The Multipreneur: He’s Building A $10M Portfolio of Income Streams

this is Alex a guy who started a newsletter in his dorm room and then sold it for Millions but after selling that business he felt lost and spent months trying to figure out what idea he would pursue next it basically took me 12 months of doing every cliche thing that an entrepreneur does when they're looking for meaning this year he found a new opportunity a new identity to become a multipreneur the goal to launch a bunch of different tiny businesses and then CEOs to run them over the next 5 to 10 years I want to have a dozen plus companies that sit under me that I am the CEO of none of but I am the co-founder and chairman of all of them I flew out to New York to ask him about this personal holding company and how it all works turns out he's already launched a few ideas and one of them is already a million-dollar business so we have uh 12 clients that are paying $7,000 a month it's roughly a million a year in annualized Revenue we're going to dive more into that business business and go over his framework for how he finds new business ideas worth pursuing the best way to think of business ideas is to plus we'll cover the insanely Scrappy method he used to launch that million-- dooll business how he defines product Market fit and how to hire top tier CEOs to run these businesses I'm Pat walls and this is starter [Music] story what's up man what's up yeah thanks for having me okay tell me who you are and what are you building uh I'm Al liberman I started a company in college called morning Brew uh which makes Business Media fun and engaging for modern professionals morning Brew is a 200 person company that does more than $75 million a year in revenue and today I'm building story ARB a uh modern Executives personal Media company and my goal ultimately is to have a portfolio of bootstrap businesses under me so what does that mean a portfolio of bootstrap businesses there's this idea of personal holding companies that's been talked a lot about recently some people call them personal Venture Studios or my buddy Greg Eisenberg uh coined the term multipreneur a personal holding company very simply is a company that is comprised of companies under it uh and so the idea would be let's just say Alex lieberman's company is Alex liberman LLC there would be hypothetically 10 businesses that sit under Alex liberman LLC and I'm the CEO of the holding company my vision for my own personal holding company is over the next 5 to 10 years want to have a dozen plus companies that sit under me that I am the CEO of none of but I am the co-founder and chairman of all of them and for me I get excited by that because it allows me to spend my time on the things within entrepreneurship that I most excited by that morning Brew taught me over the last 8 to 10 years today uh we have you know one company within my personal hold code which is story ARB and story ARB is a ghost rating Agency for B2B Executives um and very simply we help the top 1% of Founders or Executives build their brands on Twitter and Linkedin I put0 into it and our goal is to get to product Market fit as quickly as possible with the ultimate goal of having story RB a $10 million business on its own and profiting at least 3.5 million every year can you give us a timeline of how you get here I dreamed of only one thing when I was growing up and that was working on Wall Street I went to college at the University of Michigan from 2011 to 2015 studied business they are still on this path to have the world's greatest Trader job ever while I was at Michigan week before my junior year my dad passed away suddenly he was 46 years old died of a stroke was in perfect health like me and so that feeling of obligation basically guided the next 8 years of my life it forced this perspective on me that every day could be our last and we really should spend our time in a way that aligns with our values and fills us up and so I graduate from Michigan I got the world's greatest trading job I'm working on Wall Street and I realize I'm not fulfilled in the slightest while I was doing that we had already started morning brew and I was working on it on the side and I realized I was so Fired Up by what I was doing from 9:00 to midnight far more fired up than what I was doing from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 I quit my job when we had 30,000 subscribers we had not made a dollar on the business but I just had this sense of um faith and so did Austin that we'd be able to figure out a way to make money as a business so we sold the company in October of 2020 to Axel Springer almost 6 months later I stepped down as CEO of the business and that is probably the hardest professional moment that I've ever had 12 months of doing every cliche thing that an entrepreneur does when they're looking for meaning reading about stoicism taking long walks with their dog like I was trying to do everything to figure out my purpose and what I landed on was that there were a few things that I love in business I love spending time with other Founders I love coaching them I love storytelling and selling I love creating content and I love spending my time on the early days of the business you know what uh Reed Hoffman calls the town and Village stages versus like the city and state stages I love that part of the business and I just asked myself how can I spend the rest of my career just in the town and Village and not in the city and state all right let's talk about why personal holding companies are becoming a thing what do you think is the opportunity here why is it taking off yeah so I think there's just a number of different trends that we're seeing some are like macro cultural and Global Trends others our Trend specific to entrepreneurship and the business landscape the first which is like a global trend is there's just increased emphasis on the importance of like lifestyle Balance and Health in a professional's life and so I think it's very much in Vogue now to be thinking about how you're taking care of yourself we're in a golden age of Entrepreneurship right now because the cost of failure of Entrepreneurship has never been lower it is easier than ever before to ideate or test ideas with platforms like product hon or Kickstarter it is easier or cheaper than ever before to actually run your business you have an e-commerce business you Shopify you have a newsletter business you you have beehive and so I think it's inviting more people to start businesses with this different image of what a great business is and for a lot of people that's a cash flowing asset that maybe does six to seven figures a year gives you a great lifestyle and maybe you do that over and over and over rather than trying to swing for the fences with a$1 billion company that you have .1% chance of actually succeeding all right quick break this is me 5 years ago desperate to start my own business but plagued with shiny object syndrome I tried building SAS tools freelancing affiliate marketing but none of these business ideas ever panned out to anything but everything changed one day when I looked inside and wondered what if instead I built a business around what I'm good at at and what I'm passionate about well that decision led me to building a business that now makes over a million dollar a year and that's what starter story is All About it's a community of thousands of Founders who changed their life by building an online business around their skills and their passions our 4,000 plus case studies and business idea breakdowns will show you how regular people just like you found the right idea and turned it into millions for example Luke join starter story and do Andor case study about a newsletter business that makes over $25 million a year just one month later he launched his own newsletter business that did $5,800 in Revenue in 30 days so if you're serious about finding that right idea click the first link in the description we're running a special for the YouTube family all right enjoy the video I'll see you around peace with the holding company your first big success is a ghost writing agency can you tell me how you started that yeah so you know one day I was literally just on Twitter I was thinking to myself how there's all these short form video ages gencies that I've seen like a dozen pop up in the last 12 months I feel like text based platforms like Twitter or X and Linkedin haven't been given nearly enough love and so I put out a tweet that basically says if you're an executive who believes in the power of building audience but you don't have enough time or you don't have the skill to do it yourself and you're willing to spend $5 to $10,000 a year to have someone else help you build it DM me so I got 25 DMs like that's my favorite way to build a business is like product doesn't exist yet you get a sense of demand then you build the product after you truly build the plane as you're flying it so I was like okay there's demand now my next issue I need to solve for is Supply I need ghost riters CU I'm not going to write all these things so I literally connected clients with two of the ghost writers set up a slack channel for them two or 3 months in I was like okay there's enough legitimacy here where now I think I can advertise where the business is to hire a great CEO cuz again with the person personal holding company model I did not want to be the CEO of this business business and the idea is hopefully we get to product Market fit with the company by end of year where ultimately I only spend 5 to 10 hours a week on the business and that is kind of the time or investment trajectory that I hope to have with any business that I spin up can you break down story ARB how's it set up and how's it doing yep so we have uh 12 clients uh that are paying $7,000 um a month so $84,000 Top Line a month it's roughly a million a year in annualized Revenue we think this business can be a $10 million a year business that's basically 110 clients we have two full-time employees uh our CEO as well as content strategist who's a hybrid of account manager and kind of content mind and then we have three Freelancers who are ghost riders the profit margin on this type of business is roughly 30 to 35% so you know the goal ultimately is a $10 million business that does $3 to $3.5 million a year in cash flow and basically basically for our clients uh we interview them once a month we get all the thoughts out of their head and we have our ghost writer and content strategist create 12 pieces of content per week per client you mentioned product Market fit how do you determine that and how do you know when you've reached product Market fit it depends on the business that you're in for story ARB I think of product Market fit in two ways one as a percentage of of our current clients what percentage of our clients would recommend story ARB to the people in their Network where their reputation is on the line and I want that number to be at least 50% okay the other number that I'm focused on is retention because again I think the easiest part of this business is getting customers I think the hardest part of this business is keeping customers and I've heard historically for ghost riding agencies that when I talk to people who own ghost riding agencies they retain their average customer for like 3 to 5 months that is like a scary short period of time and so our goal is when we hit true product Market fit our average customer will have worked with us for on average 10 months and so those are the metrics we're focused on to hit that point where we feel like we can now scale our customer base now because clearly we're providing something that's super valuable to people a CEO runs each of the companies within your personal holding company how do you find great CEOs basically I look for a few qualities that I consider to be the unteachables I look for someone who has an obsessive brain I want someone who goes to sleep than you about the business and I want someone waking up thinking about the business cuz it means they enjoy what they're doing so much I want someone who's a great critical thinker I want them to think about how are they informed by their previous experiences but also how is this situation different and how do they need to behave differently I want someone whose value align with me like I want someone who's high integrity strong Communicator like the things that really matter no matter what business you're working in and the final piece is a great work ethic every day of the week i' bet on someone who is less talented but has more humility and self-awareness because I believe if they also have good work ethic like they will just grit their way to a higher ceiling and they will also always be willing and have the humility to call out their blind spots but I really think it's almost impossible to teach good work ethic and so I need that in CEO that I bring on how do you pay CEOs and how the distributions look like basically the range is a CEO a salary between $100 to $200,000 a year and then there equity in the business will be somewhere between 10 and 50% whenever one of my businesses hits product Market fit every quarter thereafter all of the profits of the business are distributed to equity holders and the CEO will get their percentage of equity in profit distribution and the whole idea is by having this distribution strategy it keeps the CEO super incentivized to continue to grow the business all right so you got this one successful business now you're thinking of new ideas can you tell me how you approach new ideas and how do you validate them first of all the the best way to think of business ideas is to never just sit on a couch thinking of business ideas that is the worst way to do it right be a magnet for problems so be incredible at finding and hoarding people's problems and then thinking about what are novel solutions for solving those problems if I wanted to launch another business today I would but I want to focus with story AR first so if anyone wants to steal one of these ideas they can the first idea is what I call workflow automation agency I think the next big one will be basically like notion or air table or different forms of automation agencies using these no code tools like zapier and make as well as using Ai and offshore talent and I think every business you will end up finding people working on manual tasks that can be automated or outsourced so if I was to build my next business in the holdco it would be that I think there's so much opportunity to build it so your audience should feel free to steal the idea and take it and build it themselves let's talk about the risks of a personal holding company they're pretty sexy right now blowing up but what do you think could be the downfall of that personal holding companies work well for people who understand what a personal holding company offers you and it aligns with what you want to spend your time on that's why I'm doing it but the first big risk is dilution it's lack of focus like I want to get one business right before thinking about my next business so for story ARB right now we don't have product Market fit in my mind until we have product Market fit I'm not going to launch another business once we have product Market fit I will launch a business and so my whole thesis on this is go slow to be able to go fast so launch a business figure out how to hit product Market fit hopefully that makes me better out launching a business and hitting product Market fit faster the next time and so each kind of iteration of launching and finding success with a business can happen faster and faster but like I don't also have a number in my head of like oh I need to be at 12 companies within the next 3 years I would rather four successful businesses than 12 non-successful businesses the second when you have a personal holding company and you're the entrepreneur sitting at the top of it you have to think of yourself as a product meaning you are in service of the companies you launch and the CEOs that you bring on and so if your a products like any products you have like value you have value proposition you offer to your companies and to your CEOs and if you don't offer enough value two things happen one you can't command nearly enough equity to be excited about these businesses that you've launched and two Talent like employees aren't going to be excited to work for your businesses because they don't see the value that you're bringing to the table yeah and so those are the two huge risks and I spend a ton of time thinking about them to hopefully mitigate them so for anyone watching this video uh and wants to start a personal holding company what would be a great business to start with yeah I mean at the end of the day I think it comes down to First understanding your strengths and your weaknesses you just need to be brutally honest about what are the one or two things you're exceptional at based on your interest and your past called 5 to 10 years of work experience and build around that first so one examp example I would just use is like Greg Eisenberg like Greg Eisenberg is the king of community like he is known on Twitter and on the internet as the guy who understands how to build Vibrant Community on the internet so what did he do he went and launched a paid Community for people building communities and anyone who has interest in understanding how to build a membership community on the Internet is of course going to follow Greg and join his community because they know like he is the guy for that plus not only is he just like great from a marketing perspective because people trust him for it he also knows how to build great community so he can constantly add value to his customers within that membership all right so last question we asked to all founders is if you could stand on Alex's shoulder uh in the early days and give him advice what would you say a few things come to mind first I like to say find the suck find great problems to solve don't just sit with friends on a weekend and brainstorm business ideas like immerse yourself in Industries you're interested in finding problems in identify those problems figure out what problems are especially painful there isn't a good solution for it and then start thinking about how can you provide a better solution and the second is everyone talks about taking the leap of faith in entrepreneurship and I just think it's completely a misnomer it's more about like stepping Pebble to Pebble carefully across the river versus jumping over the river like there are so many ways that you can test ideas low cost on the internet today you can put out ideas onto social you can launch ideas on product hunt you can launch a product on Kickstarter you can create a Shopify store or you can create a newsletter like my best idea for launch or for testing anything is like I always start with a tweet if there's interest in a tweet I turn into a tweet thread if there's interest in that I turn into a newsletter if there's interest in that and I turn into a video the same exact concept exists for business so don't think that business is too risky for you because you have to take a leap because business actually can be very lowrisk if you step intentionally step by step all right man thank you thanks so much for having it was awesome great to meet you yeah follow this advice and you'll have a seven figureure ghost writing agency within two [Laughter] weeks

Channel: Starter Story

Views: 267,473

Keywords: starterstory, starters story, starter story, starter stories, starter story ideas, the multipreneur, multipreneur, alex lieberman, alex lieberman story, storyarb, alex lieberman ghostwriting, ghostwriting business, ghostwriting agency, personal holding company

Id: nzVcbrLl9VU

Length: 18min 21sec (1101 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 02 2023