- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01KQW8CJCP7MMNKQKY4E96PKWN (via Ben Ornstein’s account, imported 2026-08-06)
Transcript
Pierce Freeman: It’s first coffee territory. So hopefully I’m not too groggy for y’all. Michael Houck: Well, no, that means we get your raw hot takes at the start of the day before the day corrupts your brain. Pierce Freeman: Totally, yeah. No censorship here. Michael Houck: Right, exactly. Well, cool, man. Pumped to kick this off. I gave Ben and Jacob some context, and they’ve read through, thank you for filling out the onboarding form as well. I know that’s tedious, but it is helpful. For us. We’ll go deeper on some of those areas today on this call. Main goal of this call is just get Ben and Jacob sort of what they need from you to get things rolling. I’ll let them introduce themselves first if they haven’t already, but Jacob handles the content side, Ben handles the operation side, Ben’s my chief of staff. And so, yeah, I guess any questions on your end before we dive into everything? UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: No? Michael Houck: Okay, cool. I guess, yeah, Jacob, you want to kick us off, or Ben, you want to kick us off with an intro? Ben Ornstein: Sure, yeah. As Hawk said, I’m the chief of staff. I’ll handle all things operations, anything other than like the actual content, like writing content, obviously that’s all going to be Jacob. I will talk a little bit more later about like what specifically I’ll be helping with, but I’ll be like the main point of contact if you have any questions, again, outside of like I’ll be around. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Great. Jacob Shipley: Cool. And then, yeah, my name is Jacob Shipley. I’ll be the writer and so I’ll be the main point of contact for anything content focused. Background, my day job is I’m the head of social media at Benzinga, which is a financial media company based out of Detroit. I have written on LinkedIn most days for the last four years or so. I built up an audience over there and built up a newsletter and so super passionate about all things. Content, personal branding. So yeah, super excited to dive in. Let me share my screen real quick. Michael Houck: Yeah, let’s get rolling with it. Jacob Shipley: Cool. We can kind of kick off. Let’s see. Okay, cool. So we’ll chat through, yeah, goals for, you know, working together, the audience we’re gonna write for, content pillars, and then narrowing on the voice you want to use to reach them. So some of this might be stuff you talked about a little bit in the onboarding call or in the document you filled out. But we’ll double-click on a couple areas, just make sure we have a really good fundamental understanding of the direction we’re heading. Obviously, early on, there might be a little bit more back and forth as I try to get up to speed on voice. And so the ask there would be just to be as, when I delivered the first batch of content, to be as brutal as you’re or comfortable being just so I get up to speed as quick as possible. But then the goal of this call is to make it so that there’s as minimal amount of that needed. So that first batch is as close to good as we can possibly get it. So again, mentioned a little bit in your onboarding form, but what’s the primary goal of writing content? What, you know, moving forward in six months, if we said this was a smashing success, What do we need for that to be true? Pierce Freeman: I mean, I think it’s really just developing more of an audience in this tech and AI niche, especially on Twitter. A lot of what I end up doing both professionally as well as inside projects is oriented around building software, talking about software, talking about AI, future of AI. And in the moment, just to give a couple of examples, I released a ton of open source projects do various things. I run this web app framework called Mountaineer that allows you to build web apps really easily. And it plugs and plays into AI systems very well because it has really strong contracts on how it expects you to structure code and structures a lot of that code for you. So LLMs have to write the minimum amount of code possible, which ends up developing into a better product. I think this thing could be huge. Announce it on Twitter. Zero likes. You know, or maybe like two likes from two of my buddies, you know what I mean? And I posted on Hacker News and ended up with like 800 upvotes, right? So there’s definitely like, people liked it, the quality of the thing. If anything, like the harsher critics are usually on Hacker News, but just like zero lift on X. And I imagine that’s because I just have so few followers, it doesn’t actually start to even get algorithmic propagation. And I’ve kind of been in this, you know, just zero or de minimis view state for the past, like, year, year and a half running when I’ve been trying to build a presence on X. So, you know, that’s a little bit discouraging, where even if I do have some hot take that I feel like is fleshed out, or maybe not up to your level of prose, Jacob, but like something that I could put out there that I think has some like nut or something that’s good or funny or whatever, it’s like, you know, 20 people are going to see this thing. So I kind of think like in six months what is a measure of success I would say if I post some new project that is actually good quality and has a higher chance of getting some decent lift off with the algorithm and actually becoming this focal point of like you know ideally it’s a men’s day maybe not it’s not six months but like I would love for some of these hot takes to become trending topics in their own on the sidebar at least within this like AI tech Twitter niche. So I think that’s kind of goal number one is when I actually do want to of those drops, people engage with it, people like it, people check it out. And they’re like, oh, this guy has enough credibility, where we’re actually going to like believe what he says and give him the time of day. Because what I’ve seen right now is there’s just so much cruft, especially on GitHub, because everyone’s vibe coding these projects left and right, that it’s very hard to actually tell the legitimacy from the posers. And having a big social presence and being like known as a or person on Twitter gets over that hump of being like, oh, wow, this guy has some built-in legitimacy by virtue of how many followers they have. I’m going to actually check out what they do. It’s kind of like a secondary goal that’s related to that. I think just getting more interest in the podcast, being able to reach out to more guests and have that used as an outbound strategy is also super viable where right now we try to deal these DMs to people who are in the industry and some of whom have huge followings and CEOs, but a lot of whom are actually just like pretty small niche researchers. None of them respond, I think in large part because the account is just not big enough. So ideally it’s like podcast development and growth releases, news, hot takes coming from that. And then also just being able to drop stuff. If that could happen within the next like six months to a year, that’d be fantastic. Jacob Shipley: Cool. Okay. That’s super helpful. Two things real quick. Can you let my note taker in? I just want to make sure that I’m capturing all this stuff. Jacob Shipley: I already did, Jacob. Michael Houck: Again, I think we’re having the same issue we were having last time with it, where it’s popping in and out. But I also have the Read AI bot in here, so it’ll cover it. Jacob Shipley: OK, as long as we have. Pierce Freeman: I can also turn on my granola, if that’s helpful to you, Jacob. Jacob Shipley: Do we have one that’s currently taking notes? Michael Houck: Yes, we do. Michael Houck: OK, cool. Jacob Shipley: As long as we’ve got something, that’s good. That’s helpful. I was gonna ask too, have we talked about using Megaphone as an amplification tool in addition to content? Pierce Freeman: Michael mentioned it, seems compelling. I think I loaded up my account maybe with 50 bucks or a hundred bucks and it made me sign up for a SaaS subscription. So I figured better to wait for you guys to actually instruct on next steps there, but yeah. Michael Houck: Yeah, Pierce, as a partner that we’re working with on content, subscription for free. So we’ll refund you that subscription, any budget you spend towards the creators, you know, that’s separate, but our fee we’ll, we’ll waive. Pierce Freeman: Amazing. I actually did not sign up yet, Michael, because I saw that on your, on your detail page. So no need for the refund, but the 50 bucks, I think are a hundred bucks. I just like loaded up as account credits. Um, so we have like that to work with. I probably look to you guys for what posts it makes the most sense to boost in that way. Uh, I was talking to one of my buddies on, on, uh, the Twitter algorithm team, and he was saying that they’re starting to penalize people for going direct to tweet. So any inbound that doesn’t have the current session history of another page and has stumbled upon it organically, they’re demoting your post actively. And even some soft shadow bans if people are in these engagement pods and groups. So I don’t know exactly on the back end how Megaphone people who end up engaging with these things. But as long as we don’t fall afoul of any of the Twitter sensors, then yeah, I think it makes a lot of sense, especially for the big marquee posts that are maybe a little bit more well thought out. Michael Houck: Yeah, we’ve never in three years of running it had an issue with the shadow ban or user getting penalized or anything like that. So we should be fine. But I also would recommend being very targeted with it because the following is starting off small, right? So, you know, we wouldn’t want you to just burn a bunch of budget on that. I think if we’re seeing good results with the type of posts, it could make sense to amplify them. But Megafone is not going to make the algorithm love a post that it doesn’t already love. It’s going to pour gas on the fire of a post that’s already doing well. So yeah, I would say we can look at it, but I would keep it very targeted for now and instead focus on sort of organic growth. Jacob Shipley: Cool. Sweet. Jacob Shipley: Okay, so target audience. Who is the ideal reader? Of one of your posts? Pierce Freeman: I’d say probably like software engineer or founder in San Francisco who might be a little anywhere from like early in their career or journey of like being a founder to like a relatively senior individual at these companies. I think that’s like like probably the core demo may be coupled with like VCs that also often operate in this bubble and like give the commentary on these different topics. But it’s a little hard to define target audience in terms of like company objectives because I don’t yet have this next company. But if I think of the people who are probably the most interested in listening to the podcast and engaging what I’m doing next, I’m like people who are kind of like entrenched in this like SF founder cohort, either founders themselves or people who are just like adjacent to this bubble as early startup employees or VCs or well known software engineers who are online, that kind of thing. Jacob Shipley: Cool. And then what do you see them coming to your content for? Is it education around these niche topics? Is it interesting takes they haven’t thought of Or what are they? How do you see them interacting with with you as in terms of what they’re getting out of your content? Pierce Freeman: That’s a good question, man. Yeah, I mean, I think I think hot takes would be would be one thing or just like different viewpoints on current conversations that are that are happening. I mean, like I think that gets a little bit to the to the target audience that I would like to talk to versus like where I think we maybe can find some growth opportunities where there’s so many people that want to be in San and just aren’t, and aren’t really privy to the conversations that might even be relatively common in San Francisco. So I think there are probably some categories of things that don’t seem like super hot takes to me. And if I were saying to one of my buddies in San Francisco, they’d be like, oh, I haven’t thought about it that way before, but that makes a lot of sense. But that might be a totally earth-shattering realization to someone who lives in New York or London or something. So I think that there is potential for some of that content to just increase the aperture outside of that of that core group but I think for the people that are like in San Francisco and in like my more target demo a lot of what I said is like a lot of what I say is like pretty niche but I think like relatively valuable it’s like you know comments on doing browser automation for agents you know like a very like niche thing and getting kind of into the weeds on like oh here like the fingerprinting protocols that these different sites are using and like here are some kind of cheeky observations on like 1500 browser extensions that are installed on your computer because they want to try to profile you and see if you’re doing any kind of automation activity and they’re doing this feel like this Technical mechanism, you know, so I think I think for like the cohort that are like really technical It’s probably like either that or if we can make me funny and like have some hot takes it can be like meme a fight a little bit I think I sent you the profile for guys vase or vase. I think he does this pretty well and It’s like, you know, the OG model drop. He was the one behind that format of, you know, like, I asked Claude to rewrite my entire project and spent four hours burning tokens. And the end result looks beautiful. It doesn’t work at all, but it looks beautiful. You know, that kind of vibe. That was him. So it’s kind of like one of these like in-group chuckle moments. I don’t know, but I think that’s the area where clearly what I’m doing right now is not working. So what these people would look to me for, I think if I’m talking to them individually, it’s like probably some hot takes. It’s like some different worldviews, bringing in like tech history and like themes that I’ve seen thus far through these like, you know, bursts and bubbles that SF has gone through. So that’s kind of what I imagined would be most interesting. But like I said, it’s clearly not working. So it may be just interesting to me and no one else. Jacob Shipley: No, that’s super helpful. Where do you have a place where you, like, is the podcast the best place for me to kind of look through and try to find ideas to, of these takes that you have or these ideas or these kernels to kind of expand upon? Pierce Freeman: I’d say blog and podcast. Jacob Shipley: Okay. What’s the blog? Pierce Freeman: Pierce. Okay, cool. Those are, those are probably the biggest ones. But yeah, Twitter, I’ve tried to a little bit more as like a brain dump platform. So my hottest least refined takes are with like less nuance are on Twitter, which is probably a little bit more interesting. I mean, my last one was about like how we just have totally succumbed to all of these surveillance agents that are just reporting every conversation. It’s like, you’ve got your agent note takers, I’ve got my granola, It’s like, what the hell, man? This is like the NSA’s wet dream. So anyway, I think Twitter has a little bit more shit like that. My blog’s hot takes, but a little bit more professionally oriented perhaps. And then yeah, the podcast for sure. Jacob Shipley: Okay, cool. Perfect. I’ll look through some of that. Okay. And like that, like the things that I think you’re pulling out of, like for me in Arkansas, which is probably the most like opposite of San Francisco as you can get, right? So when you say things that you think are just very ordinary or ho-hum might be, you know, like you said, somebody in New York or somebody outside of the bubble are going to think, what’s the best way for me to pull those takes or those, those opinions? Out of you? Is it just asking what have you been thinking about lately? Or is it what’s a cool conversation you had this week? Or how can I kind of start to try to catalog some of those interesting things? Pierce Freeman: Yeah, I think interesting conversation you’ve had this week is a good one. I think that that’s probably the best type of lens. But if you give me an outlet, I’ll probably give you more than you are ready to deal with. So I can link you some stuff. I can send you some of those hot dates. It’s just as they bubble up. Jacob Shipley: Okay, cool. And even like the thing about you said, like LinkedIn searching for browser extensions, I think that that’s a very interesting angle. It’s just Yeah, I would never know to ask that question. What’s LinkedIn doing with searching for browser extensions, right? But finding a way to catalog that could be a very interesting, interesting angle to take. Okay, so the three to five topics of content pillars, what things that you that you could ramble on? I always use the analogy of, you know, pound your fist on the table when you’re talking about things that gets you really excited to go on for a while. Pierce Freeman: I think the I mean, so many of these are predicated on the question that I get specifically. I mean, I think just anything around the future of work, I think is really interesting. Specifically how I feel like we have become a little bit focused on pursuing AGI, or this definition of AGI, which is artificial general intelligence. It’s basically like a machine that is fully at the level of a human being, you know, thinking, feeling, reasoning, whatever. And I feel like that whole idea kind of loses the plot, because these things can do economically valuable work today, we’ve been able to do economically valuable work for a while now. So on some level, if you can see huge job displacement, pre-AGI, it makes sense to have some of the AGI conversations now instead of trying to pump them to some future state where you’re like, oh, these machines have finally reached some bar of intelligence. Now let’s have the conversations. And there’s the pessimist in me that I don’t know is the best persona to cultivate on X because I would rather be known as an optimist. But if I’m among friends, I think my most fist-pounding discussion is why on God’s green earth are no governments doing something about this. No governments have some trigger clause in place that says, if unemployment gets to some rate because of AI systems, we’re going to do Y, like universal basic income, or job upskilling programs, or shutting off AI access, or having H1Bs that you need to file in order to hire an AI employee. There’s so many things that we could potentially be doing. And it’s like, no government is having this conversation the slightest. So I think I often like being my hand on the table with regard to both that, as well as like, you know, the coupling of that, which is like, these things are like, so crazy, impressive already, and like moving so quickly, and we should really be talking about those things more. So that’s, that’s one category. I think just like the startup ecosystem in San Francisco, as well, to some degree, again, my more cynical take that maybe we could out to be more positive is there’s just so many young founders right now. It’s like pretty crazy actually, because when I came, I’ve lived in the Bay my whole life, but when I graduated college in 2018, you know, there were like some people from my class who went off and started companies, but de minimis, maybe like two people, three people that I know actually started companies, which you wouldn’t really expect from Stanford. You’re like, oh, that’s like the startup Mecca. Like everyone is actually out there starting companies. Was really not the case. It was like big tech was so dominant in the recruiting cycle that everyone basically went to a big tech company or went to like a growth stage startup like, you know, Stripe or Chime or whatever. And now it’s like totally flipped. Like the people that I meet that are undergrads right now are either dropping out to start companies or they are graduating and starting companies. And there’s something in the water right now around if we don’t build our nest egg in the next two years, we’re just cooked. Everyone in the SF is obsessed with this idea of the permanent underclass, which is like if you don’t make it in the next few years, you’re just going to be permanently this lower income or second class citizen almost, and then be subservient to the people that actually work these frontier labs or start of these startups. And I’m just like, this is nuts guys. You’re like, it feels like such an insular conversation to be having like all of these fears. And also you just don’t know anything. Like you’re starting all of these like enterprise B2B SaaS companies and you’re a junior in college. Like that’s, that’s ludicrous. You don’t know the problems that enterprises face because you’ve never worked at one. So anyway, so I’ve been at my table about that. And any other topics that really come to mind? I think that’s probably the two big discussions, all kind of around AI, business, tech. Yeah, more hot takes to follow, but I think those are the two that I could talk at for Nazian. Jacob Shipley: Cool, no, that’s great. Maybe this might be helpful. So your unique perspective, your unique to talk about these things. If you want to back up a little bit and just give me a little context of like, obviously, you know, I’ve done a rudimentary amount of research, but what’s your, what’s your background? Like what your, your, your resume, so to speak, you know, which will give me helpful takes of like why our take or our perspective is unique and interesting. And the idea there being when we write a post, we want it to be that nobody could copy and paste that and post it on their feed because it’s so embedded with you, your personality, and your perspective. So helping me kind of understand your background so I can understand what makes your take interesting. Pierce Freeman: I’ll maybe answer that in a couple different ways. I feel like I’m probably the most technical, most normal person that I know. I’m not the most technical person that I know, and I’m also not the most normal person or like the coolest person that I know. But I do think that I’m deepest in both areas that like overlap on some level. So I think that’s like unique to me a little bit. And like, you know, I think that there’s maybe an opportunity to cultivate a slightly sexier persona that I’ve had thus far online where, you know, as one very dumb thing, not saying it’s like that cool, but I’ve I’m about to get a, an old Vespa from like the 70s. I’m like ride that around town as my commuter thing. And I’m just like, you know, the tech dudes aren’t doing that. They’re like taking Waymos around town. You know what I mean? There’s like no element of the Tony Stark sex appeal that’s like left in San Francisco. Elon Musk had that for a while and now he’s like kind of falling off that brand identity. And you know, I think that’s like an opportunity. So that’s like one thing I that’s like kind of unique. In terms of just my overall background, I’ll give you the TLDR, but I’ve just been a dork for as long as I can remember. I think I self-taught myself software programming when I was like six or seven on an old HP and then ended up just geeking out into this ecosystem of like, especially the kind of Apple subculture that was like really prolific among early adopters in the early 2000s. Really got like deep into there with, you know, TechCrunch. You had some of the other Gawker properties like Gizmodo, Leo Laporte, and whatever. I like would watch WWDC keynotes at lunch when I was in like second grade, right? So like I was that kind of kid. And then started in my first company with the dad of one of my friends when I was in high school. So like was building apps, basically through middle school and then high school, started this company. It was like in kind of sports data analytics, but it was really just in it for the technical side of things. Went to Stanford, studied AI, which was right when transformer architectures were launched by Google. So I was like, free transformers and like Alex net neural network stuff became fascinated with natural language processing. Then transformers came out and I was like, this is a step change because what we were doing before that point, these like GRU and RNN architectures, they like kind of worked, they like definitely worked better than anything else that we had had. And I was like, Oh, shit, like, you can actually teach a computer to understand, like texts that humans have produced, which is a crazy thought. If you come from a more conventional software engineering background, where you force things to be structured, it’s like the world’s a database, we just have to make it into a database. For the first time, it was like, no, people can just do whatever they want. And we can figure out how to make it actually make sense and start to reason about it. So rode this wave of transformers, joined an early stage startup and built their whole ML practice. So like deep systems, actually serving neural networks, training those architectures, coming up with novel things, figuring out how to like curate the data, get the whole pipeline, built that out to a team of like 30 some and then have gone off and just like been building startups and side projects and everything else for the past four years now. So that’s kind of like my arc of like the academic credentials and pedigree, studying transformers at like exactly the right moment, actually building and deploying those in industry and like developing with like novel new architecture stacks, and then pre-Chad GPT realizing this tech is actually about to cusp and really become mainstream, makes more sense at this point to go off and do my own thing. And hopefully apply that to people and use cases that are underserved and would never otherwise be able to get AI access. So that’s probably my, my general gist. Would it be helpful poking on any of those things in particular, Jacob? Jacob Shipley: Let’s do Yeah, let’s double click on the last four years of like the side projects and building What’s that look like, Pierce Freeman: Yeah. So, um, I basically left, uh, my previous company in 2021 did a year going around the world, um, with my girlfriend and said, you know, you have a job, so let’s not treat this as a vacation. Um, let’s treat this like we’re just remote working in different places. So as we were going off and, you know, doing whatever, spend some time in, uh, uh, cash price or the outside world, Lisbon, Paris, Copenhagen, Chile, Argentina, whatever, like wherever we were, including in Patagonia, we like got Wi Fi, and we were like working, and she had an obvious thing to do. I didn’t really. So mostly in that year, I was thinking of like, huh, you know, what? What are people going to need in this next chapter? What’s like the most interesting thing to build? I kind of came up with two things. One was a more streamlined way to actually do web development. I found myself just solving these same problems over and over and over again with, you know, you have some internal app that you want built. What is the easiest way to get that app from, I have an idea, to this is actually deployed in production. And through a whole lot of, you know, pivots and experiments and whatever, I landed on this thing that I mentioned earlier, which is called Mountaineer, which basically lets you do the backend development in Python, frontend development in React or JavaScript, which plays to the respective strengths of both things. But the framework enables the translation layer between those. So instead of actually having to like spin up a manual API, you can kind of implicitly define that in the backend and we’ll just generate it for you. It basically takes the time that it takes you to develop something new by hand. I want to change the game here a little bit, but like by hand for maybe like say a week to like a day, right? So like dramatically changes the duration that it takes to get started and also like maintenance over time. Lot easier. So during that year, I basically built that. I also built the some early models that were able to do web control. So actually go into a website and like automating steps with natural language. So you’d be able to go to a website and say, you know, I want you to book me this flight. And it would like go through and actually try to figure out how to do that step-by-step. That was really hard to do in 2021, obviously now because the LLM frontier apps have been trained to do that. And reasoning prowess has gotten better and whatever, whatever. It’s now like pretty trivial to build something like that. But I actually back then was training my own models in order to do that. Of automation task. And I came out of this year with, you know, this web app framework, a few other things, and then this like core technologies, like core model, those able to do this automation. So I said, Okay, well, who would who would need a model like this? In theory, anybody, because automation is pretty generic. But it’s very hard to sell generic automation to especially back then, because people were like, like, automation, what AI, what like why actually would I need this thing? So I said, okay, let’s like hone this to a specific buyer. Who’s the most obvious person that needs automation? Well, QA teams, you know, who are like testing software, you know, like they’re doing the same thing, software version after software version. And historically, that’s been very hard to automate because the way that you would have to do it would be to say this specific button. I don’t know if any of you have ever like done one of these web automation things, but you usually you have to say like, okay, this button has like these three attributes that are unique on the page or this like text that’s unique on the page. I’m going to target that text and like tell my browser to click it. You’re literally coding this stuff line by line. And the second that you update that text of a button, which someone else on the front end team might do, it totally breaks your automation script. And then you have to like go back, revisit and update it. The thing that I built totally removes the need to do that because you just say, Hey, find the button. Going to submit the checkout, and it’ll be like, Sure, like, whatever. I’ll, I’ll find it regardless of what the actual text label is. So I thought QA teams would be a really good, really good use case. Turns out QA teams are very sensitive to automation, because they think that they’re going to automate themselves out of a job continuously. So it was a very bad buyer persona where they were like, Oh, this text amazing. I was like, Okay, do you want to adopt it? And they were like, Well, you know, I like I have my head count, I kind of like have employees that are like doing this stuff. Institutional clout basically was coupled to how many people they actually had under them, which incidentally I’ve seen time and time again. Like I was an advisor to a commercial real estate software company that was trying to automate a lot of these back office processes. Same thing that they heard from all these CRE companies. It’s like, yeah, this will save them a lot of time, save them some headcount. But the way to gain a clout in a CRE company is by having a lot of people below you if you’re like a VP or senior director, no one was willing to part with any employee, even for automation, because they were like, this is going to reduce my own cloud. So like the human element to AI adoption, I have seen time and time again, it’s just way more of a blocker to actually implementing these things in practice than the technology is. But anyway, long story short, built out a lot of that, was like, this is really gonna be an uphill battle and maybe the market will ripen by itself. But I was bootstrapped and couldn’t really afford both the market education as well as to wait for people to do that. So I ended up thinking, what else can I apply this automation model to? And around that same time, just through happenstance, ended up meeting this guy, Will, who was trying to get my advice on doing a procurement software company because I’d worked in procurement before that, procurement software, that is. I was asked me some questions. And I was like, hey, you know, government procurement is really hard. You can crack the code, super lucrative. You know, let me know what you end up doing here. I would love to stay in touch. Comes back to me like two months later. And he’s like, look, man, procurement’s dead. Absolutely no go. What is alive and kicking though? LinkedIn content. And I was like, my man, tell me more. I’m intrigued. This was So he was like, he was like, I started posting last month. I’m like the fastest growing American creator on LinkedIn. This is this is the next big thing, like huge market here, underserved, Tapio sucks, yada, yada, yada. So he was like, do you want to help me build a company to be able to do some LinkedIn tooling software? I was like, great. So we ended up building that together. That scaled to be pretty big, and have been helping him with that for the last like, two years. And then like recently, left that and now I’ve just been figuring out what’s next. I’m like the next company that I’m going to start. So a lot of different companies. It was, it was funny to me that this model had the biggest impact in content creation versus any of the other things that I wanted to, but it kind of shows you like, you know, the, the game of stars, especially when you’re bootstrapped is you just kind of have to pivot until something hits and you got to listen to the market about like, what do people want here? Um, so that’s the, uh, that’s the story of the last four years. Jacob Shipley: Okay, cool. That’s great. Um, what was the name of the company? Jacob Shipley: The, the, around the content side of things say what I can like on the chat. Jacob Shipley: Okay. For a second there, I was like, did he not hear me? Pierce Freeman: Or what do you say? Sorry. Jacob Shipley: For a second there, when you said, say what I was like, Oh, we’ve we’ve had that a couple times. Pierce Freeman: Unfortunately, yeah. Jacob Shipley: Okay, cool. That’s awesome. How would you describe the way you talk? Is there a difference between the way you talk in person or on a call versus how you write? And then how would you describe like, sometimes it’s easier to say, what are the things you would absolutely never say or ways that you would never talk and kind of start from there and back into a voice from that perspective? Pierce Freeman: I would say direct, technically accurate are things that I aim for, at the very least. I think in terms of voice, kind of like what I was saying before, I think my current Twitter is a good representation, I think, of what sounds pretty natural for me to write. My blog’s a little bit more formal. You can make your own judgments about how I speak. But I think my current Twitter is like a decent representation, maybe not quite as funny as I want it to be, ideally. But in general, I think for tone of voice, I’m actually a little bit more interested probably on hearing from you and like you trying to pattern match to what other people are doing who like sound good and are successful because I do find that whenever I’m reading my posts in hindsight, I’m like, damn man, like that sounded like me, but like, it’s just not that good. And then I’m reading other people’s posts. I’m like, damn, like that was, that was a fire. It was succinct. It was thoughtful. It had some hot take, whatever. So I don’t know if I’m that opinionated, honestly, about, about content voice. I think the things that very much give me the ick is like any clear sense of like AI writing basically in the process. Really, really don’t like that. And I think I have a pretty, I think I’m like over-tweaked probably on being able to either recognize it or suspecting that something is AI, even if it wasn’t. But that’s a pet peeve of mine, especially for Twitter, because I feel like it should feel intimate, or you like want it to feel intimate with other people. Yeah, I think that’s kind of a vibe. And like off the dome takes. I don’t want to be seen as a guy who has been like laboring over some tweet for hours. Even if we do end up laboring on that tweet for hours, you almost want to make it feel effortless. Like, you know, I’m just going to sit in this phone booth for 10 minutes, like type my heart out if I do a thread and then just like pop it off, you know? So yeah, I think that, I don’t know That was helpful. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Yeah, absolutely. Pierce Freeman: The examples that I linked, I was like, oh, man, if we can emulate these guys’ tone of voice and focus areas, that’d be sick, because I think they do it well. I’ve always been a little envious of how well they seem to have cracked the code of the medium. Jacob Shipley: Who are some of those people that you feel like, man, they figured it out, that you would like to not emulate necessarily their content, but the way that they interact, You feel like you’re doing a great job. Pierce Freeman: I put in the onboarding doc. I think Mitchell Hashimoto comes to mind. I think like Dave Kramer. Mitchell was this guy who started HashiCorp, which is like this big tech company that got sold to IBM, now a billionaire, and just like kind of chronic like shit poster on X, but a thoughtful shit poster. Like has these like in-depth things and like thoughts on AI, but then also just collapse back whenever people say some dumb shit. He’s the guy who someone asked him who, or how he was gonna like fund this new project that he did because it’s open source and there wasn’t really a business model associated with it. And he’s like, mate, my business model is that I have three commas in my bank account. Like, I don’t need to make this. So just like absolutely iconic and very like deadpan replies a lot of the time. I think he does it well. Dave Kramer, who runs a database company, or maybe he runs Sentry. They’re both good. The one that runs a database company also has some good stuff. And then Voss, I think is pretty good for just like funny tweets that are a little bit more contemporary. And I think they all have a different, you know, way of doing it. But I think that all of them seem pretty shared to me, at least to my appetite of, I’m like, oh, wow. Not just that their accounts have grown, lot of like, you know, Will and I talked a lot about this. Like I could not write Will’s content. Like Will makes a lot of infographics. And I was just like, dude, I just, I can’t, I can’t find it within my soul to be, to be pushing infographics and carousels. So yeah, I think, I think just like keeping on the tech straight and narrow and trying to, trying to be like funny and like meme-ified where it’s relevant are the things that have resonated the most with me. Jacob Shipley: Cool. Okay. Sweet. Ben, do you want to go over any of the ops sides? I feel like that, gives me a really good place to get started on content. I’ll take a, well, I’ll let Ben kind of explain the schedule of kind of how the process works, but from my side of things, I’ll get to work on batching up that first, you know, batch of content, and then we’ll deliver that. You’ll have edits. My goal is to get a few weeks ahead so that you’re never having to review on Friday what’s being posted on Monday. You know, obviously there might be something where there’s a time where it’s, hey, this, you know, you say something needs to go out soon, or I say like, this is really timely, I want to get this out quick. And there might be a shortened review timeline on that. But for the most part, I want to get to a point where you’re looking at content that’s going out the next week or the following week, or even the week after that. I am married with four kids and so busy. And so you are super busy, have a lot going on. And so the plan is always to give us both as much buffer as possible, with the flexibility of obviously, if somebody needs to go out, we can kind of sprint to get something done too. But I’ll let Ben talk about the process around that, but I’ll get to work on turning everything we’ve talked about, doing some research and getting that first batch of content in front of you early next week. Pierce Freeman: I mean, first off, God bless you, Jacob. All my friends have one to two kids right now and are underwater. So four is just a miracle. Jacob Shipley: I will say, It’s the best thing in the entire world. It’s also the hardest thing in the entire world. But yeah, it’s, it’s great. Pierce Freeman: 100% Yeah, amazing little family. Um, was this was this helpful, by the way, like my music? Jacob Shipley: Once one has started asking you questions of like, I’ll send you know, if I see something in the blog or a tweet, and I want you to expand on it, I’ll send you know, like a thought or a question around that. And if you want to send like just a rambling voice memo, we’ve been having some trouble with Slack cuts off at like five minutes. So sometimes if you want to just record a voice memo on your phone and send that, or if it’s, okay, this is, I’m gonna need two minutes for this. You can just record it directly in Slack, but that’s super helpful. Cause it helps me capture not just the content, but also the way that you would say it. And I can kind of start crafting that into a post. So yeah, very, very helpful. The, both the content and then just getting a feel for how you think about things, how you talk about things. Yeah. So yeah, very helpful. Cool. Pierce Freeman: what’s what’s the pipeline for doing replies on other people slash for like chiming in on the trending topics that are active right now? Because I feel like those are a little bit more like time sensitive. Michael Houck: That’s what Ben’s about to talk about right now. Nice. Ben Ornstein: Yep, you got it. So I’ll jump into that first, just because that’s, so that’s, that’s going to be one of like the main things I focus on for you. So basically, how that works is I’m going to ask you for like a few We’ve already given some, and I generally know the space that you’re kind of aiming for, but it’s super helpful to get like a seed list of accounts that you’d want to kind of comment on directly. Because this is huge for like gaining followership, views, and then like views to your own profile, right? Where like people are gonna start viewing your content, and then adding your takes, et cetera. So what I’ll say is, What I’ll do is I’ll draft up kind of replies in your voice as I understand it. I will give it to you for review and be like, hey, here’s a post that I would reply to. Here’s either one option or a couple options of how I would reply. And like getting your feedback early will be super, super important there. So I can like nail your voice on the comment side. And then when and if we both feel comfortable, I can start doing this independently. For you, but again, I’m happy to check with you as long as possible until we nail that together. And so kind of the overall process for this, for everything really. So on Mondays, Jacob will ask you like questions to kind of get your unique perspective and insights on the content. By like middle of the week, like we have like an internal review process and then it gets sent to you. We’ve got like these notion automations that tag you in Slack, so it’s very seamless. And then you’ll review the content directly in Notion, or if there’s another process or another step that needs to be added, kind of, that’s, we can talk about that, but that’s the normal process. And then the content will get delivered to you for review. You can either mark it post-approved by changing the status. It’s very seamless. And so like, that’s the overall process. And then on the engagement side, yeah, I’ll handle, we’ll talk about that. I’ll ask for your account details as well. We use a scheduling tool. I noticed in the intake form that you said that you wanted to post, happy to handle that for you. But if you wanna do it yourself, that’s totally cool too. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: We can talk about that. Ben Ornstein: But we have our own schedule. Pierce Freeman: I think for that, as long as, I’m a little cognizant just on like the fingerprint, of the different accounts that are logged into my account. So maybe I can set up like a, like a VM for you guys to just be able to post under my IP address or something. That’s pretty easy. So as long as we do that, then like I’m, I’m Gucci. But yeah, that was the only hesitation really with with you guys not posting was just making sure that it’s all coming from the same machine. Got it. Yeah. Michael Houck: Yeah. I think that’s smart. If we could set something simple like that up, let’s do it because My hypothesis, I know, Pierce, that you do respond quickly, but my hypothesis is that the back and forth logistics will be, you know, it might not be as timely as we’d want it to be. Like, let’s say you’re on another call or something like that, right? We wouldn’t want to miss out on something. So early on, there will be a bit of a back and forth process as we’re learning the voice anyway. But once we get past that stage, if you feel comfortable, it would be good to set something like that up. Cool. Pierce Freeman: I’ll put it on my to-do list. Perfect. Ben Ornstein: But yeah, as I mentioned earlier, I’ll be around to answer like any questions on the up side. I try to make myself as available as possible. So yeah, if there are any questions on that side of things, I’m your guy. Pierce Freeman: Amazing. So cool. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: That’s about it. Michael Houck: I think we’re all pretty pumped about this. So we will get started on drafting some initial questions to send your way. So keep an eye out for those in Slack. Ben will also reach out about any ops things that come up, and then we’ll sort of consolidate this, what we talked about today, down into some initial thoughts on strategy that we’ll send your way later this week. Obviously, we expect that to change. You should expect it to change as we see what the audience is responding to, what actually drives followers for you, et cetera. But just keep an eye out for that sort of initial patch. As we get the first batch ready for you. Pierce Freeman: Sick. Okay, great. Well, I’ll be on the lookout for that. I’m stoked too. I’m excited to try to get this thing to the moon or at least get this thing I mean, will we be cross posting to LinkedIn as well? Jacob Shipley: I figure if we’re posting the content, you know, make sense to at least that, you know, I know that’s not a central of a strategy for you or central as a priority, but low hanging fruit to at least, you know, audience over there? Pierce Freeman: I would say no for starters. I do I do post usually at least once a week on LinkedIn just to drive people to the podcast. I would rather over tweak on being ex-native and stuff that I would probably be embarrassed to post onto LinkedIn I think works like better for this for this echo chamber. So I would say full steam ahead on that and like double down and maybe just be more aggressive with like the exes and the shit posting and totally disregard LinkedIn. And then if we decide that that in the future becomes something that’s relevant or if the audience on X is resonating more with like the LinkedIn he takes, then like, great, we can repurpose it for LinkedIn too. But I think I feel a little bit more comfortable with the LinkedIn writing style just because it is more professional. And I think where I need the most help from you guys is like, you know, I’m a chill guy. I want to be a chill guy on X too. I want to be likable. I don’t want to be as earnest as I am on LinkedIn. So like, you know, it’s, yeah, right now, right now, I would totally go like that. Cool. Jacob Shipley: All right, guys. Michael Houck: Sounds good. Pierce, we’ll follow up in Slack with everything from here. Pierce Freeman: But yeah, let’s do this. At least 400, right? Baby steps, baby steps. Let me know if you need anything. I’m chronically online, as I told Michael on our first call. So if I’m not responding within really like 25 minutes, as long as it’s from like 6am to 10pm Pacific, like bum me again, because I probably dismissed in the shuffle. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Cool. Jacob Shipley: We’ll do better. Later.