What's up everyone? Welcome back to another episode of Founders Journal. I'm your host Alex Lieberman co-founder and executive chairman of Morning Brew.

This episode is a little bit of a change up. I was recently on, I guess, a short podcast or a short video interview with my good pal, Jesse Pooji.

Jesse was formerly my co-host of the crazy ones. He was the co-founder of Ampush, one of the largest paid marketing agencies in the world.

After he sold that business, he started GatewayX, which is his personal holding company, and within the holding company has a number of businesses, including growth assistant, which is a business that places offshore marketing assistance within marketing functions at companies.

I think they just hit a $10 million run rate. All this to say, he interviewed me about bootstrapping businesses, what it means to bootstrap the metrics you focus on, how you think about growing a bootstrap business relative to a venture back business.

And a lot of other things. I got tactical with this conversation. I shared kind of what our playbook was at Morning Brew. And so I hope you enjoy our conversation.

So please keep listening for my thoughts on bootstrapping and how to build a great bootstrap business.

What's up bootstrap giants crew? I have a really special bonus email for you guys with none other than my buddy Alex Lieberman, fellow bootstrapper. What's up Alex?

Hello excited to be here. So we're going to keep this really short and brief and and focused on bootstrapping.

Alex, for those who don't know is the founder CEO of Morning Brew. He's now the executive chairman, but he was the original founder and CEO successfully sold it for nine figures.

He's all of 30 years old and he bootstrapped the business. He didn't raise outside money to get it. So he is my dream for bootstrapped giants or any of you guys listening, like he's the guy I want to be like one day or want my kids to be like in terms of business stuff.

And so I figured he'd be the perfect person. He's my co-host in a long time with the crazy one. So I was like, this is the perfect start to the email.

So let's just jump right in. This is going to kind of be like a lightning round around bootstrapping. So Alex, how do you define bootstrapping?

Well, I'll start by saying how I don't define bootstrapping. I think a lot of people have this notion that bootstrapping means being less ambitious, having a less exciting vision.

Like only the companies with huge ambition are the ones that raise money from venture investors. I don't believe that to be true.

I think bootstrapped companies can be anywhere on the spectrum of ambition from a small mom and pop business that just wants to have the livelihood to live the life they want with their family.

All the way to a wildly ambitious business like MailChimp or Atlassian. So I think ambition is not the limiting factor with bootstrapping. I think bootstrapping is more about reliance and timeline.

When you're a bootstrapper, you are relying on yourself and only yourself versus someone else and timeline to me looks a little bit different because you are relying on only yourself because you don't have five to ten million dollars in the bank today to spend on expensive executives, often times the timeline to realize your vision takes longer.

But if you are committed to a longer timeline, you can be just as ambitious.

Yep, that makes sense. And when you guys, why did you guys choose to bootstrap?

I'll provide a little bit of nuance. We weren't pure bootstrappers. We raised 750K. But I would say for all intents and purposes, we had the bootstrapper mentality. We raised it from not venture firms, we raised it from a few family and friends.

So the expectation of the money was very different. And we bootstrapped because a few things. One, everyone told us that we heard horror stories about venture investing.

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