How Morning Brew grew to 2.5M subscribers in 5 years ☕

Here are the early growth tactics used to reach 20M+ revenue in 2021

A thread👇👇

1) In 2015, Founders Alex Lieberman and Austin Rief started the Morning Brew, an email newsletter with the purpose of making business news more interesting for young people. Students wanted something to keep them informed in a more engaging and fun way

2) They noticed students felt the need to follow business news but found current media dry and difficult to read.

Current outlets like the Wall Street Journal lacked the high level roundup that most young people needed to quickly stay informed and not put them to sleep

3) Strategy 1: Pure hustle
At 20 years old, Alex created a PDF newsletter (originally called the Market Corner) and sent it to 45 friends and family. They then got their first 300 subscribers by putting out flyers and speaking at lectures to fellow students at Michigan University

4) They spoke at 50 business classes/clubs explaining what they’re doing, the problem they solve, and that it’s free to join. Students gladly joined and word of mouth spread fast. After 4 months the list grew to 1000 people, eventually reaching 1M in 2019. 15% from word of mouth

If you’re a SaaS entrepreneur, you need to study Hubspot

Here are the inbound strategies they used to grow from 0-100M+ users📈

A thread: 👇👇

1) Hubspot introduced/created the term inbound marketing.

Founders Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah grew their inbound marketing software business (founded in 2006) to an IPO in 2014 at $25/share (now around $450).

They are the 2nd fastest SMB SasS company to IPO

2) They noticed a shift in the way people shop/buy. Consumers weren’t tolerating interruptive ads and were ignoring them.

Part of this shift was due to the internet/Google. People now had the power to do their own research to find products that could help solve their problem

3)Theme: Inbound Marketing
They learned conversion rates from inbound/organic leads compared to outbound/paid were more than double. It was cheaper to acquire traffic and resulted in higher quality leads. 75% of their lead gen was inbound, focusing on blogs, webinars, free tools

4) Strategy 1: Blog
They share resources/tips/steps to improve your inbound marketing. They drew people to their posts, provided value, and added a unique CTA related to the topic at the end to capture the lead.

The blog resulted in 20% of their organic leads and 3x their leads

10 reasons why I think now is the greatest time to launch a startup

You should probably consider starting something

Just listen to this:

You can start with the community

I’ve identified ~8000 communities that could be unbundled from Reddit

- They are thriving
- They could make you ~$1m/year of revenue
- You often need $400 max to build MVP to tap that untapped value
- It's fun

Sounds like a dream job to me

People in Silicon Valley don’t have an edge on you

SF held the monopoly on startups for decades. Now, being in SF doesn’t matter for 99% of businesses

Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise

The world is flat and is staying flat

Hell yeah. That feels good to say

You have 10x the amount of funding sources

You used to have to rely on VCs. Not anymore

To name a few:

- Fund via your community
- Fund via NFTs
- Fund via pre-sales
- Fund via tokens
- Fund via accelerators all over the world
- Etc

All of a sudden, you have 10x the options

Niche businesses can be worth billions

People used to laugh at niche. Why “go small” when you could “go big”?

The way to go big right now IS to go small

Large tech companies can’t be everything to everyone

@_shahedk @buzz_chronicles save as startups

@buzz_chronicles @buzz_chronicles save as startups

@Julian @buzz_chronicles save as startups

@buzz_chronicles @buzz_chronicles save as startups