Business Case Studies #6: Excel Dictionary

What is up everyone. This is Alex Lieberman, co-founder, and Executive Chairman 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. This week on Founder’s Journal, we're doing things a little differently. We are dropping a mini series full of case studies that lay out a number of lessons you can learn from successful businesses. That means instead of just one episode, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, this week, we're giving you two: a new show that you won't want to miss, plus a classic episode you maybe haven't heard before. Today, we are talking about why we brought Excel Dictionary to be on Morning Brew’s platform as our newest creator. Let's hop into it.

Morning Brew’s creator strategy

So for those of you that haven't heard me on my soapbox talking about Morning Brew’s strategy, let me set the stage, and then we'll talk about Morning Brew’s newest creator, who I am wildly excited about. At the highest level, we want to inform, educate, and empower the leaders and decision-makers of today and tomorrow around business, money, and career. And to achieve that, obviously in the early days of Morning Brew, we had our newsletter. But as time has gone on, and we've learned more about the industry and what consumers like, we think there's a different way to do that. And the best way to achieve that, we believe, is to educate and empower through individuals as brands rather than institutions as brands. And the way I think about it is honestly a perfect comp for Disney. It is the Disney model. The only difference is we are talking about real people instead of imagined characters and the best line that I've heard over and over, and I love saying it is, the only difference between what we're doing and what Disney is doing is Mickey Mouse doesn't negotiate their contract. So here's how I think about it. Think about Buzz Lightyear and all of the ways that Buzz Lightyear has been the center of amazing storytelling and business opportunities for Disney over decades. He is the centerpiece of four Toy Story films, which made millions of dollars, to Buzz Lightyear-specific films, a Buzz Lightyear, short film, three animated series, two TV specials, a musical, and three versions of Disney on Ice. Then you have five theme park rides that include Buzz Lightyear in them, there’s an entire Lego theme of Toy Story characters involving Buzz Lightyear as well, obviously. And then you have 17 video games that have come out of featuring Buzz Lightyear. This is just the tip of the iceberg. Buzz Lightyear has been story-told and monetized in literally hundreds of way across the Disney universe. Now, obviously we can't do exactly this, what I just said, with real people, because real people have scarcity of time and scarcity of interests in life outside of work, but it creates such a valuable mental model for how you can build massive businesses with many prongs on them, around people.

How I found Excel Dictionary

So most recently I shared on Founder's Journal how we did this exact model with Money with Katie. So Katie Gatti, who has Money with Katie, the brand, has Instagram, a blog, as well as a podcast. And we just brought her onto the Morning Brew platform in the last month to own the personal finance vertical for our audience. I believe we can do the exact same thing with Excel Dictionary for the productivity and work tool vertical. And so here's how we think about the business opportunity of a creator like Excel Dictionary. So let me just give you the background on how we came across Excel Dictionary, what Excel Dictionary does, so that you would then have the foundation for how we think about it from a business perspective. 

I was scrolling through TikTok one day as I tend to do, especially in the morning as well as right before I'm going to sleep and I came across this account called Excel Dictionary, and I was mesmerized by the fact that this account had grown to 2 million followers on TikTok, as well as 1.2 million followers at the time on Instagram. And all they were doing was providing Excel shortcuts in 15- to 30-second videos. They're putting trendy pop music in the background or trending music that was being used heavily on TikTok, and they were having witty commentary and content as captions on the video. But it made so much sense to me, right? Because Excel skills and skills training has been such an important type of content for as long as Excel as a program has existed. But historically it's been super dry and boring where you take a course at your company that has, you know, a paper book that you've flipped through to see the different shortcuts. And it says command plus shift plus A and command plus shift plus slash, so unengaging compared to a TikTok account that you're learning all of these things in a way like you're talking to a friend. So what I ended up doing was I reached out to Excel Dictionary, not knowing who they were or what their goal was, but it just seemed like the perfect partner for Morning Brew after we discussed further. 

Growth potential for Excel Dictionary

And here is my high-level thesis on Excel Dictionary. I believe Excel Dictionary and Emma, the creator of Excel Dictionary, can be an eight figure business. How, you might be wondering? Great question. Let me tell you. As it stands, Excel Dictionary, with 2 million followers on TikTok, and 1.2 million followers on Instagram, we can make a lot of money with advertising on her content, either via advertising for Excel, the program or any other of the softwares in Microsoft Office Suite. We can also get advertisers who are interested in getting in front of the type of person that cares a lot about Excel shortcuts. People who work in finance or consulting or jobs that require you to do modeling of some type. We can launch Excel skill courses using Morning Brew’s education business to power our Excel courses that are far more engaging than what's been in-market for the last 20 years. You could also go as far as saying, we'll do something wild, like creating a piece of software that as you are using Excel, if you didn't use a shortcut, it pops up telling you what shortcut you should have used to save you time on a specific action that you just did fully manual. We can also launch physical products, everything from shirts and swag for the Excel obsessive to work gear,  like work from home or office gear, like mouses, keyboards, and webcams for somebody who clearly is sitting at their desk all day working in Excel. But also if you think about it, Excel is just a wedge. Excel Dictionary is the tip of the iceberg to what I believe can become the millennial multimedia brand that stands for all things work tools. You can imagine Excel Dictionary evolves into PowerPoint Dictionary and another account for Gmail dictionary, or iPhone dictionary, C++ Dictionary, Notion Dictionary, AirTable Dictionary. The list goes on. You could see this becoming a house of brands, literally a house of brands within Morning Brew, which is a house of brands. And so when you look at Morning Brew in five years, and you say, how did this media company become a multibillion dollar business, the answer is going to be simple: Excel Dictionary, Money with Katie, and 40 other talented business creators are going to become multimillion dollar businesses with many brands under them in their own, right. 

I want to hear from you

And so that's how we think about Morning Brew. And that is why I'm so fired up about Excel Dictionary being our new creator. Now I'd love to hear from you, because I think this will actually help us and help inform what our creative strategy is moving forward within the broad umbrella of business, what are specific needs are verticals within business that you think we should be building brands around? So the examples being everything from personal finance to productivity tools to crypto, what is a vertical that comes to mind when you think of specific deep interests within the business world? Shoot me an email at alex@morningbrew.com. I'd love to hear what you have to say. Thank you so much as always for listening and I'll catch you next episode.