My biz's 6 defining moments

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 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. And if you want to get notified when a new episode comes out, make sure to subscribe wherever you listen. Today on the podcast, I'm doing a 2-year review of StoryArb, the B2B content marketing agency that I co-founded after Morning Brew. I'll take you through the 6 most impactful moments in starting the business and what you can learn from them. Lastly, if you haven't yet introduced yourself, please do so. I love getting to know the community, so shoot me an email at alex@storyarb.com. That's alex@storyarb.com. Say hi and I'll get the conversation going. Now let's get into it. Moment one is StoryArb's founding story. It was 2023 and I was looking to get my mojo back post-Morning Brew. I felt lost, directionless, and I wanted to know whether I was lucky building the Brew or actually good at building businesses. On top of that, I was trying to replace my salary that I knew I was going to lose when I stepped out of the chairman role at some point in the future, which ended up being a year later at the end of 2024. After months of trying to figure out what I wanted to do next, I came to the realization that I wanted to spend most of my time on -1 to 1, which is the stage of business that I loved most, and I wanted to fire myself before it was no longer fun for me. As things started to click, a few ideas converged at once. One, I saw that short-form video agencies were all the rage, no one was focused on text content. 2, I noticed that a lot of my founder friends who posted on Twitter and LinkedIn were seeing a ton of business opportunity come out of it. And 3, I saw a problem, which is that most founders don't have the time or the skillset to create content and build an audience, but I think they wanted to. So then I went through my typical process for launching any business. First, I tested demand with a tweet. So back in March of 2023, I fired off a tweet that said, if the following apply to you, DM me. First, you're a founder or executive. Second, you believe deeply in building personal brand. Third, you don't have the time or skillset to create content and grow your brand. And fourth, you'd pay $5,000 to $10,000 per month to have a skilled content creator build your personal brand. After doing that, the second thing I did was find supply, in this case, high-quality writers to pair with the founders who said they were interested. And then the third step in the process was to actually secure paying customers before doing anything else. No website, no customer pitch deck. At the time, I hadn't even incorporated the business. All I care about is proving that people are willing to pay for this. And then the other less important stuff comes later. During this phase in the process, I also optimized for learning over profit, which is why for the first 5 StoryArb customers, I was making $0 and I was just passing through all payments from customers to ghostwriters as I tried to learn as much as I could to improve the offering. Moment 2 was finding my co-founder. My goal from day 1 of StoryYard was bringing on a co-founder and CEO for the business as soon as I could afford one. The benefit of bringing them on super early is that they would be a true co-founder and shape the vision and strategy of the business alongside me. The risk of this timing was if the business evolved or we had to pivot, there was a chance that the person I bring on wouldn't be the right person for whatever the business would be post-pivot. Once I got to that point where I probably had 10 clients, I went back to my audience and I started looking for a co-founder. I posted on LinkedIn. I got 75 applications for the co-founder and CEO role, and 7 of those actually turned into interviews. One person, Abby Murray, I thought could be the perfect fit. Now, given this was the first business that I was trying to replace myself as CEO so quickly, I wasn't entirely sure what the perfect CEO and co-founder looked like. But I had 3 criteria in mind. First, I was looking for a second-time founder who had first-time founder motivation. Second, I was looking for someone who had run an agency business before because I hadn't, and so I knew I had blind spots. And third, I was looking for someone whose values aligned with me, which meant being high integrity, speaking directly but with love, and attacking a vision intensely. My thought was if I could find the right person, I could help with content knowledge and accelerate the business with my distribution and network, and they could build the business. So my current co-founder and CEO, Abby, was the final candidate at the end of the hiring process. And before bringing her on to the business, I did something pretty unconventional. We agreed to a month-long freelancing CEO contract. Basically, the plan was that for a month, Abby would run the business to get a feel for if she'd be excited running StoryArb and working with me, and it would give me clarity on if I think she was right for the role. Well, you know how the story ends, but long story short, Abby was amazing, and having her join StoryArb as my partner and CEO was the best And most important decision that I have made with this business. Moment number three in the arb journey was the pivot. Here is a quick timeline on how we got to the pivot. First year of the business, from when Abby started in May of 2023 to May of 2024, things did not feel easy. You can just tell when you have product market fit with your company and when you don't. And for the first half of the business, we did not. Everything just felt difficult. Our writing never felt good enough to us for our clients. Our process never felt well-oiled. Clients were missing content interviews. They were taking a long time to give feedback on our content, and mistakes were popping up when posting on a client's behalf. Retention always felt like an issue with customers churning within 6 months, and we never felt like we had a clear path beyond $2 million in annual revenue because we would have to refill a leaky bucket constantly. Abby and I got to a point where we knew our 5-year audacious goal of $10 million in revenue with 30% margins wasn't reasonable with the current strategy. We simply had too much churn to get to that scale. And as we asked ourselves what was the cause of our churn, we felt like there were too many key issues that sat outside of our control. First, early-stage founders are typically really bad customers. They're the most resource-constrained. Oftentimes they're the most demanding. And if they don't have product-market fit, You are making a bet on their business in order for them to stay a customer. And second, content will never be a must-have for founders. It is a nice-to-have, and early-stage founders do not have the luxury of time to spend on nice-to-haves. So we knew it was time for us to pivot the business, but we weren't sure how we were going to do so. All we knew is that we wanted to evolve Storyarb to offer a product that was higher retention, that leveraged our existing team and skill sets as much as possible. So to try and figure out what our new offer was, we talked to our customers and asked them if there was anything else they or their team needed. Which leads to moment number 4, our product evolution. Our product really is the story of 2 new products. The first that didn't work and the second that is working. From our conversations with customers, it became clear that our customers had content needs way beyond executive social. They needed help with newsletters and video scripts and product marketing and landing page copy and cold emails. The list kept going. And so our gut reaction was, how do we do it all? How do we offer the most flexible, customer-friendly content subscription on earth? So with the first pivot of the product, we positioned StoryArc as a monthly content subscription for companies where you can make unlimited requests and flex up or down your subscription as your needs changed. Sounds great, right? It did not work. Clients found the offering to be too much work because they had to create briefs for our writers to work with. Our writers weren't creating good enough content because the briefs didn't give them enough context, and the content we were creating wasn't being connected to business results. We effectively became viewed as a copywriting factory, and the only thing that matters in that business is speed and price. And as someone who cares deeply about creating exceptional content, I knew we did not want to play that game, which led to phase 2 of the pivot. Now, while the first product change wouldn't be the final product for The Arb, I think it was absolutely necessary for us to arrive where we are today because the big shift that happened from StoryArb doing executive social to our first product pivot is we went from our ICP being an early-stage founder to it being a marketing leader at a B2B company. And with that shift came 2 important learnings. One, content is a must-have, not a nice-to-have for a head of marketing. And 2, we could now talk constantly with our perfect ideal customer about what they cared about most, the problems they faced as a marketing leader, and what they needed support with. And what we learned from talking to them was this: content has to drive sales pipeline in a B2B company or it won't get funded. B2B marketing orgs are historically very understaffed, which meant there was a huge need for a content partner. But also we needed to remove as much work from our client as possible. And third, B2B companies are really good with marketing around tentpole events and important moments, but lack the content strategy to have an always-on motion that builds trust with their ICP, nurtures their audience, and ultimately converts them into sales-qualified leads. Those learnings paved the way for StoryArc's second product evolution and where we remain today, which is as the high-growth B2B brand's trusted content partner. We build and run an always-on content motion that builds trust through high-value editorial content and drives quality leads through a combination of long-form website, newsletter, and social content. Now that we had the right product, moment 5 was all about having the right team. Over the last 3 months, I've been able to achieve my goal of firing myself from the business and stepping out of the day-to-day. I cannot overstate how great of a feeling it is for the business to not rely on me. Not only because I can now parachute into StoryArb and work on big problems or new projects as needed, but also because I could be hit by a bus tomorrow and StoryArb would be totally fine, which is a special thing, just not the getting hit by a bus part. And while one big piece of me being able to step out is because we landed on a product that truly met a need for a far better customer, the real reason I feel more conviction in this business today than at any point over the last 2 years is because of the team. And I think about it bottoms up and department by department. At The Arb, we have 3 layers and 4 departments today. We have junior employees, managers, and leadership. And departmentally, we have content creation, content strategy, account management, and ops. When I think about the quality of an org, I think about everyone culturally and executionally. Does everyone embody the core values that our business is built upon with their daily actions? And does everyone have the chops to execute on their specific responsibilities? For junior employees, that means do they have the skills to deliver high-quality work at the standards that is expected of them? For managers, do they have the skills to set a standard for what high-quality work looks like and to provide support and guidance so their team's execution stays high? And then for leaders, do they have the skills to build a strategy and process that is clear and can be followed by all in their organization? And do they have the skills to unblock the biggest issues that will inevitably arise with their team? The answer to all of these questions is yes, which is why I feel so good about this business. And that leads to the final moment. Moment number 6, what to do today. As I record this episode, we sit at an inflection point with StoryArc. Here's a quick snapshot of StoryArc's last month in business, and I haven't shared these numbers anywhere yet. Revenue was $234,000. We profited $40,000, which is a 17% margin, and our full-time team sits at 18 people. And again, this is as of March of 2025, and that leaves us with a choice to make. Should we ramp up growth significantly or continue to grow gradually? The ramp up would look like keeping growth at one new client per week, depending on client churn and how long we can keep up that pace of growth for. We could end the year around $523,000 in monthly revenue or $6.2 million in annual run rate. Profit margins would stay lower longer as we have to hire faster to keep up with that growth. The gradual growth path would look like adding 1 to 2 new clients per month and finishing the year around $325,000 in monthly revenue with margins that are in the high 20s to low 30s. Now, there isn't a right answer necessarily, just tradeoffs. Obviously, faster growth can mean being a bigger business faster, potentially a more exciting and empowering trajectory for the team. It's also my general bias in company building, but there are a few important considerations. First, will we maintain great retention with our current product? It looks to be very strong, especially as we show clients how content is directly driving pipeline. But it's just worth watching closely. Retention will play a big part in how fast we can grow because it will inform how many new customers we will need to bring on and how quickly. The second important consideration is will we have the processes in place to scale the business this fast without hurting the quality of our content or product? This one is a non-negotiable in my mind. We should only grow as fast as we are able to maintain or even improve quality. Now we are in the middle of making this decision, and we have a leadership offsite a week after this podcast goes live. So by the next time I am sharing an update on Storyarb, you will learn whether we picked high growth or gradual growth. So that's where we are today, and that's the story of Storyarb over the last two years through the lens of our six most transformational moments. That's it for today's Founders Journal. Shoot me an email to alex@storyarb.com saying hi, hola. WhatsApp or whatever else takes you less than 10 seconds, and I will get the conversation going. Thanks again for listening, and I'll catch you next episode.