Ep. 107- Morning Brew FOUNDER! ==> Alex Lieberman [$75 Million: Built and Sold Morning Brew] EMAIL NEWSLETTER Secrets to Success!

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We are here for I'm fired up. I'm fired up. That's the way it goes. We're at do this, not that, but we got a guest. We got an amazing guest.

So before he starts telling you all about himself, let me tell you who we got. We got Alex Lieberman. Now he. You probably know he is. If you don't, you definitely know of of his company, Morning Brew.

So he's one of the founders of Morning Brew. He's the executive chairman of Morning Brew. And when I say Morning Brew, you probably see the cup of coffee emoji in your brain.

I mean, he probably should have that tattooed on his forehead, right? But not only did he was he a co founder of Morning Brew, but the guy sold the business for $75 million.

I don't know why he's not on a beach relaxing and he's hanging out with us. But the real reason is because he's a machine. He's a content machine. He is out there. I love his podcast Founders Journal.

He has this other thing which is all over social. You haven't checked it out on his social, which is called 60 seconds startup, where people are pitching their ideas in 60 seconds. I love it all.

The thing that I'm most excited to talk to him about today, which we're going to get into is Story Arb.

And if you don't know about Story Arb, this is his relatively new business that's already really successful and it is a content subscription business, okay. That is powered by world class copywriters and strategists and they take your content and your brand story to the next level.

And I'm super stoked to talk about it because I got questions. I don't understand it. Not that I understand the business, but I want to know the why behind the business. So we're going to get into that.

But before we do, Alex, let me welcome you to the show. Thanks for being on do this.

Not that excited to be here. I love the energy.

I just honestly, I need like, I need to take that snippet and just, you know how you can like customize, minimize your alarm on Your phone, I need you to put it that this guy is a content machine. I need, I really need to set my alarm to that. I love it.

The amount of Celsius that I drink in a day, I know it's going to come out, it's going to be bad. I'm going to fall over at my desk. It's going to happen.

Funny story about Celsius is the, the, the CEO bought a house that's literally across the intercoastal from my grandparents.

So whenever I'm at their place and I'm on their deck at like they live in like a community, I look at his house and seems like Celsius is doing just fine.

Is he like the most wired guys? He is jumping around like a jelly bean because that's what I would imagine.

It's so funny because Morning Brew Daily, our daily podcast at the Brew, Neil and Toby, who are good friends of mine and they're also the hosts of the podcast, they just had the CEO of Celsius on and they asked him how many Celsi do you have a day? And I think he was like four minimum.

Oh my God. Now I feel better about myself. Oh, I like cell CI. I'm going to use that. That's, that's good.

That might be the most important thing I get out of the podcast. That's amazing.

All right, so before we get into story Arb and I want to talk about, I want to talk about newsletters for a second because if there's a person in the universe that knows about email newsletters, I feel like it's you. And here's the thing. I would say there's millions of businesses country and 99% of them have an email newsletter that they send out.

And I would say 99% of those are epically boring. Their wallpaper. They're garbage in my opinion. What are businesses doing wrong with their email newsletters and how should they fix that?

Yeah, I mean, very simply, most companies do not treat email with what I would say is the respect that email deserves. They don't treat it like a product, they treat it as an afterthought. They treat it it as a marketing vehicle for something else.

And so like, let's just use an example. Let's just say you're a B2B software company. Your focus is your software.

And so what oftentimes happens to B2B SaaS companies who have newsletters is they suck because they're not given the focus that they deserve. I think the beauty of why we were Able to scale Morning Brew and really build heart loyalty with our audience is because it was the only thing.

Like, email wasn't one of the things we had. It was the only thing.

For four years straight, all we did was write, grow, and sell email newsletters until our eyes bled and our fingers were about to fall off. And so I think when. Whenever you're relentlessly focused on one thing, and the thing is your only product, you have to get exceptionally good at it.

And I think when people think of email newsletters, they kind of put it into this one bucket of like, email is a channel. The way I would describe it is there are many ways in which you can create email.

You can have email marketing drips, you could have email where your goal is to get someone to leave the email as soon as possible to go buy something or consume something on your website. Candidly, that is what the vast majority of email newsletters are. There are very few email newsletters that actually act as a destination.

And that's how we always treated email with Morning Brew. And when we first started our business, there were probably only two other companies that treated email as a destination versus a marketing tool.

It was the skim, it was us, and it was the Hustle. Now we live in an age where there's an abundance of people trying to create email as a destination. And I think that's for a few reasons.

One is because tools have caught up to this product where now you have substack, you have beehive, you have ghost, you have review. So you have the tooling that allows people to create email as a product, email as a destination.

And because we had an exit, because the Hustle had an exit, because the skim had public revenue numbers, at one point, people see that there's a commercial opportunity. And so I think the combination of tooling and commercial opportunity made email as a destination more of a focus for people.

So that I. I'm totally on board that, especially if email is a product for you.

But let's take that example that, okay, you're a SaaS company and you want to have an email newsletter to be a thought leader, you know, in your space.

And you're like, okay, we're going to send this out and people are going to think that we're really smart and want to work with our software product or application. How do you do that? When it's not a product for you? How do you make it not epically boring?

Yep. I think the short answer is you need really good talent.

And the reason that most B2B companies will not hire really good talent to create a really good newsletter is because they're short sighted. And if you wanted to hire, let's just say you were doing a. I'm just going to use, let's pick A, A B, 2B company. Let's just say you're Gusto. I'm.

And I'm not picking on Gusto for any reason. I'm just going to use them as the example. So you're Gusto.

You have an HR platform for small businesses up to enterprises and so you think about who's your core customer. I would assume it's either CEOs or it's chief HR officers at larger companies.

So you say we're going to create a newsletter that is the most value ad email for people who really give a shit about human resources, culture and everything around the job of an HR person in a company. Okay, well if you're a software business, you don't have anyone in the company currently that's going to write a great newsletter. Right?

They're great engineers, they're not great writers. So then you say we have to go find a great writer. There's two issues with this.

One is likely the CEO of the business or the co founder of the business doesn't necessarily have a great sense of what great writing is because they probably have a better sense of product and engineering, etc. And if you want to hire, let's say you're going to do your newsletter daily, you probably need either two writers or a writer and an editor.

Going market rate for a great writer and a great editor is let's just say 70 to $90,000 for a writer and 100 to $120,000 for an editor. So let's just say you're talking about 200k all in just to run your newsletter. A lot of founders and executives will say 200k.

Like we could hire another engineer for that, a junior engineer or we could put that into paid acquisition or we could run like a full blown event for that cost.

Right.

And so I think what ends up happening is it's most founders of non media companies and even founders of media companies candidly do not have a clear understanding of what great content looks like. They don't have great content taste.

So they're not able to pick great talent and they're too short term minded because spending a dollar to get a dollar in the paid acquisition machine you get way faster results than creating content for a long time and then driving customers. But if I look at A company I know you know them well.

Like if I look like at a company like HubSpot, their efforts in content marketing, starting with their blog, moving to their podcast network, has paid off royally and it required them to think long term because they weren't getting results from that day one.

Yeah, and that's, I totally agree with you. And that's why I think attribution is total trash in a lot of ways because a lot like emails are sort of like last touch attribution.

Like, oh, we sent it out, we got this customer and it's very transactional.

But you know, with what you're talking about, with really putting energy and investment behind your newsletter, it's not something where, oh, we sent out seven newsletters, we got 32 clients.

It's this, it's this thought leadership that's developing in the recipient's mind over time and that is going to reap, like you're talking about HubSpot, that they win because they just keep pumping out high quality content. Is that what you're saying? Is that what we got to be doing?

Yeah, I think my view is like very, very simplistically.

It should be like whether it's the old, the old adage by Gary V. Of like jab, jab, hook, or just thinking of like 80, 20, 80% of what you create should be just like giving as much value as humanly possible to your customer. 20% can be you asking for value in exchange.

And I think if you were to actually look at what those proportions look like for most B2B marketing orgs, it's probably flipped in the other direction. It's 80% asking for something, 20% trying to give value.

I 100% agree with that. And I. It would probably be like 90, 10% of how much value they're actually putting out there because it's a waste.

And so now I feel like now maybe I have a better understanding of why you went down the path with Story Arb and I have questions about it. So for all the listeners that don't know, give us the. And here's the irony part. You have your very popular thing, your 62nd startup.

Give us the 62nd startup on Story. Arbitrary.

Yeah, very simply. Story Arb is copywriting as a service for companies and marketers. That is it, period, end of story.

And you know, to give the quick background on the business Story Arb started because I had seen how much value I got from building an audience on the Internet. When I think about every opportunity I've gotten, whether it's speaking engagements, hiring people, ad deals for Morning Brew.

It's all come through my Twitter and LinkedIn audiences.

And I had a thought probably a year ago now where I was like, other founders and executives are waking up to the importance of building an audience on different platforms, but they either don't have the time to do it or they don't have the chops to do it. Because writing is very different than running a business. And so the whole thesis was, I will bring it into a business.

The best writers and content strategists in the world, we will pair them with founders. Content strategists will interview founders for all of their lessons, their insights and their stories. They will pass that over to a writer.

The writer will create amazing social content that will go out every single day and the client will just review it and give feedback or give thumbs up or thumbs down. And so that's how it started. I learned a lot of things about this personal brand model.

Unfortunately, even though you understand the value of building a brand online, and I understand it, I think most founders treat it as a nice to have, not a need to have. And so what we found in the early days with this business is founders.

Founders would start really excited about the service and then around the six month mark they'd be like, damn, this is taking a lot of my time. Like, I don't know if I'm up for this.

And I found that like, there's pretty high churn from for just focusing on personal branding and executive social because most people are not willing to stay in the game for a long time. And as much as I remind people that Mr. Beast has been doing YouTube for 13 years, Tim Ferriss has been doing his podcast for 10 years.

Same thing for Joe Rogan, people. I'll say it till I'm blue in the face, people will agree to it.

But then when they're actually in the mud having to spend time on content, they just simply can't do it for a long time. And so where we've evolved the business to today is we've switched to a customer that we believe views content as a need to have.

And that is ahead of marketing, ahead of growth, or ahead of community at any business. But really we're focusing on B2B companies.

And so now what you can do is use Story Arb as a subscription, where you get a dashboard, you fill out a content brief for anything from your founder's social media to your company's social media, to lead magnets to your website copy to your ad creative to your newsletters. You fill out a brief in 48 hours, one of our writers turns the content back to you. You either give it a thumbs up or you give feedback on it.

And we do unlimited rounds of feedback and you get unlimited requests for content in a given month. And the whole idea is that we will power all the content in your business.

And we view that content is going to become increasingly important for B2B marketing orgs to stay relevant, because paid acquisition is just not going to be what people can hang their hat on.

Well, first of all, I probably need to become a client because that hamster wheel that we're all on as relates to content is tough. It is a tough grind. But the thing that I'm curious about, and you're a smart dude, so I know you've thought about this.

You're probably one of the last people in America that's out there aggressively hiring really good writers. Okay? All the writers are like, AI is taking my job. It's like the first job that AI is crushing. And here you are like the savior of writers.

Totally.

I mean, am I crazy to think that story Arb and AI are on a collision course or that's not happening?

Yeah. So my current view of things is that 90% of writers are bad writers. And AI is going to make those 98% of writers lives really difficult.

2% of writers I believe are exceptional. I believe AI is going to act as incredible leverage for those writers to create more great writing more efficiently.

Because my whole view is when I think about content, I think about it basically on two scales, information and entertainment. So let's just talk about something like an academic paper written by a PhD student student. 10 out of 10 on the information scale.

0 out of 10 on the entertainment scale. Let's look at, you know, if we were to do a transcript of someone's standup comedy routine. 0 out of 10 on the information scale.

10 out of 10 on the entertainment scale.

My general view is information dense content is going to be the first to get crushed by AI the more you turn up the knob of voice, personality, personal stories, and entertainment, the harder it is for AI to displace. So I actually think the world we're going to is where AI does call it the first 70% of any piece of content for any writer.

The last 30% is what the truly great 2% of writers focus their time on. And in some ways they become quasi editors where their goal is to insert voice, specificity and personality into it.

Where AI isn't capable of doing that at least yet.

Well, I think that's where we're headed to.

I think that's why influencer marketing has exploded so much, because this idea of having personalities behind content where it's not just this just generic garbage. Right. And so I hear you, and that does make a lot of sense to me, where great writers are going to be able to do even greater things.

So let me, let me pivot for a second because I'm curious about something you talked about. Personal brand. You have a huge personal brand. You've invested a lot of time into it. But what if today nobody knew Alex Lierman?

There was no morning brew? You literally had to wake up today and be like, okay, I have only 400 connections on LinkedIn. I don't have a newsletter. I don't even have a podcast.

But I want to build my personal brand because a lot of people listen, like, how do I, how do I get to that level? What do I do? What exactly would you do? What would be your roadmap?

Yeah. So I'm going to take you through four things, and if I forget them, re, remind me.

I'm going to take you through the why of why I'm creating content, the the who, who I'm creating content for, the how, where I'm creating content, and the what the what I'm creating. So let's talk about why there is not one reason to create content. Content on the Internet.

So, you know, my friend Harry Stebbings created 20 Minute VC, originally the podcast, because he wanted to meet people in the venture capital world. And by saying he had a podcast and inviting people on, venture capitalists said yet. Yes. And all of a sudden, he built a network.

So he did it for networking. My friend Sahil Bloom, he did it for credibility to ultimately land a book deal. I do it for credibility and monetization.

My friend Alexis Gay, who's a comedian, she uses the Internet as basically her sandbox for practicing her jokes. And so at the end of the day, as a creator, the first thing I would decide is, why am I creating? There's not a right answer.

The only right answer is what feels most authentic to you? And what could I see myself doing for five plus years? Okay, so let's just say as a new creator, my goal is to build credibility. The second is, who.

Who am I trying to build credibility for or in front of? And what, what I do and I, I called creating a market of one is I try to get as specific as humanly possible with who I am creating content for.

We did this in the early days of Morning Brew, where a month into the business, we created a one page sheet that built out a Persona of exactly who our newsletter was for. And I still remember exactly what that what was on that sheet. Aaron, 31 years old, living in New York City, goes to Connecticut every day.

He reverse commutes, he works at a hedge fund. Thursdays and Fridays he goes out for drinks. Saturdays he prefers to watch TED talks or go to interesting experiences in the city.

He likes old fashions, not Manhattan's. Like we went that specific.

And the whole idea is every time we would train writers at Morning Brew, they would look at this profile of Aaron and know, like, is Aaron going to dig what we're writing today? To me, it's the same thing for company, brand, or personal brand.

And so for me, my market of one, as I'm building this new hypothetical audience is Linda Boff, who is the CMO of ge. She's the current cmo. And Linda is looking for content that keeps her finger on the pulse of marketing.

Because as someone at a 200,000 plus person company, it's hard for her to know what's going on in the weeds to understand what the future of marketing and media looks like. And so my goal is to solve that problem and keep finger on the pulse. Okay, so that's the market of one. That's the who. Now it's the how.

How am I going to create content? And really what the, what that really means is where am I going to create content?

And the way I think about where you build audience on the Internet is this pyramid that I call the audience funnel. And imagine like an upside down triangle. At the very top is your rented audience. The middle is your owned audience.

The bottom is your monetized audience. Rented audiences are social platforms.

The benefit of rented audiences is that they have hundreds, millions or billions of people you can get in front of. They have virality built in front of that built into them. You can build a lot of audience very quickly.

The obvious trade off of a rented audience is, as the name implies, you rent it. You are not in full control of your audience. An algorithm is. And so, by the way, none of these audiences are inherently bad.

You just have to understand the trade offs that you're okay with. Then let's talk owned audience. Owned audiences are email, podcasts, digital communities and events, physical communities.

The benefit of these is you control your audience. No one can take your email, your Slack channel or your podcast away from you.

The downside is scaling them quickly is way harder the growth of an email newsletter is linear. We grew over nine years to four and a half million subscribers.

Whereas for rented audiences, I know people who have built YouTube channels to 4.5 million subscribers in a year and a half. That's the big trade off.

And then finally, Monetized Audience is, as the name implies, where you are pushing your highest intent people down from rented to owned to monetized. And you end up monetizing them in a variety of ways. Paid events, paid subscriptions, paid communities, education, et cetera.

And so what I would then think about if I'm creating this new content strategy for Linda Boff at GE is what is one rented audience and one one owned audience that I am going to focus all my attention on, because they are the platforms that feel most authentic to how I create content. So, for example, for me, I feel like I'm better at the written word than creating dancing TikTok videos.

And I think Linda Boff consumes more of her content on LinkedIn than she does on TikTok.

So for me, I would pick Twitter and LinkedIn, I would cross post all of my text posts across both of these platforms, and then I would have a newsletter as my owned audience that I'm driving my top of funnel to. Okay, we've talked about the why, we've talked about the who, we've talked about the how. Now it's the what. What the hell am I going to talk about?

And in thinking about what I'm going to talk about, basically I have this framework that I call the Zone of Genius, where imagine three circles that intersect and you have this middle that is the middle of the Venn diagram. One circle is what I know a lot about or what I want to learn a lot about.

The second circle is what I get a lot of energy talking about because not everything I know a lot about do I actually enjoy talking about. And then the third circle is what does my market of one Linda Boff really, really care about learning more about?

And so then I would go and fill out these circles. And in filling out these circles, I would see what ends up falling in the middle.

What are the content categories that I know a lot about, that I like talking about, and that Linda really wants to learn about? And what would probably end up in the middle is something like the intersection of the creator economy and B2B and the future of digital media?

And so then the final piece of this is, I know what my content pillars are. Those are my two content pillars.

What topics am I going to talk about under My content pillars and the way that I always create great content or posts is not by, like just trying to brainstorm ideas. I create prompts for myself and I prompt myself to answer questions.

And so an example would be, what are the three strongest opinions I have about my content pillar? So using the example, what are the three strongest opinions I have about the intersection of B2B and the creator economy?

And typically what I do is I'd open up my phone, I'd go to voice memos, I'd set a timer for five minutes, and I would just speak words and I try to answer that prompt for five minutes. I'd go to Otter, which is a transcription app. I'd transcribe my voice memo and then I would edit that into my posts.

That is awesome. I love this. I mean, that is so cool.

I really like the idea of the market of one, and I'm gonna do that because I think when you get that grandeur, like, you're literally talking about this person, you know, drinks Casamigos and not Don Julio or whatever, right?

Then when you're writing and when you're posting, you have that person in your mind and it lets you laser focus and be more intentional about what you're doing. I think that's super valuable advice. Well, let's.

Let's pivot for a second to something that's completely not valuable and the least important thing we're going to talk about. So the end of this podcast, I always get into something called since you didn't ask, which is totally useless.

And I'm curious about something because you seem like a busy dude. You do a lot of important stuff.

I'm curious if you have time for epically trash TV or you're too intellectual for that and you would never watch, like, Love is Blind or the Bachelor or are you too, like, are you watching like, that. That stuff every night?

No, that stuff is my. Yeah, my. My. My wife and I love. Love is blind. So, like, love is blind. We're up to date. The Bachelor. We're up to date. Last season was amazing.

Yeah, Joey was incredible. Like, I think all time Bachelor.

Yeah, Yeah, I agree.

We watch Survivor. We're huge Survivor people. Like, I've. I've considered multiple times applying to the show.

Oh, you would get on too on there.

Don't tempt me. Because it really is something I think about all the time.

So, yeah, I would say basically it's like anytime it's late at night and we just want to, like, go to sleep, we watch trash TV and Then we always, like, we'll. We'll mix in, like, quality TV also. So another good show we're watching right now is Shogun.

Yeah, well, me and my wife love reality tv, and there's, like, none on right now. So last night we put on A Farmer wants a Wife. And, I mean, we're, like, scraping the bottom of the barrel here.

Yeah, I've never heard of that, but that sounds horrific.

It sounds exactly what you think it is. It's Bachelor with farmers. That's hilarious. Yes. It's amazing. Well, I think it makes me feel better knowing that, you know, you watch crap.

Because now when I watch, I'm like, well, he watches it. Which is fine. See that? You're validating my existence.

Yeah. I think it's just a chain reaction. I think I do the same thing with other people. I say, oh, they watch it.

Like, I don't have to be perfectly productive.

Right, right. You're paying it forward. Exactly. All right, this has been fantastic. Alex, how does everybody find you? Consume your stuff? What should they do?

Yep.

So, first of all, if you are someone who works in marketing or runs a company and you value having great content to acquire customers and build your brand, check out storyarb.com youm can find me on LinkedIn at Alex Lieberman, Twitter or X. I still call it Twitter. I'm gonna keep calling it Twitter. My. My handle is business barista.

And then my podcast is Founder's Journal, where I just talk about, you know, the lessons I've learned building companies. And the learnings never stop it.

Actually, if anything, I feel like I'm learning more today than I was nine years ago when we were starting Morning Brew in our. In our dorms in college.

Well, I got to tell you, I'm a huge fan of Morning Brew. I'm fired up for Story Arbit. I'm going to announce something here that we haven't told anybody anywhere. Oh, wow. Alex.

Alex is going to be on the virtual stage at Guru Conference, the world's largest virtual email marketing event. It's free to register@guruconference.com and if you want to see Alex Lieberman at Guru Conference, all you gotta do is register.

Alex, are you fired up for Guru?

I am very fired up.

It's going to be awesome. All right, man. Thanks for being here. Today. And everybody go follow Alex. He's the man.

Thanks for having me.

You did it. You made it to the end. Nice, but the party's not over.

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