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. It is time for your weekly story time. One of the

hardest, yet most exciting points in any business is when you're trying to prove your business

model, where you don't have money coming in, and you're trying to show the world that

you can get money to come in. The adrenaline rush of landing your first customer is unlike

anything else. But getting that first sale does not come easy, no matter what business

you're in. It is time to take you through our experience, getting our first customer

at Morning Brew, and all of the lessons you can learn from our approach to making money

as a business, no matter what type of business you're in. Let's hop into it.

Selling something that is unproven is an absolute grind. There is no one to advocate for

your product. There are no past customers to get testimonials from to put on your

slide decks, and there's very little data to share with prospective partners about how

previous partners have done. It is just you and your word, trying to convince that

first person or that first company to take the leap of faith. That is incredibly difficult.

In the world of B2C or business to customer or business to consumer, getting that first

customer has gotten easier if you have a product and a little bit of money to spend.

That is the power of the advertising platforms that dominate society like Facebook, Instagram,

Google, Snapchat. It's either all worth hundreds of billions of not a trillion dollars.

Take all birds, for example, the D2C shoe brand. Not that it was easy for them to get their

first customer, but as long as they had a functioning website, functioning logistics

...