- Platform: meet
- Attendees: Ben Ornstein, Sameer Nusrat, Sameer’s Circleback
- Source: Read.ai 01KV5NDAGJEVS9T649NMSKB4MG (via Ben Ornstein’s account, imported 2026-08-06)
Transcript
Ben Ornstein: Hey hey, how’s it going? Sameer Nusrat: Good, good, how’s it going? Ben Ornstein: Doing well, doing well. Um, I am getting over a cold, uh, so if I sound weird or make any coughs or your weird voices, just uh give me a heads up. Sameer Nusrat: Pete, I think I’m getting sick, so oh no, no judgment on your coughs. Awesome. Ben Ornstein: All right, well, it’s great to meet you. Ben Ornstein: Um likewise. Ben Ornstein: I feel like I’ve definitely worked with you guys in the past on something. Thank you. Sameer Nusrat: What was it for? Ben Ornstein: Or maybe it’s my, we do, our partnerships team has done stuff with metal. Sameer Nusrat: Yeah. So we have, I think, we have done an event with Hook and Blake. Yes. So that’s how this came in. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So for context, let me actually share context. So we were, we did an event for Tuke, and then we oh, you know what? Like, there’s like so much relevant audience. We didn’t get like a lot of people on the event itself. I’m not sure, like, only like 40 families or SPP for that event. But yeah, I think they have been very helpful, you know, just spreading the word out. Out. So, I’m not sure how much about Metal. I can make sure about Metal too. Ben Ornstein: Go for it. Yeah. Sameer Nusrat: Yeah. Okay. Cool. So, we are an AI fundraising system for fundraising. So, we essentially, if a founder is raising money, they come to Metal, they get a lot of intelligence on which investor to target. They create their pipeline. They find out who in the network can introduce them to which investor. What kind of geography the investor invests in, how much fund size is remaining, all that kind of intelligence. So, and then lots of other things. So, that’s a very, very, very quick overview. We are the default platform for textors. So, we are all deprecated, essentially, textors deprecated their own platform some time ago for fundraising, and they launched us on that side. A lot of YC A16Z founders use us. We’re growing like 30 to 40% every quarter. And now we are doing this big launch on 1st of July, where introducing the idea of autopilot. This comes directly from, I’m not sure if you’ve read about Alfred Len from Sequoia’s article on managed services. But this is like more of that. Hey, like, you know. With metal, but like maybe like 20% human involvement, like run there for your whole round process, uh, your whole research pipeline, everything. So, everything would be like automated, obviously, with some human, some human intervention. So, uh, so that’s where we’re headed. So, we’re doing a big launch. So, I had reached out to Hook for application that hey, like, you know, so we were reaching out to our network, adding an encounter invited, and he said, Oh, you know what. Ben can help you with amplifications. I was like, yeah, okay, why not? You know, let’s explore this. We’d have to know what we can do here. So hope that makes sense. I’m sorry. I’m getting sick. So my energy knows that super dope. Ben Ornstein: Believe me, I know the feeling. That was me last week. I’m on the other end of it, still not fully there. So I get it. But no, that was super clear. And it sounds like you guys are crushing it. That’s awesome. It sounds like a sick platform. I so there’s two main ways that we could help. Well, there’s, I guess, three. One of them is like, in general, it’s not really a one-time thing. It’s more of like on an ongoing basis. We could create content for your founder, your company pages. That’s something we do ghostwriting. So, like, we could do content creation across X, LinkedIn, newsletters. We could do a launch, we could help make a launch video. We do everything on the content front. So that’s one of the main things we could do. That doesn’t help specifically with the launch, but like we would curate and how would specifically help with writing the actual launch post. So that’s something that we could do. So that’s one thing. And then the main two things on the amplification front are megaphone, which you may or may not know a little bit about. But so Megaphone is kind of the other side of the studio. The Megaphone Studio is the ghostwriting agency. Then we’ve got Megaphone, which is the amplification platform. We’ve got hundreds of creators each across X and LinkedIn. And they span across all different industries, all different sizes, audience sizes. The minimum bar to to be in the creator network is uh 20,000 followers. Sameer Nusrat: So on Twitter or LinkedIn, right? Ben Ornstein: Okay, so anyone in the network, you would get uh engagement from any of those uh at the minimum 20,000 followers on the high end, like you know, a couple hundred thousand, I think, even a million for one or one or two people. Um So that’s people in the creator network. So we have the megaphone platform that you could use. On this platform, basically, you sign up with a few different niches. For you, it sounds like if you were to use the platform, it would be like AI, startups, and maybe technology. So fundraising is not, but I think like startups would be a great one. And then, like, so I would do AI. Sameer Nusrat: startups the third might be like tech or finance or there’s a few and then and then how so by the way for context um I actually have used megaphone for for a very very brief period of time so I think I just like used just like experimenting with this I was like putting like $45 or $50 behind and then I was like oh let’s see and we got like two three comments I was like okay you know So you know the platform. Ben Ornstein: That’s yeah, very, very briefly. Sameer Nusrat: I think I just like, you know, spent like 10 minutes on it and it just like didn’t do much effort and it just like went ahead. So I think so, but then how does it like work? Like, so I think, what when I actually did fire it for like 10 minutes, I was a bit confused on like how it actually works. So that would be helpful because my understanding right now is that when you put in a request there, maybe like a message or something of that sort goes out to everyone. I think it’s called a broadcast, I And then, like, it goes to everyone, and then they can just choose to opt in or opt out. That’s that’s how it works. Ben Ornstein: Yeah, basically. So, what happens is for your use case here, we’ll skip to like the actual broadcast. So, it’s a launch post. I don’t know how much budget you’re willing to spend here. But based on how much you’re willing to spend, you could throw, let’s just use a thousand as an example. You put $1,000 towards the broadcast. That would be spent through the network, optimized in the network for the best possible creators based on spend, audience reach, and many other factors that our intro algorithm automatically does for you. And so it's spread across a bunch of different creators. You get to choose comment, repost, quote posts. So you get very specific in terms of like what types of engagements you want from the network. Sameer Nusrat: That's super interesting. And how much budget do you recommend in general? Like, for example, if we are already aligning like 200 people to 100 people of our network, you just go and comment and repost. And I think it'll be like mostly a LinkedIn or it'll be like Twitter, too. I think that's both of the request comments on both ends. How much like budget would you recommend to put behind this? Ben Ornstein: It really depends on how much you guys are willing to spend. We have people launch campaigns with two, three thousand dollars. You know, it really depends on how much you're willing to spend because I would say if you, if money is not an issue, maybe like $2,500, $3,000 would be, you'd get a ton of engagement across X and LinkedIn. Sameer Nusrat: Okay. And I'm assuming how much I think we're trying to get out of it is also that, so for example, if 2,000 we do, right? So. With that being like, it could be like 100 creators, without being like 100 creators, or this kind of number that's generally vary, or is it like per creator, every creator has their own price? I'm not sure. I'm trying to understand that. Ben Ornstein: Yeah, so that's why it's, I don't want to dodge the question, but it's because a lot of it's a hard question to answer because all the creators set their own prices. They so, but I can give you a couple baseline numbers. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Yeah. Ben Ornstein: the average spend per broadcast is about $30 per broadcast. And it skews towards $100 for a launch post. And when I say launch post, I mean people who aren't venture-backed startups that don't have that much to spend. So that's the average. But again, for the average launch post that people were. Is not really an issue, I'd say it's closer to around like a thousand fifteen hundred. That's on the back of my napkin. The second thing I can give you is creator pricing, like an average. So we tell creators for every 100,000 followers that a creator has, they can generally charge around $10, an extra $10 per 100,000 followers. So if someone has 200,000 followers, they can charge $20 per comment. Generally. This is the baseline that we give them all users. Reposts and quote posts, because they’re showing up on someone’s own kind of platform or profile, some charge more, some charge less. Some value that higher than others. So that will show up on the reposts. It’s generally more expensive than comments. The best ROI you can get is comments. Cheaper than repos quote posts, and the reach potential is only slightly less. So I would optimize for comments and reposts. Sameer Nusrat: Yeah. Got it. And so I’m assuming within the budgetary $2,000, if we're just only optimizing and maintaining that for like 50 to 60 comments or yeah, yeah, if we do it that way, yes. Ben Ornstein: I haven't even told you about the other option that. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: make a phone platform is great. Ben Ornstein: The third option is what we call campaigns. And so, this is where those creators can pay them to create sponsored posts from their account. And so, if you really want to blow up the feed and like get everyone to hear about metal, I highly recommend this. So, because these are people that are creating posts on their own account, much more expensive than a comment, repost, and quote post on your account. But we've seen posts do like a million impressions when they do a campaign that's like two-tiered investing in creators creating their own post and impressions and comments and reposts and all that on their own post. Because you're still linking back and driving towards your post. And then again, you're taking over the feed with a bunch creators that are creating posts about metal. And so this has been wildly successful for a lot of people that we've worked with. And so I guess there's a few ways we could handle it. The easiest way is for you to just give me a budget and I go and find the best possible creators for you to create posts. On your behalf, to handle all the operations in terms of when you tell me, like, I'll a bunch of questions as we go through this: like, all right, what day? What time do the post to go live? Do you want people to engage with your post first and then make their posts? It can get very, very specific and customized. You can tell them what generally you'd want them to say, but then ideally, we leave it to them to like phrase it the way they would for their unique voice. Sameer Nusrat: Yeah. Ben Ornstein: But with specific keywords and phrases to highlight and point out. Those have been very great. And then there's another similar way we could do this where you give me a baseline budget. Again, it doesn't have to be perfect, might be slightly less, might be slightly more. I work with that and I pull a list of creators for you. You have to sign a document that just says you kind of won't go around us. To like work with these creators after we share who's in the network. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Makes sense. Ben Ornstein: Nothing crazy. Ben Ornstein: It's just something we do. And then once that's signed, share a spreadsheet with you with creators, names, their profiles, all their pricing across all their different things. This could be their comments, reposts, quote post rates alongside their actual sponsored post rates. So you could do, let's say, one creator has 200,000 followers. They charge. $20 per comment, $45 per repost, and $500 for a sponsored post. You could essentially pick a creator to do, I want the comment, the quote post, and the sponsored post. Ben Ornstein: Yeah, that makes sense. Sameer Nusrat: That makes sense. That makes a lot of sense. And what’s the general budget for this? Like, what’s the baseline for this? For example, and also another question: how many how many creators do you guys generally recommend for this to go fix for them to make like sponsored posts? Ben Ornstein: So that’s also a hard thing to do. I hate having to answer these questions because there’s not a great answer. The best answer I can say is as much as possible. We’ve had companies, you know, top. Top-tier companies that have spent 30 grand on campaigns with us. They’ve done well. They’ve gotten over a million impressions they’ve gotten on their post and then, like, just general impressions on in general, like across all the sponsored posts. It really depends on how much you guys want to dedicate. I will do the best I can possibly do in terms of finding the best value based on how much you’re willing to give. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Yeah. Ben Ornstein: I’d say the average budget of campaign budget per campaign that we’ve done, we’ve had some that have done like $2,000 where it's like, okay, I can't do too much with that in terms of sponsored posts. Because like these traders, you know, they're charging a decent amount for sponsored posts. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Yeah. Sameer Nusrat: um, like how much creator actually charge for responsible? I mean, doing that's like $500 plus or something per post. Is that, or do they charge less? Ben Ornstein: Or some charge less, you’ll get some that charge like a little over $150. You got some that charge, fundamentally insane amounts that you'd probably never pick. But creators, again, get to choose their pricing. So we give them a baseline. We say, hey, you're your pricing's a little bit high compared to the rest of the network. I just want to let you know. Sometimes they go down. I try to find the balance, right? I try to make the best value for you, and to go with the creators. I say, Look, you can't charge this much, they're not going to pick you. And so, I again, that's probably the best answer I can give. Sameer Nusrat: You got it. That makes sense. Yeah, because see, all what I'm trying to hear, did you hear us just know all the options and like, you know, what we can do hence to all the weird questions. All right. Ben Ornstein: No, no, I'm trying to give as much detail as I can. Yeah. Sameer Nusrat: Yeah. Okay. That makes sense. So I'm assuming, like, even for the sponsored post, like, we have to have a budget of like at least like thousand, two thousand dollars plus. To get us a decent amount of sponsored posts, and then maybe like $1,000, $2,000, $1,000 for the broadcast so that we can get a lot of comments. Ben Ornstein: So, what we could do for the campaign is instead of using the megaphone platform, we could actually like give you, because in megaphone, you don’t choose the creators. But if you’re going to do like a decent sized, like, sponsored campaign with us, like including sponsored posts, that way you can actually choose the creators that you want. Want to comment, reposts and quote posts, which is different from the platform. Sameer Nusrat: Yeah. Okay. That’s super interesting. Got it. Ben Ornstein: And that may not matter to you. If that may not matter to you, you may just be like, look, I’m just going to use the platform. It works, which it does. It 100% does. That’s why we’ve been around for over three years. And you could just use the platform and then just off the platform, pay a few people to do just sponsored posts. It’s totally up to you. But in terms of a budget, what do you think the highest you could possibly dedicate towards this entire initiative? Sameer Nusrat: So we’re definitely for context, the first bit of it, like in terms of the actual video, launch video, and all those things are already in place. So we are doing them with an agency that’s charging like $1,400 and they're just the video for us. The second part of it is the amplification, right? So, in terms of the amplification, we actually haven't defined any budget, but I think doing $2,000 or $1,000 is something that's true. I we would have a big issue with that. Obviously, we're still like a seed startup. So, we haven't raised a series yet. The budget is always a bit tricky. So there's like something that, like, you know, I will just have to align with the founder, and that is it. But that's how we typically work. So I don't have an exact number in my head, but I would think like 2000-ish was the max that we would be going on this. I think for amplification purposes, that makes sense. Ben Ornstein: Okay, that makes sense. So if we're going to do 2000, What we'd probably optimize for then would be the comments and reposts on your own post. And then I would try to find the best, like most efficient people that we could get for a few sponsored posts. I can think a few of them in my head that charge like under 200, around 200. So maybe what we could optimize for is like $1,000 worth of sponsored posts. This would be like maybe four to five, maybe. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Yeah. Ben Ornstein: Maybe a little less, maybe three to four, depending on which creators you’d want to work with. But only ones that are like reasonable based on price. And then the rest of that budget would go towards comments and reposts. Got it. And maybe quote posts. Sameer Nusrat: And how many, like, you know? With this budget of like on with this budget of $1,000 on the amplification side, on the sponsored post side, how many comments we post can we expect in that? Is that like around like maybe just a range would be helpful? So you don’t have to give an exact numbers. It’s easier. We’re just trying to get into planning, so for context that because we’re planning out, okay, we want to get at least like 200 comments, and we were we have a network of so that will come through, hopefully. But then we like, you know, want to get like 100 or something. And then obviously we could also get organic, so we get organic too and everything. So, but I’m trying to like, you know, estimate okay, where we would like land in terms of Ben Ornstein: I think if we put if actually before I answer that, is the goal comments on your post? Like that’s what you want to optimize for? Yeah. Then in that case, in that case, maybe we don’t even put any budget toward, or maybe just a couple, maybe a couple creators that we do sponsored posts for and we put 1500 towards the create like comments and reposts. On your post if we were to do that 1500 towards your post if we did just comments, no reposts and quote posts, only comments, yes, I think we could get 50 maybe 50 comments. Sameer Nusrat: um, 300. Okay, I know reposts are told posts, right? Ben Ornstein: On this, well, we can we can do both. We like what I would do is, I would send you a spreadsheet of the creators with all their pricing, and you could literally just pick, be like, I want to work with that creator who does going to do a comment, that that person’s. Post rate is way too high. Don’t want to do that. But this creator has a decent rate. Can I do those two? And that’s how specific we could get with this. Sameer Nusrat: Okay, perfect. That makes a lot of sense because we definitely want to optimize for people who are just really relevant in the industry. So, you know, like maybe if someone’s operating in a recent space and someone’s a founder or people like that. Okay, that makes sense. Cool. So this was getting recorded by on your end, right? So I would, is it possible for me to like send over the notes for this call? Because then what I would do is I would take them over, align very quickly internally and then come back because we would likely want to definitely get it get amplified. It’s just like the matter of like how much, what number do we want to land on and then go from there. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: perfect. Ben Ornstein: So, yeah, if you I will send you the notes when you come back with how much you’re dedicate towards this, I’ll get to work right away. Um, and we will, yeah, I’ll get going. Uh, the sooner I will, the only request I would say, the sooner the better, because we have more time to chat with the because a lot of these things they happen last minute and it’s chaotic. So, yeah. If you can just tell me as soon as possible how much you’re willing to dedicate, we can get this process going quick. I can move very fast, but we prefer a little bit of lead time. Sameer Nusrat: Okay, that makes all sense. So, we have it for 15 days. So, we’re nice launched at 1st of July. So, hopefully, how much lead time do you guys need? At least a week or two weeks. Let me see if A week would be great. Okay? Uh, perfect. I think that would be that’ll be. I think we’ll definitely get back by then. Uh, probably I will get back by tomorrow or perfect this week. Ben Ornstein: That would be perfect. Sameer Nusrat: Cool, okay. Sounds good. Uh, Ben, thanks a lot. Really appreciate it. Uh, this is like super helpful. Um, and I’m curious to know where this goes. Um, but thanks, Todd, really appreciate it. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: 100%. Ben Ornstein: It was great to meet you, Sameer. Great chatting. And I’ll send one of the notes and I’ll look forward to it. Sameer Nusrat: Yeah, thank you. Okay, sounds good. Thank you. Bye-bye.