Dear Everybody,
For months I’ve been fascinated by Morning Brew, and I decided to run an experiment.
First, the fascination:
Morning Brew is at the forefront of companies giving their employees the freedom to express themselves online and become personalities…in essence, companies are atomizing into whole companies of creators.
Morning Brew is also “an audience company.” Audience companies are in the business of giving customers exactly what they want and what they’ve been promised. It’s not dissimilar from Amazon’s “customer obsession,” but in Morning Brew’s case, it means empowering business leaders with engaging and accessible content (i.e. media as a core competency).
Right now, Morning Brew is in the process of transitioning from an email company to a media brand. Its core product is a morning email newsletter sent to 2.4 million subscribers to give them all the business news they need in five minutes. Beyond that flagship offering, Morning Brew also delivers a retail newsletter (Retail Brew), tech newsletter (Emerging Tech Brew), a marketing newsletter (Marketing Brew), a business podcast (Business Casual), and a recommendation newsletter (Sidekick).
Second, the experiment:
I had a gut feeling I could better understand the Morning Brew culture and worldview if I summarized the timelines of the company’s most active Twitter users. My goal was to reverse engineer the philosophy of the company and how its leaders thought about building a business and career in this new landscape.
This summary is the result of distilling the last 3,000 tweets from four timelines: CEO Alex Lieberman (60,000 words; 250 pages); COO Austin Rief (49,000 words; 150 pages); Daily Writer and Social Media Toby Howell (43,000 words; 150 pages); and Business Casual Host Kinsey Grant (54,000 words 150 pages). [Incidentally, Alex hosts an excellent daily podcast called Founders Journal, a backstage pass into building Morning Brew and his daily diary made public to the world.]
That’s 206,000 words, 12,000 tweets, and 700 pages distilled to 1,075 words and five pages, in three parts:
Part One: Business Building
Part Two: Building Yourself and Your Career
Part Three: A Few Social Media Principles
Part One: Business Building
Never forget, no one has it easy…
Building a business is hard
Building a business is hard
Building a business is hard
The work is hard, but the formula is simple…
Hire great people
Work your ass off
Catch some lucky breaks
First things first, post truly great content…
Content that’s valuable
Content you’re proud of
Content that comes to life
Content that informs people
Content that’s differentiated
Content your customer fiends for
Content people give a shit about and want to share
Content so good your customers turn into your sellers
Focus relentlessly for years…
Show up
Put in time
Do unsexy work
Default to action
Be ready for the grind
Ask for nothing in return
Things take longer than you think they will. Always.
Prioritize consistency…
Bat for singles and doubles
Prove and reprove your value
Study, gain insights, and apply them
Small insights can have huge impact
If you want to be original, take unoriginal ideas and execute them flawlessly
Build an obsessive audience that gives a shit about you…
Earn attention
Force people to care
Hold their hands if necessary
Deliver content that connects
Serve people in a way that fuels their passion
Now that you have an audience, don’t fuck it up
Get your content in front of your specific customer…
Be tactical
Target a niche
Find relevant people
Make the niche so small it’s uncomfortable
Consume constantly (including your own product!)…
Eat content
Dream content
Breathe content
Hire the right people, but don’t rush it…
Know the job
Build a persona
Hunt for unicorns
Care about your people, and invest in them…
Enlist them in a shared vision
Empower them to see their greatness
Give them resources to be lifelong learners
Get out of their way
Empower all-stars…
Give them reign to be creators and personalities
Give them tools, training, and culture to make it happen
Give them clarity around mission, values, and direction
Put them in a position to succeed, and watch it pay off many times over
Build culture intentionally, and over-communicate…
Emphasize what's important
Don’t assume people have context
Make it easy to find out what your company does
Give adequate background before elaborating on the future
Document the journey, especially the early days…
Keep a detailed journal
Take pictures and videos
Reflect on what you’re building
Create an entrepreneurial time capsule
Showcase great and horrible experiences
Your future self will thank you
Build in public…
Increase vulnerability
Increase serendipity
Increase opportunity
Increase transparency
When context is missing, people assume the worst
Play the long game…
Leverage data to build trust
Give people more than just content
Build deep and direct relationships
Build assets that will be valuable in five years
Part Two: Building Yourself and Your Career
Get comfortable being uncomfortable…
Grow a thick skin
Show extreme resilience
Be proud of it
Increase luck surface area…
Survive
Persevere
Work your ass off
Create public work
Keep your head down
Don’t give up too early
Learn ravenously…
Absorb takeaways
Recognize patterns
Desire true feedback
Learn from smart people
Be a sponge to your own life experiences
Be curious in your personal and professional life…
Ask good questions
Seek true feedback
Acknowledge blind spots
Have the humility to be wrong
Feed your brain like an ever-expanding library
Learn every day through questioning and exploration
Think critically and challenge norms…
Challenge traditional tech teams
Challenge traditional growth strategies
Challenge traditional advertising opportunities
Challenge traditional ways of creating content
Approach everyday with an underdog mentality
Know your superpowers, and leverage them…
Lean into your competencies
Double down on your strengths
You’re great at some things and mediocre at the rest
(And that’s fine!)
Exercise empathy…
Do the right thing for others
Champion others’ franchises
Embrace others’ perspectives
Act with a purpose…
Be curious in action
Have empathy in action
Challenge norms in action
Do things with thoughtfulness and preparation
Embrace your inner nerd…
Bring others into your mind
Create a shared imagination
Engage others’ unique, original thoughts
Surround yourself with…
People who call you on your shit
People who challenge you to be better
People who challenge you to work harder
People who support you every step of the way
Find intellectual sparring partners…
People who don’t work with you
People invested in your success
People who aren’t afraid to push back
People who have complementary superpowers
Gain and sustain creative momentum…
Get outside perspectives
Do things unrelated to your business
Read things unrelated to your profession
Learn from experts about topics you would’ve never researched on your own
Will something massive into existence…
Take initiative
Access your creativity
Account for risks and rewards
Create sustained positive impact
Root your ideas in smart analysis
Take it upon yourself to learn something new
Prioritize your time…
List what you value
List what you need
List what drains you
List what makes you happy
Ask for help (and get good at it!)…
Ask…if you have questions
Ask…if the answer isn’t easy
Ask…if the price of being wrong is high
Share your insecurities…
Celebrate fuck ups
Flaunt your imperfections
Admit what you don't know
Admit when you’re wrong and change your mind
Learn (and change!) as you scale…
Find new people
Establish new processes
Incorporate new thinking
Fire yourself over and over
Sooner than you think, hire a coach…
Think more critically
Question your assumptions
Make hard decisions sooner
Reinvent and refocus yourself…
Plan every day
Read every day
Write every day
Reflect every day
Put out the fires every day
Be someone you would’ve looked up to when you were younger…
Have fun
Create a lot
Provide value
Be accessible
Be transparent
Make your own success
Above all, be a nice person…
Talk less
Be logical
Be likable
Smile and listen more
Don’t take yourself too seriously
Do things for authentic reasons
Finally, be an Easter egg in someone’s day…
Do small, remarkable, and unexpected things
Impact people in large, wonderful, and unexpected ways
Part Three: A Few Social Media Principles
Cure imposter syndrome…
Realize no one cares what you do
Realize everyone is figuring things out, including the people you admire
Realize things you think are obvious to other people aren’t obvious to other people
Always be borrowing…
Look for inspiration
Pull from everywhere
Condense, improve, and share
Create timely and evergreen content…
Use data
Find your target audience
Leverage it on every platform
Learn everything the audience wants
Own the value chain of that audience
Treat every post as an experiment, not a masterpiece…
Throw darts
Aim for the bulls-eye
Practice with intention
Ask if you’d like your content if you weren’t the one who posted it
Seize the moment — and the momentum…
Once you have lightning in a bottle, milk it for all its worth
Turn the heat up and keep it going
Never compromise your values…
Never get nasty
Never lose control
Never get personal
Never lead with malice
Always represent yourself well
Other than that, let it rip…
Share boldly
Present with confidence
Strip away perfectionism
Don't qualify your learnings
Thank you for reading!
If you'd like more Big Idea Summaries like this, please do join the email list.
And follow me on Twitter!
Sincerely,
Justin
Well done and so succinct!
So valuable, Justin. Thanks for sharing. One of these days, I'm going to print out some of these summaries to better read and reread them.