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.

What has made Morning Brew successful? I get this question all the time, and it's not straightforward because it can be attributed to several things. Some of it is luck, some of it is problem solving for an underserved audience, and some of it is faith to just putting product out thanklessly for years on end.

But if I had to pick one thing to attribute our success to, it would be focus. Putting our blinders on, ignoring the outside noise, and doing one thing exceptionally well for almost four years, that is what made us successful.

And this concept of focus sounds so easy obviously, but in practice it is probably the most difficult part of building a business. Let's hop into it.

Once you start getting any semblance of traction as a business, you become a magnet for opportunities. Customers start requesting new products, employees start sharing ideas with you for new things they want to be considered to be launched.

And your own mind as a builder swirls with big ambitions as you start seeing things work, and you want to not just be a one trick pony.

The temptation to test and dabble is real, but I believe it was our resistance to shiny new things that kept us building a rock solid foundation for a brand that would stand the test of time.

And when I think of some of the most successful businesses in the world, they were relentlessly focused on doing one thing well before rapidly expanding into other offerings.

Let's take Apple for example. If you look at the history of Apple from the introduction of the Apple One computer in 1976 until 1993 when the company launched Power CD, which was its first CD player, and then it also in that same year launched Newton, which was its PDA,

the company's product suite was amazingly focused. It did just computers and computer accessories for 17 years. That is longer than most businesses last in general.

Let's also take Peloton for example. The $33 billion fitness brand launched in 2012 and it officially went to market in 2013 with a Kickstarter campaign around its indoor cycling bike that has become known for.

The company only recently has placed more emphasis on other workouts in its digital app and other forms of hardware like launching its second product, the Peloton Tread, which it did in 2018.

So for over five years, the company was just working on this indoor bike from 2013 when it launched on Kickstarter to 2018 when it finally launched its second product.

That is the thing about focus. Focus is not sexy in the early days while you're actually being focused, but after years of keeping your head down and doing one thing extremely well for a growing customer base, the fruits of focus, all of a sudden make your business look sexy to the outside world.

And oftentimes being focused is about saying no. We have said no to hundreds of opportunities at Morning Brew in pursuit of doing one thing extremely well and for us that one thing was our newsletter.

Nothing mattered beyond creating the best daily business newsletter, getting that newsletter in front of more people and convincing companies to pay us to get in front of the audience. That was it.

So I figured it would be helpful for me to share a few of the biggest knows that we have given to exciting opportunities at the brew to help you think through how you maintain focus, even when it's not convenient or easy.

The first opportunity is what I call email as a service for years other media tech and financial services companies have asked us if we would write their newsletter that goes to all of their customers.

We've become known as the email gurus and rather than build it themselves companies come to us to effectively buy a competency.

So let's just use master card as the example master card is not come to us. This is just for illustrative purposes master card would come to us and ask for Morning Brew to create a daily or weekly newsletter about business news or personal finance as a way to engage and retain their millions of credit card customers.

And what would happen is we'd set up a one or two year contract with master card for some six or seven figure fee in exchange for us creating the newsletter for them.

In theory, it sounds great. We would be diversifying from advertising revenue into B2B longer term revenue. We'd be leveraging our skill set that we've built up over the last several years, which is creating great newsletters.

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