- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01KTW3XAFZQ0YT9KP5Z6YS742H (via Ben Ornstein’s account, imported 2026-08-06)
Transcript
Michael Houck: No. Okay, cool. So similar, well, it’ll be a little different because the SEO like abnormal because they don’t have a website yet. So Emma normally comes to those with like research and like keywords and shared description and all that kind of stuff. But in this one, I’ll introduce and you guys all give intros to Kevin and his team. And then and then Jacob will really take the lead from there. Hey, Howard. You are muted. Howard Zhong: Oh, sorry about that. Hey, Michael. Worries. Michael Houck: Kevin, what’s up, man? Kevin Jiang: Good, good. How are you guys? Good. Michael Houck: Let me let in our final AI note taker here. There we go. Are we waiting on Vishaal as well, or I saw he was optional? Kevin Jiang: He might or might not join, but we can probably get started. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Okay, cool. Michael Houck: So, super excited for this. Glad we’re able to find a time. Sorry, it was there. We go. There’s the annotator for Jacob. Sorry, it was on Thursday, but glad we’re able to make it work this week. So, brief context on what this call is for. Basically, this is to go deeper on some of the things that you shared, Kevin, in the onboarding form. Thank you so much for filling that out. I know it takes a few minutes to do so. Jacob, your note taker is freaking out, man. I’m just going to have to boot it, try to join like four times already. So we’ll use the Read AI one. But yeah, so thanks for filling that out. And hey, Michael, how you doing? But yeah, we’ll go deeper on that. Jacob has some questions prepared. He’ll share his screen. We have a notion doc where he’ll be taking notes and sort of walking through some deeper questions, like I mentioned. And really just want you to get to know the team as well. Normally, these don’t take the full hour, so you guys probably will get some time back, but we like to schedule it just so it’s not rushed. And if we do need it, obviously we have it. So I appreciate you guys for all finding the time. And so maybe let’s just hop into some super quick intros. And so I can start that unless you guys have questions before we dive in. Okay, cool. So for Howard and Vishaal, I’m Michael Howek, I’m the founder. And I’ll sort of be around to help out with just about anything that comes up. I’ve built up a large personal brand myself. That is how we started this business. And my network of creators sort of powers the distribution side as well. Before this, I founded a company called Launch House that raised the Series A from Andreessen, about 23 million in total across the C Corp in a fund. And before that was very early in the Uber Eats journey, literally loading burritos into people’s cars up until the time we were hitting 10 billion GMV. So I’ve done a bunch of different things, but yeah, excited to meet you guys and to help tell Polar’s story. So, Ben, do you want to go next? UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Sure. Ben Ornstein: Hey, guys, nice to meet you. I’m Ben. I’m Haug’s chief of staff. Kind of similar to how Haug framed it. I’ll just be in the back end, just kind of helping on the ops front. I’ll be floating around. You’ll be seeing me. Yeah, I’ll keep it at that. Michael Houck: Ben’s the only person I know who sleeps less than I do. That’s how I’m thinking about it. Blake Stewart: I’ll jump in here. My name’s Blake. I will essentially be your main point of contact for just all things. Any point in time in the day, just feel free to ping me. I’ll try to respond to everything as quickly as possible. Make sure everyone’s kind of looped in and making sure we’re hitting deadlines and sticking to schedule. So if anything comes up, feel free to reach out. Looking forward to this. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Awesome. Jacob Shipley: My name is Jacob Shipley. I am the writer that you guys will be working with. So all things Ben and Blake handle operations and actual all things content going out. That’s my wheelhouse. My day job is I lead social media at a company called Benzinga, which is a financial news and data company. I lead our social media team and I’ve been writing for Hawk for probably. Two and a half, three years, maybe something like that. So it’s love, love, love all things personal branding. I started writing on LinkedIn myself in January of 2022 and wrote almost every day for four years and built up a decent sized personal brand, decent size newsletter. So I’ve kind of parlayed that into an audience that I’ve so all things personal branding, I’m really excited about and really excited to dive in and get to work with you guys. Michael Houck: Yeah, and just so you guys know, like Jacob is a killer. He’s being modest as he always does, but he’s a killer. When I need content ghostwritten for myself, Jacob is the guy that I So you’re getting the best. Jacob Shipley: I will share my screen and we can dive in. So. Apologies if any of this feels at all repetitive, but I do, there are some areas of the kickoff call or kickoff onboarding form that you guys filled out that I’ll try to double-click on a little bit and just make sure I have a really good understanding. Ben and Blake will dive into the process after we get done here, and they’ll talk through like the cadence of kind of how the rhythms go. Early on, it’s going to be a little bit more. Back and forth, obviously. Our goal is we want to take up the least amount of time for you as possible. We want the content that I deliver to be as close to just thumbs up, good to go, ready to post as possible. And so, early on, there’s a little bit more back and forth. But the purpose of this call, one of the main purposes, is I want to make sure the first batch of content I get is as close to that as possible. So, a couple areas we’ll double-click on. But I’ll pause for just a second. Any questions before we start asking some questions? Kevin Jiang: No, it should be good. Okay, cool. Jacob Shipley: So you mentioned this in the onboarding forum, but what is the primary goal of working together? Lost this again in a little bit, in a little bit of a different way, but what would in six months for you to say, man, this partnership has been incredible, everything we hoped be? What does it need for that to be true? Kevin Jiang: Yeah. So for us, we’re focused on getting like users, and a lot of the people that we’re trying to target are on like LinkedIn and maybe less so on X, you know, X is still good to have a presence there. So that’s kind of like what we’re targeting versus like pure number of impressions or pure number of followers. Cool. Jacob Shipley: And then can you? We have that down there too. I to hear a bit more about that now. Who is the ideal customer? Who is your ideal audience? You said they’re on LinkedIn. Who are they? What kind of content are they consuming? How are they thinking? Any context that would be super helpful? UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Yeah. Kevin Jiang: So in general, like what our product does is we’re like an AI browser that can do any actual work for you. So you can hand off things like research, sales, recruiting. Ops, marketing, literally anything that’s like too manual, you just give it to us, and then we just do it for you. And so, therefore, a lot of our audience are the non-technical folks. And our current ICPs that are the most retentive are going to be like other star founders, recruiters, salespeople, maybe SB folks, things like that. And yeah, I’m happy to dive a little deeper into that, but that’s like the high level. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Cool. Jacob Shipley: Yeah, and you’d sent a document in the onboarding form that I looked at of like what actual tasks people are using. But maybe if you want to double-click on that too, of like what, how are people using it? What are the most common use cases? And what gets people, are there any certain like value props that get people to convert and become users? Kevin Jiang: Yeah, so. One good framing is like we’re very horizontal. Like, the long tail is like very, very long tail. The most common use cases are going to be things like prospecting, like LinkedIn automation, things like that. So, uh, the folks at FIA, for example, so that’s uh Phoebe Gates’s story, like they’re our biggest power user. So, they use us for basically all of all ops marketing and like, a lot of like manual work, they just have us kind of do that. So, Google’s Google Sheets is like a big one. But other things on like Google Docs, Google Calendar, people manage ads on there. People like there’s a lot of, yeah, I think people run the Shopify businesses too. Like, they’ve done that to just, they used to have a bunch of people in Pakistan, I think, just like do a bunch of stuff for them, but then they realized that we could do it all for them. And so they. Kind of fired them to just like do that. Um, but because, like, what we’ve built is a general like web agent, meaning that it could use any website, this means that if it exists on the web, the agent can go and like figure out how to use it. So, Slack, Twitter, uh, yeah, your Gmail, just YouTube, literally, anything that is uh needed. Jacob Shipley: You’re very cool. Um. On the so people are using it for all sorts of different things. Is there typically one use case that gets people to convert better than others? Kevin Jiang: Um, there are like several. Uh, let me pull up LinkedIn like automation is like one of the big ones, probably. Uh, like a lot of these prospecting use cases, like going through a CRM and doing something that like tends to convert a lot. But there it’s it’s very, it’s not very like, this is like 90% or whatever. It’s like maybe these five things are like comprises like top 60% or something. Jacob Shipley: Yeah, cool. Okay, very cool. So, users gained, how are you currently tracking like where? What’s converting the best right now? What channels are getting users to sign up? Kevin Jiang: So, right now, for the past couple of months, we’ve just been growing organically through word of mouth. So, we haven’t been doing any of this stuff. It’s just in the past couple of weeks that we started investing more in different channels. So, we’re doing more UGC stuff and some paid ads and things like that. But we just got started on that. So, we’re setting up the tracking to like put that into like post hog and things like that. So, we haven’t had that just yet. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Okay, cool. Jacob Shipley: Let’s see. So the audience is pretty broad then. So anybody that is willing to or wants to automate work like that. So sales recruitment, that obviously makes a lot of sense. With the LinkedIn automation, are there other features like, yeah, LinkedIn automation being one? I guess like on the landing page, what are the like, are there three or four that you kind of tout or come back to over and over again? Kevin Jiang: Well, it very much depends on the person. That’s the tricky part because it’s very horizontal. So, like, there are certain workflows that people do, like if they’re setting up an event and then they need to send out a bunch of invites, just have the agent just go do that and they put a scheduled workflow. Or people do like a daily brief workflow where every day the agent will go Read through like their Gmail, their Slack, their calendar, prep them for their entire day basically, and just have that running every day. Yeah. Let me see if I in the onboarding survey, did I only attach like a link to like a HTML file thing, or did I also attach like a PDF stuff? Jacob Shipley: There were two separate things. There was the one that was, let’s see, I actually have it right here. Kevin Jiang: one of the oh, there’s HTML preview and then yeah, the Google Drive should have like a basically what you’re asking for of um that shows like the cases. So should be yeah, so that’s like those are like the top like use cases. Um yeah, so recruiting jobs, yeah. Um Yeah, if you scroll down bit, I think in one of the sheets has like, yeah, these are generally what people are doing. But G Suite is like probably like things that people would do on G Suite. That’s like one biggest ones. LinkedIn, those the most common. Jacob Shipley: Okay, awesome. Let’s see what the current audience, I guess, that. Gives me some context on there for you guys. Like, what other kind of content are you talking about? So, you’re talking about the product, talking about ways people can use the product, ways, use cases, different scenarios. What other content pillars or like another way I phrase the question is like, what are things that you could like, if I asked you to ramble about something for 10, 15, 20 minutes, what are things that could get you going to talk about? Kevin Jiang: It’s a great question. Do any examples of what other people have done? I know I have some questions on the onboarding forum, maybe some of those or things like that. I guess I, yeah, part of it is I’m also not too sure. Jacob Shipley: No, that’s totally fine. It’s like for me, I ghost write content. So I will talk about my own personal brand. I’ll talk about the benefits of putting up content consistently. I’ll talk about. Brand through doing clever and creative things on social media, things that are like adjacent to your niche that build credibility as a thought leader overall. Kevin Jiang: Makes sense. Makes sense. Yeah, that makes sense. Like we could definitely talk a lot about like our story too, which is like how we like, this is not my first startup. There’s a lot of I’ve done startups in the past. We can talk about the story there, our learnings, things like that. Um especially since we’re trying to also reach founders too um we are also doing use case studies right now so like we’re doing use case study with like pbgas startup um and there will be more to to come there and I imagine we can use that for some content too um yeah I can like also think offline and kind of come back with some some more ideas and stuff if that’s useful Kevin, like, I mean, with your experience and having built companies before, there’s probably like very niche things that you know, either about industries or about just building in general that other founders would be interested in that you could probably ramble about for a while. Michael Houck: And also, I would add that like this stuff doesn’t necessarily need to just be work focused. Like, we had we asked this question to somebody who, they talked about. Jacob, what did he say? I’m talking about James. He was talking about soccer or something like that for 15 minutes, right? So we don’t necessarily need to go out and make content about soccer, but like having your full perspective can let us know what analogies are going to sound like you go that level deeper. Kevin Jiang: Okay. Well, I’ve played a lot of poker taught, taught some classes at MIT on poker. I ran the MIT poker club for a bit, uh, so I could definitely ramble about poker for a while. That’s awesome. Jacob Shipley: Well, and stuff like that, yeah, that’s how thanks for stepping in there. So, that’s like, yeah, so this guy particularly is enthralled with the World Cup, and so it makes sense. It would be weird for him if we just put out content over the next few weeks and we never mentioned it, right? So, just like for it, we want every post to be like you could never copy and paste it. And put it under somebody else’s account, right? We want it to be so unique to like your perspective. So, things that like make sense to weave into your content, not necessarily about, you know, this is a post about poker, but things that like, you know, it would make sense for you to bring up in conversation. Kevin Jiang: Yeah, makes sense. Um, I also did like Chuck Hondo for like 16, 17 years. Jacob Shipley: Oh, cool. Kevin Jiang: Um, relevant this will be, but uh, I will the US team for a couple of those years, uh, but I stopped like five years ago, but yeah, cool, okay, that’s awesome. Jacob Shipley: Um, okay, can you can we double-click on the startups you’ve been if you wanted to give me just like a short version of uh what you’ve been up to the past several years? Kevin Jiang: Yeah, so um. The first job I did was out of, I don’t know if you’ve heard of prod before, but I was out of that. And we basically did a crypto startup. So this was building a NFT marketplace for creators, raised some money for it, went through YC in summer 2022 for a bit. And then we were based out of the LA hype house, which you guys might be familiar with. We ran our operations there. So we did some fun stuff like hosting Lil Nos X’s birthday party at one point. Second startup I did was a AI chat platform for teaching like soft skills and stuff. So mainly with universities, so like HBS, Columbia, Yale. Did that for like a year, didn’t get retention really well. So we’ll round that down later. Jacob Shipley: Very cool. And what was the genesis of Polar? How did it come about? Kevin Jiang: So I was at Perplexity last year doing a bunch of random stuff there. And one of the main things I was doing was working on Comet, which was our AI browser at the time. And basically, we had a graph of like number of LLM steps and reliability on that. And after. I want to say like 10 steps, like 10 LM calls, the reliability would be basically 0%. But then, once, so this means something like booking, like, I don’t know, a calendar event or like making reservation, like that is like unreliable to do. So, if you can imagine that’s the state of things, you can imagine that this is not very useful for like any actual work. However, in mid, sorry, in beginning of October was when Sonnet 4.5 kind of dropped. And basically, I was in charge of kind of re-architecting every like all our AI agents and stuff. And so played around the model and realized it was really good for like browser tasks and basically prototype something that was basically 2x better than all the other products that the AI labs had. And it could go for hundreds of steps reliably. And even a thousand, two thousand steps somewhat reliably. So, going giant jump from like 10 to like 100 to 1,000, I saw that this was like a big leapfrog when it comes to actually doing like real work for people. And because Perplexity was not really focused on trying to like build something that could automate all knowledge rig, more focused on like with their comment browsers, more so consumer facing, you know, replacing the default search, you know, making those sorts of things. And browser is just more of an add-on, and like 20 other products that they’re trying to do. Figured we could do this separately as a company. Jacob Shipley: Very cool. Jacob Shipley: And then, so, what is so? You said the last couple weeks you kind of launched on like more specific marketing channels. When did the product actually launch, and what’s been feedback like so far? Kevin Jiang: Yeah, so we launched our desktop app version in January. And that was like the only post we’ve ever done past like five months. Um, And so everything has been just organic from that. People liked it and people used it. And then we got feedback that people wanted. They basically listed out a bunch of issues. And we realized all of these issues would be pretty much addressed if we turned this desktop app into an actual browser. So then we worked on that. We released that early actually, a couple, like maybe two, three months ago is when we started rolling it out. And then we actually fully switched to that AI browser, like basically last month. So all the things about like Fiat I’m talking about, all the people that are using us, all of that has been like through word or mouse. Someone really enjoyed it, told someone else, and they told someone else, and they told someone else. And then, that’s how it’s been growing. Um, but obviously, we wanted to grow faster, so that’s why we started investing a couple weeks ago into figuring out what good like channels. So, this is also the first time for us figuring out how to actually do this. Jacob Shipley: Okay, sweet, very cool. Jacob Shipley: let’s see. Jacob Shipley: Okay, so brand voice and again like some of this that you would rank it on the scale of like zero to ten of like is this how you would talk this wouldn’t isn’t how you talk. How do you describe do you the way you’re talking to me right now is that similar to how you write content or is there a distinct difference in how you write versus how you talk in person and then how would you I guess we’ll pause there. Do you feel like you talk how you write or is there a distinction between the two? Two? Kevin Jiang: I feel like it’s pretty similar because I feel like if I’m like writing something, I’m going to Read it out loud and feel like, okay, this is my what I so I feel like pretty similar. Jacob Shipley: so, how would you describe like sometimes it’s easier to start with what you’re not rather than what you are. What are things that you would never say or that you want to stay far away from How do you not talk to? Kevin Jiang: the most obvious ones are probably like the more the rage bait sorts of two troll, those sorts of voices. That’s probably not how I would write. I’m also not like overly professional. Like some people, you know, they write very professionally. That’s not exactly the style that I go with. And then maybe the last thing is like, I try not, I try to be interesting, if that’s the way to put it. So not like the I told Michael this of the oh, this is what I did today, here’s what, here’s what it taught me about like that, those sorts of things are maybe not the direction that I’d be hoping to go down. Jacob Shipley: Yeah, okay, yeah, for sure. Um, that’s super helpful. How, how much, like, I’m thinking, like, my brain starts going to like specific post ideas of like, okay, like, there’s something cool about the taekwondo style, like, that’s super interesting, and especially because. The more you talk about yourself personally, people get to know you as a person, who you are, what you’re about. Then they’re going to be so much more likely to listen when there is like a, you know, hey, this product feature just launched. You should check it out if they feel like they legitimately know who you are. How comfortable are you on the scale of wanting to be like one far end of the spectrum would be only talking about, you know, personal, one would be like only talking about professional. How far are you like comfortable swinging back and forth on that pendulum? Kevin Jiang: yeah, pretty comfortable. Yeah, I wouldn’t mind. Yep. Jacob Shipley: Okay, cool. And then, are there any other accounts that you follow that you feel like are doing a really good job in two areas? One would be the way they talk, how they talk, and then the second would be the type of content, the subject matter, the material. Is there anybody that you’ve you’ve seen that you’re like, man, they really? Have nailed it at like what I’m going after. Kevin Jiang: I don’t know if I off the top of my head right now, if there are ones that I’d be oh, I would want to like follow exactly that. Ones that I’m like, generally, like, this is the type of content I like, which may or may not map to what we need to do. But in general, like, I love PG’s stuff on Twitter, as a lot of people do. And what specifically I like about it is just like, obviously, he tries to be very concise as possible. So none of it is like fluff. It obviously does not Read as like AI generated, you know, like the rhythm is like very, very different there. And obviously, the ideas behind it are actually interesting. Like people are actually interested in that and they’re pretty novel rather than just regurgitating stuff from before. And yeah, so that’s probably what I would say. The more I think about it, I’m sure there will be other accounts that I like, Let me think. Yeah, it’s the only one I have off the top of my head right now. Yeah, if I think more, I’ll probably come up with more. Jacob Shipley: Okay, that’s totally fine. So, okay, we. Talking about like content ideas, like you mentioned just right there, novel new ideas. The best way for what’s the best way for me to extract those from you is you think of things because a lot of times like the trap founders fall into is not realizing this thought I’m having because it’s so everyday to you, not realizing, oh, this is actually something that’s really insightful for other people that haven’t thought this way. What’s the best way for me to start kind of extracting some of those things from you? Is it just sending you a list of questions and you sending me voice memos? And then the second half of that question: are there any places where you have written down thoughts before? You have kind of a repository of, you know, ideas where I can pull content from Kevin Jiang: Yeah, I don’t have an existing repository. I’m happy to, like, you send me questions. I’ll send a bunch of notes. Like the other day, I was talking to, I was talking to my girlfriend about, because she also runs a startup. And I was talking about, because a lot of people have contrarian bets. Against or for cursor, for example, and how that plays against the big lives. So, I had like a detailed thought process of how I felt about that and why. And I realized that might be something I could probably turn into a poster or something like that. And so, I think, in general, before this, I’ve never been aware of like, oh, this thought might be postable or something. Like, that’s not just something I thought about. But now I’m starting to think a little bit more about that. So, I’m happy for you to like send much questions or like, for me, I’m be a little bit more proactive where I’m just random ideas and be Should I flush this out more? Is this like going to be useful for an idea? If so, I’ll flush it out more and maybe send it to you. If not, I’ll just like skip it or something. Would that work? Or? Yeah, that’s perfect. Jacob Shipley: Yeah, that’s great. Um, yeah, I mean, that example you gave right there is like the perfect idea of like that could become a post of something to just like flush out. Um, so that’d be great. Um Let’s see. On the thinking about more product-centered content, one thing you said in the onboarding form that I thought was interesting was that people don’t understand the value prop of an AI browser. How would you, what, what’s your response to that? And people, like, what, I guess, how phrase that? Is it, I don’t need that, or I don’t know what to use that for? And then what’s your response to that? Kevin Jiang: Yeah, it’s usually. Things, which is like they are like, oh, do I even like need, like, what do I even use this for? And then the second thing is like when they do have something to use it for, like, oh, to book an appointment or something like that. Then the agent would usually, because the browser agents are very good, usually fail on those use cases. But a lot of people, yeah, like kind of like what I said in onboarding form, a lot of the AI browsers are targeted towards regular consumers and regular consumers don’t really actually need an AI browser because. If I’m reading an article or watching Netflix or scrolling through social media, what do I really need AI to help me with? Like, nothing really, right? Do I? And then, classic use cases that were always being shown on Twitter or something were obviously the ones that you probably know: booking flights, booking reservations, things like that. And all of those are bad use cases, mainly because for the average Joe, are they doing that every day, every week? For me, I’m booking a flight maybe once every month, two months, three months, something like that. And I’m sure I’m on frequent side of things than the average, average show. And so that’s why I kind of rambled on a little bit and decided onboarding form about, oh, what a browser agent is actually useful for, work. And so it’s like people do recruiting every day, people have to do sales every day, people have to do operations or like whatever they have to do every day. And if you can have a general agent that do all those things, that’s something that’s like, very retentive because it works. People do it every day, every week. Jacob Shipley: Yeah. And then you talk about like the horizontal nature of it, of like being, how do you feel like it, this gets disseminated to that, that broad of an audience? Because it’s not a specific, we’re only targeting recruiters. It is very, very broad. Do you feel like it’s? There are certain segments where it’s like, oh, these people immediately get it of like this could be automated? And then the people where it doesn’t click like that. How do you explain, the breadth of what the product can do? Kevin Jiang: Yeah. So the founders, recruiters, salespeople are generally ones that are like, oh, or like SMB folks are generally like, oh, this could be immediately useful because they’re the ones doing a lot of manual work. Every single day. And so, the folks who do a lot of manual work are going to be the ones be like, oh, this could be something I could just pass off to. For the folks who aren’t like that, unfortunately, we don’t do a really good job of trying to show it. We’re trying to work on that with, like, you know, like NAN has like a library of use cases. We’re trying to do the same thing to solve that blank slate problem. A lot of people come on and they’re like, okay, would I even send this? Like, what do I even do with this? And so, a decent number of people come on a chat GPT question: like, what’s the weather today? Or, blah, blah, blah. And then we are like much slower. And so they’re like, okay, this is garbage. Why would we ever use this? When they don’t realize that, like, oh, it’s actually for like, if you give it a knowledge work task, we’re much better on that. But yeah, we not good at that just yet. We are trying to fix that for the other long-tail use cases. Jacob Shipley: Okay, very cool. Let me see here. Kevin Jiang: Oh, and sorry, one more quick point. Right now, because it’s like word of mouth, usually it’s a friend telling a friend how they use it, and that sparks ideas for that friend on what to do. And then they come on to use it, and then etc. Jacob Shipley: I wonder. I’m a really big fan of episodic content of like, I just, I’ve done it in the past and I’ve kind of fallen off the wagon, but I started out today actually on my personal LinkedIn, but like day zero, zero, one of playing around with this idea, you know, this concept and posting that. I wonder if there’s something there of like, edition one of ways you can use, you know, this product for, I think, to kind of in conjunction with building out like a library of use cases, making those into posts, and then also making posts into like formal database of people, like building up that repository of like, in addition to obviously all the other stuff, but finding ways to clearly and concisely communicate, here’s a possibility you probably haven’t thought of, or maybe you have, but there are a lot of people that haven’t. Kevin Jiang: Sorry, are you saying that in general, if we get those like repository of use cases that people are liking doing. Jacob Shipley: I just like make quick videos or something like that, and we can post that, or yeah, yeah, videos, or even just like text posts of like you know, like you said, like the long tail that doesn’t really know or hasn’t really thought about it. Ways to get in front of them with content that’s immediately applicable: do you do this? Yeah, this will help, you know, that kind of thing. Kevin Jiang: Yep, sounds good. Jacob Shipley: Uh, sorry, was there a question there, or it just, yeah, just an idea that kind of popped in my head. Yeah. Kevin Jiang: Fan of it. We have some really weird use cases that I don’t know if it would be good for a post, but like, like, someone used to like they use us to use ChatGPT agent like build them an agent because they don’t know how to use interface, like, or having it reply to a bunch of reviews on like a gambling site to just like I don’t know, boost or whatever, or something like that. So, there’s a lot of random use cases that I don’t know if this makes a good post, but that we could draw from Jacob Shipley: No, I love that. I had done, I worked with a client that they hired, they were like a hired people remotely. And so it was a super interesting post was like, the weirdest jobs that you’ve ever heard that are hiring remotely, right? Because there’s like an interesting factor of like, well, what are, and so there’s like interest there. So I do think that’s use cases, even if people aren’t going to be mimicking those use cases, it. It showcases the functionality of the product and can spark ideas, which is interesting. Are there any other ones like that? I’m curious, like, what’s what are the weird ones, the crazy ones that pop into your head of ways people use the product? Kevin Jiang: Those are probably the ones I have right now. Um, I’m gonna have to dig in. I just have to dig in more to find more. Uh, people like ran, like people did try running their newsletters. With us just like doing a bunch of someone writing like a financial newsletter or something and having it do a bunch of like research and then putting together that entire newsletter for them. One time, like many months ago, someone did it for like they built, they were planning out their Valentine’s Day trip and they had it like do research along like the one to the one highway and find like some spots to go to. And then basically the agent built like a, it found like an open source version of Google Maps. And so it built like a nice interactive app for him to basically show like the entire trip, what are the places, things like that, that you can click into. And it generated that for him as he was planning out his date, which is interesting. Jacob Shipley: That’s super cool. Very interesting. Cool. Okay. I feel like I’m. Getting what I need for like the content side. This is giving you some ammo posts as well. I’ll send you a batch of questions that if to respond to. And also, when I send you questions, I’ll probably always send more questions than you want to answer. But my goal is like if I send five and you can pick three to like give you, give me a voicemail on, that’s a good place to start. And then I can start kind of crafting posts on that. The other aspect here is I will try to always work ahead as far as possible. I never want to give you a post on Friday that needs to go out on Monday and to scramble to get that out. I’ll always try to be if I give you a post Friday, it’ll be for the next Monday or even the Monday after that. So to build up a buffer. So, and granted, the exception there would be if there’s something trending that you really want to comment on, we do have the ability to move quicker, but I just never want to be in a spot where you’re having to scramble. Send that first batch of questions to you today or tomorrow. And then you can get back to me, you know, either this week or early next week. And I’ll start crafting the first batch there. Ben or Blake, I’m not sure which one of you guys wants to talk about, like the process, the cadence of the operation side, and all how all that stuff works. But I think that was the gist of what I needed. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Gotcha. Kevin Jiang: That makes sense. A couple of quick questions. Would it be so? If I have just like random thoughts and stuff, or like, because the three of us, we like to debate about a bunch of different topics like a lot. And I’m sure if we could figure out like a way to turn that to some kind of content, like, should I just spam the Slack channel? Or is there a better place? Okay. Yeah. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Yeah. Michael Houck: Kevin, we want your raw thoughts. Rather than writing in your personal notion or I don’t know, talking to your personal LLM assistant, whatever, use our Slack channel and voice notes and send Jacob ideas anytime they pop into your head. And honestly, Howard and Vishaal, if you guys have things that you want to share some perspective on that you think could be good to put out from Kevin’s account, feel free to drop it in there as well. Kevin Jiang: Cool. And then generally, what would be the cadence of posts that we’re probably aiming towards? Michael Houck: So I’m quickly throw that one back at you first, Kevin. It depends a little bit on strategy that we want to go with. And also then there’s like another layer of strategy we should go with based on where the account is today. So early on, we’re probably want to get more shots on goal. So lean a little bit more towards a higher frequency of shorter posts. But as we sort of see what the audience is responding to topically and formatting and voice and things like that, we can make more of a strategic decision about: hey, do we want the account to be an account that posts frequently shorter posts, or do we want it to be, sort of a more long-form thought-leadership-y type account? And I think from our conversations, my gut is saying that you’ll want to lean a little bit. Away from like the LinkedIn thought boy vibe, right? So we’ll probably stick a little bit shorter, but we can mix it up as well. And so frequency case would be, probably close to, if not daily. Kevin Jiang: Yeah, that makes sense. Yes, that makes sense. Yeah, the only thing I don’t like about thought. Leader sort of thing is only because most of them actually just like it’s not actually original, right? The content’s not actually original. It’s like I would have no problem with like being a quote-unquote thought leader or whatever. Because I would say like PG, for example, would be a thought leader type. That’s only actually interesting because his ideas are actually interesting and unique. Whereas most people, unfortunately, are not as unique there. Michael Houck: Yeah, I look, what we’re seeing pretty consistently across social right now. Is that the type of posts that would be able to go viral with relative predictability a few years ago of like, you know, here’s my 10 takeaways about this thing, or here’s like the eight Y combinator interview videos you should watch or something like that, and like a brief description of each one, you that stuff could be compiled by Claude in like five seconds and put into right? And so and people know that. And so, when they see that, they’re a little suspicious of it. And they’re a little bit like, hey, you know, this isn’t going to be valuable. I can just ask Claude myself if I want that information. Right. So, like, informational content in that way is sort of not doing as well. And what we are seeing doing better is more personal stories, more behind the scenes, more taking people along for the journey. So, if there are things like, even if you guys are just in the office together and, you know, a photo of something of yourself, like a little selfie, and you’re doing something. We can turn that into a post that isn’t like, here’s what I learned about B2B sales from this, right? We can turn that into a story post. We can turn that into letting people feel like they know you and that it could only have come from you. So, not that that’s required for every post at all, but we can mix some of those in and kind of see how they do because we’ve seen them do pretty well for other folks recently. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Gotcha. Kevin Jiang: Makes sense. Makes sense. Jacob Shipley: Well, like what you said, the idea of people making contrarian bets against like cursor, like that is something that’s very interesting. You you scroll on LinkedIn, it’s not like you’re seeing that every other post, right? Like, that’s a very interesting take to understand that. So there’s something there. And that’s, I’ve mentioned that, but that’s another exercise I like to do with people: I’ll say, like, look in your camera roll and pick one photo and then like, give me two sentences on it or two paragraphs on it and kind of think through that. Because a lot of times, like, there are posts on posts on posts in your camera roll. It’s just we haven’t like thought of like, oh, yeah, there is kind of a story behind that one of you know, I’m meeting at a coffee shop or something like we can expand upon and make something there. So we can definitely work with, um, yeah, as you’re going about things that feel every day. We’d love to figure out a way. Can we expand on that and turn that into a personal connection moment? Kevin Jiang: Yeah, that makes sense. That makes sense. Okay, thank you. I think, yeah, the only other question would be: are we going to repurpose this content to from LinkedIn and cross-post on like X2? Michael Houck: We can, depending on the type of post. For example, there’s some posts where, you know, I mean, it’ll be easy to adjust the formatting. There’ll be some posts where we won’t even need to really adjust the formatting. But then there’s a third category of ones that are sort of you know, unless we turn it from a long form post on LinkedIn into a thread on X and it might not fit to be a thread, like it just wouldn’t make as much sense to port over. But in general, yes, if you want us to sort of give you the LinkedIn version as the primary and then sort of add like the Twitter version, we can do that. That’s no problem. Kevin Jiang: Yeah, makes sense. Okay, cool. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Sweet. Michael Houck: Ben, do you want to walk through the op side? Ben Ornstein: Yes. So as Blake mentioned, he’ll be your like your, you know, the account manager point of contact. And so like the typical process is on Mondays, as Jacob stated, he’ll be like sending you questions to provide your unique perspective on. So he can create posts that are like uniquely you, of course. And then we have like an internal review process that we do. And then towards the end of the week, that’s when you’ll get your content. Delivered to you in Slack. And then we have an automation process. Sorry, I’m not feeling too well all of a sudden. Michael Houck: No worries. You want me to take it, Ben? Yeah, go for it. No worries, man. Yeah, so basically, that’s the cadence. So, questions on Monday. If we get the voice notes back from you by, say, Tuesday, then it’ll be incorporated into a batch of content that gets delivered to you. You realistically Thursday, Friday, most weeks, sometimes a little sooner, but just give us till the end of the week to deliver the batch. And then, sort of on an ongoing basis, obviously, if things come up, trending topics, or you guys have big announcements you want to launch, just give us as much sort of headway there as you can in the channel. And then the other side of this is like managing the account, right? So after this call, either tonight or at the latest tomorrow. I’m going to go through, Kevin, your profiles on both platforms and do a little profile audit of like the changes I would recommend that we do. Some of those we can take on, some of those will be better for you to take on. So I’ll send that over in the channel. And then from there, Ben will reach out to grab your account credentials as well. This will allow us to handle scheduling, posting, and also critically engaging with other people’s content. So if you guys have people who you want. Kevin, who you want to build a relationship with and you think it’d be valuable. Either these can be target leads, or these can be investors, or potential, you know, high-profile folks like, you know, like Fia and Phoebe’s and Phoebe, people other than her, obviously, because you guys already work with her, but you know what I’m saying. If you guys have lists of people like that, just send them in the channel anytime, and we will keep an eye on their accounts and we’ll engage with their content as you in ways that make sense and kind of fit. Your positioning, your voice. So, and we’ll also obviously engage with replies on the posts that we make from your account, too. So, there’s like that engagement side as well. Interesting. Kevin Jiang: Okay, that’s cool. That’s cool. Cool. Okay. Michael Houck: I think that’s everything from our side. Kevin, Howard, Vishaal, anything on your guys’ side that we haven’t covered that we should while we’re all here together? Kevin Jiang: nothing on my end. I don’t know, Michael, however, if you have guys have anything. Vishaal Ram: Yeah, it makes sense. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Nothing for me. Howard Zhong: Thanks a lot. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Cool. Michael Houck: Well, we’re excited about this. So I’ll follow up with that profile audit. Ben will reach out to grab your creds. And then Jacob will be getting started on the first batch of questions coming your way soon. And we’ll dive more into sort of research after this call as well. So, you guys will be hearing a lot from us over the next couple of days, but yeah, we’re looking forward to kicking this off. Kevin Jiang: Sounds good. Thank you. One quick, really quick question. Go for it. Usually, when people start doing this kind of ghostwriting stuff that you guys work with, how big are their accounts usually? Michael Houck: It varies greatly. Just using Jacob on the team specifically. Jacob writes for folks who have over 250,000 followers on X, and he also writes for folks who have under 100. So there’s a wide variety. Yeah. Kevin Jiang: Gotcha. Yeah. Because I’ve barely posted on both platforms. I still have decent, like not zero. Curious on what I’m not. But anyways. Michael Houck: I think I think on X, especially with your following to follower ratio being so good, that actually like influences impressions. Yeah, like if following a thousand people, your post would get less reach than they will because your like four to one or whatever it is right now. So that’s good. But yeah, with 720 followers, you at least have like some basis to start with there. And then on LinkedIn, I’m trying to remember off the top of my head, but let me pull up your profile here. Yeah, yeah, you’ve like, yeah, 1150. Um, so again, solid bases. It’s not going to be you know the biggest engagement on day one, but we want to see how engaged that audience is and kind of learn who they are. Um, and we can grow it from there. Kevin Jiang: Yeah, makes sense. Cool, cool. All right, guys so much. Michael Houck: All right, guys, thanks for the time. Talk soon. See you.