- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01KPBHH5FPSFW4S7N2E67VQ4HQ (via Ben Ornstein’s account, imported 2026-08-06)
Transcript
Michael Houck: bi-weekly interview with Jeff from Mantis, where I ask him a question and then he says, oh yeah, that’s a good one. Ben Ornstein: And then just doesn’t respond. Doesn’t say anything. Michael Houck: Gives me no context. It’s like pulling fucking teeth, man. So bad. Ben Ornstein: He’s a very easy client to work with though, which is good. Yeah. Michael Houck: No, for sure. I’m not disparaging. His post would do better if he gave me more of his actual opinions on things. Ben Ornstein: Yeah, for sure. For sure. Michael Houck: How are you doing? Ben Ornstein: I’m not feeling great. Yesterday sucked and still not feeling great. Just I don’t know if it’s like a 24 hour bug or or what’s going on. Michael Houck: But yeah, I mean, take it easy. Like, There was something going on going around down here like last month, so maybe it’s made its way up there. I don’t know. Ben Ornstein: Yeah, so I’m just trying to push through and just keep things keep things moving forward so. Michael Houck: Well, if you need to take the afternoon or tomorrow or whatever, like please do what you gotta do, you know? Ben Ornstein: Yeah, it’s it’s all good. I’m I’m I can still work. Michael Houck: OK, well, let’s go through. I know there’s too much today, because we’ve been in such kind of close contact all week. But let’s go through them. Let’s start with the other the other stuff at the bottom. Ben Ornstein: Yeah, so tomorrow, I just I think I told you about the random RS crap. So I’ll just be going to leave really early here tomorrow morning to have to drive like an hour to get to the spot. Hopefully that’s all done and taken care of But so I’ll be beyond you back kind of like 10 or 10 30 something like that. And thing is so the wedding is literally one month from today, which is insane to say. Ben Ornstein: That’s crazy. Michael Houck: That’s exciting, though. Ben Ornstein: Yeah, we’re we’re really excited. And so yeah, I I’m going to do everything I can. Venus is slowly taking more and more on on the proactive engagement side. She is actually starting to you know, log into the accounts and like doing the engagements herself and everything. So like she’s getting more and more independent. I’m, I’m feeding things to her more and more to like, you know, become more and more independent right now. It seems like things are going well. So, um, there are a lot of very specific things on like the Ben Gussberg account. So like very, I mean, he’s, he’s been a pain in the ass. I, I will not, I can’t, I don’t want to sugar coat that at all. Michael Houck: No, dude, he’s texting me at like 12 a.m. Every night with like, this image was terrible. I’m like, okay, like, I don’t know. Ben Ornstein: There’s only so much we can do. I’m doing the best I can. I know Blake is, I don’t even want to know how Blake’s feeling. Doing what we can. But regardless, on that side, Venus, yeah, She’s following directions, she’s logging out of the account, she needs to, she’s getting better on that. Veena or Reena is gonna start to take over the content scheduling side. So like there’s a little bit less on my side there. So just wanted, the more important thing was just to provide the context that like, we’re one month away from this, I’m doing what I can to like offload stuff. Michael Houck: Yeah, I mean, there’s two reasons to do this, right? I mean, there’s three, one is just your general bandwidth up, right? That’s number one. Number two is because you will be out sometimes, right? And number three is because when we do, when we go through with the acquisition, we want to just be able to hand them a system, right? We don’t want you to have to be part of that deal in any way, ideally. So even if it’s like a part-time thing, I don’t want that. So the more we can get them autonomous and get them off of having to check with when you are out for that week, what you’ll probably need to do is give me guidance on how to manage them in this process just to make sure they’re not making mistakes. But it’s just the one week, so I don’t think it’ll be too bad. But you’re gone a whole week, basically, right? Ben Ornstein: So I think we’re not really doing the whole honeymoon thing. It’s going to be something small where leave for like, we’re not going to do like a whole like, you know, vacation outside of the States or anything. So the weddings the 16th and then we’ll be back like, Wednesday night, the 20th. So like if I may end up working Thursday, Friday, but it might be in like a lighter capacity. We’ll see. Michael Houck: Yeah, I mean, honestly, just take take the week, you know, like, it’s fine. If there’s something on or Friday that’s like blowing up or that I’ve been sort of waiting to say, I’ll just text you at that point, but otherwise like don’t plan to log in, like take the time, you know? Ben Ornstein: Yeah, yeah, well, she might even be going back to work Thursday, Friday for like a specific thing where she’s trying to get this big job right now and like meeting all these people, it’s important for her, so. Michael Houck: That probably takes some time. Some stress off too, you know, she gets it. That’s good. Ben Ornstein: Yeah. Yeah. It’s she’d make like three X the salary. So it’d be maybe like two, two little under 2.5. It’s, it would be massive. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: So fucking exciting, dude. Ben Ornstein: Yeah. Yeah. So that’s on that side of things. Um, but on the acquisition stuff, was that doc that I filled out, filled out yesterday, was that Haven’t had a chance to look at it yet. Michael Houck: Acquisition stuff is on my plate for tonight. Got it. But thank you for doing that. I’ll go through my Read AI recordings, too, and try to find what I can. I’m sure there’s some way back in the day. Ben Ornstein: It’s so unfortunate I didn’t have Read AI up until recently, because I have no meetings from the megaphone demos. I looked everywhere. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: It’s OK. Michael Houck: No worries. OK. Let’s see what else. Oh yeah. Okay. So let’s, let’s backtrack from the 15th of next month. Let’s backtrack the next month for open claw. Cause I think more than the engagements, even that’s my bigger, like in a worst case scenario, I can go to our clients and I can just be, Hey, Ben’s getting married. We don’t have someone to do it. Like, you know what? That’s okay. I have to do that. We’ll give them like a little bit of a discount. Or whatever, like it’s fine. But the bigger thing is our roadmap for the open class stuff, right? So obviously those systems are relatively autonomous once they’re running, so you don’t need to be there to like manage them on a day-to-day basis. But the question is, what do we want to scope in for the next four weeks to ensure that we have built what we want during that time? This is a good marker, right? So we’ll go through and and do that. Um, I also wanted to flag, since we’re talking about out of office stuff, I wanted to flag that the end of June, really more than beginning of July. So from like, uh, it’s like two weeks, it’s like, uh, Monday, the 29th of June. I mean, we’re, we’re leaving on Friday, the 26th, probably like on the plane and we’ll be in New York for a day. So it’s fine. But from really Monday, the 29th through Sunday, the 12th of July. I’m gonna be in France and Italy and I’ll have my laptop, but there are gonna be some days where I’m like not online so much. So figure out that schedule as we go, but it’s not like I’ll be out of office or anything, just a heads up for you that both with the time difference and also, you know, doing things, So on my plate is making sure that content systems are up and running by then autonomously. And also we get some sort of extra sales and growth effort. But during that time, my guess is that I’ll need to rely on you a little bit more for general account management stuff with some of the studio clients. But we’ll see, by then we might not even have studio. Yeah. So yeah, a couple of things on that. Ben Ornstein: Ideally, we want to be able to do that. I mean, in an ideal scenario, maybe we don’t even have to deal with it. And then second, so just to flag, just because we’re talking about it early, so early July, I always go to Maine with my family. So again, I’ll have my laptop. I’m not gonna be completely off, but I’m also more like sparse in terms of work around then. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Is that like that same week, like post July 4th or pre-July 4th? Ben Ornstein: It’s usually like the last day we’re there. I don’t exact dates, but it’s usually like if the fourth, yeah, it’s probably like Wednesday, the first through like the Sunday, the fifth. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Okay. Yeah, that should be fine. Ben Ornstein: That’s usually, yeah. But after that, I would obviously be back full speed. Michael Houck: OK, so this is in a couple of days leading up to July 4th holiday. We’ll just let people know that, hey, it’ll We can give a heads up about that. That’d be good. OK, so let’s talk OpenCloud stuff, the top two kind of items on here, because I think that they’re sort of related, which is like scoping the FJ one and then prioritizing afterwards that versus other stuff for Megaphone. Or not for the content agent Casper plus. So let’s talk about the open cloud one first. So you saw that message that I sent after the one on one flag. Ben Ornstein: Yeah, I honestly haven’t, I haven’t had time to look into it, or like really actually think about it, but I did see it and I noted it. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Just, I mean, maybe just take a second right now and just Read through it real quick and like digest and then we can talk about. It. Ben Ornstein: You so skills we want the agent to have after it collects the info for a subscriber basically. Michael Houck: Yeah, it’s like Blake, Blake through this idea of like Stuart this idea because we had, I’m doing a couple calls with like AI workflow automation agencies to white label one of them. And one of them actually seems pretty promising that’s all another conversation. Yeah. Um, yeah, the thought was like, we were talking to this one that literally just built like a, like a one-off agent, basically without open call before open calls. It was like kind of last gen tech at this point. And I was like, well, it’d probably be easier for us to just build that ourselves. We’re already building the FJ voice agent, for example. And Blake was like, yeah, but like people want to be able to do things with them. And I was like, yeah, of course. And he was like, well, what about at the end of those onboarding? It prompts them; it gives them the CTA of like, hey, like enjoyed this call. We’d love to keep helping you out. You know, if you want to hire me as your chief of staff or sounding board or whatever, go here and I send them a link or something like that. And like, I thought about that and I was like, okay, that’s cool. Cause we can keep learning more about them. But what’s really cool about it is that we can market through it. It’s like an untapped, really high trust, very personalized marketing channel that is totally no one’s doing this right. And so if it connects to their Slack, it can Read their Slack, it can learn what their company’s problems are, and then we can propose the white labeled services that we have under FJ to them and have me, like the real me, hop on the call. What do you think about that? Ben Ornstein: I think it’s really cool. And it’s super interesting if it could collect, like I’m thinking if it goes in someone else’s like Slack, man, there’s so much data that we would just get on that person. So not only things that we can market to them, but like problems that they’re having that we could then remarket other solutions for to them. There’s a million possibilities. Michael Houck: Yeah, I mean, we can definitely go like an affiliate route with it too. But the strongest play is like we can just inject those organically. Like what’s a solution for this but I don’t want to be like spamming them like you know software products right what we want to be doing is deepening the relationship by you know selling our services essentially so I think I mean I think that’s like a marketing channel in the future I think it’s super exciting um like think about it if Casper Casper has access to our Slack I know only the channels that he’s in or whatever right but that’s a permissions thing we can set default to do whatever we want. If Casper joins somebody Slack, but Casper is me, right? It’s like Michael Hawthorne or whatever. And it sees all these conversations and they’re like, Oh man, you know, even someone just mentions like, be great. If we were showing up in organic search more, we should look into that. Then Casper messages the CEO and it’s like, Hey, your marketing person is looking for some help. With organic, your finance guy is saying you guys have budget for it. That totally fits into what we do. Hop on a call with the non AI version of me and we talk about it. Like, come on, like that’s unfair. You know? UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: That’s what I was saying. Like that’s so cool. That’d be awesome. Yeah. Michael Houck: So I think that’s the move. I think it’s like, Raphael’s building out the sort of like infrastructure of this voice thing. But I think the move is for you to work with him to build out like the Slack implementation of that and have it learn me. Right. So I’ll probably need to get on a call with it for like two hours and just talk to it and give it more context on me, and we’ll feed it in all my content and how I talk and how I talk in Slack and all that stuff. But it’s such a high leverage point. I feel like people would pay, people would literally pay us money per month in order for us to have a marketing channel. In their Slack, which is insane. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: So basically be building out the Michael Halkpot? Michael Houck: Yes, exactly. And teaching it what to look for, teaching it when our services, how hard to pitch them, things like that. We probably need to train it on transcripts of my sales calls so it knows how I talk Yeah. But I don’t know. I think it’s pretty compelling. So let’s add that to the backlog. And then we can prioritize it now against some other stuff. OK. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: OK, I just added it as a feature in the back. Michael Houck: Cool. OK, so then I guess if we’re going to do next month prioritization, what we want to accomplish by the time you’re out for a week, catch me up to where we’re at right now with Eddie. Are we good? Is he set? I guess aside from little bugs that pop up from time to time. Ben Ornstein: Yeah, the little bugs that pop up from time to time. There’s random things where he’s answering when he clearly was not asked, things like that. But I mean, in terms of like his core work, he’s he’s working. He’s actually working. It’s so cool to see. Yeah, think he’s for the most part, like fully functioning. Michael Houck: Like I like how he sticks to the script. Right. Sometimes he misses the voice bibles, which I don’t know if that’s like a little bug or something, but he knows what to look for. He does look for it. And he does pass it back to Casper when there’s errors, you know. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Yep. Ben Ornstein: And Casper is properly, now properly saying, okay, here are the edits, making the edits and passing it back to Eddie. It’s great. I guess it is working. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Yeah. Michael Houck: I think it’s honestly amazing work. How fast you were able to do that one is incredible. So, okay. So we’ve got that. So what are our candidates in your mind for what we should prioritize? Ben Ornstein: So, the biggest, the most high leverage one, but easily going to be the hardest by far to build is the design agent. But if we’re able to build that, it will be huge because we’ll be able to, I just don’t know how we’re gonna be able to prompt it to be able to learn a client’s unique style and stick to that. Imagine that’s going to be very difficult. I just, yeah, I’m not saying it’s impossible, but I think that one’s going to be very difficult, but also the highest leverage. Michael Houck: I mean, we need a designer in the room, right? Like you and I, we could figure it out, but we’re not designers. We better have a designer in the room who can help us with that. So like Celine does a lot of social media design issues. Is she like world class at design? No, she’s not, but she’s good. So I think there’s an option here where we just pay her a little consulting fee basically for her to spend a bunch of time with you and also with like talking to a bot basically. So I think that’s a move there, but we need to define what that looks like, Yeah. What do we need from her specifically? So that’s a question, but I agree. Like it’s a definite missing piece right now. And I honestly think it’s a reason why some of our clients haven’t seen good results is because at the end of the day, we know that image and GIF and short video content does better. And I mean, with Tatum now we’ve got the video side covered at least, but with images, you know, some clients don’t like them. And some clients do well without them, but it’s better to have them, right? And we don’t do that consistently enough right now, and the writers don’t know how to do it. So it’s a gap on the team. So, okay. That’s a good one. What else is high leverage? Oh, sorry, go ahead. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: How good were the YouTube scripts that Casper and Eddie were making? Michael Houck: So the keeper one I recorded last night and I really liked it. I had to go in and make some tweaks, but honestly not that extensive tweaks. Like I went through it once when I was sitting on the couch before I recorded it and probably changed, I don’t know, five or six things took like 15, 10 minutes. And then I came in here and I recorded the video and um, when I was going through the script, I was like, oh, this actually doesn’t Read like I thought it would, you know? Just like it sounded good on paper, but then I go to Read it and like, oh, it’s not natural. So I cut out a couple extra lines there, like maybe three or four lines top. So all in all, my editing time was 15, 20 minutes on this thing, less probably. Ben Ornstein: That’s absolutely insane. Walt, so because that’s the case, I wonder, we should probably deprioritize for sure, I mean, unless, okay, here’s the thing. Michael Houck: Unless it’s gonna be super quick, right? Like up Eddie in like two days, basically. That’s how it felt, I don’t know. So if we can spend two days and have one that is materially better at TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, we should do it. We can train them on those playbooks, like the George Blackman, the Patty. I’m sure there’s more people like them out there who talk about YouTube, right? We can do that. So I think it’s like, it’s medium impact, but it sounds like it’s maybe small size. I don’t know. Ben Ornstein: Maybe, maybe. The reason Eddie was easier to build was because he was sort of plugging in for the most part into Casper’s workflow, whereas like, This would be, I mean, it would, I don’t think it would, again, because we have, this is what I said before about Eddie, a lot of the, because the core files are there and we’ve like filled them out with a lot of important context, it makes things easier. I imagine this one wouldn’t be insane, but it would be different because it’s gonna be functioning on its own a little bit. Michael Houck: And give me some context on this. Is Eddie specifically trained on LinkedIn and X, or is he trained as a general sort of editor who we could give like a, here’s how to edit LinkedIn, here’s how to edit YouTube skills to? Ben Ornstein: I think it’s a general editor based on like the stuff that Blake has given for like editing content. So not specifically for like LinkedIn or X, or I think it’s just like content in general. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Okay, so we would just need a file like that, like what Blake for another platform, another use case, and he would know to pull that basically. Ben Ornstein: Yeah, I think that would work. I would be like, hey, Eddie, this one’s literally just for YouTube. Every time you’re editing content for YouTube, pull this file. That’s basically what we would say. Michael Houck: Right. I would love it if we have Casper, Phil, whoever else, and they all funnel up into Eddie, and Eddie is just like the editor layer, the editor brain. Ben Ornstein: That would be easy. Yeah, that would work. So yeah, basically we just need one like master file for ready to reference them. Yeah. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Okay. Michael Houck: Okay, so Phil is a contender, less important right now because Casper can get us some of the way there. But, and this is the reason I still think it’s worth keeping on the list. To my to the point I made the other night, maybe it was last night in one of the threads, we have solved the problem of creating; we have not solved the problem of how to create viral content. Right. And that’s, what’s going to make this thing good. We need proof points. We need testimonials. We need it to be special. We need it to be worth 200 bucks a month or more. We need to be worth 2000 bucks a month, but we just charge 200, you know? Yeah. That’s there’s some deeper work there. Um, that’s even maybe another, another work stream here is like how to make outlier content truly, right? And that there’s a lot that goes into that. But that’s like another thing we could focus on. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Yep. Michael Houck: There’s a couple other agents we’ve talked about here, like we have client voice reviewer, I’m actually not exactly sure what that one is. Michael Houck: Like, oh, this, this is the client advocate. This is the, the additional editing layer after Eddie, that is like the voice of the client, because Eddie is just trained on practices, each client needs their own implementation. Who knows their voice. I think Eddie might have context on the voice Bible, like I think he checks that he does, but like he tried to check it for me, he like missed it one or two times or something, but regardless if we fix that, like, is that the best structure, maybe it is maybe it’s like not going to impact his context window. Maybe he’ll be able to pull everything in and do it. But my original thought was it’ll be better to have a guy who’s a really good editor. And each client has their unique voice that they pass it through too. So, cause like, think about it. What’s the real process of an agency, the writer drafts, the content, the editor makes sure it’s good. And the client reviews it and the client gives their feedback based on what they want. And That’s the most annoying step. And so like, I want to be able to remove that. It’s more, it’s one because I want them to be happy with the content, but two, it’s because I want them to trust that they don’t need to be involved in the review process. Right. So I do think like we can say Eddie does it too, but I think that there’ll be more confident if it’s like its own thing that they personally trained or. Okay. Don’t you think so? Or am I, am I off base here? UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: No, I, I, I think that makes sense. Yeah. Michael Houck: So, I mean, I, again, I don’t think that’s necessarily the most urgent thing. But it is, it is something that I want to keep on the, on the docket. Ben Ornstein: The other thing I was thinking about is what we were talking about before where we don’t want the Acquirers to get To get this at all. So we need to make this clear that it’s something outside of just the ghostwriting related stuff, so we could build the partnership side of this. Although now I know Blake’s involved and I don’t want to scare him With like the builds here. So that would be the only consideration there Yeah, that’s true. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Um We’ll see. I don’t have a strong POV on that right now, but it’s a good flag. Okay. Ben Ornstein: And then we’ve got like the research agent that we could build, like just an agent literally dedicated to research. I like that. This one could be massively important because then Casper doesn’t have to use like the, I mean, there is some like a, It’s a deep research skill sort of, but it’s not, I feel like it could probably be better. I agree. And like tapping the research aid and saying, Hey, whatever your name is, like just doing that autonomously would be big. Michael Houck: Okay, I like that one. I do I do think that research is a unique skill. I do think that it’s probably requires a different mindset. And set than what we’re giving Casper at the end of the day. So like, you know, it’s the same thing, like who’s going to do better research, Jacob or you, it’s going to be you, you know? So, okay. I like that one. That’s on the list. What else we got? UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: So we have like the TikTok real short scripting agent. Well that’s that’s also Phil, but like I guess that one was you put filmmaker next to that one but I guess that one’s different than YouTube. Ben Ornstein: Yeah, I don’t know. I don’t know if they should be different or not, to be honest with you. Ben Ornstein: I feel like if they had, if they’re, if Phil’s sole thing was short form and long form, like that was the only thing he did was just scripting for those two. We could easily fit both into a context window and still have really good results. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Okay. Ben Ornstein: Let’s, let’s consider that then. Okay. Let’s see. Oh, and then there’s the whole onboarding thing, right? Ben Ornstein: That’s the biggest thing that I, I can’t seem to figure out like the best way to build this. Cause I want to be, I want it to be robust, but I also want it to be like easy on the user because like my first implementation was like 40 questions. Like if someone didn’t do the intake form at all. Michael Houck: Well, here’s, here’s the thing, right? We did it as those questions in Slack. I guess we could do it Slack with voice notes and that’s fine. Like, I know I pushed back on that initially, but then after reading that, that blog post, I actually think like, maybe that’s better. But it could be set up where it’s like, like that guy seems like a, Like he’s orthodox, right? He’s like, you have to do a hundred questions. You know, we don’t really need to do a hundred questions. A hundred questions is better than 99. It’s worse than 101, but there’s no, he’s arbitrarily picked a hundred, right? So in theory, what we could do is this. We could have somebody on board. You could add them in Slack or whatever. And then they could be like, you know, Hey, I’m Casper. I’m gonna walk you through your onboarding. Just a heads up. The more questions I have, I have 100 questions for you. The more you answer, the better this will sound like you. I know it takes time, but give me as much as you can. And if we only get 10, if we only get 20, if we only get 40, we make it work. But we’ll then see how far do they need to get in order for them to have better results on social and stay around longer retention-wise. And we’ll be able to then say, OK, our magic moment is when they answer at least six. Like, okay, we require six in order to get started. But you can go as many as you want. Ben Ornstein: Okay. That makes sense. Okay, so then that’s how I’ll format it. And this will be good because Akil still from Thera still hasn’t touched it. So I could build this out. And maybe then we can bump and be like, hey, like, do you want to check this out kind of thing. So I feel like onboarding is probably the most important one first. Well, I don’t know about that. Michael Houck: So, yeah. Okay, so the things that I think are most important, not in no particular order, are onboarding, design, outlier results, and trendspotting. Those are like the four, the four things. And then you could argue that like Hawkbot for founding is on there too. But my guess is that Raphael will be able to take on a little bit more of that. We’ll see. But yeah, so onboarding, design, outlier content, and trendspotting. Because all of those directly are either inputs from users that they want them, or they’re things that we know will have a direct impact on results that people are getting, right? Like research, the client advocate, filmmaker, Partnerships, that’s all stuff that’s good and we want to build it, but it’s not stuff that we necessarily know will drive meaningful results. So my question for you is this, out of those four things, onboarding, trend spotting, making outlier content, which I know is very nebulous, and the design agent, do you think it’s realistic to get those four things done in the next month before you go away? UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: It would be so outlier. I’m just writing these down here for now. Yeah. Just so I can visually see it. Outlier content. Sorry, what were the four? It was outlier content. Michael Houck: Design agent, outlier content, trend spotting, and improved V2 onboarding. Ben Ornstein: Outlier content would it be the one that Ben flagged, right? Michael Houck: Yeah, something like that. And we’ll have to fine tune I’m sure there’s like sensitivities, because the big thing is like, you know, if one post goes viral, it’s not that big a deal, right? Maybe if it’s really aligned to the niche, or maybe if it’s a format that we think could apply to the niche, it’s worth sharing, like something like that. But that’s like two different things, right? And then the other side of the third thing is well. If it’s a cluster, if it’s a conversation that’s happening, you know, if it’s like the current, let me just write this down. And that’s kind of like trend spotting anyway, so it kind of bleeds together, right? UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Yeah, we’ve got like the, what was that? Michael Houck: Posts outside of niche for formatting and then the current thing of the day. Yeah. Ben Ornstein: Yeah, so the outlier content, we would need a list of people to monitor. And that’s where we’d implement the Appify API, I think. Because otherwise, we risk designing. That one’s going to take time, if I speak with a designer. I just have no context. Really. That one will take, I think, a while. For trend spotting. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Trend spotting kind of is a sub thing of how to make outlier content. Ben Ornstein: That’s OK. Ben Ornstein: That was what I kind of figured as well. And then V2 onboarding. I think the outlier content and V2 onboarding, I could definitely do. And I can probably start the design agent, but I don’t see that being finished quickly. If we do want to do that one. Michael Houck: Well, Okay, I mean, we’ll see. I think out of those three onboarding, we have the most clarity on what we want to do. So I think let’s do that now. And then I’ll come up with more of a plan on the outlier stuff and just give you more like clarity on like what that should look like, Okay. And then at the same time, I’ll think about the design one, and I’ll try to find the right person to loop in to be our Blake, if you will. Perfect. OK, so those are my action items. And you’ve more clear structure for this one. Yeah, so for the onboarding, I guess let’s use the next couple of minutes on that. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Do you have a good sense of what we if you can send me the transcript because I guess I don’t know if my Read AI guy is in here or not. Michael Houck: He’s not in there, but he’s in there. It’s kind of weird. Ben Ornstein: OK. You kind of explained it pretty well. So what I can do is I can build it from what you said. Michael Houck: I’ll just send you a voice note, too, just so it’s all sort of laid out. And I’ll think about, like, form and function, like does this happen in Slack? How does someone get into Slack? Because I mean, we’re gonna need a landing page for this, right? And then like a payments page. And then from there, do they get redirected to a link to give the Slack bot permissions? Then does it show up as shared channel or how does that work? So I got to think through all that this afternoon, but I’ll send that to you. How does overall onboarding flow work? Do they have… To slack or join ours. It’s like connect to the D. So I’ll figure out, I’ll figure it out. We’re going to do like the lowest friction thing just to get an MVP out there. But we’ll see. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: So the idea is to, is to sell these services on its own kind of with like minimal people be like being involved, um, like pretty soon. Yeah. Michael Houck: Like I want to be able to, And we might need the design agent. We might need the outlier content agent to be done in order to do this, but I want onboarding to be sort of like ready to go. Um, like I don’t want you to have to build onboarding again in like two weeks, you know? So, um, I’ll just think about what that should look like, And the idea would then be, I want to write a newsletter post. That’s like, Hey, we just sold our agency and we have this automated thing and you can do this. Month. $200 You know what I mean? UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Like, Oh, God, that sounds so nice. Michael Houck: If I need to split those up, or if we need to do them in like weird order or something like that's fine. I think at a $200 a month price point, we will get people to buy this. And then the question is, is it good? Do they retain? Do they like it? Right? So I’m just sort of like laser focused on that right now. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: I love that. If we could sell the age and then just keep making this better and a million other things we wanna work on, that’d be cool. Michael Houck: Yeah, the sort of, the complicating factors around the agency thing right now are two. Well, okay, three. One is the sort of annoying process they’re putting me through and just taking forever. Two is the Draper relationship. As that gets bigger, there’s reason to consider not jettisoning that. Right. Like this guy’s a billionaire, one of the most influential people in Silicon Valley. He’s brought us into like, be a, like, once DraperU gets back to me, we might be doing as many as 10 accounts for them. You know what I mean? And more to come. And they’re referring Portcoast to us sometimes. So it’s like, I don’t want to expand a lot with them. And then like two weeks later, be like, Hey, by the way, I’m out. You know what I mean? So it’s not a, it’s not a a deterrent, but it is a consideration. And then the other thing is the Emil thing. I look at the contract because Emil gave us upside on his business being able to fundraise, right? And so I don’t know if that’s tied to Megaphone or if it’s tied to Rye Valley. If it’s tied to Rye Valley, OK, great. But if I’m doing like consulting for Emil, do I have to pull that out? Of the finances, how does that impact the price? So it’s not like a stoppage, it’s just like a complication that I need to work through with them, right? So I haven’t even brought it up to them yet, but we’ll see. They’ve been very good in sort of understanding just with like an annoying process so far, as you can imagine. So I’m optimistic, I feel good about it, but that’s what I want to do. So hopefully we can make it happen. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: If we don’t sell, would we hire? Someone to kind of take over the agency ops, so I wouldn’t focus on it because that, I know, I’m not supposed to say in my head that there’s this end of the, you know what I mean, but I’ve of course been thinking about it. Of course. Michael Houck: I mean, yes, that would be what I would like to do. I’m not thinking about that yet because right now I’m just in sell sell sell mode, you know, but if we were to cross that bridge we would. And again your time is higher leverage on other things, especially if we’re going to be launching these other white label agencies as well. Like I’m going to need you to take what you have learned on the megaphone side and apply that to how do we scale that across spinning up three or four of these different agencies, you know? So that’s like an exciting new kind of problem. Um, And so as a result, we’ll need like an operator who’s specifically focused on the megaphone. Michael Houck: Got it. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Okay. Michael Houck: Okay, so onboarding, outliers, and design, I have my next steps on those, I’ll get them to you. And then we’ll try to prioritize those three over the next month basically. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Sounds good. Michael Houck: I did. I’ll talk to you. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: See ya. Ben Ornstein: See ya.