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's episode is about curation. Why curation is a superpower, why it's misunderstood, and why it is more important than ever before. Let's hop into it.

People do not appreciate the value of curation, full stop. And in order to understand its value, you need to first understand what it is. Here's my definition of curation.

It is the act of narrowing down a consumer's choice to things that you believe the consumer will want or should want. Curation is about limiting choice for the sake of speed and focus.

And the first big misunderstanding people have about curation is they don't understand why it's actually valuable. But given Morning Brew's value proposition is quite literally driven by curation, I can speak to this directly.

Morning Brew doesn't break news or report original stories in our daily newsletter, yet 3 million people trust us with their time to inform them about the business world.

How could we possibly amass such a large audience if none of the content we're creating is technically the first version of that story. It all starts with smart curation.

3 million people trust that Morning Brew understands their business needs and interests better than any publication in the world. They don't care that we're not breaking the news.

They only care that we're saving them time that they would otherwise be spending figuring out what news they should care about. Curation is about saving people time and giving them value that is super relevant to them.

And it turns out that people will pay for that service either with money or with their time and attention. And the best part about this is the value of curation as a service is only going up. And that's thanks to the internet. The internet has unlocked abundance.

Abundance of information and abundance of choice and specifically in the world of media.

Think about all of the tools that have been created to enable the abundance of content. You have social media platforms like Twitter and Instagram.

Content creation platforms like medium YouTube and Vimeo subscription platforms like sub stack and super cast. And as individuals are enabled to create more content than ever before.

That means consumers have more content to choose from than ever before. And so if you think about it, the issue here is that consumers aren't getting more time in their day.

And now they have to spend more time looking for the content that's most worth their time.

Ironically, as they spend more time searching, they have less time to consume the very content that they're searching for.

But what if you could outsource that search to someone else that someone else is the curator and the value of the curator continues to grow as content increases and therefore search costs increase as well.

That is why people must understand the value of curation.

But to think that curation is just about content and media is also a big miss.

That's the second misunderstanding of curation as a service. It's not just reserved for media businesses like morning brew.

Maybe media is the easiest application of curation for us to understand and wrap our heads around because there's this clear distinction between primary content sources like the Wall Street Journal, the economist, the financial times and secondary content sources like morning brew.

But curation is all around you. Here's how to think about it. Trader Joe's.

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