10 VALUABLE Lessons from a Successful Show

What's up everyone? Welcome back to Founders Journal. I am Alex Lieberman, and if you didn't catch the announcement last week, Founders Journal is officially back and I am so incredibly excited. For those of you that aren't OG Founders Journal listeners, this show is my personal diary made public for the world. It's digestible, meaning 20 minutes max an episode. It's actionable. From how did you get your first 100 customers to how have I hired great C-suite executives to lessons and frameworks that allow you to make you a better business builder. And the show is also vulnerable. I am 100% open about my emotional journey as an entrepreneur, from the incredible highs of starting a new business to the lows of feeling directionless and alone after stepping down from my CEO role. So that is Founders Journal. And today's episode is all about how we launched a new show at Morning Brew less than 90 days ago and how it is already on track to do tens of millions of downloads over the next 12 months. Let's get into it. Literally since year one of Morning Brew, people have asked us if we could create an audio version of the newsletter. And every single time we said no, we wanted to stay laser-focused on one thing, which was the daily newsletter. We were worried about cannibalizing our subscribers to the newsletter, meaning people would switch from newsletter to podcast. And we also didn't know if we could monetize multimedia content nearly as well as newsletter content. But finally, with the guidance of our new chief content officer, shout out Devin, we bit the bullet and launched Morning Brew Daily on February 20th, 2023. The idea of the show is simple: a daily talk show that covers the most important news in business and the economy in less than 30 minutes. And the intention of the show was to have the same quick-wittedness and approachability as our newsletter, but offer a product that is complementary to our 5-minute read rather than supplementary. Now, as I mentioned, this show is on fire right now. It's at over 2 million downloads and it's on pace to do tens of millions of downloads over the next 12 months. But I just want to say there is so much that went into launching this show that people don't realize. This show was pitched in November of 2022 during our chief content officer's interview process. Intensive work started on it in December, and this included everything from ideating and casting the show to staffing production and editing, structuring the show in terms of run of show, as well as the supply chain of how we go from nothing to published episode every day. As well as things like dress, makeup, speaker training, etc. And then you have all of the non-show related things that we had to figure out, like training the sales team to sell the show, having a strategy for how our social accounts related to the show will be run, a website for the show, and so much more. So in reality, that's why this show has done so well. Months of prep and thought went into making this a hit. But as I say that, I also need to be realistic that there are so many shows created by media companies that are well-prepped, that were thought about months in advance, yet they fell flat on their face. So then the question becomes, why is it that Morning Brew Daily has become a breakout success? The rest of this episode is about that. I'm gonna break down the 10 lessons that I have learned along the way as I've watched this show's ascent. Lesson number 1. Co-host chemistry is everything. Neal and Toby, our co-hosts, were best friends before the podcast. They hang outside of work, they play golf together on the weekends, and you can't replicate that rapport. I would take 2 B+ players that have a deep friendship over 2 A players that are complete strangers every day of the week. And the importance of co-host chemistry is demonstrated across so many shows on the internet. My First Million, Acquired Podcast, All In, Smartless, Part of My Take, Pod Save America. The list goes on. Lesson number 2, only change one variable when you're moving your audience. 4.5 million people know Morning Brew for our daily newsletter. By keeping the variable of news constant and only changing the platform from newsletter to YouTube and podcast, we decrease the friction of having our audience follow us somewhere else. What we've learned over the years is that transferring audiences across like platforms is way more successful than different platforms. And what that means is promoting a new newsletter in your existing newsletter is way easier than promoting a podcast in your newsletter. And so what that means is when you launch a podcast, your newsletter subscribers are already less likely to make the move because you're changing platforms on them. So if you can give them something that feels familiar, at least in terms of the content, you increase your odds of them making the transition. Morning Brew Daily felt familiar to our existing newsletter audience because it was daily. It was still news-focused. And so it solved the same problem that our readers came to us for in the first place. Lesson number 3: Build your new products as if you have no distribution. Having a huge audience is a blessing and a curse. It can supercharge new things you launch, but if you treat it as a crutch, you will never create great products that are truly exceptional on their own merit. From day one, we said this show has to succeed on its own merit, and we need to treat it like we don't have our existing subscribers, like we're starting a new business from scratch. That's why we purposely promoted Morning Brew Daily very little in our newsletter for a while to see if it had the chops to be great independently. It ended up being great, and now we have built-in distribution to add fuel to the fire. We have 4.5 million daily subscribers we can promote the show to, as well as a warm podcast feed, because Morning Brew Daily is using the feed of our old show, Business Casual, which already had tens of thousands of listeners. Lesson number 4, customize content for every platform. The Daily Show is crushing it as a podcast, but there's still so much opportunity on YouTube. Why? Because we haven't yet perfectly tweaked the content based on what performs best on YouTube versus in audio-only form. Things like a hooky intro, more content variation, planned cliffhangers, things that play into retaining viewers on YouTube. And people assume when they start creating content, they can just copy and paste that content to every platform on the internet. And that just isn't the case. The rule I use is the 70/30 rule. When you're creating a podcast, I would assume 70% of the content can be used in your video form, but 30% has to be changed so that you're publishing something that is built to perform on the specific platform, in this case, YouTube. Lesson number 5, daily timely content is a blessing and a curse. The blessing is that it's easier to build a habit, and timely content creates more urgency. People need to know the news so that they can talk about it with their friends or their colleagues. And also, when it's daily, there's just more surface area. There's more content to be spread via word of mouth. But the curse here is that daily content, as we've seen with our newsletter and now we're seeing with this show, is an absolute frickin grind. Here is just a quick summary of what has to happen to put the show out every day. And this was sent to me directly from Toby, one of our co-hosts. 4:12 a.m., alarm goes off. 4:30 a.m., in Uber. 4:45, in office. 5:15 to 5:30, the rest of the production team gets to the office. 5 to 6, last minute prep and research. 6 to 6:30, film the show. 6:30 to 7, audio crew and video editor get the episode up on all platforms. 7 a.m. to rest of the day doing other jobs, editing social clips, and by 1 p.m. doing the whole thing over again. It is an absolute grind. Lesson number 6, come for the content, stay for the characters. This show keeps professionals informed, so they don't come off as stupid at work. That is why listeners come for this show. It's the same reason that readers come for our newsletter. But people stay for Morning Brew Daily because they've grown to love our co-hosts, Toby and Neal. They love their personalities and they love their stories. And this has long been our thesis at Morning Brew about where media is going, because we live in an era where the ability to create content and build an audience has truly been democratized because the cost of creating content is basically zero now. People are gravitating towards consuming content from brands that they resonate with, and it's way easier to resonate with an actual person versus a faceless brand. On top of that, we live in a time where there's honestly just widespread distrust in mainstream media, which from my perspective is just more wind at the sails of personality-driven content. And for me, as I look at Morning Brew Daily, The coolest part of watching personality-driven media in action is the comments after every single YouTube episode that we post of the show. So in prepping for this episode, I went back to YouTube. I went to a random episode of Morning Brew Daily. And the fascinating thing about going through the comments of the show is half of the comments actually have nothing to do with the content or the news stories. Half of these comments are literally just related to the hosts of the show. Daniel7173 commented, Sheesh. Neal roasting Toby at 14:49. FA commented at 50 seconds, the way Toby was trying to comfort Neal is funny. And here's my very favorite. This is a recent comment from a listener. Toby is so tanned and looks so hot. Oh my God. People come for the content and they stay for the characters. Lesson number 7, shows can serve many purposes. I think of Morning Brew shows as hubs that have spokes coming out of them. And those spokes are ways that the core content can create other value for consumers and for Morning Brew. At the center of this hub is the anchor show, which in this case is Morning Brew Daily, which is published to YouTube and podcast players every day. But then there are so many spokes to the show, some that we currently leverage and others that we can leverage in the future. One spoke is how Morning Brew Daily is an advertising asset that brands want to spend money on in order to get in front of an upwardly mobile, high-earning professional audience. Another spoke is Morning Brew Daily as a branding vehicle to extend the brand of Morning Brew outside of, quote unquote, that business newsletter to a true multiplatform media brand. Another spoke is Morning Brew Daily being a talent incubator where we can bring in guests or guest hosts in order to test talent, low risk to us, and potentially leverage some of our best test guests or hosts to launch new shows under Morning Brew's umbrella in the future. And the list goes on and on of ways that we can leverage spokes in the future. Things like live events, merchandise, satellite shows that could be spun off from the main show, a business news calendar that listeners can pay for. But at the core is this anchor IP that is created because of the great personalities that we have on the show. Lesson number 8, growth is mostly linear, maybe one day exponential. There is an old Founders Journal episode that I'll try to find and link to in the show notes, but I talk about this concept called the balloon effect. Now imagine you have a water balloon under a faucet and you start letting water run. The balloon is going to slowly start filling up and stretching, and if you keep water flowing, the balloon at some point will pop. You never know when it will pop, but you know what it feels like to see the balloon expand and be like, okay, This thing is close to popping. It's like when your eyes start squinting because you're ready for it to happen. Once it pops, the water is no longer contained and the surface area expands exponentially. And I think this is a perfect analogy for creating content on the internet. The speed that the water flows out of the balloon is, in content terms, a combination of consistent quality content and smart growth strategies. And you're not going to explode day one, but you increase your odds by increasing the flow of water or increasing the flow of quality content and smart growth. And then one day, without being able to predict it, the balloon pops and your content goes exponential. This is what I've seen for Morning Brew. This is what I've seen for some of the biggest creators in the world, like MrBeast, who was creating content for 13 years before it really popped off. And I believe this is what we'll see for Morning Brew Daily. The show is doing great, but it's not hockey stick growth. We've started with a strong base because of our brand, and we continue to grow linearly because of consistent, quality content thanks to our co-host and team. But one day, I don't know when that day will be, I believe the show will go exponential. Lesson number 9, finding content market fit is priority number one when you start creating content. Everyone talks about finding product market fit as being the first job of a CEO in the startup world, and I think finding content market fit is the first job of a media company CEO or a chief content officer for a bigger media company. And I can't quantify content market fit, but as Marc Andreessen says, when you have it, you know it. Organic growth of the show starts to be strong. You're getting a high percentage of your audience inbound emailing you or DMing you. Strangers on the street are starting to recognize you. Toby told me it happened to him for the first time a few weeks ago, and you just feel the energy of the show has momentum. And that is what's happened with Morning Brew Daily. And I believe it's because we found content market fit early. There were very few shows that cover business news in a fun, digestible way, similarly to how this same need existed in newsletters 8 years earlier. And so we simply started creating something that the world wanted. Finding content market fit is everything. If you only remember one thing from this episode, that is priority number one when you're trying to build audience on the internet. And finally, lesson number 10. Show your audience how much you care. The Morning Brew Daily team has demonstrated that they really give a shit about their audience. Here are 2 quick examples. Whether it's my tweet about the show that I made a few days ago or the comments section of the show's YouTube videos, Neal and Toby, the co-hosts of Morning Brew Daily, respond to as many listeners and viewers as humanly possible. And it doesn't seem like a scalable strategy, but imagine the impact that you have on someone that considers you to be like a Z-list celebrity in their life when they get to hear from you. One other example. Originally, Morning Brew Daily was being published at 10 a.m., but as of recently, everything was shifted 3 hours earlier to 7 a.m. Why? Because this new publish time better integrates with our consumers' morning commute. By 10 a.m., many East Coast viewers were already in the office and the show wasn't nearly as valuable to them. And it was a decision that made so much sense and ended up being a huge win in terms of increase of downloads that we saw once we changed the publish time. But it's important to realize the sacrifice that this team is making. Toby and Neil now wake up at 4 a.m. This means they need to go to sleep by 9 p.m. every night to not straight up be zombies. They come to the office and they start the record at 6 a.m. But it's not just them there. Emily, Sam, Uchenna, Billy, they're all at the office by 5:15 in the morning running the daily production for this show. It is a team effort. It's the best thing for our consumer, but it's a huge sacrifice. And so those are all the reasons why I believe Morning Brew Daily is on fire and why I think it has the chance to be as big as our daily newsletter a few years down the road. Now, I would love to hear from you. With Founders Journal back, I just want to keep the momentum going. So shoot me an email saying hey, and I'd love to get the conversation going. All you have to do is literally email foundersjournal@morningbrew.com. Literally just say 3 letters, H-E-Y, hey, and I will take on the responsibility of getting the convo going, learning more about you, and learning what sort of content you want to see from me. With that, thank you so much for listening, and I'll catch you next episode.