Using the Hub & Spoke Model to Grow Your Business

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, I am talking about the single most important mental model I use to think about growing any of the businesses that I'm involved in. Let's hop into it. 

Setting the stage

So I was reflecting yesterday, actually at a conference that I was speaking at in Brooklyn. You know, what is the most powerful framework that I use to think about businesses today, but that I also used to think about growing Morning Brew in the early days? And I came up with something. It's not something that I was aware of when we were originally building Morning Brew, but in hindsight, the model has not changed at all. So what I want to do is tell you a few stories and then share how it all ties together with a very simple framework that you can use in your own businesses. 

The early days of the Brew

So to set the stage, it's 2015, my co-founder Austin and I had started Morning Brew at the University of Michigan. We had started putting out this newsletter. We probably had a hundred subscribers on it and we had one very simple question: How the hell do we get more subscribers to read this newsletter? And now remember, we had never started a business before, we never raised money for the business. So we had to get creative and that's something, as I reflect on my time bootstrapping a business, raising very little money, not going the venture capital route, something that it made us really, really good at as founders, is the idea of leverage. Not financial leverage, but leverage in the sense of, how do you take one unit of energy and turn it into an output of 10? Meaning, how for every small effort do you create very big and meaningful change? And that is what defines everything we did at Morning Brew ‘cause we didn't have a choice. We were defined by scarcity. So going back to the question, how the hell do we grow? The answer was simple for us. We need to get more students in the business school at Michigan reading Morning Brew because that is the warmest lead for us to get in front of. These are the people that we are surrounded by all day long. But at the end of the day, Austin and I were two people. We were like, okay, we can't go up to every single student, the 4,000 students in the business school and be like, “Hey, you want to sign up for the Brew? Do you want to sign up for the Brew?” Would've taken forever. So we asked ourselves, who are the influencers in the business school? The people that if we get in front of them, they will give us access to all of the students we want to sign up for the Brew? On Michigan's campus, the answer was college professors and clubs and club presidents. And so that was basically our strategy for the first few months of the business, was how do we convince every single teacher of business classes on Michigan's campus, as well as how do we convince every club president, to give us two minutes at the beginning of their club meeting or class and pitch our socks off about the Brew? This one strategy is what allowed us to grow from 1,000 to our first 3,000 subscribers. And so then what basically happened was a few months later, Austin and I were like, well, this is great. Except now we've fully saturated the Michigan market.How do we keep growing? How do we go from 3000 to 10,000? 

How we grew the Brew

The answer was okay, we need to go to other colleges. But at other colleges, Austin and I aren't there. So we asked ourselves, how do we repeat the same thing? How do we find the Austin and Alex at all of these schools who do the same exact thing and get in front of the influencers of those schools, the professors and the club presidents? That's what led to our ambassador program. By creating an ambassador program, we created immense leverage where we were able to be in communication with say a hundred people, but those hundred people gave us access to tens of thousands of people who could become subscribers. Maybe you're starting to see the pattern here of leverage that I'm talking about.

Morning Brew’s strategy today

So let's put a pin in these two stories. Now a big part of Morning Brew strategy today is we want to get creators, people who create content around different interests in business, to come onto Morning Brew’s platform. But it is a huge grind to go find these individual people who create content and convince them to come to the Brew. So in the same scrappy mindset that we had in the early days of Michigan about, how do we take one unit of energy and 10 exit in output? Same exact mindset. So we thought to ourselves, who are the influential people and the influencers we can get in front of who open access to a lot of these people? 

One very easy thing we thought of is talent agencies. Talent agencies truly are the distribution channel to so many different creators and talented individuals that we want to come work at Morning Brew. Another example for you, this is an example of not accessing existing distribution, but building it yourself: We have the idea of building a show at Morning Brew called The Next American Creator, basically take America's Got Talent or take American Idol, but adapted for the digital creator economy, where if we create a talent show where creators create content with judges and there are prizes, all of a sudden we are bringing this entire funnel of thousands of creators to us. You're getting the idea, right? 

The hub-and-spoke model

So I want to stop for a second and tell you, what is this model? What is the model that ties together these three or four stories that I've told you? And I'm a very visual person, so this is how I think about it. I call it the hub-and-spoke model. So if you visualize a bicycle, you visualize your bicycle. What you have is you have the hub in the middle of the bicycle wheel and then the spokes, those long metal pointy things that are going to the tires. And the whole idea here is the hub is the person you want to get in front of, the organization you want to get in front of, the influencer you want to get in front of that gives you access to a ton of spokes and spokes can be different things. In the traditional sense with the early days of Morning Brew spokes were all of the readers that we want to get in front of. So we wanted to get in front of tons of people who care about business, who want to read Morning Brew. And the hubs were, who are the people or organizations who have access to all of these spokes? But going back to the creator example, I just gave you in this example, the spokes are creators, so individuals we want to come on to Morning Brew to create shows and create content for us, and hubs are talent agencies or the show we create that gives access, gives leveraged access, to all of these spokes. And this example goes on and on. You can think about it with growth of your customer. You can think about it with growth of your product or your content, but you can also think about it with growth of your business. When I think about growing our senior leadership team at Morning Brew, how does the hub and spoke model apply? What applies in the same exact way? Think about it this way as our ambitions for the business have grown, and my co-founder and I, you know, as 28 and 27 year olds have only had so much career experience, spokes are all of these unanswered questions we have about growing a media business and specifically growing a multimedia business with YouTube franchises and with social growth and data analytics. We have two options. We can make all of the mistakes and answer all of these questions on our own, or we can find a hub, someone who has answers to all these questions. Who’s someone who has answers to all these questions? A very senior content leader, AKA a chief content officer, who we can hire, who reveals all of the blindspots we had. And for us, it creates leverage where one hire answers all of these spokes or all of these questions we need to answer to grow our business. And so whether it's Morning Brew today, whether it's Morning Brew five years ago, or whether it's my current business ventures that I've talked about with you, like my mini golf venture or building creator brands, I am always thinking through the lens of hub and spoke: How do I access one thing that answers as many questions, gives me access to many customers, or unlocks a ton of talent, but just with one unit of effort? And so as you go about building your business, no matter what you're thinking about, you can apply this concept of leverage by thinking about the hub-and-spoke model. 

I want to hear from you

With that, I'd love to hear from you. How have you leveraged the hub-and-spoke model without even knowing it or realizing that this framework exists in your own business or your own career? Shoot me an email to alex@morningbrew.com. I'd love to hear what you think. As always, thank you so much for listening to Founder’s Journal and I'll catch you next episode.