Episode 1 with Alex Lieberman (Co-Founder & CEO of Morning Brew)

Hello everybody. I'm KP, a no-code maker, builder, and the current program director at On Deck No-Code Fellowship. And welcome to Build in Public podcast. So today with me, I have the co-founder and CEO of Morning Brew, the man, the myth, the legend, Alex Lieberman. Welcome to the show, Alex.

Thanks for having me. Pumped to be here.

Awesome. So Alex and I are both unabashedly open about building in public and how big proponents we are about that movement. And, you know, when I thought of putting together a show in 2021 to discuss and have an open conversation around building in public, not just to be a one-sided view on it, to get a full 360, I figured Alex would be the best first guest. So I'm honored he agreed to be here. He also was kind enough to send me some Morning Brew swag along with—

Loving the Brew Neck, loving the mug. You're repping it well.

Right. Look, so it's almost impossible to get my wife to care about my day-to-day work, She's not in no-code, not in tech, but the moment she saw this drop by her, you know, at her doorstep, she was thrilled because she's apparently a secret Morning Brew fan, and she was like so jealous that, you know, you're getting swag. So,

and that now, of course, we need to send her stuff.

But yeah, thank you so much. So, well, I have a few things that I wanted to share with you. I'm just gonna riff mostly, and like I said last night, I'm much more conversational about these things, and I wanted to be in an open floor and authentic, vulnerable conversation. I know that's your forte, so we're not going to get into any formal intros. I'm going to leave some show notes about your bio, Good Morning Brew's, you know, numbers in 2020 and 2021, but I want to start off with like, you know, if you recall, we had a tweet exchange a couple months ago where I tweeted at you and Dom from fast, you know, about a few questions that I keep getting from people on Twitter about building in public, you know, and you were kind enough to reply immediately, like, you know, chime in with your responses, so I'm gonna unpack that a little bit more. Well, for the first question, actually, let me skip the order a little bit. For the first question, I wanted to ask you, when did you discover the magic of building in public? And did you even know at that moment the phrase building in public?

No, I didn't know the phrase building in public. I think I've been building in public actually for a long time.

Right.

Because I think there's a difference between— building in public to me is platform or channel agnostic. So I think I've been building in public, telling people about what I'm doing, successes, my failures in some format since starting Morning Brew in 2015. To me, we talk about building in public and we associate it with Twitter, but it really is anywhere. Building in public is just the act of being vulnerable, the act of pulling back the curtain for people to see what's happening behind the brand. What is the machine that's allowing everything to be built? What are the emotions that a founder goes through? And so I think I've been doing that in some sense, talking about all of these things since starting the business. And I think for me, the reason that I've always done that is kind of twofold. One is from just like a business perspective, and one is a personal perspective. Like, the personal perspective in me is Is I think my default setting is to overshare, and that can be good and it can be bad. But I, I have always been an oversharer, and I think I do it honestly almost as like a, a, uh, a shield or a mechanism of some sort where I think my philosophy has always been, if everyone knows everything about me, they're not gonna have shit on me. Right. Like, that's kind of where it started, was like, if I, if I can arm someone with all the information I know about myself.

Right.

It's gonna all be out in the open. It's all gonna be talked about. And as long as I think I continue to act in my life according to my values, then there won't be things that I'm ashamed of doing. And so to me, it was always a way to like, to almost in a weird way for people who were like haters of me or people who wanted to find ways to take jabs at what we were building. In a weird way, it was a way that I found strength in disarming them, because if I give them all the information about myself that I know, then it's almost like you're a boxer, and you don't give the person enough distance to throw a punch, so the punch can never land. Like, that's part of how

I

thought.

Muhammad Ali's like, you know, epic— You know,

yeah, exactly. And, and so I think that was the personal perspective, is just give people all the information. Like, it's like, show people there's literally nothing to hide and you have everything that I have. And I think the second piece of it from the business perspective is over time I just found more and more when I was being interviewed by people, when I was interviewing people, that people just wanted to know like the backstory and what's happening behind the scenes. Right.

Behind

the scenes. And I think people, like, there's a reason that backstage passes at concerts sell for a shit ton of money. It's like, people love being voyeuristic. They love being, feeling like they are able to cut the line at the club when it's around a club that they're really passionate about or an artist at a concert that they're really passionate about. And so I think this idea has been there for a while. And I think I've just tried to think about how can I actually emulate that for people. So that's one piece is like people like behind the scenes. And the final piece is, I think, as much as, you know, mental health and things like therapy have been, I would say, less stigmatized in the last 5 years, I still think there's so much work to be done where people still feel incredibly uncomfortable with showing weakness With talking about their mental health, with talking about the things that stress them out, that make them anxious, that make them feel weak. And I think there's so much opportunity there to, to talk about it. And what I found for myself is while it was hard in the beginning, now it's like my default setting is to talk about some of the things that I suck at, suck at the things that cause me anxiety. And that's kind of my hope is to unlock that for other people.

So one of the, you know, side effects of forcing yourself to build in public or think about, you know, storytelling in public, you know, is, I think, you know, I wonder how you feel about this, but I think the amount of time that, you know, during the day that I pause once in a while, catch myself once in a while, has gone up. So the mindfulness side of this has gone up, and I'm reflecting a lot, which is crazy, you know, and you could not, like, I'm hyperactive, you could not get me to sit 5 minutes and do meditation, which anyway, I somehow like fortunately developed that habit, which is funny, but I think because now thinking about like, what have I learned in the last 7 days, in the last 24 hours, you know, and it makes me reflect almost on default every day. Now, how do you deal with this? Like, is this something you see?

Yeah, I think it's a great point. And to me, this is, by the way, I think the positive side of building public and sometimes the negative side of building personal brand. And what I mean by that is I think the positive is, to your point, it makes you hyper-aware of all the things you do because what you realize is all of the mundane shit that you do in a day that you find mundane, you realize other people won't find mundane. Mundane. So from literally like us being on this Zoom and the stack of things that you used in order to record your first podcast to, you know, the act of me making coffee before this interview and my routine of when I'm going to grab my coffee in between meetings and why I made the decision to do so. Like, it sounds so non-needle-moving, but I think people find it interesting because it allows people to connect.

What's obvious to you may not be obvious to millions of people. And so my Twitter game completely changed when I discovered that fact, and it turned into a playground. I mean, I know you do this too. I literally just play. I have fun on Twitter. I don't even care for numbers. I don't even ever look at analytics. So while for the fine folks who are listening to this, I literally taught Alex Lieberman, the CEO of Morning Brew, something new this morning, which is I shared that There's this app called Grain, shout out grain.co, and he found out about it, and we were talking about this before starting the podcast, and I think there's something about, Alex, I know you have the same personality too, around like, I'm hyper-curious, right? Like every day, I don't care where the source of knowledge is coming from, I just want it, you know? So somebody teaching me something new, I get super excited, and immediately want to pass it on, and I bet you there's millions of people who haven't heard of XYZ, Totally. Tools or frameworks.

Yeah.

Why are you recording is my point here. Yeah.

I mean, so there's a few things here. One is I think that in a lot of ways, I say that my restless brain is both a gift and a curse. And what I mean by that is I think it's a gift because I'm always thinking. I'm always thinking of new ways to serve our users, new ideas of content we can create, new things to create on social, and then totally different things from that. Yesterday, I was talking with Darren Rovell, who's a big sports name, and he was talking me through just the boom that's happening in the memorabilia industry with sports cards, but he collects all this other stuff. And my brain was going wild of like, Is there a way to actually unlock memorabilia for companies, like the first doorknob of the first Airbnb that was used? Can you actually turn that into an artifact that is something that accrues value?

You know that picture, a photograph of Jeff Bezos working in this crappy-looking room? I wonder if any of those objects would be gold.

Exactly, exactly, like the door that he was working on as a desk, or like, The first Uber ride, could we print out a receipt and get it signed by Travis Kalanick and the driver of the Uber at the time? Anyway, it's just fascinating thinking about just new ways of thinking. I would say the downside for me is you can't pick and choose when your brain is going to be on versus off, or it's very difficult. That's where mindfulness comes into it. by nature, by design, a particularly anxious person who has OCD. And like, that also eats away at me sometimes. And, and it's one of those things where it's like, it sucks, because, you know, anyone who suffers from anxiety or OCD, like, it's not an enjoyable experience. But it's also one of those things that I almost— I wouldn't just get rid of it, because I love the way in which my brain operates 90% of the time. And I do think there are things like mindfulness and exposure therapy and cognitive behavioral therapy that allow you to quiet your brain when you want to and get more control over it. But I would say that is the double-edged sword of having the always-on brain. Right. The one thing I was going to say about the downside of being hyper-aware of your experience and understanding that every part of your experience is something interesting to someone is that I will say, like, for me still, it is an absolute grind to focus myself outside of social media for extended periods of time. Like, I, like, I am addicted to Twitter and it's not a good thing. Like, I think it's a good thing that I've shared openly on Twitter, but when it comes to discipline around it, I'm not super disciplined. And this is where, like, I see one of the downsides of building in public is because there's endless amounts of content. It means there's endless amounts of opportunities in a day to go on Twitter and post and comment and reply and retweet. I think for me, a balance there is something that I need to strike.

It's so fascinating you mentioned that, because Twitter is to me— the way I look at Twitter is it's a learning academy. It's a free MBA, you know, I know you have an MBA product in the pipeline, or you probably launched it, but Twitter to me is like a free peer-to-peer learning academy. You learn from the best minds in the world who are willfully choosing their techniques and mindsets, but at the same time, it's the ultimate FOMO machine if you are someone who likes to be everywhere, wants to know everything, and wants to do everything, right? Because there's so many CTAs floating around on Twitter, like,

You

think about newsletters, there's like one CTA at the bottom and you're like, that's a conversion, but on Twitter everything is CTA. It's an engagement, you know, eggshell landmine, like everywhere. So you have to strike that balance, you're right, you know, and the technique that I use and has worked for me is dedicating, just like with email, 30-40 minutes set on my calendar saying that this is my intentional Twitter time where I'm gonna produce. And every time I get meeting breaks or whatever, I'm going to do reactions, like somebody tags me, and that's all mindless, just simple reactions.

But what do you do during the day when you're in a meeting and you have an idea for something that you want to tweet?

I actually have started putting it in my Apple Notes, and then like I said, the 30-minute block that I have is when I go to the notes and I put it out there. Sometimes I actually type it up, In a new window, and then save as a draft. Yep, makes sense. But like, you're right, I mean, there's— it's an idea fountain, you know, and I'm actually shocked at the people who say that they don't have enough ideas to work on, I'm like, I have the opposite problem, I have too many ideas, especially with the no-code movement, you know that you can build an MVP for many of these ideas, you know, at least to a 90% accuracy of what you want, it blows your mind because you're like, oh my God, I can build this. Now I'm like super tempted, but you have to strike that balance. All right, okay, so moving through this, okay, let's talk about the building in public movement in general, and I know there's so many amazing voices here. Who are some people who inspired you in the past about building in public before that thing was a Was taking off, like,

yeah. So I would say 10

years

ago, uh, I mean, to be totally honest with you, I've only been on Twitter— I've only been active on Twitter in the last year. So like, I only really started tweeting in the beginning, uh, beginning to middle of 2020. Before that, I wasn't on Twitter. Like, I honestly— what happened was, uh,

how were we

Yeah, it's wild that it wasn't part of my life before. And what happened was Austin, my co-founder, he ended up on Twitter. I don't know what originally drove him to be on Twitter, but he—

He's a baller, by the way. Shout out. That man is a machine.

Yeah, no, Austin's awesome. And he has amazing Twitter humor. The way that he leverages just his wit and what I would call his Larry David humor, Austin is the definition of dry humor. It just lands so well.

Can I ask you who hired Toby? Because I feel like he's in many ways aligned with Austin's humor. Was it

Austin? No. So what happened was Toby was already on Twitter. He had like 100 followers when he was in— what? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. He had like 100 followers. He wasn't at the company yet. He was in his first job out of school at a company in— I believe it was in Massachusetts. And he had followed— there were— he wanted to get into media. I believe he was following us. He was following Barstool and he was following, I think, Axios. And a lot of times, you know, when someone wants a job at your company, because it's when they start hyper-engaging with people at your company. So he was hyper-engaging with Austin, he was hyper-engaging with myself, he was hyper-engaging with Morning Brew, and he applied to be a newsletter writer. Like, even still, Toby's not 100% full-time on social media.

Wow.

Yeah. So, so Toby was hired as a newsletter writer at Morning Brew the way that he applied was like how any other writer applies, which is just write this application. But to us, the most telling thing is you have to write basically a Morning Brew story as a writing assignment. And within a sentence to 2 sentences, we are able to tell whether this person makes sense or not for the role.

Yeah.

And Toby was one of those people. He was someone who could balance information with storytelling and tone. And I think truly creating edutainment for an audience. Everyone uses that word, but I don't think everyone is good at it. He was exceptional at it. And then I actually can't remember if he started working on our Twitter account right when he started or not, but it was just like you started seeing some of the content he was putting out and you're just like, he just gets it. Yeah. He has just such an innate ability to strike this balance of Providing information with doing so in a way that other people weren't thinking about it, but leaves you with a reaction that causes you to leave a reaction on the tweet.

Drawing engagement, but in a healthy way. It's just being witty. I think he, you know, I'm insanely envious of his gift.

Yeah, he's amazing.

Right.

Yeah. I think the biggest thing for him, honestly, in developing him is he has so much ambition. He wants to grow so fast. If you think about it, he has grown so fast. The Morning Brew Twitter account started 2020 with 20,000 followers. It's at 120,000 followers now with no one spending their full-time job on it. For most of the year, it was Toby spending 40% of his time on it, and so it's pretty remarkable to think about. And you also think about like how he's become like the social strategist/guru in the last year, and now he has 16.3 thousand followers after joining the company less than a year ago.

Okay, that's insane. Anyway, I may. I have to bring him on the podcast. You should.

He would love it.

All right. So we were talking about who inspired you the most in the early days.

Yes. So I would say that for me, when I joined the platform, the people that stick out in my mind that I was like, wow, they're incredible at putting out content, is David Perell. He was number one. I didn't know who David Perell was. The way I originally found out about him was through the articles he was writing on his site. Read his articles and then just started seeing the absolute content machine he was. I think he was the first one to codify how Twitter is an engine for serendipity, how in a lot of ways, Twitter is a better networking platform than LinkedIn is. Yeah. If you actually think about the connections that you get through creating content on the platform. So I would say David Perell for sure. And then there are other people that don't have as large of followings, but I think that have been really, really good about building in public and talking open and honestly. One of the people is this guy, Dicky Bush. Yeah. So Dicky Bush, Yeah, not a huge following. He has like 4,500 followers, but he talks a lot about just the community, writing, and growth. What I love about it is this is the, what I would say, non-professional side of Dickie. Dickie in his day job, I'm actually talking to him in an hour. Dickie in his day— He's a

finance guy, isn't he?

Yeah, yeah. Dickie in his day job is an investor at, I think, BlackRock. But he just loves creating content and he's the definition of intellectual curiosity and doing one more thing each day to improve himself. And by the way, that's how you had mentioned earlier Atomic Essays. The Atomic Essays that I wrote were through a program that Dickie Bush started called Ship 30 for 30. And I found out about that through following Dickie and just his ability to share openly on the platform.

That's lovely. Yeah. Well, Dick is amazing. I had a chat with him a few months ago. We had a one-on-one chat and this was before Ship 30 for 30. And he had been saying that he wanted to do something in writing as a group, as an accountability, you know, group. And then, you know, it was great to watch that come to life through Ship 30.

Yeah, he's awesome.

So, all right, here's a fun question. How would you define what building in public is to your mom?

I would say building in public is giving my mom, making my mom a fly on the wall throughout my day. So literally, if my mom was a fly buzzing around my office right now, lands on the wall and just sits there for hours. That's what building in public is. It's my mom as the fly on the wall sees everything I see. And obviously it's not with a— there's no way to make building in public 100% transparent. There are things you can't talk about in public that we could talk more about. But I would say it's an 80% vantage point from a fly on the wall of what's happening That no one else sees.

Right. I love that. I love that. Also, shout out to Alex's mom, who roasted him for a while on Twitter.

Yeah, exactly. She's— if anyone wants to follow Stacy Lieberman, she's Queen of the Brew is her handle. And yeah, she's been my chief of staff for a while. She's been involved in the Brew for a long time, like literally in the early days of the Brew. She was the person responsible for packing envelopes, packing swag, sending it out, writing the shipping labels for each person. And it's crazy to think that she was doing that because now we have like literally an entire like factory that does it. But yeah, she's been involved throughout and it's awesome. It's great to have someone you trust working through your emails and your calendar because— There's just stuff that only someone you trust can see and work with. But it's also awesome to see, like, for her, it brings such joy and fulfillment.

She's a true founder mom then. Okay. I certainly hope that she'll watch this episode. If not, I'll make sure that I'll send her a DM. All right. So another actually really interesting question. I know a lot of people are thinking about this. About Morning Brew and about you. So you encourage a lot of your employees at Morning Brew to build in public as well, which first of all, I think is dope. In what ways do you think it'll benefit them and the Morning Brew brand?

Yeah. So I mean, the way I think it benefits our employees is it makes them more marketable in the marketplace. Like to me, the best case scenario, I was saying this to our senior leadership team yesterday, The best-case scenario is where the frequency of them being hit up by people for jobs skyrockets. To me, if I can build with Austin Morning Brew into a true career accelerator, I think we've done our jobs effectively because I think what that means is we have helped to develop great people who add value to our company. And my view is that it's then on Austin and I to like do our part in retaining employees. Right. And by the way, I don't think that just means like paying them more because like what you find is like, yes, obviously money is important, but also so much of an employee's happiness obviously comes down to things like the mission, the values, their manager. Do they, do they like their manager? Do they not? Do they like the substance of their work or not? And so,

even the employee, like how much control do they have in their job? Yeah,

yeah, exactly. And so to me, the benefit for employees is that it acts as a career accelerant for them. You know, the Twitter, like your Twitter brand, your LinkedIn brand, your Instagram brand, it's like, it's your new resume. It's your new printout resume. And I say this all the time, but I think like having a blue checkmark I would take over an MBA any day of the week. Right. So that's the positive. What is the negative? Or what's the positive for the business? I think at the end of the day, it's like a rising tide lifts all boats. When we have not just the Morning Brew handle on Twitter posting, but we have Devin, our new employee, posting on Twitter that she's joined the Brew, and she doesn't just get a retweet from Morning Brew, but she gets a retweet from Morning Brew, Austin, myself, Kinsey, and five other members of the team. It's like one just purely from a social media like infrastructure perspective. More people are going to see it. It's also going to make Devin feel more validated in starting at the company because it's not just like oh like Alex and Austin telling Morning Brew's social manager to retweet. her. It's like everyone is doing it in their own volition. And so I think at the end of the day, it's like the example I'll use is Barstool. And while not everyone aligns with their content, I think everyone has to at least have an appreciation for their content strategy, meaning you see like how much they have just like— they exist everywhere.

Yeah.

They exist everywhere, not just because of the amount of content they're creating, but because of their ability for all of their personalities to cross-promote one another. Right. I think what we're doing differently is we're breaking the fourth wall and we're not just saying, hey, Alex, who has Founders Journal, and Kinsey, who has Business Casual, and XYZ personality who's launching a show in the future, build yourself up. But it's also like, hey, Jenna and Scott, who are salespeople at Morning Brew, why don't you talk about what it's like to actually be a seller and grow with a sales organization. Kate, who runs HR and people at Morning Brew, why don't you talk about how you build an HR team and how you've scaled a company from— or scaled with a company from 26 people to 65 people? So to me, it's like I haven't seen anyone arm the rebels on the non-personality side.

Yeah. I mean, the incredible thing is everyone, especially a fast-growing company, fast-growing startup, has an interesting story to tell.

Yep.

It doesn't— I think the trap is people like immediately imagine that, oh my God, they're gonna out all the secrets, or open the public company files, no one's asking to do that. We're talking about, take your day-to-day, look at the 5 things you do, and what are some lessons other people can learn from this? One, that's my style, and that's your style, Or Toby style, which is like, what are the 5 silly things that happen as part of your job? You just have to do it, right? Totally. And that's the witty, that's the funny side. And both of these things work because people want entertainment sort of thing, like you said the other time, the other day.

I mean, and so to that point, it may— and I don't know if this is one of your questions, but it may just be helpful to talk about like, what are the potential downsides of this?

Can we get to that? So I have a specific question around it. It says, What do you see as the downsides of building in public? Because that's a hot question from Twitter.

Yeah. So I will tell you what I think people say are the downsides, and then I'll tell you whether I think they make sense or not.

Do you want me to prompt you? Because I got 4 prompts about those 4 downsides.

Yeah. Why don't you prompt me?

First one, competitors stealing Playbooks and plans from you.

Yeah. So what I'll say is, I think one, people overestimate stealing of things, at least as a media company, right? I can't talk on the behalf of a pharmaceutical company or a technology company where true upfront massive fixed cost IP is needed for a business. So what I'm not talking about are those businesses because I don't know nearly enough to say whether, like, you know, talking about that in public would be a mistake. My guess is yes. But what I'll also say is, like, I think when, when people think about building in public, they think it's 0 or 100. Like, there, there. Yeah, there are things that we are doing at Morning Brew that we're going to be launching in the next 6 months that we haven't talked about yet on, on Twitter.

Right.

Part of, part of it is we, you know, we want we don't want to talk about it. We want to build up anticipation for it, but also the other thing is that we want to make sure it launches and that things materialize before we set the expectation that something is going to happen. So I think that's the part of it is, it is a spectrum. People treat building in public as binary. I'm not sharing 100% of what's happening behind the scenes of the company. Right. I'm not sharing my conversations with individual employees. I'm not sharing exactly what we're launching each quarter, but that doesn't mean I'm not building in public. And so I think that that's a big distinction.

Okay. The second prompt I got is, um, well, you'll look dumb or embarrassed or ashamed when what you said didn't work when you said it in public.

Yeah. So to me, that's a strength. Like,

I think that's— I was going to say, that's, that's actually a good thing.

Yeah.

You got to erase that shit.

Yeah. I think it's, first of all, I think people, human beings have short memories. So 90% of, I think if you go back and you look at Gary Vee's content, and I love Gary Vee, he's a genius on social.

Huge fan.

I think if you go back and actually look at all of the predictions he's made, like you literally go back into his feed, you'll find so much stuff that he said is probably wrong.

Right.

And I think that's almost one of the beauties of social media for people who call things out is it's impossible to find old content or it's like really difficult. You really have to go through the effort of doing that. And so I think it actually creates this, this weird barrier where like people are hooked on your content in the now. But not hooked on the things you say for a year. In a year, the things that people will be hooked on what you say are the things you're saying in a year. Right. By the way, that is the genius of people who make predictions or make calls, is a year from now, they will call out the 2 or 3 things that they were right about and resurface them, because they will do the work to find their old posts of the things that they were right about.

Right.

So I think that's one thing is like,

right,

it is that people, people like have short memories. They're not going to remember every prediction. Like, I'm going to say something on this podcast that is a prediction. Hypothetically, people are not going to be thinking about that a year from now when they're consuming Alex Lieberman's content. So that is the first thing. But the second thing is, to their original point, I don't think it's a bad thing. Like, if hypothetically, like, I actually think Just like Gary Vee calling out that he called the Instagram acquisition before it happened, I think there's equal strength in saying, I called this. I thought this was going to happen. This was a view of where I thought the world was going. It didn't go there. I was wrong. First of all, by saying you're wrong, it disarms people, makes you more vulnerable. It actually brings you down to earth and you're human. But I think actually there's something fascinating in doing a postmortem. like a decision journal to say, okay, I was wrong, but less about what happened and more about when I made this decision at this time, when I had this point of view at the time, what didn't I know or what did I not think about that now I want to call out? And to me, that adds texture to like you being a really thoughtful person.

Right. Love that. And the final— well, the final prompt is, Good in public doesn't work because the people who show interest in your content are not the ones who are paying for your products.

Okay, so my understanding of this is that the people who show interest in your content are not the ones—

Right, who are part of the brand may not be paying customers, but I think that's the price of business, isn't it? It's just like, that's funnels. That's just how funnels work.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's what I was just gonna say is like, at the end of the day, you know, even if 1 out of every 50 people that are engaging with our built-in public content ends up turning into a paying customer, the— it's good. But also it's the type of thing, because our product is a free product right now, it's not 1 in 50. It's gonna be significantly higher because the friction to be a customer is going to morningbrew.com and putting in an email address. And so I guess my view would be like, if the argument that's being made there is like, this isn't an effective use of your time, I guess I would ask like, what companies have been around for 50 years that haven't built up their brand? Like how many companies, how many longstanding companies in the world exist that haven't done a significant amount of work

That's an interesting perspective. I mean, there's not a lot that can stay that long, right?

Yeah. And this goes into the question of like, you know, when does it make sense to invest in brand versus not? To me, right now, we're not investing money in Morning Brew's brand. We're investing time. And I think investing time is worth it because again, the—

It's cheaper.

It's cheaper. The, the ways that we benefit from investing in our brand on Twitter. Like, people think about it too myopically if they think we're just expecting subscribers. What about ad deals? What about potential partnerships? What about learning about new ways to create content that would make us better for our customers?

What about hiring? You're getting— Yes. Pipeline of people.

Exactly.

All right, so a couple questions from the audience from yesterday when we put it out. question for you. If you were starting fresh with no following popularity, how would you go about building a brand on social today?

Yeah. I think what I would do, and when you ask that question, are you saying, are you asking also what platform I would do it on?

Well, Twitter.

Okay.

So From Diego. And so let me rephrase this. If magically everything went away and you were like a guy on Twitter today, brand new, you were like Toby on Twitter today, what would you do about growing a brand?

Yep, I would do exactly what Sahil Bloom is doing.

Sahil Bloom writing Threads?

Yep.

The man is a machine.

Yeah, so I did my first Thread last week.

I

think it led to 600 new followers. The first thread took me probably 3 hours to write, but to me, it's like combine building in public vulnerability and being a smarter builder with Threads. So for example, a thread that I'm currently working on right now in— by the way, the best website to do Threads is Chirr, C-H-I-R-R.

I'm a paying member. I'm paying customers. Get chirr.app.

Yeah, I love it. And so for example, right now, The next thread I'm working on is the art of the speech. So it's the art of the speech. Why are some speeches so much better than the rest? Why are they so moving, so powerful, so clear and relatable? Here are the 5 keys to a killer speech. And so my view is I would create threads that storytell and I would make it utility or service content. So something that you walk away with where you feel like as you're reading it, you're writing your own notes down.

Right. You know, there's also another— now that you mentioned threads, you know, first of all, I think that's an open secret. Everybody who is big on Twitter constantly reminds everyone that the way to get followers is either through controversy, right, or write quality threads.

Yeah, and people just don't spend the time on it. That's why I think it's going to continue to be an opportunity, is because they take a lot of time and research.

Yeah, it does. All right, so I'm going to skip to the other question from Regina. Shout out Regina from On Deck. So she goes, how do you feel like building in public contributed to Morning Brew's success with gaining market share in an outdated industry like news? Of course, I think— well, I want to— yeah, go on.

Yeah. So I mean, my view is I actually don't think it's just a media thing. I think any company should be building in public because I think any company needs to be an audience company. Even a B2B company, I've seen incredible B2B companies build affinity through creating great content by effectively building media engines. And so what I would say is we live in a digital age where anyone that has internet connection and a device can create content, means there's more content than ever. It means that people expect more custom experiences more than ever, and it means that people expect to hear from other people more than ever. And so to me, it's like, this is our generation's version of just like, I don't know, I'm trying to think of an example, but like in the old days, hypothetically, Rockefeller being like the face of— Rockefeller's business. It's like what used to be building, bringing a face or a name to a brand by going on radio and the newspapers and TV. Nothing has changed. It's just easier than ever to do it, to, to, yeah, to put faces in front of a brand. And so to me, like, I, I don't think I actually don't think it's a new concept, but I think it's just understanding that human beings, at our cores, there's a few just core needs we have, and one is just human connection, feeling connected to other people. Someone can only feel so connected to a logo and a name of a company. Yeah. Someone can feel very connected to a first name and a last name, who writes something that you resonate with. And maybe it comes from like our early days when we were cave people, and by being connected with other cave people provided us safety so we didn't get killed by predators. But it's like connection is, I would say, forever important.

Yeah, yeah. Love it. Love it. Well, I think we're almost at the end of the time we have. I want to pause here and unwind a little bit, and then, you know, thank you, Alex, for, you know, for some insightful answers. Of course. One of my favorite parts about spending time with you is that, you know, you're so authentic, and, you know, I hope you get this all the time. You should get this all the time. I think it is also another incredible, you know, factor that is a muscle that I've realized that you can develop through building in public is being more and more authentic, you know, Because people talk about how they're not able to build deep relationships and they're like, oh, why am I? The answer is yeah, because we're not being authentic, you know? And when you're authentic, it speaks to the other person, you know, it speaks to the deeper needs of the other person and you build a connection even in like seconds.

Yeah. And what I'll say there is like, I think one, it's just like, it takes a lot of work to not be authentic. Like, it's a lot.

Right.

Yeah. It's, it's work to be something other than yourself. So it's tiring. And by the way, I just think like from a business perspective, authenticity is an unlock for other authenticity, right? Like even in the world in which in business, knowing more information is valuable, like knowing more about other businesses and what's happening behind the scenes, right? Like, it's almost like the secret unlock is being authentic and vulnerable. The more I share about what's happening behind the scenes at Morning Brew, what our revenue was last year, what it is this here, what the biggest pain points are, it literally is a magnet for a surge of information from others.

Right. And authentic information. So you get signal over noise.

Exactly.

I think a lot of it is, you get what you put out in many ways.

Exactly.

So if you put out that kind of energy and vibe, you generally are attracting that kind of people, you know, and then partly is the reason why I chose you as the first guest, you know, because it was the vibe that I was getting, and this is something that I believe with the core of my heart, and it was just an easy fit. Thank you.