Alex Lieberman
Alex Lieberman started morning-brew as a senior at the University of Michigan because he couldn’t understand the business news he was supposed to care about for finance recruiting. He was fixing his own problem. He had no idea it was the best business to be in.
By the time he sold it — six years later, to Axel Springer — Morning Brew had 2.5 million subscribers, $46 million in annual revenue, and $10 million in profit. Alex was 26.
Before Morning Brew
Alex went to Michigan intending to do finance. The recruiting process required following business news. The Wall Street Journal was impenetrable. Bloomberg felt like homework.
He built a PDF called Market Corner — a daily brief that explained the business news in a way Michigan students could actually read. He sent it to his dormitory listserv. About 600 people subscribed immediately. He thought that was the whole audience.
austin-rief was a sophomore who received that email. He became a reader, then a contributor, then eventually the operational engine who turned Alex’s content instincts into a scalable business.
The name change to Morning Brew came later. So did everything else. First it was just Alex trying to explain a world he was supposed to understand but didn’t.
The Thing They Did Every Morning
From 2016 to 2019, Austin and Alex printed out Morning Brew next to competitors — Axios, The Hustle, The Skimm — and circled what they liked and crossed out what they didn’t. With a red pen. Every morning.
Alex was not gentle with his own writers, including himself. The standard was: did this make someone’s morning better? Did it make business news genuinely enjoyable? If not, cut it.
Their approach to content was closer to a TV showrunner than a newsletter editor. Every section had a specific function. Every piece of voice — a pun, a one-liner, a cultural reference — was deliberately maintained as a marker of identity. They were not trying to be comprehensive. They were trying to be the favorite part of someone’s morning.
“The number one thing people get wrong is they see the arbitrage we had in 2017 and think it exists today. The value of a subscriber is significantly less than it was when we started, because there are so many newsletters now.”
The Co-Founder Dynamic
Alex and Austin started as college friends building something fun. They evolved into business partners without ever having the explicit conversation about what that meant.
The consequence: they couldn’t give each other direct feedback early on. They were afraid to critique each other. They didn’t want to be the bad guy.
“The level of direct communication Austin and I had as co-founders looked very different from what it would look like today. We started so young that we were afraid to critique each other, give each other feedback. A lot of my growth honestly came through therapy or dealing with it on my own.”
The thing that changed the dynamic was Austin discovering the book Traction and sending Alex a Slack message: “Dude, you need to read this book yesterday, and this is what we’re going to do.” Alex didn’t read it for a few days. Austin sent a second message. That was the first time Austin was genuinely angry with Alex. Alex recognized in that moment that Austin had grown into the real CEO — the person actually managing the business — whether the title said so or not.
Selling to Axel Springer
Morning Brew tried to sell to everyone. Fidelity, E-Trade, Robinhood — companies where the audience made obvious strategic sense. The head of development at SoFi literally said, on a Zoom call: “I don’t get it. Why would we buy you guys? We have 300 million eyeballs on our stadium. What are we going to do with 3 million emails?”
Hearst passed. The New York Times passed. Every traditional media company passed.
When they finally sold to Axel Springer, they were partly motivated by fear. They had no offers in writing from anyone else. What if Axel Springer walked and no one else ever made an offer?
“We made the decision partly because we were scared. A couple of hours before we signed, we were unsure. 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.”
In hindsight, this looks like caution that probably cost them money — the business subsequently hit $70 million in revenue. At the time, it felt like the only certainty they had.
The Media Company Trap
Alex’s most useful insight is a warning about the most common mistake he sees in content businesses: pivoting from media company to product company.
Morning Brew tried it — merch, education products, a Patreon, a Section 4 course partnership. The course partnership made $300,000 in one month and saved them during COVID. But the broader pattern is consistent: when a media company tries to sell physical products or services, it is adding complexity without adding advantage. You now need to manage content quality, plus product quality, plus a new distribution model, plus whether your audience trusts you for this entirely new category.
“You’re pivoting from a content company to a product company. It’s like BuzzFeed doing a cookware brand with Tasty. Content is the product. The media company is the business.”
His counterpoint is the approach sam-parr took with Trends: sell information to your own audience, within the same medium you already operate in. Information products adjacent to the core editorial are defensible. Physical products are not.
What Morning Brew Actually Got Right
Alex’s honest accounting of their success includes one thing he is consistently adamant about: they would not have won without being in New York.
“You’re not in it to win it if you’re not in New York.”
The reason is transactional and not romantic. Media buyers, ad agencies, and brand sponsors are concentrated in New York. Austin could walk into their offices. Take them to lunch. Build relationships that turned into six-figure sponsorship deals. If he had been in Austin or Nashville, he would have been emailing strangers rather than meeting neighbors.
Beyond geography: they won because the content was genuinely good. Not good enough, not adequate, but good enough that readers actually enjoyed it. Austin and Alex have watched enough newsletter founders since then to know that skipping the “be excellent” step and jumping straight to “growth hack your way to a million subscribers” leads to engagement rates that don’t support the economics.
A subscriber who opens every email is an asset. A subscriber who ignores the email is a liability.