What is up everyone? This is Alex Lieberman co-founder and CEO of Morning Brew. Welcome back to Founder's Journal, my personal audio diary where I give you, the business builder, the tools you need to think better in order to build better, whether that's building a business, a team or a new product.

And today I'm going to be talking about something that's near and dear to my heart as a media entrepreneur and that is building an audience.

No matter what you do in life, if you are a professional that is trying to grow your company or grow yourself, understanding how to build an audience is a 21st century superpower.

It has been the great unlock of the internet and I think it's time for some audience building 101. Let's get into it.

So I want to start with a level set. The first is what is an audience? What do I mean when I'm going to be taking you through audience building 101 and how is audience building, you know, the great unlock of the digital age? Very simply, the way I think about an audience is it is a group of people that look to you because you satisfy a specific need for them.

The second question and probably the one that you're wondering more about is why is an audience important for everyone, not just media companies. And I want to be very clear about this. Yes, I run a media company. Yes, part of my job is creating content that I believe the skill of creating content to build an audience is important for everyone, not just a media company.

So why is it important for you? Because audiences take different forms for a media company like Morning Brew audience is a group of people that we can make money on through advertising or by charging our audience for subscription revenue directly.

But for individuals like yourself audience is very simply a group of people that can become lifelong friends potential bosses potential investors in a new business you're starting potential mentors, the list goes on building an audience creates optionality in life, whether you're an individual or your business.

And I have seen what effective audience building has done for companies and for individual people time and time again. It literally accelerates a company's growth and people's careers. I know some of you are going to be skeptical about this concept because maybe you haven't spent a lot of time building audience on the internet.

So I want to provide a very specific example for you. I have a friend, a friend named Sawhill Bloom. Sawhill is an investor at Altaman Capital Partners, a private equity firm in Palo Alto, California.

He studied economics at Stanford and he has spent six years in the investing world. Sawhill is literally the last person you would expect to care about building an audience because he works in a relatively traditional finance role that you wouldn't associate with audience.

In a lot of ways, honestly, Sawhill is like most of the people that I graduated from Michigan with who went down a pretty traditional path of either working in baking, working in consulting, working in private equity, yet he is obsessed with the act of audience building.

And in my opinion, it's for really good reason. Sawhill understands that to be a well-networked professional who has a lot of optionality in their career, the highest leverage way to do so is by creating content and building an audience on the internet.

So when he needs something, at some point in the future, a job, investors, et cetera, he's not screaming into an empty stadium. He's screaming into a stadium that's full of his fans.

Starting in late 2019, Sawhill started taking audience building seriously and he made Twitter his go-to platform. He decided that his focus was going to be around creating content about finance, economics, and business, and making them more approachable because, like Morning Brew, he thought there was a ton of jargon out there, but he didn't think that people necessarily understood the concepts that were being thrown out.

So he started publishing threads of tweets to teach people important lessons around finance and financial topics. So I'll give you an example.

Sawhill recently published a thread about the whole GameStop and Robinhood Fiasco to truly get people understanding what happened, what was it that caused GameStop stock to go through the roof?

And why did Robinhood as an investment platform stop letting people trade certain stocks on the platform like GameStop?

And he talked about these wonky trading topics like clearing houses and trade settlement, but he did so in a way that was approachable and engaging.

You know, the analogy I love hearing people use is when you're really good at creating content or selling something that people need, but they don't know that they do.

You mask spinach or mask broccoli as ice cream, and that is what he is great at doing with financial jargon.

So in just 12 months, Sawhill has gone from 500 Twitter followers. That was how many followers he had on January 1 of 2020 to 136,000 Twitter followers on January 1 of 2021.

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