What's up, everybody? This is Cortland from IndieHackers.com, and you're listening to
the IndieHackers podcast. More people than ever are building cool stuff online and making
a lot of money in the process. And on this show, I sit down with these IndieHackers to
discuss the ideas, the opportunities, and the strategies they're taking advantage of
so the rest of us can do the same. Alright, I'm here with Austin Reif, the co-founder
of Morning Brew. Morning Brew is an incredibly impressive business. On your website, you
describe it as the daily email that makes reading the news actually enjoyable. And I
think last year, you generated over $20 million in revenue, which is 33 employees. Is that
accurate?
Yeah, that is more or less correct. I think 33 was probably halfway through the year,
but something like that. Yeah, it's a pretty crazy numbers. And what's even crazier is
that you started this thing as a side project in college in 2015. And you never raise any
money from VCs. And somehow, it's turned into this like behemoth media company that's generating
millions of dollars, you have millions of subscribers, it's a pretty long way to go
basically from from people who weren't necessarily imagining in the beginning that you could
ever build something this big.
So it's funny you mentioned that. I don't think that is, I think that is the reason
why it got to be so big, because we didn't plan things out at the beginning. I think
a lot of consumer businesses in general, they're too, they're like fake, right up front. It's
very staged or especially raised VC money to build community early, right? You have
to build this brand early. And for us, it was so authentic because it was just us. We
were just creating content. You know, we thought this was a good idea. But we never thought
it'd be a big business. And I think that is why it succeeded because we started it when
I was a sophomore in college. So we had two years where there was no pressure to make
money, no pressure to, is it a company? Is it not? It was just, oh, it's a college thing.
And because of that, it just grew, there was no pressure, it grew so authentically. And
I think that is so often when people think about morning brew, they think about starting
in 2017 or 2018, we went full time. If not for those two years, though, where we didn't
have to pay ourselves salaries, we didn't have to care what people thought, you know,
we had small mistakes didn't matter, we had a few number of subscribers. Like if not for
those two years, we wouldn't be where we are. And so I think it's actually, you know, like
a feature not a bug. I think about this with indie hackers too, because I joined Stripe
four years ago today, today is my Stripeversary, I got a little ping and slack. And it's funny
because you know, the goal has always been growth, make any hackers bigger and more impactful
better. But when you're thinking about that constantly, and you're kind of worried about
your performance, you tend to put deadlines on things, you tend to say, okay, I'm gonna
only do things that can work in a really big way. And the next three to six months, or
six to nine months or something like that, which excludes a whole bunch of stuff that
you could be doing that might just make your product better or more interesting or useful,
because you're trying to hit these metrics. So I'm super curious, like what you were doing
during these two years at college, that wasn't like pedal to the metal, we care about what
some VCs think, and was just like authentically figuring out your business that helps you
out later on.
Yeah, so so there were two things, right? Let's talk about growth. And then let's talk
about product expansion. In terms of growth, we had no money. So it had to grow organically,
we had to figure out organic growth. It's the classic thing where sometimes, you know,
people say, oh, a company got over capitalized, they threw money at a problem. We had no
money to throw at the biggest problem, which is distribution. I'm a big believer that distribution
is is, you know, in the product distribution war, they're both obviously very important
distribution in my mind is more important. And we had to figure it out. And so we went
into clubs and classes at Michigan, and we would just pitch it. And we first realized
no one's paying attention. It's the beginning of an econ 101 class, there's 500 kids in
here, we only have 1000 subscribers, we can grow our subscriber base 50% simply by getting
all these people signed up. And we pitch our hearts out and people be interested. And I
go to my computer and refresh, I have like two new subscribers. And we're like, well,
what do we do? So we started passing this is this is a true story, we pass around a
piece of paper and get everyone to write their email down. And after class, I'd sit outside
the lecture hall and just manually type in everyone's email into the landing page, one
by one. It's the classic, it's Paul Graham do things that don't scale before I even knew
Paul Graham was, but it was it wasn't do things don't scale was do the only things we could
have possibly done. And because of that, we knew we had product market fit because people
weren't churning. That's the growth thing. The product thing, you know, we had people
big media execs reaching out to us. Remember, 2015, buzz feeds raising tens or hundreds
of millions, vices raising hundreds of millions, these people raising ton of capital. And people
say, hey, create video, create this, create that. And we're out there being like, we're
just gonna write our newsletter, you know, we're gonna write our simple newsletter. And
it's just funny, because in hindsight, it was just so simple, like we thought it was
so complicated, we were doing, and it was so easy to look at the business now versus
then. There's a book I just finished reading called made a stick. And it's all about how
to craft a message or story that actually sticks with people over time and, you know,
allows them to share it or that just stands the test of time. And you got like, I think
five or six principles, but the very, very first one that they say you need more than
any other principle is just simplicity. Way too many people try to craft a message that's
got 15 moving parts, and it's got 10 different value propositions or whatever, you know,
you're making a newsletter and it's for people like x and people like y and people like z.
And they're like, no, you got to get rid of all that. And it's super hard when you're
the one building a product or doing research, and you have to communicate to people why
it's valuable to throw stuff away. Because you've put like so much time and effort into
this, this newsletter, so much time and effort into your research, you want people to know
all the bells and whistles. But for them, they describe basically finding the core of
your idea as being the most important thing that if nothing else gets communicated, you
need to communicate this and then literally just cut everything else no matter how painful
it is. And for the morning brew, I was looking at some of your tweets, you talked about how
you wanted your newsletter to be one thing, which is you wanted to write it in a conversational
tone for intellectually curious readers. How did you decide on having a conversational
newsletter? So that was the that was the origin. It was really my co founder, he was watching
his friends struggle to learn about the business world. And there are all these resources out
there, like you walk into Michigan, where we went to business school, there were a stack
of 20 Wall Street journals every day, no one would read that. And people always talk about
user research, didn't take user research to realize why people weren't reading the journal.
It's the same reason I was reading the journal. It was dry, it was long, it was boring. And
so what's the opposite of that fun and engaging. And there were other companies at the time,
starting to create content, the skim being the biggest one in a in a really strong tone.
We didn't want to copy the skims tone at all. But we said, what if we could take what they
were doing for pop culture, for women, but do it our way? Like, what is our way? And
the interesting thing was Alex and I, we weren't the best writers, we couldn't, you know, we
could write a sentence or two or maybe a paragraph in this tone, but we couldn't write the whole
newsletter in this tone. We could very much see eye to eye. Like day one, we knew, you
know, we knew what we were talking, we knew what the tone was. And so so yeah, it was
just by figuring out like, you know, the journal is so boring, we can do it better.
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And what I like about it is the fact that you weren't
discouraged by the fact that other people were already sending emails, telling people
about the news, it wasn't so much, hey, we need to differentiate by starting a completely
different product than no one's ever done before. It was more like, hey, we already know
that people like the news, people need the news, but we're just gonna do it slightly
differently. We're gonna find our own niche, we're gonna see what other people were doing
poorly. And we're gonna do that well. And I think that's kind of a universal principle.
Almost everybody I talked to on the show who's doing really well is solving kind of like
a tried and true problem that was already being solved well before them by a, you know,
a different company in a different way. And they just found a way to differentiate.
I mean, there are a couple different types of products, right? There are products who
are doing things completely new, like completely revolutionary. And there are people who are
doing things that are just a little bit better in a lot of different ways. And if you do
something a little bit better in terms of delivery, right, we weren't the first people
sending out a newsletter, but most media companies, they monetize via web traffic. And so their
newsletter had one goal to get people back to their website. Our newsletter had one goal
and was to keep people in the newsletter. And that allowed us to create a different
product that really wasn't that different. But it had a lot of things that actually made
it very different.
So tell me more about this process of like, trying to get college students to sign up
for a news newsletter, because even now like thinking about like, when I was in college,
I wasn't really concerned about the news. Like I remember I found out about Hurricane
Katrina like a week and a half after it happened, because I was just focusing on like schoolwork
and hang out with my friends and like, you know, like parties, I just I didn't care about
the news. And I don't think I would have signed up for a newsletter on the news. What were
you doing besides just going to classes and getting everybody to write down their emails
so that you could add them to your list?
It starts with who we targeted, we didn't target every college kid, we target the kids
who needed this, right? So we started with kids who were prepping for job interviews.
And so we pitched is like, hey, you have to prep, you're spending hours a week, might
as well read this, it's five minutes a day, and you seem a lot smarter. And starting with
those kids and starting with the kids who were like, you know, the central nodes, the
president of business schools, the president of business clubs, the guy or the girl who
whoever one just like look to, right, if we get them reading, they would share with all
their friends.
Okay, so super targeted, kind of like, you're talking like the influencers of college, really.
I watched this, this video last year was basically how to do SEO. And they were talking about
growing your blog. And like part of it was like, okay, you can grow through something
that's got sort of a cumulative traffic, like SEO, but also like a lot of people were seduced
by this idea of virality. And they had a research study in there that broke down how virality
actually works. And so most of us think that the way that virality works is you share something
with one person, and then they share with two people, and they share with four people
and eight people and it spreads and pretty soon the entire internet's reading your amazing
blog post or whatever. But this research firm actually analyzed how things spread on social
media and Twitter. And it's very influencer based. So basically, you know, a few big influencers
will tweet something or share something. And then like their whole audience will see it.
And then every single layer down the pyramid further, fewer and fewer and fewer people
see it. So actually, what you really want to do is get as many influencers to see whatever
is that you're doing, or in your case, you know, class president, most popular kid at
school, leader of the student group, and then they'll disseminate his people who will like
progressively share it with fewer and fewer people. But it doesn't matter because the
influencers just know so many people.
You know what this reminds me of? Do you any any, he's not doing any more, I assume it's
because he now works at a 16Z. But Sriram, he's worked at Twitter, he started this this
interview series, the Observer Knowledge Observer, Observer Effect, something like that. I can't
remember the name. And he had some great guests, don't get me wrong. They were great interviews.
But you think from the response of Twitter that this guy was was doing rockets. He was
he was revealing something the world had never seen. He shut down Twitter. And I'd read it.
I'd be like, yeah, it's really interesting. But it's just an interview. And again, I'm
not insulting at all. It was a great interview. But then you realize like, oh, wait, Mark
Andres in his shirt. Yeah, the first was Mark Andres in right. And so he's sharing it and
you get all these people. And I think, you know, the VC industry is like a little herd
mentality like you're saying it's it's influencer driven. And so oh, this person with 200,000
followers tweeted, Oh, now I'll look like a thought leader if I can tweet it for my
friends do it. And so I just laugh because I'm like, yeah, they're great interviews.
But they're just interviews. People are acting like it was like a cure cancer.
I'm looking at his site right now. The Observer Effect. He's actually doing a ton of interviews
on clubhouse now. I think he has like the biggest show on clubhouse got like the Good
Time Club or something. But like he only interviewed three people for the Observer Effect. Mark
Andreson, Daniel Eck, CEO of Spotify, and then Toby and CEO of Shopify. And it's like
these are all humongous names. But exactly what you said happened. Everybody just said
like, Oh, there's a cool interview with this person somehow got other influencers to share.
And like, that's the news of the day. That's the cool thing to do to talk about how amazing
this interview is. I had kind of a similar thing happened to me on Twitter the other
day, where I tweeted my second most popular tweet of all time, it got like 1500 likes.
And it was because not a lice and had this tweet where he said, I know a lot of smart
people and not a single one of them wants their kids to go to college. And then everybody
was talking about it. We got like 4000 likes, tons of famous people were just retweeting
it and sharing it. And then I just quote tweeted it and was like, actually, I had a great time
in college. And like, here's like the four benefits that I got. And I took me like five
seconds to come up my tweet and I just sent it out. And like it got a ton of steam, not
because it was some brilliant, like genius tweet, but because everybody was just talking
about that that day, all the sort of major influences on Twitter wanted to have weigh
in with their opinion. And like that just sort of carried the wave. So I guess it's
something that applies to pretty much any business if you could just figure out what
everybody's talking about. And who are the biggest names talking about it got on their
radar, you're gonna grow and you're gonna spread. But I'm sure you saw yesterday or
maybe you didn't. But the CEO who talked about her EA, this tweet went viral because this
woman wrote a tweet storm. I didn't even read it. You know, I just saw all the people making
fun of it. She wrote a tweet storm. It was based like here, I'm so efficient, I can do
all these things. I can take David, I can take David Perrell's course, I can do this,
I can do this all because my EA is amazing. And the list what he does. And it's like that's
like basically what I can see. Oh, does it like this? Yeah, it's not the job of an EA.
And everyone mocked it. And everyone was ever was piling on going viral. And then that was
bringing awareness to the initial tweet. I'm looking at one of the mocking tweets right
now. It's got like 4000 likes and says the most undervalued asset of a CEO is an executive
assistant. My EA writes software hires employees raises VC completes financial projections
and submit reports to regulatory agencies. And it's like 70 quotes 250 likes just like
I don't even that even linked to the original tweet. But it's like, you know, they're sub
tweeting somebody. And if you're subbed, we can get 4000 likes than the original tweet
must have blown up. Something interesting happens on Twitter when something can be good
or bad doesn't really matter. But once it gets to a certain point, people hate it, no
matter how good a tweet is. So someone can give really good advice on Twitter, right?
Like, yeah, it could be platitudes, whatever really good advice, and people love it. And
you can actually go back in the quote, tweet history, the replies history and see, and
be like, Oh, this is awesome, right? But then it gets 1000 likes. And then there's some
like hatred, right? Because it gets outside that bubble. And then he gets to 10, 20,000
likes. And we're like, Oh, like this tweet isn't even that good. And it's like, yeah,
but the original tweeter didn't didn't wasn't like, Oh, I'm going to tweet something good
only up to 10,000 likes. And then it's not it's not 20,000 likes. Good. It happens like
with the pumps all the time. Like, you know, the pumps will be trying. And someone be like,
it's crazy. He's got 40,000 likes. It's like, it's not his fault. They got 40,000 likes.
He just posted some contents of the world liked it. You know, yeah, it's just envy,
you know, like everybody will be happy for their friend if their friend like, you know,
gets a good job or gets a promotion. But if your friend like, when's the lottery, then
suddenly people start feeling a little bit different. Like, hey, you know, this guy's
not that cool. Why, why don't I have all these millions of dollars, etc. And I've seen people
talk about tweets in the exact same way. Like Greg Eisenberg, a mutual friend of ours had
this giant tweet store. I don't know exactly how many likes it got, but it was mega. It
was like 50,000 likes or something crazy. And he's like, I talked to five billionaires
last week. Here's what I learned. And that was like a pretty interesting tweet thread.
It wasn't like mind-blowingly amazing, but it was fine. And then like you said, for whatever
reason, it just took off. It resonated. And then the second it gets past a certain point,
they stopped saying, Hey, was this a good tweet thread? And they start saying, Hey,
does this thread deserve to get all this traffic? And how dare he, you know, be so successful
with this thing that I could have tweeted, but I didn't think of. And it's funny to watch
it happen. It's part of the reason why I don't care that much about Twitter. Like you and
I are part of this like 100k iMessage group where it's like, I don't know, five or six
people who are trying to get to a hundred thousand followers on Twitter. And I checked
it this morning. I was like, Oh, Austin's coming on the show. Let me see what's going
on in 100k club. And I realized I was kicked out two weeks ago for never participating and
never commenting or saying anything, which is completely fair. But I probably was a person
in the group who cared the least. Like I just didn't do anything to get to 100k. You might
be like one level above me. You're pretty close. You're like 70,000 Twitter followers,
but I love the way you use Twitter. I love like the fact that you have this like thread
of threads pinned to the top of your profile where before this episode, I can go and see
like, what is awesome thing about morning brew. And you've tweeted like every insight
that you've learned from morning brew and a bunch of different threads and it's super
valuable and useful for anybody who wants to go learn and how you did it. I can't stand
when people critique other people's Twitters. With that being said, I tweet when I have
something to say, I don't tweet for the sake of tweeting. So you'll see in that thread
earlier this year, I had a bunch of things I went to say and I sat down, I said them
all. And it's like, I haven't really tweet stormed and I mean, maybe there's like one
in the last two or three months. And that's why my growth has gone down so much. I grew
25,000 January. I grew like, I don't even know, three or four thousand the last month,
just because I haven't tweeted that much recent or at least I haven't tweeted things that
get followers. The thing about Twitter is it's this weird unholy combination of people
just like, just shooting the shit and just saying personal stuff talking to their friends
saying talk about what they ate for breakfast and other people who are like hardcore marketers
trying to grow. And usually you don't see those two things in the same place. Like if
you go to Amazon and you look at books, there's no one who's like casually communicating by
writing a book, you know, that's like you only do that if you're really trying to reach
an audience, same with like newsletters, like the vast majority of newsletters are people
actually trying really hard to grow their newsletters. But Twitter, I think people who
are using it for personal reasons might feel it's super unnatural to see someone else who's
like, you know, going out and researching stories and like tweaking every single word
of their tweets and you know, make it like copywriting perfection and grow really big.
And I agree with you, there's really no wrong way to use Twitter. Just let everybody do
the thing they want to do. You know what it is? It's good envy practice. If you find yourself
getting really pissed off at people on Twitter for tweeting things that are doing really
well, it's a good opportunity to check in with yourself and ask, am I envious? And how
do I overcome this feeling right now? And it's kind of cool because there's not that
many opportunities in life to do that. But with Twitter, you can do it every single day
because there's always dumb threads that are getting thousands of retweets and you can
just check in with yourself. So maybe I'll start using Twitter for that. Your tweets
are super helpful. And I want to go through some of them because they tell morning brews
story pretty well. So one of the, I think stories from your early days is you had, what
is it called? Your brewbassador program. Great name. And you talked about how this actually
was, was one of the things that helped you grow the most. And I've actually seen other
employees at morning brew write about this in other places. So it's clearly like a big
part of your business. I think someone said it's like referrals are responsible for something
like 30% of your subscribers, which is crazy. What's the brewbassador program? How did
it work? What's the story there? I told you before that Alex and I were going to clubs
and classes to find these central nodes of business schools and getting people signed
for morning brew. We then thought, okay, what if we can get our friends to do this at other
schools too. And our readers is other schools and build this out. And so that was the OG
morning brew ambassador program. And so then we thought to ourselves, and we weren't the
first people to ever do this. We thought, okay, what if we can turn everyone into an
ambassador built up the referral program. And the referral program is what gets all
that traffic. And when it comes down to referral program, there's a few components. First is
letting people know there is a referral program to making sure it's as easy as possible to
share. And three, aligning incentives with your power users or people who you want to
share or think we'll share. You don't want to create rewards for your your median user.
You want to create rewards for your top decile user. And why is that? Because they're going
to be the people who do other referrals anyway. The way I think about it is, you know, there
are certain people who critique pricing of online classes, right, or online core, basic
school classes or courses or whatever. And they're like, I can't believe they charge
$1,000. I would never charge a dollar for an online. I would never pay a dollar for
an online course. And it's like, yeah, but if you wouldn't pay at all for an online course,
you're not in the total addressable market. So no one really cares about you. So no one's
pricing based off of you. They're not pricing for the median. They're not saying, oh, well,
there are 500 people who pay $1,000 and 500 people pay zero. Therefore, let me charge
500. Say anything with the referral program. There are a ton of people who would never
refer. And so I'm not I'm not trying to encourage you to refer if you would never refer. I'm
instead taking the people who love morning brew want to represent it when I want to show
people they read morning brew and then giving them more of what they love. So more content,
more swag, whatever. So that's that's the key thing about referral programs.
Yeah, and you've got a few of those I was scrolling on your Twitter. You've got one
Sarah Rutledge, Sarah underscore Rutledge one who tweeted just this morning. Why? Yes,
I am the girl who got the morning brew logo tattooed on her leg. And she's got a beautiful
picture of her leg and some sort of Japanese kimono and a picture of the morning brew coffee
cup. So you've got a lot of people who are like your rabid ambassadors who want to share
with you. How do you find these people? Like how do you get people to be so obsessive about
a newsletter that they want to get the morning brew logo tattooed on their leg and then brag
about it on Twitter? There's a few things. First, when we started off again, we weren't
trying to build a rabbit fan base. If we were, I don't think we would have but because we
weren't trying we were being authentic. It's just about authenticity. And it compounds over
time off that authenticity compounds over time. It's impossibly authentic day one, you
can't do something one day. And like, oh, I this is like, you know, this is truly authentic.
It takes time. That's the first thing. The second thing and this is why I think referrals
are so successful for us is at first we used to kind of try like hide the referral program
and try to be like sneaky about it and make jokes. And one day we woke up and it wasn't
this simple, right? It took time. But basically one day woke up and we're like, we're giving
away free content. We shouldn't feel bad if we're asking our users to just share it. And
it's almost become like a meme, right? Where I'll be with people and look like, oh, this
is the morning brew guy. And the person's like, I've never heard of morning brew. And
they'll tell them what morning brew is. And they'll be like, oh, but use my referral code.
And so it's built like this sub franchise where people think about that, like, and they
like, that's fine. It's gamified. And we we do put in people's faces. And again, we probably
turn off a few percent of people. But if you get pissed off because we asked you to share
a free newsletter, you're probably not going to be the person who reads the newsletter
every day. Like it's just it's just not you. And what's the incentive that like these power
users actually want? Like if I share, I'm a morning brew power subscriber, I'm sharing
it with everyone I know. I'm referring, you know, 100 people a week. What am I getting
in return? We actually just changed it. I'll tell you what it was historically and now
what it is. So historically, it was the first referral you got for sharing three times was
more morning brew content. So an exclusive Sunday edition. If you like morning brew,
you probably really like morning brew. If you like enough to share it, you probably
really like it enough to share it. And therefore we're going to give you more content. Now
we have three million readers. It's time to open up the Sunday edition to everyone, make
it unique, make it we're now calling it the Sunday edition, right? It's a little more
glossy. It's like New York mag, Atlantic esque, like our version of a magazine in the newsletter.
And so now we picked our second most engaged with thing and it's our trivia. So now you
get a trivia game and people love our trivia. And so we send you a little bit of trivia
and we'll see how that goes. And we're going to iterate and find things that work.
Yeah, I love that. It's like it's very exclusive. Anyone can get money, you know, it's very
exclusive and aligned to what it is that you're doing what people like. And like, who doesn't
want to get in on like some secret edition of a thing they already love, you know, like
if you're going to a college, like who doesn't want to be part of a secret group at that
college if you're subscribed to a newsletter, or you're part of a forum, like who doesn't
want to be like, I remember when I was a kid, I had a, a world of Warcraft guild when I
was a teenager that I ran with my brother. And like you get 200 people in a guild, like
you need some sort of hierarchy for like, who tells other people what to do, who organizes
things, etc. And it was really hard splitting things up because you would have people who
are super competent. You're like this person is they know what they're doing, they're very
responsible, like they should for sure be promoted. And then you would have people who
are super loyal, but they weren't necessarily the most competent. It's like this guy's been
with us every night for two years. But like he honestly couldn't lead like a fish to water
like he probably should not be in charge of anything. So how do you reward these people?
And we ended up making kind of an exclusive group of people called like the core members
and we gave them their own like unique forum. And so they got to feel as special as all
the other people who were like in charge of stuff. And literally it was nothing other
than they just get to they got to have a private place to talk to each other. And that for
some reason is extremely valuable to almost everybody.
Yeah, I think that's what people get it miss about referral programs. Like Robin Hoods
is great, right? And why is it great? Because they give you a share or a fraction a share
of a share and like it just fits so well with the product messaging. If Robin Hood gave
you the same amount and just doll us dollars like hey, here's $5. Like I think it's PayPal
who did that or does that still it says it's the messaging is not perfect. But the messaging
is perfect with sign up for Robin Hood and get a stock refer get a stock like it keeps
you in that mindset. If you're going to refer your friends to Robin Hood, you probably really
like investing in stocks.
Do you feel like you as a as an individual need to have a big audience? And if so why
just for being an investor or other reasons?
I think it's important for a few reasons. Number one, I didn't start off intentionally
growing my Twitter audience. I just want to tweet more and be active on Twitter. And for
me, it's been like a little bit of a of a like a snowball, right? I started off beginning
of 2019. And I tweeted some stuff. And someone really awesome who I idolized, right looked
up to I admire DM me. I was like, Hey, we'd love to chat. I was like, he wants to chat
with me. That's not how she wants to like, that's not how it works. It's not should work.
And that kept on happening. And it was really, really cool on the way up. I made these relationships
and met these people, me you for example, I've met all these awesome people. I otherwise
have no would have I wouldn't I would probably don't know what indie hackers if not for Twitter
like it's where I learn about so much stuff. And so it's really cool. And I think it keeps
on growing. Now part of me wanting to grow my following is like there is a definitely
some some vanity some like yeah, I want to like wine. It's like a wine not like yeah,
a 60,000 school 100,000 school or quarter of a million schooler. But recently, and I
think this is why I stopped tweeting is and this is probably not a good personality trait.
But there are some negative side effects when you get over 50 60 70,000 followers, which
is the people who start to follow you, not only you not know them anymore, but you probably
don't even know people who know people who know them. People start to view you as like
a public figure, not as a person. And it's not said that I get insulted by the responses
because I don't. But it's like, I don't want to deal with this. You know, I just there's
just so much criticism and like, I just like don't, you know, I just don't need to deal
with it. Right? Like, you know, I've gotten a lot of what I want to get out of it. And
I mean, like I was thinking about today, like I should get back to tweeting more. I do love
the thing I like about Twitter most is I learned so much from other people. I love for someone
to learn anything from me. But you get to a point, it's like, I just don't want to deal
with all this all this negativity. There's something about large numbers where like,
you got 70,000 followers on Twitter, like, all right, like, what is like one in 70,000
people capable of? Like, it's probably like, you know, at least one or two murderers in
there. It's probably, you know, like, I don't know, a couple thousand extremely negative
Nancy's who are always going to shit on whatever you have to say. And like, it just gets stressful.
And when you have a much smaller number of people, you just sort of quality control.
There's other people that you know, the people who authentically like you. So I'm right there
with you. And I was talking to Austin Arvid about this the other day, actually, he has
a huge Twitter account, I think he's at 150,000 followers or something like that. And he was
talking about how during the pandemic, he said something that wasn't related to the
pandemic. And people were like, how dare you talk about something that's not this. And
it's like, I just can't imagine being someone who's like, trying to police what someone
else is saying on Twitter to force them to talk about a particular you can just unfollow
them, right? You don't have to manually like voluntarily follow this person. And that's
like only a thing that happens once you're beyond a certain size. You know, below that
no one really cares. No, no, it's interesting to hear your perspective, because you have
like these two audiences on Twitter and through your company. And I think most people I talked
to only have one, you know, either their company's big, and they don't care. Or, you know, their
Twitter profile is big, and they're working on working on that and not focusing on their
company.
Yeah, I mean, we're it's unique, right? Because we are a content company. And my belief at
Morning Brew is that anyone who wants to be a content creator can, it doesn't mean anyone's
gonna be monetized, right? But but everyone adds value. And so a lot of our employees
create great content, our salespeople create great B2B newsletters to send to our clients,
one of our software engineers just wrote up a tweet storm, hey, this is what I've learned
the last six months. That's all I love that. That's awesome. That does come with some liability,
you know, it comes with people are going to make mistakes, we've made mistakes, we've
done some bad things, not not like intentionally, right? But we've tweeted some things, we're
in hindsight, we're like, yeah, that probably wasn't a great tweet. But you can't get the
to some extent, you can't have the good without the bad, right? If you're gonna be empowering
your employees tweet, you can't monitor every single character that comes out of comes off
their keyboard. And so once in a while, things are gonna happen. We're, it's a conversation
or it's a very tough thing to police your employees, Twitter's.
Well, it's pretty cool to have employees who actually care enough to want to tweet about
what's going on. Because like, there's this whole building public craze, right? If you
want people to care about what's going on your company, you should be transparent and
talk about what you're doing. And so for example, you've got I don't know if he's still there,
but his name is like Toby on Twitter. Yeah, Toby runs our runs our Twitter. He's amazing.
Yeah, well, he's like, here's a quick mini thread. And this is from his personal account
on how the morning brew picks our subject lines for each email. And like, I remember
reading this tweet and be like, Oh, this is super useful. I should do this for any hackers.
And so like every morning when you're gonna send out an email, you actually come up with
four different subject lines and you send each of those to 80,000 readers. And he says
each batch gets a different subject line and whichever one has the highest open rate will
go out to the remaining, you know, 2 million readers, which is super cool. And then he
talks about how do you pick the subject line? And he's like, well, it's not even that scientific.
We just sort of skim the newsletter for interesting and eye catching phrases from the stories.
And then the writers picks one for the day and we roll with whatever they choose. And
it's just cool seeing him like explain this on his Twitter thread and knowing like, this
isn't even like, like this is just someone who's working at morning brew, right? And
there's other Twitter threads that I found from other morning brew employees, where I'm
thinking, okay, well, how do I at any hackers also hire employees who are not only going
to like build and create stuff, but also like share and build in public? Because that's
not like a very common trait for the average employee, especially in a media company, some
of these legacy companies, the sub stack thing, right? So you have people starting sub stacks.
And now in New York Times, I was like, Oh, no one can create a sub stack. And that's
okay that New York Times can get away with that, right? They have the brand, they have
the, the prestige, they're going to be fine. They're that the New York Times. But what's
going to happen is a lot of these other businesses who aren't gonna be fine are going to replicate
that. And so I think it's you have a bunch of content creators, you know, we, we have
to empower people to have a voice and tell their story on the internet. And I think it's
a rising tide that lifts all boats. I try to be a example of what people can do. And
there are people who hate it and don't do it. And I'm totally fine with that. And there
are people who love it and do it every day. And that's also cool.
Another interesting thing that you've mentioned a couple times about the morning brew is that
you basically retain your readers. And even in college, when you first started this, like
your subscriber rates was growing as people weren't unsubscribing. And I think a lot of
people who are starting companies for the first time, don't understand how important
it is to be able to retain your users. It's just as important as finding the next user.
And so I'm curious what your sort of model is for like why people who read morning brew
are more retained than people who might read, I don't know, the next newsletter over or
maybe someone's random sub sec newsletter. What are you guys doing, right? That gets
people to stay retained. And then I have my own theory and I want to hear what your opinion
is on it.
We built a day. We built a habit, right? There's a lot of downsides to daily news or to write
on daily. But the pro is it's a habit. People have to have it. They wake up every morning.
They read morning brew. Most people do it the same time every day, whether it's right
when they get out of bed, when they get to work. But we built a daily habit and habits
are hard to break once you build them. And so it's habitual, right? We're consistent.
We never miss a day. We show up every single day in your inbox. And then the content is
really, really good. Like it's something that I don't talk about enough because it's such
a given. But it's it's so important to talk about the contents. Unbelievable. If the content
was bad, people wouldn't come back. It's just that simple.
Right. Because let's say you have like 1% churn. You know, every time you send an email,
1% of subscribers are like you, you know, unsubscribe. Well, if you have 3 million subscribers
and you're sending every single day, you're going to be down to like 2 million people
by the end of the month. If you have 1 million, like 1% churn, which is crazy. You can lose
a 30 subscriber base versus if you only send, you know, a few times a month, then you're
going to be down to something like, you know, 2.9 million, right? It's way different. So
the more emails you're sending, like the more important it is for you to basically have
extremely low churn. And I think what's cool about news is exactly what you said. It's
this habit. People already basically want to know what's going on every single day,
whether the morning brew exists or not. They're going to talk to their friends. They're going
to scroll Twitter. They're going to go to the New York Times. You're going to find out
some way to figure out, you know, what's going on. And I think that churn is kind of a thing
that happens once your product stops solving the problem that people have, or once they
stop having that problem. And news is really cool because people just don't stop having
a news problem. Like with Andy hackers, our newsletter will send out, we used to send
out at the very beginning, just like, here's the five founders that we interviewed this
week about how they grew their businesses. And that was super cool. And it helped people
who needed to be inspired and help people who needed to get started. But like needing
to be inspired and you need to get started aren't problems that people have for 50 years
on end, you know, they have that problem for a few months, and then they get their solution
from you and then like, okay, cool, unsubscribe, you know, I no longer need this, even like
the happiest users would sort of graduate from the newsletter. And so we sort of morphed
our newsletter over time to be a lot more newsy, a lot more like, hey, we're gonna keep
you up to date with what's going on in the indie hackers community and the business world
and a lot less like, hey, here's some evergreen story that you really only need to read once.
And if you read it somewhere else, then probably don't need this newsletter anymore. But there
are downsides news, it's hard to monetize the news. It's also new content every day,
we don't get a second chance at it, right? You can create an email drip about becoming
an indie hacker. And you can AB test that email drip 100 ways we can't AB, yeah, we
can maybe use a subject line, we can't AB says, hmm, their audience like that first
story, it's the news, we get one shot at it. So yeah, that makes perfect sense. One of
your Twitter threads, you talked about basically, you know, here's like some things I've learned
over time, like running the morning brew, and then spend what, like six years. And one
of them said, your tenants, I say I've learned over the last five years on startups, investing,
marketing and career advice. And your third piece of advice is something that's so funny,
because it's the exact opposite of what so many people say on the podcast, I usually
end the podcast and I say, you know, what's your one piece of advice for everybody? And
by far, the most common advice is just get started. And then by far, like the second
most, most copies of advice is just follow your passion and everything will work out
from there. And your tweet says, follow your passion is complete crap. People are passionate
about things that they're good at. So get really good at something and then you'll become
passionate at it. And then you'll make enough money to follow your original passion and
your free time. Does that describe how you've grown morning brew and other things that you've
worked on? I am passionate about media. I am passionate about building a company. But
I wasn't, growing up, I wasn't like, damn, I want to build a media business. I got pretty
good, I think, or good enough can always get better, but, you know, good enough to be mildly
successful building a media company. And it feels much better to do something and be good
at it, right? I love basketball, but I'm a 5'9 Jew. I was not going to make the NBA.
I'd be pretty miserable trying to play professional basketball right now, even though it was my
passion. Cause I wasn't good at it. And so again, there's counter examples, right? There
are plenty of people who do something they love, you know, do something that doesn't
make a lot of money, but they love it. And that's totally fine. I think that's the minority
of people. I think most people should do something that they're really good at. So yeah, get
good at something and then you like it, right? People run like distressed debt hedge funds.
No one likes distressed debt. My good friends is a middle market industrials, in middle
market industrials, private equity. There is no way he grew up was like, Oh, that's the
industry I want to be in, but he got good at it. And so he starts to like it. And then
you can do things in your spare time that maybe you're more like your passion, your
traditional hobbies. But yeah, I don't recommend people trying to do their hobbies, their profession,
unless you have potential. You got to check multiple boxes. And I think everybody wants
it to be one answer, just follow your passion. It's like, okay, well, that's one box. But
what about like being good at it? You know, what about having a strategy? What about all
these other boxes? And if you ignore them, you're just significantly less likely to succeed.
And you're always going to be able to go on the world and find, you know, two or three
stories of someone who didn't do any of that. And they succeeded. But if you look at the
denominator of everybody who tried doing that that way, like who tried only having a passion
and nothing else, then like, it's way bigger than two or three stories. It's like two or
three people made that work out of millions. And so it's a little misleading sometimes.
Yeah, it's like, it's like LeBron James followed his passion. I would assume you're not LeBron
James. Like I would just, you know, and you're a believer. That's fine. Like you but but
I would just guess like, you're not LeBron. Well, there's also something we said, I think
for this thing you're saying about skill, which is there's this book drive. And the
author talks about like, what are the three things that drive you to do well at work?
And their mastery, autonomy and purpose. And the first one is just mastery. People who
love their jobs and people who are good at their jobs have mastered their job. There's
something good about like, when I sit down to write code, right, just feel competent
when I'm writing code, I'm blazing, I'm like, I'm writing this so much faster than I could
have five years ago, so much faster and better than most people could, and it just feels
really good. And then having a purpose, you know, for you, maybe you're keeping people
informed in a much better way, like, otherwise, they wouldn't be informed, because there is
no newsletter that actually does it in a conversational way that they want to read. And then there's
autonomy, which is what every indie hacker and every founder wants, which is, you have
a boss telling you what to do, you know, one's breathing down your neck, you get to self
direct. And I think that, you know, you could you could validate whether or not that's true
for you. But I have every one of those things, and any hackers, and it makes my job super
fun. And it makes me better at my job.
If you master something, or you're very good at something, I think you'll have the opportunity
for autonomy. And I can't remember if the other one was, but I think you'll, you know,
you give yourself optionality by being very good at something.
Well, anyway, Austin, we're about out of time. I love having you on the show again, because
there's so many different things you tweeted about morning brew. And I'm sure in another
year or two, you're going to be I don't know, 5 million, 6 million subscribers going to
the moon. But thank you a ton for coming on the show, talking about Twitter, you remember
me with all sorts of interesting topics. Can you let listeners know where they can go to
learn more about what you're up to? And what's going on with morning brew?
Yeah, so you can go to you can sign up for morning brew at morningbrew.com. You can find
me on Twitter at Austin underscore wreath, r i e f.
All right. Thanks again.