#202 – How to Build a Rabid Fan Base with Austin Rief of Morning Brew

Indie Hackers

Courtland Allen and Channing Allen

Startups, Entrepreneurship, Makers, Indie, Bootstrapping, Online, Technology, Business, Founders, Bootstrappers, Ideas, Tech, Indiehackers, Hackers

4.9 • 606 Ratings

🗓️ 20 April 2021

⏱️ 39 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Austin Rief (@Austin_Rief) started the newsletter Morning Brew in college when he didn’t care if he made money or mistakes. That freedom in the early days resulted in an authenticity that he credits for their growth. In this episode, I talk to Austin about how he’s using Twitter to grow, what types of customers become brand ambassadors, and so much more.

Transcript

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0:00.0	What's up everybody? This is Cortland from IndieHackers.com and you're listening to the
0:11.2	NDHackers podcast. More people than ever are building cool stuff online and making a lot of money
0:16.0	in the process. And on this show, I sit down with these indie hackers to discuss the ideas, the
0:20.0	opportunities and the strategies they're taking advantage of so the rest of us can do the same.
0:28.6	All right, I'm here with Austin Reef, the co-founder of Morning Brew.
0:32.6	Morning Brew is an incredibly impressive business.
0:35.6	On your website, you describe it as the daily email that makes reading the news
0:40.3	actually enjoyable.
0:42.3	And I think last year, you generated over $20 million in revenue with just 33 employees.
0:47.3	Is that accurate?
0:48.3	Yeah, that is. That is more or less correct.
0:51.3	I think 33 was probably halfway through the year, but something like that, yeah.
0:54.9	These are pretty crazy numbers. And what's even crazier is that you started this thing as a side project
1:00.6	in college in 2015, and you never raise any money from VCs. And somehow it's turned into this,
1:06.4	like, behemoth media company that's generating millions of dollars. You have millions of subscribers.
1:15.0	It's a pretty long way to go, basically, from people who weren't necessarily imagining in the beginning that you could ever build something this big.
1:17.3	So it's funny you mentioned that.
1:18.3	I don't think that is, I think that is the reason why it got to be so big because we didn't
1:23.7	plan things out at the beginning.
1:25.1	I think a lot of consumer businesses in general, they're
1:29.0	two, they're like fake, right, up front. It's very staged, especially raised VC money.
1:35.0	You have to build community early, right? You have to build this brand early. And for us,
	...

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