What is up everyone? This is Alex Lieberman, co-founder and CEO of Morning Brew.

Welcome back to Founders 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,

building a team, or building a product. Today, I'm going to be talking about one of the most

important moments when building any sort of venture, whether that's a business, a product,

a nonprofit, and that is the fundraising process. The fundraising story for Morning Brew is

a pretty unconventional one, but there are so many great learnings that we had from the process

that I hope will help you. And even if you're not fundraising at the moment, that's totally fine.

I still think you'll get a ton from it because convincing someone to invest in your business

is really just selling and the principles for good selling. I hope some of these principles I

talk about will stay with you when you try to sell an idea internally in your company or sell

yourself to a potential employer. Let's hop into it. Like I said, Morning Brew's fundraising story

was weird. Most startups start with a business idea at the very least or some actually have sales

and then they look to raise money. Morning Brew worked out in the totally opposite way. We started

this thing as a hobby, not a business. We were fundraising around a pet project that was becoming

a real business. And I think as I reflect on that, it created a lot of uphill battles because

we were just figuring out for ourselves that this actually could be something that made money and

wasn't just this side project we were doing for fun. Let's rewind to early 2015. It was the early

days of Morning Brew. We had just officially launched as an email newsletter. We transitioned from

a janky PDF that I had been sending out for a few months myself. At the time it was called Market

Corner. I brought Austin on as my co-founder and we had rebranded it as Morning Brew. We finally

hit our stride getting the structure of the newsletter down. And we wanted to play around with

...