Morning Brew
Alex Lieberman and Austin Rief started Morning Brew as a PDF attached to a campus email listserv in 2015. They were both in college at Michigan, Austin a sophomore and Alex a senior, and the premise was simple: students going into finance had to read the Wall Street Journal, but they found it dry and couldn’t get through it. Morning Brew would be the version they’d actually read.
Seven years later, the company sold to Axel Springer for a reported $75 million with a majority stake, reached $70 million in annual revenue by 2022, and became the most studied newsletter success story in business media. Sam Parr built the-hustle-story in parallel over the same years. The two companies were rivals who barely knew each other, mirrored examples of how the same idea — friendly, smart, readable business news delivered by email — could be executed with slightly different strategies and arrive at roughly the same destination.
Year By Year: What the Numbers Actually Were
In a rare side-by-side post-mortem, both founding teams sat down with Sam to go through the revenue year by year. The data is precise and the contrast with typical startup mythology is striking.
2016: Morning Brew did $25,000 in revenue. Three people. Their first ad deal was $3,000 with a watch brand. The Hustle did $400,000 (mostly conference revenue). Morning Brew had 100,000 subscribers by end of year.
2017: Morning Brew hit $300,000 in revenue, 100,000 subscribers, salaries of $60K each. They hired Tyler Denk — later the CEO of Beehiiv — as a “growth engineer.”
2018: Revenue grew to $3.1 million. In this year they scaled from 100,000 to one million subscribers. The paid acquisition flywheel started: they were spending $500,000 a month on Facebook ads, growing 20,000 subscribers per day during peak periods.
2019: $13.1 million in revenue, $3 million in profit. Two million subscribers. The year they hit the newsletter ceiling and started asking hard questions about the business model.
2020: $20 million in revenue, $6 million in profit. COVID killed 30% of their booked revenue overnight, then everything boomed. This was the year they sold the majority stake.
2021 and beyond: $46 million, $70 million, then $70-80 million. The Liebermans and Austin had already exited.
The Newsletter Ceiling
The most important strategic insight from Morning Brew’s growth isn’t how they got to a million subscribers — it’s what they discovered after they got there.
“Morning Brew got to a point where we started asking, how much can you make on a single newsletter?” Alex said. “I think it was $18 per subscriber per year. Something like 50 cents a month for advertising.”
At that revenue-per-subscriber figure, with a cost of $6-7 per subscriber acquired, the math had a ceiling. The answer was vertical expansion: instead of making the flagship newsletter bigger, launch newsletters for specific industries — finance, marketing, retail — where advertisers pay higher CPMs to reach a more targeted audience.
Austin’s formulation: “Our audience works in retail, marketing, finance, as CFOs. What if we took that path? Higher CPMs, don’t need to grow as fast, it’s not a race to the bottom, it’s an engagement play.”
This is the move that Morning Brew never fully communicated and that most newsletter founders studying their success tend to miss. The flagship was a customer acquisition vehicle. The verticals were the business.
The Paid Acquisition Mindset
The psychological difference between how Morning Brew and The Hustle approached paid growth is one of the more instructive contrasts in the episode.
Austin’s approach: “I’d track daily cash flow to make sure we had enough money to keep buying. My only regret is we couldn’t figure out a way to find more money to put into Facebook ads.”
Sam’s approach at The Hustle: “I had such a poor mindset. The mentality of — I will spend a dollar if it turns into $1.10 — for me it was like, $80,000 a month, that’s astronomical. It doesn’t matter what the return is. That was an immature mindset.”
Alex Lieberman’s explanation for the gap: “Austin and I were younger than you. And at the time we were only making 60K. I don’t think Austin and I were thinking about monetizing the business for ourselves the same way you were. You had a profit threshold. I said, that means Sam’s taking his foot off the gas. So I’m going to do the opposite.”
The Morning Brew founders didn’t have the psychology of protecting what they had because they didn’t have anything to protect yet.
The Sale: Fear and No Other Offers
The Axel Springer acquisition was not a triumphant exit. It was a decision made partly because no one else made a written offer.
Austin walked through the emotional rollercoaster: the first conversation with Axel Springer started in November 2019. COVID hit in March 2020, and for three weeks they assumed the deal was dead and might lose the company. Then everything boomed. By summer they were wondering if they were underpriced.
“A couple of hours before we signed, we were unsure,” Austin said. “We came back to: we own the vast majority of the company and we didn’t get a single offer in writing from anyone else. And that was terrifying.”
SoFi had passed. Financial companies like Fidelity and E-Trade were unreachable. Traditional media companies — Hearst, The New York Times — weren’t interested.
The lesson Alex drew: the difficulty of selling a business is often about the buyer’s internal incentives, not the business’s quality. When he pitched SoFi’s CMO, a woman on the call deadpanned: “I don’t get it. Why would we buy you guys?” The head of business development then flipped his background to show SoFi Stadium and said, “300 million eyeballs a year. What are we going to do with 3 million emails?”
What Newsletter Founders Get Wrong Today
From the founders who actually built it, the diagnosis of what goes wrong now:
“The number one thing people get wrong is they see the arbitrage we had in 2017 and think it exists today,” Austin said. “They think the same economics exist because they read a blog post Tyler Denk wrote in 2018.”
Alex: “The more niche the better. The trouble we had at Morning Brew was we could not figure out how to monetize our audience directly. We tried merch, we tried an education product, we couldn’t crack it. The more niche you go, the more clear it becomes how you can directly monetize your audience.”
Both founders were insistent on one point above all others: the economics only work if the content is actually good. “People aren’t focusing on the content. It’s all about the content. That’d be like selling a SaaS product where the code doesn’t work that well.”
They printed out Morning Brew, Axios, and The Hustle every morning and critiqued every story by hand. That discipline created the product. Growth hacks came after.
See also: newsletter-business | the-hustle-story | alex-lieberman | austin-rief | milk-road | shaan-puri | sam-parr