How to Start Building #1: Overcome Builder’s Block (Classic)

What's 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. Today's episode is part of a mini-series that we are dropping this week. Here's how it works: This week we are focused on one crucial topic in business that is important to builders, founders, and all professionals and we'll be serving you double the content to make the topic stick. This week's theme is How to Start Building. We're focusing on the mindset of an entrepreneur and the skills you need to go from idea to reality. In today's classic episode, I talk about a concept that I call Builder's Block, what I do to remedy it, and why I think Builder's Block is a good thing. Let's hop into it. 

Builder’s Block

So what is Builder's Block? Well, it's not something that anyone has officially heard of, but I'll set the scene. Last night after dinner, I was spending some time thinking about the strategy for Morning. Brew's soon-to be-launched paid product. Without going into too much detail, the product is a membership that helps accelerate emerging business leaders’ careers.

It is a combination of content, community, and events, and the initial team will include a product manager, a lead editor, and a community editor. So anyway, I was spending some time thinking about how we can organize all of these ideas that we've thought of over the last few months for this product, each of which would add value to business professionals in different ways, whether it be helping them with public speaking, serving case studies to drive strategic thinking, or office hours with entrepreneurs to learn how to better manage teams. But what I was trying to do was start focusing the product. We had a ton of ideas, but not enough structure around it. And how I was trying to do that was basically by asking myself, what is the MVB or the minimum viable bundle, of content, community, and events that we can offer that delivers on the promise of the product, which is to accelerate the emerging business leader’s career, and also makes it indispensable for our customer?

And if I'm being honest, this exercise was really difficult. I found myself stuck suffering from analysis paralysis, and I felt this overwhelm of things to choose from and no sense of certainty of what I should actually choose. And I didn't know how to push the exercise forward. Again, ton of ideas, no sense of what the final product was or the structure to put around it. And the best way I can describe this feeling is what I imagine writer's block feels like for writers. There's no name for this experience, but I figured a ton of people who are building teams or companies or products go through it, so I decided to name it. Half-joking and half-serious, I tweeted out about it and ask people, what should we call this feeling?

Working without a precedent

Because I think it's important to put names to things that so many people experience so then we can talk through those challenges together. By having shared language, we can talk about shared experiences and shared struggles and the best name for this feeling of being stuck when building new things was Builder's Block. Super simple, but it gets the point across. So now that you understand what Builder's Block is, I want to share why I believe I was experiencing Builder's Block and how I deal with this feeling of being stuck. The first thing that I have experienced throughout the entirety of building Morning Brew’s paid product is there's no precedent. There is no playbook or other product that we could look at to build this thing.

So we were starting with no reference point. And when we were thinking about creating Morning Brew, the daily newsletter, our original product, although there weren't a lot of destination email newsletters, meaning like the newsletter was the product, email as a technology, as a channel for distributing content wasn't a new thing. And we at least had some reference point in looking at other good email newsletters when we were thinking about our own. But when it comes to building a membership around accelerating millennial professionals’ careers using content, community, and events, there just, isn't a whole lot of precedent. There aren't a lot of other products at market that we can reference to use as inspiration for building out our paid product. And I think that made it very difficult and is partially what led to Builder's Block. 

Fear of the unknown

The second thing that created Builder's Block is this fear of the unknown and comfortability with what's already working. Think about it this way. We always have Morning Brew’s newsletter or our core business to fall back on. And I'm sure a lot of other builders feel this way, where you have a successful business, you know it's working, and it's doing really well. So you have your bread and butter. But what that means is in thinking about building new products, there's a huge opportunity cost of your time. And so whatever you build has to be really meaningful in terms of retaining customers, building bigger audience, or being a significant revenue stream.

And that added some pressure to the process for me. Morning Brew’s business did $21 million in 2020, most of which came from our newsletter products. So it added this pressure to think about, how can we possibly move the needle with this new educational product? And is there any way down the road that education as a business could become a $10 million business? If the answer was no, then I probably shouldn't be spending my time on it. 

Divergent versus convergent thinking

Now, the third reason I would say, the most personal reason for me, that I felt Builder's Block in building out this premium product for the Brew is I am really comfortable with divergent thinking, which is creative thinking or brainstorming, your brain going in 50 different directions, but convergent thinking, which is basically what happens going from ideas to product, I find to be way more difficult. You know, for me brainstorming all of the different things that we could do to provide business education to a premium audience, I love that. I live for it. I love thinking about what is this portfolio of different things that we can offer to a group that's paying a thousand dollars for a program? But then narrowing down all of the things we could do to the bare essentials to get back to that idea of a minimum viable bundle, so we are focused on just serving a specific product in the beginning and biting off more than we can chew, I find that especially difficult because I asked myself what is enough to justify the value of the product?

If we're charging a thousand dollars for things, how do I know that offering say three things rather than five things will make it worth people's time and money? So for some people, this act of what I just refer to as convergent thinking, of actually narrowing down to the minimum viable product or minimum viable bundle and focusing, that is more comfortable for most people. So for my co-founder Austin, that is his natural way of thinking. But for me, I find divergent thinking more comfortable, so having to think in a convergent manner and focus this new product was particularly difficult. 

Product in perpetuity 

The fourth and final thing that created Builder's Block for me specifically with this product is the fact that our way of thinking about it is as an ongoing membership where there's no beginning, there's no end, people just sign up and we serve content, community, and events to people into perpetuity. You can think of it like a gym membership. 

And I find this to be really exciting, this idea of building a product for lifelong learning, but it's also super daunting, because how do you think about programming something that never ends? And I just found that lack of structure around building out a product that never ends and is always existing membership to be basically impossible. Say, XYZ person signs up for it. They're a customer for four years. How can I start wrapping my head around, okay, on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays for the next ever, what content am I serving them? And on Thursdays for the next ever, what events am I curating for them?

It just is incredibly daunting. And maybe others can attack this exercise with more speed or confidence, but I found it to cause a ton of stress and Builder's Block. And so I think this combination of all of the things that I just listed made me struggle and made Builder's Block real, where I just felt like I couldn't take all these valuable but different ideas and boil them down into a skinny bundle of initial product that we think could add enough value to people. And so then I started thinking about, how can I deal with the feeling of Builder's Block now that I know about it? What are the things that I and other people can do with this feeling once we have it? And this is how I start to think about it and what I'm going to use as a guide as this feeling inevitably happens again and again, as we build anything. 

The first most important thing is I try as much as possible to sit with discomfort. A classic example of what happens to me is that I start trying to narrow down what the key product features should be for this product. I struggle with it mentally for a few minutes, and then it becomes too much to bear for my brain and I find some way to procrastinate, whether it's scrolling through social media or grabbing food, whatever it may be. So here's how it would actually work in practice. I would end up getting frustrated that I can't think of a way to narrow down the product. I reach for my phone. I go on Twitter. I go to Gmail or I go to Google and I look up, “What is a good framework for building a new product?” And I justify that act as pushing forward the activity I'm doing of narrowing down the product, because Hey, I went on Twitter to look at what so-and-so said about building a product, or I went and looked it up on Google, but all I'm doing in reality is just a justified cop-out to not sit in the discomfort of Builder's Block. 

How to get unstuck

And beyond just sitting in the discomfort, there are two other things that I do as I hit the sticking points. The first is to change my environment without just going back to my computer or my phone. That could be going for a walk, or a drive, or literally just changing rooms. But I often find that change of environment will help spark a breakthrough and push through that block. In more extreme cases when I've been sitting in the discomfort for a while, and I'm not having any luck pushing through to push this product forward, I'll actually move on to something else. I'll just do a different type of work, maybe work that isn't nearly as intellectually rigorous, just so I can build momentum and then I come back to working on the paid product.

So what I did last night after spending 30 minutes just thinking and not knowing how to push forward, narrowing down these different ideas I had, was going over, answering some emails. I went to thinking about Founder's Journal and strategizing for the next day. And then I came back to working on the paid product, once I had rebuilt up my confidence and momentum around doing work. It's kind of like jumpstarting a car: Building up this intellectual momentum through other work puts you in a better position to break through Builder's Block once you return to the work that was causing it. 

The final way I try to push through these sticking points is by talking to people I trust and people who are good convergent thinkers, but also people who are ideally the target customer of the product I'm building. For example, today, as I was hitting a roadblock, I hit up my buddy Sahil, who I believe falls squarely in the audience demographic and what I did is I put a hypothetical product feature list in front of him. And I basically said, which of these things would you really enjoy in the product if you were part of this paid membership? So many smart product minds have always said, talk to your customers to see what they think. And I do find this to be always a good fallback when you're finding yourself stuck or experiencing Builder's Block. It's interesting because while it's a very uncomfortable feeling, I'm actually really refreshed by the feeling. I wholeheartedly believe in the practice of intellectual confusion for professional development.

What I mean by that is, just like in improving your physical fitness, you have this concept of muscle confusion, where you do different forms of workouts that keep you engaged and it steepens the learning curve and it challenges your typical routine. And it leads to really good results for your body. I think muscle confusion for your brain works just as well. And I want to caveat this. I'm not saying that I think you should constantly change up your routine or remove consistency from your work. But what I am saying is that you should understand what the different groups of thinking, divergent versus convergent, and the different types of intellectual stimulation, how they all contribute to you growing as a thinker. And what working on our new product has shown me is that I've spent a ton of time exercising just very different skills, a lot of divergent thinking with creative thinking and brainstorming, a lot of storytelling skills through presentations to our team. But I haven't exercised my ability to think in a convergent or linear or focused manner, and this activity with our paid product of going from vision and ideas to focus product and game plan, is a really important shock to my system that now I will be able to use outside of just this one product. 

So now I put it to you. When was the last time you experienced Builder's Block in your career, whether it was with a team, a product, or your entire company? How did you deal with it? And do you agree that experiencing these feelings of discomfort are actually positive? As always, thank you so much for listening to Founder’s Journal.

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