Prediction Not checkable as stated
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.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
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.”
Insight
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.”
Insight
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.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
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 …”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
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.”
Prediction Held up
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.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
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.”
Insight
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…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
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,…”
Insight
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…”
Insight
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…”
Insight
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…”
Opinion
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 …”
Assertion Contradicted
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.”
Insight
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…”
Insight
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 …”
Insight
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.”
Insight
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…”
Insight
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…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
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?”
Insight
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.”
Insight
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.”
Assertion Supported
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.”
