Date: 2026-09-24 3:00 PM EDT Granola: https://notes.granola.ai/d/e4665db0-2c49-4dc3-bffb-1b04f8d7f59b Attendees: Michael Houck, Emma (Lore), Matt Gorman (MSH/Aeon CRO+COO), Tomas (MSH exec VP Revenue)
Aeon is a PROSPECT, not yet a registered client. Referred via Emil Barr (Michael invested in 2 of Emil’s companies; Matt has known Emil since Emil’s early days).
Summary
Discovery call with Aeon (MSH International subsidiary). Aeon has two products:
- Aeon Hire: Interview enablement tool, 5 years old, increasingly commoditized as HRIS systems absorb similar features natively.
- Aeon Source: Candidate sourcing, staffed by center of excellence in India (not agentic). Beat all 5 major sourcing tools in head-to-head testing. Currently bundled with Hire — can’t buy one without the other.
Parent company MSH International: $30-35M business, organically built. Exploring inorganic growth toward year-end. Founder Oz Rashid’s pet project, legally separate.
Key insight: 4 years spent on product, zero on go-to-market. Prospects respond to Aeon Hire messaging but only buy Aeon Source. PMF unclear: customers span enterprise, startup, and SMB; common thread is weak talent acquisition teams, not any industry vertical.
~25% of MSH inbounds already arrive from frontier models (ChatGPT, Anthropic, Gemini).
Matt’s budget range: $5K-$25K/month.
Decisions
None made yet — discovery stage. Follow-up call targeted for week of September 28.
Action Items
- Michael: Send Aeon website access + scope proposal including a few monthly retainer options (budget $5K-$25K/month).
- Michael: Reconnect with Emil for site assets and marketing materials (Emil owns all marketing and web assets; already in contact).
- Both: Schedule follow-up call for week of September 28 to finalize scope.
Prospect Context (key for proposal)
- Website built in 2 weeks for emergency enterprise pitch; no domain authority, starting from scratch on Webflow.
- Hero keyword “AI hiring tool” is hypercompetitive — not where Aeon can win. Strategy: rank for pain-point-specific content, get cited in AI model responses.
- Personal brand of founder Oz Rashid (“the good hire guy”) misaligned with AI tech CEO positioning needed.
- Exit strategy is a real motivator: PE flip at ~$20M, building organic presence increases standalone business value.
- Social presence near-zero: LinkedIn especially bare.
- Current outreach: LinkedIn avatars + email sequences, ~10-15 inbound leads/week. No SDRs/BDRs yet.
Notable Transcript Excerpts
Matt Gorman intro: “I’m the Chief Revenue Officer, Chief Operations Officer for MSH International and all the businesses under that umbrella, which include Aeon and Anhire.”
“Four years spent on product, zero on go-to-market.”
“The key disconnect: prospects respond to Aeon Hire messaging but only buy Aeon Source.”
Emma on SEO strategy: “The traffic that you can grasp [via organic/SEO] is compounding, and it has such a higher value with that compounding kind of factor than you really get through paid channels.”
Michael’s Rye Valley pitch: “Rye Valley is a holding company. It helps startup founders and venture firms build leverage through a variety of verticalized businesses. So we have Lore, which is our SEO, GEO, AEO agency… We have Jolt, which is a short-form video agency that’s done over 5.3 billion views for founders, celebrities… We have Megaphone… 157 million impressions… And a few others: we install company brains through a brand called Hockey Stick.”