Hire wrecking balls

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 Now onto the episode.

What's up everyone? This is Alex Lieberman and this is Founders Journal. For those who are longtime Founders Journal listeners, welcome back. For those who are new to the show, here's the deal. Founders Journal is my audio diary made public for the world. My goal is to increase your odds of success as an entrepreneur by sharing the stories, lessons, and tactics that I experience as I build my businesses. You can expect the podcast Monday and Wednesday with episodes that are under 20 minutes in length.

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Today on the podcast, I am talking about what are wrecking balls and how to get more wrecking balls into your business. Before hopping into it, make sure to shoot me an email at alex@storyarb.com to say what up, introduce yourself, let me know anything you want to hear from me on the show moving forward. But until then, let's hop into the show. So there is this guy. His name is Justin. And Justin is the definition of a wrecking ball. How do I define a wrecking ball? A wrecking ball is a force of nature. A wrecking ball is, I guess, as some people would say, a high-agency doer, someone who pulls an entire company forward. For me, a wrecking ball is someone who's proactive, Someone who makes things happen versus waits to be asked to make things happen. Someone who does not blink an eye in the face of adversity or being told no. And Justin is exactly that. So I want to just walk you through the story of Justin and kind of what he's done to prove himself to be a wrecking ball to me. And the reason for this episode is because I think wrecking balls are 10x employees in a business. They are incredibly hard to find, but I think it is worth being patient to find them. And once you find them, you fight like hell to keep them working with you. Justin is a 19-year-old sophomore at UCLA. He's currently studying abroad in China. He wanted to work with me, so he posted a thread pitching ideas that he had for my company, StoryArc. Let me just share the thread with you. This is something that Justin wrote on April 8th. It ended up getting 46,000 views, 132 likes, And he said, I'm feeling ambitious, so I'm going to shoot my shot. Hey, Business Barista, I'd love to work for you and your company StoryArb. Here's my pitch to help you with content strategy. First, a bit about me. I'm a 19-year-old sophomore at UCLA, a former international concert pianist, and recently I did operations with Peter Yang, managing his 100,000-person newsletter for PMs and creators. I cold DM'd my way into helping out at Andrew Young's Loomis House tech event in LA. Now on to why I'm the right fit. And then basically what he did is he would take quotes of things that we had in job descriptions from StoryArc and then share evidence of how he did those things. So he shared, quote, proficient in content management systems, project management tools, and process optimization. And then he would share evidence. I built Peter an AI course in Notion. 4 to 5 years of proficiency. Cut newsletter prep time with AI prompts. Creating well-oiled systems is my jam. Number 2, quote, leverage their expertise across multiple content domains to ensure that each client strategy is tailored to their unique needs, end quote. And then he shares the evidence. I optimized Peter's podcast with AI into newsletter posts, summarized, formatted, and ready to ship fast. And he goes on to basically share all this evidence for how he has what it takes to work for StoryArc. Not only was he a wrecking ball in basically letting it fly on social, clearly doing his homework into StoryArc and matching his exact experiences to what StoryArc needs and why he's right for that. He also clearly had his friends engage with the post to get the algorithm spinning on Twitter. So he ended up getting 46,000 views. Tons of people tagged me to make sure I saw the post. But also keep in mind, the job that he was pitching himself for at StoryArc was a full-time content strategist role. And for many people who are looking to like be an intern or they're still in college, they'd be like, oh, this is a full-time role. Obviously I'm not going to apply for this. And he was like, no, screw that. Like, I want to work for StoryHub. I want to work with Alex. It says full-time. I will find enough time in my day to do the job well. And so he applied for a full-time role even though he's a sophomore at college studying abroad right now. So that's how he pitched himself to StoryHub. Let me keep the story going. This thread, as I said, ended up getting 50,000 views. We didn't end up having a need at StoryArc because basically we're resource constrained right now. We didn't know if we would have enough managerial oversight to properly manage interns. So we let Justin know that most people would kind of quit the search or quit kind of like trying to work with me or work with my businesses when they get to know about the internship. But he just kept pushing. Next, he tried helping me with my podcast. He wrote up an entire strategy with specific episodes and guests. And so, like, you know, for context there, I basically said to Justin, you know, I'm thinking about what would it look like to evolve Founders Journal into a rebooted version of Sam Altman's Startup School. And, you know, just for context, Sam Altman met— I want to say 10 years ago now. He basically did this lecture series at Stanford where every single lecture he had a different unicorn founder give a, a talk on kind of their zone of genius. So we had someone give a talk on culture, someone give a talk on growth, someone give a talk on product. And the entire lecture series was, let's call it, 12 episodes. And it really took you through the journey of how to build a successful startup. My thought was like, what if we brought that back in a podcast format? Without kind of, again, batting an eye, Justin went to work. He built out a full syllabus for what this podcast would look like. He asked any friends he had in the startup world, What classes or teachers would they want in these episodes? And he prepared a full Google Doc with me of what the podcast could look like moving forward. I felt really bad doing this, but I ended up deciding that for now, for a variety of reasons, I wanted to keep the pod as is. It just didn't feel like the right time to make a wholesale change to the podcast. And so again, this is now the second time Justin is getting rejected, putting a lot of upfront work into something he's really excited about. But he didn't give up, and so then he said he'd love to help with go-to-market for Distro, which is my AI content business. Distro is basically an AI podcast host that turns conversation with you into content that you can post on social or anywhere on the internet. And he was like, "I'm super excited about this," and I was like, "Okay, honestly, you're persistent as hell. We're going to find a way to get you involved in this." So I said to Justin, "You know, we have a product hunt launch that's coming up in." a week for Distro, you can own the entire thing. And I was just curious what he would do with that. He basically said, say no more, and he got to work. He did a ton of research on what it takes to do a successful Product Hunt launch. He had to fill out this whole form that we gave to the person who hunted our launch so that they could create our Product Hunt page. He did that whole thing. And not only did he run our entire launch and Literally, you know, he was up at 1 a.m. last night, you know, his time in China, making sure that we were doing well on the leaderboard. But for a Product Hunt launch, you also have to do a launch video. And he owned creating a badass launch video. And there's 2 crazy things about this whole thing. One, he has never created an edited launch video in his life. He taught himself how to do it over the weekend. The second thing, probably the most badass part about Justin, is, as I mentioned earlier in the episode, he is a concert-trained pianist. So he created a custom score of him playing the piano and editing it for the music of the video. So all this to say, not only, you know, is this kind of this episode an ode to Justin and just like a huge thank you for the work he's done and how inspiring he's been, but he is the definition of a wrecking ball. And if there's one thing you take from this episode, You need to find yourself a wrecking ball in your business, ideally multiple wrecking balls, and never let them go. And to me, if you find a wrecking ball, it doesn't matter kind of what their expertise is, how long they've been working for, what their background is. You bring these people in and you never let them go because they are someone who will pull your entire company forward. They are high agency. They're ambitious. They fight for everything they do. They want— they expect perfection of themselves, and they stop at nothing to ensure things are perfect in their eyes. And so obviously, Justin, I'm going to do everything in my power to keep him involved in Distro. And my goal is to find other wrecking balls like Justin in all of my businesses. So that's it for today's Founder's Journal. Make sure you find wrecking balls in your companies. And if you have any feedback for the pod, want to say what's up, or have questions about kind of the traits to look for in wrecking balls, shoot me an email to alex@storyarb.com. As always, thank you so much for listening to Founders Journal, and I'll catch you next episode.