Introducing Storyarb, My Content Agency + A Temperature Check

What's up, everyone? Welcome back to another episode of Founders Journal. I'm Alex Lieberman, and with the return of Founders Journal, which if I haven't said it already, I'll say again, I'm incredibly excited about. There are 3 principles that I'm following with this show. Number one, create shit that helps increase the odds of entrepreneurs' success. Principle 2, connect with my audience as much as humanly possible. And principle 3, try a lot of different formats and see what resonates most with you all. So staying true to my word, I'm going to try a new format today. I call it Temperature Check, and you can basically think of Temperature Check as a true journal-style episode where I literally sat down at the end of last week and wrote a simple journal prompt at the top of my notebook. The journal prompt said, and I quote, Time for a temperature check. How did things feel this week? What went well? What didn't go well? What did you learn? And so everything I'm going to say for the rest of this episode is my answer to this prompt, exactly what I wrote, how I wrote it, in true journal style. So I hope you enjoy. What's feeling good this week? I am feeling cautiously optimistic about my ghostwriting agency. I really think this has an opportunity to be a large cash-flowing asset on its own, but I think it can also act as the nucleus of other businesses as well. I believe this agency can be a $10 million a year business. And here's the back-of-the-envelope math. We charge clients $7,000 per month. To be on pace for $10 million, we need 120 clients. I believe I can find 120 people on planet Earth that believe in the value of building an audience in 2023, but don't have the time or skill to do it. Oh, and also, I am incredibly pumped about the name of this business. I haven't told anyone yet about it. I haven't said it publicly or on social, so you're the first to know. The ghostwriting agency is called Story Arb, A-R-B, which is short for story arbitrage, because I believe there are tons of executives that have incredible stories to tell, but they have lacked the time or skill to share their stories. And so we are arbitraging people who have great stories, but they haven't yet told them to the world. We officially have our domain name. We have our trademark, emails, Slack, bank account through Mercury, a Stripe account, and an Asana account. And I'm currently testing out a CEO for this business. This candidate has built a few agencies, and they're excited by how they think this specific ghostwriting agency can scale. And so I currently have them as a consultant, basically trialing as the CEO of this business for a month so that I can make an educated decision about whether they're the right person for this role. I will say, as I shared a few episodes ago, hiring a CEO is an incredibly daunting task. It's a very high-risk, high-reward move. And so I'm spending a lot of time thinking about it. I'm thinking about all the ways that I can mitigate the risk of it. We'll include in the show notes that episode so you can understand how I'm thinking about hiring basically the most important person that I'll ever hire in this business. I'm also feeling great about some of our content at Morning Brew. Morning Brew Daily is our new daily news show. It's on fire. It continues to grow. It is a perfect complement to our newsletter, where it serves a similar need but in a different way. And if you didn't listen to my episode on the ten reasons that this new show Morning Brew Daily has gotten to two million downloads in ninety days, I'll also drop that in the show notes. But the TLDR on the show of why it's done well. Is the co-hosts have amazing chemistry. The team behind the show works tirelessly on it. The show has clear content market fit. It's solving a very clear problem and no one was solving that problem before. So it's just consistent quality content for a long time is how you win in the content game. I'm also just overall feeling good about being married to my best friend. I got married now a few weeks ago. We had an amazing wedding with people we love, had a rejuvenating mini moon, which it's kind of crazy people do mini moons this day, but honestly, Any excuse for a vacation and I'm in. We went to a boutique hotel in upstate New York, which, by the way, as we're at this hotel, it was a fascinating business lesson in itself. So quick tangent for a second. I was talking to the owner of this hotel and I learned that it was him and his wife. They're 2 former bankers. They bought this piece of land in the Hudson Valley 8 years ago. So they've been working on this business for the last 8 years. They only opened the hotel in the last year. And they opened up what's basically a boutique farm spa. There's only like 60 rooms. There's a farm at the hotel where they grow most of their food. They have pigs, they have donkeys, they have peacocks, they have Icelandic sheep or something. They have chickens. And when they built the property— so they bought the land, ultimately they built the property— they went to find a hotel partner who could operate the property for them and also provide branding and marketing to drive demand for the business. And what was fascinating to me is when I was talking to the owner, he was saying how he spoke to Ritz-Carlton, Four Seasons, Auberge, which is the company they ended up working with. And basically all of these hotel brands actually own very few of their hotels. The hotel's real estate. So whether you see Ritz-Carltons around the world, Four Seasons around the world, this property I was at, the real estate is privately owned by private owners. And then the hotel brand just operates the property and provides branding and marketing. Now, I don't know what the financial arrangement is in terms of if Ritz-Carlton or Four Seasons, if they lease the real estate from the private owner or if they do a rev share. But I just thought that was super interesting. Like, you think about a hotel business, you think about it as physical property, yet none of these brands actually own their property. So I'm interested in learning more about this business model, but I found it very interesting when I spoke with him. So that's what's going well. Now, what didn't go well, Alex? Well, I feel like a broken record saying this because it's always on my mind. It's always frustrating me, giving me anxiety. But I just feel like I'm a very distracted person. I'm distracted by social media. I'm distracted by a random thought in my mind that leads me down a deep rabbit hole to research something that has nothing to do with my most important work or tasks. And I feel like no matter how hard I try, I can't stay focused and be effective. I also feel like I unnecessarily extend my workdays because my calendar is relatively open, which is a great thing because that gives me time to think and do deep work and also do things outside of work. But I feel like I take these few priorities that should only take me 2 or 3 hours in a day, and I somehow extend it into this full-day endeavor just because I can. And so I'm kind of at a loss for what to do because I feel like I've tried every trick in the book to stay focused. But nothing has caught on. And so it leaves me feeling defeated and like I'm my own worst enemy in realizing my potential and not being able to maximize my time. So just for a second, as I talk with you all, I'm going to sit in this self-defeating mindset and now I'm going to push forward. The thoughts out of my mind now. I felt bad for myself for a second. And so what I'm going to try to do moving forward is I'm going to delete social media apps from my phone when I'm working. I'm going to enable Freedom, which is an app on your computer to block social media and any websites that distract you. There's also this company called Commit Action that I'm looking into. It's like a really interesting business on its own. I think it's doing really well. I was talking to the founder the other day, but basically what the business does is it pairs you with a productivity coach that holds you accountable to the things you say you want to do and work. So I'm going to look into that business and maybe sign up for it. I think it's a couple hundred dollars a month. Outside of the distraction and feeling bad for myself thing as relates to my work style, the only other thing that feels like it's not going well right now is my backyard game, The Plunge. As many of you know, if you've listened to this podcast, if you follow me on social, I was super excited about this backyard game. I was really energized about it. I loved making something physical, learning about the supply chain, testing out the game with people in New York, Austin, all different places. But my partner and I ended up getting a lot of feedback after playing That the game was too difficult for them, and it was too difficult to the point where they weren't able to land a plunger for 30 minutes and the game was no longer fun. And I've already spent $37,000 developing this game, and I've really loved it. I love the game, but I worry that if I take this game to market and then I sell it, customers will end up finding it too hard based on the feedback we've gotten. They'll find it unenjoyable, and then we'll have to deal with the logistical and financial headache of a bunch of customers being unhappy. Them returning the product. And so we have to handle the cost of the shipping for that. And then we have no place to store the inventory and we have to either deal with the cost of destroying the product or warehousing the product. So I'm considering 3 paths with my partner. The first is to market the game as a challenging outdoor game where winning in the game is about getting the plunger to stick versus being the first to 15 points. And for people who don't understand the context here and they hear me talking about a plunger. Basically, this game called The Plunge is backyard ax throwing. You throw a plunger like an ax at basically a plexiglass-looking board, and it sticks if you get it to do one full rotation the right way. And so the idea is if we change the marketing to market it as a challenging game, this solves my concern about returns because we've set the right expectation. But then I wonder how big the market is for people who are fans of difficult backyard games. That feels very niche to me. The second option is to evolve the game into something easier, which probably means ditching the plunger and either using suction balls or suction spinners that have 4 sides to them and basically making this game a suction-based version of bocce or cornhole. Now, I think this could be really interesting, especially because if you're not throwing a heavy plunger 35 miles an hour, You don't have to worry about the board being knocked over, so you can decrease the board size and weight, which will improve the economics of the game. But this also means evolving the game will take dumping more money into the game, and I don't know if I want to spend more than $37,000 looking into potentially taking this product to market. And that leads to the third option with the plunge, which is scrap the game, take the loss, and reflect on all the fun learnings and experiences I had building this game with a new person, a new partner. And getting to meet new people while playing it. And so I don't know the answer to what I'm going to do yet. I'm thinking about it. I'm talking to my partner on the game about it. But this decision is definitely weighing on me. And so that leads me to the last part of the temperature check. What did I learn this week? I learned a bunch of random shit this week. I learned that Michelin stars and the Michelin Guide was created by Michelin, the tire company, as a marketing tactic. So every time you go to a 3 Michelin star restaurant now, you can think about tires. Basically what happened was at the time in the early 1900s, there were only 3,000 cars on the road, and Michelin was trying to figure out a way that it could sell more tires. And it didn't want to have to depend on just the automobile market growing. And so their idea was, let's get people to drive more so their tires get more worn out so that they then have to buy more tires. And that's how the idea of the Michelin Guide came about, where pre-Google, if people wanted to look up a place to go, they would go to the Michelin Guide. It would have destinations. And this served as a tool to give people reasons to drive their car more. I also learned that I need typhoid, yellow fever, and hepatitis A shots for when I go to Africa in a few months. And getting 3 jabs in 1 day was not the most fun. From talking to executives in the media world, I learned that the advertising market is really precarious right now, and Q3 is a grind for media companies trying to source marketing dollars. I learned that my biggest fear with my ghostwriting agency is client churn, which I think is a good fear to have because it's going to keep me paranoid to make sure the product that we offer our clients is multiples of the value that we charge them. So I actually think this fear about clients not being happy with the product and no longer wanting to be our customer. It's a good fear to have because to me it's going to make us really product and customer-centric. I learned from Steph Smith, who used to work at The Hustle, now she works at a16z, that there is a company in San Francisco called Temple Immersive that turns nightclubs into yoga studios because nightclubs are only used on, let's say, Thursday nights, Friday nights, and Saturday nights. So all of the other days of the week. Temple Immersive takes the space from the nightclub, turns it into an immersive yoga studio, and it just plays into this broader trend of how there's this continued structural decline of commercial real estate as less people are going back to work in a post-pandemic age. And so I think there's just going to be more of a push for businesses to exist, to turn vacant commercial space into something actually usable. Which I think is super interesting. And finally, I learned that adult coloring books are incredibly meditative. I'm thinking about becoming an adult coloring book influencer, and I'm addicted to coloring after a long day of work on my couch, which has been awesome. And that's all for today's temperature check, everyone. A little bit of work stuff, a little bit of personal life stuff, some lessons, things going well, things not going well. But my hope with this really was This would be the most authentic version of you feeling like you were sitting reading Alex's diary while he was writing in it. I'm not sure why I'm referring to myself in third person now, but you get the gist. Now, I would love to hear from you. Here is the one thing you have to do. It's literally the only thing you have to do. Go to your Gmail or Yahoo or Outlook account. Type in the email address Founders Journal. It's the name of the show, foundersjournal@morningbrew.com, and type 3 letters in. H-E-Y. Hey, you're saying hi to me. Hit send on the email. I will read your email. I promise I will read all of your emails. It actually would be the greatest gift for me if I had to spend a full day of work reading everyone's emails because there were so many emails and I will respond. I may ask you about yourself. I may ask you about topics you want me to cover on the show. I may ask you what you think about this temperature check format and if I should do more of it. Whatever the case may be, this will 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. Thank you.