Why Every Creator Should Have a Newsletter with Austin Rief

0:00all right so let's let's dive into it I wanted to bring you on because I'm fascinated by email which is hilarious and I'm saying this because it's we're entering 2023. I remember 20 times email quote-unquote dying right email is dead email is dead but I'm I'm still fascinated by it and you're the email guy you know CEO of morning Brew um one of my favorite email newsletters and I wanted to kick off by asking you you know it's 2023 let's say you're starting a media company would you start a newsletter business in 2023 [Music] so quickly before I answer that going back to your comment around email is

0:48dead I actually just saw a tweet storm and it was there must be some tool where you can go back and so it must have uploaded uh like all these newspapers and you it's searchable and someone searched like the youth youth uh is lazier like young people are lazy and they took a a tweet from they tweeted every year since like 1920 of a newspaper or a recently you know website quoting young people are lazy and I feel the same way to your point about newsletters the number of times I've heard emails dead and then the year later the same publication will write emails alive and I think how it's been

1:26leveraged has changed over time and there's opportunity and there's not opportunity uh you know it comes and goes in different places but I mean I I just saw a stat I think 87.5 of people in the US use email as their number one form of communication so uh you know as in general can you start an email business a hundred percent I think the question is what does that actually mean to be an email business and I have I classify email businesses in different ways and I can I can break those down but high level every business every Creator should have an email and why is that like why should every

2:00Creator have an email newsletter yeah I think platforms typically come and go Snapchat was really popular and now at least for my friends it's less popular and Facebook was popular it's not and people change algorithms you know algorithms change but newsletters for the most part is a way to build a connection with people and it's a very intimate connection I think people don't really think about this podcast it's a platform we're on now and newsletters are both incredibly intimate right when I'm reading my inbox I'm either except for Junk uh emails which typically now are actually filtered out Gmail does a good job of this your emails are from

2:36your friends your family and your co-workers and so if I can get in that inbox you you kind of treat morning Brew like it's a friend like it's a co-worker and takes a level of seriousness and so I think that's the first thing and the second thing is newsletters are really good conversion rates click-through rates so you can over time if you want to sell something else you can sell something else push something else you can but you don't have to it's long forms you can push something to people every day that's long I mean that's what we did at morning Brew right the idea was the whole idea behind morning Brew

3:06was we saw these other Publications and they had newsletters but it was a link to their website we said what if we didn't do that and this seems so simple now but what if the whole newsletter was just the goal was to read it in email uh and that worked quite well and so I mean yeah there's a million different ways to go about it but definitely uh everyone should have a newsletter and you know let's say it's you know 20 years from now do you think people are going to be using email more or less the same I I think the same right I mean I

3:37probably heard seven years ago at this point maybe five years ago slack was going to take over email I think if anything slack is just incremental and if anything it actually clears your inbox for you right right because it gets it's more of the back and forth shorthand communication but yeah I don't see email going away anytime soon can you talk a little bit about you know the verticalization of email because like I've seen morning Brew expand from you know business sort of oriented email you have marketing Bruno I think you have like a health Brew vertical like how do you think about expanding to different verticals uh can you walk

4:13through a little bit of that process yeah I'll talk about morning brew and then we should talk about uh the email ecosystem as a whole but for morning Brew we created a daily email newsletter uh in 2015 and then in 2018 we had almost a million subscribers and we started to think what's next right we could either just you know kind of four hour work week it's so to speak we had a team of seven or eight it was super profitable but we realized we knew we wanted to do more and we also knew that we were very motivated people and we weren't going to keep this team of eight

4:41or ten really motivated people and we did the same thing for a decade and so we asked our audience what do you want and we realized two things one our audience really loved our tone our voice the way we wrote but two and I don't think people realize this is there's a certain type of person who just consumes newsletters right and so I'm sure you've seen this the best or one of the best ways to grow a newsletter is to promote yourself in other newsletters we saw that our cross promotion had our highest quality subscribers so we'd run ads and other newsletters no subscribers would click bore they'd read more they'd read

5:17for longer and so we basically said what if we instead of promoting other people's newsletters we promoted our own and I kind of fell in love with this this weird Niche world of B2B media which is serving professional audiences right not people who want to learn about personal finance although we do that too and not people who like cars or watches but people who work in a job function and make them better at their job HR retail marketing I.T CFO and the cpms and those newsletters are so high because advertisers have a really high willingness to get in front of those people right if you're selling it

5:55software it's really tough to get in front of VPS and cios at businesses and you're not going to really successfully acquire people via Instagram ad to spend a hundred thousand dollars on Enterprise software and so it's a great business model and it increases LTV so you might read the daily and then two hours later you you read marketing Brew because you're a marketing professional or you read CFO bro because you're a CFO professional and so it's allowed us to acquire more subscribers to the daily because we can monetize them more in other ways I mean obviously you know this about me but I'm like obsessed with niches and

6:33what I love about you guys is you're kind of like thinking about okay what are the different niches out there in B2B prioritizing which ones make most sense for your audience cross-promoting using that Medium like for example that method Works in email newsletters but it also works in podcasts like if I do if I do an ad for where it happens on the morning Brew Network or whatever like I bet you a bunch of those podcast listeners are going to come here and that's why you know HubSpot with their Network for example like if you listen to my first million most of the ads are not athletic greens none of them are

7:12it's all internal it's all internet uh it's all promoting their Network and by the way we're trying to do the same exact thing right we're building a network as well but it's hard because it's hard to convert people from newsletter to podcasts versus to your point it's very easy to to uh move people around from podcast to podcast and where is video in this whole ecosystem like you know everyone's saying video video short form is everything like how do you think about video in your home morning Brew ecosystem for us short form is important but it's hard to monetize and so you have to do short form in a really

7:46inexpensive way and so either you need to take long form and make it in short form right so take a podcast clip this up and put it all over Tick Tock there's a bunch of people out there who do that quite successfully I know a few who we've worked with that's option one or option two make it at basically zero costs right and so make it with just a great personality and a camera but it's very challenging to monetize short form via ads at least because how do you integrate an ad partner into a 30 second video yeah I think from what I'm seeing is like you need to come up with like an

8:20Innovative show concept so I'm addicted I don't know how I got here but like my Tick Tock feed is like 80 watch talk it's all these like live negotiations in Midtown New York are you on there I'm on the same exact I watch the same videos um by the way another great Niche I love that Niche right people high willingness to pay irrational willingness to face some would say I love that I love that Tick Tock everyone needs to watch this because I think if you watch watch talk and some of these live negotiations I think it's actually like the future video and how to think about using short

8:54form uh there's one show I watch it's called buying time it's you know it's the first thing I see when I wake up it's the last thing I see when I go to sleep type thing yeah I know I've seen this I love this it's kind of like an older guy mixed with a younger guy and they go into you know jewelry shops and they're like okay how much for the Rolex Daytona you know gold 1984 and the guy's like it's gonna be 52k and then the the buyer guys are like 52k what are you what are you crazy 52k that that's that's worth 45 tops and

9:29then it's this live negotiation and it's just so entertaining to watch that first of all you get connected to the characters and then you realize that there's this whole like underbelly inner like like they're saying words that people don't really understand most people don't understand like at the end of every watch transaction they're like you know shake their hands or like hazak you know like or no or something they were like Mazel and then you know boom did you ever watch uh Pawn Stars I've seen a few episodes I mean it's like Pawn Stars but but on drugs right it's it's Pawn Stars but you know not made for 30 minutes of

10:03TV or 23 minutes with commercials it's Pawn Stars but you just get hit with that that dopamine or that Adrenaline Rush every time and you feel like you're in a negotiation I love it yeah exactly like sometimes I I'll watch it before bed and I'm just like too amped up to even go to sleep I'm like yo I need a ticket to you know 52nd Street and to like the Diamond District whatever in New York because I need to like get in there and you know and I don't even have any watches like that's like I'm not a watch guy but it's just I'm gonna watch

10:34guy either what's different between Pawn Stars and this is that Pawn Stars is like it feels like a bit more universally understood like there's only a small percentage of people you and I not included that have gone into into a Rolex negotiation for like a very rare Rolex and that's what I think okay so like to break it down like if you're gonna create short form what do you need to create you got to create like an interesting story that's really cheap to your point right cheap to make yeah and then you need to drive them to something yeah I think that's the key with short

11:08form as well is if you're doing it as an individual and as a brand right for us brand awareness is important people know me about morning Brew but to your point I think that's the that's the key I'm sure you know Daniel Mack right Daniel Mack does a a car video and I'm he's been clever about incorporating brands in there but that's all still branded content it's all one-off videos and you have to sell individual videos right it's really tough to scale a business right if you're trying to make uh you know nice money it's great to do one-off branded videos but it's tough to scale a custom video

11:41versus if I can just slap American Express's logo and say hey they're going to sponsor the next 10 videos and so yeah I think the concept has to have a down funnel verticalized opportunity which I know you love and maybe for this watch guy it's building an online watch Marketplace and trying to compete with uh you know one of these online Brands like a hodinky for example and trying to build build one of those and doing a really inexpensive way they probably get way more views than hodinky does on all their content combined oh 100 percent to challenge you a little bit do you think that people looked at Mr Beast

12:15like seven years ago or six years ago and and been like why are you creating YouTube content it's so hard you know the cpms are so low you can't really create you know a business there like does it were you at all that you're like primarily focused on newsletter and not focused on video yeah so we absolutely are focusing on video we we each have to right size our investment with you know with the opportunity with the opportunity for us right and so we have so much direct opportunity in newsletter but we are in the process in q1 we're gonna launch a Daily Show which should be an audio

12:48video version of morning Brew which we're really excited about so we totally see the opportunity particularly in YouTube and longer form but short form again this question still exists what are you driving to to your point and I think one of the challenges is you know we see a lot of YouTube channels grow a ton via shorts but what we haven't seen is a lot of those YouTube channels convert those shorts viewers to long-form viewers right and so that's something we're tracking a lot we've grown a lot via YouTube shorts the question is how many of those shorts people people consume shorts right it's more of an international audience how

13:24many of those people are watching our long-form content I think that's a big thing to track because if it's a lot then yeah I think we're going to continue to invest more and more I heard recently I think this is true that Mr Beast God offered what was it like a billion or two for his Empire do you know the number yeah yeah how do you think about Mr BEAST's Empire like what do you think it's worth my guess is he can make more than a billion dollars over the course of his lifetime I don't know how someone's gonna make a billion dollars by buying it right I

13:58think ultimately you have to spin off companies one by one and the cumulative value of the companies he spent I mean feastables I've heard the numbers are crazy I know he said on on I apologize I think he was doing High six figures per day in Walmart right so that right there is what a hundred million dollars of Revenue right if that's a million dollars a day that's you know so so something something in the hundreds of millions of Revenue so that right there in a year might be a billion dollar brand alone and you know his Equity stake I'm sure is not 100 but he has Beast burger and he's you know I

14:34I met him a few months ago and he has plans to build software businesses and other things and so yeah I think the cumulative Enterprise value of what he creates will be well above a billion dollars if you were Mr Beast and you wanted to create an email newsletter how would you go about it that's a tough question I actually spoke to him about this for a little bit I think it depends if he wants to continue the the same brand cross channel right does he want to continue to do because he can do crazy giveaways and he could build the world's biggest email newsletter in like two months

15:10right because he gets to give away you know half a million bucks but what's the content right people will watch his long-form content for the payoff of seeing people make money but I mean I would make it in that vein it would be like almost like a gimmick right he would pay you some amount of money or do some amount of raffle for every open and there'd be some way they would get compensation whether it's some Arbitrage or an Advertiser or whether it's you have to buy feastable something like that so I would use email for him as a way again to push content to people

15:42and push something in there so I don't know what I know those plans are but again like maybe you have to buy a pack of feastables to get signed up for some some lottery or something like that and I would make it a way where every time you open up the email you have an opportunity to make money and I think that would build a habit right like you want when people open up and newsletter they get something for morning Brew hopefully it's a nugget of information maybe for Mr Beast it's like you get the opportunity to win 10 grand or something like that there's a few

16:09things of that why it's really smart I think one is if you're a Creator and you're trying to create an email newsletter around it you have to ask yourself what is unique to my audience and what do I think they're gonna like and at the same time how do I push email newsletters forward just like you did you know when morning Brew came out there really wasn't anything like it key insights get smarter in five minutes like I remember when it came out I was like it was like an aha moment for me and I think yeah if you're a Creator or even if you're not creative if you're an

16:44email news you know you're going to create an email newsletter you have to be asking yourself how do I push this format forward do you agree Yeah well yeah so let's break down so I have a framework for how we think about email newsletters right this probably doesn't Encompass all of them but I'm gonna do my best right and so I think there's like kind of and we can go through them all and talk about pros and cons right the way I think about it are is there's basically three different types of newsletters right there is the editorial or narrative email right that's like made what Packy writes or

17:15what you know a sub stacker would write so you have a full one piece of content it could easily just as easily be a blog post but newsletter or it being a newsletter kind of just gives a little bit of a unique brand and also gives you a way to deliver that content it could just as easily be a single an email with a link but it's not it's all an email because the format is attractive so that's number one number two is curation of medium and long-form content right the morning Brews the hustles the skims those are more General but then there's also more Niche ones like milk Road

17:48right so that's number two and the third is more of what I would call just like curation of links or or more of a short form hey here's a bunch of tidbits I'm gonna Market something to you that's the way I classify it so it's it's the long form packy-like uh you know Barry Weiss or whatever newsletter it's the morning Brew uh you know curation of different stories and this is a short form right each one has pros and cons and each one had their moment and some are kind of leaving the spotlight I think some are coming into the spotlight can you elaborate on the pros and cons of that

18:21and also who's having their Spotlight now and why yeah so the first one right editorial or the narrative-based emails to me that is really really hard to write something long form every week twice a week it's incredibly challenging to do and make it compelling over the course of not months but years but if you can do that it's probably the best business because people are getting your full voice right it's all you look at Ben Thompson he's now expanded to other things but for so long he had this amazing newsletter he wrote every day but again the con is it's so hard to keep up that level of intensity it's all

19:01based on you there are tricks and things you can do guest writers and things like that but at the end of the day if you're building that it basically is a one-person show really hard but the upside's nice my take on that is like you're basically like fire hosing value to people so much like it's like a book of value in an email that people trust you so much when you're one of those people um yeah but you have to be top of the game you have to tell people to do that yeah I mean our friend Julian Shapiro would say it's impossible to weekly come

19:39up with creative insights every single week at high high high quality that's why he only writes an email like once a month or something because he's just being put on the treadmill to do that is just so hard yeah I think mentally and you know psychologically it's challenging I think it's possible right if again if you're Ben's home so you're doing it based off the markets you know you have earnings every week and you can talk about companies are you gonna make this groundbreaking theory that people talk about every week no definitely not but you're on the treadmill and it's really hard to get off but I also think it's

20:12probably the fastest way to let's call it a hundred thousand dollars of Revenue I will say Ben Thompson did call me silly once in one of his emails so you know I have a little bit of a grudge but you know I can get past it um I love his emails they're super long super like packed with info and obviously there's the business model there of like you can charge for that right like people are willing to pay for it like people people pay for Lenny orchitzki's newsletter plus community and they're happy to do it because I think a lot of them are super long super

20:45in-depth super niche yeah now and I'm not gonna name names name names no I'm okay I have so much respect for people to do this but I would say is I think a lot of people long term are going to struggle right I think a lot of people in this category that even the ones who are saying this is hard to begin with but even the ones who are successful I think they built a brand off their 8 to 10 or 12 first posts they banked like their most insightful stuff right it's really really good and they had the Twitter Community or whatever else promote them because

21:19they're connected maybe they know a bunch of VCS or followers maybe they know journalists maybe they were just first to this and so they're the first investigative journalists and I think the growth rates of these things are gonna slow down dramatically and churns can increase over time I think a lot of people are signed up to these because they want to feel like a supporter but how many of these can you support and how many years in a row can I support for 200 bucks a year something I read almost never and I think the answer is going to be more than we think I think it's gonna be a lot of

21:50people are going to really struggle uh you're not going to support as many people as you originally wanted to I want sport 25 of these I'll support my favorite three a lot of people ask me Greg how do you build products that Foster Community well I've got good news that's exactly what late checkout does my company we partner with the largest brands in the world and fast-paced startups to design products that resonate with your community we add a couple interesting clients every single year so if you're interested and that sounds like you email front desk at laycheckout.studio with what you're working on what you need help with and

22:37don't forget to mention the where it happens pod thank you [Music] we'll go back to the other categories but what do you think of you know these bundle newsletter companies like there's every I think it's called every.to is one like what do you think of those businesses I think bundle economics are quite hard and everything's doing great right and so it's really good for them I think they have an interesting value prop of like Hey we're gonna be this more holistic business experience but I think in general bundling's hard because the person who adds the most value to the bundle is always going to be curious

23:14why they're in the bundle to begin with and why the bundle's not adding them value and I think it's very much a game of who adds the value and you know you're not bundling it with distribution and Technology like a Netflix or a Disney right so it makes sense for most people to be a part of the bundle of a Disney plus right as in let me sell my content at Disney because one we're talking about such high numbers such big scale and two they're adding so much value it's hard to you know deliver my 90 minute movie to a lot of people uh in a quick way a tech

23:49friendly way a newsletter is a newsletter so I think it's hard to bundle okay cool let's let's let's go back to um the list cool number two curation of medium and long-form content two buckets here General news Niche news right let's talk about General you have the hustle the skim and the morning Brew there's more I'm sure to me that train has left the station and of course I say this and there will be but I don't think there will be many more multi-million person reader General news General business news email newsletters that you know our Standalone companies whether they're bootstrapped or VC backs I just I don't think it's

24:33going to happen and it's because the economics have gotten very difficult to scale to this this size Facebook ads were so much cheaper it was so much easier to acquire subscribers so you could grow faster and also churn was less because there was less competition but with more people starting newsletters there's now a morning Brew for X for and we're disrupting ourselves because of that right we're doing it too and there's so many Niche Publications whereas before I said hey maybe I could read the hustle because I'm interested in business you know General Tech news now you say hey maybe I'm a product manager maybe I'll just listen to or

25:08read you know listen to Lenny's podcast or read Lenny's newsletter and I don't need to read a general Tech publication and so as we get more niche it's gonna be very hard to scale big newsletters into the multi-millions we have four and a half million subscribers to our daily and I don't think anyone will get there I think you've said before that media businesses and newsletter businesses have it's like the easiest way to get to eight figures and the hardest way to get to 10 figures or something like that is that is that total yeah so I mean so many media companies it's easy to get the 10 20 30 relatively

25:45to get a 10 20 30 million to get to 100 million of Revenue is incredibly hard that I think and I think that makes sense I think you're you're completely right by the way I think like there's only so many of these that people are going to subscribe to and so that makes sense what's uh what's the third category but second category is a part two though General business medium and long form content very tough but I think The Sweet Spot the real opportunity and if anyone's starting one of these hit me up I will co-found it with you I will fund it it is morning Brew again but for

26:19x a growing Niche so I'll give the example milk Road milk Road hit it perfectly they said hey we realize we can't be the next morning Brewer the hustle it's too competitive it's too General so let's go Niche let's go into a a growing industry which is crypto right we have this huge Tailwind crypto again is an outlier right because of the grift because of the money making opportunities people want to consume anything right so they hit all that but what they did is they had a really distinct and unique tone and I think because of that it was just very Niche but the niche was

26:54big and growing and so you can create a newsletter in a big and growing Niche I think there's a huge opportunity to have it you know a whole company but definitely a newsletter right so you're doing it in community right and there's a huge opportunity there Sean did it in crypto so I think someone can do an AI right and create a great AI newsletter and review all the tools and talk about what's happening I think there's opportunity in space right people are uh really interested now in space manufacturing it's what's going on in space and there's an opportunity there and so I think that's where the opportunity is

27:27build a verticalized brand I don't think it can only exist in newsletter but I think newsletter can be a huge part the biggest part of your Revenue strategy for a verticalized media business and if I was starting one and said hey I want to get to a million dollars of profit I would make let's call even the milk Road for x and pick a niche and I would just get started there uh and I think that is still the biggest opportunity is to go more Niche and maybe even more Niche than you think right uh but go Niche and and build something unique distinct uh hasn't been done before hasn't been

28:00thought of in that way in that tone in that voice again the way everything was very consistent and coherent like Sean did with milk Road how do you know if you're too niche or not Niche enough what kind of questions do you have to ask yourself to get to that conclusion yeah so I'll explain how we make decisions for morning brew and I think it will apply right so for morning Brew we are in the the universe of ad-based businesses so this is all just ad-based businesses and we can talk about subscription in a second but if you're going to have an ad based business you need to make sure there's enough

28:35content to talk about right so for example people are like why don't you have a media Brew you're in the media industry the reason we don't have a media Brew is because there'd only be one newsletter a week at most there's not that much content to cover for an ad based public a general ad based publication and so it's amount of content it's advertisers in the space so how many advertisers are in the space you can go look like is there a big conference is there a big trade show in the space how many people are sponsoring that all those people can sponsor your publication uh and then our third

29:07criteria which is unique to us is how many people who read morning Brew or in this industry who want to read this newsletter that framework is taken from Sean Griffey over an industry dive and it served us really really well now the last thing I'll say is you can throw all that out the door if you're targeting senior execs and CEOs so for example media is not that big but if you have Bob Iger and you have the CEO of uh you know zazlov over at Warner media and all these other execs it doesn't matter if you have 300 subscribers if you have the right 300 subscribers people will

29:41pay to get in front of them but I'm talking about you know the the more you know let's call it 20 late 20s early 30s audience I heard I heard a story about Tim Ferriss that he designed the his blog for billionaires to read it so when asked about hey should we include a pop-up to get email subscribers on the website you know how you're like scrolling and it's like oh hey like I mean you know this like put your email address in to get subscribed to yeah yeah five bytes by Tim Ferriss or Friday fives he said I think about designing my website as if Bill Gates

30:20is reading my website and because if you think about it like Tim probably has a bunch of billionaires who read totally yeah read his stuff so I think it's an interesting framework for thinking about like creating a startup which is especially if you're in the B2B space how do you think about crafting and experience for that type of audience perspective a hundred percent and to be honest you should be creating content for billionaires or at least very rich people right it's very hard to build a media company if you're not building B2B or you're not building for high income earners and that's why some of these

30:57Niche Publications I've spoken a lot about B2B AI uh but there's other ones right I know people who have three four thousand subscribers but it's a Ferrari Enthusiast newsletter and you charge a thousand bucks a year a Rolex Enthusiast right so if I was starting a newsletter a newsletter today it'd be super high income or it'd be B2B and going after one of those niches that's growing in a growing industry and and you know ride the wave have you seen Ben tassels AI newsletter I've heard he has an AI newsletter but I haven't read it yet so I think you'd like it it's it's milk Road for ax AI uh it's called Ben's

31:37bites uh I think he's gone from Zero Subs to you know 10 000 subs and a very short amount of time yeah if Ben's if Ben's listening what's up then yeah Ben's listening because Ben Ben was on the show a couple weeks ago and people loved it he talked about like his favorite AI tools and I think there's a few reasons why his newsletter's taking off the first is it's really authentic he was the no code guy before he was the AI guy so he's just spent like he sold his last company in his apir or zapier he just like knows a lot about No code

32:12and tools like that so like AI just is a tool in that tool set so his stories are just and his content comes across authentic check and then the other thing is he's just really good at like finding all these like Niche AI tools that are coming out like he's good at what want to hear something funny yeah when you sign up for Ben's bites which I just did there's one newsletter recommended in the you know the newsletter Swift uh newsletter Swap and it's uh it's milk Road oh no way that's hilarious yeah there you have it all right let's let's close let's uh let's close the loop here

32:47let's go to the third newsletter yep the third is the curation of links the the marketing email the you know the Greg's Corner here's five interesting interesting things I found today I think that is a great bang for your buck because if you can curate well curation is valuable right and so if I can curate five things ten things or you know write a little quip here and there that's great it's not a business right it's a part of a stack if you're a Creator you should at minimum have one of those right and you may actually say well that's that's all I want to do

33:20because my my main format is podcasting right my main format is Twitter I think you need again to have some connection but that's not a business I think too many people think they're five sentence Roundup or whatever is a business and it's not it's just a part of of your extension of your brand it's worthwhile you know it's it's it's uh necessary but not sufficient for for success in building your creator stack if you wanted to do one of these categories you want to build a newsletter in one of these categories today it's a new year new newsletter how did people actually get started like should they create like a one-pager of

33:58like here's my mission and here's like how many times a day I'm a week I'm gonna write like you know here what tools should they use like could you give in a nutshell how should people think about starting yes I think the first thing is you need to figure out what you're writing about right what community are you writing about let's say it's marketers right writing to marketers uh you need to embed yourself in that Community do a lot of user interviews understand what they consume what they're not getting out of their content and understand what it's like to be a marketer ideally you were a marketer

34:30because you want to be able to speak their lingo right you want to feel like an Insider I think you're going to succeed if you feel like you're inside the community you're telling the community you're informing from the inside and then you need to do what we did in the early days of morning Brew which is Persona work you need to say hey who's the writer of marketing grew right who's the writer of morning who's the right writer of the hustle milk Road the skin you know it's a it's a 27 year old woman who who spends her weekends doing this and who does you know who eats this food

35:02and and that's what we did for morning Brew we're like who is the Persona who's the person what do they do on the weekends right what do they drink do they go out on Friday nights do they go watch a TED Talk how frequently do they make this the decision to go to listen to Matt Malcolm Gladwell speak at their school uh versus going out to a bar and those are all the the questions we asked ourselves to align on who is this coming from uh and then you know who the reader is you know who's writing it and then you have to get reps and get better and

35:32better and better and that's all just copywriting practice right I was not an amazing writer when I started writing this I'm still not an amazing writer by any means I think that was the best decision we made which is was to replace ourselves we realized we could speak in the tone I mean Converse in the tone we could write a couple sentences in the tone but day in day out we couldn't write that tone across a full newsletter and so make sure you can write in the tone you want to write or replace yourself but if you're a one-person business of course you're gonna have to

35:59you're gonna have to write it and so writing a tone you can actually execute on shifting gears a little bit to monetization of newsletters and media businesses morning brew has courses now can you talk about how Beyond advertising how is morning brew monetizing and how did you think about those products versus other products yeah so we started uh the newsletter we started building up an ad business and our ad business is still the vast majority of our Revenue but we knew we wanted direct revenue and we so we built out a consumer Revenue team and we tested a lot of things we failed on a ton of things we thought people

36:41would want morning Bruce swag they did they didn't want to pay for it right we you know and again it's all relative to a 70 million dollar ad business so if you sell half a million dollars of Swag a year and that's your cap the question's like well you know it's nice but it's not going to move the needle and the question always came up would you ever launch a subscription and I always said for Content no but I think you can launch a subscription or or would you charge people I think was the general question I said no I think it's really tough to charge people unless you have a serious

37:13level of expertise or you're going very Niche uh or or you're the New York Times The Washington Post you have a 100 or 200 year old brand I said but I would charge people for community and for Access and for Upward Mobility to advance their career and I said that enough and then you know Alex was a big part of this as well we were kind of like well what if we did that what if we actually you know created that and along with an amazing team of early people we built what was originally called an MBA which was the morning Brew accelerator which is now seven courses

37:46we have six to eight week courses we have one week courses we've tested day-long courses and the idea is morning Brews news but it's also education and so some people want to be educated by with five minutes in the morning some people want to be educated with another five minutes in the afternoon some people want to be educated by watching our YouTube but there are some people who want to spend six to eight weeks with us learning about business analytics learning about leadership learning about financial forecasting and I think our brand has the ability to expand into a larger education brand and so we had a pretty successful year doing

38:20that you know going direct to Consumer and we're going to continue to go direct to Consumer next year but we're also going B2B and we're selling the businesses we're saying hey four of your employees paid for this program let's do it for 50 or 100 of your employees next year are the courses cohort based like are you with other students you get to meet them we have yeah so they're core based courses uh and so that's a lot of what we provide too is it's a network for a lot of people the education is is nice but the network is really important getting a newsletter listening to a

38:56podcast reading a tweet could sometimes feel very you know one way but I think that education is such a natural Evolution for where you guys are going because like I'm sure a bunch of people are like hey there's probably other people reading marketing brew that are like me that I'd love to meet you know you you call it literally an MBA like one of the reasons why people spend eighty thousand dollars a year in an MBA is because they want to meet interesting people so if you could curate those groups of people I think that's a huge huge opportunity I agree and I also think that it's

39:40something that is missing in the discourse around online courses right you're like oh should you do a courses you should not do a course is it worth the money is it not people say oh this contents on on YouTube and that might be the case but there's accountability there's Community I think those are two really important things that don't exist with content on the internet it depends the course right but I think like overall like the accountability meaning hey like I spent x amount of dollars I'm actually gonna go and do this like I run a course called Community College and like people come out of that course and they we give them

40:14tools to like come up with an idea for a community-based product and they like launch products so it's like hey you're going to launch a product in in 30 days and you're gonna have other people kind of like pushing you to do that that's worth something and then hey you're also like you can meet like you met Alex your co-founder in school right totally we've had people meet co-founders in our classes like it's it's Bonkers right and I think like that's when it becomes worth it is if you get a really high quality vetted group of people and it can't be all that you know some people could be very

40:51experienced some people should be earlier on like you want a diverse group but that's a really important piece of it so I I like that you're doing that yeah it's all about how you curate in the group of people and are they like-minded are they are they motivated right and that's what we look for what else besides courses are you interested in potentially monetizing do you have a list of you know ideas I'm not saying you're gonna do them but like what what are some ideas around other ways that a newsletter could could monetize Beyond courses yes so at morning Brewery view ourselves more as of a media company

41:26than a course so we do events we do in-person events we do these Summits uh and again if you're a B2B publication or if you have a valuable audience but B2B is where we do our events there's a big opportunity to get four or 500 people in a room and advertisers will spend real money to meet these people and talk to these people um we don't do these as much because normally it's not impactful again compared to a 70 million dollar p l but for creators out there small Niche dinners you know you get 12 15 people in finance marketers in a room you take them to a dinner and companies will pay

42:02a lot of money to get in front of those people uh you need to talk to the right person and you have the right people in the room but it's all about curation for those I think that's really interesting uh events you know bigger newsletters right maybe something much larger bigger scale beyond that I think there is an opportunity for non-core based courses right like you know people are succeeding with gun Road and things like that those it just needs to be priced correctly you know you need to make sure the value is there but it needs to be priced way less than the core based course because you don't get

42:32all of that right you know I had Jack Butcher on the show recently like he has a good model around that like it's a great model yeah for 50 100 150 Justin Welsh you know you know him too he's on the LinkedIn side and social media side he charges 150 for his course like you shouldn't be paying more than a couple hundred bucks for some of these courses and it's a volume play if you're doing Gum Road it's a volume play absolutely you know I gotta ask about Ai and how you're thinking about how AI changes the media business so I've been playing around with you

43:12know chat gbt3 a lot I've really enjoyed you know messing around with that I actually have a list of like the top 10 AI products I want to mess around with over you know winter break or over the Christmas break and so I'll I'll know a lot more and I'll probably put a bunch of content on Twitter about my experience doing that I'm really excited about that I think though what it can do people like oh it's gonna write its own newsletter and like maybe but I think it does two things one it makes writers way more efficient you can start with ideas you can edit things easier you can have

43:45rough giraffes easier that's the first thing can make you a more efficient writer right there's nothing more daunting than looking at a plain piece of paper and AI can help you not look at a plain piece of paper but I think the second thing is it only makes great copywriting more important it makes great great copywriting super unique and I think it's going to make the best copywriters worth so much more because when there's more content out there and there's more content that looks like everything how do you stand out how do you resonate with an audience how are you leveraging the AI to make you the best possible

44:20copywriter and I think that's going to be a big transition I couldn't agree more but one one follow-up question to that is when you were playing with chat GTP like how did it feel like as a writer as a person in the media business like what was that feeling that you had when you when you put something in there and you saw those answers I mean it's magical like chat is magical like it is it is almost scary it is the closest experience I've had to like wow this is not real life right I think really it's weird I think it's 90 magical 10 frightening it's like my analogy for it

45:02is like you're in New York right so it's like imagine it's winter time right it's December but it's like 50 degrees Fahrenheit out or 60 degrees Fahrenheit out you're like wow it's so nice the sun is out and it's like yeah that's magical but it's also like kind of frightening totally um couple more questions you and Sam par on the surface like you would think you wouldn't be friends but to your friends or he ran the hustle which was a you know direct competitor to morning Brew could you talk a little bit about how you're able to have a you know a good friendship with with someone like that

45:43yeah so we weren't friends when until we sold our businesses right and by the way I'm going on my first million this week and I think that's what I'm going to talk to him about it and I want to do it in a public manner I don't want to speak for Sam but I will speak for Sam anyways and I'll see if he agrees on Wednesday but I don't know if either of us had the the humility or the or mature enough to be friends with each other at that time I think we both had so much personal effort and and and so much of our self-worth was tied up in

46:18our businesses and I think we very much view them as our babies and they were so competitive uh at least they seem so competitive that there's no way we could have been friends now after the facts all of a sudden we have so many similarities so many stories we can share with each other about how he was doing this I was doing that and and that's how I think we've bonded and now I have so much respect for for him and how he's different than me and how he's the same same as I am and I think one interesting thing is I viewed him as he started the husk when

46:51he when he ran the hustle I had heard stories and I heard him on podcast and I viewed him as very very rude and I was like oh this guy's like an he seems like a complete and now you know I've been working with him on a couple projects I've been on calls with him and I've realized that he has this level of let's call it abrasiveness that I actually think works really well for him he's very transparent and I can see how it turns off a lot of people but I can also see how it's super effective when he's around people who are receptive to that and he builds these

47:26culture this culture of these people who are radically transparent and are open with people I was on a call with him and I don't give the specifics but someone started and said something and Sam was based that's like the effect of like dude what are you saying I don't know why we're on this call and he didn't meet in a rude way at all and it was and the guy you know took it really well and we all reset and there are so many people just yes each other the death in the corporate world and Sam does not do that Sam is is against a little bit

47:55abrasive I think in a great way and I I learned a lot from from that one interaction just the way he he carries himself and I think it's really effective and I think it's why he's so good at going zero to one he has no time to waste with niceties and oh yeah that makes sense it's like no no that made no sense what are you talking about like regroup and come back to me and I learned to love that I've learned to use some of that and and how I run morning brew and how I think about things so uh yeah we weren't friends initially but

48:20now I think we've become very good friends I love it I love it and you know you're you're a New Yorker so I feel like you've got tough skin and you're you're able to take it um yeah okay last question where do you see media going in five years what does it look like how is it different how is it similar more vertical eyes more Niche again morning roofer Rex and this for why and it's just you know the the cost to distribute content is zero it costs nothing to send an email it costs nothing to post on YouTube and so people can get more and more Niche by the way I

48:54don't think this is just media I think it's all of consumer consumer is going to go Niche and verticalize why would I buy the The Mattress the the general mattress so I can buy the mattress for guys who are 5 10 and you know weigh you know 175 pounds and and work out right or or why would I eat at this restaurant I just think that just generals going away and things can be so customized so tailored to you I think by the way that drives out a lot of the The Venture return to Consumer I think it's very tough uh because of that because it

49:28is Niche I mean I think media's uh is gonna have a big part in all these consumer Brands right and so you're gonna have your Rolex newsletter and you're going to sell watch collabs you're going to have watch events and media's gonna be a part of a broader consumer strategy and so I think you're going to have Niche you're gonna have vertical eyes and yes you're kind of a media industry but the difference in content and commerce and consumer it's all going to kind of just turn into one and every business is gonna be a media company every Commerce company media company every media companies would be a

50:02Commerce company it's always going to look like a lot of these companies already do today it should be built from day one you heard it here first General's going away niches niches the future Austin Reef thanks for thanks for dropping by always a pleasure chatting with you where could folks find you yeah I'm on Twitter Austin underscore Reef Austin underscore Reef go follow him sign up to the morning Brew of course morningbrew.com yeah morningbrew.com cool um all right we're out thanks thank you [Music]