How I Built This with Guy Raz - How I Built Resilience: Alex Lieberman and Austin Rief of Morning Brew

Episode Date: March 4, 2021

Six years ago, Morning Brew started out as a fun business newsletter Alex Lieberman and Austin Rief wrote for their classmates out of their University of Michigan dorm room. The company now has over 2.5 million subscribers with multiple newsletters and a podcast, and last year Business Insider paid about 75 million dollars for a majority stake in Morning Brew. Alex and Austin talk to Guy about the organic unpaid marketing they relied on in college to build up their readership, and they predict shifts in how we will consume news in the next five years. These conversations are excerpts from our How I Built Resilience series, where Guy talks online with founders and entrepreneurs about how they're navigating turbulent times.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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It had tall windows, beautiful old details, and plenty of space for all of us. And being in that home on Airbnb, right in the middle of Vienna, walking distance from so much of the city, made it feel less like a visit and more like we were actually living there. Plus, taking a trip is the perfect time to host your space on Airbnb. Your place with all of its personal touches and its amazing location could make someone else's vacation even better. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at Airbnb.ca.com slash host. Hello everyone and welcome to How I Built This Resilience Edition from NPR. I'm Guy Raz. Each week, on Thursdays, we invite entrepreneurs and other business leaders to come onto the show live to talk about how they've been building resilient.

into their businesses this year. And you can join us every Thursday at 9 a.m. Pacific 12 Eastern on the How I Built This Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn pages or on NPR's YouTube page to hear the live conversation and maybe even ask a question. And today, my conversation with Alex Lieberman and Austin Reef, co-founders of Morning Brew. Morning Brew is a podcast and a series of newsletters that focus on business in quick, digestible bites with more than 2.5 million subscribers. Last October, Business Insider paid about $75 million

for a majority stake in Morning Brew. But just six years ago, Alex and Austin founded the company from their dorm rooms as a side project to stay sharp on business before graduating. You know, the long story short is that Austin and I both come from, you know, finance backgrounds or wanted to work and finance our whole lives. And so I was in, the undergrad business program at Michigan, and I did all the motions that someone who wants to work in banking or sales and trading does. I got into my senior year at Michigan. I had my job offer in hand to work at Morgan Stanley. And just for context, that was like peak for me. That was the dream job. I grew up in a family where my dad worked in sales and trading, my mom worked in sales and

trading. My grandpa did. And I had a whiteboard growing up where be the best trader on planet Earth was on my whiteboard. Wow. It gives you a sense of what our... That was on your whiteboard growing up. My whiteboard had like basketball players and Madonna and friends. It gives you a sense of what our dinner time conversations were like. So Morgan Stanley, this was like the dream.

Exactly. It was the dream. And so senior year was quite easy for me because I didn't have to re-recruit for any jobs. I only had to take two classes. And so other than playing a lot of FIFA, NHL, and other video games, games, I was like, I need to do something to pass the time and keep myself sharp for my job. All right. So I started helping other students prepare for job interviews.

And I would always start my mock interviews by asking the question, how do you keep up with the business world? And the answer to that question was typically something along the lines of the Wall Street Journal or CNBC, et cetera. And I would dig a little bit deeper. I say, you know, why do you read these things? And the students would say something along the lines of, you know, I read it because that's my parents told me to do because it's a prerequisite to say I'm well read in business,

but it's dense and it's dry and I don't have enough time in my day to read the journal cover to cover. And so at some point, I was like, this is crazy. These kids are working their asses off to have careers in business, yet they don't have content that story tells the business world in a fun and engaging way. Right. And so I started writing a daily newsletter at the time was called Market Corner. It was a PDF that I would put together using Microsoft Word and then I would exported into a PDF. The logo was a bear and a bull fighting, literally took it off Google and had the watermark going across, and I would send it out to a list serve every day over email. One of the early readers was this guy named Austin Reef. And Austin Reef emailed me in was like, hey, I have some

ideas for how we can make Market Corner better. Can we chat? Wow. We met up for a conversation. And very quickly, I didn't think to myself, oh, wow, this is my co-founder because it wasn't even in a business. It was a hobby. But what I thought to myself is everyone is really good at telling me I'm doing a great job with this thing, and it is wildly unhelpful to actually make it better. Austin was the only person that I had spoken to who actually gave constructive feedback on how Market Corner could get better. That's when I knew it was a complementary brain to mind, someone who thought linearly, objectively. And so I brought him on as, let's call it like a partner at the time. And one thing led to another, and we ended up

launching Morning Brew Together in March of 2015. I think Austin, you were also a student, right, at University of Michigan? Both of you guys were there, right? Yeah. So most of the people initially reading this were at University of Michigan. And you were just, Alex, you were just writing a short newsletter, kind of linking to bigger articles about the specific topic, basically? Yeah.

It was basically like 50 to 150 word blurbs would link out to the full story and then kind of this other brain food related to business, right? Like investor of the day, stock pitch of the day. That's what it was in the beginning. And Austin, you come aboard and you're like, hey, you can really do this a lot better. And here's how. So when did you decide? Like, how did you get to the point where the two of you were like, you know what?

Forget about our jobs. Let's just jump into this newsletter thing. Yeah, it wasn't an easy decision. So Alex had the job lined up at Morgan Stanley. I was interning at Molese & Company, which is a investment bank in New York City. And very quickly, I realized that that wasn't the path for me. And so, you know, we wanted to be entrepreneurs. We had an idea.

And so we thought, why not give it a chance? And we saw growth. We saw this growth from Michigan to other Big Ten schools, to Ivy League schools, to, I think the big inflection point is when we saw older people reading. We thought this is something for college students. But when we realized this could actually be read by anyone, that was a big moment for us when we thought, wow, this has potential not to be read by tens of thousands, but of millions. How did you grow it? I mean, you started it out with a list serve, Alex, and then you started to see it grow to other Big Ten schools and then eventually beyond. I mean, you know, people often ask me how did how I built this grow into a show with, you know, three and a half million listeners a week. And the honest answer is I don't know. I really don't. I mean, part of it is we were in podcasting. I've been in podcasting early since 2012, but part of it is word of mouth. Part of it is, you know, we do some promotion. NPR doesn't have huge promotional dollars like big commercial organizations.

It was very organic, but the answer is I don't know. I really don't know. I think we work really hard on making the show great, but that's not always good enough. How did it grow? What did you guys do to make it grow from Michigan to then Big Ten schools to then beyond? I think it's a combination of what you're talking about, which is just longevity, right? If the content is good enough for a specific audience long enough, generally that's a good formula because a lot of people, most people will not stick with. the consistency of putting content out for years on end. Like, it sounds simple, but most people just

cannot maintain that cadence like it's a marathon for a lot of people they burn out after the sprint. You know, the other thing for us in how we grew was we didn't raise venture capital money, right? So in the early days, we had to think about what are all of the organic, unpaid ways to grow our audience? And the first way we did it was Austin and I said, okay, we have this Michigan market, how do we get people at Michigan to read? And so the model we used in our mind was like this hub and spoke model. Who are the hubs that have access to all these spokes, the spokes being the person we want reading our newsletter? And so what we decide was that was like professors of business classes or it was presidents of business clubs. And so Austin and I literally just like,

you know, pounded the pavement to get into every big business class at Michigan, lectures with 75 to 500 people. We got it to all the clubs. And we would basically give our spiel at the beginning where we'd say, you know, this is morning brew. We're storytelling the business world in a better and more engaging way. And guess what? It's free. And guess what? We'll subscribe you if you want to be subscribed. And guess what? If you don't enjoy it, you can always unsubscribe. And we basically made it where like, you felt you felt like an idiot to not subscribe because there was no downside. We got a couple thousand people from Michigan. And then we said, how do we grow from there? And the answer was, let's find the Austin and Alex at other schools. And that's when we created a college ambassador program where we found

the Austin and Alex equivalent who would go into classes at other schools. That was step two. And then the third step was we started really getting a stronghold on colleges. But to Austin's point, we started seeing this trend of, you know, in the early days, we literally would monitor every email address that would come in from different companies. We'd see if there were big celebrity names. And we started noticing people at big companies. And then we started being like, oh, wow, they're CEO. and CMOs subscribing. Why is that happening? And what that led us to saying is,

how do we grow organically without paying a lot for it outside of colleges? So we took our ambassador program and that evolved into our referral program where anyone who signs up for Morning Brew gets a referral link, you share that link with other people,

and if people subscribe using it, you get to earn rewards. And the rewards are not like these expensive things, but they mean a lot to the people that care enough about our brand to go out of their way to share the line. And that's how we grew it in the early days. Like a t-shirt or a mug or something like that.

Exactly. And again, we tried to be really thoughtful about Morning Brew Superfans. What are the things that they care a lot about? And generally it was around two things. It was extra content where it was ways to socially signal that you are a Morning Brew VIP. So it was always something that either a mug that could be on your desk or a crew neck that could be on your body in public. That's why we chose those things. And initially, was it the two of you writing everything in the first year or so?

Very early on it was just Alex. Then I joined on and was writing a bit. But one of the big ideas we had is that we could articulate the tone and we could talk about the tone and how we wanted to write. And there were times where we could do it in a sentence or a paragraph. But we knew very early on we couldn't do it consistently day in and day out across a full newsletter. And so we hired people. We hired people who are much more talented than we were. And they wrote the newsletter. And they took that. that idea in our heads to create a really great and consistent tone across the full newsletter. One hacky thing, I'll just add, that was kind of in between this point of Austin and I writing and us hiring our full-time writers, which, by the way, our full-time writer, who is, like, the first writer of the business is now, like, the managing editor of our editorial team. And it's just wild to see how he's grown, you know, to be responsible for a three million person audience. But in between when we were still doing this in college, kind of like our, our hack was, one, we got a lot of the college students who were readers of our newsletter to be

writers because they wanted to get their voice in front of tens of thousands of other college students. And then what we did is we said, if they're good enough at writing just digestible flowing blurbs about the biggest business stories, the only other job we have to do is to get tone involved. And so we literally got like a tone editor. And it was someone who had this really wonky background of majoring in both business but also being part of like the improv troupe at Michigan and his sole job was taking all of the blurbs that the college students wrote and adding voice and personality to it. Wow. Guys, I have so many questions for you because and I actually think, I hope people in public media are watching this because they're really small things you can do

to grow an audience. And it's, you know, the ambassador program and going out and, and it's, and incentivizing people to encourage other people to sign up. I mean, this is the Dropbox model, right? This is that virality model where you sign up for Dropbox, but you got the person that you connect with has to sign up for Dropbox too. And then you've got another user. It's the same with Slack. How did you guys finance this at the beginning?

I mean, where did you get the money to? Because you had to pay people, right? And you started a business. So how did you do that? Yeah, so early on, we were very lucky and we won a few Michigan business competitions. and got a few grants. And that was only a couple thousand dollars or I think the last one we got was $15,000, which was really big for us. And that helped us sustain ourselves. We were also pretty fortunate in the fact that we were in college. So we weren't foregoing a job at the time. So we had a few

years of being college students doing this on the side. And then we decided to raise a little bit of capital. We don't want to go out and raise institutional money. But we went to, you know, we call it a family and friends around, but really the way we found these people was, in the early days of morning brew, we leveraged our Michigan network to do interviews in the newsletter every Wednesday with large business figures, mostly people who had graduated Michigan or friends or colleagues of those people. And we went to those people and asked them, hey, would you be willing to invest? And either they invested, they connect us with people. And we raised a round of funding from, I think, $28 people, $750,000. Wow. And was that all the money you raised? Yeah.

So some other media company decided to raise a lot of funding and push off monetization. We didn't understand that. We thought it makes sense to monetize day one. And so that's all we raised because we fueled it through our revenue and through our profits. When we come back in just a moment, more of my conversation with Alex Lieberman and Austin Reef and how with the rise of curated newsletters, they stand out from the pack. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This Resilience Edition from NPR.

And one more thing, the New York Times best-selling book How I Built This is now available. It's a great read and a great gift for anyone looking for ideas, inspiration, wisdom, and encouragement to have the courage to put out an idea into the world. It's filled with tons of stories you haven't heard about how some of the greatest entrepreneurs you know and respect started out at the very bottom. Check out how I built this, the book, available with you. wherever you buy your books. Hey, welcome back to how I built this Resilience Edition. And my guests are Alex Lieberman and Austin Reef, co-founders of Morning Brew.

With newsletters on all subjects flooding readers' inboxes, I asked Alex and Austin how Morning Brew differentiates itself. You know, it's interesting because newsletters were a big thing. They've been a big thing for a long time. I mean, first they were sent to you in the mail, and then email started, you got newsletters. And there was a period in the email history, email where everybody just got spammed, right? You were spammed of tons of stuff. And then people

kind of pushed email away. And then newsletters letters kind of came back at the skim and a few others. And then there was sort of an ebb and a flow. And now there's been a moment again. I mean, with you guys, there's Axios, there's substack, which is a whole newsletter ecosystem. So let's talk about the value proposition here. I mean, given that there are a lot of newsletters out there, what do you think it is like why would somebody you know open yours up especially when they you know they might be getting five or six or more a day what what's the argument that you would make to somebody say open ours up yeah it's all about the content it's all about how engaging and accessible the content is to our reader it's the references we make the things going on in the world

how we make sure we curate the relevant stories to our reader and so it's tough to articulate but when people read it, they understand why they come back to it every day. And we'll see interesting tweets on Twitter. And it'll be, you know, I was skeptical about Morning Brew, but I read it. Now I've read it every day for the first week. And so it's just something you have to experience to see how great the content really is. The analogy that I like to use to that exact point is what, let's use an example of a recent story about meme stocks in Robin Hood, right? There's like, it's a crazy world going on in, in the world of just like retail investing and retail trading right now. The example that I like to use is if I went to a family dinner this weekend and I was at dinner with

my girlfriend, my parents, my grandparents, my uncle, and I start talking about the story, let's say first with my uncle. And he's my great uncle. He's like 66 years old. He doesn't know what I care about and he just keeps talking on and on. He's talking about a really interesting context, but for whatever reason, I'm getting bored and I have no interest in continuing the conversation with him. Then it's like my cousin, who's my age, went to similar school, a similar interest, starts telling me the same story with the same information, but with his or her tone and through the lens of what would Alex care about, and I'm fully engaged.

The content is the same. The delivery could not be more different. And I will have that conversation with my cousin every day of the week. Tell me about your business model. I know that you guys have paid advertisements in the newsletters and on the podcast, but I gather that it's a slightly different. approach than like a traditional media advertising, like on how I built this as public media, so we're nonprofits or governed by certain onerous rules that means that our podcast advertisements are very proscribed. Tell me how you guys do it that makes it different. Yeah. So, you know,

the way that we always thought about it was email is such an intimate experience, just like podcasting is, right? Just like the experience of listening to Guy in your ear once or twice a week is an incredibly intimate experience for the user, our view is like one of the superpowers of email is you opt into it, right? You hopefully have given someone permission to send you an email and you receive that email. And one of the things we also did throughout the life of Morning Brew is if someone replies to us, we would always write back to them. So it feels like you're having a conversation with the business. So today, Morning Brew is getting 400 to 500 replies a day to our inbox. And we were trying as hard as possible to answer all of those. It sounds very unscailable. Yeah.

But it creates this relationship that we believe has contributed to the zeitgeist around our brand. All of that to say, we wanted to play into the intimacy of this medium, which was through native advertising, written by Morning Brew in our voice storytelling these brands, and not through banner advertising. And so when you read an ad in Morning Brew, what you should feel is you should feel like the Morning Brew voice is speaking to you. Yeah. It's quick-witted.

It's digestible. it's approachable. The biggest thing is that we are writing this, like it reads like any Morning Bruce story, but obviously with the right disclosures. Right. Yeah, I mean, this is a really interesting question, right? Because traditional media, right, traditional news organizations are reluctant to do that. They've been reluctant to do that in part because they have a different way of looking at advertising. I think it's old-fashioned. I think what you guys show and prove and what a lot of younger readers and consumers have shown is that they don't care. I mean, they can differentiate between the ads and copy, and actually they like good ads. People like to read

well-written ads. Absolutely. And I think it just depends on who you compare it to, right? If you compare it to what Google's doing or what Facebook's doing, their ads are incredibly native, right? I think most people sometimes don't even realize you're clicking on a Google ad. Which is scary. Which is scary. No, it definitely is. And so I think we have all the proper disclosures, and I think it's a business model that works. And, you know, people engage with the ads, our click-through rates are 10 or even greater times higher than a banner ad and it allows us to fuel the business and hire more people and and create great content. All right. We got a bunch of questions. So I'm going to get to some of them. This is a question

from Leah Hecker via Facebook. She asks, are you worried about that you're part of the trend, a trend to blur the lines between facts and PR? And I just want to add some context to this because I think a lot of people are concerned about this, right? That determining what is real and what is just kind of spin, it's always been a problem, but it's becoming increasingly challenging with so much media disaggregation. I was even thinking about this with Clubhouse, which I think is a great, amazing medium. But you now see that some of the really big investors in Clubhouse like Andresen Horowitz have a platform to speak to millions of people unfiltered. And while there's some really interesting things that are talked about, it's a new world where you've got really powerful, financially powerful people able to directly communicate with masses of people. And there's something about that that I'm not entirely sure is a good thing.

So let me ask you about this. I mean, are you worried in any way that when you have a native ad in there, that it does blur the lines between, you know, what's real and what's spin? Yeah, I mean, what I would say is I think, first of all, there is more responsibility than ever before. for creators, whether it's an individual or institutions, like a media brand or a publisher, because that is one of the great things, but also one of the scary things that the internet has unlocked is immense leverage, right? Because it takes the same amount of resources to create content for, let's say, 100 people as it does for 100,000 or 10 million people. And so I think what you'll see, and you're already seeing it, is individual people or, you're going to

or companies that don't have a ton of resources are getting in front of tens of millions of people. So what that means to me is like there's more responsibility than ever before. I would say also there's additional responsibility for like a company like Morning Brew on the side of curation so that the consumer doesn't have to go look at all of these sources and decide what's important. They are trusting Morning Brew to do that curation. All that said like, does it scare me? Does it worry me?

I think if you are living in kind of the digital economy or the internet age, it's part for the course. It is part of living in an internet age. And I think for us, what that just means is we need to own that responsibility. We need to make sure we have the checks and balances in place where there's the separation of church and state between our editorial and between the revenue side of our business. And specifically to your last question about native ads, I think it just means that we need to feel really good about these disclosures and people understanding that someone is paying us. to get in front of our audience.

If we've done that, that is something that I can go to sleep at night with. Here's a question from Owen Samarone by LinkedIn. Owen asks, when did the newsletter get monetized? Like, how long did it take for you guys to get advertising and to see your first dollar? Yeah, so it was first sent out March 14th, 2015. And I think the first advertisement was summer to end of 2017

is when we started to monetize. So two and a half years and around 100,000 subscriber remark is when we started to monetize the newsletter. So really, I mean, those first two years, you guys were operating with a limited amount of cash and presumably everybody you brought on wasn't getting paid a lot. Yeah, it was a lot of interns and a lot of, you know, Alex and I doing most things. And again, we were college students, so we were scrappy and we figured it out. Yeah, I mean, you can assume that our costs in the early days were basically MailChimp, our website, the hosting of our website, maybe some referral rewards like stickers that cost, you know,

25 cents a sticker. And then that's one of the reasons, obviously, that we raised a little bit of capital is we wanted to get this flywheel going of create great content, get that right content in front of the right eyeballs, and then hopefully end up monetizing those eyeballs. But we knew we wanted to create great content first, which is why we raised money to be able to pay for writers and pay for marketers. Otherwise, we wouldn't have been able to hire those people. Here's a question from Taylor Lorenz, I believe, that is the New York Times writer Taylor Lorenz. That is the same Taylor Lorenz. A great writer writes about social media and technology.

So the question Taylor asks is, how do you think people will be consuming news in five years from now? Right now you've got news and Substack and Axios. You've got people consuming news through social media. A lot of people are going to clubhouse now. I mean, it's crazy. It drives me crazy because it's all over the place. And I feel like I have to be in all these things, even though sometimes I just want to sleep or, you know, sit in a quiet room silently. How do you guys think people will be consuming news in five years from now?

Yeah, I'm happy to take that one. I think it is going to continue to diversify. So people are going to ultimately consume news where they spend their time. So if you spend your time on Twitter, you're going to consume your news there. If you spend time on Instagram, you'll spend their time there. I do think the trend towards substack is really interesting. I think there is very much a push towards individuals and away from institutions. We're seeing that as a society as a whole, but also within the media world.

And so I think that will also rise. And I think news and media in general will get more and more niche. More and more people will come into the space. More people will create content. And the way to differentiate yourself, if you don't have three million readers, you won't be able to create a general business newsletter. You'll have to create a newsletter that is on bankruptcy, you know, law, or something really niche, and you'll have to figure out a way to monetize that effectively.

But I think that is the future of media, is niche and then being everywhere. You guys started in such a smart way because newsletters are cheap, and then you expand it to podcasts, and podcasting can be done cheaply. It's hard to do it really well and really cheap, but it can be done. It's much less expensive than television, for example. But, you know, there are other examples of media companies that go big at the start, a big website, an app, even digital audio. or starting digital video, there's cheddar and a few others, now that you guys have the backing of Business Insider

and $75 million investment from them, where do you see your expansion? I mean, do you imagine going into video? I imagine that's probably the next step, right? Yeah, so the short answer is yes. And to your point, like in the early days, we didn't think about any of these things because we had to be practical.

and we simply didn't have the money to afford it. And we were just like naive, right? I think part of why we've succeeded is because Austin and I were so naive to how things have always been done in media because we didn't grow up in media. And so it was like we very practically said, what is a medium in which college students are consuming content and we don't have to pay a lot of money? And that was email. The only other option was like an app, but we weren't going to build an app and like websites,

but we personally were going to any very many websites and typing, it into the URL. Now, as we've grown and we've built up this massive top of funnel of an engaged and loyal audience, it gives us a lot of leverage, right? And our view is that the transition that Morning Brew is making now, if it was chapters of a book and the last chapter was going from newsletter as a business to newsletter business, this transition is from newsletter business to media brand. And that means existing in more contexts, so different types of content that is not just timely business news and different channels of distribution because to your point and to Austin's point, there are more options than ever before for consumers to consume content. It means the onus is

always going to be on the publisher to make it as easy as humanly possible for people to get their content where they want to get it. And not everyone wants their content through email newsletters. So to the point you just made, yes, we are absolutely expanding into multimedia, meaning video, social, and audio. And we're also going to be expanding content into longer form website content to complement our newsletter. So when you think about, you know, we link out, say, to 50 things a day in our newsletter, Morning Brew starts to take back the links and keep it within the kingdom. That's an excerpt from my live conversation with Alex Lieberman and Austin Reef,

co-founders of Morning Brew. If you want to see the interview in its entirety or any of our past live interviews, You can find them on the How I Built This Facebook page or at YouTube.com slash NPR. And if you want to join our conversations live and maybe even ask questions, they happen every Thursday at 9 Pacific noon Eastern. If you want to find out more about the How I Built This Resilience series or other virtual NPR live events, you can go to nprpresents.org. This episode was produced by Liz Metzger with help from Farah Safari, J.C. Howard, Will Mitchell, El Manion, Gianna, Capadona, John John Isabella, Julia Carney, Neva Grant, and Jeff Rogers. Our intern is Janet Ujong Lee.

Thanks for listening. Stay safe and I'll see you back here in a few days. I'm Guy Raz and you've been listening to How I Built This Resilience Edition from NPR.