Do Bugs Get The Credit For Pokémon?

What's up, everyone? Welcome back to another episode of Founders Journal. I'm Alex Lieberman, co-founder and executive chairman of Morning Brew. With the return of Founders Journal, I have a few principles I want to lay out up front. First principle: create shit that helps increase the odds of entrepreneur success. Second principle: connect with my audience as much as possible. So shoot me an email at alex@morningbrew.com. Say what up, introduce yourself, and let's have a conversation. Third principle: I'm going to be trying a lot of different formats. I'm going to see what resonates most with you. I will do more of what you like and less of what you don't like. And with that, I am bringing back a format that everyone loved the first 2 times around. It is called Temperature Check. And basically you can think of Temperature Check as a true journal-style episode where I sat down at the end of last week and I wrote a simple journal prompt at the top of my notebook. And that prompt said, Alex, time for a temperature check. What went well this week? What didn't go well? And what did you learn? And everything I am going to say for the rest of this episode is my answer to this prompt exactly as I wrote it. I hope you enjoy. Let's do this thing. Time for a temperature check. What went well? For the longest time, we couldn't get multimedia right at Morning Brew. Multimedia meaning video, audio, social. We knew that finding success with something beyond our original product, the newsletter, would be a challenge. But after 2 years of spinning our wheels, Austin and I started feeling discouraged that maybe we just weren't the company to figure it out. But in the last 3 months, there's been a massive amount of momentum created with Morning Brew's newest line of business. We launched Morning Brew's daily news show, which is on fire. It's literally at the top of the charts in business every day. Morning Brew's Instagram had its fastest month of growth ever. Morning Brew's YouTube had its first viral video ever with 435,000 views. And Dan Toomey is now the face of a second Morning Brew YouTube channel called called Good Work that has 430,000 subscribers and a video that recently hit 1 million views. I'll probably do a full breakdown of multimedia success at the Brew and the lessons behind it, but a few key takeaways. First, it is vital to take in moments like this. It is so easy to exclusively focus on problems as an entrepreneur because you get paid for solving problems versus basking in their success. But moments like these remind you what you are working so hard for. Second, it is impossible to overstate the value of a good leader. We are on our 3rd chief content officer at Morning Brew. The previous 2 people, the previous 2 chief content officers were amazing people and very talented. We just weren't the right fit for each other. Our new chief content officer has this perfect mix of in-the-weeds production experience, high-level strategy, sophistication in organizational design, and a marriage between creative storytelling and data-driven decision-making that has allowed us to be in a place with this part of the business that we were convinced was not possible. And third, there is nothing more satisfying as a leader than betting on talent and seeing talent exceed even your high expectations. We hired Dan Toomey in September of 2020. He had just graduated from USC Journalism School, and he sent us a John Oliver-style business news audition tape. I watched his audition tape right before I started writing this journal entry. And what I remember about it is that it was for an investing show at Morning Brew that he was 100% not a fit for. But when we watched his tape at the time, we were like, this guy is wildly talented. We need to hire him and park him somewhere in the business. All we did as founders or as, you know, content minds was recognize his talent and give him a platform at Morning Brew. Everything else that has come after that has been a result of Dan's hard work, his amazing talent, and the team that supports him. The satisfaction of betting on talent and seeing talent run with it and grow beyond your imagination can be applied to the concept of talent in any business, not just a media business. And it is still the most gratifying part of the work that I do. So that's Morning Brew. In my other business, it's an exciting time as well. My other business is Storyarb. It's an executive ghostwriting agency where our story is telling the stories of B2B executives. And we just hit a million dollars in annualized revenue. That is twelve clients paying seven thousand dollars per month for us to help them own a niche of the internet on Twitter and LinkedIn. In addition to hitting the revenue target, employee number one Magda started this week, and I'm excited about Magda joining for a few reasons. I think she's going to be exceptional, and I couldn't be more excited to fire myself from serving as a content strategist and hand it off to someone I genuinely believe will be better than me. Also, it's way too early to call this business a success, but it's really cool to see this vision start to materialize. I've talked about how my goal is not to run the day-to-day of businesses moving forward, but instead to spin up many businesses that I have a unique advantage in with a CEO and co-founder that is brought on from day one so that I can focus my time on 3 things that I love doing. The first is driving demand and opportunities for the businesses that I help start by creating great content and building a qualified audience. The second is supporting the creative vision for the future of this business and any business I launch in the future. And the third is helping to support and coach our CEO to make sure that they are set up for success to scale with the business. On top of that, we are also seeing clients have huge outcomes way sooner than I was anticipating. Only 3 months in, clients are seeing strong growth in, in niche followers, which is the follower metric I care most about. We're seeing clients get investment and acquisition opportunities and receive recognition from media, both on social and traditional publications like the Wall Street Journal. And so as I reflect on what's happened in the last 2 and a half months with StoryYard, I'm kind of left with a few thoughts. One is I feel just a deep appreciation for what's happened, but I also have the thought that we just have to stay laser focused on crushing it for clients. That is all that matters. And if we do that, I think that will give us the permission over the long term to build towards a far bigger vision, much like how we focused on a single newsletter at Morning Brew for 4 years before doing anything else. So that's what went well. What didn't go well? I feel like I'm at my best when I'm at my most creative, and I'm at my most creative when my brain is spinning with ideas, business ideas, content ideas, ideas for solving key challenges. And I've spent time over the last few years trying to reverse engineer what my environment needs to be and how I need to spend my time to get to my most creative state. One of the things that is essential to get there is time spent off devices, off social, off team communication tools for me to just read and think. When I have at least 2 hours in a day to feed my brain with content, mostly driven by my favorite curated sources that I talk about in a recent episode, which I'll link to in the show notes, that is when I reach my creative max. And for the last few weeks, as a function of Morning Brew work, StoryArc work, phone addiction, and other things taking my time, I haven't been able to spend my time in the way I want to, to be my most creative. Additionally, I have realized that I like the idea of systems and processes more than I like or am able to commit to them myself. Here's an example. At StoryArc, we are using Asana as our project management tool. We use it to keep the train on the tracks for collecting, drafting, reviewing, revising, and posting content for our clients. It's simple, it works, and it's essential for keeping things organized as we scale our customer base to make sure quality scales as well. I rationally understand all of this, but I find it excruciating every time I have to go into Asana to mark tasks done and work with this tool. So what ends up happening is tasks build up for 3 to 4 days. I finally feel bad that I haven't looked at Asana as much as I should, and I go through a bulk cleansing of 50 to 60 outstanding tasks, which ends up making the tool way less useful than it should be, and it makes it way harder for my CEO at StoryYard to build processes. And this is one of the reasons that I am very excited to fire myself from the weeds of the business, because there are people who genuinely love process, order, working with these tools, and I have realized I'm not one of those people. And the final thing that isn't going well is the perpetual thorn in my side in life. You're going to hear me talk about it ad nauseam, and that is because I think about it ad nauseam. I am wildly distracted. I am addicted to social media. Anytime I am dealing with a mentally rigorous task, the temptation to stop it and do anything less productive or anything easier is painfully strong. And so I am committing myself to hiring a productivity or accountability coach the second I get back from my honeymoon. Seriously, I really want my audience to hold me accountable to this commitment because by holding me accountable to it, I will spend more time consuming content, thinking of content ideas, so I'll end up creating better content for you, the listener. Shoot me an email at alex@morningbrew.com. Ask me if I have hired this coach. I will respond honestly, and I really hope my answer is yes because it will be embarrassing If I say no after I make this commitment, and the final part of the temperature check is what did I learn? I learned a bunch of things. I learned that not only is Pokémon the largest media franchise in the world, grossing $100 billion in revenue, the next closest is Hello Kitty at $80 billion. But I also learned that the creator of the game was inspired by his childhood love for bug collecting, which evolved into a vision for Pokémon where trainers could collect and trade the Pokémon that they catch. I also learned or was re-reminded of the fact that I am very skilled at sales. And I don't say that to brag. I say it because one of the most important things you can do as an entrepreneur is constantly assess and reassess where your greatest value is for your business. And I have had enough experiences between my businesses now that I know one of the very few areas that I'm uniquely qualified is sales. Beyond sales and probably creating content, I think there are people I can find that are way better than me, and I should try as hard as possible to hire for or delegate those skills or responsibilities. I also learned that it's a misconception that people have, and frankly that I have, that Facebook copies the work of every other social media platform. A friend of mine and a great Twitter follow, Saar, and I'll link to his tweet in the show notes. Basically posted this picture that shows all of the major features of social media platforms, of Snap, of Instagram, of Twitter, of Threads, of TikTok. And my assumption over time, because this is kind of like the narrative that has been reiterated, is that everyone talks about how a new feature comes out and then Facebook copies it. And Facebook has gotten incredible at duplicating. Part of that is true. Facebook is incredible at duplicating features. But if you look at this chart that Saar posted, Facebook is actually oftentimes not the first social platform to copy a feature that another platform came out with first, which I thought was really interesting. And I learned about a number of different cognitive biases that people have in decision-making in life and business. It was a thread by this guy Daniel Minky on Twitter, but the one that stood out to me most was this idea of the halo effect. And the halo effect says that You either like or dislike everything about someone or something, nothing in between. And I have seen the halo effect in action so many times in business where once someone has a certain point of view of a coworker or a manager or an employee, it is nearly impossible for them to bring nuance to that point of view. And I think it's a protective mechanism because when we don't like something about someone, that equates to danger. And it is hard for us to hold thoughts that both feel dangerous and safe at the same time. But the key issue with the halo effect in work is that it limits our ability to take ownership and accountability for someone's growth by celebrating the things that make them great, but also taking ownership over this idea that we should be doing everything we can to support them in the things that hold them back. And for people who really suffer from the halo effect, They will default to promoting or firing over anything else that sits in the business, like developing talent over a longer period of time. And with that, that is all for today's temperature check. Now, I would love to hear from you. Here's the only thing that you have to do. Go to your Gmail or your Yahoo or your Outlook or whatever email client you use and type in the email address alex@morningbrew.com. That is my personal email. And shoot me an email. Could say, hey, H-E-Y, if you want to keep it brief. Or you could introduce yourself and tell me how you found out about the show or what value you get from it. Hit send. I will read your email and I will respond. I may ask you about yourself. I may ask you about topics you want to cover. I may ask you to share this temperature check episode with a friend if you really enjoyed it. It'll be a little surprise that you'll only get by emailing me. Until next time, I love you all and I'll catch you next episode.