Morning Brew

“And we're in the process of getting ready to introduce marketing brew, our newest industry vertical.”

“Good example of a partnership is where you are interested in going into a new line of business, but you don't want to hire a full team yet and assume a lot of cost and risk for it. Partner with someone who already has the team, already has the product. Do a re…”

“When I think back to the early days of morning brew, if I think about the most important decisions we made, it was the decision to default to action and consistency and never miss a day. I think that is what built habit for people.”

“And so that's what we did with Scott Galloway, who launched an education company called Section Four. Anyway we partnered with them. It's been a great partnership, but I spent from nine 30, 11 o'clock going through the content of the course just to become more…”

“I have found that reference calls are generally not incredibly enlightening, but they're almost as much a Barometer of the quality of the reference as the person that you're doing the reference call for. Meaning if you believe that people are a reflection of t…”

“By focusing on a single channel brand, it gives you the permission to build a multi-channel franchise because you're kind of, I think in a good way, putting all of your eggs in one basket to build up an audience in a place and then start creating content in ot…”

“We have not plugged it in our newsletter at all.”

“Like if that, that is that the hypothesis we can test it and then by accident get the show in front of two point, whatever million readers.”

“So you have examples of companies like morning brew where we raised, we weren't entirely bootstrapped, meaning we didn't raise anything, but we just raised a friends and family round raised 750,000 dollars and then built the business from there.”

“Emotional volatility can be your biggest enemy when running a business. It can cause you to make overconfident decisions when you feel like you're winning or desperate decisions when you're on a cold streak.”

“I think this is actually one of the strongest connections between poker and entrepreneurship is I attribute so much of morning brews success up to this point to Austin, my co-founder and my ability to stay level headed when shit hits the fan, but also when the…”

“I've assigned 20% of my time to the paid product and its beta launch for the first half of the year.”

“And together, I've assigned 40% of my time to these two things, to hiring and to culture.”

“So at least for the last two years, Austin and I have taken time to basically write out informal job descriptions for ourselves to make sure we're holding ourselves accountable to doing the things we say we're going to do.”

“20 20 was a massive year for morning brew. We grew revenue from 13 people or sorry, thirteen million to twenty million. We nearly tripled headcount. We grew our audience by 60%.”

“And the way to do that is not to just state what the future looks like to not just to state what your North star is. But also to give your team clues as to why it is inevitable for us to get there.”

“For context, the way that we typically start our all hands meetings in a normal meeting is with one P and one W from each leader. The P stands for priority and the W stands for a win. And each senior leader shares their one priority and their one win from the …”

“Why 2021 is the year of morning brew and why this year we become a true media brand that evolves from newsletter company to media company.”

“There was no paid marketing in the early days of the brew.”

“The way that we define a high quality subscriber is a reader who opens at least six of their first 12 newsletters.”

“The first time we ran the program, we had 12 ambassadors from 10 different schools, And we got around 5000 subscribers that semester.”

“Morning Brew's referral program progressed from starting on Kickoff Labs, us finding that was not flexible enough. We then had an Upwork freelancer build it custom for 500 dollars, and then we ended up giving it to our in-house engineers to rebuild and build i…”

“Morning Brew's referral program is still a major driver of growth to this very day and more than 300,000 Of our 2.5 million readers have gotten at least one person to sign up using their referral link.”

“Morning Brew has done cross promotions with everyone from top 10 business sites in the world to YouTube influencers, but the most effective cross promos have always been same channel partnerships. What that means is Morning Brew cross-promoting with another em…”

“We tried announcements in classes and through trial and error, we figured out the best first growth tactic for morning brew.”

“We have found on multiple occasions where Morning Brew advertising deals have come from people who found out about the newsletter from their kids who are in college.”

“Fast forward to 20, 21. We have 70 people across eight business units, all working remote.”

“In State of the Brunian, we review the company's quarterly goals, We talk about financial performance, literally sharing revenue, profit, cash burn numbers, and we talk about the game plan to hit our specific goals in the upcoming quarter.”

“I'd probably say that I want Morning Brew to be an eight out of 10, zero being the least transparent in the world, 10 being the most transparent in the world.”

“Every Friday, a few employee volunteers write and send out a newsletter that covers the biggest news at Morning Brew as a company, as well as the wider media industry. Think Morning Brew for Morning Brew. It's shared in a Google Doc and includes important week…”

“I believe I've had to lay off three people over the last five years.”

“The bus stop test, which is, would you spend 12 hours sitting at a bus stop with this person without losing your mind?”

“A layoff conversation should be 90% manager talking, 10% employee. There, unfortunately, is very little upside to making it a more balanced conversation.”

“Co-founding Morning Brew with Austin was probably the best decision I've made in the last six years of running the business, and that is simply because our relationship has been built atop a foundation of just these universal principles that I think any relati…”

“And that lesson was that most people suck at giving feedback, like horrible at it. And feedback is literally the lifeblood of building a business. I think it's generally because either people aren't like super thoughtful when they read something or consume a p…”

“So I got to 500 subscribers on market corner and I decided I wanted to take it to the next level.”

“No matter what you do in life, if you are a professional that is trying to grow your company or grow yourself, understanding how to build an audience is a 21st century superpower.”

“Morning Brew was founded on the premise of building an owned audience first. We started in the middle of the funnel. No big technology company can take that audience away from us. And now that we have such an intimate one-to-one relationship with our subscribe…”

“Using Morning Brew as an example, we're building a paid business education product that we will then market to our three million subscribers and listeners across Morning Brew, Founders Journal, Business Casual, et cetera, who will hopefully act as our initial …”

“As I've grown as an entrepreneur, I've noticed that, you know, while I've been able to effectively move from, let's call it doer, someone who's working in the weeds to manager, and then to kind of delegator, even higher level level, my ability to shift my time…”

“The issue is, is given in six years of working on Morning Brew, I have finished my bolded list maybe 10 times ever.”

“I think so much of it comes down to the amount of weight that I place in these thoughts. And I think I place so much weight in these thoughts because so much of my identity in my young adult life and so much of my self-worth Has been tied to morning brew.”

“And while I don't believe that like work-life balances is really a thing when you're building a company, there is definitely kind of this separation of church and state between personal life and work at times.”

“Imposter syndrome, you know, doesn't just attack specific skills. It attacks your character, attacks your identity. And when I feel like my entire identity is attacked, it will make me feel more anxious, not just about the things that I don't think I'm amazing…”

“I'm not sure if it's because we as entrepreneurs overestimate our abilities or underestimate the time it takes to complete something, but everything always takes longer than you want or expect when building a company.”

“There is little that is more detrimental to a business. Then miss hiring. It is so bad for business. And in some cases that it can actually kill a business.”

“March, 1425, the first Morning Brew newsletter was sent out By Austin Reif and myself to 1500 students at the University of Michigan.”

“Fast forward, March 1420 21, Morning Brew is a full-fledged media brand with an audience of 3,000,007 products, and a nearly 90 person team.”

“At the end of the day, you as a builder are going to be great at one or two things. Other than that, there's always going to be someone better than you to do the things you're not great at.”

“It is literally four years after we made this deck and that we promised this business plan to be executed in 2018, and we still haven't finished The business plan.”

“In decision making, right and wrong is far less important than why or why not. In business, you quickly find that there are very few decisions that you make that are so clearly right or so clearly wrong. Most of your existence as a professional sits in this ki…”

“And to be honest with you, we've had people leave our business because expectations weren't properly set.”

“You can always assume that if you start to doubt the fit of someone that you've hired, several other people who worked closer and more frequently with that person have had those doubts for some time.”

“At Morning Brew, we implemented a planning process four and a half years into the business.”

“We originally built our referral program by copying the approach that Harry's razors had when they launched.”

“We passed around sheets of paper. We asked people to write down their email addresses. Fun fact, that was the highest converting way to make Announcements asking people to take out their computers, go to our website and type in their email addresses was way lo…”

“We have three million subscribers today and over 300,000 people have gotten at least one referral.”

“And so that ambassador program was our largest growth strategy at Morning Brew, probably for the first two and a half years of the business. It's what allowed us to grow, call it by five to 10,000 new subscribers a semester.”

“If we had founded this after college while having to balance it with finance jobs where we're being paid well, it wouldn't have happened. No way.”

“If low or no code tools did not exist, there would be far fewer businesses that someone like myself could start. I definitely wouldn't have been able to start Morning Brew.”

“In 2015, my co-founder Austin and I started Morning Brew for less than a thousand dollars. We had a 50 dollar filing fee in Michigan for starting an LLC, a hundred dollars for the domain morningbrewdaily.com, 10 dollars a month for website hosting, and a hundr…”

“EOS by Gina Wickman, which we use at Morning Brew.”

“Really, at the end of the day, you want to sell FOMO. You want to sell FOMO where a potential hire says, I can't not join this company because I'm going to be missing out on this incredible train ride. I can't not invest in this company because I think this co…”

“Well, when we started the company in 2016, we were a bunch of twenty-four-year-olds, none of us were married, none of us had kids, but over the years, as the organization has grown, we're at a 120 people now.”

“What makes us great at work Is what makes us horrible at unplugging from work. We take our careers really seriously, we don't settle for good, we need perfect, and we want to move up the totem pole of our given companies as fast as humanly possible.”

“Once we started paying our ambassadors to get subscribers, they were less effective, and the relationship went so downhill between us and them.”

“And what we ended up finding out happened was one of our college ambassadors, a student who went to Lake Forest University, a school that has 4000 college students, they decided to scrape their entire student directory and sign up every single student without …”

“Morning Brew didn't invent business content, and Morning Brew didn't invent newsletters. Morning Brew just took the Wall Street Journal and old school business media and adapted it in a format that we thought worked for our audience. We were the Wall Street Jo…”

“Given in six years of working on Morning Brew, I have finished my bolded list maybe 10 times, and I think that's generous, I've needed to reorient myself to this list.”

“You know, in the early days of Morning Brew, I was always astounded that employees were sharing compensation information, but more and more as I talk to founders, it appears we just live in a world where employees are sharing that information with one another,…”

“The first thing I remember is that Allbirds did zero discounting or promo codes on their product. They were super strict about this.”

“Simply put, Allbirds was the best performing partner in Morning Brew the entire year in the year in which they advertised. I'm pretty sure they got more than four times the Average number of clicks that a normal partner would get in our newsletter”

“After a few months on the job, this person, I'll never forget it, pulled me out of our WeWork office to just a side table in the main area of WeWork, and they told me that they would be leaving to join Google, and they were going to be joining Google to write …”

“As the business gets bigger, And as you go from early stage startup to late stage startup, and there's more clarity around the specific parts of the org and jobs to be done, because there's more of a plan, what you end up needing is not Swiss army knives, it's…”

“I think Austin and I could have better set expectations to this first employee about how grueling being a first employee and first writer at a media startup was.”

“With Morning Brew at more than a 120 employees now, we have lost several employees, and it doesn't matter how great of a business you've built, how strong your culture is, or how well you retain talent, you just simply can't retain a hundred percent, and it st…”

“As you gain credibility as a business, as you become known as an upstart media business, you're going to lose employees either via them getting poached by other media startups or established media businesses, or the employees simply leverage their brand And th…”

“When we launched a new newsletter product about Politics, and it didn't work out as planned, and we had to shut it down.”

“When Russian hackers decided to crash Morning Brew's website with a DDoS attack, basically sending too much traffic to our website and our website was down for over a day.”

“I just had this vision in my head from that point on that one day I would hand seven-figure checks to every member of my family to make sure that they never had to worry about a dollar or about money again. And so no longer was Morning Brew just this opportuni…”

“Well, actually, we created a moment called Coffee Chats which is, oh, actually, it's Donut. It's a Slack channel that allows new hires to be included in the Slack where they're just randomly grouped up with, like, five other people outside of their department.…”

“One of my favorite ways to build a media company is to look outside of media for inspiration. When thinking about how can we surprise and delight our readers at Morning Brew, I would look to the gaming industry. When thinking about how can we run our business …”

“I wasn't obsessed with working on Morning Brew in the early days. I didn't have a deep passion for writing a newsletter and making it more digestible for millennials.”

“That's the story of Morning Brew. We thought of starting a newsletter and making it better and delivering it in the way we delivered it, not because we were wildly unconventional thinkers, but we didn't realize convention would have said that newsletters are d…”

“For the largest part of my time as a manager at Morning Brew, I absolutely messed this exact concept up.”

“Like I have the fear oftentimes about if I was to ever start another business how bad would it look to fail with the second thing after the first thing went well with morning brew?”

“So, my co-founder, Austin Reif, and I have spent the last six years building Morning Brew. That includes raising money, hiring a ton of people, making a ton of mistakes, and ultimately selling a majority stake in the business in an eight-figure deal.”

“I think I have placed so much weight on these thoughts, these stories that I tell myself, because so much of my identity in my young adult life and so much of my self worth has been tied to morning brew.”

“I don't really believe in work-life balance in general when you're building a company. There isn't this clear delineation of church and state or work and personal life”

“I have a folder of all of the past emails that Morning Brew readers have sent us, basically explaining why our business means so much to them. And so anytime I'm doubting the impact that I've had as an entrepreneur or doubting my abilities, I always go back to…”

“Even at Morning Brew, 80% of revenue being driven by 20% of our creators.”

“We're a media business, we have advertising revenue, we have absolutely seen softness in advertisers over the last few months”

“Middle of 20 19, we were probably at, I don't know, a dozen employees, and Austin hit me up one day being like, you know, you have to read this book. One of our investors recommended me this book, and the investor he's amazing. He was the founder of the Snuggi…”

“The best money spent after we sold morning brew other than my dog Rambo was on the tax attorneys who helped with structuring around this. Like it was worth 10 times over.”

“So in the context of gas, by them going high school by high school, the high schools are the hubs and the high school students are the spokes. And the amazing part about this model for a social network is there are network effects built in. So for something li…”

“One of the biggest mistakes we have ever made and continued to make for a while at the brew is rushing hires. Like, when we ended up being down to, say, two people, and we didn't give an offer to one because they weren't our person, we go back, give an offer t…”

“I think what happened was I went from spending, let's call it, 80 hours a week to 30 hours a week on Morning Brew when I moved into the chairman role”

“Like, I never received a compliment from Austin in seven years of running business together.”

“Biggest lesson, or one of the biggest lessons I learned is you can't hire HR early enough, or like, you can, but I would just say, like, when we hired HR, it was too late. It's one of those things that you're never gonna feel like it's the right time, but if y…”

“Oh, yeah, we didn't give computers in the early days. We made people bring their personal computers into the office like we thought that was like normal for an early stage business.”

“Not raising VC money and raising 750 K from family and friends. I think it was one of the best decisions we made in the business.”

“This year the business will do Around seventy-five million dollars.”

“One of, if I was to reflect on like the mistakes we've made over the years with morning brew, it's, we were really ambitious, which was great, but at times we were ambitious all at once in one point of time versus sequencing. Like, let's do this thing. Once th…”

“The hardest transition that I found when I switched from working at Morgan Stanley to going full time on morning brew. And then the transition I made from running the day to day of morning brew to being the chairman is I went from every minute of my day was di…”

“We had a one-pager that defined the Morning Brew voice as a person. So it would literally be like, Our voice is Sahil. He is thirty-something years old, living outside in New York City. He will drink once or twice a week. His preferred drink is whiskey. Other …”

“So the first time we did it, we had 10 ambassadors. We were super stringent. We went through resumes. We had an interview process, and we're like, we're gonna pick the most impressive people on college campuses who's, like, The student body president in like f…”

“There are people who are just newsletter people, just like when you want to promote a podcast, you do it on other podcasts. Like mediums promote like mediums.”

“And to this day, A very simple prompt, writing prompt, is like the best proxy for someone getting hired at the brew. You take a big business news story from the last few days, in a 150 to 250 words, you summarize this story in a way that connects with the audi…”

“The first email went out to like, 45 or 50 people. And it started with like, AEPI people, people in the business school, and my family.”

“There's two types of mishiring, and I think people usually think about the first that I'll give you, but it's the second that really kills you. The first is you just mess up. You hire a senior exec, you know within four to six months of the wrong person hopefu…”

“I think the biggest mistake was probably actually staying in the CEO role too long.”

“I remember Mark Cuban, we also asked him to invest, and I give so much props to Mark, because he is someone that, irrespective of his success, he still, Emails with founders at the earliest stages all the time, but basically he had a similar response to this t…”

“Deal was October of twenty-twenty. Moved out of the role in April of twenty-twenty-one. My happiness actually went down a lot.”

“It was the classic thing where product sucks but people still use it. Like, oh, I mean, it's like Amazon. Amazon looks terrible. It's the worst design site that I use, yet people, people use it.”

“We didn't intend for it to be a business. And if we did, and we thought about it as a business in 2015, I think it would have failed. We would have made long, short term decisions to make a little money here or there, but because of the side project, we didn't…”

“I think there's like that whole 70,000 dollar salary you know, study that people are happier at 70,000 dollars. I don't think that's true. I think I am happier”

“In the early days I would say none of our hires were journalists, and we've hired a more, ah, let's call it like traditional, ah, journalist journalistically trained writers over time, as we've gotten a sense of, kind of, what we're looking for, but in the ear…”

“By the time that I transitioned out of the CEO role at Morning Brew in April of 20, 21, very honestly, I was working less hard on the business. I would say part of it was because I was dealing with my own things in life, anxiety, OCD, but also part of it was I…”

“Like I said before, I felt like a huge failure after moving out of the CEO role for Morning Brew. I had this story of what it meant to be a great CEO. You have an idea, you create a product, you prove that the product has value in the world, you scale that pro…”

“Is I was terrible in the early days of Morning Brew of leveraging advisors or investors to ask them for help.”

“And it's this thought that makes me more risk averse than I probably need to be, and view money with a scarcity mindset, because I fear that I'll never have a financial success again, so I better hoard what I do have right now.”

“Spokes are your customers or your users. They're your power users. Hubs are the channels, whether they be digital or physical channels, that you can use to get access to many of your spokes at once, to many of your customers or your users at once.”

“The people we thought would do best as ambassadors, the people who were most connected in their student body, who were in five different clubs, who were You know, student body president. They were actually the worst ambassadors because they were spread so thin…”

“So, for example, for Morning Brew, it was classes and clubs. Like, those were our hubs in the beginning, right? Because we could go into an Econ one on one class, or we could go into an accounting class, And we could get access to between 75 to 500 spokes or c…”

“I think at its largest, we had like, 250 ambassadors at a hundred different schools. I think at its peak, we were getting somewhere between 15,020 thousand subscribers a semester.”

“With Morning Brew, just to provide kind of exact numbers, I went and joined Morgan Stanley in 2015, and when I joined, we had 30,000 subscribers. I said that I would leave Morgan Stanley. I promised myself I would leave Morgan Stanley. We get to a 100,000 subs…”

“Our college ambassador program. We expanded it to a point where we had 300 ambassadors at 70 schools and we were getting 25,000 emails per semester doing that.”

“I do think that scrappiness and busyness got in the way of me being an exceptional CEO, which I think I have the capability of doing. I think for far too long at Morning Brew, I was in the weeds selling advertisements versus growing as the CEO of the business”

“Because if you think about our story, it was one of raising very little money for Morning Brew for starting this media business, not going the venture capital route, and doing anything and everything to push the business forward.”

“So the example of Morning Brew for me was I learned how to sell media very well because I literally was our only salesperson up until 2018.”

“You know, at one point in the business, we were spending 500,000 dollars a month.”

“It was the fact that we were bootstrap founders, and as we were starting to cash flow millions of dollars in the business, we didn't have the skill of how to allocate all of that money because we had never dealt with that much money in our lives.”

“In the early days of the brew, we'd always, I always thought of it as like, there's two types of employees. There's pull employees and there's push employees. Pull employees are the people that pull the entire business forward. Push employees are the people yo…”

“The business wouldn't be, you know, a 250 person company with 15 different products now.”

“I actually have more anxiety today than I did before building Morning Brew or selling the business. Like I would say Money anxiety today, on average, is like a six out of 10, seven out of 10, and before, like, when I was just starting Morning Brew, it was prob…”

“After leaving the CEO role of Morning Brew, I kind of had this Ongoing obsessive thought of, am I a one trick pony? How much did I contribute to the business's success? I don't know if I'll be able to replicate my success again. And so, while I think I've come…”

“Every day, we did it every day for three weeks. We probably went through 5000 slips of paper every day, and at the end of the day, you'd see them thrown out, and we got an email one day from the venture, the Ross Business School Venture Fund, basically saying,…”

“At the highest level when we built Morning Brew, my motivation was, let's call it, 60% money, 40% love for the game. Now I would say it is pretty, there's still money drive there. Like I think for me to say that I wasn't motivated by money would just be false …”

“I always thought I was good at delegation. I assumed that I had to be, given Morning Brew's growth over the last eight years. But as I've re-immersed myself in new businesses outside of the brew, I have realized that this assumption was completely wrong.”

“If you were to look at our original pitch deck that we shared with investors in 2015, we had shared in that deck a slide that was all about our one year strategy. And while that strategy in that one slide was actually spot on with how the business has grown ov…”

“If those two people were still part of Morning Brew, I don't think Morning Brew would have succeeded, and it has nothing to do with these two individuals specifically, but I think the complexity created by having every major decision in a business made by four…”

“This is going to sound crazy, but over the course of Morning Brew, Austin and I never once had a one-on-one where we expressed how the other was doing, what we needed more of, and what we were grateful for in the other.”

“I don't know if we started Morning Brew after I had graduated, if it would be around today, because it took us basically two and a half years to actually start making any money on the business.”

“Lesson number two, only change one variable when you're moving your audience. Four and a half million people, no morning brew for our daily newsletter. By keeping the variable of news constant and only changing the platform, From newsletter to YouTube and podc…”

“And so those are all the reasons why I believe Morning Brew Daily is on fire and why I think it has the chance to be as big as our daily newsletter a few years down the road.”

“Because we live in an era where the ability to create content and build an audience has truly been democratized because the cost of creating content is basically zero now, people are gravitating towards consuming content from brands that they resonate with. An…”

“I think of morning brew shows as hubs that have spokes coming out of them. And those spokes are ways that the core content can create other value for consumers and for morning brew at the center of this hub is the anchor show, which in this case is morning bre…”

“Another spoke is morning brew daily being a talent incubator where we can bring in guests or guest hosts and In order to test talent, low risk to us, and potentially leverage some of our best test guests or hosts to launch new shows under Morning Brew's umbrel…”

“Daily, timely content is a blessing and a curse. The blessing is that it's easier to build a habit and timely content creates more urgency. People need to know the news so that they can talk about it with their friends or their colleagues. And also when it's d…”

“What we've learned over the years is that transferring audiences across like platforms is way more successful than different platforms, and what that means is promoting a new newsletter in your existing newsletter is way easier than promoting a podcast in your…”

“Having a huge audience is a blessing and a curse. It can supercharge new things you launch, but if you treat it as a crutch, you will never create great products that are truly exceptional on their own merit.”

“This new show, Morning Brew Daily, has gotten to two million downloads in 90 days”

“I find that some of the most impressive business minds have chronically paranoid brains, and in general, I wouldn't call Justin a paranoid person, but I mean this trait in a good way. When I was talking to Justin about his business, one of the things he mentio…”

“We went and we raised 750 K in the early days of the business. We raised that money Actually, a year and a half after starting the company, because we were able to run our newsletter at basically, I think, 200 dollars of cost a month that, you know, that's one…”

“So we had all of our original, like, operating agreement, our tax number, all those filings done for free, but it ended up being really shoddy work. So the first lawyer that we ended up getting after graduating from college. Basically had to redo everything. A…”

“These deals that Morning Brew did with our future in the fall of 21 ended up driving tens of thousands of new Morning Brew subscribers.”

“I think by the time that We approached the end of our talks with Morning Brew. Our company was generating more revenue than it ever had.”

“I would say 70% of my motivation or not 70, 60% of my motivation for morning brew was financially driven. Financially or status driven.”

“There was software that was out there at the time that we could have paid for to just use for Morning Brew's referral program, but instead, we found a developer on Upwork who was in Ohio, and we paid him 500 dollars to build Morning Brew's referral program.”

“And so when I think about the first year of morning brew, when I was a senior at the university of Michigan, the cost of our business was like a couple hundred dollars a month. Our only costs for the first year were MailChimp for sending out our emails Heroku,…”

“The more you use a reference point from your own business, the more you open yourself to possibly making the mistake of hiring someone who maybe is one or two X better versus the 10 to 15 X better because you don't truly have an understanding of what really se…”

“It took us You know, four or five years to get to a million subscribers from Morning Brew, where I've seen people get to a million followers on Twitter in less than 12 months.”

“In the early days of Morning Brew, when I reflect on the early parts of the journey, the pleasure-pain trade-off For me, was doing busy work that felt good because I could cross things off a checklist and say that I was productive, but I actually opened myself…”

“Every time we sent an email to a million people, we'd get 20, 30,000 responses back which is also very overwhelming, but it's an amazing touchpoint with your target readers and audience of what's working, what's not. I'd say 80% of those emails were about the …”

“You could be one of 20,000 people at Deloitte in that exact same role, or you could be one of one, the only person building what you're building at Morning Brew and make a real difference.”

“When I would respond, actually, we spent like four months building this custom. There is no off the shelf solution that also showed not just interest, but like a lack of a competitor in the market that was solving that pain point.”

“I remember when I would tell people that Morning Brew post-acquisition, we scaled from 50 employees in October of twenty-twenty to 300 employees in a year and a half. People were like, oh my god, that is the most amazing thing, and then when I give them the pu…”

“We took a look at the stats for Founders Journal, and last month we did a 152,000 downloads. We are far off from peak, which was 300,000 downloads in a month a few years ago.”

“62nd Startup very much just brings an old idea, which is Shark Tank. You know, founders pitching judges in front of an audience. It takes that idea and it just brings that idea to a new form factor, which is short form social. And then even if you think back t…”

“Our revenue basically went from zero to 70 K to 750 to three million to 13 to 25, but headcount absolutely did not grow linearly. It grew less than linearly, and so, I think at a certain point, Austin and I got up to 350 K. That we were paying ourselves.”

“After we raised our round we raised the 750 K, Austin and I took 60,000 dollar salaries.”

“Morning Brew's main YouTube channel had a video that hit one million views for the first time. That video hit a million views in six days”

“I think that saving people time and making them appear smart to their peers is a huge value add, and so that was just something that made me think back to the early days of morning brew of why I think it provided value for people.”

“Since 2019, we have used EOS at Morning Brew to scale our business from 15 people and three million dollars in revenue to 300 people and seventy five million dollars in revenue.”

“After letting go of a senior leader at Morning Brew because they had done a great job but had reached their ceiling, we hired a new senior leader who we thought was an absolute veteran compared to the other employee. But what we learned after a while was the n…”

“And what I've noticed is basically every founder who leaves their business Whether it's successful, not successful, whether they've sold the business or not sold the business, they basically go through the same exact journey, and I'm going to describe the jour…”

“There are three ways to win in news today. So in the news business, there's basically three formulas that work. The first is world-class analysis. So it's not about breaking the story. It's about having the best take And point of view on the story, that's some…”

“For reference, with Morning Brew, our first lawyer ever, was a free lawyer from the Michigan Law School.”

“The nice thing about Morning Brew is we only raised one round of funding ever. We raised 750 K on a convertible note while we were it was actually right after I quit my job at Morgan Stanley and we raised from 28 individual investors. There's 28 individual che…”

“I would say I'm a highly mediocre angel investor, but the check I feel most confident in is the Morning Brew employee who I watched for five years and literally no due diligence went into my conversation with him. I just gave him a check.”

“We looked into that in the early days of brew and most definitely could not afford it. I don't know what it costs now, but it was like a 100,000 dollars at the time.”

“I guess we weren't technically bootstrapped because we raised, like, 750 K, but from family and friends that was kind of all we ever raised.”

“I think I was probably a subpar CEO because I had my full-time job managing my OCD, my part-time job being CEO of morning brew.”

“The way I think about it is people talk about this leap of faith, but I actually think if you build a Business effectively, or if you mitigate risk effectively, if you treat something as a side hustle before it becomes a full-time job, you should be looking at…”

“You don't have to like every stage of business, and in fact, you probably aren't going to like every stage of business.”

“In career, you want to stack the deck in your favor, and the way you stack the deck in your favor is you have self-awareness of the two or three things that you're really good at, and you work your way into a job or a position where 80% of your time is spent o…”

“We got to a point with Morning Brew where we were spending 500,000 dollars a month on paid acquisition.”

“We have four and a half million subscribers, but if you were to ask me what has been the number one growth driver for Morning Brew, I wouldn't say it's our paid marketing that we did on Facebook. I wouldn't say that it's cross promotions with other newsletters…”

“I realized it when I got on a call as a twenty-two-year-old with a Fortune 50 CMO, and I got them to commit to spending six figures with Morning Brew on the spot.”

“The example of Morning Brew is Morning Brew's newsletter team is four full-time employees at four and a half million subscribers, which is what we have today, and that is the exact number of full-time employees we had on the newsletter four years ago when we h…”

“Even though I had freedom of time after stepping out of the CEO role for Morning Brew, I wasn't happy. Because I didn't have a sense of purpose, and more importantly, I didn't feel like I was growing.”

“After stepping out of the CEO role for Morning Brew, I felt like shit. I feel lucky that I've never experienced depression in my life. But the six to 12 months post leaving my role were the closest that I have felt to being depressed.”

“If I look back at my one big career win, Morning Brew, there's really nothing original about it. Business news has existed since the 1700 and email has been around since the 19 seventies. And that is exactly why it worked. We did something that we already knew…”

“I think what allowed us to be different is that we didn't assume any quote-unquote industry truth to actually be true until we verified it for ourselves.”

“Our monthly burn in the first six months was something like 20,000 dollars a month, which was two writers, my co-founder and myself, and then whatever our software stack cost, which was very limited. We had raised 750,000 dollars in the early days of our busin…”

“Our business had done thirteen million dollars in revenue in 2019.”

“The goal was to hit twenty million in 2020, which we would end up doing, and there were no signs of slowing down.”

“I was afraid that Morning Brew was my one chance at financial freedom. My feeling of imposter syndrome made me think that I had to capture and hoard as much value from my business while I could because the odds that any other major financial outcome would happ…”

“An acquisition at the price that was being discussed would take me across the freedom line that Jason talks about and put myself and my family in a place of financial independence for the rest of our lives.”

“When I think about how we got our first 1000, thousand, even 10,000 subscribers for Morning Brew, it was leveraging, as I've said now five times, the hub and spoke model”

“It's always been the highest quality channel for paid acquisition has been spending on ads in other email newsletters, because at least it is a behavior that someone already has.”

“For the entirety of Morning Brew's history, our highest quality customers have been people who were referred by other Morning Brew subscribers.”

“Not only was it not an easy decision, it was a decision that took me a year to actually make. I spent a year thinking about it. There were many times where I was about to make it, and then I called an audible and didn't quit.”

“Everyone thinks that when you sell your company, you feel like you're on top of the world. When you get money wired into your bank account after a sale, you must feel this ecstasy. And I felt none of those things. And when I think about the times that I felt m…”

“Every company has its core competency, and for its core competency, it has one role that Is most important to deliver on that core competency. At Beehive, it's a full stack engineer. At Morning Brew, it is, it was a newsletter writer. Now it's, you know, write…”

“The first 10 employees in a startup. You should be able to look at them and say to yourself, I think this person will do incredible work for us for a number of years, but ultimately I could see them starting a company of their own.”

“Something I just want to add here that's just a fun anecdote is I remember the first time that Tyler came to Austin and I, because Tyler was employee number three or four at Morning Brew, and he had been building all of our internal tools at the company. So th…”

“As they think about taking any sort of quote unquote leap of faith into building something is it never feels clear. It never feels clean. It always feels messy. And when you make the decision, whether it's to start a business, whether it's to go all in on a bu…”

“And I think a really good reference point to kind of compare your excitement and enjoyment with work to is Is things that are not work-related, things that do not make you money, do not create status for you, because those things you only do because they drive…”

“So let's just say by the time that Market Corner, which was around for two-ish months before we turned it into Morning Brew, and I brought on Austin as my co-founder, let's just say Market Corner got to 250 subscribers, so that's zero to two 50.”

“So a hub is something, a digital channel or an in real life channel that gives you leveraged access to a lot of spokes. Spokes are your, the ideal customer you want to get in front of. Again, we didn't think about it in this way at the time, but it's how I thi…”

“We probably would collect on average 90% of a class,”

“On today's episode, I'm going to talk about how we got from zero subscribers when we first started Morning Brew to 10,000 subscribers, which I would say is roughly the point at which you can actually start making money off an email newsletter.”

“The first time we tried an ambassador program, we went for quality over quantity. So we took a bunch of ambassador applications. We only accepted like 10 ambassadors, and they were the people who were like the best students, involved in the most business clubs…”

“And so ultimately, where we shook out is the best possible ambassador program is this hybrid we did, where we let in Like, we made it a quantity game, so we let in every ambassador, but a lot of it was automated until they proved that they provided good work a…”

“Today, Morning Brew has, let's call it four and a half million subscribers, and over 400,000 people Have gotten at least one referral using the referral link.”

“And so from, let's call it November of 2019 to October of 2020, so literally 11 months. That was the process of doing a deal and selling a majority stake in Morning Brew to Axel Springer.”

“Far more entrepreneurs regret selling their business too late than entrepreneurs who regret selling their business too early.”

“And I would actually say, very interestingly, the Move out of the CEO role was far more difficult and far more emotion and identity provoking than was the decision to sell the business.”

“At the time we probably were spending anywhere between 250 to 500,000 dollars per month on paid acquisition, right?”

“At the time in which we sold the company, Morning Brew, the newsletter had gotten to over a million subscribers. It was probably at, like, 1.5 million now.”

“Before we were approached by Axel Springer, In, at the end of 2019, we had probably been approached by four or five different businesses or funds in the year and a half prior. We were approached by a few media holding companies that own a portfolio of differen…”

“From 2017 to 2018 is really when we hit an inflection point in our business and grew from a 100,000 subscribers of our newsletter to a million subscribers. It was the year that we 10 X'd.”

“We have, you know, 1.5 million subscribers roughly at that point. The business is doing eight figures in revenue. We have probably 20 plus team members, very profitable.”

“I believe that Austin was a better stage two CEO at the time than I was.”

“The decision to step down as CEO of Morning Brew in April of 2021, which was about five and a half months after we sold the business in October of 2020.”

“Chapter two of building a business, which goes from the job of being a CEO is achieving product market fit to the job of being a CEO is Building a company. Like, actually building an organization that allows you to grow beyond a single product and be around fo…”

“From 2019 to through 20 20, Austin had very much taken on the responsibilities that were necessary for a CEO Who was now in kind of the company building mode and no longer in the startup building mode.”

“Stepping out of the CEO role of Morning Brew was probably the best decision I could have ever made, but it was also the hardest decision I made. Have probably ever made, but I think it made me grow up and learn more about myself in a way faster period of time …”

“I remember being super excited when we built out our ambassador program and expanding it to 200 different college campuses”

“We've been able to promote it to an audience of 4.5 million daily subscribers every single day.”

“I spent two to three years too long doing media sales at The Brew. This included LinkedIn DMing, email follow-ups, going on every sales call, and sending campaign reports to clients.”

“You don't see losing 50% of our revenue overnight during COVID and considering taking donations so we didn't have to fire anyone.”

“Being a B plus seller of an A plus product is a hell of a lot better than being an A plus seller of a B plus product.”

“When Morning Brew was scaling from 20 to 300 people and ten million dollars to seventy million dollars in revenue, I lost my love for the game.”

“That all came to a head in 2021, when I stepped out of the CEO role at Morning Brew and got punched in the face by my beliefs. For an entire year, I was stuck. I was unmotivated. I felt directionless. I felt unsuccessful internally, despite being considered su…”

“If you're interested, we raised 750 K at Morning Brew in the form of a convertible note with a five million dollar cap.”

“It is incredible how much motivation can come from the fear of not having enough money, and the fear of, kind of, Your family members or the people that you love deeply, their quote unquote financial safety. And so that was, I would say, the biggest driver of …”

“We had, you know a 300 person team at one point, business was doing seventy million dollars a year in revenue”

“Now I focus on the zero to one of businesses. So I've set up my whole life where I incubate businesses. I bring on a co-founder and CEO who will operate the day-to-day of the business, especially once we hit product market fit.”

“I would say, if I had to put a number to it, 10% of my motivation for the, you know, the first five years, or as long as I was the CEO of Morning Brew, was driven by a love for the game, a love for building, and a love for putting something great into the worl…”

“Being driven from a place of fear is exceptionally effective.”

“The short answer to that question is no. The slightly longer answer is, even though I never considered quitting, there were so many times that I was questioning whether I was doing the right thing, whether the business was growing fast enough.”

“The first moment actually came two or three weeks into Morning Brew, and actually at the time, it wasn't even called Morning Brew yet, it was called Market Corner, which was like the original product for Morning Brew, where I had emailed Mark Cuban about what …”

“I think I was making 85,000 dollars as a trader at Morgan Stanley. And I, you know, I didn't know when I went full time on morning brew, what the exact change would be, but I definitely wouldn't be making 85 K just, you know fun flash forward. I ended up makin…”

“I don't think that it is inherently a bad thing to think about throwing in the towel on a business, because if you don't do that, and you're working on a business that has no hope of working out, you can end up spinning your wheels way longer than you should, …”

“For context, we had 28 investors in Morning Brew's round, and that felt like a ton of work.”

“I would actually largely attribute Morning Brew's success not only to just our focus on building a great media company, but more specifically on only creating a great newsletter and writing a great newsletter, growing a great newsletter, and selling a great ne…”