How Morning Brew Exited in an 8-Figure Deal

Founder's Journal

Morning Brew

Entrepreneurship, Careers, Business

4.8 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 22 October 2021

⏱️ 12 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In October of 2020, Morning Brew sold a majority stake of our business for 8-figures. As I reflect on our sale and the 5-year journey that preceded it, there are a handful of key decisions we made and characteristics we exhibited that made this outcome possible. I share them on today’s Founder’s Journal. As mentioned in this edition, check out my previous episode, Why a Sales Skillset is a Business Superpower and Paul Graham's blog post, How to Think For Yourself. Check out the full transcript at https://foundersjournal.morningbrew.com to learn more, and if you have any ideas for our show, email me at alex@morningbrew.com or my DMs are open @businessbarista. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	What's up everyone, this is Alex Lieberman, co-founder and executive chairman of Morning Brew.
0:05.3	Welcome back to Founder's Journal, My Personal Audio Diary, where I give you the business builder,
0:10.9	the tools you need to think better in order to build better, whether that's building a business,
0:16.1	a team, or a new product. Today, I talk about what allowed Morning Brew to sell for eight figures
0:23.2	in October of 2020, the decision we made, and the traits we exhibited as entrepreneurs.
0:30.0	Let's hop into it. Almost exactly a year ago to today, my co-founder Austin and I officially sold
0:41.6	a majority stake of Morning Brew to Business Insider. And while it was a specific type of acquisition,
0:47.8	in the fact that we are a business focused digital media brand, I think there are a number of
0:54.2	lessons we can all learn as founders, builders, and professionals that gave us the opportunity to sell
1:00.7	our business for eight figures. What I'm going to go ahead and do is share the six most important
1:06.0	decisions we made or traits we exhibited as entrepreneurs while building. Number one is focus.
1:13.9	Today, Morning Brew is a full-fledged media brand that has newsletters, web content,
1:19.8	podcasts, social content, video shows, and events. But that's a recent thing.
1:26.0	For the first four years of the business, we only did one thing and did it extremely well.
1:32.4	We knew that as a bootstrap startup with limited resources, if we tried to do too many things,
1:38.5	we would dilute the quality of all of our products. And we also understood that if we built up a loyal
1:44.6	audience in one place through one channel and established critical mass, we would be able to move
1:50.3	that audience to other places down the line. All we cared about was delivering the best daily
1:56.4	business read for millennials, bar none, and we knew the rest would work itself out.
2:02.5	And within this one product we dedicated our time to, we had a focused approach that we called
2:08.0	the circle of life to turn something from newsletter into a newsletter business.
2:13.4	Our view is that to make a newsletter a business, we had to accomplish three steps.
	...

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