meta_pixel
Tapesearch Logo
Log in
Founder's Journal

Why Coffee Chats Have Energized My Ideas

Founder's Journal

Morning Brew

Entrepreneurship, Careers, Business

4.81.1K Ratings

🗓️ 20 September 2023

⏱️ 29 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Episode 44: Alex Lieberman (@businessbarista) does another temperature check to review and reflect the latest achievements, adversities, and ascertainments. He’s closing in on finding product market fit for Storyarb and a renewed appreciation for coffee chats – something that waned during the pandemic. Then lessons learned about battling boredom throughout the day. Finally, lessons from India’s startup culture and sophisticated payment system that is more advanced than the U.S. Send us an email and let us know what you think of the idea! foundersjournal@morningbrew.com Links: All-In Summit: Bill Gurley presents 2,851 Miles My First Million: Kevin Ryan #FoundersJournal #Startups #Entrepreneur Listen to Founder’s Journal here: https://link.chtbl.com/OV4W93_W Watch Founder’s Journal here: https://www.youtube.com/@FoundersJournal/ Subscribe to Morning Brew! Sign up for free today: https://bit.ly/morningbrewyt Follow The Brew! Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/morningbrew/ Twitter - https://twitter.com/MorningBrew Tik Tok - https://www.tiktok.com/@morningbrew Follow Alex! Alex Lieberman (@businessbarista) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

What's up everyone? Welcome back to another episode of Founders Journal. This is your host, Alex Lieberman. Founders Journal is my personal diary made public for the world.

0:10.0

And today I am doing a true journal style episode. No scripting, just a few bullets and the rest is from the dome.

0:18.0

So you can feel like you are sitting behind me as I am writing in my personal journal. Let's hop into it.

0:30.0

Think of an entrepreneur you admire. Got one? Can you also think of the commerce platform that pro partnered with?

0:41.0

Because those platforms have a huge influence on business success. So if your commerce platform is nothing to write home about, get with Shopify.

0:50.0

Their commerce platform is helping companies of all sizes make big changes and hit big goals worldwide. It's the tool you need to start, run and grow your business seamlessly.

1:01.0

Whether your IPO ready or in your garage startup phase, Shopify's all in one platform puts you in the driver's seat and puts clunky processes in the rear view.

1:12.0

Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash Founders Journal all lowercase that shopify.com slash Founders Journal to take your business to the next level today.

1:25.0

Okay, two housekeeping items. The first is that we've done a few of these journal entry style episodes before I called them temperature checks. People really like them. They liked kind of this raw vulnerable, unscripted approach to kind of just taking everything that's in my brain as I think about life and business and putting it onto paper.

1:50.0

So I'm going to do it again. I'm basically just going to have the same prompt and the prompt is what's going well, what's not going well and what have I learned and I basically just have bullets. That's it.

2:01.0

The rest that I'm going to fill in is literally what's coming to mind as I speak through the mic. So that's the first thing I'm going to start talking in a second.

2:08.0

The second is as you can tell, I sound a little congested. That's because I'm getting over a cold. So I hope that it's not too distracting. I appreciate you bearing with me and hopefully by next recording, I will be back to normal.

2:22.0

So let's hop into this journal entry. What is going well every day we are getting closer to product market fit with story.

2:32.0

For those of you that don't know what story arbe is, story arbe is my executive ghost writing agency where we help top execs and CEOs of B2B companies.

2:42.0

This ranges from investors to startup founders to large company executives story arbe is where we help them get the stories, lessons, opinions and insights out of their brain and turn it into great social content that helps them build audiences online.

2:58.0

The reason I wanted to call out that us getting closer to product market fit is something that's going well is because I think there is just so much focus these days on speed.

3:09.0

Speed of you launch a business and announcing the next day that you hit $10 million in pipeline and interest.

3:16.0

Or I remember when ramp, which is like the unicorn fintech company that does amazing work, but they were heralded for a long time as being the fastest company to hit $100 million in ARR.

3:28.0

And so there's just this fascination with speed and I think it's great, but only if you have the fundamentals to support that speed.

3:37.0

And so I think sometimes this emphasis on speed and this obsession with it causes entrepreneurs and founders to build their companies faster than their company can support it, which ends up being counterintuitive because you can't deliver a great experience to all these customers that you've brought in.

3:53.0

And fundamentals take time to build like, you know, I want to say it took us three years to get morning brews fundamentals right and finding product market fit can take months to years.

4:04.0

And that means that my view is in the early days of a business until you have hit true product market fit, you should be measuring success in your business by the speed of your product or service evolving versus the speed of your revenue growth.

...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Morning Brew, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Morning Brew and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.

Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.