- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01KNHP72F8Z0033C2EEVN3WZ6N (via Ben Ornstein’s account, imported 2026-08-06)
Transcript
Michael Houck: Ah, yeah. It’s good to meet you. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: You as well. Michael Houck: Yeah, so this is cool. This is going to be a good one. As a reminder, I have to hop off at the 30-minute mark. So I’ll probably go camera off once I hand it to you guys. But I can do the first part of the intake, Blake, on our end. And then I’ll probably hand it off to you around 20 minutes in when I have to walk over to this place for this in-person meeting. But then at the end, Ben, we’ll wrap it up. Cool, okay. How much time do you need, Ben? Well, Blake, it’ll be Tatem after you, because we’ve got to get unique questions for like the TikTok, Instagram side too. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Okay, so what’s most helpful for me to cover? Just the Notion doc? Michael Houck: Well, whatever you’re going to need. I don’t know if that changes with Casper in the mix or not. But I’m gonna run through the normal stuff, yeah. What’s up, man? You’re muted. Conference Room (Ben Gusberg) - Speaker 1: I’m muted, I don’t know how that happened. But nice to see you, Hauk, as always, Ben. What’s up, man, we miss you. And Blake and Tatem, nice to meet you both. The number of note takers in here is a little bit concerning, but other than that. Michael Houck: Well, that’s why you’re muted, I think, because when Google Meet has over amount of people, new people get muted. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: I also have granola running on my side, so you guys are screwed too. Michael Houck: You’re the secret assassin, we’re the forefront. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Exactly. You’re transparent, I’m not, that’s cool. Michael Houck: There we go. Well, cool man. Look, I’m glad we’re able to make this work so quickly and find a team today that fits. So for context, I have to hop off in like 20-ish, but the majority of this call is going to be led by Blake and Tatem and then Ben will wrap it up at the end. Basically what we want to use this call for is to go a little bit deeper on some of the stuff from the onboarding form and just like hear it from you, hear you talk about it as well. Um, and get some inspiration for content pillars, voice, you know, learn more about, obviously I know a lot about the ICP cause you know, we talk all the time, but, uh, to get the team up to speed on ICP and things like that too. So I gave them a little bit of context before the call for my head as well, but they just want to hear it from you. So, first half is going to be more focused on like the LinkedIn side and then second half will be more focused on the TikTok and Instagram and just video side in general. Conference Room (Ben Gusberg) - Speaker 1: Just to pause for one second, I just put in the Slack the landing page for this specific product that we’re now pushing in case while we’re going through folks want to check it out. Michael Houck: Sweet. Okay, any other any questions Anything we should answer before I dive in? Conference Room (Ben Gusberg) - Speaker 1: Nope. I appreciate you guys getting on so quickly. I know this was last minute, so I’m excited. Michael Houck: Of course, man. Let me open this up then. Okay. So yeah, goals for this call, identify goals, exact audience, content pillars, voice, and answer any questions. So I guess the first thing is just like, I think I understand this, the primary goal is drive customers for you guys. But can you confirm if that’s true or if there are other secondary goals we should keep in mind as well? Conference Room (Ben Gusberg) - Speaker 1: I think two goals are one, drive customers to Cape, two, build my personal brand and build following in general. Those are the two key things. Michael Houck: So our KPIs should be leads for you, but also follower growth matters too? UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: I think that’s right. Because I think that’s going to help us build this flyway over time. Michael Houck: And followers over impressions, if you had to pick? UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: I think probably right, but obviously y’all are the experts, so. But that feels right. Michael Houck: Yeah, I mean if our goal is to grow revenue, we want people to trust you. So we do need impressions, we do need to make some noise, but we need them to actually be the right people who are going to care, and following is usually a step to do that. At least on LinkedIn. On TikTok, I think it matters a little bit less, but yeah, I’ll walk through that. Okay. And then I know that you’re in this two month sprint right now. So give me two frames of reference here. So two months down the road, early June, what needs to be true for this to be a success for you? And then also like, let’s say it is a success and we are, you know, 12 months down the road, six months down the road, something like that. What does success look like, a long run for you at that point? Conference Room (Ben Gusberg) - Speaker 1: I think the 12-months one is easier. We’re raising our Series A That’s what this is all driving towards. Two months, I think we should probably think about how much revenue is driven by social versus traditional outreach and all that stuff. I hesitate because I don’t know what the right specific goal is. Explicitly enough about what the specific goal should be that comes from social versus traditional outreach. How, because you know, almost everything we’ve done so far has been traditional, traditional outreach type tactics, which has worked well for us so far, but it’s not fast enough. And so maybe it’s like, I don’t know what’s realistic. Like, you know, two X from social, is that possible? 2X from social versus outreach? Michael Houck: In terms of new business or in terms of total business? Conference Room (Ben Gusberg) - Speaker 1: I guess like new, as I think about how new business is coming, if I guess we’re getting twice the number of leads from inbound versus outbound. Michael Houck: Cool. What I would say then is just keep us in the loop on A, those leads coming in and B, the quality of those leads. Like, are they actually converting for you? What are you learning? Where are the differences in their expectations versus all that, so that we can keep fine-tuning things. The more communication we get from you there, the more we’ll be able to tune it. Conference Room (Ben Gusberg) - Speaker 1: Agreed. And I also view this as a learning experience, too, in terms of, like, we’re pretty early on the journey, as you know, Hauk, of, like, moving, switching to this new market and, like, absolutely understanding everything about what message resonates, all those things. And so, like, I’ll tell you something today. I bet it’ll be wrong two weeks from now. Yeah. Sure. Yeah. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: That’s how it goes. Okay, Blake, anything else that we should hit on in terms of goals there? UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: You’d mentioned that, just really quick, the outbound that you’re doing currently, what is the outbound that you’re doing just so that we can know? Conference Room (Ben Gusberg) - Speaker 1: Yep, so we’re in this, so I don’t know how much background Hauk has given you, but right now, the product that we’re launching, so do you know the background of our company in terms of what our core product does now? UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Yeah, I’m pretty clear on that. OK, cool. Conference Room (Ben Gusberg) - Speaker 1: And so now we’re launching, basically, into this new market, which is partnerships and event marketing focused. And we’re in this community called Smarter Ships, which Shabby told you about, where we’re in this group that has 720 people in it. And that group is already, basically, pre-qualified for our product. It’s a mixture of event marketing, partnerships, and agencies that all sell to e-commerce. And that’s really, from our existing customer base, those have been the customers that have pulled us in this direction. It also happens that the vast majority of our customers sell to e-commerce. That’s like where folks have gone with our existing product. And so that’s what we’re trying to do here as well. And so the first step of my, the outbound that we’re going to do is last night I used Claude to scrape every member of that Smarter Ships community. And now we’re going to just try to set up calls with them. I already have, I have back-to-back calls today from 10 a.m. Until 5 p.m. Basically. And we’re going to just try to do outbound with that group because it feels like it should already be pre-qualified. We have an influencer in that group, the woman who founded that community. Is an existing partner of ours. She’s pushing us really hard to build product for that community. And so that’s where we’re going to focus most of our outbound on that. And then we also went to this conference last week, two weeks ago, last week, that is a conference for people in the e-commerce space. So they’re both the brands, which we don’t really care about, and the people who want to sell to those brands. We have the attendee list. And so we’re going to do cold outbound on LinkedIn to all the people who are have the titles that we look for in that group. And then once we run through those, we’ll do just broader out, you know, cold outbound to those folks and a warm outbound using our existing tool, the warm intro tool that we have. Michael Houck: Got it. So it’s more DM than it is email. Is that fair to say? Conference Room (Ben Gusberg) - Speaker 1: Right now it’s all DM and LinkedIn, LinkedIn connect plus note and DMs on Slack. Okay, cool. Conference Room (Ben Gusberg) - Speaker 3: Sweet. Okay. So you sort of have gotten, to this Ben already, but just to like distinctly lay it out on its own, the target persona, the target. I know you guys recently did like a persona exercise. If you just want to maybe drop that in the Slack channel as well, that’d be super helpful, but just also talk over it a little bit. Like who are we writing content for? Conference Room (Ben Gusberg) - Speaker 1: I think there are two groups. Our product, you know, ideally you want to, the two groups are like partnerships, people like head of partnerships, partnership, partner manager, et cetera. And event marketing. I think the way where the product is right now, event marketing are the group that can use the product immediately. So people who, you know, set up a bunch of events in New York or set up a bunch of events or wherever, the use case, the example use case we always give is Sarah, who’s one of our existing customers. She’s the founder of Smarter Ships. She wants to host an event in Dallas. Our tool helps us allow her to do that, because what she wants to do is she wants to invite a mixture of her existing customers and potential prospects. And so our tool looks through her existing customers and enriches it and sees which of those people are within 50 miles of Dallas. It then helps her, you know, gets her review on that list. She’ll approve it. She’ll, you know, it drafts the message for her. It sends the message, blah, blah, and then does the same thing for her prospects list. So she wants to sell them to these companies. It helps her figure out who at those companies has the titles that she’d want to sell to. Of those people who lives within 50 miles of Dallas, invites them, et cetera, et cetera. So that’s really the first use case that we’re trying to sell into. Eventually, though, within the next, I would say, month, it’ll be both event marketers and partnerships folks in general. Does that answer the question? UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Yeah. Is there a difference between how you’re thinking about that for, I know we’ll advise on this too, but just from your perspective, LinkedIn versus the video platform like TikTok and Instagram? Conference Room (Ben Gusberg) - Speaker 1: My honest answer is that I don’t have, I’ve really only thought about LinkedIn. I have not thought a lot about TikTok or Instagram at all. I’ve never done content for either of those, but I like have my own personal Instagram, but I’ve never done content for those platforms. And so I don’t know enough about that. How, cause you know, I’ve taken this class on doing LinkedIn content. And so I’ve thought a lot about how, like what good content looks like on LinkedIn and like what works combining visual versus text, all that stuff. So I have more context on LinkedIn than I do on Tatem. You’re my savior here. I have absolutely no idea. I don’t know how those platforms even work. I’m an old man. So I’m going to look to you for your advice on how to think about, should we be trying to build an audience versus just finding videos that hit with specific people? I don’t know. Does that make sense? Michael Houck: Yeah. Tatem can dig more into that. When she takes the lead here in a couple of minutes, but I think that’s good to get started. So, okay, so we’re really new to this market, so we don’t really have an impression, like the audience doesn’t really have an impression of us so far, that’s fine. One thing I think that’s worth noting for LinkedIn, Blake and Ben, you can elaborate on this, is like, your existing LinkedIn audience is, you know, they’ve been active to some of the content that you’ve posted recently, but they’re not, in this niche, right? And so what we’re doing is you’re setting up an engagement group with some folks to help drive this content to the right people. And we can try to help with that too. Ben, maybe on the creator side and see what we can find there. But yeah, that’s just a call out there. It’s like in terms of how the audience sees you, they don’t know the business yet, really, because this new market doesn’t know the business yet. And also the LinkedIn audience There’s like the the hump we have to get over in terms of the algorithm showing our content to the right people. Yep Okay Next thing is content pillars. So like, you know, give me like three to five things that are like at the intersection of Your personal business expertise and what I communicate to this market and also just like things that you can rant about for a long time Yeah. Conference Room (Ben Gusberg) - Speaker 1: So I think the things that I am expert on are the things that our existing company does. So that would be like warm intro, network, building relationships, stuff like that. And then AI, you know, I think those are like the two, two pillars that we should probably have in some way, shape or form. I think the new group is all about like IRL. It’s all about like, um, you know, events. It’s all about even for the partnerships, people, they’re all like, you know, kissing babies, taking names, et cetera, et cetera. I think it’s helpful to give you examples of the profiles of people. So I remembered how a guy, there was one person who’s basically, his last post was like, I spend more time on a plane than I do at my apartment. It’s like those are the types of people here that they’re just constantly going from event to event. They’re constantly meeting people, trying to build relationships. That’s the partnerships folks. And the events folks, I think they’re doing, are doing a little bit of that but I think they’re actually most of them are not going to the events themselves necessarily they’re the ones behind the scenes like doing all the work for the events and then some of that it’s like what’s interesting is partnerships people what’s cool about partnerships people is they like represent the future of what like all of these industries are going to become which is like someone their job description for some of them it’s event marketing for some of them it’s sales for some of them it’s partnerships for some it’s like they do a little bit of everything and so that’s why that’s a unique interesting persona. And one of their jobs is the event marketing job, which is I need to go through tons of spreadsheets to figure out who are the people I want to invite. I need to coordinate with a bunch of other sponsors if it’s a co-sponsored event to figure out how we’re going to horse trade who’s going to go to this event. It’s a lot of just work. I think I mentioned this on the call. I think one post we definitely should make is perception versus reality in terms of what people perceive the event’s job is or what people perceive the partnership’s jobs. The perception is, hey, all you do is just like hang out, have fun, drink beer, that’s all you do. Whereas the reality is you’re like doing a hundred different spreadsheets. You’re like staying up till 2 a.m. Trying to figure out like which sponsor is gonna let you do whatever. It’s like, it turns out it’s like a ton of work and they don’t have enough time, which is why they can use our product so that, I think how you said this in our call, like, you know, spend more time doing the thing you actually like versus doing the thing you have to do. Does that make sense? Michael Houck: Yeah, yeah, we want them to we want them to be able to spend their time drinking beer partying at these conferences rather than doing the spreadsheets. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: We want them to do the perception, not the reality. Michael Houck: Right, exactly. We want to play into the stereotype. Conference Room (Ben Gusberg) - Speaker 1: Exactly. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Okay. Got it. Any other like, broader things you want to include? Like, I think when we do have like a mission like this around like, get customers, you know, etc, it can be it can make sense to super focused. But also, you know, people follow people with personalities and real lives and interests and things like that. So like, you know, let’s go outside of the market. Like what other things can we weave in to make you a unique character to these people? Conference Room (Ben Gusberg) - Speaker 1: I think just if we weren’t thinking about this market, we’re thinking about I think just thinking about like what I enjoy doing. I think there’s a pattern in my life of I enjoy like teaching in general. So like, how do you know I was a professor USC for three years. The first thing I did after graduating from business school was I created a crypto education platform. It’s like I just and I feel like this is like and now the content I’ve been doing so far is basically like AI education type of content. And so I feel like that is something that I enjoy doing. I’m not sure how that applies to this market because. I’m not I’m not I don’t know the audience well enough to know. I feel like you know in general on LinkedIn education content is one of the that performs best obviously, but I’m not sure whether this is a group that just like wants to like whether they’re turned on by you know learning more about these things or whether they’re more like You know to want to be the cool kids, you know where like they’re interested in content that like helps them feel cooler You know and maybe AI is cool to some extent, but I don’t think I think for a lot of people It’s less that way, you know, so I don’t know cool we will sort of discover some of that, I think alongside you here, but it makes sense. Blake Emal: Okay. I guess any Blake, I’ll, I’ll, I’ll toss it to you. What else should be helpful for you for content pillars here? Blake Emal: Yeah. I’m just going to ask a follow-up question on the AI side of things. So many people talk about AI broadly, the ones that are kind of doing it best pick a niche within that to talk about it. So you, You just kind of alluded to maybe not knowing exactly how to talk about AI, but instead of just broadly talking about it, is there a specific wedge here where we can talk about AI and how it relates to all these things, like how it’s in direct conflict with networking, warm intros, and how it can actually be used to help with those things? Is that an interesting wedge for you? Is there another way we can talk about AI that’s maybe a little more specific, because what I’m thinking through is like, there are a lot of people that just create encompassing AI content and even newsletters that are just roundups of everything happening. And I don’t necessarily think it’s best for you to be posting content like that. Conference Room (Ben Gusberg) - Speaker 1: Yeah, so obviously, I can talk about how AI works with networking, because that’s what the core business has always been. And so that’s relevant. I haven’t found resonates the most with people in general, just because I feel like, um, and I, I think I probably just haven’t done it right. To be honest, like you’ll see, if you look at my content, it’s not great. It’s gotten better. I think recently I got one, as Hawk knows, I got one post last week that got 45,000 impressions on LinkedIn, but that’s basically the only one that’s done well. And it was really just like an off the cuff, more like authentic posts as opposed to like a, like educational posts. Um, But in general, I feel like when you talk about networking and relationships, that in general I have not found is the most resonant viral type topic. And so I feel like the question is, how do you do that in a way that people really resonate with? Because I do think that in general, people have trouble with building relationships. There are a lot of people on the internet who are introverts. I find myself, I’m definitely an introvert. I’m an extroverted introvert, meaning I’m happy going to an event and having to talk but I can be fairly shy and also very much after the event, I need to go home and sleep and recharge. I recharge at home, not at the events. And I think there are a lot of people like that on the internet who, if you could use AI to vibe network for you. At one point we thought about building a product that was just a vibe networking product because I feel like everyone wants to network but no one wants to have to do the networking it’s like CRMs I always say everyone wants a CRM no one wants to use a CRM I feel like the same thing is true for networking it’s like everyone wants to have everyone wants to have the network but no one wants to do the networking because it feels icky it feels gross it feels whatever so I feel like there could be something interesting there, but again, it’s, you know, there’s a fine line. Do I really want to be like known as the networking guy? No, not really. Right. Like I, I wouldn’t mind being like the, I don’t know. I don’t, I know I just rambled for like 10 minutes and didn’t say anything that was that helpful, but I agree with your point that like specificity, I’m sure is helpful in building an audience. I’ve heard a lot about the LinkedIn algorithm is, is focusing on niches more than it is on like broad general content. I knew like 360, whatever. But I’m open to your suggestions on what’s the best path for me to go down in terms of how should I focus. What I’m most curious personally about is using AI to, as a non-technical person, what I find most exciting is that AI makes me feel powerful. Last night, I used Cloud to build a script to use the terminal on my computer to scrape all the people on LinkedIn. Before AI existed, on Slack. Before AI existed, I wasn’t able to do that. And so I feel like AI makes me feel powerful in a way that I’ve never felt before. And I want to give that power to other people too. And so that’s like the AI content I was focused on or trying to focus on was like AI for non-technical people, because you now are able to do these things that weren’t possible. Does that make sense? Michael Houck: That makes sense. Michael Houck: Sorry, I can just hop in real quick here. So I have to jump. But Blake, if you want to cover anything about voice, and we already got some good stuff on voice from the form, but maybe we just do that. And then after that, we can toss it over to Tatem. But Ben, if there are more accounts that you think people who do this content really well on LinkedIn, or also on TikTok, Instagram, please just like it when you can today spend some time going through dropping a bunch of links into Slack so that we can use that for inspiration. Blake Emal: I’ll share the thing that I was going through the other day with you, which has all the people I research and like existing community members too, who are in this partnerships community. Cause I think it helps to give you a sense for like, who are these people? Conference Room (Ben Gusberg) - Speaker 3: Yeah, I agree. And also like target customer lists for engagements. Ben will reach out about that too, but we want to be engaging with the right people on your behalf. So, okay, I’m going to hop, but if anything else comes up, let me know. Happy to chat more later today. Cool. Thanks. Cool. You guys. Yeah. Blake Emal: A couple more follow-ups on my end. So you had mentioned maybe not wanting to be the networking guy. If you had to be a guy, is there a keyword that comes to mind currently? Conference Room (Ben Gusberg) - Speaker 1: It depends on what, like, our business right now, the new thing that it’s focusing on is AI for partnerships and events. That is not necessarily my identity, partnerships and events. If you think about in general what’s growing on the internet, it’s being in general AI related. It feels like something AI related, I would like to be the AI something guy for sure. And maybe it has to be AI for networking. If I run a billboard and said Ben’s the AI for networking guy, I’m not sure that really fires me up. But that’s why I think that the thing that does fire me up is helping non-technical folks use AI, or get the most out of AI, or feel powerful with AI. But again, that’s pretty generic. Blake Emal: Yeah, I mean, it kind of just begs the question of not only what you want to be known for, but how you want that to flow through. So you mentioned a couple different goals at the beginning, one of which is to grow the business, Being more specific about warm intros, networking relationships is probably the best go through there. And then if you’re talking through follower growth or just getting your audience to grow and being as helpful to as many people as possible, it’s more the non-technical side. When you’re trying to tackle both those at the same time, you can do it. It will just go slower for both of them than if you’re just one, obviously. So it really depends on what’s the most important thing. To attach your identity to the keyword that you’re trying to use to flow through the business? In this case, you would become the AI for relationships, AI for warm intros guy, whatever. Or do you just want to focus more on audience growth and thus open yourself up to a broader topic like AI for non-technical people? UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Yeah. No, it’s a good point. I’m hoping we can thread the needle somehow. And I think even AI for warm intros is better than AI for networking or AI relationships is obviously better than AI for networking. So it seems like for these next two weeks or two weeks, the next two months at least, you probably need to lean more into the business side just because I feel like that’ll give us the best test here. But I don’t want to forsake the other side as well about growing the brand as much as possible. Blake Emal: Yeah, the nice thing about AI is that you can incorporate it. Even if it’s not your core pillar, it’s probably just going to show up in every post anyway. To some extent, so that’s probably how we thread the needle, is by treating the overarching strategy as like warm intros and AI for warm intros, like generally, but AI’s just gonna show up and be helpful for non-technical people through that stuff. And if every once in a while we wanna do something that’s really not a post about networking, but more about something interesting you’ve built that might be helpful to someone else, that can work too. But again, Hauk mentioned this, all algorithms especially the text-based platforms are really going toward niche content. And the more that you just stick on the script of your one niche over and over and over again, the more likely it is that you’ll grow. And the more that you veer outside of it, those posts tend to get kind of scrapped by the algorithm pretty quickly. And the more you do that, you’re not going to get like shadow banned for doing that, but it’s definitely going to hinder your growth. Conference Room (Ben Gusberg) - Speaker 1: For sure. For sure. Cool. Cool. Yeah. The last thing I’ll say is I wonder whether it’s makes like the new group it’s it is network. I guess maybe more relationships is still right. But the new group is specifically like partnerships and event marketing. So I don’t know if we even need to be more specific for that as well because it’s like the group the people that we’re really trying to you know hyper target right now are event marketing folks and partnerships folks particularly like those folks who sell to e-commerce. That’s like where we’ve seen the most, which is like a pretty small market, I think to start, but Yeah. Blake Emal: Yeah. It’s helpful direction. Okay. Well, we’ll brainstorm that a little bit too. And once we get to like helping you optimize your profile and everything like that, uh, we’ll probably have something clear that we want to put in your bio and that’ll help guide the strategy. And then the last thing really quickly, uh, in your intake, you said, uh, kind of like a hot take of cold outbound going to zero is that is that’s basically the flip side of when we’re talking warm intros. The flip side of it is talking about cold intros. Is that also an interesting pillar to you to kind of go that direction, talk about the opposite of what you’re doing as kind of a case for why warm intros and partnerships and things are, basically why you’re building this business and why the product’s effective by talking about the opposite of those things? Conference Room (Ben Gusberg) - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think it can be. We are adding, like, we are going to be doing some cold outbound stuff too, I think. That’s why I’m a little bit hesitant. Because even like the conference outreach stuff we do, it’s technically cold. We don’t think of it as cold because we think you’re all going to the same conference, so that’s like sort of a network. But I do think like talking about how, you know, I say all the time that, sorry, I just got a LinkedIn message, or a WhatsApp message. I do say all the time that like, you know, if you believe that cold outbound is going to infinity because we can all send 1,000 emails a day. We are basically saying that you believe cold outbound is going to zero because we’re all going to get 1,000 emails a day. And so that’s why it all comes back to the human trust layer in that world where you feel like if you’re all getting 1,000 emails a day, how do you know what to trust and what’s real and what’s not? It’s like that’s definitely a trend that’s happening. And so we believe that it’s going to come back to humans and things that you curate. So I think there is something there. And I leave it up to you on whether you think worth weaving in or not. Blake Emal: Cool, probably more of a subtopic then. Okay, cool. So it sounds like for pillars, warm intros, networking, relationships as a core pillar, AI education as a pillar, and then we might stumble across some other things. Another pillar for you to consider potentially is something kind of like building in public with the company to make it more natural to show the behind the scenes. If you want to do that, you don’t have to do that. I think based on here, seeing a lot of thought leadership stuff we can do, there’s going to be some promotion of the product that we can do. Although I recommend trying to make it a little bit more natural and not just pushing links all the time. So when we create content, it’s going to be a little bit more native. And if we’re plugging the product, hopefully it’s a little subtle. Um, but then every once in a while, if you do behind the scenes or kind of building public type content, it’s a lot easier to just have the company front and center in a natural So that’s another thing we could consider as well. Any questions for me before I hand it off to the TikTok side of things? Conference Room (Ben Gusberg) - Speaker 1: Only question is, when do you think we’ll start doing content? Because I need to know whether I should be still writing content this week? UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Yeah. Blake Emal: So for this week, we’ve got to basically take all this, formalize our strategy internally, and then we’ll get started on it. I’ll probably start writing some stuff this week. But for your safety, I would probably just continue to write some stuff this week just to make sure we have a little bit of leeway in terms of publishing. But I’m going to get started on things pretty quick here. Tatem Lindner: Well, we’ll assume that by a week from today is when we’d having you take over. Is that fair? UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Well, for sure. Yeah, we will be taking things over before then. But as a safety measure, yeah, I would just treat this week like you’re just going to tackle it. And then whatever happens on top of that is cherry on top. Tatem Lindner: Oh, sounds good. Appreciate it. Yep. All right, Tatem, you’re the wild card. I know absolutely nothing about this. So this is I’m excited about it. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: All right. Conference Room (Ben Gusberg) - Speaker 2: All right. So I’ll give you some background on me real quick to ease your worries. Um, I used to do social media for Hulk Hogan. And I still do social media for race car driver and Vivek Ramaswamy politician. So I really enjoy what I do. And I’m good at it. Therefore, I’m really excited to be working with you. Um, do you have any like real background on short form videos? And a sense of like, do you scroll? Do you find that you’re an addict in any capacity? Conference Room (Ben Gusberg) - Speaker 1: I scroll, so I scroll Reels and Instagram a lot. I had TikTok for a while and then I deleted, I’ve had it deleted probably for the past like three years. Tatem Lindner: Much better than me. Conference Room (Ben Gusberg) - Speaker 1: And then I would say for the past like few weeks my girlfriend like very much pushed me to download it again because she’s like obsessed with TikTok and it’s like I need to be able to share things with you or whatever. So I now have it again, but I would say I’m definitely not an expert on TikTok for sure. Tatem Lindner: Okay. Well, kudos to your girlfriend because hopefully that makes you more money, right? UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: That’s the hope. Hopefully one day she and I will both be TikTok influences and we can quit our jobs. You know, that’s the goal. Conference Room (Ben Gusberg) - Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. It’s teamwork right there. Exactly. Conference Room (Ben Gusberg) - Speaker 1: It starts here with the four of us right here. Yes. Conference Room (Ben Gusberg) - Speaker 2: Okay. So I just have a few somewhat straightforward questions. One of those things is, so you’ll be recording a decent amount because we need your face on there, right? So when you’re recording, would you prefer doing that in sprints or would you prefer that doing like one video a day? We could do week-long sprints, one video a day, just kind of depends on how you prefer things to go down. Conference Room (Ben Gusberg) - Speaker 1: The best for me would be to be able to record it all on Sundays. Okay. That’s the day that I don’t have any meetings. Every other day, it’s like so hard for me to do stuff because I might, it’s hard for me to figure out the timing of my day. Conference Room (Ben Gusberg) - Speaker 2: Okay. Awesome. And then for the videos themselves, do you want them to be a bit more scripted or a bit more into the trends area? Or do you want a mixture? Conference Room (Ben Gusberg) - Speaker 1: I, again, so for, for TikTok, I defer completely to you. I’m also for LinkedIn. I’m more sensitive about the content that we put out because I already have sort of a brand on LinkedIn. I have, you know, all of the people I know are on LinkedIn. For TikTok, I’m much more open to being more experimental. So I’m open to you within reason, obviously. I’m not trying to start an OnlyFans account. But other than that, I like defer to you in terms of like, like, also, we can try something for a week and see if we like it or not and try something else. Like, I’m very excited about this as like an experiment platform, to be honest. So I’m very, very The question I would have for you is like what equipment do you need me to buy like a ring light, etc, etc Tell me all those things that you think would give me the best setup and then I will get those this week Okay, awesome to answer that question. Conference Room (Ben Gusberg) - Speaker 2: You can just film directly on your phone Just because that’s a bit more native to the platform It uploads better and it’s just what people are used to ring light is good And then if you are going to be recording yourself speaking, which I foresee us doing a lot of that I do recommend some mics. Mics are the best in my opinion. It’s what most people use. Awesome. I was going to say they’re relatively cheap comparative to a bunch of other mics out there. Conference Room (Ben Gusberg) - Speaker 1: Yeah, I’ll just give you a link because I did some video content I can share with you if it’s helpful. I did like at this conference I went to, we interviewed 17 people just like we asked them the same five questions. So I can give that to you also to give you sense for how awkward or not I am on camera and stuff like that if that’s helpful. If you have links of things you should like if you have a link of like what lighting I should have I should probably get like a What’s it called a holder for the phone? What’s the word? I’m looking for tripod for the phone so I can you know Anything like that if you could just send it to me in slack I will just get all those things that we have whatever setup you need and I have an iPhone is 11, old So as long as that’s okay, I think we fine if it’s that bad then I think we have a problem with iPhone updates Okay. I need to get a new one. I can make that happen too. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: But awesome. Conference Room (Ben Gusberg) - Speaker 2: Um, okay. And then what percentage would you like to spend talking about the product versus talking about yourself? Because I do foresee that we’re going to see a lot of growth if we’re able to intertwine what we’re, how we’re speaking about the product and more of a natural capacity. Um, and I think that we can really see that happen if we do talk about who you are, And then weave that into there. Tatem Lindner: I’m comfortable with that. Whatever you think is best. Conference Room (Ben Gusberg) - Speaker 2: Okay. Another question is, do you find yourself uncomfortable in front of the camera? What is your comfort level there? Conference Room (Ben Gusberg) - Speaker 1: I have gotten more comfortable with it. I’m again, I’m, this is an all out two months sprint. So whatever you need me to do again, minus only fans, as long as it’s like reasonable, I’m willing to try it. I may be awkward because I can’t help who I am, but I will do my best. Conference Room (Ben Gusberg) - Speaker 2: Okay, would you like some feedback as we’re going on just body language and stuff? Or are you like, please do not point these things out to me. Conference Room (Ben Gusberg) - Speaker 1: No, give me as much feedback as possible. I want us to have the best performing videos. You can be if you need to be. So mean, I said, I would rather you not be mean, but you can be constructive. You can be whatever, whatever. Conference Room (Ben Gusberg) - Speaker 2: It would be very hard for me to be mean. Conference Room (Ben Gusberg) - Speaker 1: Do you have any favorite creators anyone you binge anyone you’re like if I could replicate that I want to be that so I will say most of my Instagram is food porn so it’s mostly like it it’s not necessarily most relevant for us here if I think about like AI creators though I’m a big fan of Greg Eisenberg I’m a big fan of Allie Miller Greg because I think Greg is like think about if I were unrelated to my company and the type of thing I would do, that is the type of thing I would do. Cause I feel like he’s similar of like trying to help people who are non-technical, but want to like use AI to build their own side hustle. That’s like the type of content that I think about myself too. So that’s why I think that he resonates a lot with like who I, the type of person I am and all that stuff. I’ve also run event for Greg, uh, here in New York. So I don’t know him well, but know him like tangentially. Um, and so I respect him a lot. So I’d say those are those are two that come to mind Hulk Hogan for sure. Conference Room (Ben Gusberg) - Speaker 2: Just kidding I don’t actually know I’ll check out his content and let you know I did a lot of stuff for his beer launch nice Traveled with him everywhere and I just hung out with him and recorded him and recorded the beer launch So you might have to check out that page and his personal page I’ll check it out. Conference Room (Ben Gusberg) - Speaker 1: I’ll check it out. Put it in slack. I’ll check it out Is that helpful? I can try to think about more. I can send you more if that’s helpful. Conference Room (Ben Gusberg) - Speaker 2: Those are really great. If, if you’re just scrolling and you’re like, Hey, I really like this, or I really like this video, send it my way at any point and working together. Because for me, it’s like, oh, I see where his brain is and how his mind is working. And I just want to integrate that and find this happy medium where I’m like, all right, I can see you doing this and it’s viral. So let’s let’s lean into it. Conference Room (Ben Gusberg) - Speaker 1: Just to add one thing to that, which is that what I think is really what the reason why I think Greg’s content is really great is because he’s basically like giving free things away to everyone. He’s his big thing is like I forget he is now I think on his Twitter he has this thing posted there which basically says that his like core mission in life is to like give the free secrets of how to do all how to like basically start a company. Um, and it’s like, that’s what I think resonates, which is like people watch it because they feel like they’re getting some secret alpha for free that they can’t get anywhere else. Um, and I feel like Allie Miller is similar in that, like she wants to help people get the most out of AI. And so she’s for free. She’s like, it’s like what always resonates on Instagram and on Instagram on, on like LinkedIn, for example, is always like, you know, comment for this free guide that I’ve spent hours on doing or whatever. It’s like the same type of thing. Where even though people probably don’t actually read those things, they comment or they save because they want to feel like they’re going to come back to it and they feel like they’re getting something for free that is going to help them level themselves up. I like the idea of making people, I want to give them things that make them feel powerful. Same thing with the tool that we’re building for these event people and partnerships people. I want them to feel powerful because they’re using something that they are now able to something that they didn’t think was possible for them to unlock, if that makes sense. Conference Room (Ben Gusberg) - Speaker 2: OK, awesome. I’ve seen that actually, that same strategy of not necessarily comment, but like, here’s a link in my bio to a free PDF. I’ve seen that work on TikTok and Instagram before, and people have generated so many email lists just based off of that. So I could see that being a good strategy for us moving forward and just seeing things. But for me, I’m a big person on A-B testing at the beginning And then leaning into whatever works So I’m really glad that you have an open mind going into this so that we can figure that out Do you have any followers on either platforms? Are we starting from complete scratch? UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Tick-tock. Conference Room (Ben Gusberg) - Speaker 1: We’re starting from complete scratch Instagram I have you know I have a private account currently with however many friends I’ve added, which is probably not a lot. Let me tell you, it’s probably like 500 or something like that. Let me see. Conference Room (Ben Gusberg) - Speaker 2: Do we want to use that account or do you want to keep that a private account? Conference Room (Ben Gusberg) - Speaker 1: That’s the question. I have 722. I think it depends on what type of content we’re doing if we’re doing Instagram because I do feel like it’s worth trying to build as big an audience as possible. For regardless of how this two-month sprint goes, because distribution is king, no matter whether we have to pivot the product or whatever has to happen in the future. That’s why I keep, even for Blake, I’m like, what if we have to pivot in two months? Let’s build the biggest audience possible that helps us regardless of whether we make a big pivot in two months, which is why I’m a little bit hesitant. But obviously, I think if you do that, you get to the lowest common denominator and don’t get anywhere. I’m down, but I’m not convinced yet. Again, sorry, this is another ramble answer, but I’m not convinced yet which to do because I’m totally open to, I don’t post that much on Instagram anyway. And if it was helpful to start with my existing Instagram, that would be totally fine to me, depending on what’s the type of content we’re posting. So I would be less experimental if we’re using my existing account. Versus if we’re doing something new. For TikTok, again, full experiment. I think it’s going to be fun just to try all sorts of the weirder, the crazier, whatever. But for Instagram, if we’re using my existing account, then I view it similarly to LinkedIn, where we need to be thoughtful about what we’re doing. I would lean probably more into AI education than I would just random things. Tatem Lindner: OK. I think there are definitely pros and cons there. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: trial reels are trial reels now. Conference Room (Ben Gusberg) - Speaker 2: Okay. It’s a new part of the Instagram app where they’ve kind of taken tech talk and they’ve completely stolen their entire idea of let’s not see, let’s not let other people that you already know, see your content so that you can’t be more experimental. Um, and so for that one, they push your content out to people that don’t follow you. And then if you choose to, you can put that onto your page. So that’s something we can think about if you want to keep your current socials. Um, but if you’re all for like, let’s just completely be experimental and let’s put everything on our page. Um, we can also just create a new platform, um, or a new account, but I’ll think through that and I’ll tell you which one I think would be better because also if we’re just putting it on your current page and it’s going to like your current followers, I don’t know if Jeremy from high school is really to be wanting to interact with your content about AI so I don’t know. Conference Room (Ben Gusberg) - Speaker 1: I think it depends to be honest like I think like if it’s just pure AI education for non-technical folks like I do think that Jeremy from high school I think Jeremy from high school is probably like I do have a friend Jeremy from high school by the way I feel like he it’s like he probably is like curious about AI a little bit scared like a little bit skeptical you know because I feel like you know it’s polarizing versus like, if we’re talking about like networking, I think that like Jeremy from high school is probably less likely to be like, yeah, cool Ben. Yeah. Conference Room (Ben Gusberg) - Speaker 2: Okay. Then maybe we do it. Maybe we take the current page. If you think Jeremy from high school would be interested in it, then I’m all for it. Conference Room (Ben Gusberg) - Speaker 1: My view is that every, like, I think that the TAM of AI content is literally every person in the world because everyone has heard about it and they, they’re, different some people are super excited and going all in and like maybe it’s worth focusing on that segment because it’s an easier you know vibe and then there are some people like my sister who’s like Ben aren’t you worried that like AI is going to destroy the world and all that stuff she’s still interested like I there’s still content that would resonate with her about AI but it’s a different type of content than the person who’s watching Greg Eisenberg’s videos right so I think it’s like the TAM is huge this question is just like which which sub market do we focus I don’t know if that makes sense. Conference Room (Ben Gusberg) - Speaker 2: Sure, that makes sense. So do we have the same persona that we’re targeting on TikTok and Instagram as we’re targeting on LinkedIn? Conference Room (Ben Gusberg) - Speaker 1: I assume so, because the end goal is still the same, those two things, which is one, drive leads to the business, and two, just build my audience more broadly. Conference Room (Ben Gusberg) - Speaker 2: I figured. I just wanted to double check and make sure. And then did you have any specific questions for me? Anything that you’re worried about? Tatem Lindner: it’s in about or some reassurance on this one’s I was telling how this is the one that I’m most excited about just because I know so little about it and I feel like I’m just gonna learn a ton from doing it with you so I’m super excited about it and on the tick-tock side of these excited to be experimental and just like learn how all this stuff works so not many questions I guess the only question is the one I already gave which is like tell me what equipment I need to buy to set us up as well as possible and then two is when you think we would get started. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Cool. Conference Room (Ben Gusberg) - Speaker 2: I’ll send that over to you. Start date, just kind of as soon as I finalize direct strategy and I’m able to create those ideations for you. Probably do seven at a time so that I don’t overwhelm you, but you can also record on Sunday. So maybe we can shoot for a start date of you recording this Sunday. Perfect. Tatem Lindner: Thank you. Yeah, sounds great. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: A big thing that I prioritize is just communication. Want you to know that I will respond to you pretty much ASAP. If it’s not ASAP, I’m probably dead. So you should be worried. Tatem Lindner: I will keep that in mind. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Yes. And I have no self-respect for my personal time. Tatem Lindner: Welcome to the entrepreneur life. You’re an entrepreneur too, so we’re all in the same boat here. Conference Room (Ben Gusberg) - Speaker 2: Yeah. I love what I do and I always want to do more things that I love. This is fun for me, and I’m just excited to be on this journey with you and starting this. But yeah, if anything, if I send you a script or an idea and you’re like, hey, I’m not the biggest fan of this, I will replace that for you. Any edits that you want made, I will make for you. And I have really quick turnaround times for that within 24 hours or less. So yeah, so I just want to make sure that you know that I’m here for you and that no ask is high for the most part. But yeah, I’m excited. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Sounds great. Conference Room (Ben Gusberg) - Speaker 1: I’m excited too. I also try to be pretty quick in response. If I don’t respond, I’m probably not dead, but I might be as well. That’s a pretty high bar I’ll try to live up to. Ben Ornstein: Hey, I’ve set a high standard here, but I don’t expect anyone else to do it. I just want you to know that I’m in your corner. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: I appreciate it. I’m excited. Ben Ornstein: Good, good. Ben, did you have anything else? UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Or Ben? Ben Ornstein: Which Ben are we referring to? UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: I’m talking to you. Ben Ornstein: Yeah, so if that’s all on the video side, for me, for next, so, well, what I’m gonna be doing is I’m gonna be primary point of contact on everything not video related. So, Blake, and Casper will be writing the content. And I will be doing what we call proactive and reactive engagements. So proactive is engaging with content, other people’s content that are relevant to you and your niche and your goals to hopefully kind of steal audience from those accounts. It’s a great strategy. We do it for really all clients. And so I’ll follow up asking for both The accounts that you want that initially like you could give us an idea of like, okay Here’s here the type of people I want to interact with And then second secondary to that which may and probably does overlap The target customer list of like who do you want to engage with to kind of be like, Oh, okay a great engagement on their content will lead to a follow and then a You know, um Ideally becoming a customer so those two secondary lists. I have a message that I’ll send to you right after this For that and then reactive is just replying to the posts that we create for you So like I’ll what I’ll do is on both of those for the first couple times I’ll check in with you You’re like hey Ben. Here’s what I would say in your voice from what I know about your voice um to reply to this comment or to reply To someone else’s post and I’ll give you a few options and you can kind of like guide me like this is closer because of this Etc. And so eventually I’ll learn your voice and I’ll nail it. I get pretty good at that actually, so And I actually I think you know that that I get pretty good at that. So So yeah, I’ll reach out to you on that side of things and then yeah any any questions on that? Conference Room (Ben Gusberg) - Speaker 1: Nope. So I’m going to have the VA, I have a VA currently who helps me with some of this stuff. And so I’ll have them stop whenever you’re going to start. So I’m going to assume that this is all, it sounds like my plan is that I’m going to assume everything’s going to start Sunday slash Monday of next week. But if it starts sooner than that, just, you know, obviously that’s great. But it sounds like, in general, you’re going to take over in terms of commenting proactively on other folks versus mine. One thing I’ve heard, Ben, is for the bigger creators, you want to comment as quickly as possible. I’ll send you some of those folks and we can figure out what the time is that they post every day and all that I’m also in these like engagement groups already. And so we’ll have to figure out what’s the best, like, you know, what’s the best, what’s the best way to do that? Because, you know, it’s kind of a, it could be a large volume. So we’ll have to figure out like what, what’s actually reasonable for you to do, etc. So, but we can figure that out in the coming days and weeks. 100%. Ben Ornstein: Yeah, we don’t ever comment on posts that are over a day old. We just don’t do it. There’s literally no point in doing it. It. So it’s at an absolute maximum one day, but way more often we get within the first hour or two to comment on. And so, yeah, we can definitely discuss, it’ll be like a few days a week, a decent amount of comments. And we’ll discuss, you know, what, what’s the most effective. Conference Room (Ben Gusberg) - Speaker 3: Cool. Conference Room (Ben Gusberg) - Speaker 1: Sounds great. Ben Ornstein: Yeah, I mean, well, yeah, I’ll And then yeah on my side Tatem we can chat about like any workflows that we can combine and Work together on but other than that yeah, I think that’s probably about it for now And if there are any questions I try to make myself as available as possible Tatem may beat me it sounds like But I I’ll try to make myself as available as possible to Sounds great. Micro Meeting Bot: I appreciate you guys. I’m excited about this. Just let me know what you need for me to get started Awesome. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Will do. Micro Meeting Bot: Cool. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: All right. Talk soon folks. Great to meet you guys. Bye. Micro Meeting Bot: Bye.