- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01KY58E55Q2WMHK9ZYE3GW2XWW (via Ben Ornstein’s account, imported 2026-08-06)
Transcript
Michael Houck: Yeah, it was fun. It took forever to get them edited. The editor was like kind of a pain, but they came out good. Ben Ornstein: That’s awesome. Yeah, no, they look great. Michael Houck: How are you? What’s going on? No more tornadoes this morning? Ben Ornstein: That was the craziest weather I have ever lived through. And honestly, I was fine because I was inside. I was just looking outside, waiting for my wife to come. It was insane. The worst she came in. Right when she walked in through the door, the rain was coming sideways like the house a little, the apartment, like a tiny bit. There were, oh my God, I drove her to work this morning, as I expected, and there were limbs and broken trees. It was crazy. So yeah, and you’re right. Like that weather never happens up here. Michael Houck: Yeah, I was like, I was surprised and I was worried because, like, I mean, you know, if that happens in like Oklahoma, like everyone’s got an underground shelter or whatever, right? But not in Delaware. Ben Ornstein: Yeah, no, it was a little crazy. There were the Wi-Fi went out like multiple times. Anyway, it was crazy, but we’re all good. We’re all good. Michael Houck: I’m glad she made it home. All right. But yeah, okay. So let’s let’s say I feel like I haven’t seen you in forever. Ben Ornstein: I know we haven’t done a, I was cracking up. I saw the thing that said weekly call. I was like, yeah. Michael Houck: I know. It’s been a while because with the trip and everything and then getting back up to speed. So well, let’s try and make it weekly going forward. But okay, I saw your list. I haven’t had a chance to read through it. Do you want to do you want to knock it out? Ben Ornstein: Yeah, let’s do it. Before, there was one thing quickly that Rina sent didn’t add to the list. She forwarded a question from a creator that was like, for tax reasons, she wanted the name and address for megaphone. I can obviously give her that. Then there was also, she said, she’s getting paid via Thera, but obviously there’s like the megaphone wallet. So she asked if taxes are handled separately. Megaphone and Thera. Obviously, we’re two separate companies, but like, is she technically being paid by us? Yeah, she is, right? Michael Houck: Yeah, there is the same as Gusto or Deal. Ben Ornstein: The provider, right? Michael Houck: Yeah, they’re paid by the company. Um, so Thera is just the payment portal, that’s all. That was even though it’s megaphone, because we haven’t switched things over. I believe it’s still Rye Valley LLC, technically. Ben Ornstein: Okay, so I’ll give her the Rye Valley. Got it, got it. I believe so. Michael Houck: Yes, yeah. So we got to figure that out for next month, switching over. You know, when he roughly all some stuff there first, um, he might be able to do it all in like automated, I don’t know, but um. I to get everything out of that legacy, like Hawk Stripe uh account. So, um, there’s we’ll do that for Beehive with the transition to the hard calls brand, which we can talk about. But um, um, those are the two big things: the subscriptions that are still on there. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Yep. Ben Ornstein: Lore is all good except for key card. I just have that list that I’ve been working off of, and each day, like the it’s going to renew, I switch it over. I switch another one today. So, it’s looking good. Michael Houck: Sweet. Okay. Yeah, let’s knock out the list. What’s this first one? Social image request work improvements. Oh, right. Okay. Yeah. So. Tell me what you’re doing right now because I’ve been using clawed design. I mean, it’s been like the number one thing I’ve been using for the past couple of weeks as I’ve built out, you know, I did the Rye Valley site, which we’re not use. I did the hard call site, which is wrapping up this afternoon. I did the Lore site. I did the Jolt site. And I feel like there’s, I did some Founding Journey stuff we’re not going to use too. So I feel like I have like a pretty good handle on what I can and can’t do. So, what are you doing right now for clients? And, like, what’s the process both in general and within the AI design tools? Ben Ornstein: So, the one that I was really using cloud design for was Project Omega. And that’s because they gave me a really detailed, like, brand kit with extreme, like, a lot of detail. And so, that made the image requests or like the whole cloud design build out. Really simple because, and she gave me like mock designs that she liked. So it was very, very good. But for pretty much every other client, we don’t have any of that. I asked Michelle for stuff from Draper, we never really got it. She just sent me logos. So it’s like, okay, well, so the process that I’ve been doing instead, which honestly has worked out pretty well, sometimes on like the threads that include like big carousels and stuff. It takes a while. But I give like a reference image, either it’s usually like a logo for Draper, it includes logos. But I use reference images in like ChatGBT’s image designs or image gen with just like a detailed prompt. And it usually works pretty well, honestly. Sometimes there’s some tweaking I make, but it works pretty well, honestly. Like, that’s the process. Michael Houck: So, I don’t use ChatGPT. So, you’re literally just doing this in ChatGPT itself. You’re just like making an image of whatever. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Yep. Michael Houck: Okay. Interesting. Okay. So, yeah, I mean, the benefit of the brand kit is obviously that we get details. We can like refer back to it and it can be the same each time, right? If they’re not give us that, like, I don’t know what would we, I mean, I feel like we wouldn’t need that much from them to create it, right? We could like take screenshots of their company website, we could give them some context on the person, we could give them some screenshots of like formats of carousels and infographics and stuff that other people do. Like, does that seem doable, or like, am I not thinking about? About how good it is at like social graphics? Because I only use it for like web stuff, right? Ben Ornstein: Yeah, when I’ve tried with the social graphics and I’ve given it context for like when I tried for different clients, and Blake ran into the same things, it just wasn’t very good. Maybe you’re right that if we trained it and gave it a whole bunch of reference images and best practices, and basically gave it context like we would for an agent, essentially. Maybe it could, it could work. I might have, I’m looking at this again, and I said it takes five to seven hours. I think I overstated that a bit. It’s not taking me an immense amount of time. And again, the image requests per client, like it’s not extremely common. It might be more like two hours. A week. Michael Houck: Yeah, but I mean, like, we should be leaning more into that because posts with images are going to do better, right? So, we should be creating images for honestly almost every post. So, it should be a substantial, I would assume, like, a substantial chunk of time because I know because I’ve made a couple of these images for like Rafael’s asked me to do like thumbnails for SEO, like when we drop a link in Slack for Jolt, like what shows up for the image, right? Um, and it’s hard to do that. It doesn’t do that very well. Like the words will be misformatted, something will be on top of each other. When you give it anything except like a deck or a website task, it gets a little confused with like how to do it. So I do know what you’re talking about. Ben Ornstein: Yeah, it’s hard to explain how, like, why it’s not working. But because you’re probably deeper in claw design than I am now, actually, definitely. It’s harder for the social images. It is. Okay. I’ll look into that though, because if we can build that out, that’d be killer. That’d be huge. Yeah. Michael Houck: And I feel like this has to be like a solvable problem. Like, I haven’t looked into it for this stuff because I haven’t done any work on it for this. But maybe, yeah, like, maybe just like, some YouTube videos or blog posts or something like that. Like, hey, here’s how to like trying Claude to make social images and it’s fucking terrible. Here’s how to not make it, right? Yeah. So I don’t, I don’t know, but like we should test the capacity because I would prefer if all of our design work is going to and from the same place across the business. I think that’d be, I mean, obviously. There’s like a tool that’s materially better, sure. But I have to imagine that claw design is better than just like ChatGPT, right? If we like figure out what it’s doing. So let’s see. Let’s see. Ben Ornstein: One other quick thing I wanted to mention. This is, this was it, it didn’t, claw design didn’t generate like actual images. All it did would be like lines and shapes. Ben Ornstein: Like it wasn’t doing any complex sort of oh, yeah, no, I’ve run into this too. Michael Houck: It doesn’t like illustrations, it doesn’t like to do illustrations. So maybe it’s not called, maybe there’s like an illustration-based tool. But let’s, let’s sort of, let’s sort of open up the carpet. Let’s sort of the carpet on this one and see what we can find on both those cases. It’s like, I’m going to need this for my stuff anyway, right? Like, I’m need this for mine. So, whatever you find in the next day or two, let me know. For now, I’m just going to, I have like this insanely long conversation with Claude Design about. What was originally the Rye Valley brand, we’ve sort of morphed it into a hard calls design system. So, that thing has more context on the business probably than like literally anyone but me. So, if I need, like, yeah, I need to talk to it, but I would like to be able to do it in there, ideally. Cool. Okay. Ben Ornstein: Yeah, I’ll get on research on that for that because it’s very high leverage, obviously. Cool. Michael Houck: Okay. Let’s, I saw, I did read through the stuff about Charlene. Sounds like sort of full steam ahead. Yeah. Let’s give her. Yeah. I like your idea of giving her like a viral examples type thing because that’s like something that we’ve struggled to hand off to Rena and Venus. And so let’s see if she’s at least at that level with it. Right. Yeah. Ben Ornstein: um, I think that that was a good one. By the way, is Rina okay? I’ve gotten, I’m so in tune with like how people are feeling now. Like, she doesn’t like respond as much. I don’t see her as active as usual. Is everything okay with her? Michael Houck: Everything’s okay as far as I know. Um, her hours are down. I think she’s only doing like 15, 20 hours a week right now. Um, so like one, she’s got capacity that we can throw more stuff at her. Um, but two, um, like, I know she’s at least okay enough. I don’t know, I don’t know if she’s like 100% okay, but I know she’s fine because I have her working on the final thing with Thera data that the acquisition team wants. So, she’s working on that like right now. So, she’s like active. Ben Ornstein: Okay. Okay. Yeah. It’s just. Michael Houck: she’s not responding at like 3 a.m., 4 a.m. As much anymore. She’s more like in the morning Eastern time, basically. Ben Ornstein: Yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s what I’ve noticed as well. Okay, cool. Just wanted to check in. But yeah, so Shirlene sounds great. And we had a good call. She’s very nice. Michael Houck: But let’s try to get her up to speed because if she does well on the test project, it would be great to have her and Venus both sort of tag teaming this stuff, you know? Ben Ornstein: Yeah, absolutely. Michael Houck: Okay, because especially now, since we have like viral examples, is going to expand into doing two issues a week, but having one of those issues be the X issue and one being the LinkedIn issue instead of sort of the different formats we have right now. So, or it could be where we do those to different sub lists on the email list. So to figure that one out. But that plus the trend spotting one, I think there’s be a lot of work with sourcing. Ben Ornstein: Yeah, absolutely. So that would be nice to have some help. Michael Houck: Yeah, it’d be nice to let them run with that. You can guide them and manage them, but it’s like tedious stuff to have to scroll through a bunch of stuff. So hopefully they can figure it out. Ben Ornstein: Trend spotting is difficult. For that one, I’ve been like, I’ve been scrolling and then sending to Tatum. That was what we did for the first one. I hey, would this Are the numbers good? Like, could this actually fit for the trend spotting newsletter? So, I just sent her another three for next week’s. And sorry for those issues. I should have caught those small. Michael Houck: Oh, you’re fine. We didn’t explicitly talk about it. So, not a big, not a big deal. It does look like, We have a terrible open rate today, though, unfortunately, like 2%. Holy shit. That’s so I think there’s like a deliverability thing going on. So, yeah, I don’t think anyone, I think it’s like it’s being delivered. Like, if you look performance tab or whatever, the delivery rate is actually pretty low. It’s only 82%. Usually it’s like 99.7% or something. Yeah. So that’s an issue. But then the second issue I think a lot of it is going to spam. And this is something we see with the funnel emails too, like the automations. They’re all going to spam our promotions or something. So I think we got to figure that out ASAP and we can probably try to resend some of the funnel emails to these leads. Cause right now these leads aren’t seeing anything from us. Yeah. Ben Ornstein: Okay. Michael Houck: Can you look into that like today and tomorrow? Might need to talk to Beehive support about it too. I’m not sure. Ben Ornstein: Yeah, I’ll write that down. Okay. Michael Houck: Yeah, I noticed that a little bit ago. But I mean, we’re acquiring leads. We don’t know if they’re the right leads or not. But if our emails aren’t getting to them, you know, that’s a non-starter. So. Ben Ornstein: Yeah, and that’s not so great. Okay, so that’s viral examples. I also said I wrote when Venus sends, but it’s actually Rena who’s sending me the So for FJ, should I not plan any more Tuesday sends at all? Michael Houck: I don’t know, man. I mean, I don’t think we’re going to have it live by next week. So I think you can do one more. My guess is that that will be. Well, actually, next Tuesday, we might launch Lore. So. Ben Ornstein: Should I prep one like just in case as a backup, maybe? Michael Houck: Yeah, do do one more. And I think that’ll be the last one. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Cool. Ben Ornstein: Okay. I can do that. That sounds good. Michael Houck: It’s like, as far as branding and stuff, we’re going to the lore site will be live either Friday or Monday. We’ll go live with that to people on Tuesday. And then. The following week, we’ll likely try to launch the rebrand. Depends how we get everything set up regarding like funnels and the paid options. We have to build some stuff still for the pro tier. But yeah, I’d like to get that all live either. You know, not next week, but the following one, or at the latest, the week after that. Like, that’s like, by that point, we’re getting close to the middle of August. I’d like to get it out by then. And that’ll include like FJ Plus. It’s just going reskinned as like hard calls Pro or something like that. And the benefits are going to be slightly different, but mostly the same. Ben Ornstein: Sounds good. Yeah, I don’t know how you keep all this in your head. This is insane. Michael Houck: No, it’s honestly the design stuff has opened it up for me, man. Like, I feel like I’ve unlocked a superpower in terms of clarity and thinking and like productivity. So I’m messing around with Claude and VS Code right now, a little bit yesterday, and I’m going to do more today and probably more so tomorrow because I have fewer calls tomorrow. I think I can likely, you know, I still, I’m not be able to say we don’t need Rafael and Mahul, but I think like, I think once these initial sites are built, I’ll be able to make simple updates to them and like set up landing pages and stuff like that. And then basically, you know, if we have big projects, we’ll loop them, loop them in, or like we need advice or something like that. But yeah, it’s crazy, man. It’s I feel like as I feel like I’m gaining superpowers. Ben Ornstein: That’s crazy. Yeah, the margins are gonna be nuts. I mean getting better. Michael Houck: We’re gonna be we’re gonna go from being a service business to being a service business with software margins. Um we’re not there right now. Like actually, like if you take out Emil’s payment from the beginning of this month, like we’re not actually like, you know, we’re okay this month, but we’re not like, like that’s like the majority of it, right? So, um, and I also just feel like there’s like four or five clients who are like in a tenuous spot right now. So, I don’t feel super comfortable because the jolt launch didn’t go like we wanted it to. Yeah. But once we get this funnel situation worked out for them, I’ll feel better. Um, but right now it feels a little bit like uh. You know, we’re ice skating a little bit. Ben Ornstein: Yeah, it doesn’t feel like we’re rocket shipping. Yeah. In terms of the acquisition, has there been like, yeah, where are we with that? Like, I know you said between like one and two weeks, maybe we’d know. Michael Houck: Well, I set a hard deadline with them for basically the end of this month. I was like, Look, this has been going on forever. We need to make a call for our business if we’re going to keep these writers or not. I had to say that to them, but like in my head, that’s the criteria I’m using. And so we’re either going to sell the business to them or we’re rid of the writers, except for having Jacob continue to work on Draper, basically. And so I just need to make that decision by August 1st. And so they need one more thing from me, but basically, we’re at the final stage, which is add backs. Addbacks is like RD expenses and one-time expenses that won’t be part of what they need to pay going forward, but impacted our margins for the year or two years prior. And so it’s like, oh, well, we take these things out of your expenses and we add them back to your profits basically. And then we revalue the business based on that. So, like, the engineering expenses for building the software platform for Megaphone, they’re not going to need to do that again. So, um, That gets added back. So, if we don’t know what the final number is going to be yet, once we know what the final number is going to be, I’m going to have a good feel of like, do I want that or not? And we’ll make a call from there. So, that’s that’s where we’re at. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Cool. Ben Ornstein: Makes sense. Okay, quickly on some of the other things. Yeah, internalize the newsletter. I’ve set up what I can so far when the new site’s up, when the lead magnet is live and all that kind of stuff then I can continue doing the automations and stuff. Michael Houck: I’m trying to decide about the lead magnets. I don’t know how I feel about them after that comment from Luis about like the VSL funnels being better when you advertise the newsletter and you like accept a higher CPA in exchange for people who are like actually more aligned to continuing to get content from you, you know? Yeah. So I guess I’m less bullish on minimizing our CPA and I’m like more open to like whatever is going to drive conversion the most, you know? Ben Ornstein: I mean, you do want the right leads, right? Of course. I make that. Michael Houck: So I think when we’ve talked about like lead magnets, I’m like, I need some free mental space to do maybe this afternoon, but like, I might just say, forget the lead magnets. Let’s build the funnels around the newsletter and then build a couple low-priced paid products where, like, if they’re not ready for the service and therefore we wouldn’t send them to the VSL page, we sort of funnel them off to like a $29 or $49 front-end offer that’s like takes, you know, minutes to make in a clock or something. Ben Ornstein: Okay, that’s interesting. Michael Houck: So I’m thinking through that, but yeah, I’m less bullish on like how many subscribers can we get. I’m more bullish on like how can we make sure that the subscribers we do get will be actually interested in what we’re sending them. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Got it. Ben Ornstein: And on the VSLs, I’ve been doing like a ton of research. I’ve been watching like YouTube videos and stuff there. I have this whole doc. It’s hard to find the actual examples since they’re like, nested within these flows that like people have. So, my initial approach was find these videos that people have posted publicly about like the best practices, the psychology, some of the stuff that you wanted to see, put that in, and then layer in more research plus like the actual examples that I can find. Michael Houck: Yeah, that’s like we do, we do need the real examples to just find that a foundation. There. That makes sense. Ben Ornstein: So I have a ton of stuff in a dock, but I want to like finalize it, organize it a bit better. Michael Houck: Yeah, no, no, no rush. If you can get that to me by like end of day tomorrow, or honestly, even Friday, but ideally end of the day tomorrow, that’ll give me the weekend to sort of write some scripts and get some time set up with Emma, Blake, and Tatum to film some next week. So, yeah, let me know what you find there. But sounds good. Ben Ornstein: Cool. And then I’ve got this section for like small quick things that, like, some of them we don’t really need to discuss. Like, one of them is like Cape Intros, so you can just review those. Michael Houck: The first one. So I don’t mind a 250 cost per result at all if it’s going to lead to good conversion. My issue is, I think you need to look into the ads and the way they’re set up because from Luis’s comment back to us on that thread this morning, it sounds like that might be an issue with our ads, not their ads, like the experience post-click that I had. So I would just like, I know you’ve probably gone through it the whole thing, but I would just go through it and just make sure that there’s nothing different in there. Don’t know how it’s using the Haux newsletter name. I don’t know how it’s going to the journey site. I don’t know why it didn’t go to a landing page. Like anyone who goes in through that flow right now, we are recouping 0% from them because they’re not seeing SparkLoop, right? We’re just burning that money. Ben Ornstein: That’s so weird. I literally duplicated their exact ad. So I don’t know. I’ll check again. Yeah, I look like, it could be. Michael Houck: I mean, I flagged to him. Like I told him to look into it too. There could be an issue on their end, but we are seeing Spark Loop stuff come through from there. So, like, I don’t know, you know? Yeah. Ben Ornstein: Okay. I will, I’ll look into that again. Yeah. Michael Houck: Yeah, because I don’t want this to go to like next week, and then we’ve spent like, 500 bucks or more, and we just, we’re not getting any of that back. And the area getting sent to a brand that has nothing to do with what they’re signing up for and broken promises, et cetera. You know? Ben Ornstein: Yeah. Okay. I’m going to I’ll make that high priority, like first thing after this. Look again. Because I don’t know what’s going on there. Um, so Tatum just sent over like a whole bunch of stuff for to train the agents for jolt agents on like the secret sauce kind of stuff. Uh, killer, she gave me a lot of detail. Um, I followed up on a couple things, like, she didn’t specify um stuff specifically for TikTok versus IG versus like shorts. And so, like, that’ll be killer because I imagine there will be some clients, like, some people hate TikTok for some reason. So, like, some clients will, I would imagine, would likely do just IG or just IG and YouTube shorts. Michael Houck: Even if they don’t just do it, they might have a bigger account on one to begin with, or they might just say, Hey, my audience is more on one than the other, right? Ben Ornstein: Right, right. Ben Ornstein: So, a whole bunch of reasons. So, I did ask her if she could like specify the differences between those because she kind of likely talked about that. Michael Houck: Should our expectation be that like we’ll have something there next week for the Jolt agents? Ben Ornstein: I should be able, if she gets me that information by end of week, by end of next week, I think I can have like the V1 agents built probably. Probably. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Cool. Michael Houck: Sounds good. So tentatively, end of next week. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Yeah. Ben Ornstein: that’s I would think so. Um, uh, yeah, the cape megaphone intros, uh, that those are really not anything we need to discuss here. Uh, just like Derek Beckman said, like, text me. So, I don’t know if you do have his number, so I don’t know. Michael Houck: Yeah, Derek, Derek’s a good friend of mine. We worked together at Uber. Ben Ornstein: Cool, okay. So, just wanted to make sure what text me, that’s what he meant. Um, so I don’t know how it works with like, the upwork like contracts. Do I have to like close it out? Should I close it out? Michael Houck: don’t close it out because if you close it out, then we need to restart a new one with her if we need her again and ever for anything in the future. The charge went through. I saw it come through. I got an email about it. So just leave it open. And if we need to reach out to her again, we can. Cool. Ben Ornstein: Yeah, she’s great. So if web flow work, she was really good. Cool. Michael Houck: Love it. Ben Ornstein: it. I threw this in, but yeah, I’m continuing to add to that TikTok sheet. I’m just scrolling through, finding founders and VCs and relevant people that we can reach out to for sales. Michael Houck: So, yeah, I’m going to start crafting like very personalized one-on-one DMs to these people because I think that’s going to be our most likely way to get in the door with them. I’m also going look, you know, what would actually be good if you get Reno on this? Get her to. Look at who my mutual connections with those people are on LinkedIn. Ben Ornstein: That’s a good one. Yeah. Michael Houck: And at least add like one or two, or maybe three at the most, like high-potential folks in like another column in that sheet or something. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Yep. Michael Houck: Because I think if we have 50, say 50 to 100 in there, I have to believe we can convert. At least two or three of them into clients if we send them a good message. Ben Ornstein: Would we want to use CAPE for that and do a new campaign with those specific leads? Michael Houck: We would, but if we can get it set up quickly, yes. Is officially shutting down in. A couple weeks they’re trying to get acquired right now by one of the big um labs basically. Uh, just Aqua Hired more than anything else, just they can kind of put a bow on the story of Cape rather than just shut it down. So, um, yeah, they’ve given up on sort of building the product at this point. And it’s just like, how much time do we have before they either decide to call it quits or get acquired? So, I would say if we can get that set up this week, then yes. If not, then you know, I don’t know if if they’ll if it’ll be able to make the full list basically. But yes, it would be good to do that. Ben Ornstein: If Rena has the time, it might make sense to even just have her do it. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Have her do what? Ben Ornstein: Just have her do it manually, like she would do. Michael Houck: Sorry, do you do like reach out to them or like what? Ben Ornstein: No, no, sorry, like doing the task manually, like you initially. Michael Houck: Oh, yeah. I mean, I think it’s fine. It’s only like 50 plus people, so she can do it pretty quick. Might not be worth it up, honestly. Ben Ornstein: That’s what I was thinking. Plus, like Kate has has given some intros to people. Like, I’m sending you a few every day, which is nice. Michael Houck: So, yeah. Ben Ornstein: Okay. Ben Ornstein: I’ll just have her do it manually and I’ll give her the The information there. Cool. Michael Houck: So let’s go, babe. I’m going to go back into my design cave and finish up the hard calls, Brian. I’m very excited about it. I think, like, I really think this could be a big thing, and it’s a topic we can make a lot of content about. Ben Ornstein: So, with a big tamper, there’s a million things that we could talk about there. So, I’m excited. Michael Houck: We got to just get posting every day. So, design this week. Relaunch the brand either next week or the following week, post content. And then we’re back in the saddle and we’re just going and we’re trying to get leads. We’re trying to build awareness of what we, what we’re doing and what our options are. So I’m very excited about it. I really do think it has the potential to be really big. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Definitely. Ben Ornstein: I agree. Yep, that’s that’s pretty much it. I’m just doing, I’m, you’re, you’re going through a million places in your head. I’m trying, obviously, at a little bit lower level than you. But I’m doing, I’m doing my best. Michael Houck: And we’re, I’m going to try to, like, once we get this megaphone thing finalized one way or the other. I’m try to, because I know you asked, like, I think last week, like for some clarity on what the role will look like going forward as we sort of move into the new phase of the company with the new brand and all this stuff. So I was hoping we’d have more. Traction with the LLC, the new LLCs by then, but I don’t want to keep you hanging there for too long. So either next week or the following week, I’ll put something together. Just like, hey, here’s where I think it’s going to make the most sense to lean in on and focus on. My guess is a big part of the hard calls brand is going to be the AI clone expert network product because. It’s just a natural extension of the brand. If people are coming to us, if founders are coming to us to make better decisions for their startup, and that’s like our big thing, then, okay, what’s a natural extension of that? Making better decisions by asking someone who’s made those decisions before, right? So we’re going to start that off being the sort of centerpiece of the Heart Calls Pro offer and eventually spin it out into its own product if it’s successful. The big thing we need to do there is: okay, let’s find 100 plus 200 experts. Let’s have an AI agent that can interview them and record the call and build their AI clone. And they’ll do that because they’ll get paid for the calls that they do with people who, clone they have, the more likely they are to get paid calls. So there’s clear incentive alignment there. But we need to go through and find, I first identify and then to get in touch with these experts. So that’s going to be, and then like handle the ops around scheduling and getting all their stuff into the AI clone generator and stuff like that. So my guess is that that’s where a lot of the work is going to lie. So it’s like a combination of like ops stuff and AI stuff. So, but I don’t know. I have to see where the dust settles on some other stuff too first. That’s my hypothesis. Cool. Ben Ornstein: So it’s like the AI like intros.co slash Tegas sort of Michael Houck: Yeah, exactly. That’s exactly what it is. And then, like, the vision will be here. Let me actually, let me actually show you. Let me show you the design for it. It’s not totally done. I had a Rye Valley version of it or a Founding Journey version of it that actually, well, let me just show you the Founding Journey version of it because that’s more built out than the hard calls version. Okay. Where is this guy? Dashboard. Okay, you ready for this? Let’s see it. All right. So this is your advisory board. Or with Founding Journey, I was going to call it your founding team, which I thought was funny. But with calls, it’ll probably just be your advisory board or something like that. And basically, up here, there’s like a little banner that rotates: like, oh, we have a new deal, or a new person just joined, like, go welcome them, or new expert just joined, chat with them, whatever, new skill added, et cetera, just like new stuff going on. And then here’s like new content from us too. Like, it loops in my content that’s like doing well. There’s like little gamification of like how much you’ve engaged and how much you’ve saved, et cetera. Just like little reminders. But the big thing is this: the chat window, where basically you can ask the network of AI clones and AI me how to do something. So let’s use one of these prompt questions. So it has an expert from the list who’s given an answer on how to hold EML a VC. And she is a VC. She’s a partner at a VC firm. So she’s highly relevant. And then I also give my answer to, and mine’s like especially called out as like being related to FJ, right? So from this, you have a couple options. You can follow up in general with a follow-up question, or you can go into a deep dive with either me or the expert who was surfaced. And if you go into a deep dive, Then you’re specifically talking to that person here. So you’ll be able to go deeper with them. So, let’s say, send this, blah, blah, whatever, whatever. Have a conversation with her. And I don’t know when it’s going to do it because this is just like a literal, tiny little React app. But at some point, what it’s supposed to do is it’s supposed to say, oh, oh, I know why, because I’m a member. It can go to a free user version. Basically, whether you’re a member or free user determines how long of a conversation you can have. If you’re a member, you can have a longer conversation with the AI. If you’re a free user, a shorter one. But in either case, the eventual end state here is that it prompts you to get on a call with the person. And that’s a paid call, and they set their own prices. We take a commission on that, and they get a payout. The more time they spend building up their AI clone, the more likely it is to be selected in the first place as the one that surfaced. And also, the more likely the conversation is to be high quality, which will lead the person to booking the call. Ben Ornstein: Wow. That’s super sick. Michael Houck: I think it’s legitimately better for business advice, startup advice, than like ChatGPT or Claude could be. Because we have first-party data from real experts in various niches. And we have the audience that’s going to, like, we can, we dangle the audience in front of them to get them to spend the time. Like, hey, we have a 60,000-person audience. You’re going to get paid calls. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Yeah. Michael Houck: So that’s, that’s the product. That’s the idea. Ben Ornstein: I love that. I love that a lot. Everyone’s incentivized properly. As well, which I love those products where everyone is incentivized. Yeah. Michael Houck: So we need to obviously build this out. We need to get these experts here. But I do think that it’s like a pretty solvable problem. What we’ll need to build is like an interviewer agent to get on a Zoom call with them or something and interview them. And then some like infrastructure for them to like manage their clone or something like that. But that’s what I’m going to have Raphael and Mahul work on after the public site is live. Ben Ornstein: So is Halcbot not going to be built then? Because that’s kind of Michael Houck: Well, this is Halcbot. This is okay. Ben Ornstein: Okay. Michael Houck: So it’s like there will be a public. Version of Hawkbot that, like, after you sign up for the newsletter, you can talk to Hawkbot if you want to, or you can fill out like a little quiz. Like, here, I’ll show you the quiz I built. But this is also Hawkbot, and there’s a button in there to like add it to Slack if you want to do that. And we can build that in the future. Like, you know, right now, that probably won’t exist at launch, but that’ll exist sometime in the future. But, like, this is the quiz. So, if I go to the newsletter thank you page, thanks for subscribing to hard calls. Spare 15 seconds. So, it’s like, do a specific thing you’re working through or not? Okay, who are you? Like, what stage are you at? What would help you the most? And where are you focused on building leverage right now? So, those questions seem pretty innocuous, but together they can lead to either a one-on-one session with me, or they lead to one of our agencies, or they lead to a low-end offer. And so it’s like very high, high-powered thing. So, obviously, a call would be better, or a texting conversation would be better, but at least. We’ll get something like this from the majority of them, and it’ll direct us to the right place. Ben Ornstein: I love this. This is super cool. Super cool. Yeah. Michael Houck: So I’m pumped about it. There’s still a lot more to do. Like, I got to bring the dashboard over here. I got to finish the new home page. And I got to build out the low-end offers as well. None of them exist right now, but that’s all on my to-do list right now, essentially. So, what I’m trying to say is that it will be good to get those experts in there quickly. So, after you’re sort of done the jolt agents, my guess is that it’ll make sense to pivot onto this stuff and then sort of simultaneously consider like doing the lore agents too. Because we’ll want to, I actually think. Think, honestly, my hypothesis is that we can fully automate lore, like 100%. So we’ll see if I’m right, but that’s my initial hypothesis. Ben Ornstein: It makes sense given like what the product is, like the actual fulfillment. Like it does make sense that it could be automated. So. Michael Houck: Yeah. Okay. So that’s that. You’ll see more of that stuff popping up. Up over the next couple of days, but um, I think it’s a very compelling brand, absolutely. Ben Ornstein: No, it’s exciting. Michael Houck: Cool, all right, man. Uh, anything else on your end? Ben Ornstein: Um, no, no, I don’t think so. Just continuing to push forward, doing what I can. So I’ll get back to it. Michael Houck: I appreciate you, dude. Talk to you soon. See ya. Say yep.