- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01KPV8RQZ43XRNQ44F5S12836T (via Ben Ornstein’s account, imported 2026-08-06)
Transcript
Lara Kuhn: Well, pretty busy, but I am managing. I’m trying to manage. Ben Ornstein: Are you in New York yet? Lara Kuhn: I am not. I’m still waiting for my visa. So I started remote as a freelancer for the first month, but I’ll be in New York from May 11th onwards. Ben Ornstein: Amazing. That’s so exciting. Lara Kuhn: Yeah. I’m really looking forward to it. Ben Ornstein: Have you been in New York before? Lara Kuhn: Yeah, I have my husband did an internship with BMW just outside New York for half a year. And I that that was like the first time I went and I’ve been back ever since like twice or so. But yeah, I never lived there. Ben Ornstein: Very cool. Yeah, I grew up about an hour north in New York City. It’s a good, it’s a good area. Lara Kuhn: And where are you based now? You guys are like a remote company, I guess, because you’re working with the UK as well, right? Ben Ornstein: Yep, yeah, we’ve got people everywhere. I am in Delaware, actually, currently. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Nice. Andrew Safranko: Sorry, my camera is not working. It says camera not found, but my camera’s literally on my laptop. Sorry. Anyway, it is what it is. I had to like restart my laptop yesterday and reboot all kinds of stuff. And I feel like that’s what happened. But sorry, just jumping in. I’m not American by the way, so I’m the anomaly as well in the company. I’m based out of Toronto, Canada. I am, nice. Yeah, there you go. Lara Kuhn: I’ve also been there before, like we did a road trip because he worked for BMW, so he had a car, so we went to Niagara Falls and Toronto and Montreal. It was great. Andrew Safranko: Oh wow, nice. Yeah, that’s a good drive. I drove to New Jersey two marches ago when they had the floods. There was like a crazy rainstorm like two, two marches ago. And, um, it was Toronto to Niagara, then Niagara to like, I don’t even know. Was it Syracuse we did? I forget. There was a stop in upstate New York and then it was like straight to New Jersey and it was like nine o’clock at night. I couldn’t even see the road because it was raining so hard. That was my first experience driving. And then we eventually made it to New York as well. And I drove through Times Square, which was like a horrible mistake, but I was like, whatever, I’ll be good. We have like a Times Square ish thing in It’s called Dundas Square. So it’s like a baby Times Square. And I’ve driven through that a million times. And so I know, like, OK, it’s going to be a stoplight. It’s going to be a stoplight. Like, don’t go, because you’re going to get stuck in the middle intersection. And then Captain America actually helped guide me through. Captain America on the corner of Times Square was like, here you go. They blocked everyone for me, so I could get through. I was like, oh, yes. Thank you, Captain America. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: That actually sounds iconic somehow. Andrew Safranko: Yeah. Exactly, right? So there you go. Lara Kuhn: Great. Well, thanks, first of all, for jumping on this call with me. As I said on Slack already, we have some things breaking, and I am fixing them. And it takes all my attention, especially this week. From next week onwards, it should get a little better. But maybe that’s, besides the onboarding checklist and open questions I have, maybe that’s a good starting point for me. Me to be able to plan and prioritize my time around how involved am I going to be? And should we set up some sort of cadence, like, Andrew, that you draft new newsletters? Do you do it regularly, and then we go through every single issue, one per week? Or do you draft multiple ones, and I review them? Should I just block time on my calendar every Monday to go through it? How can we best or how do you work with other clients so that I can plan my time and then actually also get back to you when you need it, and I’m not the blocker moving forward. Andrew Safranko: Yeah the beauty of us is this newsletter particularly is bi-weekly so we actually have a little bit of buffer time to do some reviews if we need to as opposed to reviewing weekly. That’s where that’s where we’re at. But number two is I’ll give you issues well in advance. So I, you might’ve already seen, so I sent the first one on Friday. Um, and so I wanted to get that in your purview first, just to kind of get you a flavor and then I’ll get you the second issue early next week. Um, once you’ve reviewed that one, because I don’t want to keep, I don’t want to keep writing and then it’s like the wrong thing kind of thing. You know what I mean? So let you take, take a look at that first, just to make sure you’re good with it, or at least you’ve got questions. I’d love some comments to just give you perspective of where I’m coming from when I write. But yeah, generally speaking, I’ll give you a view in advance and then I’ll let you know as well, like, hey, FYI, but yeah, it’ll be a combination of that. Plus we’ll have to figure out what day of the week we want to release the newsletter on weekly or sorry, bi-weekly. And that can be any day, like in terms of like statistics of like, what’s the best day. Like, honestly, we like beehive done a ton of research on that and there’s no real best day. Any day of the week generally performs decently. You’re not going to like lose out on people’s attention per se. It’s more so sometimes time of the day is usually better. So we’ll figure that one out. Maybe we’ll figure that one out on this call. But other than that, yeah, I’ll you’ll see the Notion updates on the issues that come out. I’ll leave comments for you where I see fit. But yeah, I mean, you and I, we can easily sync or async on Slack regularly if we need to. I’m pretty easy going that way. So you tell me, because I crash your initial competition. I’m sure there’s a whole lot. So I will try to make your life as easy as I can put it that way. Okay. Lara Kuhn: Sounds good. Then, um, should we jump in? We decided on the name, Good Company, and the emoji as well. So those two are set. One liner, I think, is something that you would work on on your end, right? Do you have any ideas there already? If not, it’s also fine. I do. Andrew Safranko: I’m just going pull up my notes for that. Where was the… Sorry, one second. Oh, here we go. So the initial thought, and we can kind of noodle on this, but it was like a quick Read from the experts who know how relationships actually work. I’ll, I’ll throw that in as like a draft line. Massage But I just, I recall Caroline even saying something along those lines of wanting to be that like friendly expert or that friendly, you know, group chat person who knows a bit more about this stuff that’s trying to give me advice. So that’s kind of where my mind’s at with that. But I’ll put that in Ocean and you let me know if there’s any changes or starting points, if you will. So yeah, that’s where I’m coming from so far. Lara Kuhn: I like it. Sounds good. In terms of domain, so we haven’t like made the call yet, I think. As you two know, the onboarding call was my second week, and I haven’t had a chance to speak with Caroline about what happened previously. So I don’t even know the timeline or the contract length of our engagement, ours with Megaphone. You help us set this up. Is there a plan to hand this over to us Is this, are newsletters really like a long, long-term project where it would really make sense to have our own domain for it? How, how should I think about this? Like, is it worth spending our dollars there versus on other channels? Because it will have like a really good like branding effect on, that will kind of spill back on us. How like, yeah, just, just curious about your opinion. Cause I, I’m struggling to make a decision. Because I don’t have the full picture. Ben Ornstein: Yeah, so I’ll jump in here first saying, so first of all, you guys own the newsletter. So we tell clients in almost every single circumstance, we tell the client like you should create the Beehive account, which you guys did. So you’ve created your own Beehive account. You own it. The domain that you buy, of course, you’ll own the domain. We’re not going to own any of this stuff. Andrew, I’m curious in your experience, if you’ve seen that owning an actual domain versus the beehive kind of given domain, how critical have you seen that to be, if at all? Andrew Safranko: Yeah, I’ve seen it a bunch, right? So I’ve written and actually still do. So I have an example, I manage one newsletter where it’s for a pretty large YouTuber channel. And we actually have never used a forum domain reviews, the BI domain the whole time. But they’ve got a community. So it’s sort of like, okay, they’re established, depending on the purpose of what we want to do here. So as an example, with SEO, having the domain as its own entity, as opposed to the BI entity is always helpful. And like, because we’re trying to build a bit of its own brand, but obviously with the good word, of stylizing. You may want to eventually, you don’t have to do it right away, by the way. This is another thing, like we don’t have to put our own debate right away. We can leave it for now. Maybe a month from now, like, hey, you know what, like, from a business standpoint, this makes a lot of sense because we really want to drive more traffic to Disney Center now we see some like strategic opportunities. But I would say generally speaking, it’s the SEO piece that’s going to help you with having your own domain. It’s just, it looks nicer, it’s easier to find, that kind of stuff. Yeah. Andrew Safranko: Okay, cool. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Cool. Ben Ornstein: And like, for example, you wouldn’t need like goodcompany.com. You could do like good-company.news, like slash newsletter. I don’t know. It doesn’t have to be an expensive domain, is my point. Andrew Safranko: The other piece is like the kind, so you can easily have your website where it’s just like a quick here’s the name of the like the typical template of behind is usually like, Here’s the name of the newsletter, followed by the subject line underneath, like, a quick little 1-liner. And then you have, like, a subscribe bar, and below that is just all the archived issues. And that’s it. It’s a very rudimentary, very straightforward, simple. And it’s mainly just the landing pages. You can just directly do what you want to find. Previous issues. But, you know, if you decide, hey, like, you want to really spruce up the website and turn it into something more than just that, then that’s also where the domain probably makes more sense. Because then it’s like, hey, it’s a proper domain, it’s a proper website, like, you know, that kind of thing as well. So, again, not necessarily urgent at the moment, I would say we should probably let the newsletter breathe for a month or so. And then you can kind of figure OK, strategically what makes the most sense. Especially if you’ve got to spend money, right? Don’t spend it right away. That’s my advice. That’s always my advice. Don’t spend it right away. Lara Kuhn: Yeah, let’s put it to the backlog then. Sounds good. But I’m totally fine with just starting out as we, like, the other question is if we should start out with good word at male beehive or good but we can figure these things out as we go. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Yeah, for sure. Here, I’m gonna make a note. Starting off with our custom domain. Ben Ornstein: Perfect. Lara Kuhn: While you take that note, on the sender, so one of my bigger projects right now is actually relaunching our email campaigns. And we’re sending most of them from the Goodword team and then use Caroline and Chris at Goodword or just Caroline at Goodword. Very like in specific cases where we want kind of the founder message to come through. So the question is like super happy to just copy that same style to that newsletter, where maybe if we have a piece that is more opinionated and it would help for it to come from Caroline, and maybe you can also like work with her on, or like work based off her, like podcast interviews, or like things that she is doing, and she’s speaking and you’re using her words where we could then place her name more prominently. Andrew Safranko: Yep, two ways to do that. Actually, one way. Well, so the thing about the, sorry, if you’re going to jump in, just real quick. The thing about the from address is it remains static. So you will have to choose. To be honest, it makes more sense to do the team one, just because that allows you flexibility in what sense. What you can do, though, is when you send, like when we send, we can have the author change. So then in the newsletter itself, the author changes between Caroline or just a generic author or what have you, whether Caroline shows up as a proper author, meaning she’s got an account in the Beehive account, and therefore all the people who have access to the account are authors, or are we just creating a guest author? And then she says guest author for that particular issue, and then away you go. Therefore, in that case, it’s super easy. You don’t have to worry about changing any subject lines, stuff like that. That can remain static. Yeah, in the platform you can make that adjustment. Lara Kuhn: Okay, sounds good. Then when it comes to address, I shared our like legal address but I think it makes more sense to take our office address because like Brooklyn is a bit cooler versus Delaware so that would be great. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Yep, we’ve already updated that one in BIS. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Perfect. Lara Kuhn: Reply two, I’m checking right now with Chris what emails we have but we’re probably going to go with like contact at good word.com, like just create a new one that goes directly to me so I can monitor replies. Initial subscriber import, also here I need to work with Chris on getting this list. How are you guys thinking about, because some of these folks have unsubscribed from our communication. Now this is like kind of a separate thing, so I’m wondering. I also don’t know the legal basis in the U.S. That well. Like, do we need, can we just enroll everyone or do we need to like be careful? Ben Ornstein: So yeah, Europe is nuts. Andrew, do you have like, and Europe is crazy with this. So we have another client in Europe, like very concerned about this stuff. So we, you know, so we’ve learned a lot. But yeah, Andrew, maybe, maybe I’ll let you take a stab at this one first. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Yeah. Andrew Safranko: So I’m Canadian, and in Canada, it’s similar to Europe. We don’t have GDPR, but we do have some things of similar nature. But it’s pretty loosey-goosey. So that’s Canada. Though, I don’t want to say it’s a lot, lot less, but it’s very much more open is the way I would describe it. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: OK, so we can just send it to everyone, even if they’ve previously unsubscribed. The important thing is then if they unsubscribe to this one, cannot contact them again. Andrew Safranko: Yeah yeah and that beehive will automatically take them off of this anyway. The other thing we can do is if you’ve got dormant people we can create segments and then just segment of those people that are dormant, because the other side of it is like your weekly send metrics will be affected by people that just don’t open, because they’re just they don’t exist or they’re dormant. So between Ben and I we can come up with segment rules that just kind of take people that aren’t opening. We both said to them. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Would the first edition be the first edition, the first thing we send to everyone or would they, would there be like an introductory, Hey, welcome. This is new. We’re launching this and why we’re doing it before the first issue. Ben Ornstein: So, so we’ll have like a welcome sequence that they’ll get thrown into. And there will kind of be like two paths. One will be for the people that we import. And then the second path will be the ones that sign up organically. They’re slightly different paths, but they include similar content. And so that’s part of the automation setup that I’ll be handling. And then on what Andrew was just saying about the dorm people, I’m also going to set up automations where if someone doesn’t kind of, again, this is standard for what we do, if doesn’t interact or engage within a certain amount of time, we’re automatically going to unsubscribe them. And so we kind of test around with like the how strict we are with that. And so I’ll, I’ll check in with Andrew about like, which the best the best approach for like the exact like amount of days and stuff like that. But we have an automation for that. So plus, every newsletter will have the unsubscribe button at the bottom. So that I think that is one thing is pretty clear on, like, you need to have the ability for someone to unsubscribe. So that is something that Behive just automatically has. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Okay, cool. Lara Kuhn: Sounds good. And I, like, my question, I had another question that is related to it, so I’m going to ask it now. How are you, like, beyond the initial subscribers list that we implemented, from the people that we targeted so far that signed up for Goodword? How are you supporting us with getting new subscribers in? Ben Ornstein: Yeah, I mean, so we, the kind of like the content generation is like the, that’s like the core offering. We do have like newsletter growth offerings. If that’s of interest, I think Hauk would be the best one to speak with about that on like how we do that and what’s involved, the pricing and all that kind of stuff. So if that’s of interest, I would definitely have Caroline, Alex, maybe even yourself, reach out to talk about that. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: OK. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Cool. Lara Kuhn: We’ll do that. Then branding. So I just copy-pasted what we already established and what we shared on Slack, plus a design draft. So our designer and then Carolina gave it a go and created like three different design directions. If you want to click on the Figma link, it will take you to slides. And I just pasted like a feedback from one of our advisors who would go for the ink first, like the third version in the brand direction. And Caroline and I are also leaning towards the third, but we’re still collecting feedback. So she has sent it to a few people. We’ve shared it with our brand advisor. I’ll, yeah, just for context, Caroline has blocked time today, later to go through the newsletter draft. So you’ll have her comments by the end of the day. And I think those are also most important. As I said, I’ll also review it, but she has, she’s the founder, right? So especially for the first couple additions, I think she will be like looking over plus me and for the design, I’ll just kind of tag you here once we’ve decided that this is the direction we want to go. And then you, I don’t know, like how your designer will pick up from there and what she will actually work or he will actually work on. So maybe that would be helpful to know. Ben Ornstein: This is perfect. This is so much more than what we usually get. So um, our designer will be able to very quickly turn this around into, like, the actual assets that we need for the new, so this is perfect. She will be very pleased to see this, I think. So yeah, just let me know when you’ve picked a direction and the turnaround time will be a lot quicker because a lot of this is already done. So yeah, just let me know there and then we’ll This is one of the last steps usually, adding in the design, but maybe not with this, which is great. Perfect. Lara Kuhn: Then the poll. So we were thinking or like kind of brainstorming in different directions here and curious to get your take. Our like probably preferred option is option one where we kind of ask them if they identify as a connector and they agree or disagree or answer on a range one to five because it will give us the segmentation of knowing, hey, is it someone? Because we target connectors mainly at first, and probably at some point also aspiring connectors. But it could help us kind of know who is more relevant as a lead than for Dunbar, for Dunbar, for good word, like later down the road. Or a second question idea we had was around pain point discovery, like the biggest challenge when it comes to professional relationships. And I use Claude. To go back to our user research. So it kind of mapped personas and then also the content segments, Andrew, that you created already. So, you know, based on this, yeah, I don’t know how much we will actually segment also from the start, or if we should like see, yeah, tell me like, how much does it matter to censor, would certain issues only be sent to certain people based on what we know about them? Or do we send everything to everyone anyway? And in these polls, what is actually helpful for us to figure out? Because I sometimes see newsletters that people ask an open question, and I never reply to those. But then the people who do reply, they are probably very committed to figuring out more. So should we consider an open question? How easy or hard should we make it for people to answer? UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Yeah, you want to go for it? Andrew Safranko: Yeah, I got it. I got it. To be honest, I’d lean on option two. And the reason why is because that’ll get you more data. It’ll get you more perspective on who your reader is. And therefore you can start to tailor your content accordingly. You can also eventually to your point, segment them, depending on how many people there are and whatnot. So that’s always useful too. And we can get creative there depending on what we want to do and whether certain topics get sent only to certain people. But yeah, I’m a huge, huge, huge proponent of polls, both in the welcome sequence, so as people sign up, because that’s usually when they’re most attentive, as well as in the newsletter itself, because you can just get more data, right? Like you just want to know who’s reading this thing, like who are they, where they spend their time, you know, all that good stuff, because ideally that helps you figure out if there’s a lead list you’re building here. It also helps you cater the content accordingly, you know what they like what they don’t like etc so yeah um absolutely option two obviously it’s up to you guys if you think there’s another strategic direction you’re thinking with option one by all means that’s cool very open to it but yeah my two cents is uh the more the merrier like you’ll just get better data I guess from what it sounds like is we could include the connector poll and one of the additions and maybe like even keep coming back it or yeah, cool. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: I mean, then I think we’re fine with going with two, but let me confirm with Caroline so she’s aware. Where? Andrew Safranko: Real quick on that point, actually, what I was gonna say is, you could also like if option one was something you guys were very strongly attached to, I mean, that could just be a poll that lives at the bottom of every issue. If you thought that that’s going to get you information you felt was valuable. We can have that as part of our template in beehive so that every issue gets sent and then that pulls at the bottom and then you can just check every issue to see who’s responded and whatnot. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: But there’s no way to to show it to only the people who have not replied yet is there? Andrew Safranko: No that’s the thing so you would still um I’ll have to double check on how you navigate that but yeah in theory uh I don’t think polls like polls specifically I think don’t get segmented out. The way you would work it is if you once you have the data on people and how they responded, then you could segment those particular individual actually, what am I saying? No, no, yeah, you could see sorry, you’ll see the emails that get that respond to the poll. And then in theory, you could send issues and segment those emails out so they don’t have a poll. You could I mean, if we want to do that exercise is cool. Yeah, it just depends on and what you think makes the most sense there. There’s just some sort of strategy. OK. Lara Kuhn: I’ll need to think about it a little bit more. And also about the replies. I mean, this is like a first draft, but I’m wondering if it’s a bit generic or if it will actually help us. Like, I wouldn’t even know where I would categorize myself into, and I would consider myself a connector. You know, that’s always like the difficult part of giving options, because are you really giving the right kind of options? But yeah, I’ll think about it some more. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Okay. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Cool. Lara Kuhn: And then since I actually really have to jump in three minutes, but we’re almost through, or maybe we need to schedule like a quick follow up reader incentive. So for the welcome sequence, we’re thinking about versus like not giving a discount right away, but like highlighting our special offer that we still have, which is kind of the founding connector membership. So we’re limiting that to like certain people, they get certain and access, like concierge introductions. So that’s something we could be like, hey, if you join us now, you can still become a founding connector. And this has a time limit. And then for the post-rating reward, we were thinking we could connect nicely, hey, if someone actually liked an issue, to help make them share it somehow to, hey, you liked this. Give it to someone and give them a free month that they can use for themselves or for the friend that they sent this issue to. The only thing is that we’re only now setting up a referral program. And I don’t know how it would be integrated here well, because that person will probably need to have an account already in order to be able to refer. So I have to think through the logistics a little bit more. But these are like our initial ideas. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Sorry, go ahead, Ben. Lara Kuhn: No, go for it, Andrew. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: I was going to say, there is a data referral program in BEHAB as well. So at some point, we can totally help you get that set up once you’ve got the pieces of that referral program. It works really nicely. You can throw it into every issue if you wanted to. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Definitely. Ben Ornstein: And my point, I was just going to say, for now, we could have the welcome sequence offer be the same thing. There’s like two emails in the welcome sequence, that same offer, what you have here, maybe we can keep that as the post-writing reward for now and then switch that up later. Andrew Safranko: Yeah, I think that would be great as a starting point until we have more clarity here. Ben Ornstein: Is there a link that you have that we can put in the email, like a link or a PDF document, literally anything that we can lead a reader to from the welcome sequence? Lara Kuhn: I have to check, but it would need to land to some like a landing page or something related to the funding connector. Yeah. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Yep. Ben Ornstein: Exactly. Exactly. Um, yes. Like before we do launch the newsletter, we’ll want that there because, um, yeah, yeah. We’ll, we’ll just run that there. I’ll just leave it at that. Okay. Lara Kuhn: Um, I have to jump up my biggest, biggest pending question was, uh, was around like data tracking infrastructure and, not like the report that you send us on Mondays, but actually being able to track the leads that come into Goodword. And we know that they’re coming from Beehive. So I’m just starting to get familiar with how we have set everything up on our end. But our CTO, it’s really, really important for the SEO-GEO project, as well as this project, to have the attribution right. So we see, do we actually move the needs with like, I don’t know, website visitors, signups, trial starts, like even conversion to a paid user. So yeah, maybe if you have any thoughts on that, you can send me a Slack message. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Cool. Lara Kuhn: Sounds good. Yeah. Behav has a ton of like UTM parameters. We could input codes. There’s a lot there. So like there’s, Tons of opportunities to do that. Lara Kuhn: Perfect. Then we have a few to do still on our end. I’ll keep you posted, but we should be able to kind of get back to you on these things in the next one, two days at latest until Friday. And Andrew, looking forward to get the second edition in early next week. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Sounds good. And I’ll start working on the automations now that we have a little bit more clarity on some of the stuff, which is great. Lara Kuhn: Oh, amazing. Lara Kuhn: Yeah, other open questions still like when we set this live, like I think we all need a day to work towards because that would also help with urgency on my end, right, to prioritize this. Ben Ornstein: I mean, for us, it’s as soon as possible, right? Like if we have if we have everything we need, we can move very quickly. Yeah. Andrew Safranko: So it really comes out a day a week. You want to get the newsletter out, right? So maybe if you want to ask Caroline if there’s a day you guys prefer. If not, I’m more than happy to chime in. But again, any day of the week really works in terms of like performance, so unless there’s like a strategic day of the week you guys think you prefer. No we don’t have we don’t have any preference so yeah like we could just be like all right Wednesday morning at 9 a.m. Or whatever. Let me give it a formal thought and I’ll get back to you like in an hour or something. Okay, I think this day and this time will go well. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Cool, sounds good. Thank you guys so much. This was really helpful. Andrew Safranko: No worries, thank you.