In this solo episode of the Founders Journal podcast, Alex Lieberman, co‑founder of Morning Brew, shares a personal story about his newest venture, StoryArb (later referred to as StoryArc), to illustrate the pervasive pressure founders feel to showcase flashy growth metrics. When a friend asked about the business, Lieberman felt the urge to exaggerate, yet he chose to be honest, explaining that the company has deliberately paused new customer acquisition to focus on refining its product and achieving product‑market fit. He provides concrete details: StoryArb launched in May 2023, hired a CEO in June, added its first employee in August, and now serves about 12 customers generating roughly $1 M ARR ($84 K MRR). Using a rowboat‑with‑holes analogy, he likens early‑stage product development to paddling a leaky boat toward an island (product‑market fit); adding more customers or team members before the boat is seaworthy only increases the risk of sinking. Lieberman argues that social media and mainstream media glorify rapid revenue growth, funding rounds, and valuations, which skews founders toward focusing on “sexy” outputs rather than the unglamorous, iterative work that creates lasting value. He stresses that the only speed that matters early on is the speed of product improvement, citing that 90 % of StoryArb’s conversations revolve around content quality, audience building, and value tracking for clients. The episode concludes with a call to “be boring”: embrace uncomfortable, honest answers, resist the urge to impress, and prioritize the customer’s experience, a mindset that Lieberman credits for Morning Brew’s early‑stage success.
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What's up, everyone? Welcome back to another episode of Founders Journal, the number one podcast for helping early-stage entrepreneurs navigate the physical and mental journey of building a business. I'm your host, Alex Lieberman, co-founder and executive chairman of Morning Brew. And on today's episode, I talk about the immense pressure that we feel as entrepreneurs to say things that sound sexy versus talk about the boring stuff that is actually the most important priority in our business. On this episode, I teach you to slow down and embrace the boring. So let's hop into it. Okay, so I was driving a friend to the train station yesterday. He was going back to the city, and as we were driving, he asked me how StoryArb was going. And for those of you that don't know, StoryArb is the The first business that I spun up as part of my personal holding company, as of today, it is an executive content agency where we help B2B CEOs, founders, executives, and investors build their audience online. We interview them, we get all of the great stories, lessons, and knowledge out of their head. We help turn it into great social content, and we help them build quality audiences. And the long-term vision for StoryArc is to be the kind of outsourced media company for the modern business leader. Because as executives start to understand the power of building an audience online, but don't have the skill or the time to do it, we think there's someone who can kind of act as that content co-founder to, you know, tens to hundreds of thousands of amazing professionals. But anyway, as I was talking to my friend, when he asked me how StoryArc was going, in that moment that he asked me the question, I felt inclined to lie. And I felt inclined to lie because I felt an immense amount of pressure to sound impressive. Um, I didn't lie, but I, what I wanted to say was, I wanted to say how StoryArc has tripled, uh, its customers over the last month, how we're encroaching on our ambitious goal of $10 million in revenue. How we're at a point where we can print $3 million in profit each year. It just feels like that is the way that businesses are talked about by founders and influencers who have launched businesses on the internet today. What I actually ended up saying to my friend was far less exciting. I told him that the business is going well, that we are not bringing any new customers on at the moment because we want to focus on refining our product. We want our product to be so good that a customer never wants to leave us, and we don't feel like we're there yet. And then once we get to a place where we feel like we've reached product-market fit, we will start expanding our client base and then ultimately expand the product beyond just social media content to things like podcasts, email communities, website content, etc. Let me just expand on that a little bit more so you better understand the business, to understand how I'm thinking about it. We launched StoryArb in May of 2023. I brought on our CEO in June of 2023. Our first employee started 2 months later in August of 2023. And for the last 3 months, we have been sitting around 12 customers, which is around $1 million of annualized revenue or $84,000 of monthly revenue. And so we've had these 12 customers for the last 3 months and we haven't taken on any new customers. And it's a weird thing to say, but what I believe to be a strength, and the strength is not growing our customer base until we can truly handle it and until the product feels truly exceptional, it weirdly feels like a weakness to tell people that we're doing this when people say that they're curious about the business and how it's doing. And so I think it's interesting to just explore why that is, why there's such a weird feeling about being intelligent about your business. Obviously, it would be awesome to onboard a ton more customers right now and to drive a ton more revenue, but it would all be shortsighted. This business is 5 months old and it takes time to find product-market fit and customer-product fit, meaning finding the right customers who get the most value out of your product. That's like a huge thing people don't talk about. And so every minute or dollar that we spend acquiring a new customer right now at StoryYard is one less minute or dollar that can be used to tweak our offering and improve our product to make it as valuable as possible for existing clients so they continue to work with us forever. We're going to take a quick break, but more from Founders Journal when we get back. Here's how I visualize kind of the decision to move slow in order to move fast in the future and the emphasis we place on product versus scaling revenue. When you first start a business, you have a rowboat and that rowboat is filled with holes. Your goal is to paddle that rowboat to an island that, let's say, is a mile away, but it's not going to be easy. You and your small crew, let's say one or two other people on the boat, need to paddle hard while pailing out water, while trying to fill holes permanently in the boat so that you don't sink before getting to the island. Now, in this analogy, the rowboat is your product. The few people on board is your early team at your business. The island itself is product-market fit, a place where you can finally start making upgrades, finally start adding to your team. Finally start scaling your customers, build a bigger ship. And the water is everything that an early-stage founder faces that keeps them from succeeding. Endless to-dos, customers churning, competing priorities, et cetera. Now, when framed this way, when framed with this analogy, of course, taking on more customers or bringing on more employees before you have product-market fit makes absolutely no sense. It just means your boat takes on more water and the odds of reaching the island get lower and lower. Now, while I believe that is the logical way to think about it, it feels weird and uncomfortable to not have exciting updates or crazy momentum, even though that's exactly how it should be right now. It's uncomfortable for one reason, because as a second-time founder, I create a level of pressure to appear successful and competent in whatever I do. Everyone talks about a second-time founder's opportunity cost of time as being insanely high. So if a business that I'm running, if its progress runs counter at all to that story, that feels uncomfortable. And the other reason it feels uncomfortable is because things like making product improvements, figuring out your operations, and hiring your early team is just far less sexy than revenue growth and hitting milestones in the eyes of consumers on social media. And I really do think social media and mainstream media amplify this message by kind of entirely writing stories around fresh funding rounds, huge valuations, new product launches. And I think it's actually really harmful because it focuses on outputs versus the unsexy and boring and time-consuming inputs that you need to go through under the radar for years in order for those milestones to be reached. Now, I don't necessarily blame media companies or people on social media because I believe the media is a reflection of people. And media companies have seen what people clicked on and they create more of it. So clearly people want more content around sexy funding rounds and ARR goals reached and acquisitions, but that's not actually what's most important. And that's not actually what a business is most of the time. Entrepreneurs need to know that these headlines, they take time and they're also not the norm or the right focus for most people building businesses most of the time. But for me personally, this conversation with my friend was a really good reminder that speed is oftentimes not the right answer in a business. For an early-stage company, the only speed that you want to be focused on is speed of product improvement that increases the odds of you reaching that island of getting to product-market fit. So for example, at StoryArb, 90% of our conversations are about the product. We're always asking ourselves questions like, How can we create better content for our clients? What can we do to get high-quality people following our clients? How can we track the value that we're creating for our clients? What's the best way to get as many specific stories and lessons out of our client's brain as possible while taking as little time from them as possible? This is what we are obsessing over, not our sales funnel or our total customers or even our revenue targets. But like I said, speed of hiring, speed of revenue growth, speed of fundraising, these are all things that are sexy and you'll inevitably feel pressure to talk about during your journey, but they aren't actually the right things to focus on, especially early on. So next time someone asks you how business is going, I really suggest that you lean into the discomfort, you embrace it, and you also resist the need to impress because a founder who has boring answers today, I believe, has far higher odds of having a sexy business in the future. If you asked me how things were going for the first 4 years of Morning Brew, I would have given you the same exact answer every single day. I would have said, we're focusing on writing a great newsletter. I'm cold calling dozens of advertisers a day, spending 12 hours a day on LinkedIn going through leads, and we're trying to find any way possible to acquire quality subscribers for free. I would have said nothing about revenue, nothing about headcount, nothing about fundraising. And so what I wanna leave you with is kind of a very simple thing to keep top of mind whenever you feel this pressure. Be boring. Be boring. Embrace the patience that this journey requires because it requires a lot of it. And don't worry about what anyone thinks other than one person, and that one person is your customer. Thanks for listening, and I'll catch you next episode.
