Morning Brew founder shares how he built a seven-figure newsletter: witty content for business leaders, a referral program that converted 10% of 3.5 million subscribers, and paid acquisition spending up to $500k monthly. He shifted ad spend from Facebook to YouTube and TikTok, and iterated constantly on creative.
paid acquisition or growth marketing is, it's such a fast feedback loop, not only in rotating through creative, but also rotating through platforms as you feel like you're burning through audience or things are getting super expensive.
Let's talk about that first. Everyone's probably thinking, I want to start a newsletter business, which is not easy at all. So how did you guys ramp it so quickly? Like if you were to attribute it to maybe like 2 or 3 things?
Yeah, I would say first thing, and this is like the most cliché thing, but it really is what matters, is like good content. You know, it's like the old adage of like lipstick on a pig or wrapping shit in tinfoil. Like, you really have to have a great product. And we felt super confident about serving a need for the modern business leader, making business more approachable and witty. So the first was good content. The second was our referral program. The referral program has been huge for The Brew. You know, on say 3.5 million subscribers, 10% of our total audience has gotten at least one referral, and that's been massive for us. And we've done that since the beginning, and we took a page out of Harry's Razors playbook to come up with that referral program. That's kind of like the inspiration for ours. And then the third is we were early in doing paid acquisition on newsletters, and there was a point in time where we had ramped up Paid acquisition specifically on our newsletter to, you know, half a million dollars a month.
Yeah. Not only that, like you would jump in when new features were launched, right? So when Snap launched the ad feature, yeah, you destroyed it.
Yeah, yeah, basically, you know, we were always, we made sure we had good relationships with people that worked platform side. And so we made sure that we were kept in the loop or whitelisted or put onto the beta for new products. And we always took advantage of that because we just knew that they were gonna have these new features preferred by the algorithm. We knew they were gonna be cheaper in the beginning. And in a lot of ways, that's what like paid acquisition or growth marketing is. It's such a fast feedback loop, not only in rotating through creative, but also rotating through platforms as you feel like you're burning through audience or things are getting super expensive. So for example, like in the early days, we were spending a lot on Facebook and a lot on Instagram. We had one ad creative that that absolutely crushed it. It was basically a fake text message conversation between friends about Morning Brew and how one of the friends found out about some big story because of it. And that absolutely crushed it. And then what happened was people saw that this creative was, they thought, really clever. So then there was a lot of copycats of this creative. All of a sudden it wasn't standing out as much, so we had to create new creative. Then prices on Facebook and Instagram got super expensive. the quality of the subscriber we were getting from those platforms wasn't good. And so we shifted more to things like YouTube influencers, TikTok influencers, buying ads in other email newsletters. So it was just a very nimble job of growth marketing our way to scaling for The Brew.
Love it. And I recommend everyone, if you Google Morning Brew referral program, maybe just case study, you should find a write-up on it. Just, I think it's someone on your team that wrote it up.
Yeah, Tyler Denk, who was basically our first engineering slash growth hire. He— the, the kind of the, the origin story of our referral program is we first saw it with Harry's Razors. We were like, we got to do this, but we didn't have any technical skills in-house. We found that there was a company that allowed you to make referral-based, uh, landing pages. Uh, they, they were the ones who kind of— who I believe had set up, uh, Robinhood's original waitlist. Kickoff Labs was the name of the company. We used Kickoff Labs. Then we found that it wasn't very flexible about in terms of like doing anything with our website outside of the referral program. So then we were like, let's just try building this ourselves. We went to Upwork. We found a developer who had built the Harry's Razors landing page and referral program for like 6 other people. He charged us $500. He built the whole referral program. And then Tyler joined the Brew and he saw that it was kind of shoddy in how it was built. It wasn't very scalable. He rebuilt it. Honestly, the cool thing now is he has since left The Brew. He's launched his own company, Beehive, which is a Substack competitor. And he's leveraging the referral program now as a service that any newsletter creator or provider can use after building it at The Brew. So it's just cool to see the evolution.
Amazing. Yeah. I mean, if people— we're not going to talk too much about the origin story because, I mean, it's been talked about quite a bit. So Listen to the other podcast for that one. But it's just a lot of scrappiness and also kind of looking into the future and being ahead of things, right? That's where you get the quote-unquote alpha from.
