Dec 15, 2022 · 50m · startup-ideas
Why Every Creator Should Have a Newsletter with Austin Rief
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gold bands on the timeline = statements, start to end. Hover to read, click to jump. CC turns on captions
Morning Brew CEO Austin Rief joins Greg Isenberg to discuss the future of digital media, outlining actionable frameworks for launching profitable niche newsletters, diversifying beyond ad sponsorship, and navigating modern distribution channels like short-form video and AI.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. Greg holds 30.6% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
Greg as informed peer 4.7 Guest teaching 5.0 Guest disagreement 1.7 Greg pushing back 1.4
speaking balance: gold is Greg, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 20:52 Austin challenges the long-term economics of individual Substack authors
Austin forcefully pushes back against the prevailing optimism around individual paid newsletters, warning that growth will stall and subscriber churn will spike.
Hardest push from Greg ▶ 12:10 Greg presses Austin on whether ignoring short-form video is a strategic mistakeGreg explicitly challenges Austin's conservative stance on video, comparing it to early naysayers who dismissed MrBeast's YouTube potential.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 5:00 Austin breaks down the superior unit economics of B2B vertical newslettersAustin educates Greg and the audience on why B2B niche newsletters achieve massive CPMs due to the difficulty of acquiring enterprise decision-makers through social ads.
Greg holds their own ▶ 39:20 Greg articulates the business mechanics behind cohort-based learning communitiesGreg steps into his zone of expertise, explaining how community curation, accountability, and co-founder matchmaking drive real pricing power in modern educational products.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | Greg as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | Greg pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| The Enduring Power of Email and Inboxes | 4 | 4 | 1 | 1 | Greg introduces the enduring relevance of email and prompts Austin on whether to start an email business in 2023. Austin contextualizes email with historical data and highlights inbox intimacy and high conversion rates. | |
| Expanding Media Brands Through Verticalization | 5 | 6 | 1 | 1 | Austin outlines Morning Brew's expansion into B2B niche verticals like Marketing Brew and CFO Brew, explaining high CPM enterprise software dynamics. Greg adds his own observations regarding podcast network cross-promotion mechanics. | |
| Short-Form Video and Audience Funnels | 6 | 5 | 3 | 5 | Greg shares examples of viral short-form shows and directly challenges Austin on whether neglecting video risks repeating early doubts surrounding creator media empires. Austin clarifies their strategic approach to YouTube and the difficulty of converting short-form traffic to long-form. | |
| Analyzing the MrBeast Empire and Habituating Newsletters | 4 | 5 | 2 | 1 | The conversation shifts to valuing MrBeast's ventures, with Austin laying out an incentive-driven email newsletter model tailored around gamification and habit building. | |
| Newsletter Framework One: Editorial and Narrative Writing | 5 | 6 | 4 | 2 | Austin outlines his three newsletter archetypes and pushes back on the long-term viability of paid solo Substack writers, predicting severe subscriber churn. Greg brings in Julian Shapiro's writing philosophy to support the premise of creative burnout. | |
| Sponsor Message: Community Design at Late Checkout | 3 | 5 | 2 | 1 | Following a brief mid-roll ad read for Late Checkout, Greg asks about newsletter bundles like Every. Austin explains why bundling newsletters is economically fragile without proprietary distribution. | |
| The Golden Opportunity in Niche Vertical Publications | 6 | 6 | 2 | 1 | Austin highlights verticalized niche newsletters like Milk Road as the primary wealth creation opportunity in modern media. Greg contributes an anecdote about Tim Ferriss designing content explicitly for high-net-worth readers. | |
| Curated Link Roundups and the Rise of Ben's Bites | 5 | 4 | 1 | 1 | Greg and Austin examine curated link roundups using Ben's Bites as a prime case study, noting that link curation alone serves as a brand extension rather than an independent standalone company. | |
| Tactics for Launching a Newsletter from Scratch | 4 | 5 | 1 | 1 | Austin breaks down step-by-step tactics for launching a newsletter from scratch, emphasizing granular persona mapping and recognizing when founders need to hire specialized copywriters. | |
| Monetizing Through Cohort-Based Education and Communities | 6 | 5 | 1 | 1 | Austin details Morning Brew Accelerator's monetization strategy, while Greg articulates the structural accountability and network value inherent to cohort-based courses like Community College. | |
| Alternative Monetization: B2B Summits, Dinners, and Asynchronous Courses | 5 | 5 | 1 | 1 | Austin discusses monetization via B2B executive dinners, summits, and asynchronous Gumroad courses, before transitioning into how generative AI will elevate elite copywriting. | |
| Navigating Rivalry and Radical Candor with Sam Parr | 4 | 4 | 2 | 1 | Austin reflects on his evolving relationship with former competitor Sam Parr, praising Sam's radical transparency and zero-to-one operating velocity. | |
| The Five-Year Future of Media and Commerce | 4 | 5 | 1 | 1 | Austin shares a five-year forecast predicting the complete convergence of niche media, community, and consumer commerce, before closing out the episode. |
Statements from this episode (27)
Rief: 87.5% of Americans use email as primary communication
“I just saw a stat, I think, 87 and a half percent of people in the US use email as their number one form of communication.”
Rief: Email usage will remain the same in 20 years
“I think the same, right? I mean, I probably heard seven years ago at this point, maybe five years ago, Slack was going to take over email. I think if anything, Slack is just incremental. And if anything, it actually clears your inbox for email, right? Because …”
Rief: Cross-promoting in other newsletters yields highest-quality subscriber growth
“The best or one of the best ways to grow a newsletter is to promote yourself in other newsletters. We saw that our cross promotion had our highest quality subscribers. So we'd run ads in other newsletters and those subscribers Would click more, they'd read mor…”
Rief: B2B newsletters command high CPMs because social ads fail for enterprise
“The CPMs in those newsletters are so high because advertisers have a really high willingness to get in front of those people, right? If you're selling IT software, it's really tough to get in front of VPs and CIOs at businesses, and you're not going to really …”
Rief: Converting newsletter readers to podcasts is much harder than podcast cross-promotion
“It's hard because it's hard to convert people from newsletter to podcasts versus to your point, it's very easy to move people around from podcast to podcast.”
Rief: Short-form video is hard to monetize with ads and must be cheap
“For us, short form is important, but it's hard to monetize. And so you have to do short form in a really inexpensive way. And so either you need to take long form. And make it in short form, right? So take a podcast, clip this up, and put it all over TikTok. T…”
Rief: Custom branded creator videos are tough to scale into large businesses
“Daniel Mack does a car video and he's been clever about incorporating brands in there, but that's all still branded content. It's all one-off videos and you have to sell individual videos, right? So it's really tough to scale a business, right? If you're tryin…”
Rief: YouTube channels struggle to convert Shorts viewers to long-form
“We've seen a lot of YouTube channels grow a ton via shorts, but what we haven't seen is a lot of those YouTube channels convert those shorts viewers to long form viewers, right?”
Rief: Feastables might become a billion-dollar brand within a year
“So that right there in a year might be a billion dollar brand alone.”
Austin Rief: MrBeast plans to launch software businesses alongside consumer brands
“I met him a few months ago. And he has plans to build software businesses and other things.”
Rief: MrBeast's spin-off ventures will surpass $1B in cumulative value
“I think the cumulative enterprise value of what he creates will be well above a billion dollars.”
Austin Rief: Editorial Newsletters Are Fastest Path to $100K Revenue
“But I also think it's probably the fastest way to, let's call it a 100,000 dollars of revenue.”
Austin Rief: Paid Solo Newsletter Growth Will Slow Dramatically as Churn Increases
“I think the growth rates of these things are going to slow down dramatically and churns and increase over time.”
Rief: Newsletter bundles struggle because top creators realize the bundle adds little value
“The person who adds the most value to the bundle is always going to be curious why they're in the bundle to begin with and why the bundle's not adding them value. And I think it's very much a game of who adds the value and, you know, you're not bundling it wit…”
Rief: Multi-million subscriber general news newsletters are unlikely to emerge
“And of course I say this and there will be, but I don't think there will be many more multimillion person reader general News, general business news, email newsletters that, you know, are standalone companies, whether they're bootstrapped or VC backed. I just,…”
Rief: Morning Brew has 4.5M daily subscribers and no newsletter will match it
“We have four and a half million subscribers to our daily, and I don't think anyone will get there.”
Rief: Media companies easily hit $30M revenue but rarely reach $100M
“Yeah, so, I mean, so many media companies, it's easy to get to 10, 20, 30, relatively, to get to 10, 20, thirty million, to get to a hundred million of revenue is incredibly hard.”
Rief: Advertisers will pay for 300 subscribers if they are CEOs
“If you have the right 300 subscribers, people will pay to get in front of them.”
Rief: Media companies must target B2B or high-income earners
“It's very hard to build a media company if you're not building B to B or you're not building for high income earners.”
Rief: Curated Link Roundups Are Part of a Stack, Not Standalone Businesses
“The third is the curation of links, the marketing email, the, you know, the Greg's Corner, here's five interesting, interesting things I found today. I think that is a great bang for your buck, because if you can curate well, curation is valuable, right? And s…”
Rief: Replacing the Founders as Daily Writers Was Morning Brew's Best Decision
“I think that was the best decision we made, which is, was to replace ourselves. We realized we could speak in the tone. We can converse in the tone. We could write a couple of sentences in the tone, but day in, day out, we couldn't write that tone across a ful…”
Rief: Morning Brew is a $70 million advertising business
“And we, you know, and again, it's all relative to a seventy million dollar ad business. So if you sell half a million dollars of swag a year and that's your cap, the question's like, well, you know, it's nice, but it's not going to move the needle.”
Rief: Media cannot charge for general content, only community and career mobility
“I said, no, I think it's really tough to charge people unless you have a serious level of expertise or you're going very niche. Or your, the New York Times, the Washington Post, you have a hundred or 200 year old brands. I said, but I would charge people for c…”
Rief: Curated 12-person executive dinners are lucrative for niche creators
“For creators out there, small niche dinners, you know, you get 12, 15 people in finance, marketers in a room, you take them to a dinner and companies will pay a lot of money to get in front of those people. You need to talk to the right person and you have the…”
Rief: AI will make top copywriters significantly more valuable
“I think the second thing is it only makes great copywriting more important. It makes great, great copywriting super unique. And I think it's going to make the best copywriters worth so much more because when there's more content out there and there's more cont…”
Rief: Sam Parr and I Were Not Friends Until Selling Our Businesses
“Yeah, so we weren't friends until we sold our businesses, right?”
Rief: Sam Parr's Abrasive Directness Drives His 0-to-1 Success
“There are so many people just yes each other to death in the corporate world. And Sam does not do that. Sam is, is again, just a little bit abrasive, I think in a great way. And I learned a lot from that one interaction, just the way he carries himself. And I …”