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👇👇
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
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
Referrals account for 30% of their total subscribers today. This component was key to accelerating their growth flywheel.
They have a section at the bottom every newsletter called “share the brew”, which takes the readers to the referral program hub.
They also made it easy to share right away via link, email, or social media
Once they signed up, Morning Brew sent an email reminding them of their reward progress (designed to encourage more referrals, maintaining the viral loop)
They used enticing email subject lines that got noticed, while showcasing the brand's quirky personality.
Their copywriting was key to their success, leading to a daily open rate of 45% (15% -25% considered “good” in most industries)
They sent emails to 4 groups of readers with different subject lines (but not all readers, a smaller portion), and whichever one had the highest open rate was used for the remaining (majority) of followers.
Their content was perfectly catered to their younger audience.
They gave quick rundowns of current events, breaking down content into bite sized chunks to not feel overwhelming. Students were tired of too much business jargon. It solved real problems
- $75M valuation
- Acquired by Business Insider
Keys to success:
- Finding a unique niche and solving a problem
- Created content people loved and relied on
- Referral system with clear rewards and tracking
- A/B testing Copywriting
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— Sarah Frier (@sarahfrier) November 15, 2018
In the spring and summer of 2016, as reported by the Times, activity we traced to GRU was reported to the FBI. This was the standard model of interaction companies used for nation-state attacks against likely US targeted.
In the Spring of 2017, after a deep dive into the Fake News phenomena, the security team wanted to publish an update that covered what we had learned. At this point, we didn’t have any advertising content or the big IRA cluster, but we did know about the GRU model.
This report when through dozens of edits as different equities were represented. I did not have any meetings with Sheryl on the paper, but I can’t speak to whether she was in the loop with my higher-ups.
In the end, the difficult question of attribution was settled by us pointing to the DNI report instead of saying Russia or GRU directly. In my pre-briefs with members of Congress, I made it clear that we believed this action was GRU.
