Austin Rief on Morning Brew Becoming More Than Just a Newsletter

Jacob: Over the past year, Morning Brew has received a good amount of press covering the early years of the business. I don’t really want to rehash what has already been written, but can you give us a synopsis really quickly of what Morning Brew is and the early years leading up to 2018?

Austin Rief: For sure, in 2015, Alex Lieberman, who was my co-founder was doing some interview prep with friends and that quickly transitioned to a newsletter. I quickly a couple of months later came on board, and we started writing with initially a PDF attachment called Market Corner, then transitioned to Morning Brew, which was a classic newsletter like you see today. The basic idea was that college students really struggled to resonate with the business world. We were at the University of Michigan, and people really couldn’t or didn’t want to read The Journal or The Economist. We gave them a better alternative, a more conversational and witty business read.

One of the early aha moments we had was when we realized this wasn’t just a problem for college students, this was a problem for young business professionals as well. That really expanded our mind to what the total addressable market can be beyond just college students, but really all people. We worked on it all throughout college, and then in 2017, I graduated, and we went full-time.

Jacob: At the end of 2017, early 2018, you raised a single friends and family round of I believe it’s reported $750,000. Basically, that was it. You had the money, and you went on to the races. Was that about right?

Austin: Yes, that’s right. From 2015 to 2017, that’s when a bunch of the big media companies raised massive rounds. For those couple of years, we always thought, “Oh, we’d graduate, and we’d raise big rounds.” That was very attractive. It was pretty fortunate that we weren’t able to raise everything. We didn’t want to raise in those two years because we were college students, and it was still a side project. By 2017, our vision for the future of the business was very different, at least from a capital perspective. We wanted to create, or we thought we could create, a business that functioned off of very little capital and got the profitability early. That gave us optionality and that played out.

Jacob: I want to talk about your audience because for most media companies, they view their audience either as a specific demographic or for B2B companies, a specific industry or job function. Morning Brew looks at his audience from a psychographic perspective. Can you explain what that concept of a psychographic audience means?

Austin: Yes. Our audience is pretty wide. Like I said before, initially, it was college students, but it’s expanded beyond that. It’s not just a single job function. The way we like to talk about it is that its psychographics of a person. We call it the modern business leader. It is the young, intellectually curious business professionals, people who are always looking to learn more or to get smarter. That is who we write for. That’s who we’ve been writing for since day 1, we like to think about it as this imaginary person who is intellectually curious, but also not too serious.

We’ve painted the picture internally about who this person is, and that’s helped guide the way we write and the way we think about launching new products or talking to advertisers is about this intellectually curious, hungry-driven person.

Jacob: You and I have spent a lot of time talking about distribution being probably one of the most important parts of building a media business besides actually having cash flow coming in into the bank. Going from 2018, you raised your round, you started growing your audience really aggressively, 2019, 2020, how has your audience development evolved over the years?

Austin: Starting in 2017, we had this mantra of right grow, sell, which we were hyper, hyper-focused on a single newsletter. A bunch of people in the media told us we were crazy to focus on a single product, especially one on email. All we cared about was just growing our audience and not just growing our newsletter, just absolute numbers. For the longest time, we actually had what we call the great wall of opens. Every single day, we would track at 11:00 AM how many daily opens we had because that’s all we cared about, just people engaging and opening with the newsletter. For a very long time, that was it. Every single day, daily opens, that’s all that mattered.

As we’ve grown, and we’re still in this transition now, the transition from a single product to media company, we have multiple KPIs. We track podcast downloads of business casual, we track retail Brew readers, but we just think about them in very different ways. We really care about who the person is way more for the retail professionals. We want to make sure that they are retail professionals, and it’s not just a random Morning Brew reader reading, but someone that really cares and is in the retail profession.

As we continue to grow, audience development and growth as a whole, which at Morning Brew are in the same or is going to continue to evolve and view things differently. My goal over the next few years is that we’re tracking a bunch of KPIs, and we’re thinking more about the Morning Brew ecosystem and less about a single newsletter.

Jacob: When you’re a small company, or you’re a small product, there are certain tactics that you do to grow your audience that work that might not work as you get larger. Have there been examples of specific audience development tactics that simply just don’t work anymore that when you were in 2017, 2018 were really great drivers of new newsletter signups?

Austin: I’m trying to think. I don’t think anything doesn’t work anymore because we were small and now we’re big. I think there are a lot of things that are just less effective, proportionately speaking. For example, we used to buy a bunch of ads in other newsletters, and we still do that, it’s still an effective way for us to grow. That was one of the very early insights we had and in 2018, in our big growth year, that was huge for us.

That was big, but these other newsletters haven’t scaled with us. A combination of exhausting those newsletters, and then not scaling, means it’s just less effective for us on a percent basis. We try to look for new things and new insights and that’s why we’re definitely to your point, distribution minded. I’m always thinking and looking for the next, I don’t like the word growth hack, but the next opportunity, and we’ve had a few of them. Newsletters was one. The second one was, we were on Instagram stories very, very early.

For those first couple weeks of being on Instagram stories, ads very early, we saw single for a couple of days, it was $0.05 CACs and $0.15 CACs. We were pouring every penny we had into that opportunity. I’m constantly looking for new opportunities like that to grow and to find things that will be meaningful. As you get bigger, everything it’s just different. You’re not going to find anything that’s going to double you when you’re at 2 million subscribers like you could have when you were at 50,000 or 75,000.

Jacob: Do you find now that you are at 2 million subscribers that your CACs have been increasing to the point that you need to find new tactics or are all your channels still driving pretty sufficient growth for your internal KPIs?

Austin: These are going well. I think for us, it’s more about the channel than our size. We’ve tested different platforms other than Facebook and Google. Let’s go with Reddit or Quora. They all work well for a couple of weeks but they get exhausted very easily. Their platforms just don’t work for us. I’m not saying they don’t work for everyone but just for us, we’ve struggled there. The main channels have still been very effective for us. It’s been talked about a lot, our referral program still comes along. That’s been huge for us.

Getting that right early on was one of if not the most important factors for our success. Even as a company that raised very little capital, we could take more risks. Now, we have more data on knowing who refers, and it’s not surprising, but just having more confidence in knowing who refers is great for us to test new acquisition channels.

Jacob: You talked about the flywheel really of bootstrap media, you create content, you build an audience, you sell the audience that gives you capital to invest in more content. I want to pivot to your business model. You are unabashedly very pro-advertising which in this day and age of everything having to be a subscription is a little controversial perhaps. You’ve leveraged that stance into an eight-figure business. Walk us through the various advertising products that you’re currently offering your partners specifically in your newsletter because as far as I know, there are multiple.

Austin: Yes, you have to break it down by newsletter. If we look at Morning Brew, we have a bunch of different placements. We have the standard Morning Brew primary placement, which is a logo at the top and about 150 words of editorial. That’s the key. When people talk about ad businesses, it’s too general. You can’t talk about ad businesses– It’s not comparing apples to apples, a business that’s monetized through banner ads on a site, where 85% of your traffic is through SEO is so different than a newsletter where you own the emails, you own that relationship, and you can estimate LTVs pretty accurately, and you can know your CACs, it’s such a different business. We have the primary ad, we have a secondary ad some days, which is no logo at the top, but about 80 words of a native sponsorship editorial.

Then we have what we call our Brew’s bet section, which we’ll put one or two Brew’s bets in there. Those are 30 to 40 words, I believe. Those are the standard options but then we have the ability to take over the entire newsletter, where we’ll put a cobranded logo at the top, and you’ll own every ad unit. That performs extremely well. That is by far our best. It’s our most expensive ad unit but it also performs the best by far. Brands have been thrilled with that. That’s Morning Brew and then in retail marketing, emerging tech, we have similar ad units but we’re constantly testing different types of ad units to ensure that we’re creating the right ad units for the right product.

That’s one thing we’re going to really focus on going forward is making sure that we’re not just creating carbon copies of Morning Brew products as we continue to grow.

Jacob: Let’s talk a little bit about that, with Morning Brew, the native ad treatment might be the right product but as you start going down these verticals which in a little bit, I want to talk more about those. There are other types of products that you can offer. I’ve seen you guys do some webinars, and I’ve seen some sponsored content published on the website. Are you finding your more niche clients? Are they more interested in those types of products versus the standard native treatments?

Austin: Yes, I would say definitely. If you look at a product like Retail Brew, as you know as much as anyone it’s less about quantity and more about quality. If you take a B2B advertiser who is really looking to get in front of the retail audience, they’re looking for frequency and touchpoints. They want to buy placements in the newsletter, they want to buy branded content on the site. They want to buy both sponsored and branded virtual events, so on and so forth. They want lead gen, they want everything. They want to work with us and they to be able to scale with us to get into the 10X their span what they’re doing now. That’s what we’re working on.

We’re working on building our ad offerings. We don’t just have to go to a partner who wants to get in front of a retail professional audience and say, “Hey, here’s a couple of retail placements.” We’re want to go to the packages and say, “Hey, we can sell across retail and you can buy these seven ad units for a year-long campaign.” That’s what we’re working hard to achieve on the ad side.

Jacob: Pivoting now, from your ad business to your technology stack because Morning Brew you have your referral system. Your product manager Tyler wrote a great piece about the various systems that you have. At what point do you believe it makes sense for a media company to start creating their own bespoke internal tools versus just relying on off-the-shelf tech?

Austin: I think it really depends on what’s out there and what you need. I would say, for a non-heavily venture-backed company, I would always default to using third-party tools. They have to be a big hindrance for you to spend the time to build something. For us, we knew we were going to build a business off the back of email and so we knew having the best email tools possible is so important. For us, it’s not a choice we wanted to make but more of a choice we had to make, because there was nothing out there. It was not a cost thing. If there was something out there, we would have certainly used that. I think an example is you look at ESPs.

It’s not as if we built our own ESP, we probably could. I know about a couple of other media companies have, and I’m sure they’re saving money from it but we’re not going to build an ESP to save money, at least not right now. We would build an ESP if our ESP couldn’t do what we needed it to do.

Jacob: You mentioned before emerging tech Retail Brew, and Marketing Brew. At one point you even had a political newsletter, though, it does look as if that has been shut down. What is the logic? When you started launching these verticals, what was the business plan around them? Why did you decide to move into these new markets? How did you make that decision and as you think about each of these sub-verticals, how do you think about audience development for them that is in a different strategy than say the main product?

Austin: It’s a really good question. The end of 2018 was when we were at about 750,000 subs, and we really saw a path to a million and we knew a million was going to build a really profitable business. We had two choices, one, just keep on doing more of the same, or two starting to experiment with different verticals or different things. We emailed our audience, and we said, “Hey, what do you want?” We got two responses. One was we want to podcast, which is very sexy, of course, I’m going to say that.

The second thing was really interesting. We got a lot of emails saying, “Hey, I work in marketing, I work in retail, I work in tech, I work in other industries. I love Morning Brew, all the content in our industry is so boring and so dry. Maybe my company put something out but not interesting stuff. I would love a Morning Brew for X and Morning Brew for retail.” Over the years, we got hundreds and hundreds, maybe thousands of these emails. At some point, it’s like, you just got to give the audience what they want.

I learned from people like you and people like Sean over Industry Dive and a few other companies that B2B media if done well can be a good business model. We took a stab at it, but we didn’t make a massive investment in it. We hired a writer and we saw what happened and we saw success. We’ve continued to grow them out. We just launched our third and we’re seeing really good success. It’s pushing us to think differently about the B2B’s than we did the B2C’s or than we did Morning Brew. We continue to think differently. I

think they’ve been really successful but for us, it’s really day one with the baby properties. We have so much room to grow in nurturing these audiences and building more products. We definitely don’t want to just be a newsletter company and within the verticals, we certainly don’t want to be. Like you mentioned before, we’ve launched a few virtual events and other things but in 2021, we’re really doubling down on the B2B verticals from a personnel perspective to make sure we’re creating the right quantity and types of content and then serving our advertisers in the best possible way.

Then in terms of audience development, as you asked. For us, like I said before, it’s definitely a game of ensuring we have the right people reading and not quantity. Whereas Morning Brew, we still track opens every single day, we definitely track that for retail, marketing, and emerging tech, but it’s more who is opening, and how often are they opening and how are they engaging. For us, it’s pretty cool to do a virtual event because we get to gather information, we get to see not only who’s opening, but who’s actually engaging enough to sign for a virtual event.

We were shocked the first time we ran a virtual event, the quality of people reading was incredible and just gives us a lot of optimism for the future that we really can build awesome B2B properties in our same tone, style, format, and design.

Jacob: One of the other requested products was a podcast, and you have launched a podcast. It’s very clear that you have a celebrity on your hands there. How do you view the relationship between the podcast and the newsletter? Are they truly separate products? Do they complement each other? Has it helped with audience development and/or sales?

Austin: First and foremost, Kinsey is a star. Kinsey is incredible. We looked into that. We did not hire her to be a podcast host. We hired her to be a business writer and I think we hosted a panel and Kinsey hosted. Afterward, I was pretty against podcasts at the time. We were like, “We have to launch a podcast. She’s incredible.” We launched Business Casual, and it’s been great. I don’t see it as an extension of Morning Brew,I see it as another property engaging the same psychographic of person in a different format in a little bit different of environment. It’s a 25, 30-minute podcast versus the newsletters, a five-minute read but it still hits that modern business leader.

If you’re an intellectually curious person, you want to not only read five minutes of news in the morning, but you also want to listen to Kinsey interview Ray Dalio, or Adina Friedman, the CEO of the NASDAQ, or any of the other incredible people we’ve had on the podcast. We’re starting to capture a little bit more of people’s time. I’m pretty bullish on not just podcasts. Again, we talk about this a lot, but I view podcasts, not as a product but just as a really interesting way to convey a brand.

As we launch more brands, I think a podcast is a great way to do that. Obviously, we are not the first company to do this. Crooked has done this really well, so has Barstool, but they leverage audio and social to really build brands. Then once you build affinity, you move people around. I think that’s something that’s really attractive for us, and we’ve proven that out with Business Casual, and that’s something we’re going to invest in further in 2021 as well.

Jacob: Is there a future with Business Casual where it becomes a full-blown video exercise or are you going to not make the mistake that every other media company makes and enter video?

Austin: I actually don’t think it is a mistake to enter video if you do it in the right way. I view video very much as a barbell. You either create incredibly, incredibly high-quality video like movies or Netflix shows, or you create video that costs you $0. That’s the type of video we want to create. We can do this podcast and I hope it sounds pretty good, but watching two talking heads next to each other on Zoom isn’t great.

I do think there’s an opportunity to enter video as a brand-building play if you’re creating really low-cost video, leveraging the talent you have, and leveraging the guests that come on your podcast. I think video as a byproduct of a podcast is great. Then what is the other video you can shoot on your iPhone that you can post on social to get more impressions, and more repetition with your audience? The cost of creating content right now is so low that you’re at such a disadvantage if you’re not out there creating content, iterating, and seeing what works and what doesn’t. Our goal, at least on the B2C side of the business, is to speed things up and move faster and test what works and what doesn’t, and double down on what works.

Jacob: Going back to the verticals, again, right now, you’ve got three vertical newsletters. You’re bringing on more staff in 2021 to go deeper on those. Do you view the business really just being a handful of verticals that you go very deep on or could you see a future where you’ve got 10 or 15 of these?

Austin: It’s a good question. Something we talk a lot about, right now, we’re focused on going deeper. I don’t know the eventual number. I would say it’s probably not 15. No, I would say it’s closer to five or seven, but we’ve launched three and we think the opportunity to increase– If you want to think about it very much from a business perspective, increase revenue per user is so high that we don’t want to continue to grow the number of verticals we have. We want to make sure we’re doing everything we can to optimize what we currently have.

Yes, from a B2B perspective, I think next year maybe four, maybe five. Who knows? We’ll see. We’re not going to launch anything until we think we’re doing a 10 out of 10 job in retail marketing and emerging tech.

Jacob: That’s the vertical business. That’s the advertising business. Let’s jump to another component of the business from a revenue diversification perspective. Back in July, your co-founder tweeted that you were hiring a business research analyst to be the content engine behind the soon-to-be-launched paid membership. What is this paid membership in as much detail as you can go into, considering you haven’t really launched it yet, and how do you see Morning Brew, the company, evolving to support that because the subscription business is different than an advertising business?

Austin: I really didn’t expect you to come with the receipts there. You come with the actual tweet itself. I respect the prep work. It’s a good question. We are very much in the experimenting phases. We’ve done some AB testing with a few concepts, but we want to create something separate from Morning Brew. I think that is the important thing, that we are never going to paywall what we currently create, but we want to create something above and beyond that is part content, part community, part resource, that we can look at the modern business leader and say, “What do these people need to better themselves and further themselves in their career, and how can we provide that for them?”

We’re talking to a lot of people, doing a lot of testing and thinking, what is the product that helps them advance in their career faster? We believe if we can create something that helps people advance in their careers sooner than they would otherwise, that it’s a no-brainer to pay us for that. That’s what we’re looking to do, is create that no-brainer product where if you’re a motivated business professional, you sign up because this is going to better your career. In terms of the details you know, I can’t share too much of what we’ve been testing.

Again, it’s a combination of really great content and community and learning experiences and resources and hopefully, we think this will be the go-to place for you to join to enhance your career and just improve faster.

Jacob: You and I talk a lot about how, and it’s your phrase like promotes like really well, unlike doesn’t really promote unlike very well. Newsletters promote newsletters very well. Podcasts promote podcasts very well, but then the two don’t really promote each other very well. From whatever testing you have done, again, that you’re willing to talk about, have you tested your audience’s propensity to pay for something? Have you tested how that audience converts when it’s not a newsletter product? Again, like promotes like, and unlike doesn’t promote unlike.

Austin: Yes. You just said it, but I really fundamentally believe that. I think it’s a very good assumption to say that this product will be rooted in a newsletter. I think that will solve some of that problem. It won’t only be a newsletter, but a newsletter will be a key component because, for every other reason, a newsletter is great because you own the audience because like converts well to like products. It will definitely be a newsletter component. We have tested the propensity to pay and we’re moving forward. That’s all I can say is we’re confident enough to make a bet and make some hires and build a team and test this thing. We’re really excited about it.

Austin: I want to ask you one last question about Morning Brew, and then I want to give you the opportunity to stretch your non-Morning Brew Media brain. Where do you see Morning Brew, the business, in the next three years?

Austin: It’s a good question. I think we are going to be the go-to place for, again, going back to the psychographics, and we talk about all the time for modern business leaders, but it’s going to stretch well beyond what it is now. If you look at it right now, it’s a five-minute daily read. It’s a podcast for a select number of people. Then we have three industries, but we want to hit people in way more places. We look at what are all the areas of interest that have a massive overlap for our audience. What are the things that people really care about beyond just daily business news?

The B2B business is the professional side of things. The podcast is deeper interview, deeper business knowledge. The paid product is even deeper, and that’s how do I advance my career. There are all these other franchises that we want to launch that help educate people about non-news topics that people care about. Do people care about their money and how they save their money? Can we build a franchise around that? Do people care about productivity? Do people care about career?

What are all these things that we can build content and personality and a brand behind that we can begin to build up our audience with some of our current audience because there’s a big overlap, but also build new audience? Maybe people who either don’t want to read daily news, or maybe people who don’t engage with email on a day-to-day basis, but they engage with podcasts more frequently, whatever it may be. We will have this place where people can come and they can basically pick the franchises which resonate with their business lives.

Maybe you read Morning Brew, you’re in retail so you read Retail Brew. Maybe you’re not into interviews, you listen to the podcast, but then you read our content on something like Personal Finance because you really care about your personal finances. It’s almost like a choose-your-own adventure role of so many different properties or multiple properties where you can really engage with Morning Brew for multiple parts of your business life.

Jacob: Let’s step away from Morning Brew. Austin is a media guy. He likes media. You pay attention to a lot of it. You and I talk about a lot of different types of media that isn’t just often newsletters. Where do you see the most opportunity in media today that entrepreneurs either current owners or prospective operators are missing?

Austin: I’m super interested in the creator economy and all of these people like you with your substack and media operator, how people are building these personal brands. Then even more interesting to me is how people are monetizing these brands. It’s so interesting to see the people who opt to go for subscriptions versus the people who opt to sell eBooks on Gumroad or do courses on Teachable. I think this economy’s going to be huge because the barrier to just like in direct consumer, where the barrier to create a direct consumer product with Shopify and Stripe that’s so low, that there are thousands of these, there’s like, what, 200 direct consumer mattress companies.

It’s going to be the same thing with business. There are going to be 20 people writing about the direct consumer world and 30 people writing about every industry. There are so many niches and there’s so much room to create content. What I’m most interested in thinking about is how do people monetize their content and how do they make sure that it fits what they write about and their goals. I think too many people are right now almost like sheep following the herd and just saying, “Oh, the trendy thing is to build a subscription newsletter. I’m going to do that. Or the trendy thing is to launch a podcast. I’m going to do that.”

What I think people are missing is just taking a step back and not listening to the Twitter mentality, but really thinking about how can they build a business that makes sense for them. Even if it’s maybe not the best business model or the sexiest thing, but how can they build something that makes sense for the content they create?

Jacob: One of the nice benefits of having any sort of a newsletter or a podcast is it’s basically an open job interview for anything. Whether you could use that newsletter to leverage a new opportunity, launch a consulting business, or launch a course like you said, I do think that there’s the public publishing of information that gives you such a headstart. There was a project that just actually launched the other day, or I just found it the other day, called Presubscribe, which is a place for people to vote for big well-known content creators to launch their own publications. Quite a few of The New York Times‘ biggest personalities are all really high up on the leaderboard.

Do you see this decentralization of media taking place where a lot of these legacy media reporters and personalities will branch off and launch their own businesses, or do you think that more of this creator-driven economy will be more from people who might not be really well known yet and are trying to use that as an opportunity to push their way up?

Austin: This is a big topic and one I love to talk about. I appreciate you bringing it up. I did see the Presubscribe thing. I think it’s awesome. There are a few ways to go here. First, compared to where we are now, where it’s the first or second inning, I absolutely think the individual creators, there are going to be people who leave The New York Times and leave The Wall Street Journal, because right now, so few have. A few big names have, and they made a big splash, but in the grand scheme of things, we’re so early.

These companies, whether it’s Substack or even like the Patreons and even the Gumroads, they’re five or a couple– They’re not that many years old, and so we’re in the very early innings and it’s just now getting more and more accessible. I think what people, especially people in tech miss is that for some people it is their life dream, their goal in life to work at The New York Times. They don’t care how many people want to pay them directly. They want to report at The New York Times. I think it’s very tough for people in tech to understand that because they don’t resonate with that brand the same way people in media do.

I don’t think there’s going to be this max mass exodus, so I tweeted that out three of the top five people. It was Taylor Lorenz, it was Mike Isaac, and I can’t remember the third one. It may have been Maggie Haberman, but I’m not positive. Anyways, I don’t know any of them that well personally, but maybe these people just want to work at The New York Times because they love  The New York Times , and that’s totally fine.

I actually think the future of these creators are actually going to be people who look more like you and Webb Smith who are operators or were operators who understand more about how to build a business, because I think the thing that people underestimate is, sure, you may have a subscription newsletter, but how are you going to grow your audience? Or how are you going to run your finances or anything like that? I know people are creating tools for that, but it’s still tough.

I think these former operators are going to start creating these individual companies, and they’re going to build them multi-tiered like you are with a newsletter with a podcast like Webb has his Higher Dollar Community and really build out that stack of products from free to lower dollar to subscription. I think there’s going to be a huge evolution of those types of creators. I think the last thing about those people is they’re really connected in the spaces they just worked in.

Like there’s, you know him, his name’s Lenny, I believe he worked at Airbnb, I don’t know him personally but his newsletter. It’s great. He had this unbelievable advantage, which is he’s writing about growth now, and he worked in growth and all his friends and his coworkers were in growth. They’re all going to share and sign up for his newsletter, and his content’s great. This is not discounting his content at all. It’s awesome. The headstart he had was pretty incredible because he’s writing about a space where he knows people are going to support him early on. I think things like Presubscribe help, but I don’t think anything is quite like the operator going in and building their own personal media company.

Jacob: We saw that with The Washington Post’s debacle with the whole Trump ads. A lot of people in journalism freaked out. They got really offended by that saying how could The Washington Post sell that? Really only one media reporter stepped up and she was really rational about it. That’s Sara Fischer at Axios. If you actually look at Sara’s background, she used to sell advertising. Again, by living on the other side of the wall, she understood how both sides work. First as an ad sales, then as a journalist. She was able to offer the perspective that if there were some journalism professors who were just losing their minds over that deal.

Going back real quick to the creator-driven economy, you like this stuff, I like this stuff. Morning Brew has just about, or if not more than 2 million subscribers on your list. Audience development is the hardest part of this whole business. Have you guys ever thought about incubating some of these creators and using your tech stack, your audience, your sales abilities to sort of like I said incubate multiple creator-driven economies or publications?

Austin: Yes, absolutely. 100%, that is where we’re heading. To some extent, that’s what we’ve done with our properties now. We didn’t bring on big names. They’re not subscription newsletters, but yes, absolutely we’re going to do more of that. Of leveraging our reach to bring someone on and try to boost their brand, their personal brand, the brand we create. I absolutely think Morning Brew is going to be the hub and we’re going to have a ton of different spokes.

That’s what I was getting at before, which is some of the spokes are going to be retail marketing, emerging tech, but others are going to be other podcasts. We’re launching another podcast that’s going to be very much personality driven. It’s going to be two hosts talking more about the business world and the investing world, and more of almost like a next-generation mad money type of way. We’re really excited for that. Absolutely, I think the world is going towards– Some people believe the world is going towards creators. I believe the world’s going more towards the combination of creators and brand. No one talks about this better than JD over at The Washington Post. He likes to compare it to music labels. I think it’s a good analogy the way he talks about that.

Again, it goes back to, like people want to work at Morning Brew, people want to work at  The New York Times because they want to have the infrastructure and they want to have that flywheel that  The New York Times has built out to amplify your brand. Another great one is Axios. Axios does it so well at really turning their writers into almost like media celebrities. I think they’ve done a really great job of doing that.

Jacob: It’s amazing to think that how many years Morning Brew has been around? Considering I really only found it about a year and a half ago. Starting in college, going through those early years, growing astronomically to the point that you are now an eight-figure business, profitable, raised a single round, all very good success stories. What really makes an entrepreneur is how they make mistakes and how they learn from them. What are some really fundamental mistakes that you’ve made as an organization and/or as an individual and what are some ways to prevent them from happening in the future?

Austin: I’ll talk about me personally, I don’t need to talk about Morning Brew and the mistakes that– I’ll just talk about my personal mistakes. I think for me it mostly comes down to putting the right person in the right seat. That’s really my job right now is to ensure that we have the right person in the right seat and that we have the right seats at the company. We have the right roles in the company and we have the right people to company and the right people are in the right role.

Whenever we make a mistake it’s because we hired an amazing person but we put them in the wrong position or we hired the wrong person, someone who’s not that amazing for a position where they need to be a star. I know it’s cliche and I know that it’s probably the answer most people are going to give, but it is so true. We have failed when we have not been thoughtful enough about creating the right org charts and then putting the right people in those charts and giving them the opportunity to succeed.

Jacob: What has been your biggest struggle going from a few employees to I believe you’re close to 40 now and just based on like if I look at your job board, you’ll probably be 60 by the end of 2021. What has been the biggest struggle from growing like that?

Austin: The company changes every 25 or 30 employees and especially with COVID it’s how do you keep the culture because I’ve never had–I spent one summer in investment banking but I never really had another job. Whenever I interview someone they always ask me, “What’s the culture like at Morning Brew.” I think I’m the worst person on the planet to answer that question because it’s all I know. I don’t have anything to compare it to. I do think we’ve built a very special place to work.

With the combination of growing as fast as we are and COVID, it’s something we spend a lot of time thinking about is how do we keep that culture when knowing that goals are aggressive and hiring roadmaps are aggressive and we have to make sure we perform. We can’t just focus all about work and hitting goals. We have to focus about making sure people are advancing in their career and making sure that people feel like the culture at Morning Brew is one they can, one, enjoy working in, but two, thrive professionally.

It’s just all about making sure that people feel like Morning Brew stays the same.

Jacob: This is a people business. In software, you can build systems and you can build code that will do a lot for you. In the media business, it’s all about people. It’s important that both internally, but just like, how your people react to people and everything. No, that’s the fact that you focus on people with regard to mistakes and culture. That’s important

Austin: I don’t know if it was Teal or so– Or maybe it was Warren Buffett. Someone has a quote. I think they both have a quote similar, but it’s about asking the question, how many months could no one work at Google before you find out that no one is working there anymore because of the systems they have in place? To your point, media is the exact opposite. You would know within 12 hours because they wouldn’t send out a newsletter.

It really is a people business, and there are so many stakeholders. You have content, you have sales, and you have to intermediate. To your point, it’s a challenge. You have to make sure that everyone understands the core values of the company, or else there are going to be so many conflicts that arise.

Jacob: All right, my last question is one of the hopes with a media operator is that current but also prospective media operators listen, they learn, and perhaps decide to launch a media business because it really isn’t a fun field to work in. What is some advice you would offer somebody to be successful in media and how to thrive in this business, either as an employee, but more importantly, as someone looking to launch a business?

Austin: There’s really no magic bullet, right? I think it is a few things. I’ll talk about what we’ve done, right? It’s built an obsessive audience. If you don’t have an obsessive audience, it doesn’t matter. I’m trying to think of a single media company who has not been around for 100 years. Take all of them away, even though all of them do have an obsessive audiences for most of them. If you don’t have an obsessive audience, who really cares about your product, nothing else matters.

We can talk about fundraising and my thoughts on media fundraising, how you shouldn’t raise much capital, but none of that actually matters if you don’t have an audience that if you didn’t send out your content the next day, they wouldn’t care about. If you look at the best media companies out there, the ones that are performing the best, it’s that people actually care what they’re talking about. I think one of the best ways to do that is starting very niche and starting small. Yes, it’s really tough if I want to start a new company, to start a company and talk about, I don’t know, like, business analysis, right?

People do that really, really well. Maybe I would start analyzing, to your point, media businesses to what you’re doing, or analyzing software businesses to go niche and build an audience that actually cares because ultimately, a business model doesn’t matter. People don’t matter. Nothing matters if people don’t actually care about your content.