Alex Lieberman on Building A Personal Brand & Influencer Marketing Trends

Hey, everyone. Welcome to today's show. We have a friend of the POD on today, Alex Lieberman. He's the co founder of Morning Brew and Story Arb and is one of the best creators and marketers we know. AX is on. He's going to talk drop marketing, how he's hoping to be the linear brujitsky for marketing, how you can steal some of the best ideas out there and bring them to your own marketing and bring them online to get an unfair advantage. That and so much more on today's show.

Alex, you're a really successful founder. You've sold Morning Brew. You can do all kinds of different things, but you're choosing to be the Lenny for marketers. You want to be an incredible creator for marketers. Like talk us through why you want to do that, why that's the thing you've picked to spend your time and resources on, first of all.

And this may go down a different direction. You guys don't want to, but I'll just give you a teaser which is like after I stepped out of the CEO role at the Brew, the next year of my life was like the most lost I've ever been in my life. And I, and by the way, this is a very classic thing. I've talked to dozens, very common story. Yeah, yeah, it's the same story. So I did this exercise that the Conscious Leadership Group has and Conscious Leadership Group, it's like amazing leadership education. They have a book called 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership. It's probably my favorite business book I've ever read. They have this thing called the Good Stuff Exercise. And basically what the Good Stuff exercise is, is you have to write down eight very specific moments from your life or career where you felt like you were skillful and where everything felt like easy and enjoyable. And then you basically write down these eight moments and then you start finding themes in them. And then those themes boil down into one statement of what your zone of genius is. And basically my zone of genius, like boiled down to leveraging creativity and outside the box thinking to storytell and persuade individuals like that. That is kind of my statement. And so then I basically ask myself, how can I spend as much of my time getting better at that? How can I just get exceptionally good at that? And at the same time, you know, there's two ways I see my career going and I, I, I'd be happy with either. One is right now, I don't want to run a business like I did for the Brew in the immediate future, for the next 10 years it was an absolute slog, as you guys know. Like, my goal, it's a grind. My goal is to start a family in the next few years. My personal, like, my professional goals, like, I want to be a great entrepreneur. I want to be an even better family person, and I want to prove that both are possible. And so, so to me, like, what I'm doing over the next few years is I'm just building a portfolio of companies that I hire a CEO for day one. I help incubate the business, and I basically think about what are the things I can do to increase the probability of success of every one of these businesses that I incubate, which will come back to why I'm even thinking about being the Lenny of marketing, why I'm creating content around this. The second possible path long term is every entrepreneur does fantasize about taking a massive swing in their career. And I too have fantasized about taking a massive swing in my career. When I think, first of all, I've settled with the fact that if I don't, I will still be happy, it will be okay. But if I do find that massive swing I want to take, I think about what are the tools that I want to have to make this thing potentially as successful as possible. And what I likely will do in that next business, I find is have a co founder who either is technical or a lot like Austin, who is like deeply operational. And so then it makes me think about what do I need to bring to the table. And again, I think sales and marketing is going to be a big piece of it.

First of all, I think most normal people would have thought us creating a company and selling it like Morning Brew is a pretty great swing. Pretty good swing. I know that your expectations as humans, we like, oh, well, that was quite small. I want to get even bigger.

But yeah, it's the issue with us.

Yeah, like that's humans level set to wherever they are and they're like, I'm only here, that person's over there, like. But it's a pretty big swing or a pretty successful swing. This is actually a really good topic because Kip and I talked about this a lot, which is like this kind of new category of creator led founders. Right. And you see it all the time in B2C. We've seen the Kim Kardashian, we've seen all of the kind of creators in there really usurp brands. Because marketing channels are set up today to reward personalities and to reward individuals, not brands. Right. The channels that are growing are all the kind of personality LED channels, the ones that are actually declining are the performance marketing that usually brands are much better at because they have budget, they have the resources. And so could you speak a little bit to that? Right, because we've said that we see that come into business and that's kind of what you're talking about, right? Is that I can create all of these business because me, I'm a creator and I have an audience that I can actually point in these different directions.

I mean I just think about this all the time. It's like no matter what industry you think about, it's like the holders of distribution are the one of quality and trusted distribution are the ones that have all the leverage. So you think about that like in media, obviously a creator who has a deeply engaged business audience has a shit ton of leverage. But then I take it to a totally different industry which is like you look at like Target or Walmart, it's like every DTC brand who wants to get into retail will do, will bend over backwards, do anything possible to get access to their trusted distribution as well. It's like there's just this immense power of distribution. I think basically what you're describing is like the tailwinds. There's both tailwinds for creators and headwinds for marketing. The headwinds for marketing are that paid acquisition is getting less efficient partially driven by you know, like the post cookie world that we live in. There's also just more competition like as big brands are allocating from traditional channels to digital. Like simply the demand supply imbalance is going to shift at the same time. Influence has been around forever. Like an amazing book I'm reading right now is who is Michael Ovitz?

Oh, he's a fascinating character.

Yeah, he's out of his goddamn mind.

But he's.

But, but this book is incredible partially because a business I've thought a lot about building is what would, what would a modern day endeavor or CAA look like? Like if you had to build like a, a talent business or what endeavor now is not even a talent business. It's like an entertainment holdco. What would that look like if you were to start it today? But like influence has existed forever. Like and for a while it was athletes and celebrities in la. The tailwind that exists is just now. Tools have democratized the ability for more people to create. And so what I actually think is like distribution. It's, it's this weird thing where like social platforms centralized distribution, but there's this weird thing happening where actually I'd argue like a weird dynamic is happening where distribution is actually becoming more fragmented than ever before because more, because the long tail of building audience is just getting longer and longer and longer every single day. And that's why I think like even a big challenge that I've talked to a lot of marketers about is as they try to pull back paid, as they try to find efficient channels. One of those being like influencer. And I know a ton of brands are starting to pour money, more money into like direct buys on YouTube. A big challenge they have is like, hey, I want to spend $500,000 a month on a very specific demographic of creator on the Internet. I don't know how to spend $500,000 a month on it. How do I find all these people and how do I know if they're good and how do I know if they drive engagement? And so I think that that is what has partially driven the emergence of creator co founded brands. I think the other thing is creator driven, which is being a creator is a fucking slog. Like we just talked about like so hard. Lenny has done it for six years. Mr. Beast has done it for 14 years. Marques Brownlee, you know his first video when he was, when he was 11, playing golf on a golf course, like it's a slog. And you, there's no way to get off the slogan if you're just making money from brand deals. And so I just think there's also more desire than ever before from creators to build equity in something so that they have a possibility of retiring from content at some point in the next 20 years. Now what I will say is as that has happened, you've had some really good creator led businesses created and you've had some really horrible ones created, which is just what happens anytime it gets, anytime a market gets commercialized. You've seen it the same thing in the newsletter space as you've seen Beehive get Big Substack, Convertkit. It's the same thing. It's no different from any other market where money is to be made.

I just last night I did a show because Kieran, you were asleep and in bed, but with the Wix CMO Omer and he's easily one of the best CMOs in technology. And I asked him what's been the single biggest change in his marketing mix over the last 12 to 24 months. He said influencers. He's like, man, you know, I've done Super bowl ads, I've done all of these things. We are all on influencers, it's all indirect, you know, measurement. It's fascinating. And he is somebody who's at the pulse and is and is better at finding arbitrage than most people. So it's like a really good strong signal point.

Yeah. And no, it's also just crazy is how much inefficiency there still is in the space. Not just in terms of finding influencers, but I was talking to the person who ran influencer marketing at Klarna last week and still in the space if say you're, say you're a especially a consumer business who a lot of your influencer marketing is focused on Instagram, which still Instagram is the largest platform for influencer marketing. Do you know how they like do analytics and reporting for Instagram influencers? Every influencer that works with them has to send a screenshot of their analytics of their impressions and then someone on the back end has to create a spreadsheet of it. Like the fact that that's how an economy like the influence influencer marketing economy was 24 billion last year. I can't. I think Instagram was 20 something percent of it. Like that's how this marketplace operates. So imagine when it does get more efficient what things can look like. It's pretty interesting.

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Now back to today's show. Yeah, it's still pretty nice. I'm trying my. I'm glad you. I'm just, I'm going to pass through you Kep. I'm trying my best not to talk my book here and insert my latest seed investment.

I was going to let you get there. I was going to let you get. I was going to let you get to the influencer marketplace.

Passion fruit. I have to like shout out to guys passion for I did a Q and A for them. Great, great, great company, good investment. So user perfectly set it up so I have to mention them. So carry on.

At some point I actually do want to know what Passion Fruit is. But what I will say is in the B2B space, so. So I think there's an interesting question which is like creator businesses or creator marketing? First of all, it always does feel generally in B2B like B2B is late to things. And I'm curious of why that I have that feeling or like there is that reputation. Is it a fact or is it.

It's a fact, it's a fact, it's fact.

And okay, so one, I'm curious, like why is that a fact? Like are B2B marketers on average less creative and innovative marketers than B2C? Or like. Or is it just because you have to worry about like performance? Way more significantly because it's all about demand gen, whatever it is, like I'm interested in that. But what's interesting is I think the initial creator deals were in the alcohol space and you saw some huge wins, right? You saw Tara Mana tequila, you saw proper Irish whiskey, you saw aviation gin. And I think a lot of people saw this and they were like, oh this is easy, you just attach a big name and you frickin crush it. I think then what you saw was some other celebrities launched alcohol brands and they didn't do nearly as well. And I think there's a big reason for it is like the best quality creator was skimmed first and then like there's a huge drop off from there in terms of engagement, interest in the Creator, etc. The other thing is, is the alcohol market is like the exception not the rule is the definition of a commoditized product that has repeat purchases for literally decades on end. So it truly all that matters is brand and marketing as you start working into other products. So the next stage was like consumer where it was like apparel and other consumer beauty product. Different differentiation actually starts to matter a little bit more. And I think what you saw was a lot of creators joining up with operators and on both ends they were like, let's just buy the same exact product from manufacturer in China. Let's slap our marketing and your, our brand and your marketing on it and it will work. And I think that just didn't prove to be the case. And so I think unfortunately building a creator business that can long term be a great business is a business where the creator is the best first marketing channel and then like if hypothetically they disappear two years in the future, you have to have confidence that the product is good enough to Stand on its own two feet and you have a robust marketing program outside of the creator. The best analogy that I think of is like Kevin Espiritu, who started Epic Gardening, which again shows the value of niches on the Internet. The guy has 3 million subscribers on YouTube around gardening. The way he always referred to it is if you look at like a rocket that shot up from Cape Canaveral, it has the, the boosters on the side. The boosters fall off. Fall off when they get to the outer atmosphere of Earth. That is how a creator should operate as part of a business.

Okay, I agree with that. I have a crazy idea I want to, I want to pitch to you guys. Because Alex, you said a couple of minutes ago you were, well, you know, if I do take a big swing, I want to, want to figure out what skills I'd want to bring and I'd want to be with an, make sure I had a technical co founder or operator. What if that was all wrong? What if that we're entering an era where like I could see a world where it's like we just put the dream team together, get like 10amazing marketers and that's the founding team. And you just like imagine like we did like a YouTube series that, where we pick some defunct brand and we just had 10 of us who were really great at marketing. We each put in a hundred thousand dollars and you're like, cool, we're going to, we're going to turn this into a billion dollar brand. Seems really possible today. Seems more possible today that if you could spike on one thing and I'm, and we're using marketing in this example. But you could say the same thing for R and D or anything. But it's like, seems like balance is less of a quest than it should be. Here is I think the point I'm trying to make, which is like you could see like just tripling quadrupling down on one aspect of business, in this case marketing to really go and like every day I find like a defunct brand or a brand that's clearly like not doing great. And I'm like, oh, I just like text my friends and should we just, we all just buy this and just like make it $100 million business because it's like, feels like that is more possible than it's ever been before.

And out of curiosity, why do you think that's like more possible today than it was say even like five or ten years ago?

Because the subscription economy has made all the bullshit work easy. All the admin finance Payroll, hr. All the stuff where you're like, oh, man, I just. I don't want to do this. I don't want to work with a bunch of people who have to do this, where it's like, oh, actually, we need a lot less people and time to do those things that we don't want to do. And so now you can say, all right, well, here's a good product. We can automate the aspects of this business we don't like, and we can actually focus on the part we like, which is like building a brand and building an audience and kind of taking it to market in a really effective way.

You know who's doing your business. Kip. And so you. So you basically share the same ideas as Tai Lopez.

I knew you were going to say that. I knew.

He's literally buying de stressed brands.

Yeah.

And he is an. He is an influencer. He's a marketer. Whatever you think about him, he knows how to draw attention, but he's literally running that play.

I think that is 100% a huge opportunity. I think in the. In that example, the reason you don't need, like, a CTO or some sort of technical founder is the product is already established. Like, you have an established product. You have a product that exists. There's something valuable to the asset. You attach a bunch of marketers. By the way, the idea I wanted to do this with probably a year and a half ago and I couldn't buy the asset was backyard baseball. I won. I thought backyard baseball. So I grew up with that game, and it was my favorite game. And people love Pablo Sanchez, they love Pete Wheeler, and the game basically disappeared. Like, it hasn't existed on any gaming console in the last 15 years. Someone I know recently brought. Bought the brand, and they're trying to bring it back. But, like, to me, that's a perfect example. If you have really smart marketing attached to that, you could build an amazing franchise and rejuvenate backyard baseball.

That's. Where. Where do you. Is there, like, a marketplace? Like, where do you find them?

So for backyard baseball, I literally just had the idea. I tweeted it out, and then the person who bought the rights to it, which I think they bought the rights for, like, $115,000, hit me up. They hit me up on Twitter, and they're like, what do you want to talk about this? We're going to do this. So the short answer is like, I just think of brands I grew up with, and then I. And then I get curious about them, but obviously, that's just what's in my head. So I think what's a more scalable version of that? Like how do you figure out, like.

This is the business somebody should start, by the way, a marketplace for old IP so that you can discover and rebuy old IP or businesses that have recently shut down or winding down to like revive. Like there's a, there's a, there's a seltzer company in Vermont called SAP Seltzer, which is just, literally takes maple water out of trees and cans it and carbonates it and it's delicious. And it's just like it's going out of business and I'm just like, ah, maybe we should just buy a seltzer company and make it awesome.

Totally. Yeah. I do think what's actually interesting is I actually think potentially like private equity companies, like mid market private equity companies may actually be the best sourcers of these brands because they're looking for deals like this. And so actually like partnering with one of them with like the marketing Avengers squad is potentially, I think that is a path forward, path of least resistance.

I think you're probably right.

Coming back to how you think about content, Alex, because I think it would be useful for listeners when you think about like I want to be the person who like is the Lenny from marketing or just like an incredible marketing creator. There is like lots of parts of marketing. Like there's B2C, there's B2B, there's like small companies, large companies. Do you think about any kind of nation within marketing? Like how do you think about owning that as a topic? Or maybe actually do you think it's better if you niche down and own a subset of it?

So I don't think about a niche in terms of a category. I think about a person. I'm going to do this for a second and hopefully I hope it doesn't screw up your recording. I don't think it will. Can you guys see this?

Yeah.

Yep.

Look who it is. It's Kip. So, so basically the way that I think about really like building personal brand or becoming a known individual on the Internet is you have to, you have to have a market of one. And so Kip literally is my market of one as I create content moving forward. And so the what I basically think about is what is Kip want to consume on the Internet to make himself look as good as humanly possible in front of other individuals in life and grow as much as humanly possible as a marketer. And the way again in I have access to Kip. So I could just basically ask him what are the things that you're thinking most about that you have questions around? What are the biggest challenges you're dealing with within HubSpot's marketing org right now? Not all people would have that. And so what I would say is if you picked a market of one, which your market of one should literally be a real person that you have their LinkedIn URL pull up. Pulled up is you should basically go either find things they've talked about on the Internet or go to subreddits and look at what are the biggest questions that these people have asked. But basically the way that I've thought about my market of one is I say, okay, Kip is the CMO at HubSpot. He has a really large organization. But what I know is important to him is, is trying creative new and interesting shit and keeping his ear to the ground of what's relevant in marketing, not just today, but what will be five years from now so he can go to where the puck is going versus just do what everyone else is doing. And so then as I think about it, I think about what are the topics that I can talk about that allow Kip to know where the puck is going to so he doesn't have to do all of the search for himself.

Can I ask one quick question? That's. First of all, I love that. I love this for two reasons. I love, I love that you are starting with a person. I think if you are listening to this podcast and you are doing any form of marketing, take this lesson away and you've got your hours worth of advice in this one thing. Like, that is an incredible piece of advice. The second thing is just on this, what's interesting to me, like how you think about this, a second thing is I love talking about Kip. Like, he's not here. So this is really cool. Oh, it's amazing.

Thanks, guys.

Appreciate you. So, like, I would say Kip in the marketing industry would have very niche needs. As in, like, there's not many people running the size of marketing team or thinking about the complexity of problems that maybe Kip, a Kip is. So do you think about. That's why I was kind of asking, like, do you. Are you trying to solve for. Do you think solving Kip solves for a broad enough market or you're trying to like, specifically solve for CMOs, like core leaders of marketing teams?

Yeah. So my view is the reason I actually like using Kip as the market of one is I've thought a lot about this. I think if I was to write about any like, you know, your run of the mill Fortune 500 CMO, I think you wouldn't necessarily get tactical enough. Like I think it would be too high level for me.

What, what the people management.

Exactly. To me, what I think is cool is like I think obviously that is important for Kip's job. But I think as like. But I also think from hearing you guys talk in the podcast, you guys are thinking about like deeply tactical stuff as well. Like again, when I, when I posted about this crazy stunt of going to the national football championship, like Kip DM me instantly after that. Like when, when I posted another idea recently on Twitter, kip DM me instantly. Like he is DMing me faster.

Kiss is hang. Wait. Alex comes up with new market ideas outsourcing. My strategy baby kept telling Joel, Alex just coming up with ideas and he goes to, he goes upstream CEO and goes, look what I'm doing.

No, but honestly, like, like he's hopping on interesting ideas and trends faster than like ahead of growth at a startup. And to me that's why I picked him. So I'll just even use an example. Today I post I wrote like a playbook for how Beehive does really smart drop marketing. Like I think they are a way that they've built up so much zeitgeist around their brand and I can kind of go into it if you want is like they have for the last three years done a product drop every two weeks and then they've done a very specific blitz plan around that product drop every two weeks. My view is like, is Kip thinking about that exact thing today? No. But I do think that could get his wheels turning about how do you implement a similar process with HubSpot, which is also dropping product features constantly?

Yeah, you are thinking about it in the right way because I literally am thinking exactly about this topic today. Drop the kind of drop market and how you blitz a certain demographic and segment of your audience for a certain specific sprint.

And then to me it's a no brainer. Yeah, it's. Yeah, it's a no brainer because. Yeah, go ahead.

Can you teach, can you teach me about it then? Because that's much easier. I was going to get on, I was going to start clawding my way through it today and so I, if you don't mind.

Yes.

While you're here, just go ahead and give us the five minute summary, please.

So, so, so I'm going to tell you how like Beehive did it, but. But I'm also going to abstract it to, like, what is the process that they do and I'll even share, like, how I'm doing it at Storyard with our business. So just, just as a random example, Beehive recently dropped audio newsletters, right? That was their most recent drop that you could listen to your newsletter, you could just embed an audio version in your newsletter. And so basically, here's how I think about the drop marketing process, which, by the way, going back to, like, how B2B just lags. The hilarious thing is like drop marketing, literally, it's been around forever. Literally, like music drops have been around forever. It started with fashion and streetwear in Japan. Supreme. Like, this is not new. But the. So what I know is like, Tyler started doing this because Beehive did not have a lot of features in the early days. And so a lot of people wouldn't sign up for their product because they're like, you don't have 80% of the features we need. And so his only way of building confidence that they would have the feature soon is show that they're delivering unbelievable product velocity. So people are like, oh, wow, maybe Beehive will have this feature in the next three months. So to me, the step, the first step is like, you define your product roadmap. I know at Beehive it's 90 days in advance, which means every two weeks for the next three months, they know exactly what product feature they are going to be introducing to their audience. Then basically the second step that I know they go through is you prep the team internally. So basically every, everyone who needs to be trained on how to deliver the product and a great customer experience in that product is trained before the external launch. Then you move to step three. And to me, this is like the meat and potatoes of it, which is like you have to establish your drop calendar. And there are a few things that go into it. One is you pick your channels. So, and the idea is you pick channels that every two weeks or every month or every quarter, you're, you're, you're kind of handpicking from these men this menu of channels that make sense for your business. So for Beehive, it's always been their company social on Twitter and LinkedIn, CEO Social on Twitter and LinkedIn. And I joke on, on Instagram for Tyler, because that's where he posts Thirst traps. In addition to Beehive to Beehive product drops company, company newsletter, he has his own personal newsletter. Employees post on social. Their customers Post on social company blog. For every product announcement they do, which to me, every company should do this. They, they drop it on product hunt. So they, they, every new product, they do a product hunt launch for it. And they have an own digital community where Beehive customers are. So you, you pick your channels for your company. The second is you pick your creative. So they know every time they're doing it, there's an animated short they're making social copy, blog copy, newsletter copy, product on copy. Third, you pick your dates. And they usually do. Day before something like they say something like something big is coming soon. The day of is the big drop. Day after is amplification by employees and customers. And then like a week later is a reminder. And so just for context, when they did this audio newsletter drop on August 1, it got 283,000 free impressions from just all the different posts. They had their biggest revenue day in the last 30 days. And to me, every company should be doing exactly this. And by the way, like, functionally how it works, I think their employees and their customers being evangelists is really the amazing card that they pull. Because for example, when Beehive posted about the audio newsletter drop on August 1, 18 employees all reposted or quote reposted it. And so like for that day, everyone knew about this. If you were somewhere in and around the email marketing world, we're doing this at Story Arb also where at Story Arb. So just for people who don't know, like basically what Story Arb is, is it's you're out of house, Head of content or head of content marketing. My view is content only gets more important for B2B companies. They generally don't know how to do it well or it feels incredibly, incredibly dry or robotic. Like, like super SEO. But like as you guys know with the HubSpot media network, like just great content, period, is what you want to create. And it will naturally act as marketing for us. We offer a lot of different types of content. Email newsletters, email marketing, website copy company, social, founder social. We basically planned out for the next 12 months. Every month we're doing a drop of a different type of content. On the day we drop it, we actually throw a virtual event. It's called Comic Con. My the vision is content meets Coachella. So it's like the best content festival in the world. And the idea behind it is I get the best speakers to talk about the type of content we're dropping. Which the funny thing is is we're not really dropping anything. We already Offer all of these things. We're just packaging it. Known to the world. Yeah, we're just packaging it. We do these virtual events where I interview. So like Brynna from HubSpot is. I'm interviewing her for the next one, which is on company social. Last one, we had 1500 people attend. The last comic con. Say 1500 people join. 1500 people who clearly give a shit about company social, which means they're great leads for story Arb. I'm also selling sponsorships against it now, so I actually want to get paid to be able to do drop marketing for our business. And then we also take all of the interviews from the event and we turn it into everything from an email newsletter to playbooks to social copy for the next month. So my view is like, we just kind of manufactured drop marketing by putting some sort of structure around the menu of items we offer at our company.

It's kind of like using your product, traditional product marketing, but as a much bigger kind of distribution, content, merchandising strategy.

Yeah. My whole thing is like, if you're going to create products, why not, like, squeeze as much juice as humanly possible out of them?

Yeah, yeah. I always wonder, like, one of the things around product marketing, I wonder where you should really just have a problem marketing team. Because for the most part, what people really care about are the problems the products solve and that you can just have a steady stream of like, here's, here's, like the core problem and here's how we solve it and here's the products that actually solve that problem and just keep hitting the market with that. Because that's what really resonates with people is like, oh, I used to have this problem. Why you solve that problem and just hit them over the head with that? Because I think a lot of product marketing gets lost because, like, here's another product, here's another product, here's another product. But it's like, what do you actually solve and what is the problem? You're. How do you make my life better? And that's the thing that really clicks with what people.

I totally agree, by the way. One, like, semi aside, but I think you guys will find interesting is like, I think you guys know and appreciate the importance of founder and executive social, right? Like Lulu from Rocha, like, this is like her whole thesis with the business and just going direct to audience matters more than ever before. I think, like, what Zuck has done with his brand and his team has done with his brand is like the most amazing. It's the most Absurd.

Incredible.

Yeah, it's incredible. I will say story arb started just on founder and exec social. And the reason we pivoted to helping companies with their content marketing is honestly because it was too low retention of a product because founders do not stick with their content long enough. Like, there's so much, there's so much FOMO around it. Like, they see founders doing it or execs see execs doing it. So they're like, help me with it. The first thing I always say to them is, this is a long game. I've been creating content on LinkedIn and Twitter for the last eight years. You shouldn't expect any really meaningful ROI for a few years. They say, I totally got it. I'm on the same page. Five, five months in something becomes a priority in their business, which means they can't spend the time with us, us interviewing them to get insights out of their head to turn into content, which means we don't have content to work with. And they churn. And so I think there's just this interesting thing where founders and execs understand the value of creating social. But there. But I think 95% are never going to actually do it. And it's kind of sad to me because going back to what we were saying, like, I think some of the smartest, most insightful executives in the world aren't creating on social because they're too busy working in their business, which makes sense to me. But I wish there was a mechanism to pull those things out of their head so the world could learn from them.

If you are a founder and you do have incredible expertise and knowledge, like, your advice is to have a, like, it's one of your services, right? Like, is that the way for them to get there is like, just talk to someone and who's really great at content and they can actually repurpose this into those different platforms. Like, that's the way they can get scale.

Yeah, Yeah. I mean, my, my view is, is like, say you have like day one, you have nothing in your business. Like, you're literally at zero. You don't have a marketing person. You want your initial customers. Do I think you're going to get your initial customers from putting content on social? No, I don't. Because it's going to take time to build up that audience and nurture it. I think the way you're going to do it is like, you know, if you read the Lenny article about how did, like the first, you know, how did the biggest consumer apps get their first like 10 to 100 customers. It was all of like leveraging their immediate network. So that's like always what I think it's going to be for your initial customers. But I do think if you want something after you've exhausted your immediate network, the next network you go to is your digital network. And in order to get access to that, once your immediate network has slowed down, you do need to start creating content pretty quickly. And honestly I find that most there's like an order of excuses that founders and execs make for not creating content online. The first is they don't want to be cringy. And part of my answer is like just don't create cringy content then that's true. The second is that they don't have any content ideas. I actually think is this is the biggest unlock for people building personal brand is I think when you have a naturally content oriented mind, your brain is off autopilot and you're always identifying things in your day to day life. That is an interesting idea to talk about. I just think for most founders and execs the light switch hasn't been turned on and so they're not scanning and they don't have awareness. So I think that's the biggest thing is like actually getting awareness. And if I was to tell you, I bet there are at least 10 things that happen in your day that are at least interesting enough ideas to create content around, then you start looking for what those things may be. So I think that's the biggest unlock for a founder or exec. And then the third thing is especially if they're not creating themselves, like if they're partnering with a story ARM or any sort of agency to help them, I think they worry about voice. Like the person who is writing on their behalf does not have their exact same voice. And what I've always said is like unless you are creating your own content on social, which again odds are you're not going to for a long time because 95% of founders have shown they're not capable of doing it, then your voice will be slightly different on the Internet. My point of view is that if you could get someone who has 80% the voice you want, but you can guarantee you're going to be putting content out three days a week for the next four years, I think it's a worthy trade off. But some founders can't get past that point.

Look, founders are control freaks and I've always been the mind. Like you know when, when you run marketing at a team like People are often, like, writing blog posts or covers for ebooks or different things for you. And I'm always like, yeah, it looks great. Why am I going to spend like an hour editing this thing where it's like, no, the opportunities and the distribution of like, are the ideas generally, right?

Great.

That's all that matters. And it's really hard for somebody who has real control issues to let go in that way and kind of be okay with that, but you are actually telling them the truth. That the thing that matters much more than control. Unless you're like Apple. Unless you are like so perfectly controlled, everything is literally pixel perfect. Control makes no sense. Right then.

Exactly.

You want distribution, you want the air cover that's provided by high frequency.

And also, to be honest with you, it is impossible for every. If you're posting with some level of regularity, it is impossible for you to post all A plus ideas. At the end of the day, maybe I have like five really interesting ideas a year. Does that mean I'm only gonna post five times a year? No. Like, I also think I have decent ideas, fine ideas, good ideas, and just by getting them out into the world, it creates interesting conversation as well. And so I think people just have to be realistic. And I think also what happens is people look at someone like a Nikita beer or a Sam Par, and they see their content and they're like, this person just seems to be like, you know, having banger after banger. One, they don't realize a lot of people do delete posts after it's not performing for a period of time. And the second is that these people have just been doing it for a long time. And like, It's. It's the Mr. Beast thing. Like, you look at the guy after 13 years, of course he's going to look really good. Look at the stuff that he posted when he first started.

The biggest hurdle is like, do you care if you look stupid or not? Like, that is actually the biggest hurdle. It's ego. People are like, I am unwilling to take any risk of looking stupid. And if you look at the people who are really successful, they're like, I really literally don't care if I look stupid. Like, I know Sam Par really well. Sam does not care if he looks stupid. Right. Sam is literally just like, I am me and I'm just gonna do. I'm just gonna be me. And that's okay.

To be a successful entrepreneur, you have to have no shame. Like, in the early days of the business, you would do anything humanly possible to get Someone to be your customer or investor and you got a shit ton of no's. So I don't know where this started that you all of a sudden have shame around putting content on the Internet.

Yeah, yeah. I think I always say, like, content is the one place where you can speed run failure, right? Because for the most part, most of what you put out in the early days will make you feel like everyone thinks you suck because it's right there in front of you that no one's clicking the button to say they like it. And it's like really? It's hard not to just give up really quickly. But nearly every single great content creator I have met were not successful for the first. Like it took four or five years. It's really perseverance, it's really a grind. We had an incredible creator on, Jenny Hoyas, who's a YouTube creator, amazing at shorts and like, like, she was like, hey, for two years I just put content out just to understand the algorithm. I didn't even look at my view count, I didn't even look at my audience count. Like that is the perseverance and the grind you have to commit to.

And, and to be honest on this point, like, people also just focus on the wrong things. Like, again, going back to my goal, if I want to be, say the Lenny for marketing, like, all I care about is that Kip and people like Kip are getting value from my content. And so, so this is something we've always done at story art. But like, when I'm evaluating how I'm performing, I'm not looking at even my engagement rate or I'm not looking my follower growth on its own, I'm looking at, in a given month, when I look at my follower growth on Twitter or LinkedIn, what percentage of my followers are in my IFP or my market of 1. So what percentage of my net new followers are Kip or Kip? Like people. And when I'm looking at, for example, like Twitter, I post this drop marketing thing today, okay? It has. What is it at? It has 102 likes so far. I don't care about that. What I care about is there's 127 bookmarks so far, which means to me that this is referential content that clearly a marketer is going to want to visit later. So I think people just also focus on the wrong things. Like they focus on like the flashy L A shit and not like the, you know, grinding in Brooklyn shit.

Yeah.

Speaking like a true New Yorker, I love that. Alex. Okay, we're we're getting closely to the show. We've covered, we've covered a lot of ground. One of, one last thing I want to kind of double down on because it's related to the, the kind of the drop marketing topic is like people are often unwilling to just go and take known things in a different industry, market, whatever, and just transport them to their own industry, right? Like whether that be media formats, whether that be types of marketing, doesn't matter. Like do you have any other examples, Alex, where like, where you just do that? Because like I do it all the time where I'm just like, oh, I think this thing Netflix is doing great. I'm just going to rip it off and like use it in our marketing all the time.

Like I again I think so this goes to a broader conversation which to me like I have been you know, pounding the drum forever on how the value of curation and like, and stealing and focusing people on the actual good shit only gets more valuable as the search cost on the Internet goes up. Additionally to me, taste gets more and more valuable. Like being a good taste maker on the Internet is like a, an incredibly valuable skill on its own. And so I'll just give you two examples. I have this short form series that I've done now for the last, literally since the pandemic started. 60 second startup, right? Which is where I just like do short form interviews with founders in Madison Square park in New York. That is not a new idea. I literally one day I was taking a dump and I was literally thinking to myself, shark, Shark Tank still has an unbelievable audience on linear tv. Why has a Shark Tank not been created for the digital pipes of the Internet? Like it doesn't make sense to me. Like all that exists is like Shark Tank episodes have been clipped and put on YouTube, but that's it. At the same time I was like, okay, how do I take the, the, the essence of Shark Tank and apply to a format that like our generation or people who are consuming content on IG reels or YouTube shorts or TikTok makes sense to them. One of the most classic formats is man on the street style interviews. Like it is just proven that man on the street style interviews, because they feel casual and authentic, generally perform better than if you were like in a studio. So it's like, why don't I just combine a startup, a Shark Tank style startup pitch with a man on the street? So I go to a, a park in New York and I do it and that's it. And like it was the Combination of a format that the current audience is used to. Because my whole thing is, how do you change behavior of a consumer as little as possible. But bringing in a media format that has existed forever or for a long time, that just hasn't adapted to our generation. By the way, I think there's an opportunity to do this with. Basically, if you go to any TV network, but let's use the example of CNBC. You go to CNBC, you go to your TV right now and you look at all 24 hours of programing, you write down all of the shows that they have, who they serve, and what the premise of the show is. And you ask yourself, is this being done on YouTube? Is this being done on TikTok? Is this being done on IG? There are so many ideas you can just steal from linear and bring to digital.

Yeah, yeah. It's like a good artists copy. Great art, great artist steel. Better, better, better. Artists make better. Like, you know what I mean? There's, you know, that, that, that is like the. Where great ideas come from is the inspiration from something someone's done and then just like tweaking it to figure out how to be different.

Yeah. Again, I, I just think of ourselves as like, as disc jockeys. Like, we have two, two records in front of us. We have two records in front of us that another artist made previously. And the way that I'm like scratching it and like going, whatchoo, Whatchoo. That's the value I'm adding to the audience. Otherwise they would the vinyl to start with.

Right.

Kanye west has had a pretty incredible career. Right. Like, that's kind of what he's done.

Exactly.

Okay. This was, as always, a great conversation, Alex. I think we covered a ton of topics that are very relevant to our audience. I think the audience of one was far and away just the most actionable piece of information. But you also gave folks a ton of things that they could go and take away, like drop marketing. And it's been a fantastic conversation. Thanks for joining and joining us on.

Marketing at the chat.

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