My New Business

Alex: What's up, everyone? Welcome back to another episode of Founder’s Journal, my personal diary made public for the world. I'm Alex Lieberman, co-founder and chairman of Morning Brew, and co-founder and chairman of Storyarb. Today I am talking about my journey of building a new business after leaving the CEO role of Morning Brew. And just a heads up, as many of you already know, we've been doing this podcast once a week in the month of April, but starting in May, we are relaunching the podcast with a new format based on all of the feedback that I have gotten from and read from listeners over the last few months. We are incredibly excited about where this podcast is going. More on that next week. So make sure to listen to next week's episode, which previews the new format. But until then, enjoy my thoughts and musings about my  new business, post stepping out of the day-to-day of Morning Brew. Let's do it. 

Okay, so if you listen to the last episode of Founder’s Journal, I talked a lot about the decision to step out of the CEO role in April of 2021, why it was one of the most difficult decisions of my life, why the six to 12 months after making that decision were some of the hardest of my life, but also why it was the right decision and I have no regrets having made it.

I want to talk about my new business, Storyarb, and I wanna talk about what we do, some of the biggest lessons that I've learned, pivots we've made along the way. But I think it is important to provide context on how I arrived at the business, because I think that could be as valuable as sharing my insights around the business itself. So let me give you some context. 

As I mentioned last episode, you know, for, let's call it six months after stepping out of the CEO role, I felt incredibly lost. I had lost motivation, I had lost a sense of identity, who Alex was outside of being the CEO of Morning Brew, I had lost my purpose, and I lost my confidence. I didn't feel like I was a good entrepreneur. I felt like I had succeeded because of luck. I didn't know what my abilities were. All I could focus on were my deficiencies, and why those deficiencies led me to no longer being in a position where I could be the best CEO of the business. And you know, one of the ways that I got out of this rut that I know a lot of founders, athletes, people who have their entire identity attached to one thing, experience in their life, is I started reflecting on what the greatest moments in my journey building Morning Brew were. And what I did is I basically wrote down all of these moments. And so I'll give you a few examples of moments I wrote down. 

I wrote down the time where I was pitching Morning Brew at a JPMorgan marketing super day where I basically, they had lined up eight different media companies to pitch them on their capabilities. And I walked out of the meeting after I pitched, and the CMO of JPMorgan was like, “You just crushed every company that was in there.” And that made me feel good and skillful and you know, proud of what we had built with Morning Brew. I remember, you know, one of my greatest moments was in hiring our early employees and kind of figuring out how we were gonna grow the business, how we were gonna make our content better. I remember being super excited when we built out our ambassador program and expanding it to 200 different college campuses. And so I wrote down, let's call it like eight of these moments. And what I realized about all eight of them is all of these moments happened in the first four years of the business. And that's not a coincidence. I believe that I generally just gravitate toward the early days of a company when a company feels like family. Not that it is a family, but it feels more like family, where you get to know everyone really deeply at a personal, at a professional level, where you see people growing really quickly as the business grows. Where building the business feels a lot more like art than it does science. And I think also the early days of the business very much lean into my two or three unique talents, being storytelling and sales. You know, finding young, early-career talent and also figuring out how to grow something organically and also will a product into existence. I think I am kind of relentless in the early days of a business, and I think being relentless creates momentum, and momentum is literally the most important thing in any stage of a company, but especially the early days. 

And so after I did this exercise and I was like, okay, I clearly love the early days of business more, what I then said to myself was, how do I put myself back in the trenches? How do I get back to being an early stage builder? Because that's clearly what filled me up in building Morning Brew. And so, you know, the way that I thought about it was, it's funny, at first it became such a cliche, but like everyone is building holding companies these days, or personal venture studios; basically a lot of people are trying to do this thing where rather than being the CEO of one business, they want to be the CEO of a holding company. Meaning they have a portfolio of businesses, they have CEOs that run each of those businesses, but then they sit on top of that. So a good example is my friend Jesse Pujji; he has a holding company called GatewayX. He has three or four businesses that sit under GatewayX. So for example, he has GrowthAssistant, which is offshore marketing assistants. Adriane is his CEO for that business. He's the co-founder and chairman, but he's not the CEO. So he is not running the day to day. And I thought that was a really interesting concept because I was like, I don't know if I can just work on one thing for the next eight to 10 years. You know, after working on Morning Brew for that long, I was like, you know, maybe if there's something I'm so passionate about and feels like my calling, maybe then I'd be like, I'm committed to this thing for the long haul. But until that point, honestly, my view is I love the early stages. I love the feeling of growth and satiating my curiosity and tinkering and building really, really smart, skillful teams. And I don't necessarily want to be constrained to a single business to do that. 

And so I think from day one, after I kind of got that holding company concept in my head, I was like, okay, whatever I launch first, I want to bring on a co-founder who's gonna be the CEO of this business so that the business, if we do it the right way, can operate without me. And so fast forward, I remember, I can't remember the exact thought that happened, but basically I think what had happened was I was scrolling through Twitter one day and I saw that there were a lot of entrepreneurs that had just started short form video agencies. Like it became this very sexy thing for entrepreneurs to launch, where basically if you are someone who wants to, let's just say take a long form podcast or talk you did and turn it into short form video clips on TikTok, Instagram reels, and YouTube shorts. There were a bunch of entrepreneurs who were spinning up agencies that had a bunch of offshore talented video editors in the Philippines, in India, in other places in South America. And you could basically send your long form video to them and they would chop it up into these really engaging short form video clips. 

And so I was looking at a lot of these agencies spinning up and I thought to myself, that's cool, but I fear those agencies are going to be super commoditized because they're very easy to spin up. I worried that retention of customers wouldn't be high because it would be hard for customers who are, let's say, paying $3,000 a month to actually understand, what is the ROI of putting videos on TikTok or Instagram reels? Like it's hard to connect it to revenue or some, you know, tangible metric within your business. And what I also thought to myself is, it's funny, there's like all this sexiness around video platforms right now and short form video. And it was, I think largely because TikTok was blowing up and it was really exciting at the time, and I thought, there isn't necessarily enough love for the text-based platforms, whether it's Twitter, LinkedIn, like any text-first platform, and I've always been someone who believes both the written word is incredibly powerful and it's actually one of the best ways to build an intimate connection with your audience.

But also I think, when I was looking at entrepreneurs who have used their audience online to drive a lot of business opportunities, whether it's investors, customers, et cetera, all the examples in my head came from Twitter or LinkedIn. And so I was like, I think customers of a, you know, Twitter or LinkedIn ghostwriting business would actually be able to see results way easier than a short form video customer. And so then I had the thought where I was like, what if I create a Twitter and LinkedIn ghostwriting agency and give entrepreneurs the same opportunity that I have had on Twitter, where you know, I built up my Twitter audience to 250,000 followers. I've gotten tons of customers, business opportunities, speaking engagements, et cetera from this. But a lot of entrepreneurs either don't have the time to do that or they don't have the skill set, because being a great writer is different than being a great business owner. And so I was like, okay, I'm gonna spin up this ghostwriting agency. 

And so the first thing I did, and this is just how I think, I'm very much like a scrappy bootstrapped style founder. And when I say bootstrapped style, I mean like I'm just trying to figure out what is the cheapest possible way that I can accomplish my goals. And so I just thought to myself, I'm gonna put a post out and I'm gonna see if other founders and CEOs have interest in being paired with a ghostwriter who will help them create content on their Twitter and LinkedIn to ultimately build an audience online.

And so I remember my post and I'll try to find it and link to it in the show notes, but the post was something along the lines of, “If you're a founder and executive and you want to build an audience on Twitter or LinkedIn, you don't have the skills or the time to do it yourself, and you're willing to pay $5,000 to $10,000 a month to do this, shoot me a DM.” And I ended up getting like 20 DMs from founders, which was sick, because then I was like, okay, I have customers and clearly they're qualified, because I indicated in the tweet that you'd have to pay $5,000 to $10,000. So then I was like, okay, I need writers, because I'm not gonna do the writing for all of these customers. So the next day I posted saying, “Hey writers, I have a dozen founders and CEOs who want help building their personal brand on Twitter and LinkedIn, and they need ghostwriting help. Apply to be a ghostwriter for them here.” I spun up a quick application where people would do a quick writing assignment, share their portfolio, et cetera, and I got, I wanna say 150 applications, and I whittled it down to you know, the best writer. And it's actually someone who I had known prior and my whole thought was like, with these early customers, I'm not gonna try to make money on this business. This is a long game; I'm gonna just try to learn as much as possible what I can do to support both clients getting a really valuable experience with their ghostwriter, and ghostwriter so they could focus their time on writing and not other back office or business related things. 

And so what I literally did is I asked the ghostwriter, how much would you charge for five posts a week, and how much would you charge for that on a monthly basis? I think originally he said $3,000. I went back to my first customer; I said it's gonna be $3,000 a month. So I didn't take any profit, I was just passing through the cost of the ghostwriter to the client. And then I created a Slack channel where it was ghostwriter, myself, and the client, and I basically said to the ghostwriter, I want you to manage this client like you manage any of your clients right now. I'm just gonna observe and watch this process. And so I was watching to basically see what are things that the ghostwriter is doing that I could take off their plate if I owned a business, an agency to do this. And then for the client I was looking out for, what are process improvements that the ghostwriter isn't doing right now that could make their experience better working with a writing agency?

And so I did this for a month or two and I started understanding things that I can help the ghostwriter with, everything from me doing interviews with clients so the ghostwriter didn't have to take time to meet with the client, and they could focus on writing, or me invoicing the client and then sending that payment to the ghostwriter, or me scheduling the social posts for the client so the ghostwriter doesn't have to do it. And so I started getting a feel for what are the things as a business I could do to make kind of both of my customers, ghostwriter and client, their lives easier and their experience better? 

I started bringing on more clients and as I did that, I started charging those clients $5,000 instead of $3,000. So I would make $2,000 per month per client, and my goal was to get enough cash flow for this business so then my next step would be hire a co-founder and a CEO for the business. But I wanted to have enough cash flow such that I could pay enough to a co-founder and CEO so that I wouldn't have to pull out of my own personal bank account. And I wanted enough traction with the business so that I could attract a really good co-founder and CEO, because if we had no traction, it would be really hard to attract a really good person to run the business. 

So I wanna say I got to like eight clients. So let's just say that was, you know, we're at like $30,000 to $35,000 a month in monthly revenue. Let's just say we are profiting like $10,000 a month, and I then I put out on Twitter or LinkedIn saying, “Hey, this is where we're at with Storyarb, this is how many clients we have, this is how much revenue we have. I'm looking for a co-founder and CEO to run the business now.”

I ended up getting, and I included an application, I got 70 applications, went through all of them, seven people I thought could be a good fit for the business. I ended up hopping on calls with all seven people, and then there was one person who I thought could be really good. This person, her name is Abby, and she is my co-founder and is the CEO of Storyarb today. At the time I thought she could be really good because she had run her own marketing agency for a long time and it was not copywriting or writing focused. So I knew I could bring that expertise and help her there. But she had run a design agency for a lot of customers that I could see also being customers of Storyarb, which is what we ended up naming the business.

I could also tell from our conversation that she still had a chip on her shoulder, like she felt like she still had something to prove as an entrepreneur. And I think that is one of the greatest motivators. I am always looking for people who have chips on their shoulder and really want to prove something to the world and prove to themselves that they have a wild amount of potential. 

And so I interviewed Abby, we had some more discussions, and then what I decided to do, and I don't think I've ever seen this done, but it just made sense to me, is we basically did a freelance to full-time arrangement where Abby acted as the freelance or contracted CEO for Storyarb for a month. And I set the expectation up front of, this is what your salary would be if you are given the full-time offer to be a co-founder of the business. This is what your equity in the business would be. This is how we think about distributions, and in a month we'll have a conversation and we'll talk about how things feel for you and how things feel for me. And it will give us the best chance to make an educated decision on if we're right for each other. So a month went by. I was extremely confident in Abby's abilities. I thought we complemented each other really well, and I thought she'd be an exceptional CEO for the business. 

So Abby came on as CEO and we got to work, and you know, there's so much to talk about the story here, but you know, the next big piece I want to talk about is kind of what the evolution of the business has been over the last, let's call it nine months that we've been in business, but really kind of the pivot we've made in the last two months.

So just for the first, let's call it six months of the business, we were hitting the ground running with Storyarb being the personal branding business for the modern executive. We called it the personal media company for the modern executive. So if you are a founder or if you are a C-suite person and you're looking for help building your personal brand on Twitter and LinkedIn, what we will do is we will pair you with a ghostwriter and we'll pair you with a content strategist and that is your team of two. The content strategist will act as your day-to-day content. You know, basically your account manager, but they will also help you set your content strategy on your social platforms. They will interview you so they will get the content that's in your head out of your head, and then they will give that content to the ghostwriter, who will draft up posts two times, or they'll draft up posts that get delivered to you every two weeks. You will give feedback, and then those posts will get scheduled and sent out, and you'll have posts go out on your feeds every day of the week. 

And so that's what we were doing, and we got ourselves to a place where the business had gotten over a million dollars in annualized revenue. It got to basically like, call it $1.2m or $1.3 million in annualized revenue within the first three months. And then we started seeing some challenges with the business, and I would say the two big challenges that I recognized were, one, getting exceptional writers on the internet is exceptionally difficult. And it's funny, this isn't a new lesson, but I was just re-reminded of it as I got into the weeds of the business because I saw this with Morning Brew also. 98% of writers are really bad, are really mediocre, and I would never trust them to create content for our business, for Storyarb, whether it's our website copy, our social copy, you know, articles we write, et cetera. And so then I shouldn't trust them with any of our clients as well. And so I would say it was a ton of time and lift to find great writers. 

At the same time, we were only using freelance writers, and I think that made things even more difficult because a freelance writer’s only able to work with let's say two or three clients at any given time, because they're not dedicating more than five hours a week to your business. It means you have to get to dozens of freelance writers to scale the business. But there's so few great writers that finding dozens of amazing freelancers is exceptionally difficult. 

The second big challenge we noticed is retention of customers was way shorter than I would have hoped. On average, we were keeping our customers for around six months. My hope was something that was well north of 12 months. And I think the big reason that we weren't keeping clients long enough is, first off, I believe that founders view executive social and personal brand as a “nice to have,” not a “need to have.” Need to haves are things that keep the lights on for their business. Nice to haves are things that if everything else is going well, they'll spend time on it. And so I think as we were requiring time from our executives, whether it was to do content interviews or look over drafts, it was becoming very burdensome for them to do it for many months on end. I think there's only a few industries where founders or executives truly treat personal social as a need to have. And I think that's for published authors, public speakers, full-time creators who use their content as their marketing for some product they're selling, and real estate agents. And I think that's it. So the second big challenge is that founders and executives were treating this as a nice to have, not a need to have, which meant that retention was really difficult. 

And the third big challenge that we were noticing is because it was a very bespoke agency, because it was very hands-on, where a content strategist was providing a white glove service for our clients, scaling up clients significantly at any given time was really difficult, because we'd have to go hire more content strategists and more writers. And so basically what we said to ourselves is, we need to figure out how we solve for basically clients not staying long enough. Because if churn is a real issue, then we have to create a marketing machine that has a leaky bucket, because even if our marketing is great, if clients are leaving every six months, that means just to keep revenue flat a year from now, we're gonna have to replace our entire client list twice in a year. Which seems like a really difficult and not fun marketing challenge to try to work through. 

The second thing we were thinking through is, how do we make this more scalable, where we can bring on more clients with ease and not have it be like we're trying to, you know, turn a cruise ship. And so as we were thinking through this challenge, you know what we started to really think about is, what have our customers, our current clients, been telling us that can inform where we go from here?

And I think the number one thing that clients were telling us is they were asking us to help them with other content needs beyond just executive social. They started asking about their company's social accounts, they started asking us about their weekly newsletter, they started asking us about customer case studies, they started asking us to help them with website copy. They started asking us to help them with marketing automations, with lead magnets, you know, with blogs, with copy for a video script, right? Like anything that basically had copywriting involved, they started asking us for this. 

And so that's where the idea came about for, what if we offer copywriting as a service, not for executives, for companies, and where our ideal customer switches from being the founder of a startup to being the head of marketing, head of growth, or head of communications for, let's call it, $5 million companies and up.

And the reason we thought this was really interesting was twofold: By switching who our customer was from a founder to a head of marketing, we believed we could take our product from being a “nice to have” to a “need to have.” The second thing that we thought this would accomplish was scalability. And we got the idea of this product shift from a business that's already out there. It's called DesignJoy. It's by this guy Brett Williams. DesignJoy is a design subscription for companies, where simply you pay either $4,000, $7,000 a month and you get unlimited design requests. You literally just have a self-serve Trello board, you fill out a design brief, you get an update in 48 hours with a finished design, you give feedback or you approve it, and then you can make your next request.

And our view was like, well what does that look like for copywriting? What if we are the content version of DesignJoy? And so that was the pivot we made to the business, where we are DesignJoy for content, or we are copywriting as a service for companies, and specifically our buyer is a head of marketing, a head of growth, or a head of communications. So simply they can just sign up on storyarb.com. If they pay $4,000 a month, they get one copy request at a time. If they pay for a middle tier, it's two copy requests at a time. And if they pay for the highest tier, they get a dedicated content strategist who helps inform their strategy that then they can execute on using our content subscription. And the whole idea is we can service any of your content needs in a business. Whether it's you wanna whip up new copy on your website, whether you want new copy for your ad creative, whether it's your weekly newsletter, whether it is your blog, your company social, whether it's a presentation, your founder's giving a speech, your founder's giving executive social, it's kind of crazy when you think about it, how many things the written word touches in your business. And the whole pitch is, you have people in your company doing copy right now that are suboptimal at writing because most people are not great at writing. And we're just saying, you can hire us for less than the cost of a marketer and we will create world-class copy for you.

And what we believe this does is we get a new customer who views this as a need to have, not a nice to have; it's a productized service versus a bespoke agency. So it can be scaled way easier. And we have moved our writers from being freelance to full-time in-house. So if you really were to ask me, what's the secret sauce of this business? It is finding the best writing talent on the internet, hoarding that talent, and further training and developing them. So you know, if you want great writing, you're coming to Storyarb. 

And so as I just reflect on this whole journey, there's a few things that come to mind. The first is that, you know, a lot of people talk about creator businesses. You know, they think of like MrBeast and Feastables or Logan Paul and Prime, right? They're so sexy these days, and I think the obvious benefit that companies get from partnering with a creator or someone who has audience is getting more customers. But I would actually argue that is the least exciting thing about having an audience. When I think about the value that my audience has provided to Storyarb, sure, it's been our customers, but more importantly I would say it's hiring. Every single person who works in our company, from my co-founder to our most junior employee, found out about Storyarb through my content on Twitter or LinkedIn. And the reason I think that's so powerful is because you could go and do paid marketing on Facebook or Instagram to get new customers. You could not do paid marketing on Facebook or Instagram to get recruits, candidates, and employees who are interested in working for your business simply by paying for it. So I think that is the largest advantage. 

The second thing is when we were starting to experience challenges with the first iteration of this business, I was kind of getting down on myself. I was losing a little bit of confidence. I think, you know, it comes from having these stories in my head of, because I've had one success with Morning Brew already, I should be building a business that instantly has success and I'm not gonna have to make any changes, and I should be thoughtful enough and smart enough to build a product from day one that is gonna have product-market fit. And I just think first of all, that's my ego speaking and that's a story, not truth. And what I've actually realized is one of the most fun parts of building a business for me is when a product doesn't have product-market fit. And I'm forced to talk to my customers as much as possible and use the information that they give me as these puzzle pieces to complete the puzzle that is ultimately getting our product to a place where we do achieve product-market fit. And so that has been a learning for me that I find really fun, which is evolving a product to find product-market fit. 

And I would say the third kind of big lesson that comes up for me is, it's the most cliche thing, but your business, at the end of the day, every business, whether you're Storyarb, Morning Brew, or a Fortune 50 company, is all about your people. And so I think the thing that we are so focused on at Storyarb, especially in the early days, is having the right people. And when I think about having the right people, especially for like my first 10 employees, it is people who I could see being entrepreneurs one day, where they're using Storyarb as a launchpad for the next four or five years, where ultimately I can see them go off and be really successful founders in their own right. And when I think about why is that so important to me, it's because really, their ability to be a future founder means they have three or four qualities that I think are non-negotiables for early employees. One, they have a deep sense of urgency, like they are always itching to move faster and push harder. Two, they have an owner's mentality. They are never just doing what their job description asks them to do. Third, they are deep, critical thinkers. As they get more information from our customers and from the market, they're not just doing things for the sake of doing them because that's how they've always been done. They're challenging myself and Abby for us to change things based on what the market and customers are saying. And the fourth thing is they have deep self-awareness. They know what they're really good at, they know what they're not good at, and they have the humility to call it out, so that they spend time on the things that they can really help us with in the business. 

And so it's kind of crazy how time goes. We're 30 minutes into this and I feel like I could talk about Storyarb forever, but just to sum this all up, I feel very grateful that I pursued an opportunity that leaned into the things that brought me the most joy in my journey with Morning Brew, which were all related to the early stages of business. I am so grateful that I've kind of killed this story where I had to like every stage of business because that's what great entrepreneurs do, and I've focused my time on the parts that actually light me up and bring me fulfillment. And I've learned so much already in this journey. I'm super excited to see how the new positioning and product for the business not only goes for us, but also helps our customers, and specifically people who are leading marketing orgs, from Fortune 500 companies to startups and scale-ups. And I'm sure I'll be giving you guys an update on the business moving forward. But until next time, just remember, month of May, we are launching the new iteration of Founder’s Journal, which I think you all are going to absolutely love. And for a sneak peek of it, stay tuned for next week's episode, where I'm going to share some thoughts on where the show is going, why it's going there, and why I think you're gonna absolutely love it. As always, thank you so much for listening to the show and I will catch you next episode.