Alex Lieberman, the co-founder and Executive Chairman of Morning Brew, gives you an insider’s look into building businesses. Alex explores the founder’s journey, from the painful challenges of 0-to-1 to the powerful frameworks that help you scale to millions in revenue as well as the emotional rollercoaster that is present throughout.
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Definitely difficult. And funny, this isn't a new lesson, but I was just re reminded of it as I got into the weeds of the business because I saw this with Morning Brew also. 98% of writers are really bad, are really mediocre, and I would never trust them to create content for our business, for story art, whether it's our website copy, our social copy, you know, articles we write, etcetera. And so then I shouldn't trust them with any of our clients as well. And so I would say it was a ton of time and lift to find great writers. At the same time, we were only using freelance writers, and I think that made things even more difficult because if a freelance writer's only able to work with, let's say, 2 or 3 clients at any given time because they're not dedicating more than 5 hours a week to your business, it means you have to get to dozens of freelance writers to scale the business. But, like, there's so few great writers that finding dozens of amazing freelancers is exceptionally difficult. The second big challenge we noticed is retention of customers was way shorter than I would have hoped. On average, we were keeping our customers for around 6 months. My hope was something that was well north of 12 months. And I think there's a the big reason that we weren't keeping clients long enough is, first off, I believe that founders view executive, social, and personal brand as a nice to have, not a need to have. Need to haves are things that keep the lights on for their business. Nice to haves are things that if everything else is going well, they'll spend time on it. And so I think as we were requiring time from our executives, whether it was to do content interviews or look over drafts, it was becoming very burdensome for them to do it for many months on end. I think there's only a few industries that where founders or executives truly treat personal social as a need to have, and I think that's for published authors, public speakers, full time creators who use their content as their marketing for some product they're selling and real estate agents. And I think that's it. So
It's the Walmart you love now for your business. Learnmore@business.walmart.com. That's business.walmart.com. Okay. This is going to be a fun slash emotion provoking episode because I'm going to talk about the decision to step down as CEO of Morning Brew in April of 2021, which was about five and a half months after we sold the business in October of 2020. I wanna preface this by saying that The decision to step down from running the company that I had started while a student at the University of Michigan in 2015 was Probably the hardest decision of my life. The months after the decision were probably the hardest months of my life. But also some of the greatest learnings about myself as a person and an entrepreneur happened during those periods of, you know, deep emotional, both distress and just heightened emotions in general. So I wanna walk you through why I made the decision. What the emotions were after and how I navigated them. I wanna start by saying that although the actual act of stepping down happened in April of 2021. I really had been out of the CEO role for many months prior. And the best way to describe this is to describe how the business changed materially in 2019 going into 2020. I wanna say in, like, the fourth quarter of 2019, it was the month in which my co founder in Austin and I really started to realize that morning brew was going from a chapter 1 business where the goal was to take
Opportunities we saw in being purchased by Axel Springer and partnering with Business Insider. The first was being able to work with Business Insider to take their traffic because Business Insider gets a ton of traffic to their website and being able to funnel that traffic to their website into Morning Brew subscribers. That was really exciting to us because that would allow us to not have to spend as much we were as we were spending on paid acquisition to get new subscribers for our newsletter at the time. And at the time, we probably were spending anywhere between 250 to $500,000 per month on paid acquisition. Right? So we could potentially save 1,000,000 of dollars a year by acquiring new subscribers organically through Business Insider's web traffic. And I would say the second is historically Insider was their kind of their best content was on the social media side and on the video side. And so we thought there was a lot that we could learn from them as we were trying to build up these competencies. So that I would say that's the the strategic part of the decision. Make this the year you take control of your career. Earn your online MBA from the leaders in online education, Indiana University. IU's Kelley School of Business Business pioneered the online MBA with Kelley Direct back in 99, and our innovative curriculum has kept us on top ever since. Our students learn from the best with the best. Experience the exceptional. Apply at go.iu.edu/onlinemba. And then the third, which is the one that I've been thinking a lot about recently is I think there was something that I was not conscious about at the time, but like my gut and my energy knew. And it sounds like kind of woo woo to say that, But I do believe oftentimes our gut and, like, the way our energy pulls or pushes us knows what is best for us before our head does. Because I think our
Making more money, etcetera. We started doing these pitches where we would tell students to take their laptops out, go to morningbrew.com, put in their email address. And what we realized is that was too many steps for students. So then what we started doing is I would make the pitch I just gave to you. My cofounder, Austin, would take a sheet of paper and pass it to one of the ends of the class with a pen. And we just say, if you're interested in signing up for morning brew, write down your email address, and we will sign you up for after class, and you will get the email starting tomorrow. And a way higher percentage of students in the class would sign up because the friction was taken away from the sign up process. It's like it was the analog version of basically going to a website instead of the funnel being, like, 7 steps, it was one step. And so then we would collect all these emails in class. We probably would collect on average 90% of a class. And then Austin and I would literally go to a table in the main area of the Business School of Michigan, which is called the Winter Garden, and we would just punch in every single email address manually. And say there were a 100 emails we got, we'd always punch in, like, a 120 email addresses because we were sometimes not sure if an I was an l or, like, you know, if g was a y. And so we'd put in multiple versions of people's email addresses. So we started doing that. And, basically, without knowing it, like, the big marketing tactic we used on Michigan's campus and continue to use was this idea of a hub and spoke model. So a hub is something, a digital channel or an in real life channel that gives you, leveraged access to a lot of spokes. Spokes are your the ideal customer you wanna get in front of. Again, we didn't think about it in this way at the time, but it's how I think about everything now. And the reason is is because when you get access to hubs, it gives you so much more leverage. It frees up your time to get in front of more customers because instead of going, you know, student to student, by going in front of 1 class, we got access to 75 students or a 100 students or 500 students. Students. And so, basically, Austin and I went through this process of going to every class and every club that probably got us
Seller's plans and goals usually boil down to one single desire, getting their products in front of millions of customers. After all, visibility is everything, and that's exactly what Walmart Marketplace can give you. Walmart.com has more than a 120,000,000 unique monthly visitors according to Comscore, making Walmart Marketplace one of the fastest growing ecommerce platforms. Now they wanna help sellers bask in this glory. New sellers who join Walmart Marketplace today can save up to 50% off referral and fulfillment fees. Conditions apply to unlock this deal. Gain access to millions of customers, and enjoy the scale of one of the world's biggest retailers, go to marketplace.walmart.com/fj. That's marketplace dot walmart.com/fj. Okay. So last night, I hosted the 2nd ever Challenger dinner series. It was awesome. So I cohost this event with Linda Boff, who is the CMO of GE. And, basically, the idea was Linda brings her friends, I bring my friends, and it turns into this kind of, like, creative explosion of marketers with very different brains from very different sized companies, very different industries, sharing ideas with each other. So for example, Linda brought folks like the CMO of Fidelity, the CMO of Calvin Klein, the head of tequila at Diageo, the chief brand officer of TIAA, the head of corporate impact at JPMorgan. Right? So big wigs in marketing at Fortune 500 companies or even Fortune 50 companies. And then I brought some of my friends including Nick Sharma, Patty Galloway, the, you know, king of YouTube, the head of marketing of Mischief, which is the viral marketing brand that has just done massive drops like Big Red Boots, Robin Arzone, the Peloton instructor, and other folks like that. And so the whole idea is 20 of us sitting around a dinner table talking about kind of our areas of
