- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01KVXJZX6ENN7VC29BBHF4VPZN (via Ben Ornstein’s account, imported 2026-08-06)
Transcript
Ben Ornstein: Hey, what’s up, Andrew? Andrew Safranko: How much? How are you? Ben Ornstein: Pretty good. Ben Ornstein: Pretty good. Andrew Safranko: For some odd reason, my camera’s not working. Interesting. Anyway, weird. Are you watching any of the World Cup? Ben Ornstein: I haven’t watched too much actually. My friends are all into it, but I am. I watched like the USA game. That was about it. Andrew Safranko: Hey, Lara. Lara Kuhn: How are you? Pretty good. Ben Ornstein: How are you? UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Good. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Better. Lara Kuhn: Thank God. I felt awful yesterday, but better today. So thanks for being flexible and moving to today. Of course. Andrew Safranko: Of course. Andrew Safranko: Are you watching your team? They played in Toronto on Saturday. Lara Kuhn: They did. Yeah. Am watching. Following. But I’m I’m the typical fan that is only ever a fan. Andrew Safranko: Like every four years. Andrew Safranko: Yeah, every four years. Lara Kuhn: Maybe also every two for the Europeans championship. But now sometimes. Since I’m not in Europe anymore, maybe only after four years. Andrew Safranko: Cool. Lara Kuhn: But yeah, I mean, let’s see how we’ll perform. For now, we’re the group leader, so we should progress, like make it to the next rounds. But let’s see. Andrew Safranko: Better than the last World Cup, that’s for sure. Way better. Lara Kuhn: Yeah, yeah, yeah. But then also the group was. Like the opponents were not that difficult. Andrew Safranko: So yeah, yeah, last one, Germany was stuck with like Spain. And I think it was like, I think it could be Netherlands or something like that. A pretty strong group last four years. Fair enough. So we need to start transitioning stuff to, and I think this will probably be like a series of conversations, to be honest, because like, I’m imagining you guys will continue to use Beehive for the sounds of it. Lara Kuhn: Yeah, yeah, for sure. Andrew Safranko: Yeah, so like, there’s a lot of nuances there. Like, by all means, right off the cuff, feel free to message me. I’m sure Ben’s down to help out when he can as well while we transition. But like, Beehive overall is fairly straightforward, but I can totally understand where it can be confusing because Ben and I totally have gotten. Andrew Safranko: confused sometimes. Andrew Safranko: When we were setting you guys up, Ben and I were like watching the NBA playoffs, and then like, we’re like, what’s cool? What do we need to do here? So, like, and him and I have been in the like a couple of years now, at least. So, it can have its moments where it doesn’t feel as smooth. But, yeah, definitely lean on us. We’ll answer all your questions. So, no worries there. Lara Kuhn: Yeah, I haven’t really logged in ever. You’ll see that they have an MCP, and I am very much working in cloud only nowadays. Like I barely log into tools anymore. So I’m excited to see the capabilities there. Not sure if you’re using the MCP at all or if you’re like logging in, but maybe for what it’s worth, it’s might not hurt to to see how like what I even need to do in the tool itself and then it will be much easier for me to prompt an AI to to do the same thing right so yeah no you definitely should have a good like a visual of like where things are just in case um I haven’t used MCP yet for actually writing or anything like that generally speaking I I tend to write the old good old fashioned way still um But I definitely have used it for analytics and it’s amazing. Andrew Safranko: Like all like the back end data, anything about your newsletter, whether it’s subscribers, open rates, what you name it. I’ve used that. It’s so cool. Like I love it. So yeah, you just you just have to it’s pretty straightforward. There’s like a code snippet, I think, in Beehive. I forget where, but basically, you enter the code snippet in cloud and then it does the rest and connects it. Lara Kuhn: It is, yeah, we have it connected already. Chris actually did something internally so we have access to it. So that part is solved. But yeah, how do we best do this? Do you want to like screen share and take me through the basics and then? I can also try things on my end and come back with questions until next week, where we can have like a second session if necessary. Yeah, I’m hoping, yeah, I’m hoping that I’m quite used to working with all kinds of tools, right? That I will find my way around this. Andrew Safranko: Yeah, it’s not going to throw you for a loop in a sense that something will feel like it’s off. It’s more so, like, as an example, if you wanted to edit your website. Like that can be a little bit of a challenge. Their website editor and designer and the like isn’t the greatest, but they do have an AI chatbot within that editor where I’ve found in the past I would just work with the chatbot. And then, although it will give you a certain amount of tokens, I’ll be like, hey, like the hero needs to be, you know, a couple pixels up in the page. And it’ll just move it for me as opposed to me trying to like figure out, okay, which you know, which tile or where there’s this, like, what layer should I be in? Like, just all kinds of nonsense that, like, if you’re not design savvy, it drives you nuts. So, yeah, the website editor is definitely one where I would probably lean towards taking a look at. The other is. If you’re doing any automations, my guess is the MCP will probably help with automations because you could probably just talk to it in normal language and say this is the kind of thing I want to automate and it’ll just create it. Ben, you can probably speak more to automations because that’s you pretty much set them all up, but you can talk about the painstaking process there. Yeah, those are the two I’d say. Ben Ornstein: Yeah, definitely. On the automations front, honestly. I haven’t used the MCP too much, but and I definitely haven’t used it for automations, but I could actually see that being really helpful. They have a really good user experience if you know what you’re trying to automate. So, for example, let’s say we wanted to add something. When a poll is submitted, you want an action to happen. So, like, they have these preset things, and there’s a lot of them. Like, I haven’t found something where I’ve needed to make like a custom first kind of action. They really have those covered pretty well. And then, so, after like the first action of a poll is submitted, is a lot of really simple things where, like, if you’re explaining things in English, plain English. Or German. I think it would be able to kind of figure out the automation that needs to be built. And again, I haven’t actually seen them myself. I’d be really interested to see how that works. But if you’re to do it manually, like when I do when I set these things up, it’s honestly pretty simple, given the options they give you. You can send an email, and then after the email is sent, I want to say, wait until X day. It’s got to be 10 a.m., but I want it on specific days of the week. I mean, it’s extremely easy to use, is kind of my point. So, honestly, that’s probably all I would say on the automation side. It’s kind of a kind of thing you’d have to play around with to. Think about like what automations you you’d want to use but because we have these existing ones you could use these as a baseline for like okay this one’s built this way doing this okay I can do this and mess around with it um do you like mind sharing like in a follow-up slack message a few more automation use cases that you have with other clients or that are like ones that you would recommend, or that Hauk uses on his own newsletter. Lara Kuhn: Just so we have a few more ideas that we can build in the future, sure, yeah. Ben Ornstein: These are usually the main ones. There’s, I mean, the ones that Hauk has are so intertwined with his whole ecosystem, so it may not even be all that replicable if that’s the word. Andrew Safranko: but let me see if I have anything that I could that I could share with you on that front sounds good yeah let’s see what else Andrew what else can we can we show so um I think I mean you’re pretty familiar with it but I think it’s fair to just mention it so the templates we have for the newsletter itself I think it’s worthwhile just having a quick chat about those. Ben Ornstein: Yeah, absolutely. So, basically, again they have these little ui things sometimes they’re like hard to figure out which is which but this one’s easy posts and then you have templates so Andrew and I worked quite hard putting this template together um thank you guys yeah it was a bit annoying to get that right um, it’s good, right? To make sure it’s you guys want it, but anyway, um, so these were previous ones. You could eventually probably delete these, but maybe you’d use them for something else. I don’t know. Um, this is the post template that we use. So, um, basically, you can edit the template. Um, there’s a lot of things you, if you go to the right, you’re actually editing like the content of it. Um And these are things that you know are can easily change. I think we kept like text blocks from one of the first ones just because it’s simple to mess around with. But that is the writing part of it. You can do a lot of things, right? Like you can duplicate a section, you can change specific text color sizes. Of the words and all that kind of stuff. But this is just within the editor itself, like on the actual content. The style is like the more broad and way more specific. So, like specific hex codes, typography, borders on the sides, and then like on the advanced, you can get even more advanced. It gets crazy. Email header specifically. There’s like the images that we were putting up top here. And so yeah, you could mess around with these, like the image. Sometimes they’re hard to find. The image one specifically, that was a hard one. But if you just mess around and look through, they’re all there. Andrew, anything I’m missing that would be really good to mention here? Andrew Safranko: So, the way, so I struggled at first. And they continuously update this as well. So, don’t feel like this, it’s not as intuitive as I would hope it is. So, if you feel you’re struggling, it’s normal. Lara Kuhn: Everyone else, that’s good to very reassuring. Andrew Safranko: Yeah, yeah, yeah. The way I’ve figured it out for myself is like, you’ve got it, like, the advanced section kind of divides as Ben was mentioning. So, like, you’ve got your headers, your subheader, and then you’ve got like the body of text and whatnot. And so, for the most part, the way I look at it is like, okay, I want to make sure the titles of my email make sense and they’re like the color, the font, the size. And so, you’ll find that pretty easily because that’s like in the in usually the subheaders or the body of the email itself um and then other than that like things like spacing I try not to mess around with too much because spacing first and foremost you just you’ll you’ll spend hours if you thought you wanted to make it perfect and it’s like what’s the point people don’t notice that anyway as long as you can as long as you can read it um and then color color is like a interesting one as well well. Because sometimes you don’t know what colors for what. So you kind of have to guess and test. So, yeah, like the main bit, to be honest with you, unless you wanted to do a dramatic overhaul of the current template, you should be pretty good. Lara Kuhn: I will keep it. Yeah, I will keep it as is. Andrew Safranko: You should be pretty good. Lara Kuhn: But until we hire a graphic designer and then that person can rebound. Totally. Andrew Safranko: But even then, I don’t know. Like if you had outside designs like HTML files as an example and then you imported them you can make that happen okay that’s interesting you basically yeah it’s just it’s not as again and I’m not a designer as well so like I haven’t gone that deep but we’ve we’ve got a couple newsletters we’ve worked with where we’ve added imagery that kind of looks like it’s embedded into the the email itself. Like, as an example, when we originally had the page dividers for you guys, right? It looks like it’s like part of the background, if you will, and it’s really just images. So it’s little things like that. But overall, yeah, like if the template is as is, then you should be fine. And you can totally use, like, you can replicate that and then use that template. Like, I know you guys have been sending emails already. If you decided behive you wanted to use for like just the marketing emails nature, you could totally do that. And all you do is just take the template, just like modify it a bit, right? Just delete a whole bunch of stuff, and you should be pretty good for that, too, if that was a thing you wanted to do. Lara Kuhn: Um, yeah, but otherwise, well, I mean, I am just a note here, well, I am. Sending all our customer emails right now and I’m creating them in Claude as HTML files that are then Clavio is the tool that we use. They’re created as templates in Clavio and then I assign the right segment that should receive that email and send it out. And it’s like a really easy and straightforward workflow. So I’ll look into how I might be able to do that here as well. Andrew Safranko: Just to if you wanted to. Andrew Safranko: you’re right. Andrew Safranko: Like, Clavio is great for that stuff. So, if you’ve got a process, please just keep doing it. Beehive is good for it too, but like if you figured it out, that’s cool. Lara Kuhn: Yeah, no, like we’ll for sure keep Beehive because it’s like our more like it’s a different purpose than our marketing emails. So, yeah. But I’ll try my Clavio workflow to see if it works here as well. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Okay. Ben Ornstein: One other thing I thought that would be interesting to mention is: so we send those test emails out a lot for you to review. And I do it for myself for my own newsletter. I all the time. Andrew, maybe you do the same. I always. So up here is where you can either preview and see what it looks like, Although I don’t really like doing this because it still doesn’t show you like this. You know, the actual output. So you click here and the little arrow next to it. Um, and you can see a draft link, or I usually just put my own email in, and that’s where I get those test emails. You can simulate, um, you guys don’t have a paid tier, but you can simulate if it’s a for your paid, and then you can also do like a specific subscriber. Um, so like if you have like the the first name, I don’t believe you guys do, but if you ended up implementing that somehow, this would be great to test. So, yes. And then, so, of course, you can do a bunch of different emails. For you guys, I’ve been doing like Lara at Goodword, Emily at Goodword, and then send the test email, and goes out. Lara Kuhn: Really? In terms of workflow, how do I like start a post based on like a new edition based on the template? UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Yes. Ben Ornstein: So if you were going to do that in, so if we go from the home page, you’d go to the little newsletter button. I usually click here and then do use template. Yeah, okay. And then you click right here and then use the template. Okay. Lara Kuhn: And then it opens a new draft, and I just fill in everything. Ben Ornstein: Basically, really as simple as that. Yeah. Some things to note: when you update these the first time, these are like the title and subtitle. They automatically edit, oh. No, that’s not true here. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Never mind. Andrew Safranko: Yeah, I think if it’s pre-populated already, for some odd reason, it doesn’t. There’s been other newsletters I’ve managed where I had the exact same issue. So every single time I was in the template, if the template has a title in it already, then that part, but technically, as Ben was mentioning, in theory, if you started a brand new fresh template without a title, in the website. Rule of thumb is check your title in web and also in compose. So, like when you’re building websites, just make sure that they match or whatever you want to do. Ben Ornstein: And so, it’s still good to mention this here. So, the title and subtitle, you can go through all of these specifically for you guys. It’s pretty simple right now because you don’t have any different well, I know we were originally going split up the subscribers based on like different sort of things. And so that’s something you could explore and then add tags too. I’ll show you that in a little bit. Then on the email side, the email button is where it could do the title and subtitle. Preview text, also the subtitle. And so I, and you can also A-B test subtitle, title, sorry, subject lines as well. So I definitely use these a lot on my own newsletter. What was I just going to mention? Oh, yeah. And then you advanced settings here. There was another thing I was going to mention. The tags. So subscriber tag. Actually, just delete this so we don’t have this just sitting here. Make sure I’m deleting the right one. Lara Kuhn: Yeah, I’m always stressed. Ben Ornstein: Yes, that’d be bad. Okay, so if you go to subscribers, there’s a whole bunch of things you can do here. Subscriber tags. So I guess this is what we were going to do originally, which I guess we never deleted the tags. There was like the general subscriber versus the good word users. So you can manually add these. When you import the subscriber lists, you can specify in the spreadsheet or the CSV that you’re uploading or anything like that and add those tags. And so when you’re uploading, it kind of checks, it looks at the CSV, it goes, Hey, here’s Lara’s email. You’re tagging it general sub. Is this the subscriber tag that you want to add? And then when it’s in bulk, it kind of just kind of does it. But now I’m just thinking about different things that might be helpful to mention. Lara Kuhn: Yeah, of course. Andrew Safranko: Yeah, those are probably the basics. Ben Ornstein: Those are probably the ones. There’s like there’s so much you can do in the platform. It’s kind of like you figuring out, okay, what’s the goal? And then kind of backtrack into how can you do it on Behive. One thing I use a lot actually for like the more complex things, I use their little AI assistant pretty often, actually. You’re like, hey, I’m trying to do this. What it’s not bad. It’s pretty good. So. Just a note earlier. Lara Kuhn: Well one thing that I would love like your help or maybe we can do it together now or later. Remember how our poll asked them what the next connection could unlock for them? And we had quite a few people like most of them replied a new customer. And we have a webinar and it’s actually like on Friday already, but maybe it’s not too late if we send it today. Could we segment the people that said a new customer and maybe even the ones that said all of the above? Because then that includes a customer, and send them just like a one-time email from a good company inviting them to the webinar. That is solely about how to find your next customer using Goodwood. Ben Ornstein: Yes, I think we should be able to do that. Oh it’s pending right now. I’m hoping when I download that, it’ll show the details. So we’ve got the name and a reply. Lara Kuhn: Great. Ben Ornstein: Cool. And so you were saying that anyone who clicked which two, all of the above and the other one? Lara Kuhn: And a new customer. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Got it. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Okay. Lara Kuhn: So, we’d love to invite them to the webinar. And if they cannot make it, they can let us know because send them like a summary of how to best do this with GoodWord. Ben Ornstein: Okay. And what I would do is I’ll add tags to these people. I’ll make like a subscriber tag webinar. That’s what I’ll do. Lara Kuhn: Great, great. Yeah, maybe say webinar and then Friday’s date. So just so that I can, in case I will have future webinars, I can, we will actually have future webinars. So a fundraising conversation is great because we have a fundraising webinar coming up. Maybe I’ll tell you the date so you can actually give that back as well. Ben Ornstein: Cool. Lara Kuhn: That’s the 10th of July. Ben Ornstein: Oh, oh. It’s the that’s the that’s the date of the webinar. Lara Kuhn: I’m also so sorry. The the customer one Friday and then the investor one, we have a next one coming up. So we have customer this Friday and then investor on July 10th. So any anyone who replied a fundraising conversation, we could send them that other webinar. Great. Thank you. Ben Ornstein: Sorry, what’s the date for that one? You said July July 10th. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Got it. Ben Ornstein: Okay. I will. Yeah, I’ll add the tags for these guys. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Cool. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Amazing. Ben Ornstein: Yes, no problem at all. So yeah, I’ll add. Lara Kuhn: Yeah, I can send you. Actually, we have one for the next critical hire as well, which will be. July thirty-first. So then maybe if you don’t mind, the ones that replied all of the above should get a separate email inviting them to all the webinars. But yeah. So maybe you can tag it differently just so I recognize. Ben Ornstein: So, all of the above should get all of them. Lara Kuhn: All of them. So, just maybe give it all webinar tag or so. I don’t. Ben Ornstein: Yeah, that’s good. All webinar. Let me just make sure I’m getting all these correct. I’m tagging them now so I don’t forget. Lara Kuhn: thank you so much. So, yeah, I guess everything else I will like, yeah, caveat: I am very busy right now. I have like tons of things on my agenda on my plate, so I don’t know if I will get to really like acquainting myself with Beehive before the moment it becomes actually necessary, like the before the moment I need to set up the next edition myself. So, yeah, I might only have real questions once that date comes around. Ben Ornstein: Makes total sense. Okay, yeah, I’ll work on the tagging of these people afterwards. Lara Kuhn: Okay, great. And in terms of Sunday, so we do have your next customers in your network, is already in your network set up. I don’t remember if we have final approved it, but I think so. Otherwise, feel free to send Emily and me a preview maybe right now, and I’ll check with her and see if this is good to go. Anyways, this week we’re speaking in all our emails about this topic, so it’s very much aligned with our current campaign. And then, as I mentioned, we’ll be like fundraising and hiring next. So, we always have like a campaign of emails that goes out. The newsletter is kind of related to that, and webinars as well, where we show how to actually use Goodword doing that. Andrew Safranko: Okay, so. I think in terms of megaphone, I think we had two more issues to send out for you all. So in theory, I don’t know if Helk mentioned it to you. In theory, we would have the one on Sunday and then two Sundays from now. Did he mention sort of like the end, I guess, of like work? Lara Kuhn: or he like he did send me a message and I forwarded it to Emily because I was kind of in between because she was talking to him about the actual end of the collaboration and then I was asking him things. So we’re still discussing with him, but I’m sure we’ll find a way and then he will let you know or I can let you know. But yeah, just so it’s top of mind for you, I guess. Like, if there’s one more issue, it would be related to our investor one. Yeah. Andrew Safranko: Okay, cool. Lara Kuhn: So, kind of your next investors already in your network. And, like, feel free to advise on the creative side if you would say we should match that title exactly. So, it’s almost like a series, or if we should like, give it a different headline, but then like the story is kind of similar that the next investor is already network. So, yeah, we can discuss that once we’ve clarified what is still in scope. Andrew Safranko: Yeah, that’s cool. Okay. Yeah, I’ll get I’ll get to working and I’ll flip you over. In theory, my gut reaction is consistency on the title probably makes sense. But once I dive in, I’ll message you. We’ll talk about it. No problem. Lara Kuhn: Cool. Amazing. Well, thank you so much. And also for the offer to be available if I run into any issues. But hope it will be a smooth transition. Andrew Safranko: You the message over on Slack. That’s where we are. All good. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Perfect. Lara Kuhn: Cool. Cool. Ben, let me know once you have the tagging so I can send that email. Ben Ornstein: I’ll do those right after we hop off. So it’s done ASAP. Lara Kuhn: Thank you so much. Andrew Safranko: No problem. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: All right. Bye.