Focus, fresh eyes, and pet psychics

What's up, everyone? This is Alex, the host of Founders Journal. As you may know, I built Morning Brew from my senior year of college until we sold the business in 2020. And now I'm building a variety of businesses in different spaces and different stages. I'm basically averaging 1 to 2 new businesses per year. And because of that, I have had the opportunity to test a ton of different products and services, ultimately landing on a core software stack that serves as my business operating system whenever I start a new company. I have my go-to banking service. I have my go-to formation service. I have my go-to domain hosting service. But probably the most important of them all is my HR service, Gusto. If you're a longtime Founders Journal listener, you know how much I think about people in the context of business. A business is nothing without its people, which means a platform that helps me manage and take care of my people is invaluable. And that means I've tried every HR platform under the sun, always with the same exact goals in mind. First, I want a product that's intuitive and delightful to use. As a non-HR person, I find the intricacies of payroll, benefits, taxes, compliance, and expenses to be painful. So I just want something that makes my life easier. Second, I want it to be affordable. I'm a bootstrapper at heart. I started Morning Brew with $0 and I started StoryArc with $0 as well, which means I don't have infinite dollars to drop on SaaS products. And third, I want a platform that acts as my one-stop shop for all things people. I want it to handle payroll, benefits, hiring, onboarding, and taxes, all while integrating with all of the other tools in my business stack, whether it be QuickBooks, Slack, or Google Workspace. Well, Gusto hit the trifecta, which is why I am a customer and use it for every single one of my businesses. Yes, this is a paid sponsorship by the amazing team at Gusto, but I would sing their praises even if I wasn't being paid to do so. So if you're looking for a platform that takes the pain out of payroll, benefits, and HR, I highly recommend you check out Gusto. And if you sign up at gusto.com/alex, you will get your first 3 months free. Now on to the episode.

What's up, everyone? Welcome back to another episode of Founders Journal. This is your host, Alex Lieberman. Today we're going to do a little bit of a variety show. I'm going to be talking through a number of my favorite ideas from the previous week. I'm going to be talking about why building 4 companies at once like me is probably a bad idea. I'm going to talk about the power of channel partnerships. I'm going to share a business idea related to podcasting that you could steal if you can figure out how to build it. And then I'm going to talk about a pet psychic. And then finally, the way that the best product thinkers approach the world. Let's hop into it. Okay, so starting from the top, I saw a tweet that shouted me out earlier this week. And basically it was a screenshot of my bio on X, and it said, most founders struggle to build one startup, but @businessbarista, which is my handle on X, is building 4+ companies at the same time. He is a different beast. And I just want to provide a little bit of context on how I think about my companies and if this is something that people should do. While I'm very flattered by kind of the shout out and at least this person's perception that I'm building cool things and all of that. I would say that doing what I am doing is likely not the optimal choice for most entrepreneurs. And I'll tell you why. If you just look at history, at the greatest entrepreneurs of all time, There's kind of like one through line that has been pulled out of most of their journeys. And I think if you listen to David Senra's podcast Founders, where he breaks down, you know, the biographies of the greatest founders and entrepreneurs of all time, he hits on this through line a lot, which is focus. The greatest entrepreneurs of all time basically did one thing. They did it exceptionally well. They did it for a long period of time. They didn't get distracted, and they just kept building. And so when you look at what I'm doing right now, which is I have this personal startup studio, I have 4 companies. I have StoryYard, I have Growth Pair, I have Distro, I have 10X. They're all totally different businesses, different business models, require different forms of expertise, different co-founders for each of them. I think there is a, pretty good argument to be made that I am not being focused enough, that if I really wanted to build something great and large and impactful, that I should just focus on one company. So let me just quickly tell you why I'm doing what I'm doing, in spite of the fact that history suggests that I'm probably wrong in what my approach is and why you probably shouldn't emulate what I'm doing. So, you know, there's the obvious thing, which is when I built Morning Brew, that was the one thing that I was focused on for, let's call it, 8 years without doing anything else. And so while I am involved in many businesses now, that wasn't always the case. And, and I would actually largely attribute Morning Brew's success not only to just our focus on building a great media company, but more specifically on only creating a great newsletter and writing a great newsletter, growing a great newsletter, and selling a great newsletter for 4 or 5 years straight before doing anything else. Like, I would say that is what created the center of gravity and this incredible foundation for everything that Morning Brew is today, is the relentless focus on our core product. The real reason I'm building a personal startup studio that has many businesses is not to flex that I'm involved in multiple businesses, 'cause like I said, I actually don't think it's a flex. I think a flex is doing one thing for 20 years and building brick by brick. I have a startup studio because basically I have 2 kind of guiding lights in my career today. And a startup studio for me was the most logical way to construct or to build towards those North Stars. The first guiding light is that I want to be an A+ entrepreneur and an A+ family person. If I'm just an A+ entrepreneur and not an A+ family person, then I don't consider myself a success because family is the most important thing to me. So I knew I wanted to build my professional life moving forward in a way that I could have complete control and flexibility around my schedule and time. The second is that when I came out of the Morning Brew journey, we had sold our business. I did a lot of reflection on what I enjoyed most about building companies, and I kept coming back to You know, my favorite experiences in the entrepreneurship journey, the experiences where I felt most skillful and kind of most in flow, all happened in the first four years of the business. I would say like the negative one to one of company building, negative one being I don't have a business idea. Let me let me find a problem to solve. One being product market fit and core team with revenue coming in the door being default alive where the revenue of the business can pay for the business. I would say. Every part of the entrepreneurial journey I love sits within the negative one-to-one. And so one of the questions I posed myself was, if I just want to spend as much of my time as I can in the negative one-to-one, how can I do that if I'm just involved in one business? Because I'm just involved in one business and we get to product market fit, core team, and revenue. What am I going to do now if I'm running the thing, if I want to spend my time back in like the early days that I want to, that I enjoy most? And so the other reason for constructing the startup studio is by incubating businesses, having co-founders that are the CEOs of these companies, when I ultimately want to kind of downshift time on a business as it gets to a point of maturity where it no longer needs me, the only way to like make a graceful exit is having a co-founder that I have deep trust in, that I've partnered with, who's excited to shepherd the business and grow it for the next several years. So all this to say that I tried to build this startup studio and have multiple companies from first principles of what's most important to me. For most people, the ideal scenario is not to build multiple companies. And again, I would just reiterate that focus is kind of like the timeless strategy that has led to most entrepreneurs building great things. So that's the first part of the variety show. Second part of the variety show, channel partners. So I'll give you the quick story. I was talking to a friend. My friend owns a agency business, and the agency business helps companies with SOC 2 compliance, like cybersecurity compliance. And every business needs to do kind of— needs to be compliant with their data on their website. And SOC 2, I know very little about this, but SOC 2, in my understanding, is one of the certifications you need. This person's agency has gotten to millions in revenue in less than 2 years exclusively through a powerful channel partnership. And so I'll just, you know, many of you may know what a channel partnership is, but I'll explain it quickly and then explain why I think it's so powerful and why businesses should spend more time focusing on how to lock down a great channel partner. So in the context of this agency, basically a cybersecurity software business that provides software to companies to do compliance, cyber, whatever else goes into that. They are growing like crazy. They have tons of customers because it's such a big market, but they never want to get into the business of actually helping companies implement their cyber certifications because most software businesses want to stay software businesses. They don't want to turn into managed service or agency businesses. And so that created an amazing opportunity for my friend and their business to create a channel partnership with this software company. Where once the software company brings on a new customer and they want to help their new customers actually implement the process of getting cyber certification, they introduce their new customer to my friend's agency for implementation help. And so my friend's business has largely grown to millions in revenue over the last few years from these introductions or basically getting leads handed off to them by the software business. That is the idea of a channel partner. And what's funny is I always talk about in marketing the hub and spoke model. The hub is a channel, spoke is your ideal customers, and your goal as an entrepreneur should be constantly looking for hubs that you get access to that give you kind of leveraged access to lots of customers at once. A channel partnership is the best example of this. And so what I'm aiming to do with all of my businesses now, whether it's StoryArb, whether it's 10x, whether it's Growth Pair, is to set up channel partnerships. And I'll just take you through a few examples so you know how to think about it in the context of your business. Growth Pair, we help companies with offshore marketing hires. I'm thinking about 2 types of channel partnerships. One is, can we partner with companies that do offshore hiring but for other roles, whether it's customer support, whether it's operations, whether it's finance, and say to them, Anytime you're sent a marketing lead, just send them our way. We'll give you a percentage of revenue. And so you're at least making money from the leads you're turning down. Um, and so that's one type of conversation we can have. Another type of conversation that we can have for Growth Pair is go to a fast-growing marketing software company. So an example would be a high-growth influencer marketing software company and say to them, hey, you're getting these customers to come on your platform. The way you make your customers more valuable is by retaining them and getting them to use your platform a lot. Why don't you introduce them to us? We will pair them with an offshore influencer marketer who will help them get the most out of your, out of your software platform. And so it's a win-win. You're getting utilization from your customers, which will drive lifetime value and retention, and we're getting leads that could be perfect customers for us. So that's the idea of a channel partnership. And I think it is something that gets overlooked by a lot of companies, partially because I think they take a lot of time to forge and to find the right one. I think you have to take a lot of at-bats in order to find the right channel partner. But I think it is well worth the time if you're willing to be thoughtful and strike the right partnerships. Okay. The next idea is a business idea. So Patrick Collison, co-founder of Stripe, he had tweeted out this idea around an AI audio product. And so I'll read his idea. And then share an idea that I had off of his. He said, "I want an AI product that inhabits my AirPods and continually mutters interesting things about the world around me, like an." I literally don't know what this word is. Indefatigable. Oh my god! I can't even pronounce the word. Like an indefatigably burbling tour guide. And then he gives an example. The San Mateo Bridge was built in about a year when it opened on. March 2nd, 1929. It stretched 7.1 miles, making it longer than any other bridge on Earth at the time. And then he says, I've driven over the bridge many times but never thought to look into its origins until today. So basically saying, I'd love to have an audio tour guide that as I'm going about the world, it pops in and shares interesting facts. I thought that was a great idea. And I had a similar but different thought, which was I was listening to— and I still am— I'm listening to the audiobook of the biography of Ben Franklin by Walter Isaacson, which is amazing. It's definitely dense, but it's super interesting. Ben Franklin was a fascinating person. And so my idea is I basically retweeted Patrick Collison and I said, I would love to be listening to a pod or an audiobook and then seamlessly ask AI a question about what I just listened to and resume listening once the intellectual gap has been filled in. And the reason I had that thought is there was so much learning going on while I was listening to the audiobook on Ben Franklin, and there were so many historical facts that I wanted to dig deeper on. Even small things like they shared how Ben Franklin worked in his family print shop, then he started his own print shop. And I wanted to just learn more about what the media was like back when Ben Franklin was kind of building his print shop and kind of starting his own publishing company. Or there was a part of the book so far where they talk about the Junto, which was basically this like salon where Ben Franklin and other like interesting people in Philadelphia at the time would meet up and they would just have intellectual, like interesting debate about things in society. Like they'd debate about philosophy, you know, the meaning of life, what kind of what the future of politics should look like. And I, I was curious to learn more about the Junto specifically, like get a deep dive in the Junto in a way that the book wasn't going to go into detail because it wasn't about the Junto, it was about Ben Franklin. But I would have to stop the audiobook, I'd have to go to, uh, ChatGPT, type it in, read it, go back to the audiobook. But imagine if I could just stop it, ask a question, get the answer to the question, and then resume the audiobook. So that's the idea. I don't know if it's Technically possible because podcasting and RSS is such an old technology, but I think it would be such a cool thing to be able to do. Okay, two more for the variety show. The first one is absurd, and of course it's the thing that is the most absurd thing that I talk about on social that gets the most engagement. I'm going back to the tweet quickly. Where is it? Oh, here it is. It got almost two thousand likes. I you know it's like the joke. I'll spend 2 hours writing a post that gets 100 likes, and then I'll spend 20 seconds writing a post that gets 2,000 likes. So I'll read the post and then I'll kind of share a little color. Just spoke to a friend who sent their dog to a pet psychic. They wanted to unpack unresolved trauma from a recent dog park attack. Every single day I'm reminded that there are literally infinite ways to make money. And I will say there were very funny responses, like not only are there infinite ways to make money, there's also infinite ways to spend or lose money. It was very interesting because I think one of the things that entrepreneurship has taught me, and I've had such, you know, I have such gratitude for meeting so many different entrepreneurs, is that there truly are this long tail of the number of ways that you can build businesses, make money, drive customers, and make a living is crazy. Yeah. And so I think creativity is oftentimes a limiting factor in finding ways to create a business and make money. And I was just reminded of that when I was talking to this person on the street, because, like, would I have ever guessed that a pet psychic was a thing and that people would actually spend money to deal with trauma and talk about Kind of like a dog's psyche? No, but evidently it's a business. And to me, it was just a reminder that if you are truly committed to being your own boss, being an entrepreneur, if you work your creative muscle enough and you keep your ear to the ground of people's problems, you will be able to find something to monetize and turn into a living. Okay. The final part of the variety show. Another tweet I had that came from an experience working on Distro, so I'll read it and then I'll share the thought. The best product thinkers I know look at an experience for the 1,000th time as if it's their first. They do this sort of psychological jiu-jitsu to create, quote unquote, fresh eyes every single time they dive into a product. I haven't quite figured it out, but it allows them to see friction and allows them to see friction and user fall-off where most see nothing. And so The reason this came up is I was talking to our intern at Distro, and for context, Distro, the, the vision for Distro is to be Canva for content. It's your AI content copilot that helps you with every part of the content journey, from thinking of content ideas to creating content to editing content, scheduling and distributing content to seeing how content's performing. And we were going through the product experience and again, we're a very new business, so there's so much to be done in making the experience better. But one thing that I was saying to him as I was going through is like, I was basically saying, you know, it's so easy for us to skip over high-friction moments or not think about things that aren't clear to the user. Like, right now in Distro, after you go into a studio and you have Distro interview you about a topic you've picked, you know, the studio session is like finalized and there's a button to click on it. And we just intuitively know because we've been involved in the business the whole time that you go then to the side panel, you click editor, you can go into editor, and then you can go to like you can specifically have the editor open up the studio session you just had to create content from that session. But for someone who's going to this app for the first time ever, it is so clear that after they have a studio session, they could be very confused about whether they should, like, what to click on and how do they actually start creating content and where can they edit content. And I'm trying to figure out how to do it, but somehow you have to trick your brain into forgetting everything you've learned about your product experience before in order to start asking yourself like, okay, is it obvious what I do next? Is this a delightful experience? Where is there friction here? Because any point in the experience where there's some sort of cognitive load created, you could assume that people either get frustrated and they leave, or people spend a lot of time using the app in a way that isn't most productive for them, where you're not going to keep them long term. And so, yeah, I think getting to this psychological place where you can create fresh eyes and you can basically almost create short-term amnesia to be a first-time user again, even though you're not a first-time user, is an amazing gift that I'm trying to teach myself. And I think great product thinkers are innately very good at doing. So that is it for the Founders Journal Variety Show. We talked about why I think focusing on one startup is probably a smarter move than building multiple companies like me. Talked about the power of channel partners and how it's probably worth your time to look into them and forge at least one great one. We talked about Patrick Collison's podcast idea for an AI audio tour guide and kind of my idea off of that, which is the ability to ask questions about what you're hearing on a podcast, a YouTube video, or an audiobook. We talked about the pet psychic that my friend used and how it is just a reminder that there are so many different businesses to build if you're willing to work hard enough and keep your ear to the ground looking for ideas that the world is in need of. And then we talked about this notion that the greatest product thinkers in the world are able to look at something for the 1,000th time as if It is their first time looking at it. That is it for today's Founders Journal. As always, thank you so much for listening to the pod, and I will catch you next episode. And if you have any questions, you want to say what's up, or you want to recommend a future episode or topic I should talk about, shoot me an email to alex@storyarb.com. That is alex@storyarb.com. Thanks for listening. Catch you next time.