Austin Rief, co-founder of Morning Brew ($75M revenue, 250 people), joins Sam and Shaan to talk newsletters, growth, and money. They dig into Morning Brew’s origin (cold-staring students in Michigan lecture halls until they gave their emails), their rivalry with The Hustle, the “write grow sell” wall, B2B versus consumer newsletter strategy, ad sales as a black box, the anti-climactic wire transfer, and Austin’s framework for three types of newsletters. Plus new business ideas for the downturn, the outsourced talent playbook, and Austin’s case study in public speaking.
Speakers: Sam Parr (host), Shaan Puri (host), Austin Rief (guest, Morning Brew co-founder)
The Morning Brew Origin [00:00:00]
Shaan: Austin Rief, co-founder of Morning Brew. How big is the company now?
Austin: $70–75 million of revenue this year, double-digit profit margin, 250 people.
Shaan: Take us back to the beginning.
Austin: We’re at the University of Michigan. I applied to Duke, didn’t get in. So Michigan it was. Everyone at Michigan went into finance, so I followed the herd. Then I stumbled upon this guy Alex Lieberman. He was making a PDF attached to an email — he literally made a Word document, PDF’d it, and emailed it out. Called it Market Corner. Very finance-oriented.
He was two years older than me. That’s actually a big part of our success: I was a sophomore in college, and nobody was going to fund a sophomore in college. So we never raised venture capital. Alex went to Morgan Stanley for 14 months. I spent a summer in investment banking, was like: “Holy shit, this is miserable.” So I was like — I’ll just do Morning Brew for a couple years. What’s the worst that happens?
Sam: What did your parents think?
Austin: They were okay with it, except I wanted to drop out. The deal we made: if I graduated, they’d be cool with me doing Morning Brew for a year or two. And then fast forward — I think we were in the middle of M&A at the same time you guys were.
Sam: You and I have an interesting background. We kind of hated each other.
Austin: I didn’t entirely hate you. It was like opposing sports teams — I had a lot of respect for you, but I made up a story to motivate myself. We launched the first newsletter in 2015, and you launched The Hustle in April 2016. We were tracking right alongside each other.
Sam: Everything I was bad at, you were good at. I remember being at your office and showing your team Morning Brew and saying: “Why does this email look better than ours?” I would show it to the whole team and ask what they were doing better. I could never hate you fully.
Austin: Alex was maniacal about this. He would print out Morning Brew and The Hustle every single morning and go line by line. Some early Morning Brew employees were pissed. When your line was better — and sometimes it was — people revolted. But we did that for six or nine months, just hyperfocused. I woke up every day saying: write, grow, sell. That was on the wall.
The Great Wall of Opens [00:10:00]
Austin: Every day at 11:00 a.m. we had the Great Wall of Opens. We tracked our open rate and wrote it down on the wall. We did that for two years.
Shaan: I love that. One of the highest predictors of success for founders I’ve met is whether they know what the main thing is. Not just conceptually — but translated into a number they’re watching every day. The Great Wall of Opens is the best version of that I’ve heard.
Austin: The math was simple. If we grow subscriptions by 50,000 a month and our costs don’t change, we’ll go from $50,000 monthly revenue to $75K to $100K to $125K and be at a million subscribers doing a million dollars a month by end of year. I told investors that and they were like: “That doesn’t make any sense.” I was just looking at the Excel.
Our business only had $100,000 in costs. People couldn’t believe it. People, growth marketing, and an ESP. That’s it.
Getting the First Emails [00:16:00]
Austin: We may have broken a couple of laws to get our first few thousand emails. Michigan has a 10-minute gap between classes. At 10:05, I’d get up in front of these 1,000-person econ lecture halls and pitch Morning Brew. Then I’d print out an Excel spreadsheet and walk around and stare at people until they gave me their email. Sat in the back and typed every one in.
Then: “Do you have a friend at Penn State? Let’s do it there.” Penn State, Miami, NYU. Next thing you know, we have 50,000 college students across the country reading Morning Brew.
Sam: That’s the Collison Installation for newsletters.
Austin: We just didn’t know what to call it.
Morning Brew vs. The Hustle: Strategy Divergence [00:20:00]
Sam: Your strategy diverged from ours pretty quickly.
Austin: You took the route of verticalizing — Trends, HustleCon, community. We took the horizontal route and launched multiple newsletters. I think both routes can work. It depends on what you’re selling.
Our content was more general business. Your content had an edge — you were targeting entrepreneurs or account execs who wanted to become entrepreneurs. That gave you way more opportunity to launch a Trends or a HustleCon. For us, a Morning Brew subscription or Morning Brew event wasn’t going to work the same way — the tone wasn’t specific enough, the target customer wasn’t specific enough.
So we fell in love with B2B. I know you both got some Twitter heat about that. But we’d launch a newsletter and it would be break-even before we even hired the writers — we’d pre-sell an advertiser. It’s a B2B SaaS company buying placements for HR professionals or retail professionals. Launched, break even on day one.
I don’t think there’s a better or worse route. Your opportunity was easier to get to a billion-dollar company because of the subscription and multi-revenue stream potential — it would’ve just taken another 8–10 years. Our route was easier to get to $100M of revenue.
The Three Newsletter Categories [00:28:00]
Austin: I split newsletters into three categories.
Category 1: Editorial newsletters. Your Substackers, your Puck, your Matt Levines. Long-form, 2,000 to 10,000 words.
Category 2: Aggregation. What Morning Brew and The Hustle did. Summaries, general business, going for scale.
Category 3: Morning Brew for X. Still aggregation-style, but more niche. Maybe the TAM is smaller, but you think your tone and coverage can own a larger percent of that TAM.
I think the biggest opportunity right now is Category 3 — what Shaan did with Milk Road. Find a growing industry, ride the tailwind, build a distinct brand in a niche. If X is finance or something B2B, or a job title, it works better than if X is fly fishing or basketball.
On the consumer side: go high-dollar. The newsletter for Ferrari owners, the newsletter for Rolex owners — people who spend hundreds of thousands a year. Or go B2B. Milk Road was the best of both worlds — consumer-oriented readers plus people who work in the crypto industry.
Ad Sales as a Black Box [00:35:00]
Sam: Ad sales suck.
Austin: They do. We were selling direct response ads in the early days — Casper mattress, Away luggage. Three hundred clicks, three percent convert, you make $1,000, we charge $800. Clean.
As we grew, being in New York opened up the world of media buying — big ad agencies, huge budgets. We’re not talking $100K from Casper. We’re talking $5 million from the biggest brands in the world.
It’s a black box intentionally. Not based on logic or fact — based on relationships. I eventually realized: this person has to spend $20 million this quarter and she just wants somewhere to place it where she won’t get fired. That’s a weird feeling when you’ve been a 10-person company just trying to make money.
At scale, it makes sense. You’ve got 4 million subscribers. If you can change the perception of a million people and have 10% of them think more positively about Visa’s rewards program — that’s worth a lot to Visa when you’re spending a billion dollars on marketing.
Our first big advertiser was Discover. I was a senior in college, beer cans all over my frat house, and I get an email from the CMO of Discover: here’s an RFP. I’m like: what the hell is an RFP? I open it and it’s for half a million to a million dollars.
The Anti-Climactic Wire Transfer [00:43:00]
Shaan: You were 25 when you sold. What did it feel like?
Austin: It was fucking dope. And also: the most anti-climactic thing ever.
I get the wire. It’s during COVID. And I’m sitting in my childhood bedroom, next to my parents. My mom is cooking meatloaf. Everything’s like: what are you going to do now?
Getting a win early in life is so important — the swagger, the confidence, the brand it gives you. But in the moment, it’s just there.
Shaan: What did you do with the money?
Austin: I put 85–90% into very boring stuff. S&P 500, Vanguard target date funds. About 5% in crypto, 5% in venture. The vast majority is boring. I didn’t buy a Ferrari. I bought an Acura. A used Acura. My friends gave me so much shit.
Sam: Immigrant mentality.
Austin: I increase my rent four or five times. I travel. I stay at nice hotels. I fly business class. But I don’t drop 50K on a car that sits in a parking lot 361 days a year.
Business Ideas for the Downturn [00:51:00]
Austin: My framework for right now: help companies save money or help individuals earn side income. When capital was abundant, companies only cared about growth. Now they’re trying to cut. If you can help companies save money, you can build a great business.
Idea 1: Outsourced talent agencies. I became co-owner in a company that finds talent in Sri Lanka — U.S.-educated graduates, trained at Big Four accounting firms. Startups are questioning every FTE. A niche marketplace — say, content marketing for B2B companies — can be bootstrapped to nine figures. We went from zero to seven figures of ARR in eight months.
Idea 2: Morning Brew for AI. Someone will do what Shaan did with crypto, but for AI. The bootstrap version: niche newsletter, distinct tone, own a specific audience. The next level: build a small holding company around it. Thousands of founders have built $50–100K ARR AI tools over the last few months. Reach out to them, roll them up, cross-promote them. You end up with a portfolio of 10–30 tools and you’re bundling and marketing them.
Shaan: The durability problem: a lot of these tools get wiped out when the next model drops. You’re picking up pennies in front of a steamroller.
Austin: That’s fair. Durability is the real question. Same risk that killed the Amazon aggregator space — Thrasio worked until it didn’t.
Storytelling and Public Speaking [00:60:00]
Sam: You’ve improved a lot as a communicator. What’s the plan for getting better at it?
Austin: 2023 goal: New York improv.
Shaan: Here’s what worked for me. Three things.
First: watch yourself on video. I had to go review the game film. I was saying “um” at the start of every sentence. I had no idea. Nobody told me.
Second: take it seriously. I prepared. I warmed up before speeches. I stopped just showing up.
Third: find who’s best at this and learn from them. I went to a Tony Robbins event. Not for the content — for the craft. The rhythm, the gestures, the hooks. Even if you disagree with everything he says, watching how he works a room is a master class.
Growing up in Houston also helped. The natural charisma of the people I grew up with was just very high. My sister is way funnier and a better storyteller than me — she was always the one at family parties. Watching her made storytelling feel important to me.
Then I got cast in a movie with Kal Penn — Harold and Kumar. I was around a professional actor for weeks. Hung out with him every day. Sort of a boot camp in charisma by osmosis.
Then SF improv. I took classes, loved it. Improv is a superpower: on your feet, making people laugh, quick wit. I studied comedians not just to enjoy them but to reverse-engineer them.
Austin: Did you actually know before the podcast that you were good at storytelling? Or did you discover it?
Shaan: I don’t think I’m that good in absolute terms. But relative to tech/business podcasting — maybe. The best wedding speech I ever gave was at my own wedding. Unrehearsed. I retired from the game right there.
Austin: Okay I’m going to New York improv. See you there.