- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01KZC1CB59AXCB88585W390W31 (via Ben Ornstein’s account, imported 2026-08-06)
Transcript
Michael Houck: Um, there actually might not be anything in there Well, no, I guess it would be good to I’m trying to do is I’m trying to bring all the content production for all clients into the new dashboard tool. Um, so it would, yeah, let’s get the API key for his account. I’ll just throw it in there. Ben Ornstein: Yeah, no problem. Um, I’m gonna make a note on that now. Michael Houck: Also, if you want to go through and give feedback on it, I’d love that too. Because the more sort of eyes on that, the better. So, just I have like a fable ultra session right now going through and finding bugs for it. So, it’s pushing like a ton of stuff. But yeah, the more eyes we have on that, the better. Ben Ornstein: Yep, for sure. I’ll check it out. I started watching the loom a little bit yesterday, but I didn’t. It looked cool from like the first minute of what that I watched. Michael Houck: Yeah, it’s buggy, but it’s basically like what Squib would have been if Squib like knew what they were doing. Yeah, yeah. And more tailored to like our specific needs, too. So I think it’s good. What else is going on? Ben Ornstein: with all the like little tasks that have come up, I’ve definitely worked a little bit more than I thought I would, which is nice. Michael Houck: That’s how it goes. Of this stuff is like setting up this system Like, I’m probably burning a ton of tokens on various things that are going to pay dividends, but the upfront time is a bit. So makes sense. I did, the VAs know what the deal is this morning. So Angelica is like off-boarded. I’ll move her out of Slack relatively soon. Charlene, I’m going her on, like I mentioned, for Jeffrey, because I think that’s smart in case we scale up. Venus will handle everyone else, including me. And then Rina has like her updated list of tests. I’m going to try to get her off of the kick stuff. But their API right now, or their MCP, whichever one it is, is only read, not write. She has to ask for write permissions. So I sent them an email. We’ll see if they give it to us. Ben Ornstein: It’s crazy how much you’ve like automated in such little time. Michael Houck: Dude, it’s honestly made me kind of mad because, like, I could have done a lot. When Hermes came. Hermes came out sometime in the spring. Right? You flagged it, I think, when it came out. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Yep. Michael Houck: Like, I could have done this then. And so, like, we’re paying between AWS and Accountify. And the only reason we use AWS is if we use Accountify, we spend like almost $2,500 a month on just those two things, $2,000 to $2,500 a month. And it's like, those should literally be $0 costs because we can just use Appify and do it for pennies. You know? Ben Ornstein: Is that fully like that has fully been replaced and it’s working, or you’re that’s still in progress? Michael Houck: So we’re doing one week of shadowing to see both are going to run for a week. Um, and it’s going to send me an update on the 12th basically saying how it went. And if the accuracy is like 95% or more, I’m just going to do it and then we’ll literally have those costs removed. Ben Ornstein: So, yeah, that’s insane. Plus, not to mention everything else. Michael Houck: Yeah, I know. It’s just like, yeah. So, anyway, it feels good. I’m doing a lot of it. It’s put me back a little bit on the funnel stuff, but some of this stuff has been such low-hanging fruit that I was like, I should just do this. So, yeah, I don’t know. I feel like I’ve gained another superpower. Like, I felt this way with Claude Design, which reminds me, I have to go through and get everything out of there tomorrow. And now I feel this way with engineering too. And with engineering, it just opens up so much other stuff you can do, you know? So I’m sure it’s all going to be buggy, but I’ll fix that over time. Ben Ornstein: So that’s how it works. I think the V1 of these things, it’s like, okay, show it can do it. And then when it can, it’s like, okay, then it’s iteration to make it as close to perfect as it can get. Michael Houck: Yeah, I think so. I think so. But yeah, like, I don’t expect. You know, I don’t expect you to be doing the probably 10 hours a day or whatever you were doing for a while, at least like ramps and things back up with like you know, context farmers or whatever the creator partnerships or over end up doing there. But I also don’t think it’ll be zero. So we’ll figure it out. Ben Ornstein: Yeah, 100%. Michael Houck: Anything we should talk through? I just wanted to make sure we had some time on to check in with everything changing going on. So, anything on your mind? Ben Ornstein: Yeah, I started like pulling together a list of like who I’d even think like an intro would even make sense for. Yeah. And I landed on pretty much almost the same as last time. Because, and I think it comes back to what you had said. I think I have this now this specialty of working with these like creator businesses. Yeah. Just because, like, obviously, you working with the creators from the megaphone campaigns, megaphone in general, the platform. I don’t know. Just, I think, like, that’s like a niche that I could play up. A part in. Michael Houck: And it’s a good niche. Like it’s a growing niche, too. So, yeah, literally anyone, happy to. But that makes sense to me. You sort of understand how the economics work. You understand how creators think about their businesses. You understand the unique things about how their businesses are set up. So it makes sense to me. Me. Ben Ornstein: Yeah, the one that I thought was interesting is when we did the video on Thera and Akil. Yeah. And you’re an investor in them too, right? Michael Houck: Launch houses. Michael Houck: Launch houses. Ben Ornstein: Got it. I applied to a chief of staff role there like years ago, like back in 2021, I think maybe, maybe. And they have a VP of ops. So, like, I don’t think they would need someone like me, but maybe it wouldn’t hurt to ask. Because the first product that I ever tried to build myself was like pre-Chat GPT and all that was an HR tech platform. I just love careers. That was what my podcast, my original podcast, was about. Michael Houck: I remember. Yeah, I remember. Ben Ornstein: And it was all about that. Like, being able to be of an HR tech platform, I mean, horrible industry. I mean, it is as cutthroat as it gets, but I don’t know. That could be interesting. I’ve fallen in love with the whole bootstrapped, like, creator, like your business. I love how simple it is. If you execute, if you execute, you don’t have to have simple is not the right word. The idea of being venture-backed, it’s so, I’m so kind of against it now. I love the idea of a bootstrap business where cash flow is the name of the game because I’ve worked for venture-backed companies where I had, I mean, this was peak like of the crypto hype where we had 25 employees and not a dollar of revenue. We were on like blockchain grants and venture-backed venture-backed money. It was ridiculous. I felt like an idiot working for that company. So, I don’t know. I guess I don’t really know where I want to be where I’m at. Michael Houck: I you’re circling around some stuff, you know, and it’s the right stuff. I’m happy to introduce you to you talk Akil, but I’m happy to like facilitate that if you want. But yeah, man, I mean, look, it’s not like we’re kicking you out the door. So, it’s, I want there to be more here that justifies it, that like, is a big enough area where you can own it. So, um, as I get all this, honestly, once we have the funnel working for Jolt in particular, I think, um, I’ll feel good about like, let’s take on another experiment, let’s take on another kind of new thing. But wanted to, you know, again, last week, I just wanted to be super transparent. Like, I do not know what that is going to be for the next couple of weeks and TBD. Period. So, yeah, that’s sort of my thoughts, but it makes sense. In the meantime, obviously, happy to help in whatever kind of way you need me to. Ben Ornstein: Yeah, believe me, I do not want to go anywhere. I know, I know. It’s a weird situation to be like, I’m so excited about everything that’s going on. I totally realize, like, where my skill set is, given where the business is, it’s not, it can’t be the primary focus. It can’t be, there’s too much going on. So, I get it. Um, and like, when Hermes is fully up to speed across the entire holding company, when the funnels are all set up, my God, this business is gonna be blowing. Michael Houck: Like in like three, I’m gonna cautiously say three, but maybe less, maybe more. But three months from now, I want this thing to just be churning, you know? So we just got to be focused for that period, basically, until it is. But yeah, look, I mean, obviously, more things will pop up. And honestly, I think the most valuable thing you can do is just like, the more you can wrangle a Hermes or an open claw, et cetera, the more valuable that’s going to be to people. Because, like, and even to yourself, you want to, if we say, hey, let’s spin up an agency that you run, or if you want to say, hey, I want to go do my own thing, or whatever it is, right? The number one thing you can have is knowing how to do this stuff. Because whether it’s partnering, whether it’s suiting yourself, or whether it’s someone coming after you and kind of poaching you. All the above, like, who are people looking to bring on? It’s people who know this stuff. Where is the revenue opportunity? It’s with people who know this stuff. So everyone’s kind of tended about everything else. So that would be my advice. Like, if you want to niche down and say creator businesses, makes sense. If you want to niche down and say creator businesses, and I’m this AI guy, I think that makes a ton of sense. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Yeah. Ben Ornstein: I’m curious because I have not played around with Hermes much. I mostly did research about it versus Open Claw. I did not try building. So you didn’t, I guess, do the setup for Open Claw. I guess I mostly did that part, but how easy was it to spin up Hermes? Michael Houck: It was so easy. Like I did a test. Where I asked to create a YouTube script with Sonnet. It was like, okay, because Sonnet’s like, okay, right. And then I just got started talking to it and like setting it up as far as integrating it with the mini. It was so easy. I opened the mini, I ran one command and it was good. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Wow. Ben Ornstein: Holy shit. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: I know. It’s not. Ben Ornstein: OpenClaw was a disaster. I had to connect so many different things, set it up a certain way. Michael Houck: I remember when we had to return it on, even was a hassle, you know? Ben Ornstein: Yes, yes. Michael Houck: But yeah, so I mean, that’s that’s the good part about Ermes too is that you get this you get this UI, like you get this chat window. I’m looking at it right now on my other monitor. Like, let me, I’ll just show it to you. Hold on. Um, one second. And then, how do I share this? Okay. Can you see this? Okay. Yes. So I sent it this prompt earlier. I said Can you improve our QA reviewer? So it did built a QA reviewer for us. It reviews all our code before it goes live. And like, I’m pushing. So all I said, it has spent the last maybe like two hours thinking about things. And it just sent me this report while I’ve been on this call with you, basically. Ben Ornstein: Reviewer update. Michael Houck: But like, if you look at it, it’ll be like, it’ll like think for like minutes and it’ll go through this whole process itself. And the UI is great because you have all these sessions over here. Context window is really large. And you don’t need to do any technical stuff. It’s just like in this chat UI. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Wow. Michael Houck: So I would totally recommend it. Even if it’s just for like, you know, random life stuff. Like, I didn’t do anything outside of work with it yet, but I will. Ben Ornstein: Yeah, I’ll have to mess around with that. I’ll use that, I’ll have to laptop that that extra laptop, because it’s still, I think it’s still nice having it separate from your actual computer. Yeah. But yeah, no, that’s super interesting. But I guess it’s even just a year that has passed since. We last did these intros. Like the way we went about it was asking people, and I feel like I have to just, I have to go in with the assumption that, okay, this is take longer than you think it’s going to be. And I just have to. So I’m just prepping for whatever I have to, if that makes sense. And when when we did last these intros, you told me to do like, which makes complete sense, it was like asking specific things that I could help out with for these creators. I was looking at the emails that I had forwarded to you. And I think even a year having passed, it’s a much different time with Hermes and Openclaw and just like, getting even stronger. And so I wonder, and easier to use. I wonder if the approach of, I don’t know if the approach should be any different, is basically what I’m wondering. Michael Houck: I mean, the way to stand out the most now, like if someone were coming to me and were like, bring me onto the team, and I wasn’t like necessarily looking or whatever, what would catch my eye? Would be like they looked at my business, they analyzed it, they understand it. Maybe they don’t even understand it fully, right? But they understand it to a degree. And they literally sent me something that’s like done. Like, hey, I think you should have a creator partnerships agency. Here’s the website, or here’s 10 creators I’m interrupting you to right now. You know, something like that. Ben Ornstein: Value up front. Yeah. Michael Houck: Like that would tell me they, okay, they understand what the point of the founding journey newsletter is. They understand how we’re selling into that audience. And they have a good idea for, you know, what to develop on top of that. So that’s what would catch my eye. Ben Ornstein: Okay. By the way, leading context farmers or like being involved in leading that, that would be incredible. As you know, I love research. Michael Houck: I really think that would be a good fit because you are very good at research. You’re very good at prompting as well. And I know you would keep a high-quality bar for what we would deliver. The thing that would make that possible is: how do we go out? We don’t have a website for it. I’m not band with the build website for it in the next couple weeks. How do we go out and sell somebody on? Working with us on a research capacity. So the first thought would be: okay, like let’s put together, you this is what this guy at the Costa Rica retreat did. He, Chamoth now pays him for research because he put together a research report on a topic Chamoth tweeted about and wanted to know about. And he sent it to Chamotha’s email, which he was able to find. And very well done. It provided interesting perspective, and it wasn’t just AI slot. And he actually put a lot of time into it. And so then Shaman starts paying this guy like $100,000 for this other big report. So it's like, like, obviously, if you're go out and do that by yourself with Hermes or something like that, I'm not sit here and well, give me my fucking tax, you know, like, hey, that's crazy. But what I would say is that if you did something like that, that, and you were like, Hey, you have this audience of founders who probably needs research, and this network of VCs who probably want research on markets and things like that, where things are going. Okay, let's partner on that. We share equity in it in some capacity, right? Like that, if like I can't spend the time to start that right now, but I know it should exist. I know my audience would like it. If you want to start that and partner on it, we can do that. Ben Ornstein: Yeah, yeah. It's not something I don't have the leverage to start it by myself right now, anyway. So I think that it would just make even more sense to, if we were to partner, because it's so interesting. When I think of research, I'm like, oh, ChatGPT has this deep research, but like people still don't know how to do good research. There's so much that goes in. It doesn't seem like it's an opportunity, but when you tell me something like that, like Jamal paid the guy. We could do scraping for what people want to know about. There's a massive opportunity. That's a business I would love to be like in charge of Michael Houck: Right. Because it's like, who is like, what are you really paying for with external folks? Like, as I'm proving out with this studio thing, if I need to build internal software, I can build internal software. You know, I'm not going to go out and look for new SaaS products to sign up for right now. Right. Yep. I talked to Brett from Micro yesterday. He's like, We're looking to be Apple hired because we don't see like no one's paying for software. And Yeah, no one's paying for software. And so if that's the case, then it's like, all right, what are people paying for? They're paying for context, they're paying for data. And it's one thing to go pay someone for like a data set or like a data partnership. It's another thing to do first principles, first-party research that literally doesn't exist anywhere else with perspective that doesn't exist anywhere else, and then feed it into your company's internal brain. My thought is: Hockey Stick owns the brain. We set that up for folks. We upsell the ongoing research with context formula. Ben Ornstein: I like that a lot. I think there's something there for sure. Yeah, no, that sounds super interesting. I mean, it's even weird for me to go on LinkedIn and look at job boards. I'm like, oh, this is horrible. This is the worst possible thing. Plus, I know when I'm applying to jobs, I'm not going to hear back from these people. Like, it's just, it's so, it's such a broken system. Michael Houck: Um, yeah, I mean, it's totally spam and inundated, and all everyone's sending out their resume to thousands of places with AI, and everyone's verifying those messages with AI, and nothing's like actually getting through to anybody. Yeah, so I mean, relationships is definitely the path, or you know. Side by siding that with like some project that you're setting up on your own, too. Ben Ornstein: I do have this one thing I'm working on on the side that I'm pretty passionate about. It has nothing to do with founders at all. It's a lot of my friends, and it's not even really my friends. It's just, I know it's a problem, is gambling just in general. And I see all these apps. Like there's this guy that I use actually in the founder in FJI a lot in terms of like the Haux picks, Stephen Cravada. He built this like one of those quit vaping apps or something like that. And he did pretty well, bootstrapped, you know, sold it for a decent amount of money. And now he's like this app guy on Twitter. And he gives out a whole lot of free information. But I figured, okay, wait, if these quit vaping, quit alcohol, quit smoking, why not quit gambling? And there's not like a crazy amount of apps out there doing that. There's a few. And so I tried to niche down even further into specifically sports betting. Smart. So I'm starting to build it. It's a very simple thing. I'm using Codex. It's like beyond simple. But I'm passionate about it. It's a major problem to solve. I mean, even when you go into casinos, I don't know how often you go into casinos. Don't often. Honestly, smart. My family likes to go, like when we go visit my family in Pittsburgh, and my mom likes, she likes doing the little roulette and stuff like that. But you see these people that are gambling their lives away, and it's like the saddest thing in the world. Michael Houck: Dude, I saw a video on Instagram of this lady who's being interviewed at a slot machine. She's like some old fat lady. And like, Oh, yeah, I've lost 3 million over the past X number of years. And the interviewer was like, Does that bother you? Like, are you going to be okay? And she was like, Yeah, I'll be fine. She just likes the game. Ben Ornstein: Yeah, it's a disease. Like, it's so bad. And I think, and I looked at like a lot of the ways these other apps are doing it. And it's just habit building, it's habit formation. And like, I think I found a way that could work. A lot of the similar apps are doing it. So I'm just going to have to win on marketing because, especially, I know anyone can build anything these days. So I don't know. I'll think about it. But that's something just I'm doing like nights and weekends kind of thing. Michael Houck: I mean, I like it. It's definitely like, I mean, I even know people who've lost over $100,000 with sports betting because they’re just stupid, right? Like you just get addicted to it and you can’t get out of it. And it’s the same deal as these other things you’re talking about, too. But I think it’s smart. But you have to, you’re right, you have to win on marketing, it’s standout, has to be really aggressive. That’s that’s the that’s how you need to go at it for sure. Buy your campaign, something like that. Ben Ornstein: Yeah, I’ll think about that. But that’s something I’m just thinking about on the side. But the yeah, the main thing I’m doing right now is, of course, whenever you message me, I’m trying to work as normal. That’s that’s my main priority, and then just looking for jobs and stuff like that on the side. But yeah, so I guess maybe I will try to put together. Maybe I’ll just DM Michael from Thera. I’ll just message him because I do have his contact. Michael Houck: Yeah. He’ll probably reach out to me and I’ll be like, yes, like 100%. But yeah, it makes sense. I had something I was but I forget what it is. Ben Ornstein: yeah, I’m just all over the place right now, so I’m just trying to uh rile it in. Michael Houck: Well, I’m gonna try to get through this like initial setup period for everything as quickly as I can. Um, so I’ll keep you in the loop, and when we get to a point where it makes sense to talk about context farmers, um, we can have that conversation. Ben Ornstein: Sounds good. Good. Michael Houck: All right, man. Well, let me know if anything else comes up, but I’ll talk to you on Slack. Ben Ornstein: Sounds good. Ben Ornstein: See ya. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: See ya.