- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01KYJ10ZRS1BQY5BM5NT6VYDJM (via Ben Ornstein’s account, imported 2026-08-06)
Transcript
Julius Bachmann: Hello. Michael Houck: Hey, Julius, what’s up, man? How you doing? Good. Julius Bachmann: You’re the last one of many, many calls today. Michael Houck: Oh, wow. Sorry to hear that, man. Julius Bachmann: I don’t know. I don’t know. I haven’t stopped counting. Hi, Stephan. Stephan Schmidbauer: Hi, gents. How are things? Michael Houck: How you doing? Stephan, I’m loving the stash, man. You look baller. Got a group of mine out. Stephan Schmidbauer: I’m growing more hair here and I’m losing hair here. So the amount is still the same. I’m just shifting it. Julius Bachmann: It’s increasingly, oh, I’m now realizing there’s no camera. It’s increasingly moving down. So we’ll see if we meet in five years. You have absolutely no hair here. Michael Houck: The great migration begins, as they say. Julius Bachmann: Okay, so thanks for taking the time. There’s two topics that I want to talk about. One is we so I attend SuperVenture and Super Return every year as a speaker. Through that, I obtained a list of all of the participants of Super Return and SuperVenture, which is a huge list of investors basically. And so we’ve cleaned up the list to exclude all of the event organizers and lawyers and MA bankers and all the people that I’m not interested in. That being said, now we have a list of investors that I am interested in, and I slowly want to migrate them into my newsletter. The general kind of metrics are still the same. It’s around, it’s like, it’s stagnating, but with every addition, I’m kind of losing one percent or one and a half percent. Um, and through and and I’m sending every two weeks, and in between, I can’t make up for how many, um, how many people have lost because I’m not really, I don’t know, um, I’m not really growing it in the right way. The thing is, I have, I still have 70 plus percent open rates, um, so and people. People are talking to me about it, you know, all the time. Like, hey, I’m reading your newsletter. It’s so good. It’s so interesting. So, it’s like, for some reason, it’s not growing, even though people like it. Maybe because my readers are too busy. I don’t know why. Michael Houck: Well, what are you doing to grow it right now? Nothing. Stephan Schmidbauer: Nothing. That’s the answer. Yeah. I just wanted to say, I mean, the first time we spoke, Michael, to understand also where Julius went, we still were thinking about doing a funnel like you were doing it, or like I think you are aware of Ben Ben Mir. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Yeah, of course. Stephan Schmidbauer: Right. I mean, super clear funnel where you always tell people on top of funnel stuff like LinkedIn, hey, there is a newsletter if you wanna Read. Deeper into topics, then go to the newsletter. That’s where you can find it. Call to actions to the newsletter everywhere. We stopped doing that because we figured the newsletter is more like a place for awareness and to continue Julius’ authority building. Julius Bachmann: Like cultivating the community or like my network. That’s basically the job Newsletter has. Exactly. Stephan Schmidbauer: And reminding them that Julius is there and that Julius is great and that he has interesting perspectives. But it’s not like we are that we are selling coaching through a funnel that kind of where the newsletter is one of the last steps, or that we are, I don’t know, trying to sell other services like, you are, for example, doing it, right? So, um, we shifted away from that. Julius Bachmann: So, but that’s the perfect jumping off point to illustrate my second point, the one that I mentioned in my email this morning, which is speaking. Yes, speaking. So, I wrote a book, it’s coming out next year. It’s first is going to be in German, and then later on, I’ll publish an English version. But the thing is, so. Almost all of my coaching engagements, the leads are coming through word of mouth. Hey, someone told me you’re doing a great job at this and this. Like some investors, like, you should talk to my portfolio CEO, something like that. And through working on the ICP for speaking clients, I was like, typically, my clientele. Moves in social circles that as big tech employees like the Google, Meta, whatever OpenAI people, the consultants at McKinsey and Bain and BCG and whatever, the big banks, and of course, the investors and other startup employees. But the thing is, right now, I’m only targeting the investors and the startup founders, but not all the other people who are relevant as word of mouth. Kind of like the social bubble, the social circles that my clients move in, A, and B, as speaking for my speaking business, they become directly relevant because I might be able to sell, you know, a speaking gig into their company or like a workshop into their company. And if I ever manage to sell like, some whatever product and service that is not directly tied to my client, it needs to come from a bigger base of community in terms of numbers. For example, like a like a, I don’t know, like a retreat or something that scales, right? I won’t be able to sell like, 50 founders. That’s a lot of a harder sell than like 50, more generally ambitious people that have a little bit more time than founders on their hands, founder CEOs. Michael Houck: Yeah, I agree. Okay, a lot to pick through there. But what I’ll say is: the first thing I’ll say is that, yeah, if we’re not doing things to grow, like newsletters are not going to grow organically unless you’re on Substack and you already have 500,000 followers, right? If you’re small on Substack, it’s not going to matter. If you’re on Beehive or Kit, it’s not going to matter because they don’t do a lot to organically grow. And if you’re just relying on social media, you can get people in from that. But if your list is already a decent size, the net is going to be negative and the volume is going to be low at this point, anyway. People going from social to directed newsletter, in most cases, if you’ve already been like pitching them on the newsletter for a while, basically. So what I would say is, you know. If the goal for the newsletter, then I know you have the list and we can talk about that, the existing list from that you mentioned. But if generally growth is the goal, we should tie that. I mean, we should think more holistically about the funnel and we should tie that to like where we, who we’re going to monetize and how we’re monetize them on the back end, right? Because you’re saying you don’t want to necessarily do that for the founders, which I think is fine and makes sense. But if there is that cohort of people who find you and who come to you and who are on this list. Who you can monetize, maybe for the speaking gigs or you know, one of many other ways that is high-ticket, that is worth your time. Um, that seems to me like something we should cultivate because that’ll bring in the revenue to fund the sort of upfront cost of growing it through one channel or another. And that’s that’s what we do too. You know, we run ads aggressively for our various agencies, and they all funnel through founding journey. Um, and then on the back end. We either upsell them to an agency service or downsell them to like a lower price info product or something like that. Julius Bachmann: And so, when you hear what I’m saying about this like larger audience, are you still thinking, like, what kind of channel are you thinking right now? Michael Houck: For the list you already have? Julius Bachmann: No, I mean, that’s straightforward, I guess. That’s the same process that we used before, but for the other. The other audience. Michael Houck: Yeah, I mean, the you know, nothing has really changed in that world in quite a while. The number one way to acquire folks for these is still through social ads, and the platform will vary a little bit based on who it is. Like, for example, in some cases, you might want to run a mix of Meta and LinkedIn or Meta and TikTok. General, it’s meta ads or the best price. Everyone’s on Instagram and meta platforms in general. So we see that time and time again be like 90% of the new subs that most folks are getting. And then it just becomes a matter of the ad copy, the offer that you’re giving them with Elite Magnet being compelling to the specific type of people who meta’s algorithm will automatically target for you based on the content you’re putting out there. And then on the back end, the sort of service you’re monetizing, the offer you’re monetizing be compelling enough to have enough of them opt in where the cost is, the goal is negative CAC. Stephan Schmidbauer: So the idea is to come up with a lead magnet for the specific sub-target group to be as specific as possible. Make them leave the email address and then have like a asterisk saying you confirm that we can send you more material and then run them through an activation funnel as it in the past. Michael Houck: Or I would break it out a little bit, a little bit deeper. What I would say is free lead magnet, hit some landing page, email capture, get their opt-in, and then on that thank you page, once they give you their email, have like a you know two to four question qualification survey. Um, and then if they end that survey, offer them a free bonus, like an extension of the free lead mag, like something else, something new, something extended. Um, if they complete the survey, if they complete the survey, then if they’re high fit, loop them into some high-ticket offer. If they’re low fit, then just downsell them to some cheap offer. Or if you guys don’t want to even do that or have anything you want to push there. Just add them to the newsletter. Stephan Schmidbauer: Yeah, Julius, I think that’s the perfect pod where you can push dinners because people love dinners with other high-quality people. So I think that’s the best thing that you can do to actually get more info from them. Michael Houck: Yeah, like for example, we sell to founders, right? But we have different high-ticket offers. So we have our founder authority building LinkedIn X thought leadership offer. We have our newsletter offer. We have our short form video, TikTok, and Instagram offer. We have our GEO and SEO offer and Reddit thread offer as well. All those are things that can help founders with go-to-market. And so we run ads specifically for those funnels and around lead magnets for each of those funnels. They all get added to founding journey, but the process, the flow they go through, and then the email sequences that we opt them into. Are all dedicated to like what they’re actually interested in, but for founders, feels more for them. Julius Bachmann: So, um, so within this like very broad description of like ex-Google or currently, currently a Google, uh, currently at McKinsey, whatever, we would niche down into like, a more specific subset of that audience and say we’re creating a lead magnet for exactly those people and then we’ll target them or how specific do we want it? Michael Houck: Yeah, I mean, there’s with your audience, it as like two levels of specificity, right? On the first level, it’s like founders versus investors versus these other folks, these X, et cetera, right? So the first thing I do is like pick there of who we want to. Start on, or if we just want to do it at that altitude. It sounds like that last bucket is who we want to go after for these like monetized offers, which makes sense based on how you’ve described your engagement with the audience and then your guys’ goals. So, within that audience, you could then niche down to like, all right, these are people who are in big tech, these are people who are in consulting, these are people who are in investment banking. Like, an example here would be. We have our TikTok offer, but right now we’re actually breaking that out one level deeper where we’re going to say, based on the answer they gave us on our qualification survey, you know, if they say, oh, yeah, I’m already on TikTok and it’s working, well, then we’re certainly not going to show them a VSL and a landing page headline that’s like, you know, that’s like, oh, your company is everywhere, but you’re nowhere. You know what I mean? Because you already are somewhere, you’re already on social media. It’s not relevant for them. So, in terms of the copy, in terms of the positioning of the offer, you should niche it down level. But that doesn’t necessarily mean you give them a different offer. That’s something we can think through. Right. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Okay. Yeah. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Yeah. Stephan Schmidbauer: I personally just see one big problem because, I mean, I know this flow as a marketer, and it sounds exactly as what you should be doing. The problem that I see is that. Currently we do not really have that money-making offer that you typically need to make the money that you are investing at the beginning into ads, right? Because what you guys are describing there and doing, Michael, is through the offer, you exactly know what you can kind of pay. And ideally, you optimize this so that you can spend more. Than others, which either increases the volume or the conversion. Michael Houck: Yeah, it becomes a decision for you guys: of like, do you want to, A, first do you want to monetize this or do you want to just sort of build awareness, build reputation, build connections, et cetera, right? If you do want to monetize it, okay, like what let’s structure what that offer should be for this specific ICP. And then it becomes a question of positioning and funnel design as Stephan is too. Stephan Schmidbauer: Because exactly, talking about the goal, if Julius says my goal for now, since I don’t have the relevant offers yet, my goal now is just increasing the awareness and email capture to grow the newsletter. That means either he’s willing to pay a specific price for a relevant subscriber. Or it means that he’s willing to spend amount X every month trying to get as many subscribers as possible, right? So fixed input, max output, or the other way around. And the question is: does that change anything based on what you just pitched? Julius Bachmann: Just briefly kind of jumping in here. I mean, the overall strategy for the company right now is to untie, to a certain extent, untie the revenue from my time, right? We’re making good money, but it’s really me. I feel you on that. Yeah. And it’s also me as a person, not specifically my ideas. So, what we’re doing with the book is we’re introducing. We’re introducing a new idea around ownership, culture, and care. And so that’s kind of number one. And through building up the community, hopefully, we’ll be able to introduce products that are also untied from my person. Those are the two strategic moves. I just haven’t been able to think of a product that is. Relevant enough to my target audience that they would be interested in. I mean, you know, if you can come up with one for me and that makes money, I’d be happy. And it doesn’t tank my reputation, like for my core audience. But yeah. Michael Houck: Yeah, we don’t want to turn you into a course bro, you know? Stephan Schmidbauer: That’s what I wanted to hear. Michael Houck: We could definitely brainstorm and come up with some ideas because if we have something like that, it obviously unlocks here for you and for ways that we can work together too. Julius Bachmann: So that’s why I’m saying that. And it points in the same direction. It’s just that we haven’t been able to come up with something where we’re like, oh, cool, that’s contributive to the overall strategy at this point. Michael Houck: What would be helpful for us or for both Ben and I is. And you don’t need to, we don’t need to go necessarily right now on the call, but if you guys can send over, like, hey, here’s what we have thought through, here’s what we don’t like about XYZ, or here’s what we’ve tried, and here’s what hasn’t worked about it with this audience. That will give us sort of the lay of the land. And then we can come back with our best ideas basically. And you tell us, hey, we think this could be good, but needs to be different in XYZ ways. Julius Bachmann: In terms of product ideas. Michael Houck: Yeah, in terms of ways to monetize the back end, whether it’s products, whether it’s services, whether it is retreats or something like that. Like, I don’t know where that lands for you, but just we need to understand the landscape and we can come back with some ideas. Julius Bachmann: Yeah, I think we can do that. And then, then, more specifically to the list, because that two separate issues, right? We have that list. Yeah. We need a sensible process, the one that you have, to process that list without running the risk of people being mad at us. I mentioned we removed all of the lawyers already. Michael Houck: Very strategic. Julius Bachmann: These two, three emails that I received, I was like, whoa. But yeah, I mean, it’s too, it’s. It’s too much of a golden pot to not use to not use. Michael Houck: Well, look, the best way to engage that list and to actually get them to be compelled into paying attention to what we send them on an ongoing basis is to give them something for free up front, something valuable up front. And then, depending on what they do, we can decide: okay, do we just add them to the newsletter? Do we not add them to anything at all? Or, in like a highest fit, most high intent scenario, do we try to upsell them and pitch them on something else that we come up with? So, I would actually, you know, you don’t want to keep that list sort of sitting there for too long. And I get that, but the first step here to me seems to be: let’s identify the end state of this funnel and these funnels that we’re going to split out for the different ICPs. So, that seems to be the next step in my mind. And once we have that, then it’s like, all right, here’s how we utilize the list with regards to that, too. Julius Bachmann: So, one of the ideas that I have that while the book has a different take on ownership culture and care and connection and relationships and all that, it’s geared through to like a broad audience. We talk about ownership culture, and those are all investors, right? We can say, Look, you think ownership culture is really solved through equity, and like that, that’s. What people are talking about right we we in like incentivizing founders and investors and do something around like the skin in the game um rhetoric um to say if you really look into what drives ownership behavior it’s really it’s really not that and and we’re we’re producing a maybe like a briefing or something like that that, um, around like what, like, what is the thing that actually produces uh like a behavior that looks like ownership? Um, and you would be surprised it’s not giving people shares, right? Um, and we can do some we can quote some research and stuff like that. Is that interesting enough? Is that going somewhere? It’s like a lead, it’s an elite magnet after all. Michael Houck: I think it’s very interesting for the people within this. Broader ICP, who have ownership to give specifically? Julius Bachmann: Because I was talking about the investors, the list that we already have. Michael Houck: Yeah, I just think like when I hear that idea, what I think is like, if I’m in a position to give ownership to people, or if I’m looking at a company and evaluating whether a company is going to be set up for success too, maybe how they give ownership to people within the company, I would want to know what the answer to that is. I’d want to know what the truth there is because that tells me. Like, one for a founder, it’s like strategic. It’s like, okay, well, here’s, here’s what I should be doing that I’m not doing. Right. And for an investor, it’s like, is a founder doing this or not? So I think it’s interesting. I want to Read the book. You’ve already made to Read the book based on this conversation, or Read through an outline of it. Julius Bachmann: But I am daddy sorry. Michael Houck: I don’t want to rely on my GPT translation. So I. Stephan Schmidbauer: I can just add to that from my own experience currently working at Julius, you know, the other company I’m working for. Pounders, I think, oftentimes overestimate how much ownership they are actually giving to their teams. And many always want that, right? And tell you that in an interview. That everybody’s free to do whatever, and then the situation might look totally different. And I can see that at this other business. So, for me, be super interesting to actually know because I have no fucking clue how it is at other businesses: how to measure ownership. Like, if you could measure that for me, right? There would be 10 questions, thinking like checklist or whatever, yeah, for my founder to see how much ownership is he actually giving to the team, that would be extremely interesting. Michael Houck: And it can also be from the perspective of, like, again, going back to the list, these big tech folks, these consulting folks, is investment banking, maybe a little bit less so, but definitely on the tech and consulting side. You people working in big tech and who are high achievers and same in big consulting firms, they’re doing impactful work, but like, it’s not like, I feel like a lot of them are questioning, like, how much does my work matter? Like, my changing the color of a button at Google, right? That’s like the classic example. So, you have, like, I know I felt that when I worked at Airbnb, um, and so it’s like when you have that. And then you have something that can actually show you and prove to you, and is reputable from someone like Julius. You know, actually, yeah, you don’t have the ownership that you think you do. That can spur you to make a good decision for your career. That can spur you to maybe follow, you know, starting a company if you’ve wanted to. There’s, there’s like it can drive outcomes, is what I’m trying to say. It can drive change, and therefore, it would be seen as impactful for the people who are, you know, thinking about it if it’s copy and positioned and framed the right way for sure. Julius Bachmann: So I think maybe we want to start with a list. And because the people on the list are still more directly driven by these kind ownership questions, because they’re literally handing out shares to management teams. We can start there. Stephan, do you know what is it, 4,000 people that we have on the list? Stephan Schmidbauer: You mean the event list? Yeah. I reduced it with AI and I think what was left was only 1500, 2,000 maybe. Julius Bachmann: Ah, okay. So start there. And once we work our way through that list and then we move on. I also have to pay attention to like I’m currently promoting the book, which means I getting on stage and I’m also moving the family to the city, stuff like that, right? So my time is a bottleneck there to a certain extent. My time and attention is a bottleneck. Um, so I want to make sure that when we when we one of these initiatives, we’re doing it with full intention and we absolutely know what we’re doing. We’re not just like wasting time and money, of course. We find like the right hook in a way, um, and I think the low-hanging fruit is the list, including including, I’ll call it a lead magna because that’s what it is, right? Like a document that we’re producing that is around basically how can you make other people engage in ownership behavior, right? That’s that’s what we’re trying to do. Like you are in a position where you’re on the board or you’re investing in companies. Everyone wants ownership culture. Your portfolio CEOs want that, but you also want that from your portfolio CEOs and management teams if you’re a private equity investor. So, how does ownership culture even come about? We talk about skin in the game and we think shares, but that’s not really it. And then we talk about like, you know, what are the sources of that kind of behavior? Stephan, as you mentioned, you know, how can like, you think you’re, you think you’re delegating ownership, but oftentimes you oftentimes don’t, because that’s the real secret in the science is like, um, the more people have a feeling of agency, the more they will take ownership. And it’s not the share, like, shares are nice, but if you have shares, but you have no agency, you won’t take ownership. Michael Houck: Right. You don’t want people just getting the shares and not acting like owners, not feeling like owners. Julius Bachmann: Exactly. So it’s much more about kind of designing the roles. But then there’s a bunch of other things that we can get into. And like what, like, how long should that document be? It’s like a, it’s, it is a PDF. Michael Houck: How many pages is it right now? With the book is 280 pages. Sorry, do you guys have a PDF already or no? Yeah, we don’t. Oh, yeah. We could put together like a, I’d say, I don’t know, anywhere from three to five pages should be sufficient. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Okay. Stephan Schmidbauer: So and just last question back to what I was asking earlier. So in case Julius would say for the time being, just awareness, let’s collect email addresses through a piece like this. We don’t have a follow-on offer yet. What are the prices? If you design a flow exactly to a target group like a founder, a PE, investor? What are we talking? Three to five bucks for an email or where or what’s the experience? Just so that we can decide what makes sense. Michael Houck: Sorry, so in terms of in terms of like getting the emails through the funnel or in terms of designing the flow and building the lead magnet and like what ad spend to get an email. Oh, ad spend. Yeah. I mean, for us, I mean, again, we have a very similar audience. So I feel like I can use ours as sort of a semi-proxy here. We go between $2 and $250 per. That’s what we see. Okay. Julius Bachmann: Globally, or US, or what’s the GL? Julius Bachmann: That’s US. Michael Houck: We have done parts of Europe in the past as well. And we see maybe slightly lower, roughly similar, but consistently 2 to 250. Stephan Schmidbauer: Yeah, US is always the most expensive. Stephan Schmidbauer: So, yeah. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Cool. Michael Houck: Okay, so what we’ll do then is I’ll follow up over email, just summarizing everything. And then I’ll also get to work with Ben on brainstorming some potential things we could do. Not necessarily immediately right now, Julius knows what’s going on, but as we sort of move past the initial list to going broader, like what could those? Potential product paths be? You let me know what you think, and then we can figure that out move forward. Julius Bachmann: Sounds good to me. And I’ll think about a structure of like a three to five page lead magnet ownership thing that we can use to bring in people from the investor list. Michael Houck: Yeah, and it should be it should be branded, it should be engaging, you know, it’s on it’s just like, put the text in there, but um, and then we just need a page to have people get that ideally, uh, and a page for people to be taken to after they uh put their email in, essentially. Julius Bachmann: Do you have like where do you typically host these? Michael Houck: Oh, we we build we build our own sites. Um I can I can send you the example that we use for for example, for our TikTok flow that I was talking about. And you can probably do it through Beehive. We don’t use Beehive for our main site for any of our agencies or anything like that, but you might be able to do it through Beehive too. You probably can. Julius Bachmann: It’d be best if it all stays in one ecosystem. Michael Houck: Yeah. I imagine that that’s no, at least it’ll be sufficient. You probably won’t get as many, like, analytics and data points, and like here’s where someone bounced, and here’s their dwell time, etc., etc. But you’ll get enough to be able to tell, oh, they did this or they didn’t do this, and then we can take action based on that. So, it should be fine. Stephan Schmidbauer: Yeah, it’s not so hard anymore to build these pages, right? So, but a sample page would be great so that we better see what is the flow because that also determines how you structure the document, right? So, um, you guys have an example. That would be highly appreciated. Michael Houck: I’ll send over one that we have working for one of our offers right now, and you guys can walk through it and see what it’s like, But okay, I’ll get that over to you guys later today. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Wonderful. Julius Bachmann: Thank you very much. Michael Houck: Good to see you guys. Michael Houck: Talk soon. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Bye-bye. Julius Bachmann: See you. Bye-bye.