4 Reflections Bringing Me Closer to My North Star

What's up, everyone? Welcome back to another episode of Founders Journal. I'm your host, Alex Lieberman, co-founder and executive chairman of Morning Brew. Before we hop into the show, I have a 10-second favor to ask of you. We have tons of new listeners to the podcast, and my goal is to get to know as many of you as humanly possible. Either before you start the episode or right after you finish, shoot me an email to alex@morningbrew.com. If you want the easiest option, just say hi, H-I, in the subject line, and I will respond. Getting the conversation going. And if you're trying to be a little bit more ambitious, maybe the 30-second option, shoot me an email to alex@morningbrew.com and tell me a little bit about yourself and why it is that you listen to Founders Journal. I'm specifically giving this request to all of you people that have thought about writing to me in the past, but you felt like you were a little bit too busy or you told yourself you were gonna do it later but never did it. Please send me an email. I would love to chat with you. Now, I can't wait to get to know many of you over the coming days, but for today's episode, it is time for a true founder's journal. So in the spirit of a true founder's journal, I gave myself a prompt. I asked myself one very simple question and then let my mind and my pen do the rest. My journal prompt was, Alex, what's top of mind as you reflect on your week? Let's hop into it. Dear Diary, there are 4 things that are top of mind as I sit down and reflect on my week. The first is content. The second is myself. The third is my businesses. And the fourth is my mind. Let's dive into each. Number one, I feel like I am having a breakthrough in how I think about my content. Most importantly, I'm becoming very clear on who my audience is, and what problem I am solving for them. My goal with my content is simple. I want to increase an early-stage founder's odds of success. By the way, if you're not in that audience, that doesn't mean you can't consume my content or get value from it. But this mission acts as the focusing mechanism for most of what I put onto the internet. So let's go down the list. I think my social media content is headed in the right direction. There are two core formats that have proven to perform well on social. The first is 60 Second Startup, which is my rapid-fire interview format with early-stage founders, and it's doing well. But we see opportunity to increase retention and get people to watch till the end. The current format we're working on is gamifying the show. So any founder I talk to basically gets a dollar value assigned to their pitch, and that represents how much I would hypothetically invest in their company. So you'll see that coming out soon. The Second is Half Baked Business Idea, where I just give away my business ideas for free. I'm trying to figure out what the third slot can be, kind of like that third core format for my social content. And so if you have any ideas, let me know. Next up is Founders Journal, a.k.a. this podcast. The recent thought I've had around the show is I think it can be more structured so that listeners, a.k.a. you, know exactly what to expect, and then we can have a more proactive marketing and distribution plan around the show. So here's what I'm thinking moving forward, and I would love your thoughts. Right now, the show is three days a week. It's Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. And as it currently stands, it's kind of just like me deciding what to talk about the day before. But what I'm thinking is Mondays moving forward will be tactics, and this will be a solo episode by myself or an expert in a specific topic. And tactics will be all around specific problems or priorities that early stage founders are facing. That basically this episode can act as almost think of it as like. a short lecture. Like if you were in startup school, this would be a lecture on that problem or priority. And so this could go anywhere from how to run one-on-ones to how to hire A+ employees to how to approach fundraising to how do I find and pick a great co-founder or run a great offsite. So that's Mondays. Wednesday is a founder interview where I could do— I'm trying to decide between 25 to 30 minute or longer form interviews with founders who are either in the early stages or they're past the early stage, but they can impart a lot of wisdom that helps early-stage founders. And then Friday, I'm thinking, will be just like this. It'll be my Dear Diary segment where I do a true journal-style entry from myself. And so let me know what you think of that format. Number 2, I am taking the right steps to better understand myself. Something that I shared with my new executive coach, Dave, is that I don't feel like I have a North Star right now. For eight years, Morning Brew was my North Star. But since stepping down as CEO, I've felt absent of that guiding light that acts as a litmus test to evaluate how I'm spending my time, and also for me to have a stable sense of purpose. Without this feeling of a future destination, goal, or endpoint, I felt lost as I've spoken about. But more importantly, I have found that my mind races and ruminates. about if I'm spending my time well. Said differently, anytime I have a meeting or I'm doing something with my time, I find myself constantly checking to say to myself, am I getting energy from this? How is this a good use of my time? How do I know I'm not wasting my time, et cetera? And what I've appreciated about my work with Dave is that he's helping me work towards understanding my greater purpose or my north star or my mission, while also getting comfortable sitting in discomfort and feeling the range of emotions that come with this journey. So on one hand, He has had me answer the question of what does winning look like for me by the end of 2023, or what's the most beautiful, exquisite vision I can imagine for myself and my life 3 months from now? But on the other hand, he has helped me understand that part of being human is the ability to sit with uncertainty, and that me asking the question why or how about how I spend my time can be a very easy trap for trying to create certainty out of a completely uncertain situation. And just to give you a sense, Here's a classic question I'm constantly asking myself. How do I know that I truly enjoy building businesses versus that I'm building them because they are a vehicle for success, which allows me to feel important, valued, and enough? By the way, the short answer to that question is that I will never know exactly the answer, and sitting in the uncertainty of not having the answer is very healthy. One last thing I'll mention is that I'm working hard with Dave to feel my feelings versus to intellectualize my feelings. Knowledge workers and especially entrepreneurs are paid to think. We are good at thinking and it serves us professionally. But when it comes to leading with intuition and actually feeling and locating your emotions like in your body, it can be difficult. And I am excited to progress here because being tapped into our body and our emotions not only acts as great information and data to know what energizes us versus what weighs on us in life, but it also allows us to experience life more fully in all facets. Number 3, I am really enjoying the journey with the businesses that I am involved in right now. Morning Brew is in a really exciting place. Our content slate has never felt stronger. YouTube, podcasts, and social are becoming as well-known by consumers as our newsletters are. And now so much focus is around our leadership team and especially the revenue org setting the foundation for a successful 2024. StoryArm, obviously way earlier in the journey, is evolving so quickly. Our number one priority is getting our product to V2, where very simply what we offer will be the best personal brand platform for executives on the market. We're getting to a place where we'll handle everything from content strategy and landing page design to content interviews, content execution, and targeted connecting and DMs for a client on their social platforms. We believe this will not only separate our product from other offerings in the market, but it will also increase the probability of us retaining clients for a long time and ultimately upselling them into things beyond social content. On the people side, we brought on a part-time operations wizard who is streamlining everything from customized RSS feeds for our clients to task management for CS people. And we are in the process of hiring a second full-time content strategist. Hit me up if you know anyone. In addition to more freelance ghostwriters. Outside of that, I'm in the ideation and testing stage for a few ideas, and I'll share, uh, 2 of them. Most notably, I'm working with someone on testing the appetite for a supercharged COO service where we help companies get more done with less effort through automation, AI, and offshoring. We're testing the idea by leveraging my audience on Twitter and LinkedIn to see who is experiencing the specific pain we're solving for, and then interviewing these folks to understand their needs more deeply. And then even earlier stage is an idea that I'm concepting, which would basically offer AA for technology addiction. The person I'm working on this with went through AA, and so they're very familiar with how AA works. And what we're thinking about is how we can apply the principles of AA in a different context to a different audience. And number 4, I have been learning a lot the last few weeks, mostly from podcasts or conversations with really smart entrepreneurs and executives. And a few learnings immediately come to mind. I was listening to a conversation between Turner Novak and Keith Rabois about OpenStore, which Keith is the co-founder and CEO of. And on the surface, people might be skeptical of OpenStore because it buys profitable bootstrapped Shopify stores, which many companies have tried to do in the past and failed miserably. But what's awesome is OpenStore's ultimate play. Keith shared the stat that only 30% of all retail sales in the world are via e-commerce. And he believes a major reason is that most purchases that you make on the internet are intent-based, meaning you're looking for a specific thing to buy when you go to, say, Amazon versus serendipitous or impulse-driven. And his vision for Open Store is to create almost like the, the internet mall or the internet destination where people buy out of serendipity, which is a behavior that is responsible for almost 50% of all physical purchases. Meaning when people go into stores in real life, 50% of those purchases are not intent-driven. They are impulse or serendipitous. But that is not the case at all for online purchases. Aside from Open Store, Keith is just a super smart guy. Obviously, he was super senior at PayPal and he is a general partner at Founders Fund and he has super interesting and just different views of the world. So, for example, one view that he has is that Founders Fund will not invest in any businesses that are not 100% in-person, which obviously is a pretty contrarian and pretty sharp point of view in a world where most companies today are fully remote or hybrid. I also listened to a podcast episode where Steph Smith, who is the former Hustle employee and she is currently the podcast host for Andreessen Horowitz, she talked about interesting ways to find business ideas. And there were 2 ways that specifically fascinated me that I want to share with you. The first was doing an advanced search on Twitter where basically you go to Twitter's or X's advanced search function and you filter by tweets that received at least 100 or 1,000 likes. And I can put in the show notes kind of what is the syntax for that. And then you basically add another filter for specific keywords. And the keywords you can try out are things like request for product, business idea, or product sucks. And basically when you hit enter, You get a ton of search results that show any tweets that had some level of traction, say at least 100 likes, that also in the tweet have something like request for product or product sucks. And at bare minimum, it gives you the ability to see business ideas and try to evaluate them for yourself. But best case scenario, you find an idea that you're really excited about and you start going down the rabbit hole of researching it and talking to users or customers. The second technique or idea that Steph shared was actually a newsletter. And I feel like being in the newsletter space, I've heard of every newsletter, but every day I hear about a new one that I've never heard of. This newsletter is called Patent Drop, where each issue you are informed of new patents that have been filed by major tech companies. And the idea here is that by knowing what the smartest, well-funded builders are investing in, you can get a better sense of where the puck is going and a trend that will be big. And it's funny, as I think about this, I think equally as valuable newsletter would be— you could call Patent Drop also, where basically the newsletter shows any patents that have fallen off, like companies that had a patent and the patent expired. Because I know companies like Hims& Hers or Ro, like the reason they became big is because a patent that Viagra had lapsed and then they basically built around now what was open IP. So I think lapsed patents or lapsed trademarks could be a really interesting way to find business ideas as well. And so that was my week. I hope you found this journal entry helpful. I hope you found it comforting, or at the very least, I hope you found it interesting. And so this is Alex signing off until next week. I love you all.