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- Source: Read.ai 01KNMMQB2JX96Z3PJDMFKV2K5V (via Ben Ornstein’s account, imported 2026-08-06)
Transcript
Conference Room (Nina Lea) - Speaker 2: Inconspicuous. Help, please. Michael Houck: Yeah, blink twice if you’re okay. The funny thing is, that’ll get picked up by the AI bots, and now it’ll say, like, beginning of the meeting, start of the meeting. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Emma, held hostage. Michael Houck: Hey, Emma, how you doing? Hi there, doing well. Emma Sivess: I think Caroline and Chris are just finishing up another meeting that they should be on soon. Lara Kuhn: Cool. We’ve got a big group in this one. What’s up, Lara? How are you doing? Good to meet you. Emma Sivess: Hey, Lara. Hey, Ben. I walked right over you, Lara. You’re muted. So that was just rude of me, actually. I apologize. Michael Houck: I like, sorry, my internet connection is struggling a little bit, but nice to meet you all. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Okay. Michael Houck: Okay. Michael Houck: It looks like Caroline just joined too. And then we’ll wait for, Oh, Chris looks like we’re sitting next to each other. Conference Room (Caroline Dell) - Speaker 2: I’m only doing this because of granola. Michael Houck: Yeah, for sure. Got to get the granola to capture it. Cool. Well, sweet. Okay. Is everyone here? Should we, is anyone else going to join from your side, Caroline, Chris? UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Everyone is here. Michael Houck: Okay, sweet. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Yes, we are good to go. And the only one not on the screen right now. Oh, she’s here. Emma’s here. We’ve got both Emma’s. Michael Houck: Okay, cool. Well, I’m pumped for this. Caroline, I just sent over the docs. Sorry, it was a little delayed. I had to run out and take care of something a little earlier today, but that’s in your inbox for when you get a chance. So just let me know if any changes are needed there and then we can finalize all that. But excited to kick things off. I would say they can go around and do quick intros. Maybe they should be very quick intros because we’ve got a big crew on here. So we can do that. And we’ve got a lot to cover because we’ve got both sides of this. We’ve got the SEO, GEO, AEO side of it, and we’ve also got the newsletter side. So these calls, we normally use them just to kick off both of those processes where we will ask questions from our normal onboarding process just to go deep on you know, who are we speaking to, how do we want to speak to them, what resonates with them, what can we talk about that we think we want to highlight, just like a combination of voice positioning and ICP-related questions, content pillars, etc. So we’ll run through all of that in sequence, but before we dive in, and I guess before we do our super quick intros, any questions from y’all’s side that we should go over at the top? UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Not at the top. Michael Houck: OK, cool. Well, maybe some at the bottom. We’ll see when we get there. OK, so I’ll do a super quick. So I’m Michael Houck. I’m the founder of Megaphone and a few other things. I worked in big tech for five years at Uber and Airbnb. I founded a company that raised a bunch of venture capital and then a venture fund as well. And now I have a creator brand through which we run Megaphone and a few other businesses. The TLDR on me. Emma, do you want to take it next from our side? Conference Room (Nina Lea) - Speaker 2: I’d love to. Hey, guys. Yes, I’m Emma. My history is actually been in kind of head of marketing roles, all channels, ranging from agencies directly for companies. I’ve done SAS, I’ve done airlines, and I’ve really niched down in SEO and GEO. So seeing that kind of organic work compound and genuinely kind of change businesses trajectories is is fascinating to me. So I’m really excited to be working on that. And Nina is on my team. So Nina, let’s do you. Conference Room (Nina Lea) - Speaker 1: Yeah, so I’m Nina. I work directly with Emma on the SEO MGO side of things. My background is actually in the visual creative side of marketing. But when I was freelance, everyone only cared about stats. No one cared about the pretty stuff that I created. So I was like, OK, I’ll go down the kind of stat route and then ended up working in SEO. It’s great to see the kind of organic work that we kind of put in actually pay off and really help websites grow. So yeah, big sites work with you guys. And I kind of appreciate how like beautiful your website actually is, because that’s kind of my background. So I went on. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Andrew, you wanna go next? Conference Room (Andrew Safranko) - Speaker 1: Sure. I’m Andrew. I’ll be a writer. My background is predominantly technology based. I worked at IBM for 12 years and then numerous startups and other technology companies across sales, marketing, product roles, lead product teams, lead development teams, lead design teams. But I’ve always been a writer in the background and it was always a dream of mine to do that full time at some point. And so here I am writing. I manage a bunch of newsletters, I write my own newsletter, grown it substantially, still looking forward to seeing how I can help you guys out. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: And Ben, you want to close it out from our side? Conference Room (Caroline Dell) - Speaker 3: Yeah, for sure. I’m Ben. I’m HAUK’s Chief of Staff. I’ll be working with Andrew and then HAUK on the newsletter front doing all things operations related. I’ll keep it short and sweet with that. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Ben is a Swiss Army knife. He sleeps less than I do somehow. I don’t know how he does it. Conference Room (Caroline Dell) - Speaker 1: As all Chief of staffs are. Conference Room (Caroline Dell) - Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly. Conference Room (Caroline Dell) - Speaker 1: Cool. I’m Caroline Dell. I’m co-founder and CEO. My background is more strategy, operations, chief of staff, not formally marketing, but I’ve worked for some great brands. So I will have feelings and reactions to content and copy probably more so. And Chris can intro himself. Probably have more feelings on the data technical side of the house. Conference Room (Caroline Dell) - Speaker 2: I’m Chris, I’m a tech founder, CPTO, been doing that for a long time, I’m like nine startups in. I have a pretty deep background actually in performance marketing, content marketing, have done a lot of this stuff before and honestly like really disliked it until Claude has made a lot of the TV on things a bit more interesting. It’s a lot quicker to be able to do some of the technical components of tagging, making sure all your images are set up correctly. Also, it’s kind of cool that we have this new world of AEO, GEO, and a system that’s developing there to get content on your sites indexing and influencing these AI engines. So super, super excited. That’s all to say I’m super excited paid doing it here. I am also excited to have you guys though, because I thought maybe by myself and it is a big one. So pumped. In working with me, the one thing that I will really want to make sure we do here is I also do like all of our data warehouse analytics attribution. So I care a lot about tracking, less of like proving is it worth the money that we pay every month, but like we’re trying to learn a lot as a business. What problems are our customers solving? Where do we have great fit? And part of great fit isn’t just product. It’s like, what problem did your users have when they came to the internet to ask a question or query? So I would have a lot of questions and probably ask for some specialized tracking things or data ingestion on the world of like understanding like the people who end up loving our product. Where did their journey begin? Were they looking to find a new job or were they looking to recruit? Like, we’re still in that learning phase. And I think that it’s an underutilized area of keywords, SEO, that kind of space of understanding what problem your user’s really coming to you for. And I would love our copy and brand marketing to still be great brand, but also start to talk a little bit more about solutions to problems. Yeah. Lara Kuhn: I can go next. I’m Emma. I work in customer success here at GoodWord. I’ve been trying to help out a little bit with very limited SEO stuff, working on getting meta tags and meta titles up on our website and also making more content for the blog. So I’m looking forward to working with you on the blog. Michael Houck: What a cool surname, Emma. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Nice. Michael Houck: I love it. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: And I’ll go last. Hi, everyone. I’m Lara. I actually just joined the GoodWord team yesterday as strategy and ops lead. And I’ve been building early stage startups and chief of staff type roles for the past seven years actually in the Berlin ecosystem. So I’m from Berlin, but moving to New York city now. So yeah, pretty excited to be working together. Michael Houck: Awesome. Um, I’m pumped. Okay. We’ve got a full crew, so I want to make sure that we have enough time to go through both sides. Um, I’m going to hand it off, uh, Andrew, if you want to start things off for the newsletter side. Um, and then, uh, Emma, And Nina, we will move over to the GEO, AEO, SEO world after that. And then at the end, Ben will jump in and talk a little bit about process and operations and how this will work on a week-to-week basis going forward. And I will be there to answer any questions and talk about next steps also at the end. But if any of you guys do have questions that come up or things you want to flag as we walk through everything and ask you for your POV, please feel free to stop us, interrupt us. And make sure that you guys get your questions answered here, too. So yeah, Andrew, with that, I’ll turn it over to you, and you can talk about goals for what we’re going to talk about on the newsletter side. Conference Room (Andrew Safranko) - Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure. So whenever we do these kickoffs, we like to do a little bit of a collaborative effort. It allows us to see a little bit more from your perspective, kind of gives you a chance to just off the top of your head ramble on a few topics. And this just gives us an idea of where So in essence, what’ll happen is after this call, I’ll go back and take some ideas that you guys gave us. I’ll put together a laundry list of different thoughts and opinions on where I think we should go based on what we discussed. And then we’ll kind of go back and forth and then you’ll start seeing drafts come through the hopper next week or two. So at any rate, outcomes, basically we’re gonna be looking to get what your goals are in working together. Audience you’re looking to write for, content pillars. I went through your socials. There’s a lot of great stuff there so I’m sure a lot of that will replicate here. Obviously, the voice, what we want to sound like through the newsletter and then obviously, if you’ve got questions and things like that, we’ll talk about that too. So without further ado, I wanted to get a bit of thoughts in and around what the primary goal would be here with the newsletter. So what are you looking to ultimately achieve? Achieve with the publication? Conference Room (Caroline Dell) - Speaker 2: It’s a great question. I mean, I think that everything we’re trying to do here is really around growth and legion. And so I think we’re in actually a really cool space where a very narrow set of people really understand how to use their network to create new opportunity or to find a new role or to like do any of the things that great networkers do. But like, they’re like a very, very tiny group of individuals. Even that group, I don’t think does it formulaically, they usually say things like, I’m great in a room, or, you know, I can do these things well, but I don’t have a system. And so what I would love in the newsletter generally, is almost like widening the market potentially of like, people all have problems that you should be using relationships more to solve? And in that newsletter, how could we both highlight the problems, but also the general systems and solutions? And of course, when it’s appropriate, plug like good word is here to do that. So I want people to first and foremost view us as an authority on like, relationships, building them and using them. But kind of making people understand, I think we are in a market that fewer people that they actually have a problem utilizing their network. It’s something where they’re like, they don’t really realize the opportunity that’s there. So I’m hoping the newsletter can also just build that awareness. That’s maybe the backdrop too. A lot of people are worried, afraid, concerned of like AI is changing the landscape of what hard skills mean at work. Conference Room (Caroline Dell) - Speaker 1: Taking their jobs. Conference Room (Caroline Dell) - Speaker 2: Taking their jobs, yeah, to put a real fine point on it. And at the end of the day, whether you’re moving into a new field, learning a new skill, or just doing anything where you’re not going to lose a job, or maybe there’s a better job, your relationships are something that the AI is not automating away. And we do fundamentally believe that that’s one of the great timing elements of GoodWord is that relationships matter a lot. That’s my general. Conference Room (Caroline Dell) - Speaker 1: Yeah, I’m going to say, I think, pretty much the same thing or a very similar thing. But just from my perspective, I think I think, well, quick story. When I left Chief and started working on this concept for GoodWord, what I heard from potential investors in the market generally was like, why would you build a personal CRM? Consumers don’t want that. A bunch of people have tried and failed. It’s a bad idea. And two years later, it’s the complete opposite, where everyone’s like, relationship intelligence, consumer application of AI, yay, money. And it’s funny how sort of that shift in the world it does feel like we could be in the right place at the right time in like culture and society where it’s this like AI is taking jobs like if my skill set is commoditized what is my competitive advantage it’s my network but like I don’t like networking has always been an icky word and an awkward thing and like I’m not an extrovert I don’t want to go to an event every night like I think there’s so much around what is networking and what is relationship building mean today as a professional and why it’s important. And we, Michael and Emma showed us this in our search terms, like it’s like when people are searching for us, they’re searching for good word, which is awesome that there are people in the world who know what good word is, but it’s still a very small market where like it’s our organic social followers, which is probably 30,000 people who have actually heard good word. Other people are like, how do I get an intro to a job because my resume is getting screened out by the AI screener. So like, I think we need to start to be a voice of authority, but also just like Chris said, build drive top funnel, get leads through people understanding like, this is actually a real problem. And there are lots of solutions and there’s stuff out there of like, how do I be a great networker? We often call them super connectors. And one of our product visions is like, make every professional a super connector. So I think part of that is having a great product for them. But part of that is all of the content and learnings around like, what does it mean to be a great super connector? So I think that’s where a newsletter could play. We have not done this before at all. So just sort of like taking the bet that a newsletter could be a good channel, good new marketing channel for us. Conference Room (Andrew Safranko) - Speaker 1: 100%, definitely, definitely. And that leads to the second question, which is the secondary goals. And to be honest, from my perspective, from what you both said, one of the biggest secondary goals will be education in and around this space, right? The fact that the market isn’t as big as one might expect it to be, especially with the advent of AI doing what it’s doing, but also the folks that you’re focused on, right? Think of the typical professionals who, to your point, are introverts and are scared to go to that event or scared to make that email, that cold email, et cetera, right? I think education and the how-to could be, but I would love to hear. Is there a secondary goal to this besides the typical sort of lead gen building market and things like that? Conference Room (Caroline Dell) - Speaker 1: I like that, and I think there’s a lot of a human psychology behind it that some people have heard of but then sometimes when you describe it to people like Dunbar’s number like you can only have 150 friends people are like oh yeah like it’s sort of it’s like it’s not your fault you’re not a bad networker like it’s the human brain has limitations like good word could be your relationship memory so I think there’s also like there’s like academic type of education that we could make more accessible. Conference Room (Andrew Safranko) - Speaker 1: I like that as well. I think that’s like one of the key parts about a great newsletter is to have that diversity in thought. And so you’re not just hammering home who you are every, every issue, but you’re, you’re veering in different directions, but then eventually tying it back to who you are, if you will. And I love the idea of going into that scientific realm. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: I think there’s a lot of great content there. Conference Room (Caroline Dell) - Speaker 4: That’s cool. Okay. Uh, realistically, If you’re saying this was successful, what are some things you want to see? Obviously, you want to see leads. Are there any other things aside from leads that you’d want to see? Conference Room (Caroline Dell) - Speaker 2: Yeah. Leads, earned media, PR, impression. One goal for this year is to just get enough stuff out in the world that even if it’s small pickups, I would love people to reach out to us. Like, Chris Caroline, would you like to speak on a panel? Give us a quote. Quote, like I write a small blog about the value of connection and would love to, you know, feature you guys like, it’s kind of that world of just, in addition to leads, people starting to inbound us more of like, we want your opinion with you as experts. You know, you guys know more of these than I do. But one group that like did this amazingly, and I love those guys is there’s a newsletter called the Fit Insider. And it’s a fitness kind of thing, Anthony Anvaro I think runs it. Anyway, they turned it into like a recruiting firm and placement agency because they just started talking about every fitness brand out there that was doing something cool. And they eventually became like the most reliable source for anything new in fitness. So much so that if I was going to go look for a job in fitness again, I’m like, I’m not even going to talk to a recruiter or call a brand. I’m going to call this guy who knows everyone who’s ever built anything in fitness. So for me, like the thing that’s interesting is everyone thinks the same about that person who is in the fitness community. So in the world of relationships, I would love people to be like, LinkedIn, that’s just like a place that you go for a station. If I want to talk to someone who’s like really, really focused on connecting, I should talk to the folks at GoodWord. That takes time, but like it didn’t take him more than a year and a half. So it wasn’t 10 years. Conference Room (Caroline Dell) - Speaker 1: No, it was really cool. We did a study, and I use study in quotes, like we surveyed our 500 friends and we did the state of human connection report. And the stat came back that 83% 3% professionals view social capital as their most important competitive advantage in the AI era. It got picked up by Fast Company. We didn’t even go pitch them. Truly, one day, we’re like, shit, we’re in Fast Company. They just cited the research. I think we’re happy to partner with you too, Andrew, where you’re like, if you could go survey a bunch of people, or if you could do something that we right about. I think people like culturally we’re having this conversation. The other angle that I think we have uniquely that like there are a couple of other early stage competitors in this space. I think we have a very human point of view of the world of like how to do relationship intelligence with keeping the human at the center. And so that’s like an angle or a thread I would want to pull on with you where it’s like, okay, everyone else is like, I built like an AI super connector robot board B or like, I built like a networking agent or like agentic people search. And we’re like, yeah, totally. We’re using AI. We want to be, we want AI valuations for our company, but like, we also can kind of take the counterpoint sometimes of like, this is a fundamentally human experience. Conference Room (Andrew Safranko) - Speaker 1: Yeah. The best newsletters I’ve written and red are the ones that do well, I should say, are the ones where it’s got that unique point of view. So love that you’ve said that you’re happy to go get those stats, because that’s going to drive a lot of great impressions and reads and opens, et cetera, all the good stats we need from a newsletter. But that’s going to also drive people to come back, because now they’re going to realize you guys are becoming the voice authority. So I’m going to look out for you in my inbox, because you actually have something unique to say, not just something that’s regurgitated from another source. So I love that. It’s a good one. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Cool. Cool. Conference Room (Caroline Dell) - Speaker 4: Target audience. The best newsletter. So from a writer’s perspective, when I write mine, so like I write my own personal, right? I’ve got like, I don’t know, 21,000 subs now on my own personal. I write about culture. I love shoes. But it’s funny, my next door neighbor in my mind is who I write for. Conference Room (Caroline Dell) - Speaker 1: So I have 20,000 people I write for weekly, but the person so who is like your persona maybe there’s a couple but like who is that that individual that would be your audience you’d say yeah so I’ll what good question I will admit that like we have more work to do here um with Lara joining I actually think one of her first projects might be like go figure out who our 500 paying subscribers are especially like take out our friends like who are the random strangers who have have found us and love good word. Um, I can, there are two people that come top of my mind. One is Katie Dunn, who like is an angel investor, but she posts about us. We post about her. Um, she is a, and then, well, she is a, an executive. She’s probably in her early fifties. Um, she had a whole career in like real estate. She now is like, she works for her but she’s like an advisor. She’s an investor. She’s an angel. She does fractional work. She has a big audience on LinkedIn. She’s got like 20,000 maybe followers, maybe 30,000. So she’s got this big network of people who like know who she is. She does not know who everyone in her network is. I think that is the key thing. It’s like, it’s not one role, although founders, solopreneurs, anyone in a kind of go-to-market commercial role like BD partnership, marketing sales, executives, definitely. But I think that the thread is people who have two things. One, they have an existing large network, because what most of the value prop of GoodWord today is actually managing your existing relationships, like a phase two of our product roadmap is to help people thoughtfully expand and grow their networks. It’s not doing that today. So like it is not the best product for like a college student, an MBA grad, like kind of early career. And the second piece is someone who’s like, they, they have had an experience in their career where they have learned that relationships are really, really important. Like they have connected the dots of like every job I’ve ever had has come from an introduction or like, you know, that kind of epiphany moment where they’re like, this is a thing worth investing in and really really like paying into the system. They might identify as a connector, they might identify as a giver, but they, so some of that like give to get, like Adam Grant writes a lot on these topics. He’s one to look at, but anyway, I think what we could do is send you a few profiles of people we know or like call them our super fans. And then I think Lara, a good project for the next like couple of weeks would be Let’s go figure out, like, let’s do some segmentation of those 500 people. It’s only 500 people and like, see if we can maybe get even a little crisper. I love the idea of like, is it Katie Dunn? Or like, is it Katie and you know, person A and person B? Because it’s like, it’s more about large network state of like mindset around their network versus like a singular profession. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Yeah, that’s right. Conference Room (Caroline Dell) - Speaker 2: The only thing I’d add of like, we should definitely do that. Cause that’s what I think the customer is. But I think there might be an opportunity here of like, and that other bucket of people who are like, I’m a little worried about my career. I’m a little worried about AI. And this is so broad that maybe it’s impossible to target, but there’s like a group of people who are like, I’m seeking something new and other before what I would have done is gone on LinkedIn. And whether it’s for like a job or a different field or information, maybe I was gonna go look for it. And they’re maybe not, what they should be doing is calling all their friends. So the thing that is still true, and that is that you could almost say, well, what does that person look like, It’s anyone who maybe does have that 2000, 3000 LinkedIn connections, but they have them because they’ve been a professional and they’re old, and maybe they’re good at something, but it’s not, I actually fit into this bucket of like, it’s not evident to me that the answer before I started doing this was like, I already know everyone I ever need to know. I know experts in like literally anything I’d ever want to build, but I would never think to hit them up first. Instead I’m like, I’m going to go down on the computer and like solve this thing myself of, and I don’t mean technically, I mean like search for a job. I’m going to build up a resume. If I’m interested in venture, instead of like calling the venture First, I’m going to Google around and try and explore. And I think there are a lot of people like that who have a lot of experience and for years have gotten ahead because they were good at doing work, but it was secondary or tertiary to them that like, people might even like you. All you have to do is like ask for some help sometimes. So I don’t really know the right way to target that group, but there’s an interesting long tail here. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: I feel like that’s the market expansion, piece. Conference Room (Caroline Dell) - Speaker 2: Yeah, but I still think they have some similar characteristics. I still think they’re a little older, have senior, have established relationships versus like, I’m a college student starting my first career. These are like mid-career and beyond people with lots of connections that might be interested in, yeah, I should be using my relationships more than I have historically thought about. Lara Kuhn: Yep, I got you. I know exactly who you’re talking about. I worked with a lot a lot of people like that. They had a lot of, they worked, it was like a career job for them, right? They worked forever and now they’re stuck. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: So, cool. Lara Kuhn: Okay. What does your audience come to you for? UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: You can just jump in. Conference Room (Andrew Safranko) - Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I did. Okay. Regarding like the, the first bucket, like the Katie Dunn type of people, what I would love to understand how you approach this or how you think about this is these people are busy and how much does does it match what we want to put out there as content as versus something that they would actually read like you know if I look at Caroline’s calendar for example she’s a founder she’s super busy like what would make her stop and read our newsletter versus like you know that the themes that we want to bring out there is that actually what audience wants to read? How do you think about that? Conference Room (Andrew Safranko) - Speaker 1: Great question. I’m going to just pause for a second because I know I’ve got Emma and Nina waiting in the wings to go on their side of the house of AEO and GEO. Real quick, I will just say that it’ll come down to a couple of things. One will be the actual topic itself. So, okay, what are we talking about that’s going to relate to their life? So what is it in and around the way they work, the way they operate, where they live? And then how does that then relate to the connection So for instance, what are they looking for in life, right? Could be like, you know, you’ve made it to your pinnacle, what’s the next step after that kind of thing? And maybe you don’t know how to get to the next step and maybe it’s because you don’t realize what you have in your network or you don’t realize what you have as a relationship to others. So that could be one. The other side to that is the way the newsletter actually comes across to the audience. So as much as the writing is important, and this is something I’ll work with you guys on. I’ll happily admit I’m not a designer, but I do have a good sense for what would work in terms of visually how the newsletter comes across, right? So as an example, if it’s a busy person, what do you want them to get out of it? So okay, where do you bold, where do you title, where do you separate sections to ensure that the key point is read, and then if nothing else is, it’s fine. It’s like you got the point you wanted out. So there’s a combination of things. But we’ll happily dive deeper on that for sure. We can set a million calls up after this call. I’m more than happy to jam one of this with you guys. It’s a world I’m very familiar with as well, so. Sorry I didn’t totally answer your question, but I wanted to be cognizant of the time, so. I’ve got a couple more questions on my end. The audience, we’ve kind of jammed on this a little bit, so feel free to just sort of reiterate quick, but what your audience would come to you for. And how they see you in the world, what would you say there? Conference Room (Caroline Dell) - Speaker 1: Right now, I think it is like trusted relationship management. I do think a term that I struggle with a lot is like CRM, where people are like, oh, is this actually my solution to a personal CRM? And I’m like, I don’t want to be a CRM. But it’s like it kind of, you know, they do want relationship management that is not enterprise level. It is like authentic. It is human. It is their relationships. That’s like the personal piece. Um, I think they see us as, as like a product or a tool that could potentially help, but a lot of what they’ve seen been seeing and see is a brand. Um, and that’s like cool people, cool events, like feels like a, you know, um, thing that they’re interested in being, part of I think, you know, we’re actually where we are. We have more work to do on like the product marketing side and getting out in the world. But like, I think what they come to us for is like, maybe this is finally going to be the thing. Like I’ve tried them all. Like maybe this is going to finally be the thing that makes this easier. Okay, nice. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: A couple more and then I’m done. Content pillars, real quick, any topics that kind of burn? If you don’t have them right now, that’s fine, because we’re definitely going to reconnect after this, and I’ll get that from you. But anything top of mind for a topic standpoint? Conference Room (Caroline Dell) - Speaker 2: Yeah, I don’t know. We should probably follow up with you on like a secondary list. But one that I’m pretty passionate about is like how relationships, I don’t want to say they’re changing, but like how much more valuable they are now in the age of AI, like it’s important to us to not be like the AI automation tool so you don’t need relationships. It’s the opposite is that we always struggled to build great relationships because we’re busy and technology only makes us more busy. But for the first time, AI might actually have something to allow you to foster better ones or maybe even save you time, but still keep you at the center. So like I could rant forever on how and why I think that that this is an enablement thing. And honestly, it’s the thing I want to believe with AI, because otherwise it’s like the world just gets noisier and sadder. Conference Room (Caroline Dell) - Speaker 1: I could talk a lot about sort of like best relationship advice, worst relationship advice, or like networking, like networking do’s and don’ts. Like, you know, when to make the ask, like being super transactional versus relationship building. There’s some best practices that we could do like a half Like how to do an amazing follow-up how to like make a thoughtful intro My background is a little more community driven so like I can talk about that stuff. I’d say another good starting point for both teams here It’s like Emma on our side has been writing some blog articles So like we’ve started a little bit to think about like those content areas But I actually think that we should probably have a list that is, again, relevant to both teams of like, what do we want to rank for? Like, okay, networking may be hard as a search term, but like, there’s probably, you know, other things that it’s like, we should, we should, relationship intelligence, there are not that many companies in relationship intelligence, we should show up for that. Conference Room (Caroline Dell) - Speaker 2: I think there’s one more that’s probably aligned with something we should rank for, but a lot of people, even people who are great, networkers don’t, many of them don’t have a system. And I think that there is, we should be talking about great relationships, especially in professional contexts, can be the result of having a really great system to follow up, reconnect with, stay in touch with people, versus I think right now, people do it all on emotion or randomness. Sometimes they think that that’s makes them special, but it’s not the most effective way. It’s not even the best way to be authentic. Like we have a lot more emotional energy to give than our brains can remember the faces and the names and the stuff. And so I think there’s actually a thing here that’s really cool about it is that it can help you bring like that best foot forward. People should use a system to do that. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Like one of our customers said, I thought it was serendipity, but then I found out it was good word. No, it’s true. Conference Room (Andrew Safranko) - Speaker 1: Sometimes you need that kick in the butt, right? So it makes sense. Okay. This is the last one. Oh, wait, I have a couple more. We’ve kind of talked about your unique perspective on these topics. So I want to skip over that for now and then just go to the voice. Cause that’s actually the last piece that I have. In terms of voice, real quick. Actually, you mentioned Katie Dunn, so I’m just going to put Katie Dunn here. How do you want to sound? I kind of have a sense online, but is it the same for the newsletter, from like the blog to the socials? Like, is there a similarity there? Conference Room (Caroline Dell) - Speaker 1: Well, I mean, I would ask if you guys have a recommendation or you’re like, you should sound like very similar across all channels versus like what works great for this specific channel. I’d say our voice has been like authentic, Human first sort of like your your knowledgeable friend But like still kind of like friend friends, but like we’re you know, we have a little bit of expertise here We have a Brandon comms advisor Haley who would be awesome to loop in what we should probably have a follow-up or even like just give her something to react to I Think we do probably have a pretty strong like I like having a strong voice. I will also say I a lot of the other companies in this space, no offense Chris, are founded by like young engineering tech bro dudes and like that’s not us and so like I’ve done a whole women’s history month series recently and like we’re not only for women but I do think like it is the brand is kind of interestingly speaking to people who are like I’m a little more like I want to be authentic, I want to nurture my relationships, like I don’t think this is like a power through like volume spray and pray game. So I do like that sort of voice that we’re carving out. Michael Houck: Yeah. Yeah. I also think that this might be a decision we make either in tandem or after we decide, um, Caroline and Chris, if we want to brand how we want to brand the newsletter, whether it’s around good word brand, whether it’s a new brand, whether it’s around one of you guys, um, kind of a key decision we’ll want to make definitely this week. So we can follow up on that, and then sort of Andrew, we can build the voice based on that decision. Conference Room (Andrew Safranko) - Speaker 1: Yeah, that’s a good point, because we can do your brand, GoodWord, or we can create a whole other brand all together, and then we can slowly just pitch GoodWord in the newsletter. Michael Houck: Yeah, we talked about this on the call before, so they have context there. I want to be really conscious of time, because I know that we’re 20 minutes left for Emma and Nina, and we still have to get to Ben. Sort of the operational side of this. We can maybe follow up on that too. But yeah, so Andrew, anything else that you like urgently need on the newsletter front? Conference Room (Caroline Dell) - Speaker 4: Nothing urgent. Thank you so much, guys. You’ve given me so much already. Appreciate it. Conference Room (Caroline Dell) - Speaker 1: I think my answer first is it is not good word. It is like a separate related brand. Like actually really, I don’t read a lot of it, but Kira Kloss on brand. I just think that’s such a clever name, like on brand about branding and but like it’s her, it’s like buy, buy her, but it has like a brand. So I think there’s something we could, and good word. There’s so many times. Conference Room (Caroline Dell) - Speaker 2: Sometimes I worry a little. I want to get too much off. I think this would be really good if it was off on another brand, unless someone pushes us hard the other way of like, we run the risk sometimes of like, we do need to promote who we are and what we’re building. And I don’t want it to come off as like, it’s yet another transactional sales ploy. And so like, there is a real authenticity, we definitely want to make money need to make money. But like, if we have something that’s almost like supportive and on the side that feels a bit more detached or authentic, but related versus like, we’re literally just telling you guys things you buy our product. I think it might be helpful. Michael Houck: I think it’ll feel more like our ethos. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Yeah. Michael Houck: Yeah. That’s my instinct. That’s my instinct as well about what will fit best here. We can start coming up with some some thoughts on our end about directions to take that different for the actual content, maybe even brainstorming some names with you guys, because I think that’ll be a big part of the decision. So we’ll get to work on that, and then you guys give us feedback and let us know what you think, and we’ll follow up from there. Emma Sivess: OK, cool. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: OK, so Emma, Nina, do you guys want to take it away? And Caroline and Chris, I know we already talked a bunch about this side of things on the first call that we did, or actually Caroline is our second call. Emma, you can just take it from here and go through what things will look like going forward. Emma Sivess: Awesome, cool. Emma Sivess: Yes, I’ll give the context of what we’re looking at, what we’re trying to achieve, and then Nina will share some of the stuff we’ve prepared with you guys and our strategy. And yes, I know not everyone here has heard what we look at, so I’m going to start there. But for SEM and GEO, essentially, there are three pillars that’s really important to get right. The first one is It’s technical. So technical, SEO, and GEO is basically, can your site be crawled? Can it be understood? Is it clear what you do? And can I actually physically show it to the right people so it’s able to actually see what you’re about? We spoke about it on the call, but there’s a bunch of things that we’ll need optimizing, which is our job to do for you. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: We look at a score that’s called website health. Emma Sivess: And we need the site to be a 92% plus site health to be healthy and, therefore, to be able to compete for higher difficulty search terms. If Google specifically sees that a competitor answers a similar thing to you, but their site is healthier, it might be quicker. It might have less duplicate tags. There’s a whole bunch of code elements that go into it as well. But if Google sees that, then it can prioritize competitors, and we can lose some of that traffic. So it’s really important to get right from the jump. So right now, you’re on 76% site health, and 92% plus is our goal, so the first thing we’re going to do is ask you guys for access to the website and then our tech team is going to make sure that it’s all fully optimized. Most of the issues you do have at the moment are really nice easy fixes, it’s things like changing metadata around and just making sure that there’s no duplication there but it’s going to help it be crawled, be healthy and then for our work to see results. The next slide is content and so Nina will share with you our plan but at the moment you guys have a really healthy amount of traffic and it is all all good word it’s all branded and as we spoke about it’s actually amazing that you guys have built that and that people recognize you and are actively searching for you but right now they have to already know about you to find you you’re just not ranking for anything else that matters so for our first few months our goal is really to get engines and crawlers to understand what you do understand what you’re about and then to be able to show it to the right people essentially so Nina will walk through that stuff but we’ve got a whole bunch of keywords we want to target, their volume which we’ll walk you through and then our plans to include them into content. Emma will make sure that’s shared with you as well and then we’ll tag team if there’s anything on your list and we’ve got a whole bunch of keyword research we can share too so we’ll make sure that we’re not going after the same stuff but actually complementing your work and making sure that we can just see faster growth by tag teaming on that front. Conference Room (Caroline Dell) - Speaker 1: Our Emma is signed up to also do, I think you guys are committed to 10 blog, 10 posts a month. Emma on our team is also committed to doing at least 10. But so we’ll, we can, you know, double the forces. So I would just call that out to say for coordination, or if you’re like, these, this is this is the stuff we really want to write for let’s like divide and conquer or like both write posts on this topic, whatever that happens. But we have also a writer. Emma is now a writer. You didn’t know that this was your job, but now it’s your job too. Emma Sivess: I love it. Yeah. We’ll share it through with you and make sure that we’re all on the same page of what we’re writing on, but it’s only going to be a benefit to having more content. So it’s a really good position to be in. And the last thing we’ll look at is links. So for us to get more credibility in the organic space and to see growth, having external authoritative websites linking back to us is a signal to crawlers that actually we’re worth what we’re talking about. A little bit more goes into it. So anchor text and choosing the anchor text that is linked back to us, that helps us to rise in rankings where we need to actually go up in rankings. If we’re positioned 10, 15, we want to get in the top three. That helps us to do that and therefore get more traffic. But also overall, it helps our website be more authoritative. Which means everything we do, everything you do Emma, it has a higher chance to succeed because we are more of an owner in this space and actually we have that credibility too. So they’re the three things we’ll be working on but yeah Nina will get into some of the specifics for you guys now. Conference Room (Nina Lea) - Speaker 1: Yeah so in terms of content I’ve taken loads already from that conversation with Andrew. So Andrew could you share the notes from that with us? I feel like in terms of content loads we can go off there already. But and I’ll go through a thing in a second but I was gonna say in terms of press releases Caroline I’d love to get loads of kind of personal quotes and stuff even just like as you were talking then I was like I could imagine that being really valuable in our press releases and I feel like that would be great kind of from like a founder’s perspective. Emma Sivess: Interesting and actually Nina sorry to jump in, the survey side makes us tick, it is one of the most circulated things that gets picked up up and we work with a whole bunch of businesses and weird and wonderful industries but one of them is a job board and so they’ve got a great amount of data and what’s working on their side and the data driven releases have been picked up and circulated beautifully so anything we can get and jump on there would be awesome. Conference Room (Caroline Dell) - Speaker 1: We need to on our side figure out what to track product metric wise where like like clay.earth used to say like a hundred I’m like, you don’t have a hundred thousand users. Like, I know you don’t. And so like, what are, you know, or like how many intros made or like, like chief actually struggled with this where we didn’t track a lot of like outcome driven metrics. So I’m saying it for Chris and for our team of like, and you guys can push us on this where you’re like, we need like, we need data that some of it can come from surveys with some of it needs to be stories or quantitative data. Like how are people actually using good word that’s something we do hear a lot is like how do I like like I think we’re missing sort of like the social proof testimonials thing of like well what did people get when they used good word absolutely yeah and that’s a huge sales piece as well we need a lot more of that yeah yeah I think for a conversion element too so again we’ll go through it that we have different intent Some people, the goal is to join the newsletter. Conference Room (Nina Lea) - Speaker 2: They’re not ready to sign up right now. Other people were pushing for that. But overall for that conversion piece, actually being able to say, you know, you’re shaping what you’re doing based on data. You’re leading that industry. It’s all with reason and people are behind it. Stats and stories are behind it. People are at the heart of it. That’s, you know, you pioneering a field that actually is emerging. There are people doing it, but no one quite like you. Yeah, I think that is beautiful for business growth. Conference Room (Nina Lea) - Speaker 1: OK, so in terms of content, we have created brand guidelines that we know align with your current website and your current tone of voice and everything like that. And this goes through a lot of the conversation you just went through with Andrew. So I won’t bore you with the whole document. But what I will say, because there’s a few chefs in the kitchen all kind of writing content and things, is brilliant. We just need to make sure that we’re all using the same tone of voice. So I will send this over afterwards. And it’s a live Google Doc. So I feel like, Emma, if you’re writing the content, maybe go in and make some amendments and obviously make sure it’s all good with the team. But I feel like this is why we need to start kind of before any content is created, just to make sure that it’s all nice and seamless and it doesn’t, you know, it all looks like it’s in-house, which I think, yeah, this is the main kind of starting point. So I won’t bore you with that. So I’ll go into the keyword research. So we’ve gone away and created a big old document with all of the keywords, the volume, the keyword difficulty. So for example, social capital has a brilliant high volume and a really low keyword quality so this would be a brilliant keyword to use in your content moving forward. What I will say again this is a live doc so before we get started again I’ll send it over and you guys have a look through and if there’s anything on here that you think no that’s not what like what aligns with us not what we want to kind of write about moving forward if you could just highlight it in red and but we’ll keep it on there because it’s good for us to keep track of what not. Conference Room (Caroline Dell) - Speaker 2: I don’t want to waste too much time on this, but this is the kind of thing where I would love to understand how some of these shift a little over time, so I would love to coordinate with you guys of what you use for measurements on this type of research, so I can set up like a similar infrastructure here and just like store something every few days in the database, because this is great. This will also help me think about paid ads and some of the other components that we’re running, so we can talk about data coordination and stuff later, but this is great. I can also pull it out these sheets, obviously, but maybe there’s a better way that we collab on it. Conference Room (Caroline Dell) - Speaker 1: The other thing that would be really helpful as you send this over is like, just give us a little maybe a little bit of a legend on like, keyword difficulty and volume like what you’re like, anything with difficulty above 80 is going to be like really impossible or like, you know, here’s like, I just see the numbers don’t mean a lot yet. So that context would be great, but definitely can look through and like social capital I looked at that and I was like, I mean, that was the word we use when in that 83% stat, 83% think that social capital is our competitive advantage in the AI era. And it’s like, I agree when I read that, I’m like, I should start saying social capital in my personal LinkedIn posts. Like it’s just a term that maybe we start to adopt more than like personal CRM. We could talk, there’s some probably brand guidelines and you had it there of like, it is not a personal CRM, but like, we could probably write a post that’s like, we could say like, you know, what is a personal CRM in AI era? Or like, we could say, what is our take on that word? Conference Room (Nina Lea) - Speaker 1: Yeah, 100%. That’s absolutely fine. We’ll send that over afterwards with a brief explanation of what each one is. But once you’ve done that, if you just highlight anything that you don’t want us to go ahead with, that would be brilliant. And then we also based off the keywords so this is open to changes if the keywords change we have got a three-month content plan which I know will come in handy with Emma with you writing content as well just so you know exactly what to expect. So for example the main keyword on this one is social capital and that’s the primary keyword that we touched on earlier and the title would be what is social capital and why it matters now more than ever and then we’ve got more in detail about what kind of the explanation behind the blog post as well and but again we can write that up and a brief explanation to send it over to you after the call. Emma Sivess: And that will tie in as well with some of the keyword difficulty will definitely give you an overview but every article it will target clusters, so some of them it will rank for more quickly, other ones you might sit at a 100 while, 80 for a while, it’s still good for your footprint, it still helps you to grow, but just a note on the keyword research that actually if it is super high difficulty it doesn’t mean it’s a no, it just means it’s not how we win now, but actually at this point of your business journey being able to start ranking for it even if it doesn’t bring you traffic yet is only beneficial for you growing, so don’t get too scared if anything’s super high difficulty. It’s all kind of part of the overall growth plan. Conference Room (Nina Lea) - Speaker 1: So yeah, we’ll send everything over and now is the time to make the changes. So go ham on kind of editing the document. Don’t be offended, like the work that we’ve done, like go ahead and make all the amendments because now is the time to do that. But yeah, super excited. I’ve had all the ideas. One thing I would say is I know you guys mentioned LinkedIn. In a blog post or press release, are you comfortable with us kind of using the names of other platforms to kind of raise a bit of traffic and traction that way? Or do you want us to leave that at the moment? Conference Room (Caroline Dell) - Speaker 1: I think we have to name things. We could maybe have a conversation about how we want to position against LinkedIn. Like, we’ve been very, very soft in that so far because we don’t want LinkedIn to step on us before we get off the ground. But what’s funny is sometimes when I tell people the concept behind GoodWord, their reaction will be, can you kill LinkedIn? And I’m like, well, that might take some time. But, you know, it is interesting. And so I do think there’s probably some. I need to get comfortable. I saw some of the suggestions of like X alternative. Alternative. Like, I think that’s the reality of what people are searching for. I’ve sort of been in a make friends, not enemies. There’s like a lot of white space in this space mindset, but I’m willing to be pushed. And I think like, for example, for that, I might not do a LinkedIn post promoting the blog of like, why Good Word is better than Dex. But I would do a LinkedIn post about the like, what is social capital and why is it important to help like amplify or like maybe we post that also from GoodWords, LinkedIn, where it’s like, that feels more like our brand. If we do need to do some of the competitive comparisons for search results, like aim to be told we should start to do some of that. But I do, LinkedIn is probably the one we just want to be a little bit sensitive because we do actually believe that LinkedIn will still exist and like be a great place for your public resume. It serves a different function. And so maybe that’s a post of like, it’s just, this is like your public resume where you build an audience and GoodWord is where you manage your relationships. Emma Sivess: Yeah, of course. Well, we can start with a soft approach, get some traction, and then we discuss that. It’s nothing, it’s just something that came to mind. Emma Sivess: Yeah, and that can specify if the goal is not to, you know, smear but actually what you’ve done is better, it’s a better alternative for many people and so being able to rank for their search terms without saying this is a bunch of trash, choose us, is really useful for growth as well but we’ll make sure we’re on the same page there. Nina will follow up after this call but we’re going to ask you for website access so we can start to work on the technical stuff. She’ll send you through the docs she’s shared and then we’re also going to ask you for Google Search Console and Google Analytics access so we can report and track what we’re doing truthfully and wholly with the data in the back end, but we’ll send that all in our follow-up. Ben Ornstein: Awesome. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Cool, thank you. Ben Ornstein: Okay, I know we’re coming up on time here, but Ben, do you want to talk through just how we are going to handle the operational process of getting the newsletter started in particular from here? Conference Room (Caroline Dell) - Speaker 3: Yeah, for sure. So, we’re going to handle the vast majority of everything the automation setup, many of the backend stuff to actually get the newsletter running. There will be a few asks from your end. We’ve got a checklist that kind of describes what you’ll be doing, what we’ll be doing on our end, and what we’ll be collaborating on together. And so I will follow up on the asks, including like actually setting up the Beehive account and then adding us to it. And yeah, so I invited all of you to the Notion space already. And so we’ll get that all cleaned up and finalized. And then we’ll be providing weekly content within there. So that’s probably all that’s worth mentioning right now, given the time we have. Michael Houck: How do we work together? Is it mostly in Slack, like we just ping each other in Slack and then the stuff goes in Notion and like you guys give us a heads up when things are going live or like I guess maybe quick quick ways of working obviously small teams. Michael Houck: So whenever we’re gonna write out a new issue Andrew will share some questions with you guys in Slack and we just want sort of rambly voice notes back from you for that like your POV to make it sound uniquely like you because that’s what we want. We want it to sound like something no one can get any Um, so if we get those back from you, you know, there’ll be how we shape the piece. If we don’t, we’ll still put the piece out on sort of the schedule that we, um, we, we plan to, and you will align on sort of what the best time of day for you guys is and things like that with day of week, et cetera. Uh, you know, we can go with a few different options there. Um, but, uh, if we get those from you, they’ll, they’ll shape the piece. And then, um, our team handles all scheduling and, uh, reporting of how the piece did and and things like that, we’ll report that in Slack. If you guys want to do sort of content interviews, especially as we talk about maybe doing social down the road or something like that, if we wanna do recurring content interviews, we can do that too. But because we work with super busy founders, we know that it’s tough to do that. So our default process is async through Slack. But again, up to you if we want to hop on calls on a recurring basis, that’s fine. Okay. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: We’re definitely open to it, like open to anything that would be helpful. So you guys are the experts. Tell us what would be helpful and we will see if we can deliver. Like, even if it’s like, um, I spoke on a panel and I’m going to send you my granola transcript from the panel and like, you guys can pull from it. Or, you know, you’re like, you guys should really do another survey. Like, okay. So, so tell us what would be helpful for creating the content. Michael Houck: Okay, cool. Yeah. Andrew will be on that. Um, and then Ben will be on it specifically for the sort of, uh, onboarding a welcome sequence that we set up through the newsletter and things like that. You’ll get that from us in Slack. If we’re just doing the bi-weekly newsletter, I don’t think we should need to do content interviews, but we’ll see, right? As we walk through the first couple issues, we’ll see what the needs are. On our end, I think that’s all for today. I know we went over a lot. Anything else that we should cover while we have everyone on the call from your you guys said. Conference Room (Caroline Dell) - Speaker 2: Not right now. Everyone’s got individual, I’ve got a couple things I might follow up with each one of you guys direct on, not each one, a couple of you on, but I think I’ve got all of your emails on the chain, and then I guess soon we’ll be in Slack. Conference Room (Caroline Dell) - Speaker 1: Everyone’s in Slack. We’re in Slack. Conference Room (Caroline Dell) - Speaker 2: Is everyone that’s on this call in Slack individually? Okay, cool. Got it, great. Conference Room (Caroline Dell) - Speaker 1: Okay, great. Cool. Awesome. Kickoff with you guys. This is like feeling like really good timing on our side with the start of Q2 team members coming on who can support from our side. And so yeah, really excited to see we’re as a company moving marketing like, away from mostly an events like IRL mode of go to market and trying to test some other channels that’ll give us the digital reach now that GoodWord is officially launched. I’m excited to see how these, how these start rolling. Micro Meeting Bot: Sweet. I think Caroline, both the, I think I mentioned this at the beginning, both the agreement and also the Stripe link are in your inbox. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Great. Okay. I’ll take a look at that. Micro Meeting Bot: Thanks everybody. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Thank you guys. Bye. Micro Meeting Bot: It’s a beauty.