(Ep 46) MORNING BREW -> Launching, scaling and selling a $75M media business 📩
(Ep 46) MORNING BREW -> Launching, scaling and selling a $75M media business 📩
Alex Lieberman | Co-Founder & CEO
Hey friends,
Back again with another edition of The Founder recap - this is Episode 46. If you’re new here, my goal is to give you a quick synopsis of what got me thinking from this week’s episode of The Founder Podcast in 5 minutes or less.
No idea what The Founder is? Read this.
Mission control:
Learn -> Founder favorite resources
Free money -> Discount codes
And who am I?
I’m Kallaway - a future founder trying to get some answers before I jump in the ball pit myself.
Let’s get it.
This Week’s Episode (Ep 46) 📩
Guest -> Alex Lieberman, Co-Founder & CEO of Morning Brew
Mission -> Morning Brew is on a mission to make reading business and tech news more fun
Episode available on -> Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Website
In this episode we talk with Alex about…
👶 The origin story of Morning Brew
🚀 The Morning Brew growth playbook and the power of the hub and spoke model
🧑🤝🧑 Building a rabid following through ambassador and referral programs
⭐ The moment Alex knew Morning Brew was something special
💰 Going behind the curtain on Morning Brew’s sale to Business Insider for $75M
🔨 Brainstorm of the week -> Improving business education and elevating mental health through emotional sherpas
Summary 🔍
What is Morning Brew and how did Alex get started?
Alex is a first-time entrepreneur and started Morning Brew during his undergrad days at the University of Michigan in 2015.
So how did this all start?
Alex found himself in a fortunate position during his senior year — he’d already landed his dream job (trader at Morgan Stanley) and was set to coast to graduation.
In fact, he had so much free-time on his hands that he didn’t know what to do with himself. In an effort to keep his business skills sharp during his relatively light class load, he started writing a daily business roundup called Market Corner.
To keep himself honest on quality and consistency, he sent the email to a few friends and consistently received positive feedback. His insights were not only informative on the latest business headlines, but also, they were delivered in a much more engaging format and tone than legacy publications like the Wall Street Journal.
As he looked around the business content landscape, he realized there was a major gap for business education targeting Millennials. What started out as a personal pet project quickly became a reliable business news source for many of the students at Michigan. Later that year, he and his Co-Founder Austin would rename the email to Morning Brew and were off to the races.
Today, Morning Brew is a media company focused on delivering business and tech news to 3M+ subscribers.
Alex and his team supercharged subscriber growth by building robust ambassador and referral programs and launching several other content products including Emerging Tech Brew, Marketing Brew, Retail Brew, Sidekick and their hit podcast, Business Casual.
What was once a single daily email has morphed into a full fledged media operation.
In October of 2020, Morning Brew sold a majority stake to Business Insider for a reported $75M.
🚀 Here’s why I’m a fan and excited about Morning Brew 🚀
Alex and Austin took an industry that was stiff, stale and predictable (legacy business media publications like the Wall Street Journal) and disrupted it by building a rabid community with more relevant and compelling products.
I believe the world is in dire need of significantly more “basic business literacy.” This could include things across topics like personal finance, investing, career, real estate, etc. With the acquisition by Business Insider, Morning Brew is aptly positioned to become one of the leading brands in a new wave of digital content.
Recently, Morning Brew launched the Morning Brew Accelerator (MB/A), an 8 week course positioned as a faster and cheaper alternative to a traditional MBA. I think paid programs and courses like these are incredibly compelling if executed by the right brand and instructor set.
Morning Brew’s superpower is the ability to distill complex, often unapproachable topics into bite-sized chunks that are fun to consume. That playbook could apply across several verticals in business.
Alex’s Startup Manifesto 📜
What’s a Startup Manifesto?
During each episode, I ask all of my founder guests this question:
If you had to write a Startup Manifesto with 5 of the most important key lessons or pitfalls to avoid when starting out, what would they be?
Here’s what Alex had to say:
There isn’t a more important quality in a founder than being self-aware. Self-awareness allows you to grow and reveal your blindspots. Austin and I knew what we knew and hired around what we didn’t.
There’s a big debate around if you should double down on your strengths (and ignore weaknesses) or work to strengthen your weaknesses. The right answer is that in building a business, you should double/triple down on your strengths and hire into your weaknesses.
Spend a lot of time thinking about how to hire properly. Most people shoot from the hip and are not prepared in the interviews. Usually it takes a month to realize you made the wrong hire. It often takes 3 to 6 months to let the person go. All in, it costs you 9 months with a bad hire. There’s no such thing as spending too much time on hiring.
Have your non-negotiables in the work you do. For me, I want to feel challenged, work with great people, build and provide something that adds value to a lot of people, not wake up feeling anxious and not worry about money. As long as I’m doing those 5 things in a job, I shouldn’t need to do something else. Once 5 drops to 4 or 3, then I need to reevaluate if it is the right fit for me.
As a founder, you have to evolve into the work you do. In the early days, you’re the writer, editor and prompt creator. As the business grows, you should start firing yourself from different positions. First, I replaced myself with writers, and then eventually, hired editors and replaced myself in that role as well. The work you do changes as you evolve as an entrepreneur, but a lot of people fail to change their mindset as their role evolves. “Doing” can be addicting at first, but when you shift to a prompt creator, it can feel like you’re not “doing” when you stop owning the day to day execution. You have to fight those urges.
What Got Me Thinking From the Episode 🤔
After reflecting on my conversation with Alex, here’s something that really got my wheels spinning:
Strengths vs Weaknesses 👍🏽
One of the topics that Alex referenced during his Startup Manifesto hit home deeply with me. It’s the age old debate between:
Doubling down on your strengths and ignoring/hiring into your weaknesses
Strengthening your weaknesses so everything becomes a strength
Interestingly, this is kind of the same debate as specialist vs generalist.
A specialist is someone who has extraordinary abilities in 1-2 domains. That’s what they become known for and often deliver exceptional performance in those areas for the teams and projects they work on. This is a proxy for doubling/tripling down on your strengths and largely ignoring your weaknesses.
A generalist, on the other hand, is known for being knowledgable and dangerous about a lot of different things. There usually isn’t one area where they have relative expertise over a specialist, but they’re able to take initial actions on bigger projects because they can execute on many of the required skillsets. This is analogous to strengthening your weaknesses so everything is relatively strong.
I like to look at this debate in three different contexts:
Personal development
Starting a project/business
Scaling a project/business
Personal development
As Alex brought up during the conversation, anybody who has a competitive personality will likely default to strengthening their weaknesses. Competitive people don’t like being “bad” at anything and will do whatever it takes to eradicate that feeling.
When I think about my own personal development, there are several disciplines that interest me. Making music, photography, designing UX/UI, fitness, writing and cooking are all disciplines that I like to spend time on. If I took the specialist approach to personal development, I may be exceptional at photography but would have to let the rest of my interests suffer.
That doesn’t seem super compelling to me and so I tend to lean towards the “strengthen weaknesses” camp for my personal development.
Starting a project/business
Similarly, when it comes to starting a project, let’s say launching The Founder, the easiest path is to be a generalist. Launching The Founder required me to be able to write questions, conduct interviews, manage execution around booking/scheduling, engineer the audio, build a website, design a logo, etc. If I was an interview specialist only and had to contract out for everything else, I would have had a lot of dependencies on contractors. This would have slowed down my time to release and significantly delayed progress.
The reality here is that I did contract out the website and logo, but I did everything else, so I went with more of a hybrid approach. I served as a generalist on everything I knew or could easily figure out and then hired a couple of specialists for pieces where I was willing to trade money for time.
When starting a project, most people will optimize for speed and scrappiness. The generalist will often get an MVP or prototype off the ground quicker because they don’t have any dependencies.
Scaling a project/business
When it comes to scaling a business, or even making hires beyond the 15-20 person mark, I think the script flips.
To succeed in business, you need to have a competitive advantage. In other words, what’s the special sauce that your company brings that no one else in the industry can match?
As soon as you find out what that special sauce is, you should make as much of that sauce as possible. That’s what people know you for and why they buy/consume your products.
Doubling down on that special sauce is another way to say “becoming a specialist.”
Think about the best pizza shops. The best ones almost always make exclusively pizza. Maybe they have a couple of additional menu items here and there, but they are known for their pizza. That’s what customers come to them for.
Imagine if they also tried to make amazing burgers, soups and baked goods. They would have to split their resources and take focus away from the pizzas. Not only would this confuse customers on a branding/messaging front, but also, the quality of the pizza would inevitably go down.
In essence, the same principles apply to every business - find your special sauce and make as much of it as possible. Hire/contract for everything else.
💡 Check out Alex’s recommended resources here (favorite books, articles, podcasts and influences)
Wrapping it Up 📕
I hope you found this interesting and inspiring! If so and you want to help support our journey to bring The Founder to millions of people across the world, here’s a couple things that would be really valuable to me and the show:
If you enjoyed this post, share it with one friend that you think is on the same wavelength.
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Listen to the full podcast episode with Alex on Apple or Spotify. If you don’t have an hour to listen to the full episode, pick a couple of topics you’re interested in and skim through (topic time codes in the show notes).
Watch the full episode and our top clips on YouTube.
If you’re feeling super giving:
Find our show on Apple Podcasts (https://apple.co/2VCosu6) and (1) subscribe, (2) give a 5-star rating and (3) leave a couple sentence positive review. This doesn’t seem like it would move the needle but it really is a massive help!
Till next time ✌️
Kallaway
Want more? Check out other founders we’ve featured on the show!
— 📖 36. Toucan | Taylor Nieman
— 🛋️ 34. Burrow | Stephen Kuhl
— 🛌 30. Eight Sleep | Matteo Franceschetti
— 🌵 25. The Sill | Eliza Blank
— 🥦 22. Levels | Josh Clemente
— 💍 11. The Clear Cut | Olivia Landau and Kyle Simon
— 🥘 7. Kettle & Fire | Justin Mares
— 🥾 2. Thursday Boots | Connor Wilson
See any mistakes or have feedback? Let me know (kallaway@thefounderpod.com)