How Morning Brew Grew to 6 Million Subscribers and $70 Million Revenue in Six Years | Austin Rief, Co-founder & CEO
The Peel with Turner Novak
Turner Novak
4.6 • 11 Ratings
🗓️ 12 December 2024
⏱️ 73 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Austin Rief is the Co-founder & CEO of Morning Brew, building the Wall Street Journal for the next generation. They started the company in 2017, and grew it to 6 million subscribers and $70 million in revenue in six years.
We talk through the journey starting Morning Brew with Co-founder Alex Lieberman while students at the University of Michigan, and Austin's playbook for starting a new media company from scratch today. We get into the creator economy, early stage investing, ad based business models, being the first advertiser on Instagram Stories, advice for hiring, and his secret for sourcing remote talent in Sri Lanka.
Timestamps:
(00:00) Intro
(03:42) How to start a media company from scratch today
(13:01) Future of the creator economy is niche products
(14:42) Opportunity in B2B media today
(17:05) Reflecting on investing during ZIRP
(21:30) Why its starting to feel like 2021 again
(23:16) Talking VC portfolio math
(27:09) Starting Morning Brew with Wall Street interview prep
(33:35) Being so dumb that they never pivoted from being a newsletter
(35:29) How newsletter business models works
(38:32) Morning Brew’s first viral Instagram post
(40:37) Acquiring subscribers for two cents on Instagram Stories
(42:29) Nik Sharma’s poor mans paid ads strategy
(44:32) Landing Discover as their first big sponsor
(46:06) How agencies and ad buying works
(49:49) Why sales roles are so hard to hire for
(53:04) Importance of offsheet references
(57:43) Sourcing talent in Sri Lanka with Oceans
(01:04:23) Austin and Alex’s unique co-founder dynamics
(01:07:16) Dental plans, rotisserie chickens, and company laptops
(01:10:00) Building WSJ for the next generation
Referenced:
Morning Brew: https://www.morningbrew.com
Try Oceans: https://www.oceanstalent.com/
Kevin Espiritu episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FefGL-qPzDo
Craig Fuller episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oPPqO8eBq2M
Forbes article: https://www.forbes.com/sites/hayleycuccinello/2019/02/07/morning-brew/
Follow Austin:
Twitter: https://x.com/austin_rief
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/austin-rief/
Newsletter: https://www.theaustinbrief.com/
Follow Turner:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/TurnerNovak
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/turnernovak
Subscribe to my newsletter to get every episode + the transcript in your inbox every week: https://www.thespl.it/
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | people told me you were crazy, very well-known media execs, some of whom I think you know, |
| 0:04.9 | would call us and say, you're making a huge mistake, you have this cool brand, go raise a bunch |
| 0:09.4 | of money and put video on Facebook, right? The whole pivot video thing. Oh, yeah, that was the thing |
| 0:13.6 | at the time. And we were so lucky in the fact that we just had no idea how to even do that. |
| 0:25.1 | I always say we were the only team who could have built Morning Brew, and it's not a compliment. It's an insult. Because you were so bad at everything |
| 0:29.6 | else. Yeah, we had no idea. We barely could put out a daily email. So, you know, Axios comes out, |
| 0:35.3 | I think, 2018, 2019, and they launched 10 newsletters. We're like 10 newsletters. We can barely do one. They come out and they're doing events. We say, events, we can't write a newsletter. But the very best thing we ever did was for longer than anyone else, stay more focused than anyone else on the one thing that mattered to us, which is right, grow, |
| 0:54.7 | and sell the best possible newsletter. So by the time we launched something else, no other newsletter |
| 0:59.4 | had a million, million, a half, two million subscribers. So we started dipping our toe in the water in |
| 1:04.6 | some of these B2B verticals, whether it was marketing or retail, but the machine was built. |
| 1:11.2 | That daily newsletter was a $10 million plus product. |
| 1:14.7 | And so we were fueling everything with profits from the newsletter. |
| 1:18.6 | We raised one round of funding in 2017. |
| 1:21.6 | You raised $750,000. |
| 1:23.8 | We barely dipped into that money, |
| 1:26.2 | and we never raised money again. |
| 1:30.7 | And it was because we were not investing in other things. |
| 1:34.2 | We just said, hey, let's become best in the world at this one thing. |
| 1:35.7 | Welcome to the PEO. |
| 1:38.1 | I'm your host, Turner Novak, founder of Banana Capital. |
| 1:41.5 | Today's guest is Austin Reef, co-founder and CEO of Morning Group, |
| 1:43.7 | the Wall Street Journal for the younger generation. |
... |
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