- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01KTM408S3AT1A03QDHW1REC1G (via Ben Ornstein’s account, imported 2026-08-06)
Transcript
Blake Emal: Yep. Hey, what’s up? Michael Houck: What is up, Blake Squared? How are you guys? Guys, I’m over external designers. I’m done with it. I just used Cloud Design and made something in like 10 minutes. Yeah, it looks good. It looks okay, right? Like it needs iteration, but if 10 minutes gets me there, what does 20 get me? You know? Yeah. And it’s like taking four weeks for them to give us a freaking landing page. So I’m just, I’m done with it. So for the, time being, after I get all the design systems set up this week, I will be our designer. And then I will be anxiously looking for someone else to become our designer so that I don’t have to be our designer. Blake Emal: Can’t believe I know. No, never mind. Anxiously waiting the call. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: There you go. Michael Houck: Yeah, no, excited. It’s good that we, you know, I guess, Blake, for your context, we’ve been working with these guys off and on, really, for what, Blake, like eight months? Yeah. And so. Were doing mostly like strategy and just like sharing like content formats. And, you know, it started out as weekly calls and was bi-weekly calls for a while. And now they want us to move on and sort of take on actually creating the content, which is good. So I’m excited for that. We’ll wait for Jon to show up. Jon is the founder and CEO. So we’ll wait for him to show up and then we can dive into it. Want you to meet him. And then Blake E will take the lead on most of the call and just sort of go a little deeper onto some of the stuff we’ve talked with them about for the content side. Blake Emal: Ben, you’ve talked to them before, right? Or is this your first time? Ben Ornstein: I’ve interacted with them on Slack a couple of times, but I’ve never actually jumped on a call with them. Blake Emal: Cool. Cool. Blake Emal: They’re a friendly group. Yeah, they’re good guys. They just need some help to put it all in order. I think they’re super slammed. Michael Houck: Yeah, because they raised. I actually didn’t know this at first, but they raised a bunch of money. And I think they’ve just been growing pretty quick and a ton of priorities and things like that. So, yeah. Jon, what’s up, man? Blake Emal: Hey, Jon. Michael Houck: You are muted. Jon Morehouse: Can you hear me now? Yeah. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Hold on, man. Jon Morehouse: How are you all? Great to see you again and/or meet you before you get into that. Michael Houck: Yeah, man. No, good to hop back on. I wanted you to meet Blake and Ben, so I had them on here. And then I think the majority of this time, Blake E, who obviously you know, will just sort of go deeper on some of the stuff that we’ve talked about over the months of working together. But now that we’re taking more of an active role in production, both on the process side and on sort of tone and goals and things like that, he’ll just go a little deeper on that. So but maybe Blake and Ben, if you guys want to give quick intros first to give Jon some context on what it would be like working together. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Yeah. Blake Stewart: Hey, Jon, I’m Blake. We’re kind of deciding if I should just change my name altogether. Yeah, feel free to tag me on anything that goes on in Slack or email. I’ll kind of be your. Manager to help make sure it gets routed to the right place and we’re staying top of deadlines and whatnot. So feel free to ask me anything. We’ll make sure you get taken care of But yeah, nice to meet you. Excited to see what happens here. Ben Ornstein: And I’m Ben. I’m Howe’s chief of staff. I’ll be kind of lingering in the background doing a whole bunch of random stuff, but I’m just mostly operations. There’s not really a quick way to explain it other than that. That’s probably the best way to explain it. Blake Emal: He’s the blue guy. Yeah. Michael Houck: Cool. Well, I guess, Jon, maybe first, anything on your end that we should cover before we dive in? In? Jon Morehouse: I don’t think so. I think I shared the context. I think, you know, we tried this before, and I think that we brought on Matt, who’s our product marketer. He’s putting out more product content. Kind of things that are top of mind for me is just like having a voice on Twitter and LinkedIn every day. And some weeks I’m really good, some weeks I’m really bad. And I just want to make sure that I have the team around me to make sure that there’s no bad weeks. And I think in terms of some of the goals, like I want to make sure that we have like five or so tweets a week, maybe like one long-form linked Twitter post, maybe once every two weeks or something like that. Um, I have a lot of ideas, so I also just like in terms of maybe shooting ideas and things we can write about and helping me go from like here’s a brain dump to here’s something that’s ready to be published and kind of forgetting about it, like, those are the things I’m thinking about in terms of outcomes. You know, growing the following, I think is probably like, like number one, I think in terms of like the audience. And then I, but actually I would say consistency is number one. And then number two is growing the following. Do I expect this to lead to leads and revenue directly on day one? I don’t think so. It would be awesome. I mean, you know, but it’s more like if people are seeing me and then they were reaching out to them or something like that, I think it’s a good thing. So yeah. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Got it. Blake Emal: Cool. You ready for me to remove it? Michael Houck: You want to take us away? Blake Emal: Yeah. Yeah. So just while we’re on that, following consistency as core goals. Can you break down, especially on the grow the following, can you just give me an indication of why? Like, grow the following so that I get more investor interest, so that I get more acquisition opportunities so that. I just become an expert authority in the industry. Seems like maybe the last one, but yeah, it’s totally. Jon Morehouse: It’s like, I feel like I tweet about bring your own cloud deployments like that pretty frequently. But the more people who see that and see me as like a leader in the space, that’s just good for our business for all the above, right? It just builds trust with prospects, with existing customers, and then potential new customers. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Cool. Blake Emal: Okay, that makes ton of sense. For, you know, you have taken the strategy stuff that we’ve worked on together and you’ve been posting here and there for the past, I don’t know, I guess we started working together in like October. So since that time, are there things that you have done that you want to keep doing, like formats, topics, pillars that you still want to be a regular thing? I know BYO Bring Your Own Cloud is going to be like the main overarching thing. So, not necessarily that broad, but are there formats, styles, types of things that you’ve tried that you actually did like and want to keep doing? Jon Morehouse: Yeah, the articles work really well. Um, I think threads are kind of like mid-I don’t know. I can put a thread together, but if like somebody could turn it into an article, I think that’s the best approach. I think some of the topics that seem to resonate are like, I mean, everyone talks about San Francisco online. It’s, you know, that helps. But maybe how we’re operating the company and like the startups life, like how the company operates. And what I’ve also tried to do is be an expert in the problem, not an expert in our solution. And so, like, I talk a lot about like the problems with bringing your own cloud and what’s hard and what’s challenging. And I think that kind of brings and builds a lot of trust with people. So those are the kind of things. Blake Emal: Makes sense. Have you ever done like a problem matrix exercise for for bring your own cloud? Jon Morehouse: Maybe a little bit with some of our like pillars and things that we do in our marketing content. Yeah. Yeah. Like, yeah, here’s challenges. Blake Emal: Yeah, I think that that might be something helpful too. If I can give you like a formal. Template or whatever. Just depends on how much time you have to go through it. And I could probably try to scrap through some of it myself, but basically, just identifying what are like the five big problems that just impact everybody, and then break those down into sub-problems. That becomes instant content. The more you break it down, you just keep doing that. And these webs spin off of every single one of those. And then we end up with 200 ideas that are basically all problem-focused. It’s a pretty easy way for you to become the expert on the problem, so to speak. So, I didn’t know if you’ve ever done something quite that robust or if it’s just been like, we know the top three problems, but haven’t gone layers deeper than that. Jon Morehouse: Yeah, maybe what I could do is I could share some of that in Slack actually as like a follow-up. And yeah, I would probably need to sign, set that up as a, as like a for myself, I’m going note of that right now because it’s kind of neat, it’s a little dated, even the stuff that we have right now. Blake Emal: Okay, yeah, that’d be awesome. And I’d hate to add stuff to your plate, but if that’s the goal, and you already have an idea of what the core problems are, and then this the sub-feature or the sub-problems that spin off of those, and however far back you can go, it basically just sets me up to then. I mean, those are the hooks, right? That’s what we want to write about, and we can just spin up content a lot more easily there. I think that’s probably the easiest way to get long-form content like that as well. So that’d be great. Let me know if you want me to, you know, there’s not a huge template for it because every industry is different. So it’s basically just like continuing to add layers onto, okay, but now what’s the problem? And then what’s the problem off that problem? So, however deep you want to get into that, but I can help out if you need me. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Cool. Jon Morehouse: Okay. Sounds good. Yeah, I’ll take that as an action. I’m give myself like maybe till tomorrow or Wednesday, and I’ll share that either in Slack or some other thing. Blake Emal: Yeah, take your time. Awesome. Okay, so problem-focused, being an expert there. And then we, you know, looking at past pillars, it was bring your own cloud. Another pillar that we were working toward was kind of the build in public. A little bit more just sharing operationally how you do things, a little bit about SF, things like that. So, is that still of interest to you to focus on, or do you want to go heavy on thought leadership? Jon Morehouse: I think thought leadership is probably the one. I think some of the other things, it’s like, I don’t know, I guess it’s like the way I think about it is the other topics are just for getting reach and sort of activity. And if you’re tweeting about the same thing all the time, do people just get tired of it? Like, I guess an example is, you know, I kind of steer away from anything super controversial on Twitter. Like, the most controversial I’ll get is, like, you know, the not gonna make it post occasionally or something like that. And, like, but I see like a Sam at Planet Scale does this really well, you know, and he gets into full flaming words, which I don’t want to do, yeah. Um, but then he has a lot of trust with the content he does put out, so I feel like there’s some sort of mix-up. I don’t know. Blake Emal: Um, yeah, it’s it’s one of those, I think we’ve probably talked about this before, too. But if you’re going to be that guy, to be that guy, there’s really not a midpoint. I think the people that try to be midway between controversial and not controversial, you know, you just kind of see through it and you end up just not being controversial anyway. So the decisions make for you regardless. I’d say if that’s not who we are, that’s okay. Let’s just be experts and lead into that. If you want to be controversial, you wake up one day and feeling spicy, like you can try it, but that’s something you either are or you aren’t. And it’s better not to force that. In terms of your own involvement, so let’s say we’re putting out long form content consistently and we’re always be hitting that. So that’s like table stakes. Beyond that, are you interested in showing up in any other ways, like through engagement and things like that? What do you want that to look like in other areas? Beyond just the long form stuff and some of the short forms that we’ll be doing, yeah. Jon Morehouse: I think, like, my thinking is like one or two, maybe three Twitter articles a month, and then like daily Twitter posts, just you know, what’s going on. Um, I think most things, like touching LinkedIn, like three or four times a week as well, but kind of the same content, right? Like, what I imagine could work really well is like we have like topics we’re talking about and like, ideally, these problems are also tied into like product releases coming out, right? Like, for instance, like, we’re launching something called Runbooks, a way to like combine all these operational steps, you know, Ruby OIC. Like, I could kind of say, hey, here’s the problems that we’re solving. Oh, like, actually, kind of in the lead up talk about the problem. And then when we launch the product, like, a week later, you know, with like a blog or something that the team’s put together, then it’s like, I’ve done this thing before. It works pretty well. It’s like problem, problem, problem. Oh, cool. We built a thing. And it’s of connected, then you keep talking about the problem. But, like, yeah, figuring out like, could we just focus on Twitter and then somebody in the background on your side could help basically just syndicate that to LinkedIn in a way that, like, obviously, you’re taking the same content, but you’re like rewording it for the LinkedIn format to kind of grow that as well and get eyes both. I’m sure there’s a bunch of best practices that you all know around how to do that, but I just want to sort of yeah, yeah. Blake Emal: we can definitely do that. It’s kind of the old hrefs model of just talk about the problem all the time. And oh, hey, the product kind of ends up showing up every once in a while in there. How about that? Yeah. And then the repurposing, we’ll take that off your plate as much as possible. Make sure that we’re pushing over to LinkedIn in the appropriate ways, reformatting if needed, things like that. Articles lend themselves a little bit better over to LinkedIn posts. We can get some long-force stuff there. I was going to ask as well about the visual side of this. So not everybody needs to do this, but I’m seeing at least, and I don’t know if you all, other people on this call agree, but stuff that has good visuals attached will tend to do a little bit better on average. So that could come in the video. Low production talking head video. It could come in the form of just infographics, things that we can create. I just want to see what your sensibilities are and visuals and what you would want to do versus not. Jon Morehouse: I like it. Actually, have you seen like the South Park San Francisco stuff? There’s like the South Park Blue Bottle and all that. Like founders are posting from We’re literally right next door to it. I think Sam has done a post where he just like holds his phone up walking around South Park. And there’s like, I think the profound founders might have done it. So I’m super into that. I think that’s cool. Like, I could literally try some things there if we have some ideas and you give me some like ground rules. Um, visual side, too. Um, yeah, like anything there makes sense. Uh, we have a lot of visuals as well, and like, you know, if it’s something as well, like using like claw design or something like that to like make something look solid and it kind of like, you know, along with the post, I think totally works. Michael Houck: Yeah, Jon, depending on how much you’d want to get into sort of the founder-focused video side of things, we do have a whole team that specializes in that as well. That wasn’t true when we started initially working together, but it is now. The team that we’ve brought in is, you know, very, very expert level at like TikTok, Instagram, short form vertical video, things like that. They’ve, you know. They just sent me a screenshot of one of our clients that they’re working on right now that they took from zero to, I think it was 2.4 million views in the first month. So they’re very good. And if that’s of interest, either now or at some point down the line, we can talk about that. Jon Morehouse: Yeah, it’s all of interest to me, to be honest. I think whatever, like, we’re in full-on sort of growth mode. So if you think that there’s an audience that we can reach and help us, let me know. And yeah, I mean, I think the other unique position is I can sort of yap about this stuff all day. I just really need like a system and structure. Like, I can, yeah, I, and I think actually, like, even having your team help project manage me a little bit too on some of this stuff like helps internally. The team is so busy that like my Twitter and LinkedIn stuff fall by the wayside, even though it’s really important. Um, but like I can imagine this at some point basically being a full-time role. If we get to like stage, right? Michael Houck: Yeah, Blake, Blake S will make sure that we keep moving things forward. He’ll be your bulldog. Don’t worry about that. On the video side, I’ll chat with sort of our head of that side of the business, this girl Tatum, who you haven’t met. I’ll have her take a little bit of a deep dive into you guys and into the niche, and she’ll come back with some ideas. I’ll put them in front of you. You kind of let me know what we want to test out there. Blake Emal: Perfect, and then, yeah, sweet. So, on the video side, I’m never really gonna push, like, hey, I need you to record this video from my end because I’m not the expert on that. Uh, we might have some opportunities where just you recording a quick little, like, hey, I’m gonna go out and do a selfie video. We can do stuff like that. It probably will just be more on the fly. Um, that option that Hauk mentioned is better for if you want to get serious about it. But on the other visuals, what I’m seeing now, just for your reference, the infographics can work as long as they don’t look too chat GPT. And like we really refine them and make sure that there’s good content there that’s not just a regurgitation of whatever content we wrote. So, especially for articles, we’re gonna wanna do some visuals alongside that and figure out exactly what that looks like, We’ll hone in your style and everything. But I’ll be the one probably me and Ben and Blake probably patch together. See what we on the design side there and get something good in place for those. What I’m seeing work even better, though, especially if you’re okay with talking about your personal experiences as it pertains to these problems, is personal images. They’re also easier because you either already have them or can just take a picture. And so it’s like you don’t have to think through this whole infographic. I actually see those performing better than infographics. On average right now. So I’ll probably ask you every once in a while: like, hey, can I just get a shot of you with the team doing this or whatever? And if you’ve got it, great. If you can go take one, great. If not, just let me know and we’ll figure something else out. Jon Morehouse: So I think most of the team here, Casey and Matt, like they can do that stuff like in their sleep. You know, Matt is also deeply in the product now. So, like, if there’s any sort of questions or we’re doing a launch like, he’ll still be involved and I’ll kind of make sure that they’re here. But I think the main difference is like before they were kind of driving and like going to do like using more for like company socials and things like that. And like, now I’m going to be kind of like more involved. But I think for a lot of this like supplementary stuff, like if we also say, hey, to do like a team photo or something like that, like just at Casey and the channel. And then I would say for like infographics and like upcoming blog posts and things like that, I think we’ll also want to cater. So like I’ll make sure that Matt is sharing any sort of content going out with us, like the new on team. Like for us, because I think that’s how these kind of work. Like, I look at planet scale, like Sam will like tease stuff and then they do a launch. It’s like, oh, yeah, I’ve been talking about this for a few days. And yeah, gotcha. Blake Emal: Yeah, that makes sense. That kind of brings me to another point with content: is you know, sometimes we’re gonna be launching stuff, or depending on what you wanna do, lead magnets, things like that, that are designed to drive growth. So, wanted to gauge. How often you’re thinking that versus our normal scheduling of evergreen content. How often do you think we want to slot in launching new things or doing a lead magnet, for example? Jon Morehouse: I don’t have any preference. I think, like, more like when do you think we should do those? I think generally, like, we probably launch a feature type thing, maybe once every two weeks. And so, like, yeah, I think in between, maybe it’s we’ll put out like a change log and like all the features that we’ve done and like things like that. Um, because we’re open source sometimes, like, I’ll even share like tweets around like stuff that we’ve been building. Um, so that’s actually an interesting one as well. Um, but yeah, got it. Blake Emal: Yeah, I when I’m thinking of the founders that impress me online that I want to follow. They’re usually shipping at a pretty high rate. And I like, even if I have no clue what they’re talking about, I just like seeing that they’re shipping stuff and I’ll follow for that reason. So I think beyond just pushing things on the brand account, whenever there’s a new feature, we should have a different variation for how you talk about stuff and be shipping as a part of that. So we can either treat that as one of the long forms or it can probably end up being short form a lot of the time, but I want to get in the habit of making it seem like you are always pushing new stuff. Jon Morehouse: That’s that’s awesome. Yeah. And actually, to that point, I could even have some of the engineers on the team, like I can make it so that they are like posting in the megaphone channel. So, like, when something new is going out, like, yeah, they’re also input there. Blake Emal: Yeah. The more inputs that I have coming in, like, obviously, I’m not use every single thing you ever share with me for the, like, most of it, probably. Yeah. Some of it I might suss out, filter out a little bit. But of those inputs make it so much more likely that I can deliver you accurate things that we don’t need to align on as much because it’s pre-aligned and things that are more personal that can’t be copied or AIified. Like that, that’s really the thing that’s working now. Is can you create content that just clearly had some effort behind it? Because there’s either some data point or unique insight or visual or whatever that had to have been done by people. That’s that’s That’s just working now. And the more that we can have content like that, the better. Where this process becomes a little bit tougher is when it’s just always evergreen stuff and very low input from the team. So I want to make sure that we find a good process for you that leads us to like, we always have ideas and they are fully aligned and we’re actually doing this stuff as opposed to. You just generically writing about bring your own cloud, which anybody could do by using an AI tool. We don’t want to really do that. We want to try to weave in stuff that is genuinely non-replicable, if possible. So, how I usually accomplish that is I come to the table with ideas every single week and I ask for voice notes. And if you voice notes, if that’s a good format for you, then that gives me tons more context than even if you type it out. Because you can just ramble and not have to worry about formatting or whatever. You can just talk to me and I’ll do the rest of the editing and putting the ideas together. So, wanted to see if that simple process for the ideation side works for you, or if you prefer a different way. Jon Morehouse: It makes a lot of sense to me. It kind of works. I think, like, but imagine as well as if we have like a like some sort of like topics and calendar kind of thing going on and like a bucket of those ideas, and like I’m sure there’s gonna be times when we don’t have stuff to talk about, we go back to the backlog and then there’s like a product sector coming in. Blake Emal: So, yeah, there’s a backlog that we’ll share. That is it already in the idea if it’s in the hub yet or not. We’ll have a backlog and all the ideas will always be in there. And we can, we can punt on stuff and say, let’s just do this in July. We’ve talked about this a bunch. We can always do that, but I’m still going to probably. Ping you every Monday or so and just give you a bunch of different ideas or even prompts, questions. And then you just pick the ones that you’re interested in and you can riff on them in a voice note and you can ignore the other ones. Jon Morehouse: Okay, cool. That sounds good. Blake Emal: And then I’ll do effort of like sorting it out, cutting things into different topics, putting them in the backlog. But you’re going to have access to all that. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Cool. Jon Morehouse: And then I’m going to have like engineers also bringing topics in as well. Blake Emal: Great. Yeah. Michael Houck: Yeah, that’s Jon. Honestly, like the more I think, as Blake has said, the more of those unique inputs that not only from you, like, we don’t want to put this all on you, but the more that folks are able and willing and remember to share that stuff with us, it’s just going to lead to that exact type of content that Blake’s talking about is performing well right now. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: So, yeah, the more the better. Jon Morehouse: I was going to say on the project management side, like, I’ll just give you a list of people to pay. And so, like, Blake, I guess this would be you. If you don’t have any inputs and we’re kind of dry, like you can actually ping and ask folks on the team for inputs. The same with Mark, who runs sales. Like, he’s good at going through customer calls and seeing things that are coming up. Matt is going through customer calls and seeing things that are going up. And like, a lot of stuff, like, they’re just not going to be able to tweet about from the company account. It doesn’t make any sense, right? But, like, they can go through that. And honestly, like, we could probably even share a grain calls with you as well if that’s of interest to like pull some of these things out with like an AI. So, yeah. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Awesome. Blake Emal: Well, why don’t we do this then for today? I might ping the channel and just kind of reintroduce, tell, tell what we’re going to do really briefly, and maybe ask for some of those initial ideas if anyone else on the team has them. You had mentioned that you’re probably going to go through and do this problem matrix exercise by maybe tomorrow or so. Since we’re at the very start of the week anyway, why don’t we just spend today, tomorrow brainstorming and ideating? I’ll come to the table with a bunch of ideas of myself tomorrow, but I do want to see kind of what you come up with problems-wise, so I can weave that into initial content. I don’t think we need to do. We could do like a re-intro post about your story, but I think we helped you do that before, didn’t we? Jon Morehouse: Yeah, I think we like we could do some of that stuff in the future, but I feel like just talking about what’s going on right now would be useful. Yeah. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Yeah. Blake Emal: Okay. We’re aligned there. All right. So let’s all brainstorm for the next day or so. I’ll, I’ll, I won’t wait for your inputs to start getting my stuff on paper as well, but I want to, I want to see that as well. And then tomorrow, to start the process kind of as normal, and we’ll just get things going. So I’ll send ideas, we’ll get voice notes going, get the initial inputs in, and then I’m start organizing the first couple posts that we can do and start writing some things. And then, since it’s the first batch, if I have more questions about details, specifics, whatever, and I just want to make sure I’m not being inaccurate in anything, I’ll just ping you, ask questions ahead of time, or ask for your feedback after, and we’ll do a round of that. Usually, Monday is idea day. Tuesday, Wednesday, I write and then deliver your batch. And that gives you end of Wednesday to end of Friday to review things. If that schedule doesn’t work at any time, we can work around it and be more flexible, but that’s usually how it works. So by the end of Friday, we should have feedback in from you. We should feel pretty good and aligned. The next batch should be getting ready to be scheduled out and everything. I think that covers. Do you have any process questions? Any content questions right now? Jon Morehouse: No, I kind of just want to follow your all’s process to the best I can and just like, yeah, have as many people on the team put in information. And then like, when I take the stabs at writing stuff, I’m pretty confident I can just like throw drafts at you all and you can take it and run with it. And yeah, I just want to see how it works for a month and would love to see the numbers go up in terms of things published. And yeah. Cool. Michael Houck: And then, Jon, I’m gonna follow up with updated Stripe link and all that stuff later today. So you’ll see that in Slack. Cool. Jon Morehouse: Okay. Sounds good. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Cool. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Cool. Blake Emal: All right, guys. Jon Morehouse: All right. I’ll see you all. Thanks. Jon Morehouse: Talk soon. Michael Houck: Appreciate it, Jon. Bye.