believe, a nice discount. And so we’d ask that you create the newsletter and then invite an email that we have listed. I’ll chat with you about this as well further. But yeah, there’s an onboarding checklist. Some things you’ll do, some things we’ll collaborate on, and then some things we’ll just handle ourselves completely. Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1: Yeah, Dom, we’re going to handle the vast majority of this stuff. Don’t think about it like you have to do a ton of stuff here. We just need you to handle some very small, like logistical stuff around setting up the beehive account, but we’ll take everything else from there and then we’ll also get to work on Designing the newsletter as well. If there’s like a brand kit that you want us to use I know there’s some debate right now about how we want to name and position the newsletter like you were talking about so we can talk through that now if you’d like but we’ll want any sort of relevant brand assets that can inform the uh, the design of the newsletter too. Dominic Forth: Yeah. Um, we’re going through, so the hero video of our website went down last week, right before I was heading out of town. I haven’t replaced it yet. Um, we originally just went with the sort of dark executive style, the black, the black and white sort of look for the website. Um, but I wanted it to be kind of more, a bit more electric, we use Webflow, the designer, like these teal bars were really meant to be more kind of like lens flare, you know, sort of electric sort of glow versus just solid colors. So, I mean, nothing’s off limits really. It’s got more color. This new site’s got more color, but we’re, I mean, we don’t have a dedicated brand kit. Back in December, I was working with someone was recommended to redo it, overhaul our whole brand. And then after January, he just ghosted me. And so then I was like, well, you know, I hadn’t paid him luckily at that point. So I was like, well, if he’s not ghosting me now, what’s it going to be like when we get into the project? So if you have design as you recommend, or if you think we need design or sorry, so to clarify, we have an in house designer who specializes in newsletter design. Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1: So they can create a brand around the newsletter what we like to ask for is you know if you guys have existing brand colors or brand book or figma file even that they can use as inspiration so that we make sure that the brand of the newsletter fits with the broader brand we would ask you to drop that in the slack channel we’ll send it over to them but yeah we have someone in-house who’s who’s very good who does this stuff for all our newsletters yeah yeah well and this is where I struggle a little bit is just, you know, I get inside my own head a little bit. Dominic Forth: You can probably tell about the color schemes and stuff. It can always evolve as well, can’t it? I mean, do you have data on like performance? Like is a lighter template better than a… Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1: I mean, you know, you don’t want like too much or too little contrast between the text and the background, for sure. Like an orange background with orange text is going to look crazy, as will a black background with orange text on top of it. Both of those are like two extremes, right, in terms of like color theory. So, excuse me, like we have some general best practices that we can use, but really we just, the most important thing is if we have an email list, right, and these people are used to your brand, we want to make sure that the first time that they get an email from us, they don’t see this as like some spamming person who just added that to an email list. They want it to feel like it’s coming from you, right? It’s coming from the brand that they already know and trust. So that’s why we asked for this. It’s just like, again, we can always go through a brand redesign sort of exercise later down the road, but just any assets that you have right now that can be helpful for us, we’ll, we’ll sort of reduce back and forth as we sort of get the brand up and running. Dominic Forth: Yeah. So the main thing that just the logos, um, the, cause we, we used a guy from fiverr, I think, or Upwork originally, um, for the TV book as my old company, um, we got the full brand kits, fonts, And for this new guy, he just sent through a bunch of logos, basically, and the font that he used for it. So I can send that through, but it is quite limited. Good news to that, it gives us more flexibility as well. Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1: Yeah, any and everything will help. It’s just, you know, if we start from a blank page, we can infer based on, you know, what’s on the website right now, but maybe that’s not the most, you know, what you guys have in internal files or anything. All I’m saying is share with us anything that could be useful. That’s not publicly available already. Dominic Forth: Yeah. Yep. Yep. And I was thinking about the, uh, the goal of the pop, the newsletter and is it better like Hormozy works with some really big companies, but he’s helping the little guy. And that’s what I feel like I would like to maybe do because I’ve been on the other end of it where, you know, you think people are going to help you and you get eaten alive quite often. And you know, like chase banker went in to see them and it was like, it’s been a customer 15 years thinking, oh, they’re going to help me out, you know? And they’re like, oh yeah. Have you been in business two years yet? And I was like, no. And like, oh, we can’t help you. And it was just such a distinction. And so I think with the content, if I can, maybe that’s helping people get booked, helping people find a voice, helping people get started in media. Yeah. And then we can upsell them into the bigger packages down the road. Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1: Yeah. The way that these newsletter-based media companies tend to work is that you have a free offer that you’re posting on social media or running meta ads against or growing in other channels. You use that to get people’s email addresses, and then you have their email addresses, you’re sending them emails, and those emails are hyper-relevant to what they want. It’s hyper-relevant to why they signed up in the first place. It’s helping them. It’s adding value. In some way for free. But while that’s the case, you’re also dripping in these front-end and back-end offers. So the front-end offer is some low-priced offer that can attract the entire group in theory. And then the back-end offer is the high-ticket services, the big packages, et cetera, et cetera. So we’ll look for opportunities to include those types of things on both sides across the content. But we’ll want to know from you, What do you want to position as the front-end offer, as the back-end offer? How should we think about that? So that stuff we’ll gather from you asynchronously in Slack. We don’t need to align on that necessarily right now. But as we get things set up with the welcome emails and the formatting of the weekly issues, bi-weekly issues that go out, we want to make sure we have that stuff so that we’re always getting that in front of people, both when they sign up And then also in, in each issue. Dominic Forth: Yeah. Cause I created this, um, it was a seven point on camera checklist, you know, so before someone goes on TV, like just the way like, uh, airline pilots, you know, they, they have a checklist that they go through. And, um, I thought this could be something that, let me just something like this, you know, that could, could this be a freebie upfront? Like, Hey, thinking about getting into TV will before you start in media, I just, yes, this is, this is perfect. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: This is exactly the type of thing I would recommend for that. Dominic Forth: Yeah. So that’s what I need is just a nudge to, cause I love creating this content. And then did I share with you that I purchased the URL media millionaire.com. You did, you mentioned that. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Yeah. Dominic Forth: Yeah. So that’s the thing for the personal brand is then you’re creating this out into a course eventually. Like at the end it says about the author or my experience. Right. Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1: So like, So there’s a very easy funnel here of something like this, and we can even use AI to create multiple versions of this, different types of lead magnets, et cetera, so you can try multiple ones out. But doing that as the lead magnet-free offer, and then the front-end offer being something like a course or like a, excuse me, some other info product, a course could easily work for that. And then the back-end offer is sort of the high-ticket packages that you guys put together. Dominic Forth: Yes. Yeah. So I really like this approach. So it’s just providing value up front. Like the, the chaos reset kit could be a piece of this. You’ve got the checklist. Um, just what makes, how to evaluate a podcast if it’s a good fit or not. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Yeah. Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 2: Yeah. Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1: A hundred percent. Like those are all the types of things that the average person isn’t going to know, but you’re going to know. And it’s also not necessarily the type of thing that you would want to charge for that information. It’s stuff you can use to just get a wide group of people interested in you and trusting you from day one. So I would say the more we can do that while still of course holding something back so that we can sell a front-end offer to them is a smart strategy. Dominic Forth: I wonder with an ad funnel could this be something that we just sell at low tickets? I could build these guys out a little bit. Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1: Yeah you could. Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 2: What you could do is you could You can run them as free for a little while and see what area and which ones get the best opt-in at the lowest cost of acquisition and things like that. And then based on that, based on which one’s most successful, you can build out a more involved one that you charge for on the back, which is the full bit of information. But that way, you’re not spending your time building something out that’s not aligned to what is the most popular thing your audience is going to want from you in the first place. Dominic Forth: Yeah, that’s so yeah, just give it away for free and then um, And then if people are like, hey this people are downloading this like crazy saying I should charge for it Well, yeah, but yeah, and then and then building out like a like an educational version of it, right? Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 2: so it’s like you keep offering the sort of not watered down, of course, but like, um this sort of like, uh bite-sized version of it for free. And then in that you keep talking about how you go deeper in it in you know, this other version of it, this this course or this other info, you know, operating system or something like that, we could brainstorm what that thing should be and how and how to position it. But that’s that’s definitely the funnel that I would recommend here. Dominic Forth: Yeah. Yeah. And that would go into the media millionaire course basically. Yeah. Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1: I mean, it’s up to you how we want to brand it. Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 2: I mean, I think, let me ask you this, like what, what size email list is thought leaders of America have today? Dominic Forth: Like how, we’re starting from scratch. I mean, we might have 40 people that downloaded the CES guide. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Okay. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: That’s just from organic LinkedIn. Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1: Okay, cool. Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 2: Um, so yeah, so then that gives us a ton of kind of flexibility. To go in either direction, right? We can go all in on Media Millionaires or we could stick with Thought Leaders of America. I think the way I would think about it is like, one, what is going to be most congruent for where people find you, right? So if they’re finding you on LinkedIn or if they’re finding you through meta ads or however you want to approach it, What is that impression you want to make? Do you want to make that through the idea of turning people into media millionaires? Or do you want to approach that through the lens of, like, I don’t know. I don’t know. How do you think about the Thought Leaders of America brand? Maybe some context would be helpful for us there. Dominic Forth: Yeah, I mean, we have to drive revenue in the short term. Because I’m in this cycle where we get a bunch of revenue in, and then I want to go build stuff for the vision. And then I have to get rain back in, back to revenue. So I think it’s Thought Leaders of America as a booking service first and the coaching is, you know, kind of included with that just to help sales. And then eventually what I’d like to do is break off the coaching where people are paying me 10k for, you know, a three month cohort or, you know, twice a year, something like that, where I can scale quite quickly where it’s a much higher profit margin, really. Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 2: Yeah, that makes sense. Okay. I think for the sake of simplicity, And since we are starting with a smaller list, I would say let’s keep it simple and let’s keep it congruent there. And as it evolves, no one’s going to… We rebranded my newsletter when we had, I don’t know, 40, 50,000 subscribers from Hauk’s Newsletter to Founding Journey, and it’s continued to be successful since then. So there’s no rules is basically what I’m trying to say. We should be hyper-focused on, I think, a couple of things. Getting people on the email lists, right? And then two is delivering content to them that will drive sales for you. Those are like the two, the two goals I would say. So we, you know, Tanyo and Ben are going to be laser focused on the second half of that, making sure that the content and the option of the newsletter is set up to drive results. And then I think, Dom, what you and I should brainstorm is, you know, what are the best channels of acquisition to get these people in there? Is it layering LinkedIn on top of this? Is it, going through meta ads, using lead magnet ads on meta? Is it using Spark Loop or Beehive Boosts or one of those types of co-reg channels? There’s a few different options we can talk through there. We also have an option to find targeted lists and add them to the newsletter with a drip campaign that we would send them to. So there’s four different channels we can go through. I can outline all those to you. But obviously LinkedIn is going to be just using, trying to get your existing network and anyone who sees your content versus other channels are going to be colder, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re going to be less interested. In some cases, it might mean they’re more interested. So we talked through the sort of pros and cons of each one, but that’s what I would say. Dominic Forth: Yeah. Yeah. And you know, we meet anywhere from probably five to 10 new businesses a week when I, when I was doing it and I I can jump back into that piece in the short term. I was getting like 20, like if I ran a LinkedIn campaign now to startup founders, I’d get 20 appointments this week. Say, hey, you know, a really interesting story. Do you have 15 minutes? We’d love to hear more. And then they’re like, we’re not just ready yet. I said, well, great. Hey, so here’s our newsletter, subscribe. And then now we’re having a nurture sequence. Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 2: I would also say that like, it would be beneficial because one of the biggest benefits of a newsletter is that you have unlimited shots on goal to stay top of mind for these people, right? Like you pop up every two weeks in their inbox, they remember who you are, maybe it’s a better time for them to reach out then than it was two weeks ago or a month ago or et cetera. So it would be good, I think, to have someone go through, and this could be someone on your team or this could be you yourself if it’s something you wanna do, but it’s a little tedious so I might be better to delegate, but just go through your Gmail, history, basically, and just pull together a list of anyone who might be relevant to add to the newsletter, right? That way, it’s not just those first 4050 people, we have this whole history of people who are in your network, who may be their fit themselves, and it wasn’t the right time before, or maybe they know somebody who could be a fit who they could either refer to the newsletter or refer to you if you’re showing up in their inbox more consistently. So that’s, that’s how I would approach task worth doing and if they’ve emailed back and forth with you before, them getting a new email from you is not a negative thing. We did that when we started Founding Journey and we didn’t have any issues with it. Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1: We’ve done that with other clients as well. Dominic Forth: So is there an introductory email that says, hey, we’re launching this new newsletter, I’d love for you to check it out and then can I send it to you with no link originally? Because I’ve already emailed them in the past, I could put the link in it, the first one You don’t even need a link. Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 2: What we would do is within Beehive, we’d set up an automation. Excuse me. Oh, nice. And so when we add these people, they would go into the Beehive account, but we’d block them from the main newsletter right away. And the first thing they would get is sort of a special custom welcome email that says like, hey, it’s Dom. I know it’s been a while. I’m starting this newsletter. Here are the three main things you’re going to get from it each week or every two weeks. Um, just keep an eye out and let me know what you think. And if you want to unsubscribe, here’s like a way to, to make sure you don’t get any more emails from me. That way you’re sort of default assuming they’re interested, but giving them an option to opt out in case they’re not. Dominic Forth: Yeah. And so with, because I’ve not been taking many sales calls with my, my director of strategic partnerships, could we do a split campaign where then the people that she’s spoken to, it comes from her because they might not, of course, that’s totally fine. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: We can that too. Dominic Forth: Yeah, maybe just do a headshot. I just don’t want to. She’s very heavily invested in the company. She’s really one of my sort of part part of the founding team, really. But there’s always that risk that she retires or, you know, jumps to a different company. So that’s why the branding original is like, Oh, maybe both of us could be part of the brand. Yeah, better just one person, isn’t it? Really? Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 2: It’s better with just one person. Yeah, for sure. But with the welcome email, we can we can set it up be split that way. That’s totally fine for this, these initial sort of import cohorts that we do. Dominic Forth: So that’d be really interesting because the last three years we’ve met with so many people and it’s just been timing so many. Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1: Everyone’s got a bigger email list than they think. And newsletters are a really great way to sort of reactivate old leads where the timing just wasn’t right. So if you guys have that, I really think it would be a worthwhile exercise to go through and you, you could even do it where like you give us a Google sheet and the Google Sheet has like, you know, I don’t know, four columns. One is like the email, one is like the last date you contacted them, one is like who they contact, whether it was you or her, and then the fourth one could be like, I don’t know, like whether they were an active lead or not at some point. And then we can use that to draft a couple different variations of the email to send to them when they get added. Dominic Forth: Yeah, yeah. Export it. We have a lot in monday.com that I can just export over in that format for you. Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1: Oh, yeah, that’s even easier then that’d be great. Dominic Forth: Yeah Yeah, um I was thinking I mean there might be white label opportunities as well with them because a lot of people that Come to us ask about newsletters and they ask about social media So there might be opportunity for for us to be able to like honestly refer people to you through this. Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1: Yeah I think that sounds great Um, you know, we’re, we have, uh, a couple of different referral offers that we do with folks, whether it’s, you know, some people prefer sort of the one time upfront referral, uh, amount other times they prefer like a six or 12 month, uh, percentage. Um, you know, we’re definitely open to open to those. Um, so I think it’s, uh, yeah, I think it’d be great. Dominic Forth: Yep. And then down the road, do we, um, cause I have clients, active clients that we could probably sell into sponsorship. Like I have an e-commerce brand for example So does your team help with that down the road? We’re like, hey, we’re up to 10,000 subscribers now 20,000 think you could get some good revenue for because I noticed you have the sponsored links and stuff like that in your newsletter Yeah, so what is the question? So do you help advise on like the sponsorships how we can monetize? Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1: Yeah, sure. Of course, and we have a partnerships guy in-house and we can loop him in to excuse me, to, um, to help out with deals in, in like other newsletters as well, not just mine. So that’s, that’s completely fine. But that’s something we would do. We have a network of sponsors as well, obviously who we already work with. So, um, You’ll be able to get generally speaking. You can make some revenue back from the newsletter today even with a small list by including like Beehive ad network sponsorship opportunities, but those are per click and they’re really low. It’s a couple bucks per click, right? So the best approach that we’ve consistently seen is that we don’t use the Beehive ad network at all. What we do is once you get the newsletter to like a critical mass of subscribers, you can start selling direct to sponsors and they’ll pay generally speaking, a premium because they want to work with your specific brand or Beehive just spreads it out across like a ton of tiny little newsletters. It gives them like, you know, the rates are not great. So we can, we can talk about that when the time comes. Yeah, for sure. Dominic Forth: Yeah. Yeah. I’m thinking, you know, with, um, I think early stage CEOs or solopreneurs or even startup founds, I think that ICP is because then it opens up like SAS platforms. That are, you know, um, I think to, um, is it product homes where they have new programs coming out, like those sorts of sponsorships. Um, so, so there was a CRM on yours, for example, you know, yeah. So, um, but like you said, we got, we’ve got to grow the audience first. I’m getting too far ahead of myself. Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1: I think let’s just be laser focused right now on getting the right people on the list and then making sure that the content sort of incentivizes them or entices them to get I’m gonna call with you guys and go from being an email to a lead to a client. Dominic Forth: Yeah, could we have, I know we’re almost at the top of our time, but could we talk about social media just really quick? UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Yeah, sure, of course. Dominic Forth: Yeah, so how could that, would you, so what we have, can I show you our social media really quick, what we were doing? Yeah, sure, go ahead. Because we got good traction with this. It was just, I was the one executing it, And so, you know, if I, honestly, I just burnt out. I mean, I’ll be brutally honest. I was going like all in for the first six weeks of this year, probably eight weeks. And then we had a conference in Orlando. And after that, I was just, I was, I’ve been done till, I haven’t done anything since then. But this is the, this is our LinkedIn. We’ve grown into five, it’s funny, since I’ve stopped posting, we stopped at five, 10. Was working really well. I just want to do like the last 90 days. I mean it’s so There was fat, you know, it’s it’s just honestly like grinding this out Yeah, but you you have like 6 000 followers on your personal linkedin, right? Yes. Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1: Yep Like if if we were going to do social I think I think we’re much better positioned to do it from your personal account rather than from the brand account but not only because of the 10x different and followers, but also because, you know, people are going to respond to content from a person more than they’re going to respond to content from a brand. Dominic Forth: Yeah. So like, this is an example here, like GenWealth TV. Like, so this is one of our clients that the New York Stock Exchange that got featured. Like Liz Chrissy, one of our team members that then went on to Fintech TV. So we have all this great content coming through. And then I started writing these Sunday stories, like these parables. And, um, so kind of like think like one is like waiting for the invitation. Like how many people like stand at the side of the room? Like, Oh, when they asked me to speak, I’ll speak. And then no one asks them and never speak. And so that was something, but the main goal of this was originally promoting the magazine. Like here’s just shots of us at the new American home in Orlando. We had private exclusive access one day, IBS, KB, KBS, but what, um, what was really working well for us, I’ll pick a good example. This was a client shoot in New York Stock Exchange. Here’s a client on a, the one I wanted to show you was the magazine. Here, this is a great example. So we did a magazine article on Roseanne and her company Coroflow. And then we have this graphic, we post her, a little bit of story about her, and then we drive people to the guide to CES. And then people put their email in. And then the access, the magazine, um, I might have shared this with you. And then like, there’s a digital version of the magazine. Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1: Yep. Dominic Forth: Um, but this, this like doing a hundred likes for repost one comment, and then it just shot up. We had like 20 followers that day, which, you know, it’s sad that we’re counting like by 20 people at a time. Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1: It’s good. I would just say that again, like you’re going to have more chances to do more posts like that from, It’s an outlier right now, right? That that came from the brand account. I would even say in general, it’s an outlier for 500 follower brand accounts to get a hundred likes on things. Like if we’re posting every day or somewhere close to every day Dom from your personal LinkedIn, that’s where we’re going to generate stronger follower growth, stronger email collection, um, stronger inbound DMs that you get. Um, all that stuff is going to come from your brand account. Is a lot harder to do from a brand account, regardless of follower count. But when you layer on the 10x follower count difference, I mean, we’re happy to do it for the brand account if there’s some other reason that that’s where you want to focus. But in terms of, again, just being laser focused on what’s going to drive results for you, I would say that your personal account is going to get us there much faster. Dominic Forth: Yeah. And then would you repost it? Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1: page I mean we we can um it that’s not really going to add much one way or the other we can do it to keep it active for sure but um we’d want to bring out your personality I think in the content a little bit more um and also continue to tell these these type of stories especially because it does look like they do resonate so um yeah I I just I think I think that we can repost it from, uh, to the brand account if that’s important. Uh, but in terms of what’s going to drive results, it’s going to be your personal account more, more so. Dominic Forth: Yeah. Cause this was more like, so, so would you help my cap map out that sort of logic flow? Uh, because my thought was creating thought kind of like a Forbes company page or BBC company page that has news and stories and content coming out. It’s slightly different from a personal approach where it’s more, here’s my opinion on the, on this story? Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1: Yeah, but again, what do people want on LinkedIn? They want people’s opinions. They want that extra layer of context and information, because it’s a social platform at the end of the day. Again, I’m just trying to work within the constraint of what’s going to drive the most results for you and for the newsletter. And so if there are other projects you want us to keep in mind and consider, having this Forbes-esque page, that’s fine. And we can work within that constraint as well and sort of optimize for that goal as well. But when the goal is newsletter subscribers and revenue from the newsletter, the best way to do that is creator personality on social and then any other growth channels you want to layer on there. And doing it from a brand account just isn’t going to have the same impact on that specific goal. Dominic Forth: I see. Yeah, no, it makes sense. That’s why I wanted to talk through it. Um, the challenge is all the content we’re doing as a company, you know putting out that last moment Like what do we do with it all or does it even matter? I mean, is it really just build a personal brand people? Um, you know align with what I’m saying. They want to get booked themselves. Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1: They reach out to me and we just book them Yeah, like we want to position you as like The guy who knows how to get booked and can help you get booked if people think of you as that guy Then you’re going to be getting inbound dms. Like hey, we’d love to chat with you about how I can get on this level of the other people that you’re showing their stories and you yourself are doing. We want you to be that guy. We don’t want the brand to be in that space. We want you to be the center of that ecosystem. We want them to see you as this critical connector, this high-value connector. And so that’s why the personal page is way more impactful because they’re going to feel like they can DM you and have a conversation with a guy who they already have a parasocial relationship with, because they see your content all the time in their feed, and they know how you think because they Read it, right? It’s way different if they see some brand posting content, and they’re like, oh, I should reach out to this brand. It’s just not the way that sales happen through social as much. Dominic Forth: Yeah, it makes sense. So it’s two separate things, isn’t it, really? I’m just, do we really, I guess, we That’s the most traction we’ve had featuring our client stories on our social. Yeah. Um, but it doesn’t, so I’m just, it’s almost like what I hire somebody else just to repurpose those clips and stuff to them. So to the company page, or are you saying for now, don’t even worry about that. Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1: Yeah. I literally wouldn’t even worry about the company page unless there’s some reason. Like if you’re like, Hey, I’m trying to make this into a sellable asset in 12 months or 24 months or like that, then, okay, maybe it makes sense to spend some more time on the company page from that respect, so it’s not tied to your personal brand, it’s less like he-man risk in a future deal. Okay, I get that and we can talk candidly about that, right? But if the goal is like, how can we be as focused with our dollars and our time on return from leads and revenue? It’s super clear. We see it time and time again, like the people who build their personal brands, build the biggest brands on top of those, rather than trying to do it the other way around. Like a great example of this is Andrew Gazdeki, right, with acquire.com. He built like a hundred plus person, a hundred thousand person Twitter audience before they even did anything on the company page. And now he has like two or 300,000 followers on Twitter. And the company page has like 50,000 because he was able to easily build the company page on the back of his personal page. But the focus for the first year or two was just the personal page. And I did the same thing. We don’t have a founding journey social media presence. We don’t have a megaphone social media presence. But both of these people find and trust us because they know me from my social content and from my newsletter. Right. Um, so there’s just, there’s countless examples like that. Dominic Forth: Yeah, yeah, no, it’s, it’s great. So part of the media millionaire plan is to teach people how to become authority entrepreneurs. And this is the path to it, isn’t it? Really building that big LinkedIn profile X as well. And then, and use it like, for example, a megaphone, I didn’t realize that was your company name. I was not, you know, it’s really your personal brand was what, how you and I Right. Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1: Case in point, right? So if that’s something we want to discuss, we’d love to do that with you, for you, alongside you, et cetera, and partner with you on that, because that can create a strong funnel to go from LinkedIn to the newsletter. There’s a couple ways we can optimize your profile and obviously continue to post content as well to do that. So if that’s something that we should add on to this, we’re more than happy to, and we definitely have bandwidth to do So yeah, I guess like we can talk about that now, or if you wanna think about it, we can talk about it as we get started, that’s fine too. I know we’re over time and I don’t wanna keep you late from your in-person meeting. Dominic Forth: Oh yeah, no, it’s so good. So it definitely makes sense for the alignment, because what happens, I’m the bottleneck in the company, and so we’re gonna be doing this great work on this newsletter, but then I’m gonna have to be like, Thursday, four o’clock, oh, I haven’t posted about the newsletter yet, and then I’m rushing off to go post about it. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Yeah. Dominic Forth: And so, no, It makes sense. What I’d like to do is just kind of map out, I think this will only take us 30 seconds or so to map out the flywheel where, because I’m building out a new website, which was going to be where, so what happens is we go on a sales call, because at the moment we’re doing cold outbound. People are like, this is awesome. I didn’t know you guys could do this. I just need to finish my book, my website, or anything else. So then what we did was created the magazine in January where we go to people and say, well, hey, we want to feature you on this magazine. We put them in the magazine and now for free. Now we’ve got a relationship where they’ve worked with us. We understand the product service. And then they say, well, what else do you do? And now it’s a much easier conversation to sell podcasts and TV. So we were going to lead with the magazine as a news, as the, um, as a lead sales asset, really. And then, you know, grow that piece. We realized it’s a big lift to design it. So then I was like, well, we should just publish straight to the website, have a website with all these founders and experts on at the end of the month. Those the best 10 articles go into the magazine or best 20 or everybody does it. We can figure that piece out. But in the meantime, we in the magazine, we reference our weekly newsletter because I want to eventually get to weekly. And the newsletter is more of a deeper conversation. And it’s also supporting those people that are in our funnel as a sales asset, because then it’s not as an asset, but as a nurture sequence. So, so that was kind of how I was thinking is, so we lead, we, we, we approach people in the sales conversation to be in the magazine. They say, yes, we put them in the magazine. They subscribe to it. That subscription also gets them access to the newsletter. And then the newsletter is also a touch point for people in the sales process as well. Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, I think if our goal is to get the most leads and the most revenue as a result, we want as many people in the newsletter as possible. So we want like the newsletter to be like the lowest friction thing that someone can get to, right? So that’s free lead magnets that we offer on social and maybe through ads or wherever else, right? That’s excuse me, that’s existing emails and things like that. If you have people who come in through other channels, of course, let’s add their email to the newsletter as well, right? 100% like we should do that. But if we’re only adding people to the newsletter, who find us for a sales call first, and subscribe to the magazine first, we’re really like reducing the amount of people who are to the newsletter, right? So I see the newsletter, I see like social as like very top of funnel. And then I see the newsletters, like the first layer underneath that, like the lights, like the earth’s crust, Right. And then we get down to the mantle where, you know, the sort of, you know, the lava is really churning, and then things are happening down there. That’s when they sort of are in the newsletter. And now we’re pushing offers to them, right? We’re sending them the opportunity to purchase our front end offer, we’re sending them the opportunity to sign up for a sales call for a high ticket offer that you’re gonna you’re gonna pitch to them. So I see that funnel as being pretty clean. And the magazine can fit into there too. You know, we can give them opportunities in the newsletter to reach out to be featured in the magazine. And that gives you another sort of a channel to get deeper with them and get them into a sales call and get them into a higher ticket package. Cause you know, they’re high intent if they want to put themselves out there like that. So I just see it as like social newsletter, the sausage is made. So to speak. Dominic Forth: Yeah. Thank you so much. That helps clarify it. So it’s really Mark. So social and newsletters marketing, it’s getting people and know us, you know, Hey, I’m not ready for a conversation yet. I just, Oh, this is great information. Maybe 12 months from now, they’ll be ready. The magazine is then something separate. It’s really a sales tool that we use for a direct one-on-one conversation to build it out. And those people also by nature go into the magazine, but yeah, social and newsletters really for nurturing the funnel. And then the magazine is something that we have control of and it’s a big lift. So we’re doing it four times a year, But if we can avoid doing all that lift and just have people come to us through the newsletter, that’s a win. Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1: Yeah, it’s just going to make it way easier. So it’s just a very clean way to set it up. So look, I do think that social can be a meaningful part of that. There’s obviously ways to grow the newsletter without social as well. But I think if our goal is leads and our goal is revenue at the end of the day, social can be a meaningful way to establish trust and continue to build stronger ties between you and these people who are going to be interested in the type of content we’re putting out and the services that you guys offer. So yeah, I guess let me know. Maybe think through it. Let me know what you think about social. We can layer it on. If we do social and the newsletter together, we give a combined discount on the package and everything like that, of course, to make it, because we’re already working with you. So yeah, just put some thought into it and let me know, and we can get started on that as soon as next week as well. Well. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Yeah, I think what was the beginner tier for the social? Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1: If we wanted to do like, it depends if we do like long form or short form, but we’d handle all scheduling, we’d handle all reporting, we do engagements, we’d be commenting on other people’s posts, sort of on your behalf to sort of join in their conversations, get free profile views that way. And maybe we’d be publishing content from your page as well. It would be it would be the 1995 for that as well. But again, it’d be discounted. So we’d add like, you know, our standard 10% discount for a package deal. So it would come down to about 200. So it’d be about 1,700. Also the newsletter would come down by 200 as well. So you’d be getting a total of like 400 discount on the two. Dominic Forth: Yeah, no, I think it makes sense because just, yeah, like the engagement piece is gonna be huge. Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1: And then would you help with like, so that the engagement piece is, do you follow people like Cody Sanchez For example, she posts like comment on her then you get like a thousand extra views Yeah, if you’re if you’re one of the first people So what we do is we’d set up a list of folks who are in your niche who we think are worth Engaging with there’d be a mix of people in there Some of them would be influencers who we can get a ton of free views if we make like timely comments on their posts but the other part of that list would be like people who are targets for you people who You specifically think would be great to work with would be great clients for you guys and we would be engaging with their stuff too, so they’d see you proactively in their feed specifically. So it can be a sort of an outbound channel that way too. And if we really do that consistently and establish even a relationship with them, that can easily lead to DMs and sales calls, et cetera, from there. We see that happen all the time. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Yeah. Do you handle the DMs or help with those at all? Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1: We can. Yeah, we can. Ben is a DM master actually. Amazing. Dominic Forth: Yeah. Yeah. That’s great. No, yeah, let’s do it. Let’s do the social. That’s cool. Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1: Okay, I’ll update everything on our end and then Tanyo if you have any other questions specifically on the social side Let’s you and I jam on those later today or maybe first thing Monday. I don’t know because I know it’s late for you right now But we’ll jam on those shortly and Dom will follow up if we have any Additional like voice or formatting fault. We might want some like social accounts who you like, the type of content they put out, like Hormozy obviously puts out amazing content. There’s other people. We can just go back and forth and slack on that and figure out some, some inspo folks. Dominic Forth: Yeah. I mean this, I think this could become part of our, like not, not our, this could be part of our offer as well. Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1: If you’re, if you’re able to white label this as well, just because so many of our clients need this same help dude. Yeah, I mean look let’s We we should honestly just jam on that a bit, but we’re totally open to To that and to sort of doing a meaningful kick back to you guys as part of that as well. Honestly, if we get a few people in that way, that could literally pay for the whole thing for you guys too. So I love that idea. I think that sounds like a win-win. Dominic Forth: Yeah. I mean, it’s because we put them on TV sometimes and they don’t do anything with the clips. They don’t, you know, it just sits there. I’m like, why do we do all this work? But having the thought leadership, cause we know it’s coming. We know like, Hey, in two weeks time, they’re going to be on ABC in San Diego. Like, and And then, so there’s so much, and then the newsletter, so many of my clients need help with that. And just those two pieces is, it’s the whole funnel. You’ve got very high authority on TV, deep middle funnel relationships through the podcasts. And then you’ve got social, which can then be a conversion engine for them at the end. And then the newsletter nurturing everything and growing an owned audience, which they don’t get. The borrowing audience is everywhere else, but the newsletter, they own, 100% unlimited child song goal total ownership of the relationship. Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1: They have a direct relationship with you The platform is not some like middleman that’s deciding who gets to see what? So look here’s what I can do I’ll send over Some maybe like a notion doc of just like how we what how we would white label and Like some ideas on structure and things like that and we can lock that in because again Like if we if we push this out and we get some bites of those folks turned active clients, you know, I mean It’s literally it’s literally gonna pay for it for you. So It’s just a win-win all around. So I’m very down for that. Dominic Forth: I think it sounds great Well, we could sell against paid ads as well Like hey, you don’t need to spend thousands of dollars on matter testing different campaigns and everything else Own your own audience become an authority entrepreneur. We put you on top rated TV stations the best podcasts for your ICP and And we manage all your social media so you maximize every appearance and build your own following through the newsletter. Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1: Yeah, it’s a super clear pitch. So I think it’ll resonate with the type of folks that you guys are working with as well. So I’m excited about it. I think that sounds great. Dominic Forth: Yeah, brilliant. And then I’m building out like a VSL funnel at the moment, but I’m going to pause that until we get this going. Yeah, okay. Yeah, because this could be part of the offer with that. Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1: Yeah. Once we’ve established the newsletter too, it’ll be easy to pitch things like a standard VSL offer through there to the folks we want to get it to. And we can incorporate that into the various segmentation, the various automations we’d set up for new subscribers and things like that. Also, if you have folks at risk of churning, we could hit them with something before they go. Et cetera, et cetera. So there’s a few things we could do there. Dominic Forth: Yeah, brilliant. And then, yeah, I love your feedback on the lead magnets as well. I just need someone to say, Don, go and create these five things and I’ll do it. I just need, you know. Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1: Yeah, we’ll follow up with some more ideas on lead magnets too. Ben, can you make a note? Maybe let’s brainstorm later today some ideas for lead magnets. Cool. Okay. Cool, man. Well, look, I’m really pumped about this. We will get started on the onboarding checklist for the newsletter and also I’ll follow up about social and the white label stuff. We’ll need a couple of small things like Ben mentioned from you for the newsletter setup, but we’ll handle all that as it comes up. But look, Ben, I’m really excited about this and I think let’s blow it out of the water here. Dominic Forth: Yeah, yeah, there’s so much potential and thank you all for being so responsive today. I really appreciate it. Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1: No, look, we know that when you got the IRL stuff, But time is, I don’t know, it can jump up on you and you got to take it. So we’re very flexible and we’re just happy to be getting started. So no problem at all, man. You have a good one down there. Dominic Forth: Well, you’re so right about where someone’s in the car and it’s like every other word’s cutting out and it’s so frustrating for everyone. So I was like, no, I’m going to stay in my office. Let’s knock this out. So it’s been awesome. Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1: Well, man, I’m excited. We’ll talk more, but have a good drive down. Dominic Forth: Yeah. Cheers. Have a great weekend, everyone. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Take care, brother. Bye.