Adam Torres and Blake Reichenbach discuss Howdy Curiosity.
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Show Notes:
Howdy Curiosity is a digital-first bookshop specializing in connecting tech, product managers and other professionals with resources to help them develop new skill sets. In this episode, Adam Torres and Blake Reichenbach, Founder of Howdy Curiosity, explore the Howdy Curiosity story and plans for growing its community.
About Blake Reichenbach
Blake currently works as a Product Manager at HubSpot, focusing on the Content AI Platform, and is the owner of Howdy Curiosity, an online nonfiction bookstore and learning community.
With a diverse background spanning higher education, marketing, and the SaaS industry, Blake brings a unique blend of expertise to the role. Over six years at HubSpot, Blake has led significant initiatives, including the modernization of Trust and Safety infrastructure with advanced machine learning integrations and juggling multiple high-priority corporate objectives.
Full Unedited Transcript
Hey, I’d like to welcome you to another episode of Mission Matters. My name is Adam Torres, and if you’d like to apply to be a guest in the show, just head on over to missionmatters. com and click on Be Our Guest to apply. All right, so today’s guest is Blake Reichenbach, who is founder over at Howdy Curiosity.
Blake, welcome to the show. Hey, hey, Adam. Great to be here. All right, Blake. So first thing first, howdy Curiosity. How did you come up with this name? It’s a great name, man. And how was it not taken? You got the URL, like it’s a great name. I got the URL. Well, , I, I like to say that I’ve been an acolyte of Curiosity for a long I love curiosity and for a while there was this, and there still is, this big, especially online push to say, Oh, you know, follow your passion, do what you’re passionate.
And I think that’s garbage advice. I think follow your curiosity, especially for entrepreneurs is much better advice because passion and excitement is fleeting. Whereas curiosity is a good way to open doors to research and building habits and figuring out what works and what doesn’t. So that’s where curiosity comes from the howdy.
It comes from the fact that I am a good old Appalachian Kentuckian. So I use Howdy unironically constantly. So I, you know, that’s, that’s part of my brand as a person and saying Howdy to curiosity, just, it just fits. So you were born into it. Okay, good. So I like it. It’s authentic. That’s what I like about it.
That’s awesome. So look, check out the website, Nonfiction Bookstore, a community for doers, thinkers, learners, and dabblers. Like, how did you come up with this idea originally? Yeah. So for a long time, I wanted my own bookstore, right? I, my background is in literature. For a long time, I assumed I would pursue.
A career in academia focusing on literatures because I love that world and , I love what books can do for people, but I think where a lot of my interest is, is in the innovative aspects of entrepreneurship. And saying, , what else is possible? Right? Again, it goes back to curiosity. And I don’t think it’s going to be a surprise to any of your listeners that bookstores aren’t exactly the most profitable enterprise especially in the current economy.
And the traditional retail model of a brick and mortar bookstore It’s very expensive to get started, very low profit margins, and it didn’t quite fulfill that full It didn’t quite scratch the right itch of my curiosity for what I wanted to achieve. So I took a step back and asked myself, what was it about nonfiction books in particular that I found so compelling?
And what I realized was that what interested me most was when people came together over ideas. And dissected those ideas and found ways to integrate those concepts into their other creative and entrepreneurial pursuits. And so I wanted to take that concept of a bookstore and set up a bookstore online, use that as my top of funnel and then build down from there and say, okay, how can I take books as a way to get people in the door, but then start building community around that and start building out something that is more focused and more tailored to particular interests and problems that people look to books to solve.
What was it like setting up an online bookstore? Like, that’s a did you have experience in kind of that space of tech or otherwise? Like, what was that like? Yeah, so, surprisingly complex. I do have experience in tech. Not surprisingly. Everything seems easier until you start doing it, and then you’re like, not surprising.
Not to anybody listening to this show, it’s not surprising. Go ahead. Fair. So, I do have experience in tech. My day job, I like to say is as a product manager at HubSpot. So I’m a product manager for our content AI platform. So if anybody who does listen to this podcast has used HubSpot or has seen our content remix tool, which is an AI content repurposing engine that’s mine.
I, I built that. So very familiar with tech. I’m a fairly technical person. I’ve built websites from scratch before. But going through the challenges of building out an online bookstore, I think what made it particularly difficult, compared to a lot of the other projects that I’ve spun up online in the past, is that the underlying infrastructure for things like book distribution and fulfillment is pretty fragmented.
And a lot of those platforms are pretty outdated. It’s pretty fragmented. And so figuring out how to create an integrated and automated system for managing inventory, placing orders, fulfilling orders. It’s complex. A nightmare. A nightmare.
But you cracked the code, and I’m looking at the website, and it’s beautiful. I mean, you did it. this going? you find your authors? Give us a flavor of how people can participate. Like, how does this work? Yeah, so, as far as like, how I find authors, especially for like, Content that I promote or for one of the new things that we’re starting in August, which is book clubs.
A lot of that right now is, is hand curation. So I’m looking at within my target audience, where am I seeing particular interest? Some of that is through like self data on my website itself. What are people buying? What are people searching for? But a lot of it is also through social listening. So going on to websites like Twitter, I guess now it’s, it’s X or YouTube and looking at, okay, within things like the book talk hashtag or the, , just general book related topics.
What are some of these books related to maybe the craft of writing or related to entrepreneurship? That people are talking about a lot right now, or where there’s a lot of debate over and then I go through and just I manually read the book and evaluate it, make those recommendations then put up all of the, review collateral promotional material if it’s something for a book club, I put together like the discussion guide and the promotional materials for that.
I do all of that just by hand outside of the books that I feature so the full like 28, 000 title back catalog, which spoiler, I have not read all 28, 000 books that the store carries I work with a really great data engineer. Who has managed to help bridge some of those horrible technical nightmares I was speaking about earlier, where I paid him a monthly retainer fee.
And he does a lot of that SQL database querying for me to basically look and see with my distributors, what titles are in stock, what is that stock amount what’s to been taken out of stock and then I keep everything synced into my Shopify site that way. That’s awesome. This is quite a complex ordeal here, but , you’re pulling it off and it doesn’t, I don’t doubt it based on your background.
So this is awesome. The community component, I find that pretty interesting. Like we, when you start, we started the conversation. You mentioned that this is kind of like the top of people just getting to know you and the funnel. Like, , what’s the idea behind the community component of this?
And I see on the website, it says, you know, the book club that you mentioned already, that’s coming up to talk to me about community. Yeah. So the way that I like to encapsulate the community is like, It’s bringing people together, particularly creatives and entrepreneurs, so that writers can learn to brand themselves and think like entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs can learn to tell stories like writers.
and it’s Very intentionally, like those two cohorts, writers and entrepreneurs because a, that’s where with my background as someone who comes from a writing background and a content marketing background and a product management background and an entrepreneurial background, it’s where I can create the most value.
But also, I think there’s this perceived dichotomy where writers have been told over and over again that if you’re in the arts, you’re a starving artist. You’re going to labor away at your novel in shame. Maybe it’ll get published. Maybe not. You’re just going to have to, you know, work whatever menial job, get your bills paid, and you’re going to hate it.
And then I think on the other side of the spectrum, entrepreneurs often get this Message about business strategy that puts creativity and storytelling as a secondary or tertiary skill to think about and to hone and for both groups that does a disservice, right? Writers can contribute so much value either, you know, within their own craft or to others that they have a real opportunity to.
Establish a platform, establish a brand, create multiple revenue streams that fuel their creative pursuits that are really meaningful to them. And that trope of the starving artist doesn’t have to apply. At the same time for entrepreneurs, being able to tell a really compelling story and being able to have written communications in particular, but really communications across the board that are clear and compelling and effective.
That is a skill set that can open the door to so many networking opportunities, investment opportunities, And growth opportunities that those can’t be second class skills. Those need to be first class skills for an entrepreneur. So my goal with the community then is to bring these cohorts together and mastermind groups to start.
breaking down the walls of this perceived dichotomy, this perceived opposition of entrepreneurship and written artistry. And, and again, facilitating writers owning their entrepreneurship, entrepreneurial brilliance, and entrepreneurs owning their storytelling and their craft fair. So it’s still very much in an alpha state, you know, I’m still working to recruit that first cohort.
And iterate on it. I am, like I mentioned before, a product manager by trade. So my, my approach to entrepreneurship is to start with a really small MVP test. Things out, iterate, and then build from there. And that’s where we’re at with this community, right? We’re in that first cycle of iteration and figuring out, okay, as these people are coming together, what’s working?
What’s not working? How do we make this more valuable moving forward? Yeah , I think that’s great. And I feel like, especially for writers, for entrepreneurs, not having to make that choice anymore, like just in the age that we’re living in is amazing. Like to be able to, where everybody can create content and do different things.
Whether it’s long form. Form like a book, right. Or even if it’s shorter form and they can still have a contribution, right. And, and be heard and get their messages out there. So I I’m loving that. I’m loving that. And I, and I’m, I’m just a big fan of it because nobody wants to be put in a box. Like, and I told that they have to be, Oh, you’re an entrepreneur.
You can’t be a writer or you’re a writer. You have to be broke. I mean, nowadays it’s nonsense. Like they used to say about for graphics or this or that, or any creator, it was like, the concept of needing a patron. No, you can provide value and if people are willing to to pay you for said value, you’ll be okay, right?
Exactly. Yeah, I think it’s a great concept and The cohort side of things like talk to me a little bit further about that about the NVP that you’re putting together Or have put together like do people participate? Like how do people get involved? Yeah, so it is it’s application based right now.
So if folks did want to get involved, the best way to do that would be to head over to the website. So www. howtocuriosity. com and then you can click through to the community landing page. I don’t remember the exact URL off the top of my head right now, but essentially there are a couple of. Cohort options.
There are writing cohort and entrepreneurship cohort. It’s easy to find too. It’s just right there. And you go to howdycuriosity. com scroll down. It says community. It’s pretty easy to find. Go ahead. Yeah, exactly. And from there, you can click on either of those cohort options and there’ll be an application form that’ll pop up for folks to apply.
And with the applications, I’m going through and reviewing all of those myself and doing follow up with folks just to, get a clear sense of what their interests are, what they hope to get out of the community cohort. And basically making sure that everyone who comes in at first is someone who is going to be able to A, have time to participate and B, be able to give feedback.
Right? Because my main goal right now is like, if you’re going to participate with this cohort, I really want to make sure you get something good out of it. Right? So you have time to participate, meaning we have time to work together. We can brainstorm. We can collaborate. The other, , peers in the cohort are able to collaborate together.
I think that’s really where folks are going to see the most value. And then, of course, the feedback, that’s going to help me then evaluate the big picture of how this community is structured and figure out before we let more people in, before we, you know, open the floodgate, so to speak, or hopefully to speak, I hope it’s a floodgate effect, not a trickle, but, you know, before we open the floodgates, then what do we need to do to make sure that everyone who comes in after this alpha cohort It’s going to have just as good of an experience.
So. The alpha is a little bit selective, and I am going to be, like I said, reviewing the applications, doing some follow up calls. That’s really just about making sure that if you come in, and if you join those, that this 1st cohort that you’re going to have, like, the best experience possible. And it’s not going to be just like.
Folks sitting on the digital sidelines waiting for someone to talk first. Yeah, it’s great. I love the concept. Love what you’re doing. Howdy curiosity. com is the website. We’ll put the links to all of that in the show notes. Blake, I just want to say, Hey, it’s been great having you on the show today.
Learning more about this. I look forward to seeing this continue to grow and who can ever forget a name like howdy curiosity. My great job. Well, thank you. Great. And to the audience, as always, thank you for tuning in. If this is your first time with Mission Matters, this is a daily show, meaning each and every day we’re putting out new episodes, new ideas, new thought leaders new content.
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And Blake, thanks again so much for coming on. Yeah. Thank you so much for having me Adam.